Ryan Hicke
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead
Thank you, Lindsey. Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today. I hope everybody is staying healthy and enjoying the summer. Since stepping into the role of CEO on June 1st, I've had the opportunity to spend time with our employees, clients, and many of you on the call. I've appreciated the engagement and insight from our investor and analyst community and I look forward to future meetings to discuss the strategic approach we are taking, the opportunities it represents and the progress we are making. One thing is clear. We are focused on making the necessary changes in investments to grow our great company. We are clearly focused on three key strategic areas: growth, talent and culture. Our objectives are clear. We are going to be an innovative entrepreneurial market leader in the delivery of solutions that drive change, growth and add significant value to our clients. We will be focused on strong profitable recurring revenues diversified across segments and markets. We will be willing to take risks to exponentially grow existing and new revenue engines. We will remain client centric and market aware, taking the best of SEI outside of our walls and bringing fresh perspective inside our walls. We will have a lean, nimble, diverse, and flexible workforce with an unrivaled employee base of talent. And we will be engaged positive and aware of nurturing and refreshing our culture constantly, always curious and passionate about the future. We announced many important actions over the quarter, including welcome and bringing Jonathan Brassington into our board of directors. We brought on Denis Okema as a Director of Diversity and Inclusion at SEI to enhance our commitment to having the best workforce in the industry. We continue to execute daily successfully in key markets and installed new clients and business. We launched programs focused on our talent, including initiating a voluntary separation program with our workforce to open opportunity while providing a positive exit process for those who helped make SEI so successful. Finally, we began to lay the groundwork for our future growth plans, including the appointment of Sanjay Sharman to lead our Private Banking business. Later in my remarks, I will dive further into this strategy for each of our focal areas. Now turning to our results from the quarter. Second quarter revenues grew 1% from a year ago. Our second quarter earnings were down 17% from a year ago. Second quarter EPS of $0.81 decreased 13% from the $0.93 reported in the second quarter of 2021. In the quarter, we repurchased two million shares of SEI stock at a price of $55.48 per share. That translates into $109.3 million of stock repurchases. Net sales events totaled $8.8 million, $6.5 million of which is net recurring. Dennis will go into further details on our financial results. We are acutely aware of the need to grow our revenues by driving increased sales results. I am confident we are making the right decisions to generate the sales results that we and our shareholder community expect. We will align our talent and spending to capitalize on market opportunities for both the short and medium term. The second quarter of 2022 was marked by the same market volatility and geopolitical disruption that we felt in the first quarter with an even bigger deterioration of capital market returns. Inflation, as well as changing economy, also had an impact. While our results include these challenges and we expect there to be more ahead, we remain steadfast in our conviction that we are moving in the right direction. The overall market trend of outsourcing continues to increase. SEI's expertise in investment management, investment processing, and operations and financial technology and cybersecurity position us extremely well to take advantage of this dynamic. As business challenges continue to intensify, many firms, don't have all the capabilities to keep pace. We recognize that talent retention and acquisition further amplifies this need, and it reinforces the benefit of partnering with established leaders and experts like FBI. We understand the competitive landscape and we're able to bring platforms and people to clients and prospects that help them grow and maintain their business. Alternatively, we appreciate the impact that has on our business and we are acting appropriately to invest in our talent. Turning the three strategic areas of focus, growth, culture, and talent, I'll start with growth. We are committed to driving greater top line revenue growth, both organically and through new engines. We are aggressively assessing our investments, spend against the potential return. This includes keeping an eye on margins and reducing spend where necessary. However, we also recognize we have areas of strong momentum and opportunity. And to increase our revenue engines there will be investments to make. This may include expanding our global footprint or using M&A to enhance an existing capability or build a new solution. We will continue to refresh our strategy and align our spend with market opportunity and growth. The Investment Managers segment had another strong quarter with significant implementations of our backlog, continued client delivery and strong growth prospects moving forward. In the alternatives market, we signed a number of new names and our cross-sale strategy continues to resonate. It's resulting in robust sales to existing clients. A particular note, we were selected to provide fund administration for two large private equity real estate firms. In the traditional market we continue to add new business lines in all products with new and existing clients. And in Europe, we continue to expand our ETF, private equity and private debt business, primarily through cross sales with existing clients. I met with the executives of a few of our largest IMS clients in the quarter, and I am very enthusiastic about our growth opportunity in this market with continued execution, innovation and platform delivery. Turning to the Investment Advisors business. During the quarter, we leveraged the depth of our investment management expertise to launch SEI branded factor based ETF. We also launched a strategic partnership with dimensional fund advisors, further increasing investment solution flexibility to our advisor clients. We expanded our sales capabilities with the deployment of a new RIA sales team led by industry veteran, Gabe Garcia. And we rolled out a beta version of SEI Connect, a digital collaboration tool built on the Orange platform, which we acquired last year. We are on track for a full launch by the end of the year. We remain excited and focused on our strategy of growing our business in the RIA market. The breadth of our technology and investment architecture combined with the market leading capabilities of SEI’s own investment management expertise makes me personally very bullish on our opportunity to expand our footprint with current advisors and widen SEI's market penetration. The Institutional Investors segment had a solid quarter, during the quarter, a large global investor selected SEI for a combination of our outsourced CIO and enhanced CIO platforms. This signing aligns with our committed strategy of expanding our footprint into sophisticated allocators on a global scale, showcasing the OCIO to ECIO continuum to large investors, leveraging our proprietary portfolio intelligence technology, SEI Novus, which we acquired in the fall of last year, increasing our UK Master Trust business, as well as growing our traditional markets. In the quarter, we also announced Sanjay Sharma, a 15 year SEI veteran and his appointment to lead the private banking segment. Sanjay's expertise in the technology and wealth management landscape will be invaluable to progressing our business strategy and driving future growth. I’m confident that not only will Sanjay create a revenue and growth plan that will succeed. He will also drive discipline and efficiency on the expense and profit side of our business. His fresh perspective is already having a positive impact. In the private bank business, we signed an agreement with the current Trust 3000 clients to move to the SEI Wealth Platform. We also successfully migrated another client from Trust 3000 to SWP and installed a new client from a competitor platform. We additionally re-contracted two clients in the quarter. Working with Sanjay, we are making efforts to rightsize the expenses in this segment as we accelerate sales activity. To do so, we are working to improve operating efficiency, but also consolidating teams across our business, operations and technology platforms. Additionally, we are focused on improving client engagement to create more cross sale opportunities across our enterprise. While we continue to have good success in the regional and community bank space, we will work with our jumbo clients and prospects to grow that important segment. We also remain committed to building a pipeline of clients globally. I'd like to take a minute to highlight some positive traction and growth areas in our investments in new business segments. One of those investments is SEI Sphere, representing a new growth engine to drive diversified revenue streams. Sphere is situated in the fast growing space of cyber security and cloud. We have signed clients in both existing and new market verticals, and we are excited about the potential for this business. Our private wealth management business is also growing. This quarter, we achieved increasing sales as our business strategy gains momentum with our target market. Our pipeline remains healthy. We also continue to explore new markets where we can successfully meet client needs. Finally, in investments new business, our partnership with LSV remains very strong. Dennis will report on their financial results for the quarter. As part of my opening comments, I mentioned the talent is one of our key strategic focal areas. In the quarter, we announced the voluntary separation program. This program was not designed to reduce expenses or remove a specific demographic from our workforce. I want to be very clear on that. It was designed to create an opportunity for tenured SEI employees to have an option, to explore their life ambitions and concurrently create space for internal mobility, fresh perspectives, diversity and external experience. We believe creating opportunities for diverse perspectives in talent inside and outside of SEI will position us for growth. And in fact, accelerate our growth as we challenge and refresh our strategy. We are committed to our employees bringing their best sales to SEI every day. We will embrace internal mobility and diversity and inclusion in our talent and leadership development. We are investing in programs and initiatives focused on future skills, rotating talent, idea sharing and professional development. SEI has a global pool of talent to unlock an unlimited amount of potential. The final strategic area of focus is culture. We believe culture drives a company forward and plays an integral part in its success. You can deliver something similar a competitor’s product or playbook, but you can’t copy a culture. An SEI’s culture is unique and valuable, and we are going to continue to invest in making it a huge differentiator. We recently refreshed our corporate values, examining them to cultivate an environment where our behavior aligns with those values. We will be nimble maintaining focus and attention on our clients and opportunities. We are also looking at the future of our workforce. As the pandemic has shown us all the traditional work model is shifting and it’s permanently disrupted. In June, our workforce returned to our global offices, adopting a hybrid working model that will play a key part in reigniting our culture and bringing our teams back together. We have always understood the importance of integrating work and life because finding harmony in your professional and personal activities is key to achieving fulfillment. As the year progresses, we will continue our efforts to make changes that truly capitalize on our opportunities. We will remain focus on maintaining and accelerating growth in existing businesses, expanding our focus on new growth engines and reinvigorating our current talent and culture strategies across the company. In future calls, we will continue to share our progress on these initiatives as well as provide additional clarity on our evolving strategy. This concludes my prepared remarks. I will now turn it over to Dennis to discuss our financial results to the – for the quarter. Dennis?