Cliff Skelton
Analyst · Cross Research. Please go ahead
Thanks John. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to Conduent's Q3 earnings call. I really appreciate everybody joining today. I've been the CEO here since August of 2019. And I don't think I need to really remind anyone, the amount of change we've all experienced. And of course, Conduent is no exception to that change. Given that I'd be remiss if I didn't again, say thank you to our over 60,000 dedicated associates, most of whom continue to work from home and take care of our clients. In a services business, nothing works without a dedicated team. So I'm very grateful to our team. Regarding the quarter, it was a strong one. We have numbers to report today that exceeded both our internal and our external expectations, again, due to the hard work by our associates. As I've said previously, the secret sauce at this point in our company's evolution is really in the foundation centering on the fundamentals. We saw some solid fundamental performance. And we'll take you through some of that in just a moment. Now, Slide 4 just gives you a bit of narrative feedback from our clients and our associates. So let me quickly go over the agenda. Before we dive into the details. First, I'll go through the high-level financials for the quarter. And as always, we'll discuss our sales results. In both cases, we were fortunate to have exceeded our previous internal and external expectations. I'll also go through some of the improvements we're seeing from our operations and our delivery teams, as well as give you a flyby of the organization and process model changes, we've made here in 2020. I'll then turn it over to Brian to run through some of the more detailed financials and our outlook for the remainder of the year and of course questions at the end as always. But let's turn to Slide 5 and we'll get started. The third quarter was definitely strong. Revenue and adjusted EBITDA both came in higher than expectations with revenue of over $1 billion at 1.041 billion and EBITDA at 14 1 million. Brian will go deeper, but let's go over a couple of the highlights. Our government business performed well in Q3, primarily driven by COVID-19 upside in the payments business and increase subsidy enrollment in eligibility activities. Our transportation businesses continue to see a more muted impact from COVID-19 than we previously anticipated. In fact, in some states, volumes, believe it or not, we're pretty close to pre-COVID volumes. In our commercial activities COVID continues to create some downward pressure as anticipated, especially in our claims processing offerings and associated mailroom scanning activities. Regarding EBITDA, we saw even stronger performance with improved margins, primarily due to some overachievement in our cost and efficiency efforts and our measures of revenue. We now see ourselves exceeding 140 million in savings, which was at top end of the range we described to you on the last call. Also, and importantly, the government payments revenue, which ramped up with government subsidy efforts, is coming in at higher margin due to relatively low incremental expense. Now, both of these tailwinds resulting in expanded margins and improved EBITDA. We think that some of this margin expansion may be temporary, or at least tied to the duration of the increased subsidy volumes in our government business. With respect to sales, we felt like Q3 was also strong, certainly on a year-over-year basis, as we sold twice as much new business in Q3 2020, as we did in the same quarter last year. I'll go through more details on the next slide. We believe we will meet or beat our full year quota for 2020, which, as you may remember, is 160% of last year's actual new business sales TCV. Also, our IT journey is also ongoing and remains important. We continue to see progress from our client's point of view, and our metrics show that 2020 is much improved. My sense is that the incremental improvement will always be needed as the environment is and always will be constantly changing. But to date, we feel really good about our progress. Now, while 75% of our associates are still working from home, we've been able to meet the vast majority of client expectations, despite the remote working conditions. While we do have a return to work plan, it will remain quite flexible based on geography, pandemic conditions, et cetera. So in terms of our office footprint, we don't ever really see ourselves getting exactly back to pre-COVID models. But at the same time, we likely won't stay where we are either. So the good news is that given all that our employee base seems to remain motivated and optimistic, as evidenced by our most recent survey. Associate satisfaction will always remain critical for future success. And we're going to stay focused on that as we are today. So let's turn to Slide 6, and we'll discuss in a more detailed way our strong sales quarter. We $468 million in new business signings double last year signings as I previously mentioned, Annual recurring revenue signings were also up 35% year-over-year. Overall, year-to-date, our new business signings are around 180% of what we signed in the exact same first three quarters of last year. So let me give you a few examples of the types of deals we signed in Q3. In our commercial business, we signed a learning contract with a very large global aircraft and defense manufacturer. We will be running end-to-end management of learning providers. In our government business, we signed a deal with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to provide Medicaid and children's health care eligibility processing, and some support to some long-term care programs. And finally, we expanded our services with the city of Memphis in our transportation space, beyond the curbside management and public safety solutions we already have in place and we're keen to continue to expand these important relationships, so we can continue to drive add on revenue wherever we can. As we've discussed in the past, growth is always simple to describe and difficult to achieve. It not only requires sales, but it's heavily dependent upon retention, and overcoming the last contracts of the past that have a run off tail. We clearly think there are leading indicators for growth. Certainly one is client retention, where we see renewals up compared to 2019. Now, volume shifts are also always important because in some of our contracts, volume swings can come back and forth depending on performance. In our case, discretionary volume this year is holding its own. Finally, as mentioned new sales and add on TCV in annual recurring revenue are on track this year. All three metrics are leading bellwether indications for the future. But while we can't yet predict when the overall shift to growth will take place, primarily due to the continued uncertainty of COVID, all of the components were in place and had moved in a positive direction. The rest of the story is really about time and consistency. So attach whatever analogy or metaphor or story that suits you, but to use my own, it's clear to me that our ship is turning. Let's not turn to Slide 7 for an update on how we continue to drive change throughout the company. As always, our strategy remains focused on growth, efficiency and quality. We use these pillars as guideposts for our continuous improvement plan and we've already started making progress on several fronts. So a couple of key bolts here. We're standardizing the processes and the governance around client implementations and contract ramp. We're strictly governing account management now and incident responses. We'll measure specific commitments from and to clients post sale to ensure revenue ramp is more predictable. We've also added several new leaders to the senior leadership team in operations, customer experience management, government services and payments and in healthcare. And we've added new leaders in technology, finance and human resources. Now, these are proven leaders in the marketplace, who have come to Conduent because they believe in the dream, they believe in the promise of the future. And they're already adding value. But our talent focus goes beyond the senior leadership team. We're also driving change to the corporate culture. We're encouraging teamwork, openness, and improved communication, all of which seems to be driving improvement to associate engagement. And speaking of our associate engagement, we had a significant improvement in participation. And we showed marked improvement in nearly every category. So things are different and they continue to improve. And I believe our clients are feeling it as well. We're also focused on efficiency as you would expect, we're leveraging a new shared service model to drive process improvement and cost containment. We're heavily focused on improved associate recruitment and development where cost can be really high. And we're seeing improvements in associate retention. As mentioned, from a cost perspective, in 2020, we now expect to overachieve the high end of the $120 million to $40 million range, we gave in the key to earnings call. And we're expecting the bulk of the savings to be permanent and bleed into 2021 as you would expect. Regarding technology, or data center modernization efforts continue to go well, our newly open IT command center is adding value, especially in the way of improved performance levels. But the bottom line, before I turn it over to Brian, is we have more work to do across these three pillars of growth, efficiency and quality. While it was a great quarter, I'll say again, the more important than one or two or even three quarters is consistency. Our mission here is to do what we say we're going to do minimally. And over time, Conduent will become a growth company. We see that path to stabilizing revenue, then showing growth. And I'm confident that what we've been able to do on this most challenging year shows that we're going to get there. But this is a marathon it's not a sprint. This growth plan requires that we first must stop the slide from the past. It's not a light switch recovery. This is a rheostat recovery. And it will migrate into 2021 for sure. That all said these are exciting and unique times and I look forward to continuing this journey with you and certainly with the team. So now I'd like to turn it over to Brian for a detailed look at our financials. And I'd like to thank you very much for your time today. Brian?