ExlService Holdings, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the fourth quarter 2023 EXL Service Holdings, Inc. 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 the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, John Kristof, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Rivka. Hello, and thank you for joining EXL's fourth quarter 2023 financial results conference call. On the call with me today are Rohit Kapoor, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Mircea Nicolali, Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the fourth quarter earnings release we issued this morning. We also posted an earnings release slide deck and investor fact sheet in the investor relations section of our website. As a reminder, some of the matters we'll discuss this morning 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 SEC from time to time. EXL assumes no obligation to update the information presented on this conference call today. During our call, we may reference certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe provide useful information for our investors. Reconciliation of these measures to GAAP can be found in our press release, slide deck, and the investor fact sheet. With that, I'll turn the call over to Rohit.

Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to EXL's fourth quarter and 2023 year-end earnings call. I'm pleased to be with you this morning discussing our strong results and continued ability to outperform. EXL performed exceptionally well in 2023 despite a challenging macroeconomic environment and weakness for discretionary and project-based work across the industry. We grew full-year revenue by 16% and delivered EPS growth of 19%. We achieved 13% revenue growth in our analytics business for the year and an impressive 18% growth in our digital operations and solutions business. In the fourth quarter, we generated revenue of $414 million, an increase of 11% year over year, and 10% in constant currency. And we grew fourth quarter adjusted EPS by 11% to 35 cents. Our ability to consistently deliver industry-leading double-digit growth even in a difficult environment is the result of sound execution of our differentiated strategy and our balanced portfolio of businesses. We recognized the importance of data several years ago and pivoted to being a data-led company which resulted in a three-year revenue cagger of 19%. Our data-led strategy and deep expertise in analytics has uniquely positioned us to embrace AI and pivot to now becoming data and AI-led in everything that we do. Just as data-led enabled us to drive superior growth over the past several years, Combining data and AI positions us well for industry leading performance going forward. Data is crucial for the accuracy of AI outputs and is the foundation upon which all successful AI is built. The more reliable the AI outputs, the better the outcomes for our clients. This enables us to expand our total addressable market and offers our clients a much richer value proposition driving operational efficiencies, improving customer experience, and growing revenue. The value and impact of data and AI together is greater than the sum of parts. Over the past several years, we have been at the forefront of embedding machine learning and AI into our clients' operations to drive greater efficiencies and enhance customer experience. EXL has unique industry-leading data, analytics, and AI capabilities, which, when combined with deep experience in industry-specific business models and operations, results in superior business outcomes. That's what it takes to transform AI from concept to reality and why we are so excited about the opportunity ahead. We are making meaningful investments to propel our data and AI-led strategy going forward. We have established an AI center of excellence with 1,500 specialists. More than two-thirds of our employees have already taken advantage of AI training and development tools to help them expand their knowledge and skills. We have developed several generated AI applications for enterprise use in areas such as employee self-service, recruiting, and finance. We are collaborating with the leading technology partners, including our most recent announcements with Microsoft and AWS to co-develop AI solutions and accelerate go-to-market plans. And we embedded AI into our core solutions and continue to build our portfolio of more than 150 AI use cases across industries with over 30 deployments with clients. We are leading the way in helping our clients reinvent their business models fueled by data, analytics, and AI to deliver higher value with speed. To support the shift to our data and AI-led strategy, We recently expanded our executive leadership team with two new leaders. Andy Logani, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, is responsible for advancing EXL's digital and AI initiatives. And Baljinder Singh, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, leads EXL's technology, cybersecurity, and enterprise transformation functions. As we focus on implementing data and AI-led solutions to transform our clients' businesses along with our own operations, it is crucial that our senior leadership team is made up of executives with a deep understanding of digital and AI. Let me now share a couple of examples of how our data and AI-led strategy is enabling eXcel to deliver more value to our clients. We have been working with a large US-based financial services company to reinvent their collections and payment assistance processes. We pursued an omnichannel approach leveraging data and generated AI to produce intelligence which enables the clients to offer their end customers more personalized solutions and reduce potential defaults. We initially deployed Paymenter are proprietary AI-based digital payments and collection solutions for one of their credit products and are on track to reducing their net credit loss by $30 million per year. As a result of our initial success, we are extending our payment or solution to various other lending products over the next several months. In addition, we won the mandate to run their collections operations end-to-end using a data and AI-led solution with human in the loop. This delivers not only improved collections outcomes, but also a better customer experience in an area where the engagement has typically been adversarial. With the recent high inflation and interest rate environment, many of our financial services clients are seeing an increase in customers requiring payment assistance, and debt restructuring. We are confident in our ability to help clients overall their collections functions using the latest data, AI, and CX technologies. In another example, we are using AI to help one of our large healthcare clients significantly reduce losses from potential billing errors. We review their claims data on a running basis to identify, audit, and recover hundreds of millions of dollars from incorrect payments each year. As we further embed generative AI into our solutions, this enables us to identify a greater number of billing errors in a shorter period of time while significantly reducing the number of false positive encounters with providers. We are also using AI-based tools to aid our auditors in finding billing errors faster, creating more productivity gains. One of the most exciting aspects of GenAI is it allows us to identify errors in real time, prior to payment, and identify root causes of payment or submission errors. We have put eXcel in a leading position by adopting data and AI as part of our core growth strategy and making significant investments to further strengthen our value proposition. Looking ahead, we have solid momentum in our business. As we deliver more tangible value to our clients through data and AI, we are winning larger deals and improving our competitive win rates. This enables us to grow faster than competition move more of our revenue to an outcome-based business model, and capture a greater share of the value we create for our clients. Our board of directors authorized a $500 million stock research program effective March 1, 2024, for two years. This reflects confidence in our ability to continue to deliver industry-leading growth and generate significant free cash flow. This is part of our ongoing capital allocation program. There has been a tremendous amount of change in our business, and we would like to keep our stakeholders informed about the transformation of our business. Therefore, we will be holding an investor strategy update event on May 7th to provide further insights about our data and AI-led strategy. Please mark your calendars and we will provide event details in the coming weeks. In summary, we delivered exceptional results in a challenging environment in 2023. Our winning strategy, unique data, analytics, and AI capabilities, and an exceptionally talented and dedicated team position us well to deliver industry-leading performance in 2024 and beyond. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mauricio to cover our financial performance in detail.