Dun & Bradstreet Holdings, Inc.

Good morning. My name is Sylvia and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Dunn and Bradstreet's third quarter 2020 conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Deb McCann, Treasurer and Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. You may proceed.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Dun & Bradstreet's Financial Results Conference Call for the third quarter ending September 30th, 2020. Today, we have Dun & Bradstreet's CEO, Anthony Jabbour, and CFO, Brian Hipscher. Before we begin, allow me to provide a disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. This call, including the Q&A portion of the call, may include forward-looking statements related to the expected future results for our company and are therefore forward-looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to a number of risks and uncertainties. The risks and uncertainties that forward-looking statements are subject to are described in our earnings release and other SEC filings. Today's remarks will also include references to non-GAAP financial measures. Additional information, including reconciliation between non-GAAP financial information to the GAAP financial information, is provided in the press release and supplemental slide presentation. This conference call will be available for replay via webcast through Dun & Bradstreet's Investor Relations website at investor.dnb.com. Anthony will begin with highlights from the third quarter, including the progress we are making with our growth strategies and transformation. Brian will then take you through a review of the financials before we proceed to Q&A. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Anthony.

Thank you, Deb. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for a third quarter earnings call. This was another solid quarter that finished in line with our expectations and putting us on track to meet the full year 2020 outlook provided on the second quarter call. Our company's financial results demonstrate that despite experiencing impacts of COVID-19 and other near-term headwinds, the core fundamentals of our business are strong. Our continued focus on efficiency is reflected in our improved EBITDA margins and the annualized run rate cost savings to date of $225 million, which is up $5 million from the second quarter. We continue to progress towards our revised target of $250 million and will continue to update you on future calls. Overall, our team continues to make great strides in executing on our strategy and we are building significant momentum. During today's call, I'll update you on some notable progress against both our growth strategy and ongoing transformation and then turn the call over to Brian for a financial review. After that, we'll take your questions. So let's start with some of the announcements and successes that occurred during the third quarter. First is the announcement we made last month that we entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BizNode, a long-time Dun & Bradstreet Worldwide Network member. The acquisition represents a key investment in support of our international growth strategy. During our October 8 call, we described how BizNode adds several strategic and financial benefits, including a significantly expanded footprint across the DOC region, which is Germany, Australia, and Switzerland, Scandinavia, and Central Europe, allowing us to better serve our clients operating in the region and globally. We are busy with the integration planning in anticipation of the transaction close, which is still expected in January 2021, and plan to share incremental financial and strategic details on BizNode during the next quarter's earnings call. Now turning to our sales and operations execution in the third quarter, our year-to-date retention rate remained strong at 96% and 32% of our business was sold in multi-year deals. One deal that exemplifies both of those metrics is the expansion of our strategic relationship with Microsoft to a multi-year contract for enterprise data management with use cases spanning both finance and risk and sales and marketing. This is an important example of our ability to not just retain, but expand the scope and duration of strategic relationships, which is a key element of our growth strategy. Other third quarter renewals include a multi-year enterprise license deal with HSBC, supporting their data and analytics strategy. A Global 500 office supply retailer who turned to Dun & Bradstreet to help them manage fraud risk. and an expanded multi-year relationship with a multibillion-dollar private shipping supplies company. We also renewed business with insurance solutions provider, CNA, and financial technology solutions provider, WEX, who both use our finance and risk solutions. Plus, we expanded our relationship with Greensill, a British market-leading provider of working capital finance. These renewals are examples of where we're able to build off of an existing set of use cases within the enterprise and cross-sell and up-sell our solutions to broaden our penetration into different parts of their global organizations. Turning to new business. Among others, we recently signed a Fortune 500 manufacturer of coatings and paint who turned to our United Kingdom and United States teams for a cross-border solution that provides an end-to-end view of their customers' and suppliers' master data using our latest API Direct Plus offering. We also won back an industry-leading Fortune 1000 global specialty chemicals and performance materials company who turned back to Dun & Bradstreet from a lower-cost alternative to consolidate its credit processes. As you can see, client engagement is strong, and we continue to see high demand across our existing portfolio of solutions, giving us confidence that we have listened to our clients and that our ongoing transformation of technology, data coverage, and analytics is delivering what they need. In addition to our existing portfolio of solutions, we recently announced a new sales and marketing solution, D&B Connect, a highly configurable, plug-and-play, self-service data management platform. D&B Connect helps our clients assess, clean, and enrich their customer data against category-leading data in the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud. With D&B Connect, time spent on data management is reduced from days to hours so that our clients can focus on what's most important, growing their business. This is particularly important for small and medium-sized businesses who do not have the resources of a large enterprise. and who need to quickly make sense of the data they have and gain additional insights to safeguard and grow their business. Next, I'll update you on our technology transformation, starting with our progress on Project Ascent. As we described on the second quarter call, Project Ascent will modernize our data supply chain, allowing us to rapidly expand our traditional and non-traditional data sets, simplify connectivity to the end-user solutions, and enhance our overall throughput. In the quarter, we began ingesting global shipping manifest data, which is a new non-traditional data set that is complex to curate and in high demand for use in supply chain fraud and risk analytics. We're already using the data to fulfill a finance and risk use case for our customer engagement and are pleased with the initial performance. In the fourth quarter and beyond, we plan to enhance the operational user interface, reporting capabilities, and most importantly, add new non-traditional data sets and convert our existing data sets over to the new supply chain process. Our ongoing enhancements to our API technology allow us to expand our latest D&B Direct Plus offerings globally, including the United Kingdom and Ireland, China, and to our worldwide network, which has been met with strong market reception. Consolidating and progressing our API solutions enables simplification, scalability, and the ability to deliver integrated data solutions with speed at lower costs. As we connect deeper and deeper within the core workflows of clients through our technology enhancements, it is clear to us that organizations are seeking more effective ways to grow revenue, improve their margins, and mitigate their risks. Our transformation also includes the expansion and enhancement of our data, which has led to significant growth of our data cloud, which today includes over 400 million public and private businesses worldwide. This is 85 million, or 27% more coverage of our businesses than we had when we took the company private in February of 2019. We frequently hear from customers who want more and better data coverage, especially in international markets, including Asia and Europe, In February 2019, we have increased our coverage of businesses in the Asia-Pacific region by 57% fueled by our proprietary AI engine that addresses local language translation. We also renewed focus on the expanding coverage of small and emerging businesses in the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland, increasing the pace of small business data accumulation, growing from 56,000 per month in the first half of the year to 174,000 per month in the third quarter. We are listening to our clients and delivering, which is translating into sales and ultimately revenue and profit. Another key element of our transformation is a strengthening of our analytics and insights. Last quarter, we told you about D&B Analytics Studio, our cloud-based analytics platform, which allows clients to combine their data with third-party data and the scale, diversity, and accuracy of our constantly expanding data cloud to achieve broader insights that could not be achieved on their own. It puts the power of analytics directly in the hands of the user and gives them a glimpse of the power of our data and could translate to future cross-selling into different solutions. For example, one of the largest global management consulting firms piloted our analytics studio using Dun & Bradstreet data and insights combined with their data and insights to build derivative B2B analytics for improved customer engagement. Being able to rapidly ingest third-party, internal, and customer data is a key advantage for consulting engagements, and we believe that the analytics studio gives our clients differentiated capabilities. The studio is gaining fast momentum, and we have 13 proof-of-concepts underway with clients. We sign five deals in the quarter, including a global financial software company who is studying its total addressable market as well as to analyze its customers' product purchasing behaviors and and with a government client who turned to D&B Analytics Studio to research and understand the impact of federal funding on small and medium businesses. With continued strong interest from clients and a growing pipeline, we will continue to evolve the studio with alternative data sources, services, and commercial use solution sets to meet more use cases. Overall, we are pleased with the extraordinary effort of our team and are excited about the continued progress we are making in our transformation. We look forward to closing out the year strong. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Brian to discuss our financial results for the quarter.