SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (SSNC) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SS&C Technologies First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Justine Stone, Head of Investor Relations.

Welcome, and thank you for joining us for our Q1 2026 earnings call. I'm Justine Stone, Investor Relations for SS&C. With me today is Bill Stone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rahul Kanwar, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Brian Schell, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, we need to review the safe harbor statement. Please note that various remarks we make today about future expectations, plans and prospects, including the financial outlook we provide, constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, which is on file with the SEC and can also be accessed on our website. These forward-looking statements represent our expectations only as of today, April 23, 2026. While the company may elect to update these forward-looking statements, it specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. During today's call, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to comparable GAAP financial measures is included in today's earnings release, which is located in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.ssctech.com. I will now turn the call over to Bill.

Thanks, Justine, and welcome, everyone. The first quarter of 2026 included a war in Iran, tariffs war, spiking oil prices and other macro headwinds. Nevertheless, we delivered strong first quarter results, underscoring SS&C's resilience. Based on our performance and visibility today, we are raising 2026 guidance. We recently rang the NASDAQ closing bell to celebrate SS&C's 40-year anniversary of powering mission-critical systems our financial services and health care clients rely on every day. Our business is built on deep domain expertise, strong trusted client relationships and constant innovation guided by what we call our Customer Zero strategies. These strengths position us well as our industry enters the next phase of technology transformation driven by AI. We are updating the name of our largest revenue line item to better reflect the deeply embedded technology framework powering our services business. Technology-enabled services encompasses our proprietary data streams, domain expertise, software, private cloud, data center infrastructure with ISO and SOC certifications and the redundancy and multilayered cybersecurity measures required by our sophisticated client base. First quarter results were adjusted revenue of $1.648 billion, up 9% and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.69, a 14% increase. We delivered adjusted consolidated EBITDA of $651 million, up 10% and an adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin of 39.5%. The dollar figures I just said are all Q1 records. Adjusted organic revenue growth was 5%, with performance driven by GIDS, which grew 10.4%, GlobeOp, which grew 6.7% and our recent acquisitions are executing ahead of expectations, strengthening our global capabilities and expanding our addressable markets. Intralinks grew 3.2% with positive leading indicators and an increasing adoption of its next-generation AI-enabled deal center platform. The resilience of our business is highlighted by the $581 billion in assets under administration we have added to our fund administration business since Q1 of 2024. Across SS&C, we are leveraging AI to enhance software development, increase our speed to market, accelerate implementations, improve customer experience and drive efficiencies. These initiatives support both revenue opportunities and cost leverage over time. All of our teams are partnering closely with Blue Prism to scale our AI operations in a governed and secure manner. For the 3 months ended March 31, 2026, cash from operating activities was $300 million, up 10% year-over-year. In Q1, we returned $233 million to shareholders, which included 2.3 million shares repurchased for $168 million at an average price of $72.60 and $65 million in common stock dividends. Through share repurchases and our dividend policy, 98% of our allocated capital in Q1 was returned directly to our shareholders. At current levels, our conviction around share repurchase has strengthened, and we are prioritizing repurchases absent high-quality accretive acquisitions. We remain bullish on our opportunities and continue to be AI as a structural tailwind for our business. Our platforms are deeply embedded in our clients' day-to-day operations, serving as systems of record and execution. That positioning makes SS&C a natural partner as clients look to advance their A1 (sic) [ AI ] strategies. I mean, their artificial intelligence strategy. I'll now turn it over to Rahul.

Thanks, Bill. We had a strong first quarter. GIDS and GlobeOp built on last year's sales performance with additional new logo wins and continued upsell and cross-sell activity. Across the business, disciplined attention to our clients is generating new opportunities. SS&C's pipelines are robust, and as always, execution remains the priority. Our AI capabilities, including agents and workflow orchestration are accelerating how services are delivered. Our Customer Zero strategy is working as intended. Internal adoption of Agentic capabilities is driving product maturity, credibility and faster time to market. Deep product expertise is the prerequisite for harnessing these tools, and we are well positioned. We serve the largest and most sophisticated firms in the world. And as their businesses grow more complex, our platforms grow with them. We sit at the center of their operating models with deeply embedded workflows. These workflows form the natural foundation for further innovation. As Bill mentioned, we've renamed our largest revenue line to Technology-Enabled Services. Our clients are buying services such as NAV computations, tax returns, regulatory filings, investor interactions, risk calculations and hundreds of others. These services are usually tied to contracts for services rather than software license agreements. Delivery requires deep domain knowledge, expertise operating complex workflows refined over decades, the networks we operate across counterparties and secure, resilient infrastructure. We estimate that software, largely in the form of subscriptions, represents 11% of this category. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian to walk through the financials.

Thanks, Rahul, and good day, everyone. Unless noted otherwise, the quarterly comparisons are to Q1 2025. As disclosed in our press release, our Q1 2026 GAAP results reflect revenues of $1.647 billion, net income of $226 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.91. Our adjusted non-GAAP results include revenues of $1.648 billion, an increase of 8.8% and adjusted diluted EPS of $1.69, a 14.2% increase. The adjusted revenue increase of $133 million was primarily driven by incremental revenue contributions from GIDS of $38 million, GlobeOp of $29 million and a favorable impact from foreign exchange of $22 million. As a result, adjusted organic revenue growth on a constant currency basis was 5% and our core expenses increased 2.9% or $27 million, which also excludes acquisition and impact of FX. Adjusted consolidated EBITDA was a first quarter record of $651 million, reflecting an increase of $59 million or 10% and a margin of 39.5%, a 40 basis point expansion. Net interest expense for the quarter -- for the first quarter of '26 was $105 million, flat year-over-year. Adjusted net income was $418 million, up 11.1%. Our effective non-GAAP tax rate was 22.5% this quarter. Note for comparison purposes, we have recast the 2025 adjusted net income and EPS to reflect the full year effective tax rate of 22%. Also note, the Q1 diluted share count is down 247.6 million from 254.9 million year-over-year, primarily due to lower dilutive shares and continued impact of treasury share repurchases. Cash flow from operating activity growth of 10% was driven by growth in earnings. SS&C ended the first quarter with $421 million in cash and cash equivalents and $7.5 billion in gross debt. SS&C's net debt was $7.1 billion, and our last 12 months consolidated EBITDA was $2.6 billion. Resulting net leverage ratio was 2.76x. As we look forward to the second quarter and full year of 2026 with respect to guidance, we will continue to focus on client service and assume that retention rates will be in the range of our most recent results. We will continue to manage our business to support our long-term growth and manage our expenses by controlling and aligning variable expenses, increasing productivity and leveraging technology to improve our operating margins and effectively investing in the business, especially with respect to R&D, sales and marketing. Specifically, we have assumed short-term interest rates remain at current levels and effective tax rate of approximately 22.5% on an adjusted basis. Capital expenditures to be 4.4% to 4.8% of revenues and a stronger weighting to share repurchases versus debt reduction. Second quarter of '26, we expect revenue to be in the range of $1.64 billion to $1.68 billion and 5.6% organic revenue growth at the midpoint. Adjusted net income in the range of $408 million to $424 million, interest expense, excluding amortization deferred financing costs and original issue discount in the range of $102 million to $104 million and adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $1.64 to $1.70. For the full year 2026, we increased our expectations to revenue to be in the range of $6.664 billion to $6.824 billion and 5.3% organic revenue growth at the midpoint. Adjusted net income in the range of -- excuse me, adjusted net income in the range of $1.665 billion to $1.765 billion, adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $6.74 to $7.06, reflecting approximately 12% growth at the midpoint and maintaining our targeted annual EBITDA expansion of 50 basis points with a goal of 40% margin in Q4. And now back to Bill.

Thanks, Brian. Next week, SS&C will launch Blue Prism WorkHQ, our Agentic workflow orchestration platform designed to coordinate automation, AI agents and human decision-making across enterprise workflows. Feedback from early adopters has been positive, and we're excited to share more at our launch event, which will be open to virtual attendees and registration right now is over 2,000 people. It's also available at blueprism.com or by reaching out to Justine. With that, I will now open it up to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Kevin McVeigh with UBS.

Great. And really just exceptional results given the environment we're in. Bill, I mean, you beat on everything. I mean, would the results have been even stronger if not for the environment that we're in? I mean it's just -- I know the business is pretty predictable, but is there anything that kind of held it back just given the environment?

Well, you get hesitancy, Kevin, as you well know, right, when you have tariffs flying out at billions and billions and billions. And then you have war and then you have spiking oil prices, which generally is going to increase inflation. So there's a lot of macro headwinds. But at the same time, I think people need to have the technology to run their businesses. And we just had the GAIM conference, which is a big hedge fund conference in Cayman Islands, and we had a bunch of our clients there, and it was a spectacular event for us. They were happy. They were investing in us and buying more services and products. And we're pretty bullish on 2026.

The results speak to that. And then just maybe remind us because one question we get a lot is on the AUA growth just in different market environments. It obviously continues to grow. And is that just client balances increasing or just the way they're running their asset allocation. It's just again, just been another terrific part to the story.

Well, as we said in the press releases or in our comments is that we grew AUA $581 billion since the first quarter of 2024. I don't know where $581 billion would put you in the league tables, but probably pretty high. And that's just our growth. So that's market appreciation, which obviously, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 hit new records, I think, this past week. And the equity markets have been pretty robust. We also have almost all of the large global macro funds, and they have been getting increasing allocations from all of the different allocators and large-scale pension funds and insurance companies that are investing in hedge fund solutions. And hedge funds have been stronger over the past couple of quarters than they have been over the past couple of years.

Our next question comes from Dan Perlin with RBC Capital Markets.

I had a question around private credit. Obviously, it's incredibly topical these days. I think that falls into your GlobeOp operations. So I'm wondering from what you can tell and what you see and hear, specifically around potential redemptions, how does that impact your business? Is that -- do you see that as any kind of perceived risk? And to the extent the assets do get redeemed, like what kind of recapture rate do you historically see in other areas of your portfolio?

Like a lot of things in the news, some of these maybe fears might be a little bit overblown. But I think we've got some structural things that do protect us in any event. The primary one being most of our -- by far, the vast majority of our private credit funds are closed-end fund structures, which generally means that our fees are predicated on things that are fairly static, whether that's committed capital or some volume-based metric like number of investments or investors or something like that. So we're not -- we're pretty immune from day-to-day fluctuations, and that's probably the biggest one. But to be honest, most of our big clients that are private credit managers are still continue to grow with us.

Yes. No, that's great color. On GIDS, another really strong performance here. The -- I'm just trying to think through the cadence throughout the year. I feel like in the past, you talked about first half, obviously being kind of in the high single digits or maybe even better, certainly given the 1Q performance. And then you got more difficult comps heading into the back half. Does that still hold true that you're expecting kind of a mid-single-digit in the back half embedded? Or are things changing in and around, let's say, the Australian market that's giving you maybe more conviction that, that might actually prove to be too conservative?

I think that we are making great strides. You mentioned Australia, which we're up to over 3,000 people in Australia. And we -- obviously, everyone knows we signed Insignia, which has about $321 billion in assets, but the superannuation market in Australia is [ $4 trillion ]. So there's a lot of room to grow, and we're the new kid on the block, and we're really working hard to satisfy our clients there and then grow our market share. And so we're very optimistic about that. We also have some tremendous opportunities in North America and in Europe. And I think that if I was a betting man and sometimes I am, I would guess that GIDS is going to do very well in 2026.

Our next question comes from Jeff Schmitt with William Blair.

What segments do you think have the most risk from AI? And what segments do you feel most confident you're protected against disintermediation?

I don't -- we have some very pointed software businesses that are not large, but they're in all total, maybe $100 million in revenue. But we are so embedded in the things that we do that we don't really look at AI as a threat. Yes, there can have some disruption. The Internet had disruption and client server had disruption and lots of things have disruption, but people still have to get their work done. They still have to file a tax return. They still have to file their Qs and their annual statements. And it's not just in the United States, it's everywhere around the world. And so we do that everywhere, whether it's the Australian Stock Exchange, and they have some rules about short sales that you have to give them notification and the Ministry of Finance in Tokyo has all kinds of requirements and OSFI up in Ottawa. And we have several of those regulatory bodies here in the United States as well. So we are very steeped in that. And it's pretty detailed. It's pretty arcane and the regulators can change it whenever they want.

Okay. And then share buybacks were lower than they've been since, I think, '23 or '24. Is there a potential for you to get more aggressive there with the stock down, I guess, so much over the last few months?

How much cash we generate, that tends to be our favorite investment. I think we bought $168 million in Q1. So while Q1 is -- we have our bonuses paid, we have taxes. We have -- so we have other uses for our cash. But yes, we're quite bullish.

Our next question comes from Surinder Thind with Jefferies.

Bill, can you maybe expand upon the Blue Prism offering and the new platform offering? I guess it's something you guys have been working on for a while now. Is the idea here that it's a game changer where maybe we begin to see a material inflection in the growth rate within that segment? Or how should we think about the rollout, the cadence, the initial feedback that you've been getting here?

Well, again, we're very vertical as a company. And so when we go out and talk to people that large-scale places like you guys at Jefferies and others, everyone is really studying the market and trying to figure out how do we implement this in the best way with governance. My talks at these different conferences, I always say, "Look, AI is not just a gas pedal. Somebody better have a break and you better understand what you're doing. And if you don't, you can get hurt." And I think it's pretty important that you have a company that's really, primarily, we're a bunch of accountants and systems people. So we understand what controls are. We're kind of a little nerdy when it comes to internal controls. We think they're important. We really think some silly people ought to reconcile their checking accounts. So we reconcile all of our customers' checking accounts. So I think that's what you're going to be able to use AI for is different things that are primarily mundane. It will get increasingly sophisticated over time, but it's very difficult to replace human judgment, to replace human trust and then also years of delivery and the ability to attack problems and solve them.

That's helpful. And then maybe turning to the expense side of the equation here. I think you talked about maybe some investments in R&D and sales. Can you maybe provide a bit more color on the scale of those investments that you're thinking at this point? And then maybe how do we think about the potential impact on the range of outcomes on the margin for that? I think the target is the 50 basis points. But is that kind of fully loaded with all of the investments? Is there some flexibility there that maybe there's a bit more, a bit less? Any color there would be helpful.

Well, I think, Surinder, there's a lot of opportunities for us to drive margin. And what we've done over the last number of years is try to plow money back into our infrastructure and our ability to deliver new services and new products quickly and efficiently, and that's expensive. And so we've been able to maintain our margins at really close to 40%. And I think I've spoken for a few years that if we want to move it up to 41% or 42%, that's certainly within our grasp. But I don't know if that's enough money to take away from R&D or other initiatives that we have going on. So we have a lot of flexibility. I think last year, we generated about $7 a share in cash. So we have a lot of flexibility with buying back shares, looking at acquisitions and paying down debt. So we have opportunities to use our cash, and it's nice to have plenty of it.

Our next question comes from Peter Heckmann with D.A. Davidson.

I wanted to talk about the emerging developments around tokenization of different asset classes. Where do you see the pain points for your customers? And how do you view SS&C's preparedness to have some portion of different asset classes being tokenized and processed versus some of your competitors?

So like a lot of these things, we're really viewing the technology itself as an enabler, right? And so we want to make sure -- and look, that's true for the broader AI question, too, right? We want to make sure it helps us get whatever our clients are looking to have happen faster. So we're fully prepared. We have customers that are tokenized today. We have customers that are in the process of becoming tokenized. We're helping them get on the right digital platforms and chains. We're maintaining the IDs. We're doing all the work that's associated with it. And the primary impact that we've seen is in those instances, and we're talking about pretty -- still a pretty limited subset of examples that we have, the onboarding process for investors is obviously simpler, but the rest of the work stays exactly the same, right? But we're fully prepared to be part of the process and help them any way we can. And Calastone is a big part of that for us.

Which we spent $1 billion acquiring. So as usual, with things that we believe in, we don't dabble. We go get it. And then we deliver it to our clients, and we have several very happy clients with our Calastone acquisition already.

That's great. That's great. And acquired revenue from acquisition is a little bit higher than what we were thinking. Did Calastone outperform in the quarter? Or is there a bit of seasonality for them to the first quarter?

Yes, they did. This is Brian. They continue to perform well. And so that was a strong quarter by them, yes.

Our next question comes from Alexei Gogolev with JPMorgan.

This is [ Bala Kumaj ] on for Alexei. So just looking at Intralinks sequential improvement, would you say that's driven more by the market or by share gains? And are there any metrics such as win rates or room volumes or retention that you feel best evidence that?

I think it's a little bit of -- one, there's maybe 3 or 4 things. One, the market has come back a little and is helping us, and you're starting to see that show up in the numbers, but we're seeing it even more in kind of the early indicators that we have of what it might be a quarter or 2 quarters from now. I think we have also invested a fair amount in the product itself. Some of that is building out services capability around the data rooms and things like that. Some of that is putting more AI-enabled modules within the data room itself, and that's helped us gain some market share.

Understood. And looking at health care, that segment posted a nice turnaround this quarter. How sustainable do you view this growth throughout 2026? And what are the largest points of excitement that give you optimism throughout this year?

Well, I think the biggest thing we like about health care is how big the market is. It is really enormous. And as more medicines and therapies come out, the more people are going to use those. And so GLP-1s, obviously, are a big deal and the government is, I think, going to use Humana, which is one of our great clients to administer that program for the government. So we're excited about that. We have Domani making some inroads at places. It's big health care places. And so it does not move with extreme rapidity. They are very testing oriented and very detailed. At the same time, there's tremendous opportunities similar as financial technology. A lot of it that runs Wall Street is decades old. So if you can get people to take the leap to change, a lot of people in their 40s don't want to change systems because they want to wait until they retire. Keep thinking that's 20 years wait, let's go. But that's very difficult for people. And people had a bigger version to risk. So -- but we think there's a lot of opportunity in health care, and we think that we could be a winner.

Our next question comes from James Faucette with Morgan Stanley.

A lot of our questions have been answered, but I wanted to quickly touch on the wealth business. And just wondering if you can help us unpack a little bit of what was driving the growth there. And I guess really kind of what we want to be cognizant of is going into Q2. Is there any deal slippage there into Q2 or any tough license comps we should be aware of from the first quarter?

Our Wealth business primarily is Black Diamond and some other products that we have embedded around that, whether that's Salentica or Tier 1 or our Intel Trust. So we have made great strides with Black Diamond. Trust Suite, where a lot of the RIAs, as their customers get older, they're going to move their assets into their kids, and they're often going to do it through trust. You're going to have to be able to do trust accounting or you're going to lose your best customers. So that's been a nice tailwind for us. Plus we did the Morningstar transaction, I guess, about a little more than a year ago. And that gave us 600, 700 more RIAs. And so Black Diamond continues to execute, and it's got a lot of very strong and satisfied clients. And we would guess it's going to continue to grow in excess of double digits.

Got it. And then I wanted to ask just -- it's a topic that's increasingly been coming up with investors, not just about SS&C, but generally. But I wanted to ask about your AI efforts specifically. And how do you think about kind of what you're doing there and how much may be aimed at external revenue generation or AI-driven products versus internal productivity? And are we getting much benefit internally today versus what you may be able to charge or monetize later? Just love to hear from you how you're thinking about that as an enabler.

Well, James, in 2022, we bought Blue Prism and Blue Prism got us deep into robotic process automation, machine learning, natural language processing. So with that, we have deployed close to 4,000 digital workers. And now what we're doing is improving them by adding -- turning them pretty much into AI agents. So we're doing this throughout our business, and we feel like the deployment of all these digital workers has maybe saved us a couple of hundred million dollars a year. And you said, why isn't that all dropping into margin improvement? Well, I don't know if you're aware, but getting compute and larger data infrastructure is not cheap. And so even though we've done all that, we've maintained our margins and we've gone in and we've built the money Rx, and we've built a number of other new systems that we're rolling out now. And so we're pretty comfortable with what we're doing. And Rahul is running a number of projects in the AI space. And maybe you could talk about that, Rahul.

So it's the speed of software development. We are seeing a positive impact there. We're also seeing -- we have deep domain expertise, right? So it's 40 years of processing things in very, very complicated, very regulated ways. We're very deeply embedded in our customers and their operating models. So taking that, taking sort of that knowledge and turning that into skills, right, and having those skills be things that AI agents can run, we think is a massive opportunity. So not to kind of give too much away from our event next week, but I think one of the things we're going to do is preview some of what we've built already in a very short period of time, and we're pretty excited about what else we're going to be able to do.

And it's taken -- it has a lot of enthusiasm by the earliest adopters that we have rolled this out to. So there's real opportunity here, and it's orchestrating it like the delivery, the pricing and having the right teams install it and train our clients. We're excited about it.

Our next question comes from Patrick O'Shaughnessy with Raymond James.

How are you thinking about the application of blockchain technology from the perspective of services that your GIDS business provides such as transfer agency? Is there any disintermediation risk that you're thinking about?

I think it's mostly an opportunity. At least one, just in terms of context, right now, the number of examples we're seeing of folks that are interested in sort of blockchain and tokenization is still fairly small. Like I said, we've got a few up and running. We've got a few that are doing it. But in the examples we have and the data we have, not only are we a big part of enabling them, which is a revenue stream for us, but it simplifies our work, which is a cost opportunity for us. And the rest of our work, which is probably 95% of the work being done, stays exactly the same or grows a little. So net-net, we think it's actually beneficial.

Got it. That's helpful. And then GlobeOp, organic growth, 6.7% in the quarter, down from 9.6% last quarter. Anything to read into that or just kind of the natural ebbs and flows of the business?

Yes. I think it just depends on -- when you win some of these very large global macros, you've got to get those assets blocked. And then we get paid when they're not live, but we're getting paid like maybe an 8. So if we're getting, say, $2 million, then when we get them live, we get $16 million. So it just depends timing-wise on how that works. And then sometimes there's some renewals where GlobeOp might get a pickup in a particular quarter based on a renewal.

I would now like to turn the call back over to Bill Stone for any closing remarks.

Well, we really believe we had a strong quarter. We believe we have really a lot of momentum. We believe we're bringing out stuff that's going to give us more momentum, and we look forward to talking to you at the end of the second quarter. So thanks for dialing in, and thanks for your questions, and we'll talk to you in about 90 days, I guess.

Thank you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.