Verisk Analytics, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the VERIX third quarter 2021 earnings results conference call. This call is being recorded. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After today's prepared remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session where we will limit participants to one question and one follow-up. We will have further instructions for you at that time. For opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to VARIC's head of investor relations, Ms. Stacey Broadbar. Ms. Broadbar, you may go ahead.

Thank you, Julia, and good day, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for a discussion of our third quarter 2021 financial results. Today's call will be led by Scott Stevenson, VARIC's chairman, president, and chief executive officer, who will provide an overview of our business. Lee Schabel, Chief Financial Officer and Group President, will follow with the financial review. Mark Angolari, Chief Operating Officer and Group President, will join the team for the Q&A session. The earnings release referenced on this call, as well as the associated 10Q, can be found in the investor section of our website, VAERS.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 dial-in. 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 their future performance, including, but not limited to, the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. 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 filing. Now, I would turn the call over to Scott.

Thanks, Stacey. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. I'm pleased to share that Verith delivered a solid third quarter result, building on our deep domain expertise, innovative offerings, and strong relationships with our customers. Specifically, Verith delivered organic constant currency revenue growth of 5.1% and organic constant currency adjusted EBITDA growth of 2.1% for the third quarter. What I find encouraging is looking at the results on a two-year basis to adjust for the lumpiness related to the pandemic. In this view, Barris delivered two-year cumulative organic constant currency revenue growth of 8.7% and organic constant currency adjusted EBITDA growth of 16.8%, demonstrating strong core operating leverage and a sequential improvement from the second quarter. Lee will provide more details in his comprehensive financial review. Across insurance, we are seeing strong demand for our products as our customers are striving to become more digital and more automated and are turning to Verisk's solutions to help them. Engagement with our customers remains at very high levels as we continue our virtual work and our Salesforce and customer service teams are doing an excellent job staying connected. In fact, we recently hosted our signature underwriting conference called Verisk Velocity, again in a virtual format. This year's event was another success with over 600 attendees participating across 27 different thematic sessions. This year's focus was accelerating the digital transformation and developing new ways to increase efficiency and improve underwriting outcomes to better serve their customers. Strong customer engagement within insurance is translating into strong sales. With growing ACVs, longer contract terms, and very robust sales pipelines, to that end, We've been very successful penetrating the new insurtech companies as they can take advantage of the full suite of various solutions across underwriting and claims. Additionally, with our more traditional P&C customer base, we are also having success leveraging our scale and our comprehensive insurance solution offering. These are two of our competitive advantages. By bundling our solutions together, driving increased adoption of new solutions across many different customer segments, and these bundles are proving to be quite sticky. One area of growth we are particularly excited about is our international expansion within insurance, which is predominantly in the UK today, but we see a long runway as we expand our analytic capabilities within the UK and extend our global footprint into new developed markets. Within our SQL business in the UK, we are building out a truly integrated and digital ecosystem across carriers, syndicates, brokers, and managing general agents throughout the specialty market. And we are bringing in new customers and expanding our suite of products across existing ones. Most recently, we made a tuck-in acquisition of Ignite Software Systems, a SaaS platform that includes policy administration, rating engines, and digital engagement for brokers, managing general agents, and insurers. This acquisition expands SQL capabilities and enables SQL to add a modular, API-driven SaaS platform to the SQL suite of products. Within our core underwriting, we are using the time-tested playbook that has worked in the U.S. for years, using proprietary data assets to help better price and understand risk, and extending to the U.K. with our data enrichment hub. Data Insight Hub is enabling the digitization of the personal and commercial lines insurance in the UK, deploying a data-forward strategy to pre-fill key data elements and provide predictive analytics that help customers with risk assessment and pricing. Our recent investment in Hug Hub extends these capacities upstream to support the ecosystem at point of sale and distribution. Our international travel business has experienced significant declines due to pandemic-related travel restrictions, but we believe we are well positioned to take advantage of the rebound when cross-border travel returns. On the claims front, and consistent with our focus on the insurance business and international expansion, we recently announced the acquisition of Actineo, a market leader for personal injury claims digitalization and medical assessment in Germany. Actineo will be integrated into our broader Verisk Claims Europe business and should provide a strong platform to grow our footprint across continental Europe and establish Verisk as the pan-European leader in the personal injury and medical malpractice sectors. We are encouraged by the opportunity to create incremental value by helping deploy Actineo's technology and services across Europe and leveraging customer relationships. We also plan to introduce other claims solutions to these key European markets. And lastly, we are excited about the growth opportunity within international markets for our extreme event business. In June, we released an on-time update to our Japan typhoon and earthquake models. These updates reflect the latest science and learnings from recent catastrophes in Japan. Our extreme event business has very strong share in the key Japanese markets, with both primary insurers and reinsurers as customers, both of whom rely on our models for the quality of the science and the local knowledge that we incorporate through our partnerships with local insurers. Within the energy segment, we're seeing a strong uptake of our new and innovative solutions, including our energy transition and chemicals research, as well as our innovative LENS platform. We are realizing double-digit growth in ACV for contracts that include LENS as our customers recognize the value of this innovative solution. Importantly, LENS is being adopted by customers across industries including upstream oil and gas, financial services, and power and renewables. Moreover, with roughly 10% of our customer base on LENS today, we see a long runway for growth as we expand its use cases to include additional commodities and geographies over the next few years. You've heard me say before that at Verisk, we are moving ever closer to our customers and that we are on an exciting and successful journey to deliver best-in-class customer experiences. Our collaborations with management leaders, along with a customer-first mindset, help power this journey. Customer experience is not just the responsibility of our dedicated customer service teams, but it runs throughout the entire organization. In the third quarter, colleagues from every part of Verisk participated in Verisk's Discover CX Summit, It was a moment in time when we came together to listen, learn, and collaborate on how we can be better partners for our customers. Leaders across every area of the company assembled to focus on learning CX best practices, and we have emerged with a robust pipeline of ideas that I believe will lead to innovative solutions and outcomes that benefit our customers and Verisk. On the personnel front, I'm pleased to publicly welcome Sunita Holzer as our new Chief Human Resources Officer and Deanne Green as our new head of inclusion, diversity, and belonging. Sunita brings with her three decades of enterprise-level human resources leadership across several industries, including technology and insurance. Deanne brings a business-centric mindset to ID&B from her decade-long experience as a business leader in the payroll and HR solutions industry. At a time when attracting and retaining diverse talent is top of mind for every business, I am really excited about partnering with Sunita and PN to develop a comprehensive and differentiated human capital strategy for Verisk and foster our diverse, inclusive, and equitable culture. Finally, we are committed to enhancing shareholder value as part of that commitment to allocating capital to the highest growth and highest return opportunities. Accordingly, Verisk has been undertaking a bottoms-up review of our businesses and portfolio compositions. Our review is ongoing with a focus on the most value-creating path for sustainable growth and success and doing what's in the best interest of our shareholders and all of their stakeholders. As we've said previously, we believe that portfolio changes are probable in the next two to three quarters subject to market conditions. With that, I will turn the call over to Lee to cover our financial results. Thanks, Scott.