Dun & Bradstreet Holdings, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Dunn and Bradstreet's third quarter 2021 conference call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded and your participation implies consent to such a recording. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, press star then 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 third quarter ending September 30th, 2021. On the call, 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 replay 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 third quarter earnings call. We are pleased to report strong third quarter results as revenues for the quarter grew 22% and EBITDA grew 12%. Progress in our core business continues to accelerate as reflected in our organic revenue growth of 4.1% or 3.7% excluding the impact of foreign currency. Increasing growth in North America complemented another solid quarter in our international segment due to strong retention rates, increased pricing, a growing share of wallet with our strategic clients, the addition of new logos, and the lessening of previously communicated headwinds. On top of that, the business acquisition is progressing very well with the integration going better than we originally expected. Both finance and risk and sales and marketing had solid growth in the quarter. Two bright spots in particular were our risk and our marketing solutions. Internal investments in our risk solutions over the past few years have strengthened our position and demand range high of supply chain and third-party risk management continue to be a point of focus for businesses throughout the world. On the marketing side, our online audience solutions business continues to see robust growth rates and we see a significant untapped opportunity in the online business-to-business marketing landscape. This led us to strengthen our position through the signing of definitive agreements to acquire IOTA and NetWise. I'll go into more detail as I expand upon our latest innovations, but these two complementary companies will extend their position further in the B2B online marketing value chain and build upon a business that has grown over 40% year-to-date. Overall, we continue to focus on expanding and enhancing our offering set through internal investments, strategic partnerships, and focused acquisitions. We are pleased with our increasing organic growth rate throughout this year and with the momentum we have entering the fourth quarter. We expect to drive progressively stronger growth in the fourth quarter versus prior year to establish a solid foundation for further acceleration into 2022. As we close out the year, our key priorities remain consistent. Innovate solutions and localize them globally. Increase our share of wallet with strategic clients. Approach and monetize the SMB space in new and innovative ways. And finally, integrate and accelerate the BizNode acquisition. The team has made great progress towards executing on these priorities, and I'll now share some highlights of those accomplishments before I turn the call over to Brian for more in-depth financial review. After that, we'll finish up by taking your questions. New product innovation continues to be our primary objective. I'm pleased with the focus and urgency with which our North American and international teams are operating. As we look to enhance existing solutions and add new capabilities, we've been able to leverage our incredible client base. We've established finance and risk and sales and marketing advisory boards to help guide our roadmap through direct input from senior decision makers or industry experts from leading enterprises throughout the world. For example, with our recent launch of ESG intelligence, we're able to focus our solution on individualized client scores as opposed to relative scores or indexes based on industry code or some other shared attribute. Listening to the needs of our clients encourage the more supply chain-focused use case that is very complementary to the risk and compliance scoring and workflow we have in the market today. We believe that an end-to-end workflow that incorporates financial, regulatory, compliance, and ESG underwriting through data and analytics is a powerful tool for the industry and are pleased with the feedback we've received from clients and prospects today. On the sales and marketing side, we continue to focus on building upon our strengths in master data management and online marketing, while simultaneously bolstering our sales solutions through expanded data, third-party integrations, and a more seamless UI UX experience. While the master data management and online marketing solutions make up the vast majority of our revenues in the segment, we believe there's a lot of potential for us to evolve our sales solution from a deep research tool to one that is more agile and able to deliver on our global contacts in a more simplistic and effective manner. We continue to streamline our offerings, expand upon our growing contact data coverage, and to integrate third-party data with our solutions to make campaign activation more efficient and effective. With limited downside and significant upside, I'm excited about where we are today and where our team is driving us as we make significant progress in capturing a piece of this growing market. Turning to our marketing solutions, this morning we announced the signing of IOTA, a fast-growing provider of audience targeting capability that enables the activation of online audience segments. IOTA's products extend our audience solutions business from being dependent on others for execution to being online and participating more fully in the B2B martech and adtech supply chain. We also entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Netwise, an industry-leading B2B online identity graph. Combined with the DUNS number in our existing offline data, this enriched offering will allow marketers to target B2B clients and prospects across every major online channel, individual device, or a marketing platform. Just as our clients rely on the DUNS number for position in their offline data, we're looking to provide the same level of confidence and consistency online as well. For marketers, this means they'll have assurance that their online audiences are targeting the right people and that they can reach them across every online channel. We are solving for the current audience shrinkage these marketers face today with the low match rates that plague this industry. This will enable clients to build upon the investments they've made into data management mastered on the DUNS number and more readily activate that data in social, search, and display advertising campaigns. Said simply, Dun & Bradstreet has the offline B2B targeting data, NetWise enables marketers to translate that data into online audiences, and IOTA syndicates it across the digital ecosystem. I'm excited about what we are doing both organically and through acquisition, and we are on the right track to take advantage of these growing markets related to how sales and marketing professionals are increasingly utilizing data and analytics in their business-to-business interactions. Moving on to key salesmen in the third quarter, we're pleased with the ongoing success we're having with our strategic clients, which includes renewal rates at nearly 100% and the addition of several new logos. As businesses face heightened pressure to meet regulatory requirements, prevent supply chain disruption, and protect brand equity, our risk and compliance capabilities are well positioned to assist our clients and prospects. For example, we want competitive new business with one of the largest global investment bank and financial services companies in the world who sought to expand automation opportunities for their onboarding and know-your-client processes. Our patented business verification process sets us apart from competitors, and our data provided the breadth and depth they required, particularly the beneficial ownership structures. We also signed new third-party risk and compliance business with a current client, one of the three largest aerospace companies in the world, to support the global trade compliance and corporate compliance efforts. Walmart renewed their multi-year agreement with us to support their supplier onboarding process, and we look forward to continuing this important strategic client partnership. We won new business with an existing client, a top German multinational banking and financial services company, to support this compliance verification and background checking needs. We are pleased with the ongoing growth of our third-party risk and compliance business across multiple industries and geographies. We're very pleased to announce a new business with one of the world's leading global microblogging and social media platforms. This multi-year deal supports their sales operation and client relationship management program as they recognize the value of our patented matching capabilities, the ability to integrate and automate capabilities, our global coverage, an extensive hierarchy data, and our sales and marketing data attributes. We also continue to make inroads with innovative technology companies such as DoorDash as they look to reduce the risk through improved credit and accounts receivable prioritization. DoorDash chose BNB for a comprehensive integrated portfolio monitoring and accounting compliance tools and the ability to manage financial risk in accounts of all sizes. On the international front, We collaborated with Siemens on a two-day datathon event where over 180 of their colleagues from around the world explored use cases in combination with the studio platform and AI technology to write a tangible solution for the most impactful use cases identified by business owners and analysts in the areas of risk, marketing, sales, and procurement. The event uncovered further Siemens business opportunities, and as a result, Siemens entered into an agreement leveraging Analytics Studio for sales and marketing. The access we acquired through our Bizno deal to strategic European Global 500 clients, such as the German bank mentioned earlier, and Siemens, is invaluable. And we continue to get in front of these new clients to support their businesses with our global solutions. Lastly, in Asia, we successfully renewed another important strategic client, Alibaba, who leverages our data to verify entities on its leading global e-commerce platform. Data is sourced through our data block solution, delivered by our Direct Plus API. Further, as a trusted partner to Alibaba, we're progressing a number of innovative growth initiatives, leveraging our global finance and risk solutions. This is an example of how Dun & Bradstreet is able to adapt and replicate our client success in North America to international markets and support the needs of some of the most sophisticated names in emerging markets. While we continue to demonstrate success with our strategic clients, we're also making progress in the small and mid-sized markets. I'm excited to announce that we recently signed an agreement with TransUnion to launch a proof of concept for a blended commercial credit score that in part is powered by TransUnion data. This score is the integration of consumer data from up to two business principles with our commercial data and additional data assets to enrich and enhance the decisioning process for our clients. The score is expected to be available in approximately 90% of all inquiries, and it's particularly important for our clients who lend to small businesses, including commercial banks, card issuers, and small business lending institutions. We believe our combined solution will increase our match rates, provide lift to our existing commercial scores, and deliver superior small business score that any single standalone commercial or consumer credit score could not accomplish. On the e-commerce front, we are seeing strong subscription numbers to our platforms, such as Dunn's Manager and Credit Signal, averaging over 1,100 new small business signups per day. While still small, e-commerce sales in the third quarter are up nearly 50% from prior year quarter. We also completed implementation of a modern online shopping cart to include internationalization with additional payment options with a United Kingdom and Ireland e-commerce product to launch shortly. These initiatives are all examples of our continued dedication to helping small businesses thrive. In our international segment, we continue to roll out localized solutions across our own and partner markets. In the third quarter, we delivered 10 product launches across Europe, Greater China, and the worldwide network partner markets. DataBlocks launched with partners in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and Finance Analytics launched in Latin America. These launches will be critical for driving product royalties in the future. We also launched RevUp and a beta version of ESG Intelligence in the UK, along with our local language hoovers offering in Greater China. These new international solutions, along with the many in North America we have discussed over the past few quarters, are allowing us to create a significant amount of new product revenue. For a total company, the new product vitality index, or the percentage of revenues from new products, was 8% in Q3 versus 2% in Q3 last year. We'll continue to drive more and more solutions into our markets around the world and look forward to updating you on our progress through the coming quarters. Lastly, we continue with the successful integration of BizNode with offline performance and synergy realization ahead of expectations. In the third quarter, we launched localized D&D Hoover solutions in five markets. We also enhanced BizNode's existing products, including adding B2B credit decisioning on BizNode's flagship risk-guarding credit platform. These solutions will enable us to execute our strategy of migrating clients off legacy offerings onto modern digital platforms, as well as attracting new clients. Regarding synergies, we are on track to achieve approximately $25 million in annualized net savings by year-end 2021, and remain on pace to achieve $40 million annualized of net savings by year-end 2022. Overall, I'm pleased with our continued progress in 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.