Rohit Kapoor
Analyst · William Blair
Thank you, Steve, and a very warm welcome to everyone joining us on our third quarter earnings conference call. The agenda for this call will be as follows: First, I will discuss this quarter's results and will comment on our pipeline and the areas of opportunity and growth we are seeing in the market; second, I will comment on our acquisition of Overland Solutions we announced this morning and provide an update on our recent Blue Slate acquisition. I will then turn the call over to Vishal for a more detailed financial discussion. Following which, we would be happy to take your questions. Before I talk about the quarter, I want to welcome Henry Schweppe, our new president for Global Business and Marketing, and a member of our Executive Committee. Henry joined us earlier this month from IBM, where he led IBM's North American finance and accounting and procurement practices within global process services. In this role as a general manager, he was responsible for all aspects of the group, including overall P&L responsibility, client delivery and satisfaction, and new business development. At EXL, Henry will provide leadership in sales and marketing and have executive oversight for the business units of finance and accounting, travel, transportation and logistics, and our consulting businesses. I'm delighted to have Henry join EXL and add his expertise to our talented team. Moving on to earnings. I am delighted to report that in the third quarter, our revenue grew 10.8% organically year-over-year, on a constant-currency basis, excluding disentanglement costs and client transitions taking place. The revenue growth was primarily driven by our Transformation segment, which was up 33% organically, and 38% including our acquisition of Blue Slate. Our Outsourcing segment was up 5% year-over-year, excluding disentanglement costs and client transitions. Our existing clients continue to have increasing confidence in our business model and have driven a significant portion of our business growth this year and in this quarter. Year-to-date, 110 new processes have been migrated to EXL, including 32 new processes across all domains in the third quarter. Also importantly, EXL had 7 new client wins in the third quarter, 5 in Transformation and 2 in Outsourcing. For the first 9 months of 2014, we have signed 19 new clients. EXL continues to demonstrate its ability to attract new clients and build up revenue growth momentum. The client wins were across all our major industry verticals, including banking and financial services, health care, insurance, utilities, and travel, transportation and logistics. Several of the new clients have already started to generate revenue in the third quarter. As we head towards the end of 2014, our sales pipeline in Outsourcing looks promising, and we are seeing demand across all of our major industry verticals, including health care. In health care, we are investing in combining our EXL Landa technology platform, with service offerings around total population health management, medical management, and payment integrity. In several verticals, current and prospective clients have moved past FTE-based process solutions and are looking to create more robust partnerships with EXL. To further differentiate ourselves, we are continually investing in our proprietary EXL Business EXLerator Framework, which uses our core strength in operations management in combination with our embedded analytics, consulting and proprietary technology platform solutions. The Business EXLerator Framework is resonating well with all our new and existing clients, who are seeing the business benefits of this framework being able to drive incremental business impact for them. The pipeline for decision analytics is extremely strong, especially in banking and financial services. We expect to see new opportunities in the years to come as a result of increasing demand for services, including insight generation and model creation, risk management and analytics around changing regulatory requirements. We have also seen increased traction in decision analytics cross-selling to our outsourcing clients in the insurance and healthcare industry verticals. We believe that the demand we are seeing in decision analytics, combined with the suite of services EXL provides, will create a long runway for sustainable growth. In the third quarter, our decision analytics revenue within Transformation segment grew 53%, and now represents almost 14% of total EXL revenue. As such, we are now providing additional public disclosures to investors regarding our analytics revenues each quarter, which can be found in Investor Materials. In the second quarter, I spoke about how we had hired 300 new employees that had joined EXL in decision analytics as we projected higher demand. The advanced hiring was a good decision and we have been able to more than fully utilize the 300 professionals we hired. Our team is focused on developing solutions that integrate our proprietary analytics methodology with data management platforms in order to meet our clients' need for real-time analytics embedded in their systems and operations. In the third quarter, we invested in our infrastructure to match increased demand for our services. In August, EXL opened our fourth operation center in the Philippines, in Alabang, with 570 seats to serve our banking and financial services and travel, transportation and logistics clients. In September, we opened a new delivery center in Dallas to serve our F&A clients with a full suite of products, including transaction processing, risk management and working capital optimization. During the quarter, EXL received several recognitions from industry analysts and advisers. Gartner positioned EXL in the Magic Quadrant for North American Life Insurance Policy Administration Systems for EXL's LifePRO Policy Administration System for life, health and annuity companies. We were positioned as a major contender in the Everest Group finance and accounting outsourcing service provider landscape, with peak metrics assessments 2014. We also achieved recognition as a leader in the transportation management supply chains management BPO segment within the HFS blueprint report Supply Chain Management BPO. We are delighted with the overall performance of the company and the industry recognitions that we are receiving. This morning, we issued a press release on an important strategic development for EXL. We announced that EXL has acquired Overland Solutions Inc. for $53 million in cash. Overland solutions is a leader in underwriting services for the property and casualty industry, and specializes in premium audit, commercial and residential underwriting surveys and loss control consulting. Overland will enhance EXL's position in the property and casualty industry with a broad range of client relationships, a deeply experienced leadership team and services that leverage proprietary workflow technology. Overland Solutions uses a proprietary workflow technology that fulfills the industry's growing demand for business process as a service, or BPAS service, offerings by providing an attractive variable cost operating model for clients. Overland's technology and data directly connects and interfaces with its clients, providing a truly integrated operations management solution. Overland will bring to EXL 3 key benefits. Number 1, its clients. Founded in 1951 and based in Overland Park, Kansas, the company is a market leader, with more than 400 P&C clients, including 21 of the top 25 P&C underwriters. Overland Solutions provides distinctive services that improve carrier underwriting precision and reduce risk exposures. EXL is already a clear leader in providing operations management to P&C insurers. Overland's strong foothold with many loyal and long-standing clients creates an attractive springboard to cross-sell outsourcing and transformation services, and adds additional points of contact with EXL's client base. Number 2, its people. An experienced and talented team of professionals with an impressive wealth of knowledge about underwriting, including premium audit, property surveys and loss control. Overland will add approximately 750 U.S.-based employees to EXL, including 8 regional offices, and leverages a nationwide network of auditors and surveyors to provide its services. And number 3, an opportunity to add value to clients through analytics. The Overland Solutions acquisition presents an enormous opportunity to provide decision analytics offerings to Overland's client base in order to provide better insights and effectiveness in their underwriting decisions. We will invest in new products and services related to predictive analytics, underwriting analysis and risk and loss protection, which we believe will be valued by our respective clients and are difficult to replicate in the P&C industry, given our combined capabilities. Overland Solutions enables EXL to offer a more comprehensive end-to-end solution offering for the P&C insurance clients, thereby strengthening our competitive position and reinforcing our commitment to the insurance industry. This combination bolsters EXL's insurance capabilities today and enhances our ability to create innovative solutions, leveraging technology and data. I want to personally welcome all of Overland Solutions employees to EXL. We are very excited to have them become part of the EXL family, and look forward to a successful integration. In our last call, we talked about the acquisition of Blue Slate, which combines deep technology expertise to transform clients' core mission-critical applications inside their IT environments, fundamentally transforming their business processes. Blue Slate's primary market has been the health-care industry, but we believe its consulting expertise can be leveraged to all outsourcing clients. The Blue Slate team is already working with EXL's clients, and is now actively engaged in several implementations and projects. Overall, the first 9 months of the year have been very exciting at EXL. Our organic revenue growth, averaging 12.4% year-to-date on a constant-currency basis and excluding client transitions, is healthy, and new client wins so far this year give us continued momentum. We have increased our revenue guidance again this quarter, owing to both organic revenue growth as well as our acquisitions. We're pleased with the strategic transactions and investments in our people and infrastructure that we have made this year, and we believe they will benefit our clients for many years to come. With that, I turn it over to Vishal.