Alight, Inc.

Good morning and thank you for holding. My name is Daryl and I will be your conference operator today. Welcome to Alight's second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all parties are in a listen-only mode. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded and a replay of the call will be available on the investor relations section of the company's website. Now, I would like to turn it over to Jeremy Heaton, Executive Vice President of FP&A at Alight, to introduce today's speakers.

Thank you, and we appreciate everyone dialing in this morning. Earlier today, the company issued a press release with second quarter 2021 results. A copy of that release can also be found on the investor relations section of the company's website at investor.alife.com. Before we get started, please note that some of the company's discussion today will include forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. These factors are discussed in more detail in the company's filings with the SEC, including the company's registration statement on Form S-1, filed on August 2, 2021, as such factors may be updated from time to time in the company's periodic filings with the SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements. Also, throughout this conference call, the company will be presenting non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of the company's historical non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, to the extent available without unreasonable effort, appear in today's earnings press release, which is available on the company's website at investor.alight.com. On the call for management today are Stefan Scholl, CEO, and Katie Rooney, CFO. After their prepared remarks, we will open the call up for questions. I will now hand the call over to Stephan.

Thank you and good morning everyone. We're really pleased with our performance over the first half of the year. We drove accelerated growth, beat our first half guidance, and the momentum we are seeing gives us confidence to raise our full year guidance. It's just been over one year into our transformation, and we couldn't be more energized about our unique opportunity to support the decade of the employee. Companies are waking up to the fact that their own employees sit at the heart of driving their transformation, and they need to accelerate their digital strategies to address the two most important aspects an employee cares about, improving their financial well-being and staying healthy. This is why we are so excited about the transformation underway at Alight. We are powering human capital by bringing to market the first integrated employee benefit engagement platform, Alight Work Life, which drives unprecedented levels of engagement and improved productivity through a personalized experience. And this is resonating with our clients. Back in January, our original forecast was for a moderate revenue decline in the first half of the year. But as we have shifted towards higher value cloud-based solutions on the Alight Work Life platform, we are happy to report we are ahead of that guidance, delivering positive growth and improved bookings. Given these results and the momentum we are seeing, we are raising our full-year guidance on revenue and adjusted EBITDA and have increased visibility to our out-year projections as well. Katie will review our financial performance in more detail in a moment, but let me give you a few highlights for the second quarter. On a year-over-year basis for the second quarter, total revenue increased 3.9%. More importantly, this was driven by a 5.4% increase in our employer solutions segment, where the majority of our tech-enabled business process as a service offerings, what we call BPAS, sit. Gross margin in our employer solutions segment improved 400 basis points to 33.6%, and adjusted EBITDA increased 6.6% to 145 million. Finally, a key indicator of our transformation progress is our BPAS bookings. I am happy to report that these were significantly ahead of our plan, up 268% to 280 million in the first half of this year. When I joined Alight in April of last year, it was for one reason, to change the relationship and experience that companies and their employees have around benefits. Today, companies are spending billions of dollars on benefits and often have hundreds of providers and applications, but none of these are stitched together to drive outcomes or insights into the health and financial security of their people. Businesses are thriving. but the challenges facing employers and employees today have never been greater. Increasing levels of stress, depression, and anxiety are leading to a surge in mental health issues. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing, and more of the burden is shifting to employees. The cost of living is going up, and many employees don't know if they'll be able to retire on time. And a rise in part-time workers, gig workers, regulation and global competition for talent is changing the relationship between employer and employee. Employees are facing a real crisis and so are employers, and the pandemic has only made things more difficult. As a result, companies everywhere are waking up to the realization that their employees need help, which is key to their success going forward. For the last 20 years, companies have been evaluated by the value they create for their shareholders, and customers. At Alight, we believe over the next decade, success will be measured by how companies treat their people. Our solutions are changing the way organizations think about their relationship with their people and the way their people interact with their benefits. Unlike the technology world and the shift from perpetual to cloud-based systems, the human capital industry has remained highly fragmented. Companies are implementing more and more service providers and seeing diminishing return on their investments. We are disrupting this approach with a best in class enterprise solutions that brings together health, wealth, and global payroll into a single integrated platform that drives better outcomes and higher engagement for employers and their people. To achieve this, we have transformed our business and the way we bring new technology and solutions to the market. We are deploying our solutions on a common reference architecture with common data models and common integration points to implement new solutions across our client base in a fraction of the time it took before. The most visible example of how we're bringing our new strategy to life is the Alight Work Life platform, which is the foundation of our next generation product. Alight Work Life combines a beautiful consumer-grade experience with advanced data analytics and AI to deliver personalized recommendations in a user-friendly format. It has a built-in integration layer that allows for seamless integration with our health, wealth, and payroll clouds and other third-party applications. Historically, what would have taken us years to complete will be rolling out in a matter of months as our new Alight WorkLife mobile app goes live across 400 of our largest clients. The app will allow employees to use their mobile device during the upcoming annual benefit enrollment period this year. The speed of this deployment and putting real innovative technology in the hands of approximately half of our entire membership base would never have been possible without the investments we made in cloud-based technology. In conjunction with a light work life, we are rolling out our next generation health, wealth, and payroll clouds. All of these clouds are designed to integrate seamlessly into our Light Work Life platform, and as we sell and then implement new clients over the next few years, we will reduce implementation times. With the framework of the Light Work Life platform, mobile app, and new clouds in place, we can bring our value engineering teams into our client discussions and begin to show them how we can engage their people, drive better outcomes, and improve their ROI performance. This gives us the opportunity to meet the current needs of our clients while providing a clear path to migrate them up the value chain by providing additional solutions when they are ready. Starting with our core benefits administration solutions all the way up to our premier integrated platform with guaranteed outcomes and ROI, we offer clients a natural progression based on their strategic priorities and particular needs. Most of our clients today are at the foundation level, and moving them to Premier presents a 2x revenue uplift potential. Organizations around the world believe in a lights approach and the value we bring to them and their employees. In the second quarter, we added Navistar and Sartorius to our new client roster and expanded our solutions with ABN Amro, Ledesma, and GE Appliances. So let me walk you through a great example of how we are executing on our work-life BPAS transformation. Navistar is a one a light new partner with a total employee and retiree population of approximately 40,000 people. Navistar has a vision for an end-to-end partner that puts their employees at the center of their own transformation. Through our value engineering team, we quickly demonstrated how Alight is uniquely positioned to be Navistar's preeminent employee transformation partner from hire to retire. Our integrated solution will allow us to optimize Navistar's technology, positioning them to win in a competitive marketplace. Looking ahead, our progress on the product and technology front will allow us to continue expanding our breadth of solutions and core competencies. The fact that we serve over half of the Fortune 500 and have 30 million members today with that number going to an estimated 36 million members once the Federal Thrift Program goes live next year gives us a huge strategic advantage. That's the moat around our business. To drive outcomes, you must first drive engagement, but to drive engagement, You need data, you need content, analytics, and AI. We have completed seven acquisitions over the past four years and will continue to build, buy, and partner to expand on this significant competitive advantage. Before I wrap up and turn the call over to Katie, I would like to take a moment to thank our team of elite colleagues around the world who are working tirelessly to deliver for our clients and their people with excellence each and every day. This past year has been extraordinary in so many ways and our people have shown exceptional resilience, flexibility, commitment, and dedication. And I am so proud to be part of an organization with such an incredible group of talented people. I'm excited about what's ahead for Light as we enter our next chapter as a public company. Now, let me turn the call over to Katie to provide a deeper dive into our progress and our trajectory and review of our second quarter results.