Carlos Rodriguez
Analyst · Ramsey El-Assal with Barclays. Please go ahead
Thank you, Danny and thank everyone for joining our call. Before we can, I want to first say that our thoughts and prayers are with those who have been or know someone who has been impacted by COVID-19. Every day we hear about how much of a challenge it has been for employers and workers alike, including our own.I'd like to recognize our associates for rising to the challenge and delivering exceptional service to our clients despite the extraordinary circumstances they've had to face. To them, I want to say thank you. For our discussion today, we'll spend a little less time talking about the third quarter and more time on the current operating climate. And I'd like to offer a couple of upfront points.First is that ADP is not immune to the global pandemics impact on the labor market, but while we may make tactical adjustments as we navigate through this crisis, we believe our long-term strategy is unaffected and we remain optimistic about how we're positioned over the coming years, once the business environment and our clients return to more normal operations. The second point is that we will continue to serve our clients in the way we know best, by offering the tools, resources, and support they need to manage their business and their workforce through all types of operating environments, including this challenging one.With that said, this morning we reported our third quarter fiscal 2020 results with revenue of $4 billion up 6% reported and organic constant currency and in line with our expectations. We expanded our adjusted EBIT margin by 60 basis points in the quarter, which was ahead of our expectations, even though it included an unplanned [$50] [ph] million global associate assistance payment in response to COVID-19. And with the solid revenue and margin performance, we were pleased to deliver 8% adjusted diluted EPS growth, which was also a slightly ahead of our expectations coming into the quarter.Turning now to the current situation, I'd like to take a few minutes to go deeper on how COVID-19 has affected our operations and what we've done to respond. As the situation evolved over the past couple of months, we focused first on the safety of our associates. In March, we took steps to quickly shift over 50,000 of our associates to work from home and now have approximately 98% of our workforce working remotely in a secure manner. In doing so, we leveraged our previous investments in business resiliency and in addition we ordered thousands of laptops, expanded remote access capacity, provided at home internet and for those critical personnel that needed to work onsite, we took steps to ensure their safety while they perform those essential onsite tasks. This was a huge undertaking by our global IT, security and legal, and HR organizations and I'm extremely proud of their execution.We also worked with our critical third-party service providers to ensure they were positioned to continue to support us. In March, we also had our field sales force shifts from in-person to a virtual sales model, and while that's not an ideal circumstance for some of our quota carriers, they're making the most of the situation. While we were executing on these business resiliency plans, we also worked nonstop to address our client's needs to ensure uninterrupted service across our HCM solutions. We provide a mission critical service and process payroll for one in six Americans and over 40 million workers around the world, and to offer immediate support we’ve provided a number of online resources including an employer preparedness toolkit and webinars attended by tens of thousands of clients. We also quickly made available for free the payroll costs and headcount reports necessary to apply for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program of the CARES Act and these reports have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.Service is more important than ever in times like this. We saw call volumes increased significantly beginning in March and have nearly 2 million inbound requests across our service channels in a matter of weeks, with clients looking for help with a variety of issues including adding custom pay codes related to COVID-19, redirecting checks to different locations and requesting new time tracking hardware that doesn't require physical contact. In many cases they were simply seeking general guidance in understanding new legislation. To meet our client's needs we retrained and quickly redeployed hundreds of associates to where they were needed most. And our service and IT teams worked quickly to digest and translate new legislation from the many jurisdictions around the world into our global payroll, time and attendance and other systems in a short period of time to allow our clients to comply with and benefit from these changes in legislation.As the environment for companies continues to evolve, whether due to legislative changes or operational realities, we at ADP are committed to supporting our clients to help them best navigate those changes. As we communicated in an open letter to U.S. policy leaders, ADP stands ready to facilitate current and future initiative that provides support to our clients and their workers. And in support of our local communities, ADP has made over $2 million in donations to relief efforts, including a dedicated relief fund for ADP associates that needed assistance as well as donations of medical supplies for hospitals, food banks, and their workers.With all that said, the significant impact of COVID-19 is having on a broader economy, is in turn having an effect on our reported metrics, in a much more abrupt fashion as compared to previous macro economic slowdowns. You can see this in our Employer Services new business bookings metric. This quarter we reported a decrease of 9%, as we saw bookings declined significantly and rapidly in mid-March when we typically would have expected to close many deals for the quarter. These results were of course well below our expectations coming into the quarter and while some of our businesses performed slightly better than others in March, the weakness was generally broad-based as the health crisis is affecting companies of all sizes and regions including internationally.We believe the impact to bookings stems from two factors. First is the buying behavior of our clients and prospects. As with prior uncertain economic environments, our clients and prospects have become time and resource-constrained and are faced with reassessing their own operations to best ride out the impact of this health crisis. And although our products support mission-critical functions, making decisions about additional HCM services or making the decision to switch from another vendor to ADP can get put off to a later time. Even in circumstances where decisions have already been made, clients are understandably delaying implementation which can also cause us to adjust down the bookings we record. The general change in behavior is common in recessionary periods and we are certainly not surprised to see it this time. It's clearly happening in a more abrupt manner compared to what we've experienced in the past.Second, as I mentioned earlier, there have naturally been constraints that limited the activity of our salesforce. What we have been able to lean more heavily on an inside sales strategy and virtual interactions by our field sales force. There has still been a reduction in our salesforce productivity. Our sales organization is experienced and resilient and we will continue to work hard in the fourth quarter. Because of a variety of factors which we believe will have an outside impact on the fourth quarter booking, including the effectiveness of the Paycheck Protection Program in supporting small to mid-sized businesses and how quickly our clients can adapt to working in this new environment and resume more normal buying behavior, there is clearly a very wide range of outcomes.But to calibrate your expectations, we are guiding for a full year ES New Business Bookings, our ES New Business bookings to be down 20% which implies our fourth quarter bookings will be down by more than 50%. With all that said, we remain confident in our product portfolio and optimistic about our ability to drive sustained growth in ES bookings in a sounder economic environment.I now like to spend a minute or two on some of the other macro driven trends we've observed in our client base. Our pays per control metric, which represents employee growth for a broad subset of our client base was solid through February, but decelerated to a slight negative growth by the end of March, averaging 1.9% growth for the quarter. Early in April, we saw it deteriorate further to a double digit negative decline, with the steepest decline among smaller businesses. For context, this level of pays per controlled decline is significantly worse than even the worst quarter in the financial crisis, underscoring that it's hard to compare this environment even against the past recessions. While we hope that legislation aimed at preserving employment will drive a recovery in pays per control, we had not seen it through mid-April.On retention, we were actually pleased with our performance in the third quarter, with both third quarter and year-to-date retention performance better than our expectations and ahead of pays per our previous annual guidance. We set all time third quarter retention record in our down market and mid-market businesses, as client satisfaction scores were at or near all time highs and as the benefits of our technology and migration strategy over the past several years continue to bear fruit. But clearly, out-of-business losses are a concern for the fourth quarter and beyond. And although they have not yet meaningfully picked up by the end of March or even into April, early indicators of stress in our client base have shown up and we expect deterioration in retention in May and June.Kathleen will share some of the assumptions for the fourth quarter when she goes through the outlook. I'd like to pivot now from the current macro environment and focus on our strategy and what we're doing to drive longer term value for our clients.At ADP, we remained steadfast in our commitment to lead in the HCM industry with best-in-class technology and service. At our February, Innovation Day we shared an update with many of you about the innovation we are driving across our key strategic and next gen solutions. The HCM industry is an exciting place with constant change and we will continue to invest to position ourselves to meet the evolving needs of our clients over not just the coming years but the coming decade.At Innovation Day, we've covered several topics and I'd like to reframe a few of our key products against today's backdrop. With ADP RUN we help small businesses manage their essential HR tasks from basic payroll to a full HCM suite. We highlighted our push-to-drive digital sales and onboarding capabilities1 which is especially relevant in today's environment and we also highlighted innovations in automating service and implementation which relieves pressure on our service organization. We discussed Workforce Now and our public cloud native version that we are pairing with our next gen payroll engine, which utilizes a fully transparent policy-based model for improved implementation, maintenance and self service as well as continuous payroll calculations for clients looking for on-demand pay options.We also talked about Wisely and the ease of use and the financial tools that make an attractive –attractive way to get paid. And just this month we made Wisely Direct available to our mid-market Workforce Now clients, which we believe will be beneficial to the many workers in our base that still get paid by a paper check. And of course we discussed our next gen HCM, which we believe represents a big step ahead of current offerings in the market and for which we remain excited about scaling and selling more broadly.Before I turn it over to Kathleen, I'd like to take a moment to once again thank our associates. This health crisis and the resulting economic fallout hasn't been easy on anyone, but our associates have really stepped up to ensure we continue to provide our clients with the support they need, and our clients and I appreciate it, Kathleen, I'll turn it over to you now.