Alight, Inc.

Good morning, and thank you for holding. My name is Doug, and I'll be your conference operator today. Welcome to Alight's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all parties are in 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. And now, I would like to turn it over to Greg Fuggett, head of investor relations 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 third quarter 2021 results. A copy of that release can also be found on the investor relations section of the company's website at investor.alight.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 prospectus filed with the SEC on August 24, 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 historic 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 from management today are Stephan Scholl, CEO, and Katie Rooney, CFO. After their prepared remarks, we will open up the call for questions. I will now hand the call over to Stephan.

Good morning. Thank you so much for joining us today. Before we get started, I want to say thank you to the elite colleagues around the world. We have been on an incredible journey over the past two years, and our colleagues have been at the center of helping us to transform the way companies think about their employee experience. Through our Light Work Life platform, we are bringing together a holistic view across health, wealth, well-being, and payroll to more than 30 million people at the world's most influential companies. We believe this unique capability set is generating positive momentum in the marketplace as companies fully embrace the differentiated experience and return on investment we can provide. Given the strong momentum in our business, we are raising our full-year guidance for the second time this year to 5% to 6% revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA to $615 million to $625 million. Before we dive further into our results, I want to start with a number that shows how critical Alight's solutions are for today and tomorrow, 65%. That's the percentage of American adults who say they are planning to switch jobs in the next year. Think about that, 65%. Then there are millennial and Gen Z workers who make up more than half of the workforce and are even more likely to be searching for another job. The pandemic has accelerated a tightening of the labor market. It's the great resignation. I know you've all been reading about it and probably hearing about it as a risk on every earnings call you've been on. On top of this, companies are grappling with the return to the workplace strategies, vaccine requirements, and keeping their workplace healthy and prepared. While never simple, the workplace, HR, benefits, regulation, all of it has gotten even more complex. And yet, companies are spending billions on pay and benefits. But the mass exodus of workers continue. This should lead us to ask, are we spending our money on the right things that matter the most to workers, and will that have the biggest impact? In our view, the simple answer is no. Employees are asking for more. When they leave one company for another, employees are saying that they want a different experience and they have higher expectations of their employers. They are voting with their careers. The pressure employees are putting on companies is changing the conversation, and it's elevating the conversation. Things like benefits, employee engagement, and well-being are no longer HR conversations. These are C-suite and board-level discussions because putting employees at the center has become a business imperative. We believe these very real challenges companies are facing have created tremendous tailwinds for Alight. We moved early to double down on our investments in technology and commercial, given our strong and stable free cash flow profile and are seeing the benefits. In the third quarter, we delivered 20% BPAS revenue growth with double-digit BPAS TCV bookings growth. We are now ahead of our full-year expectations for BPAS TCV bookings. We are also driving margin expansion on both gross margin and EBITDA margin as we leverage technology to move faster with our clients. And as I mentioned earlier, we are raising our full-year revenue guidance to 5% to 6% growth, and adjusted EBITDA to 615 to 625 million. So why can a light turn these headwinds into tailwinds? Because the answer to these challenges lies with the employees. How companies are treating their workers, what they're doing to improve employee experience, and their overall well-being has never been more important. Alight's Business Process as a Service Solutions, BPAS, leverages the Alight Work-Life Engagement Platform to provide tools and technologies employees can use to maximize the value of their benefits and improve outcomes driving increased productivity and helping employers develop high-performing cultures. For some perspective, I recently spoke to the CHRO at a major manufacturing company we work with. Right now, they need to hire thousands of engineers, and they need and want employees who are going to stick with them for the long term and not switch jobs after a year or two. At the same time, their job candidates are asking for more. They don't just want foosball tables and free lunches. They want to know how their employer is going to care for them and their families throughout their career and life. This creates an incredible opportunity for this employer to align their benefits and employee experience strategy to create a differentiated employer value proposition that will attract and retain workers for the long term. We believe Alight is the only company that can work with this client and others like it. to support their employees and their families from hire to retire across health, wealth, well-being, and payroll in one seamless experience. Of course, this company could choose 22 different programs from numerous providers, but instead, Alight can provide a best-in-class approach that brings everything together in one common engagement platform to create a differentiated employee experience, drive engagement with HR and benefits programs, and most importantly, improve outcomes. Let me bring this down even a level further. Consider an employee who is diagnosed with breast cancer. For most people, this is an overwhelming and confusing experience. Trying to determine which healthcare providers to entrust your care to, navigating treatment options, second opinions, and not to mention the incoming bills. Now, what if that same employee had an entirely different experience that was personalized, to their unique situation. This is where Alight changes the game. Using the Alight Work Life platform, this same employee gets bespoke information and messages related to her care, prompting her to an Alight Nurse Pro who can assist her in finding the right provider, suggest support groups to help her cope with the mental and emotional impact of her diagnosis, direct her to a second opinion, and essentially guide her through her entire journey. And the great news, of course, is that our existing clients and prospects understand the need to move the needle in a more meaningful way. Rather than sticking with the best-in-breed approach that has been pervasive in the human capital management space forever, companies see the headwinds they are facing and are choosing a different path. They are choosing our best-in-class approach that will help them transform the way they think about benefits, pay, HR, and their entire employee experience. Let me help you think about the shift Alight is driving in the HCM space in a different way. Decades ago, companies approached their back office technology in this siloed approach, where they picked the best provider in X and the best provider in Y. But then you had innovators that started pulling all of these services into one seamless, integrated platform. That is what Alight is doing in the HCM space. we are getting rid of the administrivia of multiple providers. One platform that provides payroll, one for health, and so on, and replacing them with a single, beautiful consumer-grade experience that provides data, analytics, and actionable AI for both employers and their people. Companies like Camping World and PwC, which we signed in the third quarter, know the outcomes a Lightspeed Pass solutions can drive. These companies are looking for a strategic partner to help them transform their employee experience across health and retirement benefits and well-being and provide the business with the data they need to make better HR and business decisions. Pairing alights AI-driven engagement and personalization to create an intuitive employee experience with our analytics capabilities to drive frequent, high-quality interactions that help employees make the best use of their benefits, provide better care to lower costs, and result in improved well-being. And our data analytics allow companies to benchmark existing benefits and total employee experience against their peers, use AI to prioritize the biggest opportunities, and offer recommended actions. Together, this powerful combination can help companies move the needle on their talent strategy, employee well-being, and healthcare spend. We're also converting existing clients from siloed solutions to our holistic VPAT solutions as they look to rethink their strategic approach. In the quarter, we expanded our relationships with existing clients, including Aptar, Arconic, CNA, Genworth, Shell, and Randstad. An integral part of our success with our clients is our product strategy. We are continuing to innovate and bring new products to market at a much more rapid pace than ever before. For example, in just eight weeks, we went from testing the concept to finished market-ready product to launch Alight Verify. Alight Verify helps companies manage vaccine requirements and leverage data in driving business continuity decisions. In just a few weeks, we already have more than 20 companies signed up for Alight Verify, and with the new vaccine requirements in the U.S. and elsewhere, we expect to continue to see positive adoption of this product. As we shared last quarter, we were on track to have 400-plus clients live on the Alight Work Life mobile app in time for annual enrollment, and we're seeing positive adoption by clients and their employees. Alight Work Life is already one of the top 100 business apps in the Apple App Store, For clients that have deployed and communicated about the app to their employees, we're seeing a decrease in call volumes of 33%. Users are coming back again and again, with the average user logging into the app 14 times a month. With the Alight Work Life platform in place, we are moving to semi-annual releases focused on three core areas. Continuing to create a more engaging and positive employee experience, driving overall well-being, and enabling employers. For example, in our next release, we anticipate further enhancing the employee experience through expanded clinical second opinion functionality, which we have been able to accelerate in part as a result of our recent acquisition of Consumer Medical. We are also working on some exciting new analytics capabilities to measure the improvements in benefits and program utilization that the Alight Work Life platform drives for our clients. As we continue to innovate and bring new products to market, we are also looking for opportunities to bring more of our solutions directly to consumers. One way we're doing this is through Choice Health, which we acquired last year. Choice Health allows us to tap directly into the post-65 individual Medicare market. Combined with our full solution set and the recent acquisition of the Aon Retiree Health Exchange, we will be able to serve employees through the entire lifecycle. No other company has the ability to provide the full end-to-end solution model through nearly the entire expanse of people's lifetime. This is a light's true differentiator. As I said in the start of the call, we're moving quickly and investing behind this market opportunity to support our clients. So now let me turn the call over to Katie, who will walk you through the financial momentum in more detail.