ExlService Holdings, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the first quarter 2022 EXL Service Holdings, Inc. Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker for today, Mr. Stephen Barlow, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Erica. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for EXL's first quarter 22 financial results conference call. I'm Steve Barlow, 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 had an opportunity to review our Q1 2022 earnings release we issued this morning. We've also updated our investor fact sheet in 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. EFIL assumes no obligation to update the information presented on this 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, our Chief Executive Officer. Rohit.

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Q1 2022 earnings call. I hope all of you and your families are safe and healthy. I'm delighted to report that EXL had a strong start to the year. In terms of revenue and adjusted EPS, we outperformed our expectations for the quarter. Our first quarter revenue was $329.2 million up 11.4 percent from the previous quarter, and up 25.9 percent year over year. For the quarter, adjusted EPS was $1.42 per share, up 20.3 percent year over year. Our analytics segment had another excellent quarter, with revenue of $149 million up 17.8% sequentially and 45.7% year over year. Analytics now accounts for 45% of our total revenue. The maturity, scale, and expertise of our data analytics business has differentiated us from competition and accelerated our overall growth. Our digital operations and solutions business also saw strong growth this quarter with revenue of $180.2 million, up 6.6% quarter over quarter, and up 13.2% year over year. This was driven primarily by double-digit revenue growth in our insurance and emerging segments. We've been able to drive consistent double-digit growth rates across our core industry verticals by number one, delivering larger enterprise-wide digital transformation engagements, and number two, deploying new scalable solutions that are being leveraged across multiple clients and industries. I would like to share a few examples that illustrate these two aspects of our revenue growth acceleration. In our data analytics business, we recently added a strategic account from the financial services industry, which turned to EXL for our industry-leading strength in customer analytics, data engineering, and data management. This client, one of the largest investment management firms in the U.S., initiated its relationship with us across the entire analytics value chain. We are leveraging our technology and industry expertise to extract insight from this client's structured and unstructured data sets. This is allowing the client to deliver better consumer experiences across digital and non-digital channels, driving both higher customer engagement and building larger customer lifetime value. This win is also significant in terms of the scope and scale of the project. While historically we would typically start a new client relationship with annualized revenue of $250 to $500,000, we are now signing larger engagements with annualized revenue of $1 million or higher. In this particular client example, Our annualized revenue for the first year is well above $5 million. It is a prime example of how clients are increasingly turning to Excel to drive bigger enterprise-wide initiatives, and our leadership in data analytics is now clearly well established. An example of a new engagement that allows us to scale our offerings is our recent work with a leading credit union in the U.S. This client wanted to improve customer experience across multiple lending products by reducing the time to underwrite and accelerate the pace of customer onboarding. This transformation included challenges such as legacy lending technologies, lack of personalization in the underwriting process, and complex and manual onboarding workflows that slowed the customer acquisition journey. As their strategic digital partner, EXL designed a next-generation digital lending platform that allows faster response time and much more personalized offers based on real-time customer data. By combining our AI-powered data extraction capabilities and our comprehensive customer analytics, we were able to automate underlying operations and decisions. This helped our client immediately offer the right lending product to the right customer at the right time. This new digital lending platform is fully scalable within our existing client by expanding across multiple product lines, and can now be deployed in a plug and play fashion across our entire client base. This one EXL approach of leveraging data, analytics, digital, and cloud capabilities to create scalable solutions is also helping us secure more wins in our emerging business segment. Each quarter, we have been increasing the depth and breadth of our client offerings in this vertical while adding a number of new logos. Our insurance business has become a prime example of our continued evolution as we've become the partner of choice for large-scale enterprise transformation projects. In fact, we have recently announced a trial of major industry recognitions that showcased this leadership capability. We were ranked second overall in the HFS Top 10 for Insurance Services, and in this year's ISG Provider Lens for Insurance BPO, EXL is a leader in all categories in the US and Australia, including property and casualty, life, and third party administration. For the third straight year, EXL earned the top spot in Everest Group's peak matrix assessment for property and casualty insurance, recognized as both a leader and a star performer. The Everest analysts note our strength as a digital transformation partner, combined with a strong foundational understanding of the insurance domain and operations. In December of last year, we announced the acquisition of Clairvoyant, a global data, AI, and cloud services company. The acquisition adds to our expertise and depth in data engineering, design capabilities, data management, cloud enablement, managed services, and data security. The addition of Clairvoyant's capabilities and team has strengthened our value proposition for our clients. We have significantly added to our talent base and are enabling a more integrated set of services for our clients to truly unlock the potential of their data. Over the course of the last quarter, our combined team has introduced new capabilities to our existing customers and prospects. We are thrilled with the response and adoption of our expanded value proposition. We have successfully started joint engagements with several of our large strategic customers across all verticals. This has significantly added to the overall growth potential for our analytics business. We are pleased that the Clairvoyant acquisition is meeting both our revenue and profitability expectations. The demand for skilled talent in our space particularly around digital, cloud, data, and analytics-oriented skill sets, has significantly increased in the past few months. Talent management and wage inflation is a top priority that we are managing at EXL. We have adopted a comprehensive and holistic strategy to ensure employee well-being from a 360-degree perspective. Our culture is a key driver that helps us collaborate as a team and brings out the best in our people. Our employees cherish the strong growth, collegial environment, entrepreneurial work culture, and the caring manner in which we engage with each other. This includes a continued focus on career and growing and developing our talent organically. EXL has a long history of promoting from within, and our strong upskilling programs have been embraced widely. In 2021, our employees completed almost 571,000 hours of training to help them advance in their careers. Second, we have benchmarked our compensation and benefits to be competitive in the marketplace. This allows us to retain and attract the best possible talent. Over the last two years, we have chosen to be flexible in terms of our business operating model. We have expanded hybrid work models to best align the needs of our employees with our client requirements, compliance with regulatory policies, and create an environment to collaborate and innovate together. We have significantly accelerated our focus on employee health and well-being with a focus on both physical and mental wellness. Recruiting from outside EXL is also important as we are growing at a fast pace. Our growth provides opportunities for advancement and new challenges for our employees. The kind of work we do for our clients is very stimulating for our employees. It helps our employees learn, grow, and get exposed to cutting edge technologies and path breaking business models. In analytics, we continue to be a successful recruiter at the world's leading universities and technical schools. We have been a top recruiter for analytical talent for over 15 years. In summary, our people are our most important asset. we will continue to endeavor to make EXL a preferred destination for employees to build a rewarding career. This is an incredibly exciting time for EXL. While we are closely monitoring the volatile economic and geopolitical environment, we are enormously confident in our agility and ability to navigate changes in the marketplace. We are capitalizing on our data-driven solutions and strategic investments that have helped us create a great deal of momentum over the past several quarters. We are well prepared to seize the market opportunity and create meaningful value for our clients. I will now invite Maurizio to highlight our Q1 financial performance and 2022 guidance.