ExlService Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Your conference call shall begin momentarily. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Q4EXL Service Holdings Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question at that time, please press star then 1 on your touch-tone telephone. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Steve Barlow. Sir, you may begin. Thank you, Valerie.

Thank you, Valerie. Good morning, and thanks to everyone for joining EXL's fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results conference call. I'm Steve Barlow, EXL's Vice President of Investor Relations. On the call today are Rohit Kapoor, our Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Maurizio Nicolelli, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review our Q4 and full year 2021 earnings release we issued this morning. We've also updated our investor fact sheet and the investor relations section of EXL's website. As you know, some of the matters we'll discuss in this call are forward-looking. Please keep in mind that these forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, general economic conditions, those factors set forth in today's press release, discussed in the company's periodic reports, and other documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. EXL assumes 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 on the investor fact sheet. I'll now turn the call over to Rohit Kapoor, EXL's Chief Executive Officer. Rohit?

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our 2021 year-end earnings call. I hope all of you and your families are safe and healthy. The past financial year was truly an extraordinary year for EXL. We have had excellent financial results, and our focus on becoming the indispensable partner for data-led businesses is resonating strongly in the marketplace. Our clear-sighted investments in data, analytics, and digital solutions have been well-timed to address the massive changes happening in the marketplace. Put simply, we thoughtfully and proactively positioned our services and solutions to better address market needs in this period of rapid change. We did this by systematically changing our business model to a data-led value creation business. With each new client engagement, whether we are working with digital natives, digital reinventors, or legacy clients, we now lead with data and digital to drive large-scale transformation initiatives and accelerate new market introductions. Empowered by our strength in advanced analytics, AI, and the cloud, combined with our deep domain-based operational expertise, we are developing scalable, integrated solutions to leverage an opportunity-rich demand environment. This allows us to drive new efficiencies, have a much bigger impact on our clients' business, while creating solutions that can be rolled out to clients across a wide variety of industries. We were always a strong operations management and analytics company. We have evolved to become a leading data analytics and digital operations and solutions company with exceptional talent. Our strategic shift towards front-ending our work with data and digital transformation has allowed us to surpass our projections, take on bigger and more complex and impactful projects with shorter sales cycles, and deliver higher margins for our stakeholders. Our 2021 financial performance is a clear indication that the rapid evolution of our value proposition is resonating in the marketplace. we generated revenues of $1.12 billion, representing a 17.1% increase year-over-year on a reported basis. In addition, our adjusted operating margin was 18.6%, which drove adjusted EPS for the year of $4.83, a 37% year-over-year increase. our analytics business had an outstanding year with $460.7 million in revenue, representing 27% growth year over year. This performance was attributable to multiple expansions within our strategic banking and healthcare clients, increased revenue from our data-led client marketing solutions, and continued demand for our payment integrity business. our digital operations and solutions businesses reported $661.6 million in revenue in 2021, up 11.1% year-over-year. This growth was driven by new client wins from 2020 and 2021, especially within our insurance and emerging business segments. We continue to expand our existing client relationships and build a greater share of wallet. We feel confident that the growth that we have experienced will continue to play out longer term. A combination of healthy growth across all of our businesses and a large pipeline of mature deals that have more than doubled over the past two years are strong indicators of robust demand. In November 2020, at our Analyst Day, we provided medium-term financial performance targets for revenue and margins. Our target for revenue growth was 10% plus per annum, based on our analytics business growing at 13% to 15%, and our operations management business, now referred to as digital operations and solutions, growing at 6% to 8% per annum. We also targeted an adjusted operating margin of 16% to 17% by 2022. We are updating and increasing our medium-term financial targets. We now expect organic constant currency revenue growth to increase by approximately 200 basis points at the midpoint to 11% to 13% per annum. We believe that digital operations and solutions revenue can grow faster at 7% to 9% per annum and that analytics revenue growth will accelerate to 15% to 20% per annum. In addition, we also expect our profitability to improve by 100 basis points. Our new targeted range for adjusted operating profit margins is increased to 17 to 18%. And lastly, in line with our previous goals, we will endeavor to continue to grow our EPS faster than revenue. Behind our financial milestones is the story of breakthrough projects that have increasingly come to define our unique approach to the marketplace. As an example, we were recently selected as the preferred data analytics partner to support an enterprise-wide digital transformation initiative at a major global automaker. The engagement, which involves collecting voice of the vehicle data, includes billions of discrete touchpoints between drivers and their connected vehicles, consumer shopping behaviors, and customer experience data, represents the cutting edge in integrated data and analytics work. We are partnering with the clients to analyze millions of connected vehicles, handling dozens of petabytes of data, and to top it all, we had an entire solution up and running at full speed in under 12 months. The quality of our work and the ability to tangibly deliver superior business outcomes were instrumental in not only ensuring high customer satisfaction scores, but also resulted in improving employee satisfaction scores within our client's direct team. In this engagement, EXL was selected over much larger competitors for two important reasons. One, our AI technology and analytics capabilities were at an advanced level that allowed us to process complex interactions quickly and seamlessly. And two, the confidence that our client had in our ability to deliver business outcomes and build solutions that are an integral part of our client's enterprise workflow. The tight connection between digital and analytics and technological innovation were also instrumental in securing a strategic win for our EXL Health business. In December, we were selected by one of the largest consumer-governed non-profit healthcare organizations in the nation to develop a next-generation care management solution. Our deep healthcare domain expertise helped us to redesign how care is delivered to patients by leveraging insightful analytics cutting-edge digital engineering and platforms, and omni-channel operational execution. This solution sits at the center of our clients' value-based care strategy, allowing them to identify at-risk patients, spot gaps in care, and drive effective care management. This project is a good example of EXL's ability to break down silos and create a world-class integrated solution. In this engagement, we extracted real-time patient data, analyzing it to stratify risk and identify gaps in care, and manage patient outreach and engagement through a multi-channel combination of automated and human touchpoints. Engagements like this one demonstrate how our roots within a data and process intensive world have enabled us to enhance our digital analytics and AI driven capabilities. These engagements are successful because of our focus on domain expertise that leads to a comprehensive understanding of our clients' businesses and ensures that we deliver digital transformation strategies that work in the real world. We have continued to invest significantly in scaling digital transformation capabilities as we grow. Notably, in December, we announced the acquisition of Clairvoyant, a global data, AI, and cloud services firm. The acquisition adds to our expertise and depth in data engineering and in the cloud enablement space. The addition of Clairvoyant's talent and capabilities in data engineering and cloud will accelerate our progress on our chosen path of becoming an indispensable partner for data-led businesses. Clairvoyant helps us become an even more effective partner for digital transformation. We can help clients design, implement, and operate AI-enabled, cloud-native digital processes and data flows. We've integrated our clairvoyant capabilities in our go-to-market strategy and are in active discussions with multiple strategic clients. This acquisition is performing very well and in line with our expectations. In terms of full-year revenue guidance for 2022, we expect revenues in the range of $1.28 to $1.31 billion, representing a 14% to 17% increase year-over-year. This implies an organic constant currency growth of 11% to 13%, excluding Claire White. We expect adjusted diluted EPS to be in the range of $5.35 to to $5.60, representing an 11% to 16% increase over the prior year. This aligns well with our medium-term financial targets. Before I hand over to Maurizio, it is important for me to recognize the effort of our entire team for making this exciting transformation possible despite the obstacles we've encountered over the last two years. I've always been humbled by the quality of contribution and the depth of commitment in our global team. I am incredibly proud of our talent and feel fortunate to be part of this team. We will continue to progress on creating a workplace that reflects our core values of innovation, collaboration, excellence, integrity, and respect. Our core belief is to create an inclusive work environment that uses the diverse experience, ideas, and contributions of each and every employee. This provides us a competitive advantage and makes us a great place to work for our team. In December, we published our second annual sustainability report, which highlights our progress across key environmental social and governance performance metrics, and highlights our emphasis on human capital management as a key part of our overall business strategy. We consider sustainability to be an integral part of how we operate our business, and we are keenly focused on continual improvement. To that end, as it relates to environmental sustainability in particular, we announced in our sustainability report our efforts to seek to become a net zero emissions business by 2045. Our commitment to ESG was recently recognized by Newsweek, which named us to its 2022 list of America's most responsible companies, and by Barron, who recognized EXL as one of the top 100 most sustainable companies. I feel confident about EXL's growth and impact in the market. Our capabilities in digital and data are now well established. Along with our leadership in analytics, we believe that we are uniquely positioned to be an indispensable partner for data-led businesses and to outperform in this growing market. With that, I will turn the call over to Mauricio.

Thank you, Rohit, and thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. I will provide insights into our financial performance for the fourth quarter and full year 2021, followed by our outlook for 2022. Our quarter was better than expected with revenue of $295.5 million, up 18.8% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Adjusted EPS was $1.21, exceeding the high end of our guidance by 3 cents. All revenue growth numbers mentioned hereafter are on an organic constant currency basis. We now refer to our operations management services as digital operations and solutions. Revenue from our digital operations and solutions businesses, as defined by three reportable segments excluding analytics, was $165 million, up 12.2% year over year. Sequentially from the third quarter, revenue was flat. Insurance generated revenue of $98.1 million, up 10.5% year over year, driven by expansion in existing client relationships, and higher volumes. The insurance vertical consisting of both our digital operations and solutions and analytics businesses grew 15% year over year. Emerging reported revenue of $44.4 million, up 18% year over year. This growth was driven by new client wins of 2021 and higher volumes in our travel and transportation businesses. The emerging vertical consisting of both our digital operations and solutions and analytics businesses grew 24.3%. Healthcare reported revenue of $26.5 million, up 9.7% year-over-year, driven by higher volumes in existing clients. The healthcare vertical consisting of digital operations and solutions and analytics businesses grew 16.1%. Analytics had revenue of $126.5 million, up 27.4% year-over-year. This growth was driven by over 20% growth in all the major business verticals of insurance, healthcare, and emerging. In addition, we saw growth in other verticals such as media, manufacturing, and sports. Analytics now constitutes 43% of our revenue. Sequentially from the third quarter of this year, revenue was up 3.9%, indicating continued strong momentum and demand for our analytics services. The Clairvoyant business contributed $1.4 million in revenue in the fourth quarter. Our SG&A expenses increased by $250 points year-over-year to 21.4% of revenue, driven by investment in front-end sales, marketing, digital capabilities, and employee benefits. Our adjusted operating margin for the quarter was 17%, down 270 basis points year-over-year due to investments needed in ramping up new logo wins in 2021, incremental bonus expense due to the better financial performance and investments in front-end sales and marketing. Our adjusted EPS for the quarter was $1.21, up 6.1% year-over-year on a reported basis. Now, let's review our full-year 2021 performance. Our revenue for the year was $1.12 billion, up 17.1% year-over-year on a reported basis, and 16.4% on an organic constant currency basis. Our revenue per headcount improved by 10.3%. Growth was broad-based across our verticals, and notably, our top 10 clients grew revenue by 21.8% year-over-year. Our adjusted operating margin for the year was 18.6%, up 270 basis points year-over-year. driven by improved gross margin and reduced operational expenses due to the work-from-home environment. Our effective tax rate for the year was 23.1%, down 170 basis points year over year. This decrease was driven mainly by lower tax rates in certain foreign jurisdictions. Adjusted EPS for the year was $4.83, of 36.8% year-over-year on a reported basis. We exited the year with a very strong balance sheet. Our cash and short-term investments at December 31st was $314 million, and our debt was $260 million for a net cash position of $54 million. We generated cash flow from operations in 2021 of $184 million, our DSO at December 31st, 31st was 56 days. During the year, we settled convertible bonds, bought back $115.6 million of our shares, up from $78 million in 2021, and purchased Clairvoyant for $80 million. In addition, we spent $37 million on capital expenditures as we continue to invest in the business for the long term. Moving on to our guidance for 2022. The environment for our services continues to be strong across all our business lines. While the pandemic has eased in the geographies we sell in and deliver from, it is early in the year and we have seen how the pandemic can impact forecast. We feel confident that our business model is resilient and agile and demonstrated by our 2021 performance and expect the momentum to continue in 2022 and beyond. Rowley reviewed our financial targets for the medium term, which include accelerated revenue growth and higher profitability. I will provide additional details on our 2022 guidance. Revenue is expected to be in the range of $1.28 billion to $1.31 billion. This represents a year-over-year growth of 14% to 17% on a reported basis and 11% to 13% on an organic constant currency basis. We expect analytics to grow 15 to 20% and digital operations and solutions to grow in the range of 7 to 9% on an organic constant currency basis. Our guidance includes 40 to 45 million of revenue from Clairvoyant, which implies analytics growth in the mid-20s on a reported basis. For 2022, we have made certain assumptions in our expenses. We have factored in wage inflation in certain areas such as analytics, AI, and cloud to be higher than 2021. We are also anticipating going back to the office starting late in the first quarter with a hybrid model of working either full or part-time from the office and with some employees remaining remote. If this increased utilization of our facilities will occur as the year progresses. Our travel expenses should also increase gradually over 2021 as the pandemic-related restrictions are eased, but we do not project returning to the expense level incurred in 2019. We expect a foreign exchange gain between 3 and 4 million, net interest income of 2 to 3 million, and our effective tax rate to be in the range of 23 to 24%. Based on the above, we expect our adjusted EPS to be in the range of $5.35 to $5.60, up 11 to 16% from the $4.83 we reported today for 2021. In terms of capital allocation, we continue to invest in analytics, digital capabilities, and technology. We expect CapEx to be in the range of 40 to 45 million. We anticipate our buyback program will continue at a pace similar to 2021. In conclusion, we've had a very good 2021 year, despite the numerous challenges created by the pandemic, and we have demonstrated our ability to quickly align our solutions to market changes as evidenced by our revenue growth and the addition of 58 new logos in 2021. The outlook for 2022 is solid, and our resilient business model gives us strong visibility to drive SHIP stockholder value in 2022 and beyond. Rose and I would now be happy to take your questions.

Thank you. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star then 1 on your touchtone telephone. Again, to ask a question, please press star then 1. One moment, please. Our first question comes from Dave Coning of Bayard. Your line is open.

Oh, yeah. Hey, guys. Tremendous year. And even the last quarter, I mean, we were looking, right? You won the most clients in a quarter, I think, in at least five years. Your employee count was up by the most in 10-plus years, right? So a lot going right. So my question, I guess, is with all that going right, how do you know – that 2021 wasn't just kind of a reversion because 2020 was down a little, 2021 up a lot, but they averaged kind of normal. How do you know that this is like a sustainably better than normal environment?

Thanks, Dave. So there are a couple of factors, you know, which kind of provide us with that level of confidence. Number one is the amount of business that we have won and the backlog that we have, that's very strong and very solid. As you know, in our business, most of the deals that we win basically result in revenue being recognized in future periods. So all the business that we have won in 2021 should really result in revenue growth in place in 2022. Second, the pipeline that we have and the kind of conversations that we have with our clients at this point of time, the pipeline is much larger, much more mature, and the cycle time for sales is reduced sharply. So the speed and velocity at which decision making is taking place with our clients, that's very, very positive and very encouraging. Third, our capabilities and solutions that we have built, they seem to be resonating very strongly in the marketplace because we're getting a fair amount of inbound inquiry from clients and prospects asking for those capabilities in analytics, in data, in digital, and they can see the client referenceability that we have built with our existing clients where the customer satisfaction scores are very high the ability to execute and deliver business outcomes is clearly demonstrated and therefore there's a high level of confidence of wanting to engage with us. So when we kind of think about all of these factors put together, that's very positive and it's something which we think that this is likely to be a longer-term phenomenon. And that's the reason why we have updated and increased our medium-term guidance both on revenue as well as on profitability.

Gotcha. Thanks, guys. And then maybe just one quick follow-up. Definitionally, the new guidance, the 15% to 20% analytics, 7% to 9% digital operations, does that include acquisitions or is that organic over time?

That's organic constant currency growth, Dave. And on a combined basis, that would aggregate to 11% to 13%, and that's on an organic constant currency basis. Great. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Bergen of Cali. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning, guys. Thank you. Wanted to dig in here on the margin side. So can you just give us a little bit more color on how you are seeing the wage inflation environment as far as that incremental wage inflation you forecasted this year relative to 2021? And then the return to office and the travel expense, maybe help us just as you think about the cadence of this year as kind of operating margin moves forward.

Sure, Brian. Why don't I take both those questions? The first one on wage inflation, we are anticipating wage inflation you know, going forward into 2022. We've incorporated that into our 2022 budget and also into our guidance that we give into the street. We're starting to see that or seeing that, I should say, in particularly a number of different areas. And it's the hotbed areas within our business. It is in our capabilities or in the areas of analytics, in the area of AI and digital, and also within our technology group. Those are the areas that we're seeing some significant wage inflation coming into 2022. So in seeing that, we have adjusted our expense base and have projected higher compensation for those areas going forward within our budget and it's included within our guidance. Those are the areas that we are seeing that happening and the areas that we are making adjustments into to mitigate that going forward so that it doesn't affect our business. In terms of travel expense and also back to the office, first off, in back to the office, we will start migrating back to the office slowly throughout the year. We're starting that process in late Q, first quarter, really in the month of March and But that's really starting out on a voluntary basis and really gradually doing this. So this is going to progress throughout the year. You know, at the end point, we have thought about, you know, what our end point is in terms of how we operate going forward. And in general, after speaking to our clients and also doing a lot of work internally, it really comes down to, you know, a structure of potentially a third in the office full-time, a third on a flexi model. and a third working from home. But we're going to migrate into that, and that's going to happen throughout the year, starting in the first quarter. In terms of travel, you're going to start to see travel expenses start to come back into our P&L. We are going to start to do a bit more of travel, especially visiting our clients and having our clients visit us in our centers. But we do not anticipate going back to the same expense level that we were at in 2019. We do believe that the world has changed. And also our clients, in terms of their level of wanting to travel also, has changed. So we are basically adjusting with the whole environment around us. And we do believe that the travel expense will start to come back, but nowhere near where it was in 2019.

Okay, just kind of digging in there on the gross margin side then. Obviously, you guys did very well in 21 above 38%. Presume wage inflation prices out a bit, but what are you thinking about a sustainable gross margin level within the context of that 17% to 18% target?

So when we look at gross margin in terms of that construct, it would be fairly similar to 2021. maybe a slight improvement, but when we think about gross margin, it really would be fairly comparable, I would say, to 2021, even with wage inflation, because we will continue to grow our revenue base and get some leverage out of that.

Let me add to that, Brian. One of the things which we are seeing is that with general inflation being high in the U.S. as such, the you know, the propensity for our clients to agree to changes in our pricing is much, much more accepting and much more understanding. So we do think, you know, we'd be able to benefit from some of the COLA increase, you know, provisions that we have in our existing contracts, some of the changes that we would need to make to our rate card and to our pricing and be able to pass that on to our customers. and be able to have a commercial arrangement that will allow us to be able to maintain the high quality of service, the innovation, and the value-added work, and do that at a reasonable price point. So frankly, there's going to be a play which is going to be there both on the expense management side as well as on the pricing side.

Okay, great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star then 1 on your touchtone telephone. Again, to ask a question, please press star then 1. Our next question comes from Maggie Nolan of William Blair. Your line is open.

Hey, this is Ted on for Maggie. Thanks for taking our question. Rohit, you talked about developing scalable solutions that could be used across a wide variety of industries. I'm curious, does that create an opportunity to decouple revenue growth from headcount growth? through some of those solutions that you're providing to clients?

Yes, Ted, that's a great question. So let me just try and elaborate on that. One, when we create an industry solution, our ability to leverage that across multiple clients becomes far more scalable, and it certainly delinks completely the revenue growth from the headcount growth. You will see that in 2021, our revenue per employee has increased quite significantly by approximately 10%. So it's a big shift that's already taking place and is visible in our financial statements. The other piece is the ability to apply and leverage solutions from one industry to another industry is also becoming more and more prevalent. and something that our clients can take advantage of and we can be a lot more helpful to them with. So, for example, in order to improve customer experience, if we apply certain solutions in one particular industry, the same solution is actually applicable in other industries because the end goal is the same, which is of enhancing end customer experience. And therefore, It allows us to play in a much larger field. It allows us to replicate these solutions without necessarily taking up our employee headcount correspondingly. And it provides for much greater leverage as we get into these database and digital solutions.

All right, great. That's helpful. I wanted to ask about the pipeline. What are you seeing in terms of the mix of project work and first annuity type analytics deals? Do you expect the one-third, two-thirds ratio to change? And then how should we think about the cadence from analytics and digital operations in 2022? Thank you. Sure.

So on analytics, we continue to see the same trend, which is we will typically engage with a new customer with essentially project-based work, and that quickly translates into an annuity-based relationship. The overall mix between one-third project-based and two-thirds annuity-based work pretty much holds true for us. What we are seeing is as we provide greater insight to our clients leveraging data analytics, our clients are coming to us and asking us to take those insights and deliver the full business outcome to them and therefore give us responsibility for managing that process end to end. And that's again a very positive trend that we're seeing where the engagement on analytics can lead to us getting more work around digital operations and digital solutions And that works really, really well. So, frankly, our analytics business right now is growing very rapidly. It's something which we have acquired a leadership position in. This is something which we deliberately invested in for the last 15 years, and right now it seems to be playing out very, very well for our clients and for us.

All right. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Vincent Colicchio of Barrington Research. Your line is open.

Yeah, Rohit, a follow-up on an earlier question. So what portion of your contracts had COLA adjustments, say, a year ago versus now? And another part of the question is, do most of your contracts have COLA adjustments right now, most of your new contracts? Yes.

Sure. So, Vincent, you know, all of our existing contracts which have COLA adjustments, those, of course, kick in and continue to be enforced. But in this environment of heightened inflation expectations, all new annuity and long-term contracts that we are signing do have, in general, a COLA clause built into it. We don't really share the percentage of contracts that have COLA elements in it, but you are aware that we have about a third of our business which is on the basis of transaction-based and outcome-based pricing models, and two-thirds of it is based on long-term annuity contracts. We think the way in which our contracts are spread out it gives us an opportunity to renew these contracts at price points which are going to be higher, taking into account the changes that have taken place in the underlying cost dimensions. So frankly, the COLA part protects us, and then the fact that our contracts are well spread out over the next three years. Each time there's a renewal, it allows us to be able to reset the pricing with our clients accordingly. So, frankly, we feel very good about how our business is structured and set up so that we can adjust to the market needs appropriately.

Thanks for that. And one follow-up. So the tight labor market, to what extent do you think you're benefiting from clients having a hard time doing things digitally, internally? because of the shortage and so turning to you as a result?

Oh, absolutely. I think that is a huge driver of demand. I think there is a big talent war that is out there, and particularly in data analytics and in digital, being able to recruit is a big challenge for our clients. Our ability is a lot, lot better because we've established a very strong brand with our employees. the kind of growth that we can promise them, the kind of quality of work that they can have, the kind of work environment that they have, and the culture of our organization. These are strong motivating factors for us to be able to attract very, very good talent. We've built up a pipeline of talent hiring from premier colleges and universities, and our ability to train and upskill the workforce, that's also very, very significant. So frankly, this is driving demand, and we are very well suited to be able to help our clients in this time period of working on these projects and doing that at scale and doing it with speed.

Thank you. Nice quarter. Thanks for answering my questions.

Thanks, Vincent.

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude your conference. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.