Verisk Analytics, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Verisk First Quarter 2019 Earnings Results Conference Call. This call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Verisk Head of Investor Relations, Stacey Bradbar. Ms. Bradbar, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Natalia, and good day to everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for a discussion of our first quarter 2019 financial results. Today's call will be led by Scott Stevenson, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, who will provide a brief overview of the business. In an effort to provide the investment community with a broader perspective on our industry verticals and to offer deeper access to our senior operating executives, Neil Anderson, President of Wood Mackenzie, will then provide an update on our Energy and Specialized Markets segment. Lastly, Lee Schabel, Chief Financial Officer, will highlight some key points about our financial performance. Mark Anquillari, Chief Operating Officer, will join the team for Q&A. The earnings relief referenced on this call, as well as the associated 10Q, can be found in the Investor section of our website, bears.com. The earnings release has also been attached to an 8K that we have furnished to the SEC. A replay of this call will be available for 30 days on our website and by dialing. Finally, as set forth in more detail in today's earnings release, I will remind everyone that today's call may include forward-looking statements about VAERS' future performance. Actual performance could differ materially from what is suggested by our comments today. Information about the factors that could affect future performance is contained in our recent SEC filings. Now, I'll turn the call over to Scott.

Thanks, Stacey, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be able to report that 2019 is off to a solid start at Verisk. The first quarter was marked by solid organic constant currency revenue growth of 6.7%, which remains the most important measure of our vitality as an organization. Moreover, our growth was driven by continued broad-based strength across our insurance vertical and ongoing improvements in energy and specialized markets. This growth was a product of our continued efforts to get closer to our customers, to introduce new innovative solutions, and to cross-sell existing solutions to help accelerate value creation for our customers. With regard to innovation and cross-sell, we are beginning to see early success from the integration of some of our more recent acquisitions into the Verisk family. To that end, we are leveraging technologies and capabilities across all of Verisk to deliver new innovation and leveraging client relationships to drive cross-sell. In the insurance vertical, we are working with a number of clients in the London market to help them achieve an integrated workflow across a suite of Verisk products, helping them to be more responsive to their clients while at the same time improving the quality of their analytics. As an example, Verisk clients who insure commercial properties are now able – to leverage integrations that we have built between applications from SQL, AIR, and Analyze Re to review exposure accumulations, assess extreme event risk, and determine the impact of a policy on the overall portfolio in real time during the quoting process. These integrated products enable insurers to perform such analytics in minutes where previously it could have taken at least a day. We think this early success with clients can be replicated more broadly within London and the United States. In energy and specialized markets, Power Advocate, our market and cost intelligence solution, is seeing early success expanding out of their core markets of oil and gas utilities into new end markets, including metals and mining, by leveraging Wood Mackenzie's deep customer relationships. Neil will talk to you about these opportunities in more detail. In the financial services vertical, we've integrated LCI's comprehensive bankruptcy data with our proprietary Argus credit card industry consortium data, to more accurately predict bankruptcy as much as 6 to 12 months prior to a bankruptcy filing. This should enable our bank customers to significantly reduce bankruptcy losses through the appropriate utilization and credit line management strategies. We had a very active quarter with regard to customer engagement. In fact, in the quarter, we hosted 17 customer events, and attendance and engagement were very solid. In February, we hosted our Elevate conference in Salt Lake City. The attendance included almost 1,000 insurance executives, claims adjusters, contractors, and vendors from the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The event focused on artificial intelligence and automation to enhance the claims process and introduced the many enhanced features and new products offered by our claims team. Insurers clearly understand the disruptive innovations that are taking place throughout the industry. and they are intent on maintaining a competitive advantage. This is driving increased engagement and focus around increased use of data and analytics, as well as digital engagement. The conference featured, first, the use of computer vision, such as remote imagery, and image interpretation to automate the claim cycle. Second, utilizing natural language processing to better respond to policyholders through advanced analytics and chatbots, to speed the claims process and better digitally engage with customers, and third, product demos of our enhanced solutions and an innovation lab to showcase our cutting-edge insure tech. The unprecedented interest in these topics resulted in over 150 requests from customers to meet with our product managers, industry experts, and account executives. This level of customer engagement positions us well for future growth. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Neil to provide some additional insights on our energy and specialized markets segment. Welcome, Neil.