Earnings Labs

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (BR)

Q3 2017 Earnings Call· Wed, May 10, 2017

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Alfonso, and I will be your conference facilitator. At this time, I would like to welcome everybody to the Broadridge Fiscal Year 2017 Third 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. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Edings Thibault, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

W. Edings Thibault - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Thank you, Alfonso. And good morning, everybody, and welcome to Broadridge's third 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 third 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 income, adjusted EPS, and free cash flow. We believe these non-GAAP measures provide investors with a more complete understanding of Broadridge's underlying operating results. An explanation of our use of these non-GAAP measures and reconciliation to their comparable GAAP measures can be found in the earnings release and in the earnings presentation. Let me now turn the call over to Broadridge's President and Chief Executive Officer, Rich Daly. Rich?

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Thanks, Edings. Good morning to everyone on our call. I would like to start off this morning with the highlights section on page 4 of our presentation slides. Broadridge reported strong third quarter results. Total revenues rose 46% to $1 billion in the third quarter. As has been the case all year, the acquisition of NACC continues to be the largest contributor to our total revenue growth, adding to both recurring revenues and distribution revenues. Adjusted operating income rose 22% to $134 million, and adjusted EPS rose by 19%. Profit growth reflects the impact of NACC, our organic growth, and an increase in event-driven revenues. Recurring fees rose by 30%, driven by the NACC acquisition. On an organic basis, our recurring fee revenues rose 4% and are up 5% year-to-date. Our organic fee revenue growth continues to be broad-based across both the ICS and GTO segments. Our growth is also being led by new sales, an indication that our product innovation is well-aligned with the underlying growth drivers in our markets. Speaking of sales, we reported another strong quarter for closed sales, as Broadridge continues to benefit from strong demand for its solutions and services. Third quarter closed sales were $48 million, up 66% versus the third quarter 2016. Those results pushed our year-to-date closed sales to $125 million, 33% higher than last year. I'm especially pleased at the breadth of this quarter's sales, which are not being driven by any single significant new win, but instead represent literally hundreds of incremental wins. As always, many of these sales require lengthy implementations and will take time to translate into revenues. But the increase in our backlog gives us more visibility into Broadridge's growth going forward. Broadridge's balanced capital allocation strategy enabled us to continue to invest in the business, while…

James M. Young - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Thanks, Rich, and good morning, everyone. Before reviewing the quarter and outlook in more detail, I'll make a few callouts to begin. First, guidance. We're reaffirming our fiscal year 2017 guidance this morning, and I will give you a sense on where we expect to land within those ranges. Specific to earnings, we expect adjusted EPS growth will be in the range of 13% to 15% in the middle of our 12% to 17% guidance range. Second, investment gain. In connection with the acquisition of Message Automation, we realized a $9 million investment gain related to our prior ownership stake. For purposes of our adjusted earnings, we deducted this income, dollar for dollar, since it's a non-taxable gain. And third, tax rate. Our GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 28.6%, which was driven down by the impact of the Message Automation investment gain. Our effective tax rate after adjusting for the gain was 31.3%. Our full-year GAAP tax rate is expected to be 33% or 34%, excluding the Message Automation gain. I will touch on these topics again through my review of the quarter and our outlook. I will now provide a quick recap of our results. Third quarter 2017 recurring fee revenues rose 30% to $592 million; and total revenues rose 46% to $1.01 billion. Adjusted operating income rose 22% to $134 million; and adjusted EPS rose $19% to $0.69 per share; and closed sales rose 66% to $48 million. Let's move to the drivers of our top line growth, which are laid out on page 6 of the presentation. I will start with total revenues and then focus on recurring fee revenues. As I noted, total revenues grew 46% to $1.01 billion. The acquisition of NACC, which occurred on the first day of the first fiscal quarter…

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Thanks, Jim. With two months remaining in the fiscal year, we are expecting 2017 to be another typical Broadridge year. By that, I mean, mid-single-digit organic recurring fee revenue growth, modest margin expansion, and low-double-digit adjusted EPS growth. Putting aside the NACC acquisition impact, our guidance very much matches us with that Broadridge kind of standard. Clearly, the acquisition of NACC has had an impact on several of those metrics by significantly accelerating our revenue growth for the year and lowering our reported margins. From a strategy point of view, the acquisition positions us to win new business at some very large clients and accelerate their efforts to move away from traditional mailings to a better digital future. Also, typical of Broadridge is the balance we try to strike between investing in our business and rewarding our shareholders. Over the course of the first nine months of this year, we have deployed your capital to make strategic acquisitions, like NACC, and advancing our blockchain capabilities, and we made two additional tuck-in deals that enhance our existing product line. We have also continued to reward our shareholders in the form of an industry-leading dividend payout and more than $167 million of net share buybacks. And we accomplished all of that, while maintaining a strong investment-grade credit rating. That's typical of Broadridge as well. We also continue to invest internally to drive organic growth. Over the 10 years since we became an independent company, we have reshaped our company to aligning with industry growth drivers. Those investments have positioned Broadridge to take advantage of the need by the financial services industry to neutralize large parts of its cost structure. By reinvesting in the technology and people on our GTO business, we have positioned Broadridge to take advantage of that trend. By investing…

Operator

Operator

Your first question comes from the line of David Togut from Evercore ISI. Please ask a question.

David Mark Togut - Evercore Group LLC

Analyst

Thank you. Good morning. Rich, a couple of months ago, some of the largest investment banks, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BofA, announced the formation of Project Scalpel, a consortium to cut up to $2 billion in their equity and fixed income trade processing costs. I'm wondering if Broadridge can play any role in that, either in providing some of the critical infrastructure services or any value-added services beyond that.

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Sure. So, there have been, Dave, a number of dialogues that have taken place. We've participated, I believe, in every one of these dialogues, and have looked at how the industry can mutualize (36:13) cost as we go forward. And Dave, I've been in the industry now for a very, very long time. So, I remember in the mid-1980s, Sandy Weill and George Ball announcing putting things together. And the dialogue's the easy part. Actually getting the rubber to meet the road and find the way to create a multi-entity platform, cost effectively, has always been the challenge. The reason we are participating in all of these dialogues is, because we are really the only true multi-entity platform with the scale and capabilities to drive these type of activities. So, here's what we are looking to do, and I use that term network value for the first time specifically to call this out. So, Dave, I love the question. If you think about us having 19 of the 23 primary dealers, you think about the fixed income markets overall, all right, you think about that being about $6 trillion a day in clearance requirement. We're looking to start there first for our customers. And we've been proposing this out to the market overall. And as the world goes to T+2, we have envisioned to take our clients at the T+2 to T+1 pretty quickly and even to T by netting transactions. If you think of the capital cost benefits of that, it's very, very meaningful. If you think of the taking risk out of the process benefits of that, it's very meaningful. So, in our dialogues, whether it be Scalpel or other activity to the market, Dave, we're constantly out there saying, let's get from this big theory with a pragmatic view of what we can tangibly get done in the near term. Because when you talk about a project of this nature, you're talking about huge investment, okay, which gets a little tiresome unless you deliver results pretty quickly. So, what I love about where we're positioned here, Dave, is for our clients, we are consistently presenting to them a tangible plan based on real assets today. So, in the last quarter, when we announced that significant global bank, okay, arguably the largest global bank, who previously committed to put their worldwide fixed income onto our platform, and then last quarter committed to put their equity platform on us, all right, you're hearing that we're getting very real players, and our ability to do what I just described is the key driver behind that. So, we will continue to talk, and I think, continue to be in every dialogue, because we have the most tangible assets in the process today.

David Mark Togut - Evercore Group LLC

Analyst

Thank you. Just as a quick follow-up, could you give us your thoughts on stock record growth for 2018? We've started to see a nice pickup in the IPO market after what was a very weak market in 2016. Should that be encouraging in terms of a possible acceleration in growth in the street name proxy business?

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

So, Dave, look, IPOs and having more companies out there is an important long-term trend. If you look at our ability to grow positions versus the number of public companies out there, we've actually managed to offset position growth by more investors coming in versus the number of companies coming down. My favorite thing is when people spin companies out, because that generally immediately creates two shareholders for every one shareholder that the company previously had. IPOs have been terrific, but what we've seen in this last quarter, whether it be mutual fund position growth or equity position growth, has been more individual investor money coming into the markets. So, this is something that over the long term, we've always seen grow. If you're going to be saving for retirement, even with rates slightly higher, it's going to be pretty difficult to retire, unless you're putting an awful lot of money into fixed income or pretty difficult to plan for your kids' education, et cetera, unless you're getting better returns than what fixed income still offers.

David Mark Togut - Evercore Group LLC

Analyst

Understood. Thank you very much.

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Thanks, Dave.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Puneet Jain from JPMorgan. Please ask a question.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Hi. This is Connor (41:24) on for Puneet. I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about your sales and pipeline. It's great to see the strength that you're seeing there. Could you speak a little bit about the sustainability of these sales, and how they're converting? You spoke a little bit about the timing, but could you speak a little bit more on that? Thanks.

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Sure. So, over here (41:45) getting ready for the call, we were talking about multiple paths, the products we've added. I said, I wonder how tired they're getting of hearing me say this. That's when I decided to end the line with just saying, we've been talking about this over, and over, and over again. So, if you exceed customer expectations – and remember, all of our associates are tied to customer satisfaction, over 50% of our associates, the only way they can earn their bonus is if customer satisfaction goes up. So, we have, and we have the data to support it, highly-satisfied customers. And we continue to grow that satisfaction. If we can offer more offerings to those highly-satisfied customers, particularly with an industry that's so focused on getting cost out and neutralizing cost, it puts us in a pretty strong position. So, we try to highlight in this call, and not only, is it record sales, not only we had a great position year-to-date, but it's not even this time from this quarter driven by a single large big deal but it was literally hundreds of deals. So, as we look forward, as you just heard me answer to Dave a minute ago about the opportunity to neutralize cost, right, the NACC transaction has given us near-term benefit, I'll call it cost synergy, mid-term benefit, which played directly into this, because of our ability to have cloud-based digital solutions combined with the most efficient ability to deliver today's needs, our sales pipeline grew with the NACC transaction pretty meaningfully because of that midterm benefit. Of course, what the clients would consider coming with us are looking for is for us to enable them to more successfully get to that longer-term benefit of digitizing these communications. But if you look at all of the products we've added, momentum growing in those products, whether it be tax, data and with GTO segment, the transactions we did this year in GTO, we have more products than ever, and we have a stronger pipeline than ever. And so, we're running this for the long term. That's what you should always hear. We're investing in us, so the more product we have, the more likely we'll be able to maintain this momentum, even if the markets aren't quite as strong as we'd like them to be. And, obviously, if something material happens, we're going to be affected like everybody else, but we're better positioned than we've ever been in our history because of the product we have. And that product turns into the largest pipeline we've ever had.

James M. Young - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

And Connor (44:27), this is Jim. And it sounds like you did catch the comment on the lag between sales and revenue recognition. Again, it's a great success. We've built up a good set of deals in our revenue backlog. And because it's skewing towards larger deals that Rich mentioned, we'll take a little bit more time to see the revenue flow in. So, there'll be a little bit of delayed gratification. That said, it's giving us very good visibility into the next couple of fiscal years, which is a good spot to be in.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Sure. Okay. Great. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Raymond James. Please ask a question. Patrick J. O'Shaughnessy - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Guys, hoping that you can maybe provide a little bit more color on those efficiency initiatives that you talked about that you're going to start to implement during the fourth quarter.

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Pat, so, let me start. So, at Broadridge, every year, we expect as part of our associate's commitment and engagement, we expect everybody to be relevant. And part of being relevant is using technology to be more efficient as we go forward. So, that's kind of like table stakes. For like every business, every now and then, you need to take that step back and look and see other ways we can better align with customers, other ways you can potentially flatten the organization to make the distance between me and the customer have less tiers in it. So, I wouldn't call it anything extraordinary, right, but I'd certainly say that there's a little bit more intensity or focus this time around than in the average year.

James M. Young - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

And Rich, you captured exactly why, which is as I can tell you since I've been here, this is a recurring activity at Broadridge. Sometimes, it's more formal, less formal. As Rich said, maybe a bit more intensity and formality around this. But this is kind of a muscle that we exercise pretty regularly. So, just sort of giving you a heads up that we could see a little bit of elevated expense in the fourth quarter for that, as part of laying our foundation for more growth. Patrick J. O'Shaughnessy - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Okay. Got it. Appreciated that. And then for my follow up, there was one M&A deal during the quarter that you guys did not participate in. That surprised me a little bit. It was the Interactive Data Managed Solutions business that ICE ended up selling to FactSet. And it provides a lot of web-based portal and API functionality to the wealth management industry, and that seems like it's right up your alley. So, I'm guessing you probably don't want to comment on that specific business, but can you maybe give us a view of your wealth management aspirations, and what makes sense, and what doesn't make sense at this point?

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Sure. So, let met first comment on, again, our acquisition strategy is something that we feel we built that muscle over time. So, first, there has to be a strategic fit, and as you pointed out, one can argue at what you just mentioned, probably would have a pretty good strategic fit. Then, there has to be a view that we would be a better owner of the asset, which I'm not going to comment on one way or the other. And then we have to have a view that we're also going to be able to set a return bar that has it make sense on an overall basis. So, every deal has to meet that criteria. And there have been – and I'm not going to comment again on whether this deal was in there or not, I'm just going to simply say that there are literally, probably 10x the number of deals we consider versus, actually, will end up doing. So, there will likely be more deals out there that one could look at and say, why didn't we do it. And there's lots of criteria as to why we do with those deals. In terms of wealth, we have very, very strong processing capabilities. What we're doing in tax certainly enhances our wealth capabilities. Tax is one of the pain points for wealth advisors out there. Personally, when customers or investors are making money, they hate paying taxes, all right. And, we believe, almost like proxy season, tax season is something that shouldn't be as painful as it is today. And with the right technology and the right process tax season shouldn't be a surprise. So, we took proxy season from being an annual fiasco to one of the more recurring activities that can happen in…

Operator

Operator

Your last question comes from the line of Crispin Love from Sandler O'Neill. Please ask a question. Crispin Elliot Love - Sandler O'Neill & Partners LP: Thanks, guys, for taking my question. Just one on the Communications Cloud. I just wanted to see if there's any updates on the Communications Cloud, and if there are any key milestones that we should be looking for in the future for when the cloud starts to generate revenue?

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Okay. So, again, if you go back to the press release we had out in Vegas for Money 20/20, we laid out our strategy there, where Broadridge is uniquely positioned to enable our clients to move data into, as we go forward, any one of the key clouds, all right. And so, we're pretty pleased with the fact that the investments we've made over the last couple of years, all right, without any revenue offset, are really starting to come into play, where we can connect our clients. We believe that's a key driver in terms of taking the assets of NACC, the scale capabilities we have, and positioning us to do lift-outs, and that's a midterm benefit. So, we're in the early stages of that midterm benefit by having the dialogues out there. Now, one of the things that we really are looking to do and want to enable, all right, is to drive real transactions into the cloud, okay, as we continue to go forward. So, I'm not willing to put a date out there yet, or better said, Jim's not willing to let me put a date out there yet. But it's almost daily dialogues, as in every day, not Rich Daly. I guess, you could call it both dialogues, daily and daily dialogues, all right, where we're looking with Doug DeSchutter, who's leading these digital outfits, okay, and is now going to be responsible going forward for the NACC or our BRCC communications business to generate real transactions. We should look to start with proxy. So, not only will we be able to do e-proxy, but we're looking to have proxy transactions and then some statement transactions going directly to the cloud. If you look at that BRCC press release for Money20/20, that pretty much lays out the strategy for you. Crispin Elliot Love - Sandler O'Neill & Partners LP: Okay. Thanks. And then, just one follow-up on closed sales. Closed sales have been pretty good this year. And then, in past years, we've typically seen a strong closed sales in the fourth quarter. Do you expect to see any seasonality in the fourth quarter for closed sales, looking at an uptick, or is that not really the right way to think about it going forward?

Richard J. Daly - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Well, we've never been better positioned year-to-date than we are right now. So, my cardiologist and I are extremely grateful. I mean, as you know, there were times when we ended the third quarter in a relatively weak position versus the target, and then had a pretty significant rally in the fourth quarter to get there. So, we would always rally to get the sales done sooner rather than later. So, we feel good about what we are. That's why we positioned it to say, we should comment in the upper half of the forecast for the year. And my position on sale is sooner is always better than later. And we're going to look forward to the fourth quarter call and see where it comes out. Crispin Elliot Love - Sandler O'Neill & Partners LP: Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. Speakers, you may continue.

W. Edings Thibault - Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Management

Thank you, Alfonso. Before we close, let me remind everyone in the call that we will be hosting an investor lunch, as we always do, to discuss our third quarter results in our offices in New York next Wednesday, May 16. If you would like to attend, please let me know. Thank you, everyone, for your interest in Broadridge. And to shamelessly steal a line from Rich, choose to have a great day. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

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