ExlService Holdings, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the second quarter 2021 EXL Service Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Steve Barlow. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Catherine. Good morning. Nicolelli, our Chief Financial Officer. We've also had an opportunity to review our Q2 2021 earnings release we issued this morning. We've also updated our investor fact sheet in the investor relations section of the Excel's website. As you know, some of the matters we'll discuss in this call PXL seems no obligation to update the information presented on this conference call. During our call today, we may reference certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe provide useful information for investors. Reconciliation of these measures to GAAP can be found in our press release as well as the investor fact sheet. I'll now turn the call over to Rohit Kapoor, PXL's Chief Executive Officer. Rohit?

Rohit Kapoor Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter 2021 earnings call. I hope you and your families are safe and healthy. I am delighted to report continued strong growth through the first half of 2021. EXL achieved better than expected results in the second quarter on revenue and adjusted EPS. Our Q2 revenue was $275.1 million, which represents a both on a constant currency basis. Adjusted EPS for the quarter more than doubled to $1.14 per share. Our analytics business reported revenues of $111.4 million, growing 8.8% sequentially and 35.1% year over year. The demand for analytics has increased in the post-pandemic environment. This growth is driven by three long-term trends. One, adoption of data-driven decision-making across the enterprise. Two, hyper-personalization of customer interactions. And three, an accelerated shift to the cloud. Our investment in the advanced analytics, AI capabilities, cloud capabilities, and our proprietary data assets gives us a competitive advantage. It has helped us accelerate our growth across all our targeted verticals. Our operations management business generated $163.7 million in revenue in 2017. year over year, driven primarily by higher revenues from our insurance and emerging businesses. Before diving further into details of our business performance, I'd first like to give you a brief update on the COVID-19 situation across our geographies. As you know, we have all been through a very challenging period across the globe, and despite progress on many fronts, the threat from the virus remains. We continue to monitor the situation closely and are providing health-related assistance and relief to employees in areas that are still affected. We have reopened our physical office locations in the US with limited capacity and continue to operate a hybrid work-from-home model in India, the Philippines, Europe, and Latin America. Company-wide, we anticipate maintaining this hybrid model in the near term. In India, the second wave spike that occurred in April and May served as a stark reminder of the severity of this pandemic. Several of our employees were directly impacted. We systematically addressed the situation by leveraging our resources, forming strategic partnerships, and working closely with our clients. We provided essential medical supplies, isolation centers, vaccination support, and financial assistance to help employees and their families. We have an active vaccination program in place and expect to have 75% of our employee population in India fully vaccinated by the fall. Thankfully, the situation in India has improved, but we continue to monitor it closely. I must commend the commitment of our employees and the collaborative spirit of our clients in helping us get through this daunting challenge without any significant interruptions to service delivery. Our employees and clients immediately sprung to action to help. I cannot thank them enough for their support, flexibility, and empathy. Getting back to our Q2 performance, I'm delighted to share that our strategic client relationships have strengthened as we advanced our cutting-edge analytics offerings and reinforced our delivery capabilities. We have been successful in growing multiple new engagements while securing significant strategic client renewals. Our analytics and digital capabilities have emerged as key differentiators end-user customer experiences. We continue to invest in new digital and analytics capabilities and maintain a robust pipeline heading into the second half of 2021. An example of this is our work with a leading global bank with whom we are deploying data flow and decision automation capability to transform their wholesale and retail banking operations. Building on an engagement that started in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, we created automated data ingestion and decision-making procedures for the bank to process applications and provide timely funding to customers applying for relief under the CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program. Our engagement has now expanded to a multi-year global contract to design and deploy similar solutions in several markets within the U.S., U.K., Europe, and APAC regions. The program has already driven significant cost reduction benefits and improved customer experience. It has also addressed the need for automating manual Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and other operational controls. Similarly, our AI-powered digital collection solution, Paymentor, has been resonating well with our clients. In a recent example, EXL partnered with an international bank to engage and activate customers using multiple channels, including email and two-way SMS. The solution enabled the clients to reduce phone calls significantly and and Paymentor's reinforcement learning-based algorithms achieved response rates that were close to twice the industry standard benchmarks. We also deployed Paymentor at a Fortune 1000 client in a B2B context, enhancing collections and reducing delinquent receivables. We were able to pivot the solution's B2C a B2B use case by making subtle changes to the underlying algorithm, thereby dramatically expanding our addressable market. To support the continued growth of our data-led strategy, we have aggressively ramped up our talent acquisition, training, and talent development efforts. We have a particular focus in building competencies in the areas of data, analytics, and digital expertise. In order to meet the growing demand of our clients, we have been hiring at a rapid pace in Q2 and have been successful in onboarding new talent at scale. We have also scaled up our leadership capacity to enable the achievement of our strategic goals. In addition to building our capabilities through talent acquisition, we are also developing internal talent to take on more significant responsibilities. One of the core elements of our capability development program is an agile learning ecosystem called EXL Infinity. This ecosystem provides personalized, ongoing development of employees across multiple disciplines. The program is AI-driven, and it anticipates individual learning needs to develop diverse skill sets through continuous micro-learning. The platform has seen a major shift in learning towards digital and analytics capabilities, helping us build an internal talent pipeline. We also transformed our communication and engagement systems to support real-time feedback loops and enhance employee experience. We expanded our reach and frequency to keep up with the demands of remote working. EXL has demonstrated a true spirit of collaboration, responsiveness, and creativity, and this has helped us get through the uncertainty over the last several quarters. We have been able to continually grow our business and form closer partnerships with our clients. I am confident in the resilience of our business model and the commitment of our people to support one another and our clients through a fast-changing and complex business environment. We have emerged stronger from this experience. Our business continues to grow, supported by a stronger pipeline. We are confident in our ability to maintain this momentum in the second half of 2021. I will now invite Mauricio to highlight our Q2 financial performance and 2021 guidance.