Dun & Bradstreet Holdings, Inc.

Today's call is being recorded and your participation implies consent to such recording. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and intercession will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. With that, I would 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 first quarter ending March 31st, 2021. On the call today, we have Dun & Bradstreet 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 reply via webcast through Dun & Bradstreet's Investor Relations website at investor.dmb.com. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Anthony.

Thank you, Deb. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter earnings call. We're off to a strong start as we continue with our transformation and the execution of our near-term and long-term objectives. We finished the first quarter with solid financial results and made significant progress with the integration of BizNote. Overall, we were pleased with the start of the year as adjusted revenues for the quarter increased 29% and adjusted EBITDA increased 37%. Organic constant currency revenues increased 1.3% as strength in international was partially offset by the final quarter of COVID-19 headwinds and data.com in North America. Total company revenue retention was 96.3% and we now have approximately 48% of our business under multi-year contracts. The enhancements we have made to data quality and our underlying technology are resulting in positive feedback and deeper customer relationships, allowing us to have more productive conversations about cross-sell and price opportunities of both existing and new products. As we reach the two-year anniversary of our cost savings program, we finished the quarter with $246 million of annualized run rate cost savings. Despite COVID-19 delaying some of our planned cost savings initiatives, we exceeded our original target by 23%, which ultimately contributed to the expansion of adjusted EBITDA margins by over 800 basis points from when we took the company private. While this marks the completion of our formal cost savings program, we will continue to drive ongoing improvement in terms of operational efficiency through optimizing our geographic footprint, modernizing back office technologies, and further integrating our solutions to reduce cost and complexity. It's important to note that the cost savings figure we just discussed is a net number, meaning that while we took a significant amount of cost out of the business, we also continue to invest a significant amount in the business, primarily by enhancing and expanding our data and technology assets. While much of the heavy lifting was completed in 2019 and 2020, Our transformation is ongoing as we look to leverage the foundational enhancements we've made during that time to more rapidly and effectively deploy new and innovative solutions. Our key priorities for 2021 are to continue to grow our share of wallet with our strategic customers, approach and monetize the SMB space in new and innovative ways, launch new products domestically, localize new and existing products globally, and lastly, to integrate the BizNote acquisition. Throughout the first quarter, our team has made great strides towards executing on these priorities, and I'll now share some highlights from the quarter before I turn the call over to Brian for a more in-depth financial review. After that, we'll finish up by taking your questions. We're pleased with the ongoing success we're having with our strategic clients as they renew near 100% while continuing to expand their relationships with us. In North America, we signed and expanded multi-year renewal with the largest online retailer to support their third-party risk management strategy. As the client continues to expand and enhance their controls around their global supply chain, we are pleased to continue to support their growing needs. We also signed a multi-year renewal with one of the largest multinational retail corporations, expanding their use of data across their business. The client leverages our third-party risk and compliance solutions to mitigate risks throughout their extremely large and complex supply chain, and we are glad to extend and broaden this relationship with such a key customer. We renewed business with another strategic client, a global property and casualty insurance firm, who needed access to timely, high-quality data on their current client base to ensure proper underwriting methodologies, ongoing monitoring, as well as access to data for new customer acquisitions. The result was a multi-year deal for both core risk and marketing solutions. In our international business, there's been significant focus on re-architecting our go-to-market efforts to better capture the large global opportunity. In the first quarter, we rolled out a global 500 account program simultaneously with the close of BizNode, prioritizing the most strategic accounts. I'm pleased with the early traction we are seeing from these efforts, demonstrated by several wins in the first quarter. Our UK team is working with Generali, a Global 500 global insurance and asset management provider with a leading position in Europe and a growing presence in Asia and Latin America, to help them identify ways to improve consistency of screening across their global corporate and commercial businesses, as well as reduce risk. The result is a multi-year deal for the integration of D&B data by DirectPlus and our third-party risk solution into their CRM and underwriting system, to provide a flexible end-to-end solution that was fully compliant with their global requirements. Another Global 500 company, Linde Region Europe North, member of Linde PLC, is a leading global industrial gas and engineering company and wanted to improve their credit checks and risk monitoring of B2B customers in a more data-driven way. We were pleased they chose D&B Finance and Risk Solutions, bringing us both new business and a multi-year deal. We are pleased with the momentum we have with our growing roster of clients and expanding existing client relationships worldwide, particularly with our strategic clients. One segment that we continue to see immense opportunity in is the small and mid-sized business market. And as I mentioned in my opening remarks, this is a key priority for us in 2021. I'm excited to update you on the progress we have been making to enhance our SMB strategy through a mix of digital marketing and delivery efforts, as well as through innovative partnerships. After a difficult 2020, the SMB market is beginning to reemerge. As existing small businesses begin to recover from the effects of COVID-19, we're also seeing a significant rise in the formation of new businesses, especially gig economy startups, that would benefit significantly from our self-service finance, risk, and sales and marketing solutions, along with software and services offered from our partners. This was the driving purpose behind the first quarter launch of our improved digital platform. This includes personalized small business resources and offerings for each D&B.com user, driven by the utilization of our visitor intelligence solution, as well as the D&B marketplace, which makes it easier for small businesses to identify and purchase D&B solutions and those from our partners. The marketplace has two primary sections, a product section called D&B Product Marketplace and a data set section called the D&B Data Marketplace. The D&B Product Marketplace includes a curated set of our solutions along with those of our partners that creates a combined set that allows a small business to operate in a much more sophisticated manner much earlier in their stage of maturation. But we will continue to add new D&B solutions and partners in the coming quarters. We are mindful of keeping the number of partners limited, as this is not a broad-based marketplace, but one that has preferred solutions that we believe will drive the best outcomes for our S&B customers. A few examples of solutions that are available in the marketplace today are Duns Manager integrated with Plaid, Credit Signal, Credit Monitor, EmailIQ, Analytics Studio, Hoover's Essentials, and D&B Connect. We also have partner offerings such as KPMG Spark, SAP Ariba with the D&B Direct Plus integration, and Amazon Business Access with special rates. Within the D&B data marketplace, users can buy a broad range of data sets from alternative data providers to help them identify opportunities and mitigate risks. These data sets are already curated and matched to a DUNS number to make it easy to append to a client's existing BNB data. Today, we have 22 partner data sets, including healthcare reference data from IQVIA and commercial fleet data from IHS Market, and we're adding more partners monthly. User feedback has been overwhelmingly positive around the power of the DUNS number and how it's the key to unlock the power of the data. and is something that meaningfully differentiates us competitively. The D&B Customer Portal, also launched in the first quarter, allows existing clients to log in and access their already purchased products through a single sign-on, unified digital experience. While inside the portal, we offer personalized offerings of our and our partner's solutions, which has already resulted in a 60% increase in cross-sales during the first quarter. And while we continue to grow our solution set within D&B, we're also expanding our reach outside of our core ecosystem. A great example of this is what we're doing with Bank of America. Bank of America became the first major financial institution to offer millions of small businesses the ability to get ongoing insights into their D&B business credit score directly through their Business Advantage 360 banking platform. This is exciting for D&B because it is driving net new paid subscriptions and increased engagement with our small business digital platform. We also partnered with Plaid to bring their network to our solutions. By integrating Plaid capabilities to our digital platform, small businesses can securely permission access to their bank account information for authentication purposes. This gives them instant access to update their D&B business credit profile. In addition, small businesses can share their bank transaction details enabling us to explore new ways to establish business credit outside of traditional payment data, which many smaller businesses may lack. We're really excited as this is the first of its kind in the business credit space. In the first quarter, subscriptions to our freemium products were up 43% from the prior year. The investments into our small business and digital go-to-market strategy, products, and groundbreaking partnerships are clear evidence of our determination to make this segment a priority. and deliver more innovative solutions to our small business clients. The third critical priority is launching new products and use cases. Yesterday, we announced B&B RevUp, a solution that simplifies and automates marketing and sales workflows by providing data, targeting, activation, and measurement in a single platform that easily integrates to a customer's existing MarTech or sales tech stacks through the use of open architecture integrations. Clients can purchase the full breadth of D&B RevUp capabilities or even start with a specific channel and build up from there. We have also collaborated with Bombora and Follows to further extend the insights and capabilities of the D&B RevUp offerings by adding best-in-class intent and personalized omni-channel experiences to help increase demand generation. In addition, we have entered into an Accelerate partnership with a leading data-driven MarTech company in support of this platform. This is a game changer in how we approach account-based marketing through the integration of our solution sets along with complementary partnerships. We look forward to providing more updates on RevUp as it progresses, and it's just a great example of how we're thinking more holistically about serving clients through an integrated platform. This is the vision behind RevUp, as well as the late 2020 launches of D&B Finance Analytics, an integrated and powerful credit-to-cash platform, and D&B Risk Analytics, an integrated third-party risk and compliance platform, both within our finance and risk business unit. In our international segment, we continue to focus on rolling out localized solutions across our growing territories. After 20 new product launches in 2020, we continued the momentum in the first quarter, introducing the finance analytics platform in the UK, DataVision in Greater China and India, and data blocks in three additional worldwide network partner markets. We're also launching multiple new products in D&B Europe, which is the newly created region that describes our recently acquired BizNode markets. Leveraging our solutions in these markets is a key pillar of our playbook, which we're starting to execute. Regarding the BizNode transformation, we're leveraging the same playbook that led to the successful transformation of D&B these past two years, and we're off to a great start coming together as one D&B. In Q1, we completed the first phase of synergy actions immediately following close, principally senior leadership rationalization. Overall, we have actioned approximately 12 million of annualized run rate savings and continue to see significant efficiencies through the combination of our two companies. We also established a new European operating model and expect this to be fully implemented during Q2 delivering a more streamlined and integrated business with corresponding operational synergies consistent with our business model. We developed a robust product plan for D&B Europe to accelerate sales of our modern global product solutions and support the sundown of legacy BizNode products. Several product launches are slated for the second half, including finance analytics, risk analytics, D&B Hoovers, and data blocks, to name a few. The team is also accelerating rollouts of several solutions BizNote had recently launched prior to the acquisition. Overall, we're really excited about the progress we are making and look to capitalize on the strong momentum we have built in our first quarter together. Overall, I'm pleased with our start to 2021 and I'm excited about the progress we continue to make in terms of increasing share of wallet with strategic clients, better serving SMBs in innovative ways, developing new products domestically and localizing them internationally, and integrating BizNote. These, along with many other projects the teams are working on, are laying the foundation for accelerated, sustainable growth throughout the remainder of 2021 and into 2022. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Brian to discuss our financial results and outlook for the remainder of 2021.