Verisk Analytics, Inc.

Good day everyone and welcome to the Verisk first quarter 2024 earnings results conference call. This call is being recorded. Currently, all participants are in the listen only mode. After today's prepared remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session where we will limit participants to one question so that we can allow everyone to ask a question. We will have further instructions for you at this time. For opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Verisk's Head of Investor Relations, Ms. Stacey Brodbark. Ms. Brodbark, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good day, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for a discussion of our first quarter 2024 financial results. On the call today are Lee Schabel, Verisk's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Elizabeth Mann, Chief Financial Officer. The earnings release referenced on this call, as well as our traditional quarterly earnings presentation and the associated 10Q, can be found in the investor section of our website, Verisk.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. As set forth in more detail in today's earnings release, I will remind everyone today's call may include forward-looking statements about VAERSC's future performance, including those related to our financial guidance. 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. A reconciliation of reported and historic non-GAAP financial measures discussed on this call is provided in our 8 and today's earnings presentation posted on the investor section of our website, VAERS.com. However, we are not able to provide a reconciliation of projected adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margins to the most directly comparable expected GAAP results because of the unreasonable effort and high unpredictability of estimating certain items that are excluded from projected non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margins, including, for example, tax consequences, acquisition-related cost, gain loss from dispositions, and other non-recurring expenses, the effect of which may be significant. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Lee Schaefel.

Thanks, Stacey. Good morning, and thank you for participating in this morning's call. 2024 is off to a solid start at Beresk, as we are building upon the strong performance we delivered in 2023. Elizabeth will provide the detailed financials, but I am pleased to share that we delivered 6.9% organic constant currency revenue growth, with strong underlying subscription growth of 7.8% that was broad-based across most of our businesses. Our focus on cost discipline and operating efficiency produced strong double-digit organic constant currency adjusted EBITDA growth and healthy margin expansion, translating into 26% adjusted EPS growth. This quarter's performance was in line with our 2024 guidance. We are driving predictable and consistent growth by harnessing the power of our more integrated insurance-focused company and executing against our strategy to partner with the insurance ecosystem to help all participants address their most pressing challenges. Our execution priorities are unchanged from those that we communicated to you a year ago at Investor Day. We are building on the progress that we made in 2023 as we continue to focus on three key things. One, delivering consistent and predictable revenue growth. Two, driving operating efficiency and profitability. And three, allocating our strong free cash flow with discipline and a focus on return on investment. I've spoken on this call many times about our efforts to engage with our clients on a more strategic level, To that end, in April, we hosted the Verisk Insurance Conference, or VIC, as it is affectionately known in the industry, which attracted a record number of attendees from across the global insurance ecosystem, including representatives from the carriers, reinsurers, regulators, and our channel partners. VIC is our flagship event where we strategically engage with all our ecosystem clients and partners through joint discussions and presentations as an integrated one Verisk. This year's event featured over 70 different educational sessions and panel discussions on some of the industry's top of mind issues, including fairness, generative AI, fraud, climate risk, rate adequacy, and social inflation. One of the best attended sessions was a panel discussion about Florida property insurance and featured representatives from key market players, including the carriers, regulators, legislators, and bear risk. The discussion focused on lessons learned from the insurance crisis in this important and high-risk market and what other states can learn from this experience. The event also featured a solutions gallery that showcased many of our offerings covering risk, natural perils, commercial property, home and auto, as well as several of our key technology ecosystem partners. The event has generated strong collaboration ideas with our clients and partners, as well as leads for our sales teams. It also builds upon the goals that we set last year to elevate the strategic dialogue with our clients and continue our path to serve as a data and technology partner to the global insurance ecosystem. During the Verisk Insurance Conference, our Extreme Events Division unveiled its latest innovations. Next Generation Models, or NGM, for insurers, brokers, and reinsurers. Verisk is the first firm to release its full suite of over 100 models across all perils and geographies to a next-generation financial modeling framework. And these models are all now accessible via our Touchstone platform. As the rising cost of catastrophes and an increase in losses from frequency-driven perils such as severe convective storms has challenged the industry. Next-generation models provide a better quantification of uncertainty and enhanced capabilities to assess insured losses across the insurance industry more accurately. With next-generation models, our clients can make better financial assessments of loss potential and more accurately represent the risk to their policyholders. their businesses, and their partners. NGM also offers new advantages to support complex insurance policy structures and deal with new terms and conditions that previously went unmodeled. Clients can effectively manage risk both at the portfolio and individual levels using the NGM suite of models. NGM represents the next step in our journey towards a fully SAS-native platform. underscoring our commitment to continuous investment in advanced data and technologies and capabilities on behalf of the industry. Next, I'd like to provide you with an update on our CoreLines Reimagine program. As previously mentioned, we are on a journey to digitize and enhance our essential suite of industry standard solutions to make our forms, rules, and lost cost content easier to access, use, and customize. and provide much-needed updates and insights. We've made good progress in modernizing our internal systems and processes for digital-first content creation, enabling us to deliver new client-facing modules. We recently introduced Filing Intelligence, which is accessible on our new platform. This tool simplifies our filings delivery process by consolidating all necessary documents, forms, rules, and loss costs into one accessible interface, eliminating the need for manual review and piecing together multiple documents. Filing Intelligence digitally connects all documents related to each filing, streamlining the process for users and ensuring seamless access to essential information. On the actuarial front, we recently added Actuarial Hub to the new platform. Within the Hub, clients can access new insights such as the ISO experience index, the loss costs activity dashboard, and a new series of actuarial perspective articles. These resources offer deeper insights into our filings and data, empowering our clients to make quicker, well-informed decisions. Looking ahead, we plan to launch additional customer-facing modules that will provide even more value to our clients by introducing new proprietary analytics, workflow tools, and insights to further streamline processes and enhance underwriting accuracy for our clients. Overall, we're excited about the progress of the Reimagine program. This initiative is already driving returns for Verisk as we are receiving positive client feedback and experiencing better price realization in contract renewals. Lastly, today is an important day, as May 1st is officially Verisk Generative AI Day. Our technology teams from across our global offices and business units are gathered at our Jersey City headquarters to collaborate and share best practices and learnings on their work with GenAI for both customer-facing initiatives and internal efficiencies. More specifically, all of our divisions have active Gen AI pilots running with many other areas in active development. And within our claims business, we have three solutions in production and available today for clients. Generative AI continues to be top of mind for our clients and is a topic of much discussion in my conversations with industry executives. One very promising application that I'm seeing is the use of generative AI to gather and predigest massive amounts of information to organize and distill it for the insurance professional, improving and focusing their expertise, not replacing it. This is a natural fit and opportunity for the work we do in curating and managing the needs of the global insurance industry to facilitate more effective and efficient workflows. As we have done with other forms of advanced technology, GenAI is an area where we can invest for the benefit of the industry at a lower cost of investment and ownership than any single client can do on their own. With that, I will turn it over to Elizabeth to cover the detailed financial review.