William C. Stone
Management
Thanks, Justine. And thanks, everyone, for being with us on our fourth quarter and 2015 year-end conference call. We are just crossing our 30th year in business and I'm happy to report $1.056 billion in 2015 adjusted revenue. Our first year in 1986 we did $86,000 in revenue. This is a 38.4% compounded annual growth rate, a pretty good 29-year track record. SS&C finished 2015, as I said, with over $1 billion in adjusted revenue, 42% EBITDA margins, and we earned $2.66 in adjusted diluted earnings per share. Obviously, we had a strong year financially and we have become a dominant force in financial technology and fund services industries. We acquired four companies in the past 14 months and we are set to close Citi Alternative Investor Services in Q1. This will propel SS&C to being the second largest fund administrator in the world. And I'd remind you, we started in fund administration in 2002. We believe technology ownership, size and scale are key elements of our strategy. We added game-changing projects through both acquisitions and our research and development efforts. Precision LM, our comprehensive loan origination and servicing system, and Primatics EVOLV, an end-to-end loan risk and finance solution, expanded our offerings to loan portfolios and banks. We have enhanced our Fund Services portal to include performance attribution and tax optimization modules. Very impressive analytical tools that we believe may help performance for our fund administrative and other clients. Finally, we have added the capability of servicing RIAs with Black Diamond, one of the products that we acquired with the Advent acquisition, and it services one of the fastest growing segments in financial services, the RIA market. This quarter SS&C has also received approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to bring its disruptive cloud-based post-trade matching service, SSCNet to the U.S. market. We own about 80% of the Canadian market today, and we've been trying to get this exemption for 10 years. Our technologists have had a free hand to develop the SSCNet technology and we're excited to bring it to the United States, and we will be at a compelling price point. At SS&C, we value and thank our shareholders for their continued support. We aim to maximize shareholder value, and our capital allocation strategy reflects this objective. In 2015, our operating cash flow was $230.6 million, and that was after paying $67 million in financing charges and other expenses with the Advent and Primatics acquisitions that went through our operating cash flow. So otherwise it would have been about $300 million. We spent $2.7 billion on acquisitions this year. We believe these acquisitions are a good way to deliver shareholder return. We continued our quarterly dividend and gave a total of $45 million back to our shareholders. And now with $2.4 billion in net debt on our balance sheet, we will focus on bringing our leverage down quickly. Now, I will turn it over to Norm.