Rohit Kapoor
Analyst · Baird
Thank you, Jarrod. Welcome, everyone, to our fourth quarter earnings call. The agenda for this call is as follows: first, I will review our fourth quarter and full year results; second, I will discuss the new client wins we have signed since we last spoke to you and detail a few key priorities for 2014; third, I will give an overview of the current demand environment; then I will turn to Vishal for more detailed commentary on the financials; finally, we would be happy to take your questions. In the fourth quarter of 2013, EXL reported stronger-than-expected revenue and adjusted diluted EPS, driven by excellent results across all our businesses. In particular, our decision analytics business revenue grew 24% year-over-year and 19% quarter-over-quarter. In addition, our platform businesses, EXL Landa, LifePRO and Trumbull, grew well, driven largely by recent new client wins. Higher revenue with operating efficiencies drove 24% adjusted EPS growth year-over-year. Our proactive and transparent client outreach program over the last 3 months has yielded solid results. Our client relationships remain extremely strong and are proceeding as normal. And I will -- as I will detail in my comments, we have won 3 significant deals with new clients since we last spoke. In the last several months, we have proactively accelerated our document protection protocols to ensure we remain a key trusted partner for our clients. We were recently recognized to be among the top 3 companies in our sector by the NASSCOM DSCI Excellence Award for Security and were rated excellent in the Third Cyber Security Mock Drill for 2013. In the fourth quarter, we were pleased by the recognition we received from the industry analyst community. EXL was recently ranked among the top global providers for insurance BPO by research firms, including Everest Group and HfS Research. And in Everest Group's November 2013 report, Analytics Business Process Services - Deciphering the Analytics Code, EXL was recognized as the only large business process solutions provider with more than 40% of their analytics team engaged in predictive and prescriptive analytics, indicating a high level of solution sophistication. This recognition enhances our brand and we believe will lead to valuable future opportunities. Looking back on 2013, I would like to share a few highlights. First, our new client acquisition engine gathered significant momentum, particularly in the quality of the new relationships won. In 2013, we won 10 new Fortune 500 clients, up from 8 in 2012. These relationships all have great long-term potential for expansion. In total, our revenue from new clients expanded over 40% year-over-year in 2013. These data points tell us that our capabilities are increasing, our sales force is energetically communicating this to prospects and there is a healthy expansion of our relationships. Second, our 3 growth initiatives in analytics, health care and platforms performed well. Our decision analytics business grew 24% for the year, with over 60% growth in annuity-based revenues. Due to the relatively faster growth rate in annuity-based decision analytics, our revenue visibility is increasing. In 2013, annuity revenue rose to over 70% of total decision analytics revenues, up from approximately 55% in 2012. Our rapid growth in analytics is driven by increasingly sophisticated risk and marketing engagements, particularly to the banking, insurance and health care industries. Following aggressive hiring at the beginning of 2013, decision analytics revenue growth accelerated through the year as we anticipated, resulting in expanding gross margins over the course of the year. We began the year with 700 analytics professionals and ended the year with over 1,000 highly talented and technically trained individuals. We added 10 new logos in decision analytics last year and expect to accelerate this growth trajectory in 2014. Further, we have added dedicated analytics sales resources in both the U.S. and U.K., with specific competencies in insurance, health care and banking analytics. Meanwhile, our rapidly expanding healthcare business benefited from strong secular demand. U.S.-based health insurance will continue to face rising volumes, pressure to improve patient outcomes and a need to comply with massive regulatory change. They will continue to aggressively engage focus partners, such as EXL, who understand the intricacies of the health care industry to manage clinical operations for them and help them make better data-driven decisions. Our healthcare business grew close to 20% in 2013 organically and grew 87% year-over-year, including our EXL Landa acquisition. Healthcare rose to 11% of 2013 revenue from nearly nothing 4 years ago due to our focused investment and commitment to operational excellence. During 2013, we won new care management clients at EXL Landa, several new decision analytics engagements and new clinical operations management engagements with both new and existing outsourcing customers. A good portion of our health care growth has been delivered by our fast-growing Philippines geography, which is a success story in its own right. In 2013, revenue delivered from our Philippines geography grew 40% year-over-year to $43 million of revenue across over 15 solid client relationships in multiple industry verticals. And encouragingly, profitability can increase nicely in 2014, as in 2013 we scaled up new facilities and amortize some of the management investments we have made. During the year, we set up our Philippines command center, a significant upgrade to our capabilities. We now run 3 operation centers in the Philippines, one of which is URAC-accredited for complex health care clinical services. Lastly, our platform technology businesses gained traction through strong new client wins, including a major health insurer win at EXL Landa. Our platforms continue to bring differentiation to our service offerings and will play a substantial role in cross-selling going forward. Now turning to new client wins. We begin 2014 highly encouraged, first and foremost, because since we last reported, EXL signed 3 substantial multi-year outsourcing deals with new clients. Two of these deals are in insurance and one is in transportation and logistics. Each of these deals have an initial scope of several million dollars in annual contract value once implemented, and we see great opportunity to expand all of them over the next several years. These deals reemphasize our leading position in our targeted industries, particularly the insurance segment. They are a powerful endorsement of EXL's people, solutions and strategy and increase our momentum in the marketplace. In addition, in our pipeline, we have a few significant deals where we have been chosen as a finalist and are now negotiating legal contracts. I would now like to discuss a few key priorities for EXL in 2014. First, during the fourth quarter of 2013, we introduced the Business EXLerator Framework, EXL's proprietary process framework, which embeds business process automation, analytics and benchmarking into operations management. Our customers are demanding integrated end-to-end solutions, and this framework is a key asset with which to capture this demand. Our framework leverages years of industry and process management experience, volumes of industry data, proprietary analytics methodologies and a large inventory of technology-enabled automation tools, wrappers, and platforms. Our early experience in rolling out the framework has generated terrific success, delivering near-term efficiencies while also generating multiple new opportunities to manage our clients' operations. 2014 will be a key year for implementing the Business EXLerator across the many hundreds of individual business processes we manage for clients. Second, we will continue to expand our share of wallet with our largest clients. Within our top 20 clients, each of which generated over $5 million revenue in 2013, we see multiple large expansion opportunities in our pipeline. We need to focus aggressively on winning these opportunities. One key way is through cross-selling. We recently had some highly encouraging achievements in cross-selling between our EXL Landa business and our decision analytics practice and see many opportunities to grow on this success in 2014. Concurrently, we must execute on the significant opportunities at our next 75 largest clients. Each of these clients has over $1 billion in revenue, they are all large, complex organizations, many of them in our targeted verticals. These 75 accounts offer great potential for EXL, and we believe we can generate demonstrable business impact for them quickly. Third, we have recently refined our operating structure to enhance end-to-end ownership and accountability. Our new structure empowers the leaders of our key verticals and horizontals. We believe this will increase our agility, responsiveness and innovation in each of our key business lines and drive faster growth. Fourth, we will continue investing aggressively in our key growth areas. Top investment areas for 2014 include our Business EXLerator Framework, front-end resources and capability development in our decision analytics business, research and development in our EXL Landa platform and health care capabilities, incremental investment in our information life cycle management processes and our new capacity in our Kochi SEZ and Philippines geographies. And as always, we will continue to invest in our people and in our process expertise within our targeted verticals. As an example, in the last 2 months, we formalized educational partnerships with both the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, or ACCA, and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, or CIMA. Both partnerships will provide our financial accounting focus employees a highly unique opportunity to advance their professional education with leading global institutions. Opportunities like these will translate into more engaged employees and more delighted customers. On this topic, in January, EXL was recognized with the Aon Hewitt Voice of the Employee Award for the IT and the ITES sector in India based on employee opinion scores, recognizing EXL's investment and people practices that attract and retain strong talent. Finally, in 2014, we will pursue strategic acquisitions to enhance our franchise but have the balance sheet flexibility to continue to buy back stock to the extent we don't find the right opportunities that meet our valuation and strategic criteria. Now turning to the demand environment. Our new business pipeline remains strong, both among potentially new clients and existing customers. We are seeing particularly strong prospects in the areas of operations management for insurance and health care, analytics engagements in banking, health care and insurance industries and platform deals in our Landa, LifePRO and Trumbull businesses. We are also encouraged to see an improving pipeline in our U.K. business, in which we have invested strongly over the past 2 years. While 2013 was a challenging year, we finished the year strong and enter 2014 with terrific momentum. I would like to offer a heartfelt thanks to all of EXL's over 22,000 employees for their truly exceptional work, both in 2013 and thus far in 2014. To close, the long-term drivers of our growth remain robust. Our strong fourth quarter performance, recent major new client wins and attractive sales pipeline reflect this. We look forward to executing on the many exciting growth opportunities ahead of us in 2014. And now, I will turn it to Vishal.