ExlService Holdings, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by, and welcome to the first quarter 2024 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'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, John Kristof, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Justin. Good morning. Thank you for joining EXL's first quarter 2024 financial results conference call. On the call with me today are Rohit Kapoor, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Maurizio Nicolelli, Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the first quarter earnings release we issued this morning. We have 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 investors. Reconciliation of these measures to GAAP can be found in our press release, slide deck, and investor fact sheet. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Rohit.

Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to EXL's first quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm pleased to be with you this morning, sharing our strong financial results as we've had a solid start to the year. In the first quarter, we generated revenue of $436 million, an increase of 9% year over year. and we grew first quarter adjusted EPS by 9% to 38 cents per share. Our data and AI-led strategy has generated a sustainable competitive advantage for EXL. The sound execution of this strategy has enabled us to continue our growth momentum. In analytics, we delivered revenue of $191 million for the quarter, up 5% sequentially and year-over-year. I am encouraged by the first quarter performance in our analytics segment, which has been relatively flat for the past three quarters. This is the result of continued strong double-digit growth in healthcare payment services and data management. Our banking analytics business stabilized during the quarter while marketing analytics remains challenged as discussed previously. In our digital operations and solutions business during the first quarter, we generated revenue of $246 million with growth of 6% sequentially and 12% year over year. This was driven by continued strong double-digit growth in our insurance, and emerging business segments. Looking at the overall demand environment, our new and existing clients remain focused on lowering costs, improving efficiencies, and enhancing customer experience and growth. Our data and AI-led strategy combined with our deep domain expertise is helping them achieve these goals. we have been able to significantly increase our total addressable market by offering innovative new solutions and expanding into new buying centers. This is reflected in the continued strength of our sales pipeline. As clients increasingly turn to us for end-to-end solutions, we have also grown our average deal size, which is fueling our above industry revenue growth. Based on our strong performance in the first quarter, we have raised the lower end of our full year guidance range for both revenue and EPS. Maurizio will review the details in a few minutes. We recently held our AI in Action Virtual Customer Symposium where attendees heard from EXL and industry leaders on the future of business models and how they are scaling the use of enterprise data to bridge the gap between strategy and operations to make AI real. The event included live demonstrations of practical applications and use cases of embedding AI across all our business segments. The event was attended by over 2,300 clients, prospects, analysts, advisors and partners and feedback has been very positive. A replay of the event is available on our website. Let me share a couple of recent examples of how we are bringing to life all our capabilities at the intersection of data, AI, and domain expertise for our clients to deliver meaningful value. First, we developed a GenAI-based conversational business intelligence solution for a leading life and annuity insurer. The solution is designed to help them better understand their captive and independent advisors, interests, behaviors, and demographics. This helps them optimize targeting and message development to improve their experience and increase sales and return on marketing investments. Effectively developing the solution for the client required bringing together our talented team of Gen AI experts, data engineers, business subject matter experts, and AI deployment specialists to work as an integrated team. We harnessed large volumes of both external and internal client data assets to build a 360 degree profile of each advisor. We fine-tuned LLMs to generate personalized insights for distinct advisor groups with unique traits. Finally, we developed a conversational interface for an easy and intuitive user experience. This solution is highly scalable and delivers on-demand, real-time, natural language insights across all our clients' sales and marketing functions. By leveraging additional data sets and embedding digital into our clients' marketing and sales processes, we have created significant value by enabling them to double their new business volume. In another example, EXL has become the preferred AI and data partner for a UK-based leading retailer. We accomplished this through the successful implementation of multiple AI-based solutions to transform their online sales operations. For example, we deployed our proprietary GenAI-based Smart Agent Assist solution at scale, which is currently running live across 1,100 customer agents, handling 6 million calls annually in the client's captive operations as well as those outsourced to Excel. Our solution provides real-time speech-to-text, AI nudges for next best action, customer sentiment, and vulnerability detection and call summary. Early results include a greater than 90% reduction in customer repeat calls, a double-digit agent productivity gain, and vulnerability detection accuracy rates of over 95%. In addition, we have helped our clients reduce returns, streamline orders and refunds, and improve overall customer experience. We also deployed EXL's Buyer Assist solution, which utilizes GenAI and natural language processing to generate insights from disjointed and unstructured data from 40 different sources across the web, social media, online reviews, and catalogs. Our solution is adept in handling data in any form, be it text, images, or videos, and feeds it into our buyer assist recommendation engine. By presenting our clients' buyers with customized recommendations, we help them better predict which items to procure based on potential future demand. This has resulted in a 2 to 3% increase in sales, a 30 to 40% improvement in buyer productivity, and enhanced customer satisfaction. Due to our success with this client, EXL is now their strategic business transformation partner in deploying AI across their enterprise, thereby expanding our TAM and enabling us to continue our growth momentum. These are just a few examples of the proprietary AI-based solutions we have developed and deployed that combine data and AI with our deep industry experience to deliver meaningful business benefits to our clients and their end customers. I am pleased to highlight two key appointments we made recently within our senior leadership team. Vikas Bhalla and Vivek Jaitley have each been promoted to president of EXL in addition to their current roles of head of insurance and head of analytics, respectively. In their expanded roles, they will take on broader company-wide responsibilities, including being more involved in driving overall corporate performance and executing on our data and AI-led strategy. As we implement our data and AI-led strategy, it is important that we continually optimize our leadership structure to execute on our strategic objectives. Vikas and Vivek are highly talented and strategic leaders who have built strong, sustainable growth businesses and have created tremendous impact for EXL over the past two decades. In their expanded roles, I look forward to their continued leadership as we transform EXL to the data and AI partner of choice for our clients. We will be holding an investor strategy update event next Tuesday, May 7th, to provide an in-depth overview of our strategy, our pivot to being a data and AI-led company, and our growth opportunities. Registration for the event is available on the investor relations page of our website, and we look forward to seeing you there. In summary, we delivered strong results in the first quarter, and we are encouraged by the continued momentum in our digital operations business, as well as the growth in our analytics business. Our winning data and AI-led strategy combined with consistent execution by our exceptionally talented and dedicated team, position us well to deliver industry-leading performance for the remainder of 2024 and beyond. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mauricio to cover our financial performance in detail.