Dun & Bradstreet Holdings, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Dun & Bradstreet's second quarter 2022 conference call. As a reminder, 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 answer session 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 Ed Yen. You may proceed.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Dun & Bradstreet's Financial Results Conference Call for the second quarter of 2022. On the call today, we have Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour and CFO Brian Hipcher. 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 Donna Bradstreet's Investor Relations website at investor.dnb.com. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Anthony.

Thanks, Ed. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our call today. I'll begin with an update on our second quarter results and then provide a general business overview, including some of the more strategic initiatives we have going on. Following my commentary, Brian will provide further details on our second quarter results and our outlook for the remainder of the year. After that, we'll open up the call for questions, and then I'll finish up with some closing comments. The second quarter of 2022 was another solid quarter of financial and operational execution. Adjusted revenues for the total company grew 3.1% or 6.3% before the effect of foreign currency. And revenues on an organic constant currency basis grew 3.7% for the second quarter. Despite an increasingly challenging macro environment, we continue to show the defensible growth nature of our company. With over 50% of our revenues under multi-year contracts, over 96% gross revenue retention, and over 95% recurring revenues and solutions that are deeply embedded within our customers' most critical workflows and technologies, we are in a privileged position to be able to weather these difficult markets and continue to execute upon both our near-term and long-term objectives. In fact, on July 28th, we announced a quarterly dividend of 5 cents, which will be the first quarter of our annual dividend of 20 cents per share per year. We continue to drive strong results through our transformation and acceleration efforts, and I'm pleased to be able to share a portion of those gains with our shareholders. From a segment perspective, organic constant currency growth in both North America and international was driven by demand for our finance and risk solutions as broader business and macro conditions continue to create a strong demand environment. Our 3.7% organic constant currency growth included a 1% negative impact from the conclusion of the GSA contract and continues to show our progress towards sustained mid-single-digit growth. As businesses throughout the world face deteriorating conditions, DMV stands as a trusted provider ready to deliver the mission-critical data and analytics that help our customers underwrite with confidence in times like these. Our finance business continues to be solid in North America and international, with growth driven through receiving incremental value for the enhancements we've made to our data, delivery, and technology platforms. As businesses look to tighten their credit and business lending underwriting standards, we believe that our solutions are uniquely positioned to help clients and prospects make better decisions when it matters the most. The same goes for our third-party and supply chain risk management business, which had another quarter of strong double-digit growth. These solutions are a natural progression to finance organizations throughout the globe as they look to meet the evolving demands of enhanced data-driven reviews on global third-party participants. We believe that in the coming years, third-party and supply chain risk management will continue to be a top priority for businesses, and we will continue to invest in data and software enhancements to meet this increasing demand. On the public sector front, While this quarter marked the completion of our direct relationship with the GSA, we continue to make significant inroads with several of the federal government agencies. Whether it's Food and Drug Administration, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Defense, or FEMA, U.S. federal government agencies continue to rely upon the DUNS number and the data and analytics that support their missions. And finally, with sales and marketing, we have made a significant progress this quarter on enhancing and upgrading our solutions in North America, while localizing and releasing international versions to our clients across Europe and Asia. For instance, our new localized version of Hoover's in Europe has achieved a near 50% increase in revenue versus prior year, Now, we believe there's ample greenfield opportunities to continue to accelerate growth over the coming quarters and years. This is yet another example of how we continue to prove out our thesis that as we bring new solutions to geographies, customer demand is high. In fact, the D&B solutions overall in Europe grew over 15% this quarter. With Europe continuing to localize new solutions and North America bringing incremental innovation to bear, I'm happy to report that we built upon our first quarter vitality index of 10%, with a second quarter vitality index score of 15%. While many companies are pulling back due to cyclical pressures, we are continuing to drive forward with our strategy, and I'm pleased with both our financial results and operational progress. As we continue to execute against our near-term objectives, our guiding strategic principles remain the same. Innovate solutions and localize them throughout the world. Increase our wallet share with strategic clients through expanded data sets and complementary solutions. Approach and monetize the small business channel in new and innovative ways. And continue to grow international in both our owned and worldwide network markets. On the innovation front, Our product, technology, data, and analytics teams were hard at work delivering some exciting enhancements to our existing solutions and bringing new solutions to market that will continue to drive the progress I just mentioned in our vitality index. With the latest release of our fraud suite, we've signed our first two client contracts, moved the solution from pilot to general release, and have a growing multi-million dollar pipeline for the second half of this year. We continue to see a strong demand for risk mitigation solutions as fraudulent activity has historically risen during periods of global economic distress. Prospects are looking for data-driven solutions to help sift through hundreds of thousands of transactions that could result in millions of dollars of losses if even one fraudulent transaction is missed. We believe that our B2B-based fraud suite can play a unique role in fending off this type of activity, and the early signs of our building pipeline are proof of that. On the sales and marketing front, we continue to make progress on laying the foundation for our accelerated growth in our sales solutions. We grew our business contact database to 441 million global contacts, including 41 million emails and 18 million direct dials, and released the new version of B&B Hoovers for small business. This solution is a lighter version aimed at delivering packets of contacts that can easily be activated through our clients' MarTech and SalesTech solutions and keeps clients coming back for more as each month new leads are generated. The solution is sold through both our inside sales and digital channels, which we believe is a more effective way for us to reach the tens of millions of SMB prospects that have been an untapped market for us to date. We also completed the integration of our audience solutions business, including the integration of the DUNS number throughout our enhanced business identity graph. With NetWise and IOTA growing over 20%, we continue to see big potential in the B2B digital marketing space over the coming years, and we'll look to capitalize on our strong momentum there. And the last one I'll touch on is the enhancements we've made to our ESG intelligence score. We now have detailed scores on 34 million companies in 39 markets throughout the globe. Again, at D&B, we want to make sure that when we score a business, it's informed through accurate and validated data versus modeling companies based on simple things like industry or geography. For instance, with the recent addition of businesses' consolidated utility bill data, we're able to calculate the carbon emissions of a public or private company at a level of granularity we believe is unparalleled in the industry. We continue to see strong engagement from our existing customer base and are pleased with not only the wins we have seen in the quarter, but the growing pipeline across several industry verticals. Moving on to sales, I'm pleased to report that the second quarter was another strong one for our strategic client segments in both North America and international. In North America, we won new business with Lendio, a modern lending platform that helps businesses get funding in a new and innovative way. Lendio will leverage our data to make offers to small businesses enabled by Lendio's loan marketplace. With the millions of small businesses that come to Dun & Bradstreet to understand, monitor, and potentially impact their business credit scores, many will take this step to get the funding they need quickly. Another way we are supporting the intelligent flow of capital is our expanded relationship with Goldman Sachs. Through our coverage and patented matching capabilities, we're able to link Goldman Sachs consumer credit card holders with their associated businesses to create a significant source of new commercial credit card prospects for Marcus by Goldman Sachs. On the renewal front, Wells Fargo, a client that has been with us for over 35 years, renewed a multi-year contract for our products and data to support several use cases across their business functions, including portfolio management and monitoring. Another significant multi-year contract renewal was with one of the largest payroll and human resources management companies in the world. Through the direct integration of some of our latest scores and analytics into their key platforms and work streams, we were able to automate the risk decisioning process upfront and then integrate financial health monitoring capabilities to mitigate the ongoing risk exposure going forward. In our D&B Europe market, we won new business with a Global 500 pharmaceutical company. The multi-year, seven-figure deal provides various products across risk, sales and marketing, including finance analytics and data blocks. We also won a multi-year, seven-figure master data and credit monitoring deal from a large Nordic telecom provider, displacing a significant global competitor. And finally, we began selling our D&B ESG intelligence solution in Europe and had some notable wins, including a deal with a large German metal processing company as they looked to further understand the ESG posture of their large and complicated supply chain. In the SMB channel, we continue to look for ways to enhance our offerings to small businesses through both our internal efforts along with strategic partnerships. One such partnership is our latest integration with Plaid. Through Plaid, businesses can provide permission to connect their business bank accounts directly to D&B and directly influence their business identity and scores. Even with a modest number of bank accounts connected right out of the gate, 90% of the companies that added banking information improved their risk assessment via delinquency score by up to 40 points. As the global economy slows, we look to assist clients and prospects with more timely and more accurate reflections of their business standing and hopefully allow them to access capital in a more efficient and effective manner. At the same time, we continue to progress with our blended score as multiple proofs of concepts are underway. As you can imagine, the testing process is a thorough one when it relates to the inclusion of a new underwriting score. but we are quite optimistic about the early results and the significant improvement in our ability to more broadly and more accurately score small and medium businesses today. We've also been focused on new ways to expand our reach and serve more of the SMB community. One example of this is how we're adapting to more seamlessly meet the needs of small businesses through our Embedded Credit Partner Program. The goal of this program is to continue to provide small businesses with credit access and education by embedding directly within products used every day in their flow of work, such as their business banking accounts or accounting software. Think about how a customer credit score are embedded in consumer banking apps, except we're doing it from the commercial side. We've offered this successfully to a few partners over the past year and have taken these learnings to scale the offering, allowing our customers themselves to become more holistic partners to small businesses. And finally, I want to share with you the fantastic progress we made in our international business. As we previously discussed, the migration of customers from legacy outdated products to our modern D&B solutions in Europe was a critical part of our acquisition of BizNote. And through disciplined execution, the D&B Europe team has now migrated over $50 million in cumulative revenues to our modern D&B platforms. This coordinated effort moved over 6,000 customers in the second quarter, which improved our vitality index and has put us in a better position to drive cross-sell efforts from our latest offerings versus legacy products. I want to congratulate our team on achieving the high bar we set out during the acquisition and recognize the operational execution that led to D&B's largest successful migration in the last 20 plus years. Overall, I'm very pleased with the way we're executing during the first half of 2022 and believe Dun & Bradstreet is uniquely positioned in the market due to our combination of high-quality revenues, increasing innovation, strong margins, solid balance sheet, and disciplined capital allocation. I look forward to continuing to report on our progress over the coming quarters, and with that, I'd like to now turn the call over to Brian to discuss our financial results for the second quarter in more detail and the outlook for the remainder of 2022.