Rohit Kapoor
Analyst · Wells Fargo
Thank you, Charlie, and welcome, everyone, to our third quarter earnings call. The agenda for today's call will be as follows: first, I will provide an overview of our third quarter results; second, I will describe a few examples of strong new business activity over the last few months with both new and existing clients and provide an update on ongoing contractual discussions with an existing client; third, I will discuss our demand environment; lastly, I will turn it to Vishal for more detailed commentary on our financial results and outlook. Then we will be happy to take your questions. In the third quarter, EXL achieved strong revenue and adjusted EPS growth, both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. As expected, transformation services accelerated quite significantly, posting 21% sequential revenue growth. This impressive sequential growth was driven by decision analytics due to expanded relationships with several key clients in health care and banking and financial services. This growth was also driven by our Finance Transformation business, which enjoyed both seasonal strength and expanded consulting engagements with a large client. Concurrent with improving revenue growth, utilization and profitability increased in transformation services in the quarter, in line with our expectations. The investment in decision analytics we made earlier this year, in hiring over 160 graduates from top Indian universities, is already paying off, with nearly all the new hires productively deployed by the end of the quarter. Separately, our platform technology businesses, which are included in our outsourcing segment, showed strong growth in Q3. For example, our EXL Landa care management software business showed robust third quarter revenue growth, driven by a new license sale to a large U.S. health insurer. Both decision analytics and our platform technology businesses, such as Landacorp, are key investment areas for EXL, and we are pleased to see them generating such strong returns. We believe both businesses enjoy a robust long-term growth outlook, driven by proprietary business-process solutions in our targeted verticals. Third quarter total revenue from our banking and financial services vertical grew 17% year-over-year, while our insurance and health care vertical grew revenue 21% year-over-year. Health care remains a key growth opportunity for EXL across all our businesses and grew nicely above company average. In the third quarter, our outsourcing business as a whole grew 13% on a constant currency year-over-year, driven by the acquisition of EXL Landa and growth from existing clients in insurance and health care, finance and accounting and utilities. We are encouraged by the strong new business activity we generated over the last 3 months, both in signing new clients, implementing recently signed deals and expanding with our existing client base. I would like to discuss a few examples. We won 3 new deals with top-tier U.S. insurers in the last few months. These wins demonstrate our position as the leading strategic partner for operations management and decision analytics to the global insurance industry. Our unmatched experience and capabilities make us an attractive partner for companies looking to offshore for the first time in this sector. We believe these 3 new deals are the first step on a long runway of growth with all 3 companies. They also highlight the various ways we can deliver business impacts to an insurer's operations. One contract is for decision analytics, one is for operations management and one is for finance transformation services. We began an exciting new engagement with a major U.S. bank during the third quarter, providing us an excellent opportunity to showcase our operations management expertise, specifically in legal support solutions in this case. In addition, this allows us to promote our services in other areas of banking and financial services, such as decision analytics, where we are among the leading providers of decision analytics for risk, marketing and banking operations. While the majority of our organic revenue growth in a given year is likely to emanate from expanding within our existing client base, these 4 new deals provide strong evidence of the diversity and the size of our market opportunity with new Global 1000 clients. On last quarter's call, I mentioned that we won sizable, new, multiyear operations management contracts with 2 key existing clients, one in travel and one in insurance. Both contracts are ramping up impressively and will continue to grow well into next year. Both are being delivered from the Philippines, where we have invested aggressively to build world-class delivery capabilities. For example, this past quarter, we added incremental capacity to our facilities in Cebu, our second delivery location in the Philippines. We are working to implement 2 large new contracts in our platform technology businesses. One was in our EXL Landa business, which is continuing to grow its leading position in care management software for health insurers. The other was for our LifePRO policy administration platform for life, health and annuities with a leader in supplemental insurance. In the third quarter, we signed 3 partnerships, an area we see as increasingly important to our growth and differentiation. We entered into an agreement with SunGard to distribute comprehensive receivable management services globally, leveraging their AvantGard GETPAID technology platform for order-to-cash management. We signed a joint marketing agreement with Ariba to provide integrated procure-to-pay services. Both of these partnerships enhance our financial accounting practices' ability to offer unique and powerful business process solutions to the finance organizations of EXL's clients. Finally, we commenced a strategic relationship with Urban Lending Solutions to provide dual-shore business process management, operations consulting and analytics solutions to the U.S. mortgage industry. Tempering the prospects of positive new business activity is uncertainty about future volumes and terms with a material client. As a matter of policy, due to confidentiality agreements we have in place with our clients, we do not disclose details of commercial arrangements with our clients. As discussions with this client are ongoing, we will be limited in the amount we can discuss on today's call and will provide further updates in due course. Our new client pipeline remains strong across our businesses. In particular, demand is robust for operations management among our existing customers in insurance and health care. Demand remained strong for finance and accounting operations management, as well as for decision analytics, particularly in banking and financial services. Most of the deals in finance and accounting and analytics tend to start relatively modestly, but the quality of the logos and the long-term business opportunity for expansion and value creation is exceptionally high. We are continuing to see an increase in large, transformational deals in our pipeline. Often these are with first-time users of third-party operation managers. We believe this increase in large, complex deals is good for our industry. It is evidence of the evolution to technology-enabled operations management with embedded analytics and of the ongoing shift away from FTE-based pricing. It is good for the growth and the long-term profitability of leading focus and innovative strategic partners like EXL. In closing, the third quarter showed strong growth across EXL's businesses. We were pleased in particular to see transformation services accelerate as we expected and the strong growth in our platform technology businesses. Our business outlook remains robust and we look forward to executing on the large and exciting growth opportunities ahead. Now I will turn the call to Vishal.