Benefitfocus, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the BenefitFocus first quarter of 2022 Earnings Score. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star and zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. Art, we had the pleasure of introducing your host, Mr. Dale Koppelman, Head of Investor Relations.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome to BenefitFocus's first quarter 2022 earnings call. Joining me today are Matt Levin, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Alpana Wagner, Chief Financial Officer. Matt and Alpana will offer some prepared remarks, then we'll open for questions. Before we begin, let me remind you that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties and opportunities and the impact of our growth strategy that could cause actual results to differ materially. For more information, please refer to risk factors discussed in our most recently filed Form 10-K. We also will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Important disclosures about those measures can be found in today's earnings press release. Lastly, we will reference a presentation furnished in an 8K, which you can also find on our investor relations website at investor.benefitfocus.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Matt.

Thank you, Doug, and good afternoon, everyone. As I approach my one-year anniversary with BenefitFocus, I have never been more confident that our company is on a path to achieve sustained growth. We are focused on making the necessary changes to create long-term value for our customers and shareholders. Today, I will cover our progress to date against our strategic plan and provide further insights on what to expect in the coming months. After that, Alpana will discuss our first quarter results. Looking back at our work that started in the second half of 2021, I am proud of our team for taking decisive actions necessary to address a number of challenges, to reposition the company for a return to growth, and importantly, to be a safe set of hands for our customers. The impact of our efforts to execute on our three-pillar strategy, which involves strengthening the core, growing with intent, and increasing operational efficiency, can already be seen. We identified and began improving many aspects of our customer service function with a specific focus on implementations and case resolutions. We also focused on platform enhancements for better data interoperability and expanding product offerings. These efforts have improved our go-to-market channel relationships and created meaningful leads and new prospects for future business. We believe all of these efforts will enable us to grow market share and solidify our position as an industry leader. We look forward to providing additional insight into our strategy, accomplishments, and longer-term financial targets at our Investor Day next week on May 10th. Turning to slide five, I would like to provide an operational update of the quarter where we hit a number of strategic milestones. I'd also like to give some insight into the selling season and discuss how we are delivering on our plan. Starting with our efforts to strengthen the Corps, we have concentrated on service excellence, and we have been delivering on our commitment As I have said in the past, our associates' dedication to our customers is a unique competitive advantage, and I am grateful for all they do every day. End-to-end service excellence is key to strengthening customer relationships, fueling a flywheel effect for sustainable growth. Having delivered the best open enrollment in our history at the end of 2021, we now expect to begin seeing the results through improved customer retention and increased customer references. which we anticipate will translate into a growing ARR base. One of our investments to strengthen the core, the Tango Health Acquisition, is off to a terrific start. Tango is already delivering greater levels of value to our customers with our expanded suite of administrative services, more advanced data management and delivery processes. We are now bundling Tango's suite of offerings in the new customer contracts and have started to cross-sell it with our current customer base. We believe this more robust and comprehensive solutions platform will help us improve attachment rates and grow our revenue. I'm pleased to share that this quarter Tango achieved another year of 100% on-time filing of all ACA forms with the IRS and the applicable states. I want to thank and recognize our team. The execution on this was stellar. even in the midst of the acquisition integration efforts. We are now beginning to migrate legacy benefit-focused clients to the Tango offering, which we expect will enable us to deliver even stronger customer performance going forward. Service excellence is also critical to brokers and third-party evaluators, who are key players in our ecosystem, as they need to have confidence in service levels to refer business to us. As a result of our efforts to improve our go-to-market strategy through stronger channel relationships, we were recently included in Aon's Connected Benefit Solutions panel, a key listing from one of the top brokers in the world. This seal of approval, along with referrals from other industry-leading brokers and third-party evaluators, validates our work and should help to drive more business from both existing and new customers, particularly in our employer segments. I am grateful that our broker partners have helped us shift our company's narrative. Moving to our efforts to grow with intent through capital employment, investing thoughtfully on the right opportunities at the right time. We're doing this through expanded product offerings, leveraging our data assets, and moving up market. During the first quarter, we conducted extensive technology and product research and discovery with our customers. This feedback drove decisions related to our product roadmap for both health plans and employers. Additionally, we have in place a number of innovative customer product pilots in the area of engagement. The initial feedback from customers has been very positive. We will have more to say about our product roadmap and pilot programs at our upcoming Investor Day. Lastly, we continue to automate service and implementation processes to improve the customer experience and drive increased operating efficiencies. These cost savings are being reinvested in the organization to support our revenue growth strategy while preserving our margins on a full year basis. We have a solid sales pipeline stemming from direct sales activities, improved broker-channel relationships, and SAP. We are optimistic that this plus our strong 2021 open enrollment will result in a successful sales season over the next several months. Our teams are now working through the most critical part of the sales season for employer where final decisions are made by both current and prospective customers. As a reminder, much of our employer market sales season generally runs through August and will have a meaningful impact on our revenues for 2023. whereas our health plan sales go throughout the year. Here, too, we continue to see improvement in the overall market, but these are longer sales cycles. Given the nature of the business cycle in our industry and our subscription recurring revenue model, the majority of our sales made in 2022 will begin being reflected in our financials in Q4 and into next year. We look forward to reporting out on the results of the sales season on next quarter's earnings call. Turning to slide six, we are on track against our transformation plans and could not be more excited about the unique opportunity ahead of us. We believe we have a compelling value proposition as we grow our presence in a large and increasingly complex market. With more than 20 years of domain expertise and a unique technology platform, our investments and service excellence are fueling our growth strategy. Our seasoned team of industry leaders is focused on executing against our transformation plan. I am proud of the progress we've made in the last 11 months and am confident that we are on track to achieve our goals. Before turning it over to Alpana to walk through the financial results, I'd like to welcome our new Chief People Officer, Kristen Adams, to our leadership team. I met Kristen when she worked at Morgan Stanley, and I am really excited to have her on the team. Kristin has ambitious plans to continue to make BenefitFocus an even better place to work and will support efforts to make sure we deliver an exceptional associate experience, which is a top priority for us, particularly in the current talent environment. One of my early priorities was to put in place a first-class team. We believe the tenure and domain expertise of our team is unrivaled in our industry, and it will drive our continued execution of our strategy to reposition BenefitFocus and set the foundation for future success. I am also pleased that as I approach my one-year anniversary at BenefitFocus, our leadership team is largely complete. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Alpana, who will cover our financial performance.