Rohit Verma
Analyst · Truist
Thank you, Tami. Good morning, and welcome to our third quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me today is Bruce Swain, our Chief Financial Officer; Tami Stevenson, our General Counsel; and Joseph Blanco, our President. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions.
Before I review our results, I would like to take a minute to acknowledge the heightened conflict currently ongoing in the Middle East. Our thoughts are with all of those directly impacted, and we join the world community in our desire for peace in the region.
Let's turn to our results now. This was an excellent quarter for Crawford where we achieved record consolidated revenue and saw continued growth and profit expansion. We still have a lot of work to do, but this is a clear indication that our operational strategy is working, and we're making progress on our strategic initiatives across our business.
As a reminder, Crawford is one of the world's largest providers of claims management. We operate globally, manage over $18 billion in claims annually and have approximately 10,000 employees and thousands of field resources. Our customer base is diversified and growing, including a wide spectrum of brand names who increasingly rely on Crawford as a claims solution provider. Our established partnerships are strong and getting stronger. And we have made meaningful strides acquiring new clients and establishing a leadership position. This has further reinforced my belief in the long-term growth opportunity for the business.
There are multiple reasons that we're optimistic about our long-term growth prospects. First, globally, weather-related catastrophes are becoming more prevalent as floods, wildfires, hurricanes and other serious weather activity are increasing in both severity and frequency. That said, some years include multiple severe weather events and other years do not see any severe events. For example, in the back half of 2022, there were several damaging weather events, including Hurricane Ian, Winter Storm Elliott, historic floods in Australia and a winter freeze in the U.K. Conversely, as we move through the final few months of 2023, we have yet to see similar severe events this year.
Nonetheless, we are always at the ready to support the recovery of affected communities from all types of weather-related events with the highest level of compassion and excellence. We are focused on executing our operational strategy to grow and touch as many of these claims as possible to improve the customer experience.
Second, we expect to see a long-term trend of carriers outsourcing claims as they contend with increased volumes, staffing challenges and continued pressure of a complicated technology environment.
Third, the independent loss adjusting market is very fragmented, and we believe our growing scale is a considerable competitive advantage in the market landscape, particularly with the reliability and resiliency of service providers becoming more and more critical.
Fourth, the depth and breadth of our relationships with key clients across our segments, including carriers, brokers and corporate customers, continues to be a valuable attribute of our business. I continue to spend much of my time building these strategic partnerships, and we have significantly advanced our customer base over the past few years.
And finally, insurance technology, or insurtech, is a key element in the future of claims management. We are at the forefront of technological innovation for our clients, whether it's machine learning, data visualization or other SaaS-based offerings, improving the claims process and experience.
Okay. Now let's get into the results for the third quarter. We delivered another quarter of strong results. Revenues grew by 10% on both a reported and constant currency basis to a new quarterly record. And both net income and operating earnings more than doubled year-over-year. This quarter, we achieved revenue growth and profit expansion across 3 out of our 4 segments.
Our underlying operational strategy remains solid, and our business this quarter reflects the success of our operational execution. In fact, these were our highest quarterly earnings since 2018 fourth quarter. We added $24 million in new and enhanced business in the third quarter with all segments announcing new partnerships and client wins this quarter. These new clients have driven our revenue growth, which has, in turn, contributed significantly improved cash generation with $68 million in year-to-date operating cash flow.
We will continue to strategically allocate our capital by investing in innovation at Crawford and returning capital to shareholders. And as a reflection of our commitment to returning value to shareholders, we paid a $0.07 dividend in the third quarter and resumed our share repurchase program.
Lastly, I am pleased to provide an update on our NPS, which has increased 3 points from the last quarter to 49. NPS, or Net Promotor Score, measures customer loyalty and satisfaction, and it remains a priority at Crawford to provide excellent service.
We continue to see progress on our commitment to grow organically and improve margins across our business. While we may see anticipated quarterly fluctuation due to weather, our operational strategy remains strong and continues to produce improved financial results.
In our North America Loss Adjusting segment, we focused on driving low- to mid-single-digit revenue growth and improved margins through efficiency on the volume side and investments in expertise on the major and complex side. We have added approximately 60 new expert adjusters year-to-date, which has increased our coverage density and market share in the U.S.
The significant margin expansion achieved in the third quarter was driven by the addition of multiple new accounts and improved utilization. I am pleased with our third quarter results, but I want to reiterate that we currently have a relatively benign weather trend in the second half of 2023. Accordingly, we do not expect a similar over-performance in the fourth quarter of 2023 as compared to the fourth quarter of 2022.
Our International business has significantly improved this year. We have made excellent progress on our goal to get International to a mid-single-digit growth target as revenues have increased 6% year-to-date, 11% on constant currency. In the third quarter, we saw 14% growth or 12.5% growth on a constant currency basis, and we delivered improved operating earnings of $2.2 million compared to an operating loss in the third quarter of last year.
We have successfully turned around Latin America, U.K. and Europe, although we still have work to do in order to reach our targeted margins. We have demonstrated progress in executing our strategy to address pricing and productivity, and I look forward to continuing to improve our margins as we grow our International business.
The third quarter was a record quarter for Broadspire, featuring best-ever revenues, gross profit and operating earnings. We continue to see tremendous growth in Medical Management and workers' compensation clients, while we also benefit from a shift in mix. It is likely that 2023 will be our strongest-ever sales year, and I'm very optimistic about Broadspire's outlook as our high-performing teams continue to capture share in alternative markets and leverage data to offer cutting-edge analytics services to our clients.
Platform Solutions achieved growth in our Contractor Connection and Subrogation businesses related to changes in mix, but faced some comparative pressure related to the benign hurricane season and the absence of other significant weather events as compared to 2022 in our Networks business. Platform's operating margin remained solid at mid-double digits.
In summary, our business has had a tremendous third quarter. While we do not anticipate -- while we do anticipate some softness in North America Loss Adjusting and Platform Solutions due to continued benign weather in the fourth quarter, we expect to deliver record revenues for full year 2023. Bruce will provide some additional detail around our outlook during this discussion of our financial performance.
Turning now to capital allocation. We continue to maintain a disciplined and prudent capital allocation strategy. Continuing the efforts of the second quarter, we once again saw improved cash generation in the third quarter. Our stated goal was to have our leverage ratio between 2x EBITDA by the end of 2023. And we have surpassed that goal and are now at 1.4x EBITDA at the end of the third quarter. We are pleased with our progress and early achievement of our financial goals.
Our capital allocation strategy remains focused, invest in Crawford to foster technological evolution with a long-term benefit of the company while returning capital to the shareholders. This quarter, we raised our dividend to $0.07 from $0.06 per share for both CRD-A and CRD-B and bought back more than 60,000 shares of CRD-B as part of our share repurchase program. I'm proud to tell you that we have returned more than $131 million of capital to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends since 2019.
With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Joseph who will discuss our business line results for the third quarter.