Derek Dubner
Analyst · Chardan Capital. Your line is open
Thank you, Jordyn. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us today to discuss Cogint's third quarter 2016 results. I am pleased to report yet another strong quarter in revenue and adjusted EBITDA. This quarter exemplifies our innovation, our technology and the effectiveness of our initiatives and execution against them. As we scale our platform, generating and leveraging massive data to deliver on-demand solutions across expansive markets. We saw strength across both of our information services and performance marketing segments during the quarter. Revenue and adjusted EBITDA were $52.2 million and $3.2 million, a 27% and 2% growth over second quarter 2016 respectively. Within our information services segment, specifically as it relates to our risk management division, we continue to rapidly expand our primary investigative solution, idiCORE. We ingested and integrated key foundational datasets including the addition of billions of motor vehicle records. We enhanced the solutions search functionality and accuracy and have continuously used additional data to provide greater insights to our end user customers. As well our teams continue to fortify our cloud based infrastructure with a view towards greater scale while maintaining efficiencies and continuously hardening this infrastructure to ensure a secure environment. Our efforts continue to be rewarded. We are receiving terrific feedback from customers regarding idiCORE and as a result, our sales force is receiving inbound increase from prospective customers within various verticals. We are experiencing increasing adoption of the idiCORE solution by new customers and greater search volume from existing customers. By this team's previous experience building this marketplace over the last two decades, we have knowledge of which industries are historically early adopters of this type of solution, as well as a firm understanding of the requisite maturity of the product in order to penetrate those industries that require a solution of greater breadth and depth, such as banking and insurance. We are experiencing two very important dynamics worthy of mention. First, as I mentioned, we are seeing not only adoption by new customers but increased search volume from existing customers. We saw a greater than 400% compound annual growth rate in idiCORE online transactions for the third quarter 2016. This informs us that our solution is not only being adopted but also becoming ingrained in our customers' daily workflow as they turn to our solution more and more for their decision making processes, an essential metric to provide future visibility. Second, historically in the early stages of similar product releases, we have seen a larger percentage of transactional usage versus contract usage, as high as a 70:30 ratio of transactional to contract customers. Today we are experiencing the opposite. Customers are executing long-term contracts with us. We attribute this to several factors. These include, positive customer impressions of our solution as to both usability and the understanding of what lies ahead in this product roadmap. Our provision of excellent customer service and the customers willingness to build a long-term relationship with us at an early stage, and the customer's desire to avoid anticipated price increases by competitors. Again, these indicators provide affirmation of the successful execution of this product rollout as well as future visibility in the form of recurring revenues. Across the entirety of our information services segment, which includes a portion of our consumer marketing business, we now have a differentiated and extraordinarily valuable, comprehensive database which includes holistic views of greater than 95% of the U.S. population, including, unique data assets of over 120 million self-reported profiles including 150 million unique email addresses across 63 million households. 80% of consumer interactions with our owned media properties are from mobile, with over 700,000 daily survey respondents and 5 million compiled responses daily. As a result of our technology and processes we continue to deliver excellent results to our advertisers. Our proprietary process by which we interact with consumers enables us to match the right consumers with the right advertisers at the time when those consumers are in market for a product or service at massive scale. This process powered by our proprietary platform termed the agile acquisition engine, permits us to build custom audiences for advertisers and betters the consumer experience, all while fueling our platform as data is the lifeblood of our business. Within our performance marketing segment, we continue to experience strong growth within existing and emerging product lines, as this segment increased $9.7 million or 35% from Q2 2016. In line with our strategy, Q3 marked the beginning of an important evolution in our marketing business as we look to activate our audience data utilizing third-party media channels in order to provide our customers access to a highly targeted inventory outside of our owned and operated media. Such as search, social, mobile, native, and programmatic display inventory. Our strong performances is attributable to key characteristics of our business will. Direct advertiser relationships as opposed to agency, our performance-based model and our mobile first approach. When it comes to advertising, our advertisers know that there is no better return on spend than digital advertising. Along with our strong performance in the core marketing business, we are seeing strong trends from new product initiatives. For example, we saw continued scale in key growth verticals with a focus on the gig economy, providing recruitment solutions for industry-leading technology platforms in areas such as, ride hailing, delivery and home services. Our carrier and education vertical experienced triple digit quarterly growth to $2.6 million from second quarter 2016, demonstrating an extraordinary market opportunity. Our mobile app vertical grew 44% to $4.6 million compared to $3.2 million in second quarter 2016. We saw a 70% increase in revenue from third-party media channels from approximately $1 million to approximately $1.6 million from second to third quarter 2016, reaffirming our planned initiative to increase the platform scale through custom audience development and vertical specific marketing programs. We experience strong trending in our health vertical, leveraging our massive database of self-reported consumer information allowing for custom audience targeting and the ability to design efficient and scalable campaigns. Our marketing business is well-positioned for strong future performance. And finally, as you know, we rebranded the company from IDI or Interactive Data Intelligence to Cogint. IDI remains our go to market brand for the risk management division. Cogint is a brand that represents who we are as a company. Derived from cognitive intelligence or the literal meaning of clear, powerful and convincing. Cogint represents our mission of transforming data into intelligence and delivering mission critical solutions to our customers to empower them to better execute all aspects of their business. Along with our rebranding efforts, we moved our listing from the NYSE MKT to the NASDAQ Global Market as we feel this move is befitting given who we are as a company and where we are going. We have received very positive feedback on both our rebranding and the move to the NASDAQ Global Market. In sum, I am pleased to close another great quarter with strong performance including record revenue. We continue to focus on development of our proprietary platforms. We are aggregating and generating massive data sets which fuel our platforms and solutions. We are seeing increased customer spend across product lines and new product launches are demonstrating excellent traction. The key take away is that there is tremendous demand for our products and solutions. We remain focused on our key initiatives with an eye towards developing and enhancing solutions to address our market needs. Now I would like to turn the call over to Dan who will discuss the financials.