SEI Investments Company

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SEI second quarter 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star, then zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd like now to turn the conference over to our host, Mr. Alex Whitelam, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome, everyone. I'm excited to join the team here at SEI and look forward to working with you all. We appreciate you joining us today for our second quarter 2023 earnings call. On the call, we have Ryan Hickey, SEI's Chief Executive Officer, Dennis McGonigal, Chief Financial Officer, and the leaders of our business segments, Wayne Rithrow, Paul Clowder, Jay Cipriano, Phil McCabe, and Sanjay Sharma. Before we begin, I'd like to point out that our earnings press release can be found under the investor relations section of our website at SEIC.com. This call is being webcast live, and a replay will be available on the events and webcast page of our website. We would like to remind you that during today's presentation and in our responses to your questions, we have and will make certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our notices regarding forward-looking statements that appear in today's earnings press release and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake to update any of our forward-looking statements. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Ryan Hickey. Ryan?

Thanks, Alex. Hello, everyone. I hope you're all having a great summer. Over the past year, we have been laying the foundation for strategic growth. We've evolved leadership, invested in our talent, increased our market presence, and aligned our resources to drive an enterprise-wide approach to our markets. The headlines for the quarter's financial results are revenues in the second quarter were $489 million, up 2% from a year ago. Net income for the quarter was $119 million, a 7% increase compared to last year's second quarter. EPS was 89 cents, up 10% from the 81 cents reported in the same period last year. Dennis will provide more details on our results shortly. In the quarter, we repurchased 1.3 million shares of SEI stock at an average price of $58.56 per share. That translates into $75.5 million of stock purchases. We also declared and paid a semiannual dividend of 43 cents per share. The sales momentum we saw earlier in the year continued through the second quarter. Our focus on proactively engaging with current clients, expanding our pipeline, and connecting resources across the enterprise to identify and execute against cross-selling opportunities are translating into more wins for our sales teams. Net sales events totaled $29.3 million, $23.6 million of which were net recurrence. This represents a 24% increase over the net recurring number we reported in the first quarter this year. While markets have improved recently, we remain vigilant on growing our profits, prudently deploying capital, and delivering at a high level for our clients. With that, let me turn to our business line. The investment manager segment had another solid quarter. We successfully converted several new clients and funds while growing profits. We also recontracted multiple clients and converted our backlog, implementing a number of large accounts during the quarter. Dennis will provide further detail on this in just a moment. Our teams are cultivating strategic relationships and driving growth for our clients. During the quarter, we won new accounts in the global, traditional, and alternative segments. In alternatives, our largest clients continue to expand in the private credit, private equity, real estate, and infrastructure markets. In the quarter, we onboarded a private equity firm previously using in-house administration and two private credit firms. One is a competitive takeaway and another through a competitive bid process. We also signed a large cross-sale PE access platform client, which was also a competitive takeaway. The traditional business and IMS had a very strong quarter. We added new business and all product lines across more than 40 investment managers. In particular, our business expansion in both our turnkey collective investment trust and ETF solutions continue to be strong. We're also pleased to announce that we've recorded our first SEI wealth platform sale to an existing client in this unit. Finally, we completed a large transfer agency conversion, adding more than 1,700 institutional accounts, and successfully partnered with a renowned global asset manager to utilize our CIT platform. This highlights the breadth of our capabilities and the expanding reach on our global scale. Next, private banking had another active quarter, signing three new deals and recontracting four clients. We also successfully implemented three clients on the SEI Wealth Platform during the quarter. We're making significant strides on the technology front, including the SEI Data Cloud. Our cloud solutions are generating growing interest with both existing clients and new prospects. We also continue to make headway in converting clients from Trust 3000 to SWP. During the quarter, we successfully migrated more than 35,000 accounts and approximately $120 billion in assets for one of our larger banking clients. Sanjay and the team continue to capitalize on our pipeline, prudently manage expenses, and drive that growth to the bottom line. We still have some previously announced events to absorb in coming quarters, but we are confident in our current strategy to grow both revenues and profits. Turning to our investment advisors business, we completed the integration of our North American-based intermediary businesses during the quarter. We believe our intermediary business is better positioned to accelerate growth across each of its channels with this realignment. We're seeing early signs of that growth already. especially in the RIA channel, in which we experienced accelerated positive net cash flow during the quarter. Our technology, investment processing, and asset management capabilities allow us to meet our clients where they want to be met and provide a holistic solution that is unmatched in the market. In the institutional investor segment, we secured wins with our outsourcing capabilities across the full spectrum of our offerings. Additionally, existing clients continue to consume our expanded suite of products. Corporate defined benefit curtailments and annuitizations continue to be headwinds in the UK and US, and were the driving factors for the quarter's financial results. We continue to mitigate the DB headwinds, though, through improved cross-sales and lead generation for other SEI services in our private wealth management business, as well as expansion in other institutional markets. Additionally, we recently announced our agreement to acquire National Pension Trust, pending regulatory approval. NPT is a leading master trust in the UK, serving more than 60,000 members. NPT is our second master trust acquisition following the purchase of Atlas in 2021. As we've mentioned, we built a corporate development team last year with a focus on developing, executing, and integrating our strategic transactions to accelerate growth. The NPT acquisition demonstrates our commitment to this strategic priority, as well as our commitment to the UK market. Turning to our investments in new business segment, SDI Sphere had a positive quarter, adding a new credit union client and successfully migrating its first client to the cloud. And our partnership with LSV remains very strong. On the talent and culture front, we expanded our executive leadership team with the addition of Sneha Shah, who will lead new business ventures and will be a future participant on our earnings calls. We are excited to have Sneha join the team as she brings a wealth of knowledge and experience. Throughout her career, Sneha has led growth initiatives at leading international firms, where she created and scaled new businesses at the intersection of data, artificial intelligence, and technology. Sneha's hire also highlights the fact that with our existing growth engines positioned for success, it is now time for us to increase our attention and devote additional resources to new businesses and platforms. Sneha will be focused on identifying and incubating those businesses including SEI Sphere, that we believe will build upon SEI's foundation for future growth and contribute to our corporate revenue goals. It also evidences our commitment to infusing external talent into the company and our ability to attract that talent. On the cultural front, we also made strategic investments in building SEI's brand awareness and our community engagement initiatives. These investments will help amplify SEI's message, drive employee engagement, and elevate our core values. This concludes my prepared remarks. I will now turn it over to Dennis to discuss our financial results for the quarter. Dennis?