Good morning. My name is Karniesha, and I will be your conference facilitator. At this time, I'd like to welcome everybody to the Broadridge Fiscal Year 2017 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder this call is being recorded and all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Edings Thibault, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Karniesha. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Broadridge's first quarter 2017 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call this morning are Rich Daly, our President and CEO; and Jim Young, our Chief Financial Officer. Please note that the earnings release announcing our first quarter results and slides that accompany this call may be found on the Investor Relations section of broadridge.com. During today's conference call, we will be making forward-looking statements regarding Broadridge that involve risks. A summary of these risks can be found on the second page of the slides. We encourage participants to refer to our SEC filings, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for a complete discussion of forward-looking statements and risk factors faced by our business. We will also be referring to several non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted operating profit which excludes the impact of the amortization of acquired intangibles and purchased intellectual property as well as certain acquisition and integration expenses associated with the company's acquisition activities, and adjusted EPS which excludes the after tax per share amount of those same items. We believe these non-GAAP measures provide investors with a more complete understanding of Broadridge's underlying operating results. For reconciliations to the comparable GAAP measures can be found in the earnings release and in the earnings statement – in the earnings presentation. Let me now turn the call over to Broadridge's President and Chief Executive Office, Rich Daly. Rich?

Thanks, Edings. Good morning, everyone. My only comment before we begin on the elections is that we're certainly going to – (2:18) in not having our earnings call the day after presidential election going forward because as important as Broadridge is to, I know, everyone on this call and everyone here at Broadridge, somehow I think the world might be slightly more distracted by other events than Broadridge's earnings call. So, with that, let's start. I'd like to start up this morning with the highlights section on page 4 of our presentation slides. We delivered solid first quarter results. Although first quarter is traditionally the smallest of the year from a revenue and profit perspective, I am pleased to report that Broadridge is off to a good start in fiscal 2017, and is building on the momentum we saw in 2016. We are reaffirming our fiscal year 2017 guidance and are on track to deliver the three-year financial objectives we laid out in late 2014. A key reason for our confidence is the continued momentum we see in Closed sales. We booked $22 million of Closed sales in the first quarter, an increase of 26% versus last year. Our sales pipeline is strong, and the quality of our dialogues with clients is high. The integration of NACC, or Broadridge Customer Communications as it is now known, is going well. We're executing on our operational plans and putting in place the key building blocks of our digital strategy. We continue to take steps to strengthen Broadridge's core proxy business by acquiring a software architecture that will enable the delivery of blockchain applications to our proxy clients within the next two to three years, building further on our long-term legacy of delivering technology-driven innovation to the proxy market. Tuck-in acquisitions which broadened…

Thanks, Rich, and good morning, everyone. I'll provide some additional details about our growth drivers and comment on Broadridge's operating income and margin performance. I'll also try to address some of the questions many of you have asked about our potential exposure under our contract to Scottrade in the wake of its announced sale to TD Ameritrade. Finally, I will close with the discussion of our balance sheet and uses of cash and review our full year 2017 guidance, which we are reaffirming today. Before I jump in, let me remind you that the first quarter has historically been our smallest revenue quarter, accounting for just over 20% of the total in recent years. Similarly, adjusted net earnings of the first quarter has historically averaged around 12% of the full year. So, please keep this in mind as you analyze our results. I'll start with a quick recap. First quarter 2017 recurring revenues was 32% to $517 million, and total revenues rose 51% to $895 million. Adjusted operating income rose 19% in $2 million and adjusted EPS rose 9% to $0.36. The drivers of our growth are laid out on page seven of the presentation. As I noted, total revenues grew 51% to $895 million. The acquisition of NACC which occurred on the first day of the fiscal quarter was the biggest driver of our total growth, contributing $272 million to our revenues. That acquisition drove the increase in both recurring revenues and distribution revenues. Changes in foreign currencies, specifically the weaker Canadian dollar and British pound lowered our reported revenue growth by 1 percentage point or $4 million. Recurring fee revenues grew 32% to $517 million. Excluding the impact of NACC, the growth in recurring revenues was largely organic. Revenues from closed sales accounted for 6 points of growth…

Thanks, Jim. Please turn to slide 12 for my closing remarks. Broadridge is off to a solid start to fiscal year 2017. We reported strong top and bottom line growth, and we are reaffirming our 2017 guidance. The integration of NACC is going well. We are making progress in bringing our two businesses together and are on track to deliver the cost synergies we laid out at the time of the deal. We are implementing our digital strategy, which was a key strategic impetus, for the transaction by rolling out the Broadridge Communications Cloud and building the largest client and channel network in the industry. We invested in our proxy business by acquiring key technology that will enable us to deliver blockchain capabilities faster and with lower risk. We are committed to maintaining our leading role in the proxy market by delivering innovation to our clients. Last, our Closed sales increased and our sales pipeline is strong. The common factor in all of these trends is execution. When we hosted our Investor Day in late 2014, one of our key messages was that we wanted to transform Broadridge from a company that relies on the market for its growth into a company that was focused on providing solutions to our customers across the capital markets, wealth management, asset management and corporate client segments. Focusing on our clients' needs and delivering the breadth of products they require gives us multiple tasks to achieve our objectives. I am pleased with the progress we have made in making this a reality. Our organic revenue growth in this quarter was driven by higher sales, which is an indication that we are finding ways to add value to our clients and by continued higher retention, and not by internal growth. Our strong sales pipeline speaks of the depth of our client relationships and breadth of our products. The investments we are making in our business in both digital and blockchain should put us in a position to further extend the value we can offer. That progress and our continued focus on execution gives me increasing confidence that we will deliver on the three-year financial objectives we've set and continue to deliver top quartiles whole shareholder returns for years to come. Before I turn the call over to Q&A, let me thank our associates. Thanks to their efforts, the service profit chain is alive and well at Broadridge and their work is critical to the value we add to our clients. Now, let me turn the call over to your questions.

We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question is from Peter Heckmann with Avondale.

Good morning, everyone.

Hi, Pete.

Good morning, Peter.

Hi. Can you talk a little bit about the Department of Labor's pending rule and some of the puts and takes? I'm wondering if that may have some sort of – be creating a pause in turnover in advisory portfolios that may be hitting positions – position growth. And then as well would you expect the changes that the fund industry makes to fee structures or to fund share classes could then result in an uptick in mutual fund proxies over the next two quarters?

Pete, it's a terrific question and that's part of the analysis that we're working on when I talked about analyzing the interim record positions. If you recall, we called out in the last call, our year end call, that some of our larger retail clients have been pointing out to us that until the DOL rule dust settles, advisers have been very hesitant to put clients into new funds until they better understand the grandfathering aspects of the rule and just have this whole fiduciary part of the rule is going to play itself out. So, it's clearly part of what's going on in the fund volumes beyond fund flows. But what we found was a pretty good correlation between fund flows and volumes and funds flows are down. Now, the DOL rules are going to require a different way to service these assets. We're in the asset servicing business, in particularly in communications. As the world continues to work on lower fees, that's why our focus on digital and our excitement about being the largest network to identify individuals whether they do it through a brokerage account or they do it through a cable bill, whether they do it from a cell phone bill, whether they do it through a credit card bill. All the things we're servicing now in the largest network with those 5 billion pieces of content we distribute, identifying ways to drive that cost of paper and postage out, we see as one of the most significant ways, not only for the financial services industry, but for all industries we're going to enable people to communicate more cost effectively and it should also be highlighted – because I mentioned it and I want to emphasize this, it also has to be a better experience, okay, both in terms of convenience and the content you're looking at. And if you go and look at the release from Vegas, it not only talks about this network, okay, of Money 20/20, but it also talks about enhanced content and enhanced experience. So, DOL is one of the factors, however driving cost out through digital adoption where we let it in proxy, we let it in interims, and now we're going to leave it for consumers, right, is something we believe will enable us to have not only maintain our strength in the market while pursuing meaningful opportunities as this evolves going forward.

Okay. And then any thoughts on the need for more mutual fund proxies, from any changes that funds need to make?

You're talking about the event-driven side of this, Pete?

Yeah.

Okay. We believe that we've been running below historic norms really because, of course, management. There is – I'll call it interesting dialogue activities in some of the larger funds about the need to go-to-market. The timing of that, it's too early to tell. But we do believe that the event-driven side of this would be on the historic low but I can't tell you what it will be going forward. But I'm not expecting to be going back to historic lows.

Your next question comes from Darrin Peller with Barclays.

Thanks, guys. Just on a bit of a higher level, what do you see is the potential? Maybe you could just help list off the potential for items that could lead to reacceleration of the ICS segment organically just given what we're seeing on the growth and the number of positions, obviously decelerated, and the event-driven is also had to tell. So, I know data analytics is an initiative of your deals. And I guess that will lead to the follow up question of what the pro forma growth could look like with NACC and how that's been performing.

Hey, Darrin. It's Jim. It's obviously – ICS on organic basis a little light at 2% with that software interim position growth. But look, I think as we think about new business, that's the big driver. At 3 points this quarter, we continue to believe that a lot of the emerging and acquired businesses that are still gaining steam and also are contributing disproportionately to our sale and the ability to drive that much higher. So, even in a scenario where position growth comes down and what the internal growth moves to something that's more flat, which we're not anticipating at the moment, but if we're to get more flat, we still think that net new business number can continue to be well more than 3%, more of the kind of the 5% range as we think about a lot of these new businesses growing, this is obviously excluding the acquisition of NACC. So, there's still a lot of growth left.

Okay.

Obviously, we like the growth that comes from the interims and proxies and stock-record positions but that's not what we're focused day-to-day. It's all the sales activity whether it's daily analytics to the advisor space, et cetera. I think that I've seen kind of organic growth going forward just as a reminder for NACC, as we layer in that business, it's going to contract for a couple of years as we work through some of the things we outlined at the time we announced the acquisition, including consolidation in the telecommunications industry, they'll decline for a bit before it rises back to higher levels and we start layering in what we think are good sales opportunities for – on the combined entity. So, again, we're pretty optimistic about the growth and where our dollars are invested in or against these emerging acquired products that have – continue to have really good sales performance.

All right. So, it sounds like – yeah, Go ahead, Rich.

Darrin, so let's take a step back because really your expertise here is going to help you a lot more than anything, in some ways, our expertise. It's not something that hasn't been very actively discussed on your side of the world that leading up to this election, money here and around the world has been somewhat on the sideline waiting to have a better understanding of what this all means. All right? And I've been doing this, getting close to four decades now, and this is not the first time that I've seen questions about where the market is as it fully value, doesn't it fully value, what is the political world mean, what a world events mean et cetera, et cetera. I don't even put this to even close to some of the more significant activities we went through in the past, including 9/11. With rates being where they are, this money can sit on the sidelines and stay on a money fund yielding a basis point, internationally having a negative return. So, the question is, and I've seen this, the best place for returns historically has been and I expect will remain to be in the markets. And as money comes into the market, those assets need to serviced. So, I very much still love the position that ICS is in for a long-term point of view, right? Because I still believe that market, whether they correct, stabilize, they ultimately go to new heights. And we thought it was a how a dire that situation seemed in the past at that moment, it's always proven to be true. So, that's one of the advantages of having more gray hair every day. With that said, we transformed the business when we spun from a company that relied on…

Right.

I ultimately believe volumes will come back, right?

So, that's ...

This money has to go somewhere.

It sounded like that – right. So, hopefully it comes back, but even despite that, I think what you guys, and Jim, you were saying earlier also is just that even in this environment there's enough catalysts and levers between data analytics and new business to reaccelerate to maybe a mid-single digit rate for the – from an organic standpoint for the segment.

Yeah. The harder we work, the luckier we get in here, (47:11) Darrin.

Right. Just a quick follow-up question on the GTO side. I mean, obviously we get lots of questions around demand and the environment around financials, broadly retrenching on spending, obviously it was Brexit; now it's other things, election, et cetera. I mean, any insight into what you're seeing from your clients on -- bigger clients on spending trends right now? I mean, it's seems like the segments' growth rate has held up pretty well.

Hey, Darrin. We talked about sales. And we talked about sales with confidence. And look, the $22 million is not a knock-you-out-of-your-seat number. The reason we're talking about it with that confidence is because of the pipeline, the size of it, the quality of the conversations and the level within the largest financial institution that those conversations are taking place. So this industry needs to transform itself. It's not just a matter of taking heads out or reducing the cost per head; it needs to transform itself. And if you go back to the last quarter, we announced that one of the largest global banks, or one could even argue the largest, right? But certainly in terms of what they do, went to seven platforms worldwide to Broadridge going forward, right? That is not insignificant. As other firms are looking at, we can't announce who that client is on something like a call or we can't advertise it. What we can do is talk to every other firm about what's happening in the industry and there is an enormous amount of interest in what's happening particularly because of the size of the firms now that are saying it just doesn't make sense to do this on their own particularly when Broadridge has created a solution that enables us to combine platforms around the globe to create that level of efficiency.

Okay. All right, guys. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Thanks, Darrin.

Your next question is from the line of David Togut with Evercore ISI.

Thank you. Good morning, Rich and Jim.

Hi, Dave.

Hi, Dave.

Recognizing that the first quarter is seasonally the smallest quarter of the year from a contribution of revenue and earnings. Adjusted EPS growth was 9% under the 12% to 17% guidance for the year as a whole. Can you talk about sort of the puts and takes at this point that would take you, let's say, to the low end of the range versus the middle or the high end of the range from what you see today?

Sure. This is Jim. Yeah, obviously the first quarter is small. So, growth off of a small base -- not as meaningful. So, what we – again, we reaffirm guidance; we have good confidence that we deliver that. So, clearly, if some of the key variables we think about between the low and the high, clearly if interim growths were to pick back up in a significant way, that's a variable that starts pushing you a bit higher. Clearly, if events-driven revenue continues to grow like it did last year, we're assuming more flattish this year, that's certainly a nice tailwind that will push you up into the higher end of the range. Both those variables, obviously, can have factors, bring you down to the low end of the range. But otherwise, we've got very good revenue visibility given the nature of the business, given the recurring revenue base, and business under – the revenues that we have under contract. On the investment side, obviously, in any given year, we've got a set of investments we're trying to make and this year is no different, probably as large as ever. So, those are always levers, although we're pretty disciplined about making sure we make the investments each year. And then obviously, I think, one other variable when you have a large new business like we do with this NACC acquisition, you're still learning about that business, so it's not hard to have a few million dollars move either way, either in additional savings you find or frankly year one cost as you integrate the business. So, those are some of the variables that I think about at the moment, but we don't have to sort of natural volatility that others might have just given the sort of large recurring revenue base that we have.

Understood. That's helpful. Just as a quick follow-up. Rich, the Tier 1 banks that outsourced trade processing to you -- do you get a meaningful revenue and earnings contributions from that contract in fiscal 2017?

Well, David, this is going to be a pretty meaningful conversion process, so you shouldn't be thinking of that as being a major uptick in 2017. What you should be thinking about is the strong sales that we've had over the years rolling into 2017, and that's some of the revenue visibility that Jim was talking about.

And you do have a follow-up question from Peter Heckmann with Avondale.

Guys, I may have missed it, but a lot of things going this morning as you note. But Jim, your commentary around kind of the percentage of earnings that typically comes from the second quarter, you do have what appears to be a fairly difficult comp with the event-driven revenue in the second quarter of fiscal 2016. So, it looks like the consensus for the second quarter is about $0.41. Should we infer from your commentary that that's something more around the mid to high-30s is probably a little bit better number?

Yeah. I would just stick with the comments, Pete. I think you're right to highlight the very tough comp for next year. So, back to David's question about, and I'm just seeing a growth coming in the second quarter, I think again queuing of that 11% to 12% of our full year earnings typically fall into the second quarter will probably get you in the right zip code for what we're seeing right now.

Okay. Great. Thanks a lot. We'll talk to you next quarter.

Next queue.

Next queue.

Your next question is from Patrick O'Shaughnessy with Raymond James. Patrick J. O'Shaughnessy - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Hey. Good morning, guys.

Hey, Patrick. Patrick J. O'Shaughnessy - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: So, my question is around the Inveshare technology assets that you acquired. Can you kind of walk us through the build versus buy decisions that you made. Obviously, it's through the investment for technology that's not completely developed at this point. So, what led you to say, you know what? Let's not do this internally, let's buy this from Inveshare.

Patrick, this is Rich. Good morning. Yours truly really drove that. As I heard in the ways about blockchain, we are participating with our clients on blockchain dialog as it relates to back office processing which is mind-numbingly complex. As we looked at markets like Estonia and Australia, well, I knew as the leader in proxy and as somebody, as an organization and as a leader myself who was lead proxy for decades, I needed a faster path than the build path, and what I highlighted in the call was that the Inveshare technology does not cover all the functionality of ProxyEdge and lots of the reconciliation things we do, but it's on a more current architecture. And by starting with that as our starting point, our technical people said to me without question we can get to a blockchain solution faster than the path of going in on our own. That's what led to that decision. So, we intend, through this transaction where we've already gotten a reaction of the marketplace, for the world to again look to Broadridge to lead. What's unique about proxy for Broadridge versus any one of us is because we already connect to all parties, the toughest part of blockchain is getting the parties connected. So, hypothetically if IBM wants to get instant voting results via blockchain and another company does not want to participate in it, we would be in a unique position with this solution that when we expect during an election a corporate secretary closes the polls at IBM, it will be – give our preliminary results and we'll issue them in an 8-K within 48 hours, it will be – they close the polls and instantly, at that second, split-second, every vote received through that split-second is now in front of that corporate secretary, all right? So, there are other efficiencies that this will drive but most importantly is Broadridge is the leader in proxy. And if you're going to remain the leader, you can't say, well we like what we had and we don't want to be concerned about making investments. You need to invest to remain the leader. And so, everyone should interpret this, is that Broadridge will continue to invest at the levels required to lead across the markets we weave in. Patrick J. O'Shaughnessy - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Got it. Now the follow up would be to what extent are you concerned that through this investment you've now capitalize a smaller competitor in the proxy space and maybe make them a more viable product to you.

There will always be competition out there. We think the differentiation and that's why I emphasized the functionality. The differentiation between what we do and anyone else can do is very dramatic. We spend more on cyber security than all of our competitors combined have in revenue. So, we live in a world where the days of a Rich Daly starting a proxy business in an extra bedroom are over. Because the requirements to get to even the cyber security needs, no one who gave me the data almost 30 years ago will give it to me today. That's the reality, and no one worth talking about would give me the data. So, this is not about that aspect of it. We remain highly confident that our value proposition is very well-differentiated versus any other offering in the market, and that's why we continue to win. There have been better deals on the table to our – commercially all of our clients for quite some period of time.

And at this time, there are no questions. Speakers, do you have any closing remarks?

All right. Well, it certainly is going to be a very interesting day today. And I regret to say it's probably not just because of Broadridge's earnings call. We're three minutes into the open now, so I'm sure everyone wants get off to that. We'll remind you that we have an investor launch on November 16 in New York City. We will certainly look forward to seeing you there, and we look forward to discussing Broadridge as we go forward. I've said this many times before, but it requires particular emphasis today, choose to have great day. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect.