IBEX Limited

welcome to the ibex third quarter full year 2024 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 1 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. To note, there is an accompanying earnings deck presentation available on the IBEX Investor Relations website at investors.ibex.co. I will now turn this conference over to Mr. Michael Darwall, Investor Relations of IBEX.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. Before we begin, I want to remind you that matters discussed on today's call may include forward-looking statements related to our operating performance, financial goals, and business outlook, which are based on management's current beliefs and assumptions. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinion as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to revise this information as a result of new developments which may occur. Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expected and described today. For a more detailed description of our risk factors, please review our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 13, 2023. As a reminder, as of July 1, 2023, we became a domestic filer, and as such, are reporting on a US GAAP basis rather than from the previous IFRS standard. With that, I will now turn the call over to IBEX CEO, Bob Deckinson.

Thank you, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today as we share our third quarter fiscal 2024 results. For my remarks today, I will briefly review our results for the quarter. which included the strongest adjusted EBITDA margin and EPS quarter in our history. And then I will go into detail and share our strategy to be at the leading edge of the transformation from traditional live agents to a business that also offers AI virtual agents and automated interactions. Our third quarter fiscal 2024 was one of the strongest on record. The operational and strategic initiatives we have delivered upon over the last several quarters resulted in adjusted EBITDA of 19.2 million, delivering record 15.1% adjusted EBITDA margin and 70 cents adjusted EPS. Revenues for the quarter were slightly down to 126.8 million versus prior year, primarily due to the completion of a short-term project we serviced last year. These results are an output of the structural business we have built. We continue to grow our highest margin services and geographies. Our digital-first and integrated omni-channel business grew to 78% of our revenues from 73% prior year. And our higher margin offshore and nearshore regions grew to 76% of our revenue from 72% prior year. Our higher revenue, lower margin U.S. region contracted to 24% of revenue from 28% prior year. We expect these trends to continue as we land and expand with great new clients. I'm again excited to report we had three new client wins in the quarter, totaling 15 for the first three quarters of 2024, as compared to eight in the same period in FY23. Our pipeline is loaded with great blue chip clients that continue to look to better alternatives to their long-tenured relationships with our multibillion-dollar competitors. I am also encouraged by the velocity of our pipeline. The signature win for the quarter was with a leading member-focused health and fitness company where we initially began discussions in November of 2023, launched training by the first week of January and reach scale by the end of March. We continue to be confident in our ability to compete and win. Our balance sheet remains a position of strength with approximately $50 million in net cash while generating nearly $10 million in free cash flow in the quarter. We were able to leverage this strong position to buy back more than $8 million in shares demonstrating our board of directors' confidence in our business and in our management team. Let me now segue to our AI strategy. The intersection of generative AI and CX continues to create a lot of excitement, potential disruption, and headlines for the BPO industry. One of the most important questions is if generative AI will significantly impact live agent client volumes and potentially provide headwinds in the industry. At IBEX, we see these potential shifts as opportunity. Let me explain. When I arrived here at IBEX nine years ago, there were two distinct trends occurring in the industry. The first being the evolution of CX as a competitive weapon for leading clients, while the second was the acceleration of digital first support. We set a strategy to transform our business and capitalize on these trends. This is what we called BPO 2.0. This is the exciting business we have built. Fast and flexible, digital first, tech-led, leveraging deep analytics and insights, grounded in amazing, long-tenured clients with trusted relationships. Built around branding and culture, we have been and continue to be extremely successful in this transformation. Now, the convergence of AI and CX creates another opportunity for IBEX, and one that is on a level playing field. we now see the opportunity to transform our business from providing customer support by live contact center agents to one where we will also provide AI virtual agents to resolve certain customer contacts, which in turn will provide significant cost savings for our clients while creating additional revenue and margin opportunities for IBEX. Our goal is to be on the leading end of this transformation. And I am confident in our ability to be successful because many of the key differentiators in our current business position us well for this pivot. We believe one of the critical success factors will be the ability to marry generative AI technologies with customer journeys to create great customer experiences. The combination of being a tech-led BPO coupled with our deep analytics capabilities creates a compelling competitive advantage. We will not be the developer of the technology, but rather a builder of the solution. The technology will be provided through strategic partnerships we have built with several best of breed technology companies. But the overall solution is being developed by IBEX and leverages our knowledge of the customer journey. This is an example of how our speed and nimbleness allow us to get ahead of our competitors. We believe our size is an advantage as well. While the largest BPOs work through the complexities of massive merger integrations with hundreds of thousands of additional seats to protect, our size creates opportunities. Simply put, Our new call automation solution, IBEX Automate, will likely reduce the number of calls we handle by live agents as well as for our competitors who service the same client. However, by implementing this AI solution across the entire enterprise, we expect to cover a greater percentage of the client's needs compared to what our live agents currently handle. As a result, This will more than compensate for the decrease in live agent volume. Additionally, we have developed a disruptive solution we call IBEX Translate that uses generative AI to translate conversations into various languages that are difficult to support. This solution targets costly, old-world language translation service companies that result in poor customer experiences. IBEX Translate is gaining tremendous amount of interest and will be 100% accretive to our business. IBEX is well positioned as a first mover where we are front and center with our clients developing customer facing AI solutions. In fact, our early success taking this to market has already yielded more than 35 pipeline opportunities. with many in the late stages and one recently closed. We continually get feedback from our clients that we are further along than our competitors in developing these types of solutions. Being first to market also strengthens our relationships as a trusted partner. The traction we have And our speed to aggressively market these services provides exciting near and midterm opportunities for growth for IBEX in this next generation of customer experience outsourcing. We believe our balance sheet is a competitive advantage as well. While the majority of our competitors are challenged with highly leveraged balance sheets as a result of large acquisitions of more seats, We have been very patient in our M&A strategy. Now, with our clear strategy of transforming our business into a provider of customer experiences, whether live agent, AI virtual agent, or hybrid, we are able to look to the future and identify companies that can help accelerate this strategy, as well as opportunities to invest in our key tech partner ecosystem to create more points of differentiation. In summary, we are very excited and confident in our ability to be a leader in the future models of the BPO industry. We are well on our way to successfully transforming our business. Now, before I turn the call over to Taylor, I would like to take a moment to recognize and thank our CIO, Jim Ferrado, who recently announced his retirement at the end of the fiscal year in June. Jim's contributions to IBEX cannot be measured simply by traditional IT metrics. Since joining the company in 2015, Jim has had an immeasurable impact on the business. His leadership has been instrumental in the company's success from building our award-winning WaveX BPO 2.0 technology platform to enabling our agents to be resilient during COVID as we had to transition thousands of agents to work at home overnight, to keeping our systems safe and secure. Jim has also been key in the development of IBEX's groundbreaking generative AI-powered Wave IEX customer experience solution suite. His pragmatic approach and leadership resulted in a world-class IT infrastructure and organization that has consistently delivered the best CX solutions for some of the world's greatest companies being recognized globally again and again for excellence. We thank Jim for his near decade of service at IBEX and more than 35 years in the IT and BPO spaces and the legacy he leaves at the company. I will now turn the call over to Taylor to go through our financials. Taylor?