ExlService Holdings, Inc.

Hello, and welcome to the EXL Service Holdings Inc. 4th Quarter 2024 Year-End Earnings Conference Call. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you will be given instructions for the question and answer session. Also, as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to John Christoph, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Thanks, Jennifer. Hello, and thank you for joining EXL's fourth quarter and year-end 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 fourth quarter earnings press release we issued yesterday afternoon. We have also posted a slide deck and investor fact sheet to 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. With that, I'll turn the call over to Rohit.

Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to EXL's fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm pleased to be with you this morning reviewing our strong financial results. In the fourth quarter, we generated revenue of $481 million, an increase of 16% year over year. And we grew fourth quarter adjusted EPS by 26% to 44 cents per share. we were able to maintain a strong growth momentum across both our analytics and digital operations and solutions businesses during the quarter as we continue to successfully execute on our data and AI strategy. In analytics, we delivered revenue of $208 million for the quarter, up 2% sequentially and 14% year over year. This acceleration of growth was driven by an improvement in the analytics services growth rate, continued strong performance in healthcare payment services, and the contribution from the ITI data acquisition. Our analytics business benefits from client focus on data modernization and AI adoption across the enterprise. These trends will continue to drive demand for our services. In our digital operations and solutions business during the fourth quarter, we delivered strong growth as we leveraged our domain data and AI capabilities to win new clients and expand our business with existing clients. We grew revenue 2% sequentially and 18% year over year to $274 million. This is the result of strong growth across all three industry verticals that make up our digital operations business. We remain bullish on our digital operations business as clients continue to focus on re-imagining their operating model to drive greater efficiency, better customer experience, and accelerated business growth. To accelerate the execution of our data and AI strategy, capture a greater share of the growing AI market, and drive EXL's long-term growth, we have changed our operating model. The new model is comprised of industry market units focused on delivering higher value to clients, leveraging our full suite of capabilities. and strategic growth units focused on rapidly advancing our operational analytics, data engineering, and AI capabilities specific to our chosen industries. This new operating model allows us to deepen our industry expertise and brings us closer to our clients. This enables us to anticipate and solve their challenges with greater agility and bring to bear the full suite of Excel's capabilities. It will foster collaboration, enable more efficient resource utilization, allow for scalable infrastructure deployment, and enhance adaptability to rapidly changing market needs. This will allow EXL to swiftly develop and deploy innovative data and AI solutions at scale and across multiple clients simultaneously. Concurrent with the operating model change, we will be moving into new financial reporting segments beginning in the first quarter of 2025. These segments are aligned with our industry market units. They are insurance, healthcare and life sciences, banking capital markets and diversified industries, and international growth markets. Our data, AI, and analytics capabilities are driving all of our solutions and are embedded across business lines. As such, our analytics revenue will now be included in the financial reporting for each segment. In order to provide greater transparency, we will report overall data and AI revenue alongside our new segments beginning with the first quarter of 2025. This shift will provide a more comprehensive representation of the performance and quality of our business as we continue executing on our data and AI growth strategy. It is an exciting time for EXL as we accelerate our AI journey. A journey that is not only redefining our company, but also reshaping the way our clients and their industries operate globally. we made a strategic pivot towards a data and AI growth strategy built on decades of deep domain expertise, mastery of data, and proven capabilities in leveraging AI. As we execute this strategy, we achieved several significant milestones in 2024. With the acquisition of ITI data, we enhanced our data management and engineering capabilities to enable CIOs and CDOs to drive data and platform modernization mandates. We scaled our existing proprietary AI solutions, such as Extractor, Paymentor, Smart Agent Assist, Code Harbor, and Digital Finance Suite, and we filed several new patents. We also launched our domain-specific insurance large language model, which leverages proprietary data and over 15 years of claim processing experience. To continue innovating and leading in the AI space, we have expanded our partnerships with Nvidia, Databricks, AWS, Microsoft, and Google with a focus on leveraging their scalable and secure infrastructure, a genetic AI development toolkit, and engineering innovation. Let me share with you a few examples illustrating the depth and breadth of our AI implementations and the broad customer base and industry set in which we are deploying AI. We built and deployed an enterprise gen AI platform for a leading healthcare services client. We have thus far implemented four use cases on this GenAI platform, resulting in $10 million of operational savings. We will continue to leverage this platform to deploy more use cases with this client going forward. We implemented our domain-specific LLM for a large US insurance company to automate their claims adjudication process and provide improved negotiations and resolutions for insurance casualty claims. This has facilitated better decision-making, improved indemnity, and lowered the cost of claim handling and settlement time. We have launched an agentic AI deployment for one of the largest UK utility providers, increasing customer operations efficiency by 45% while improving resiliency and customer experience. We have deployed an agentic AI solution for a large consumer products company with multiple agents across their source to contract and invoice to pay cycles. This has resulted in a 75% reduction in manual effort while improving adherence to quality and compliance standards. Data and AI are at the core of our business and accounted for 53% of our revenue in 2024, making EXL a more strategic partner for our clients. This is facilitating more complex engagements and leading to more integrated deals, resulting in a stickier business with higher growth potential. Looking towards 2025, we expect AI adoption to increase significantly. While much of the AI conversation has focused on the supply side of AI, eXcel is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for data and AI services. First, we possess a comprehensive suite of AI assets, including our own IP with over 100 pre-built accelerators. Second, We offer an open cloud agnostic modular architecture that enables us to work across various legacy tech stacks and data streams and access third party assets. And finally, we have extensive data management capabilities and decades of experience in domain-specific workflow complexities leading to larger integrated deals that create substantial value for clients. This fusion of domain, data, and AI expertise is our core competitive differentiator, which is why we are so excited about this opportunity. Yesterday, we announced eXcelerate.ai, our agentic AI platform, which enables clients to reimagine their workflows by embedding eXcel or third-party AI agents into their business operations. The platform leads to greater efficiency, increased accuracy, and scalability across operations, resulting in substantial return on investment. E-Accelerate.ai is an open and modular orchestration platform allowing for fast implementation in all client environments. It includes more than 10 industry-specific Excel-built AI agents already in use across insurance, healthcare, retail, utilities, and financial services. EXL's deep domain expertise, AI capabilities, and strong partner ecosystem allow us to collaborate closely with our clients to reimagine their workflows at speed. We received feedback in our most recent investor survey that it would be helpful for us to communicate more details about our AI solutions, including specific use cases. I'd like to call your attention to two upcoming events, which may be helpful. We will be hosting our annual AI in Action virtual event on March 5th, where we will feature clients discussing their shift to scalable AI, as well as conducting demos of our AI solutions. Details are available on our website. We will also be holding an investor strategy update on May 6th in New York, where we will be providing a deeper dive on the progression of our data and AI strategy and discuss our new operating model and reporting segments. Details will be announced soon. We encourage you to attend both events. Thank you all for your time and continued support. We look forward to working together to shape the future of data and AI. With that, I will turn the call over to Maurizio to discuss our financial results in more detail.