Dun & Bradstreet Holdings, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Dunn and Bradstreet first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Thursday, May 4th, 2023. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sean Anthony, VP Corporate FP&A. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Dun & Bradstreet's Financial Results Conference call for the first quarter of 2023. 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 the 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 Dun & Bradstreet's Investor Relations website at investor.dnb.com. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Anthony.

Thank you, Sean. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2023 earnings call. On today's call, I'll start with a brief overview of our first quarter results followed by an update on our operational activities and progress towards our strategic initiatives. After that, I'll pass the call over to Brian for an in-depth review of our results and to discuss our expectations for the remainder of 2023. We'll then open up the call for Q&A and I'll finish up with a few closing comments. With that, let's get started. Our first quarter results demonstrate the continued progress we are making and the strength and resiliency of our business model throughout the world. We exceeded our communicated expectations by delivering 3.2% revenue growth on an organic constant currency basis as customers and prospects continue to rely on DMV's mission-critical solutions to help them navigate this challenging business environment. Beginning with North America, we grew just over 2% despite this being the final quarter that included the impact from three full months of the GSA contract expiration. Excluding the impact of the GSA, North America revenues grew 4% with solid performance in both our finance and risk and sales and marketing solutions. On the finance and risk side, our risk solutions drove high teams growth as companies continued to look at ways of driving a more real-time, AI-driven approach to assessing and monitoring their third-party and supply chain exposure. As we continue to expand the magnitude of our existing data and add new and alternative data sets to further extend our offerings into areas such as fraud, cybersecurity, climate, and ESG, we're positioning ourselves to land and expand through a variety of use cases within clients' risk, compliance, and underwriting departments. For example, we recently expanded our ESG rankings data coverage across public and private companies from 42 million to 74 million in 185 countries, reflecting the latest sustainability accounting board standards. This expansion further strengthens Dun & Bradstreet's position in the ESG space as organizations seek to make sustainable decisions with confidence. We are also bringing in new real-time financial data sets into our data cloud. An example of this is payments transaction data that allows us to blend near-term transactional behavior with longer-term trends, creating a unique perspective on the financial profile of an entity in ways that have never been done before. These new analytics are enhancing our proprietary data cloud and through the use of our latest artificial intelligence driven algorithms, we are further extending our leadership position in the decisioning of commercial credit and embedding ourselves even more deeply into the most mission critical finance decisioning workflows. Finance solutions continue to have strong retention rates and is benefiting from the impact of price increases as we look to optimize our contracting and pricing structures. Overall, our finance and risk solutions in North America grew 2.5%, excluding the GSA impact, which is right in line with our expectations for the start of the year. Within North America sales and marketing, we are seeing continued progress in our financial results from the ongoing transformation and investments in the solution set. We delivered over 5% organic growth in the quarter, driven by our master data management and digital marketing solutions. Improvements to solutions like Hoover's have driven retention rates from the 70s to nearly 90%, turning them from headwinds to tailwinds, and are allowing the benefits of our transformation efforts to be realized in our financial results. As we continue to resolve a shrinking group of legacy, underperforming assets in our portfolio, it allows us to show the true strength we have been building in our sales and marketing suite. We also continue to innovate new solutions, which further support our now 20% vitality index in North America. In the first quarter, we launched a mid-market version of D&B Connect, that includes a self-guided user interface, which brings most of the benefits of master data management to medium and smaller sized companies with limited tech complexity. BNB compliance intelligence engine, which created smart workflow integration to seamlessly onboard and monitor third parties from cradle to grave, and we are launching our SMB Navigate portal, which builds upon the foundational improvements to our SMB ecosystem, such as the website consolidation and shopping cart enhancements we have made over the past few quarters. We continue to move forward with supporting small business in their efforts to thrive during these tough times. Whether it be our partnership with Lendio, allowing SMBs access to capital in a quick and efficient manner, improve the visibility into the commercial credit profile through connectivity into Plaid, or our latest partnership with Accelerate Tax that helps small business garner tax credits and incentives. We are committed to working hard to assist small businesses become big businesses. On the North American sales front, we saw examples of our momentum in both finance and risk and sales and marketing. On the finance and risk side, we had a strong quarter of expanded renewals and new solutions upsells. One of our largest and most tenured customers, an American-based multinational technology company, signed another multi-year renewal. This company is a great example of a sophisticated global firm that utilizes our DUNS and hierarchy master data management capabilities as a keystone for their finance and risk and sales and marketing solutions throughout their organization. While other providers attempted to compete based solely on price, our differentiated solutions, data and analytics clearly won out. We saw a similar outcome with one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world. Like many auto manufacturers, they face the need to invest significant capital into the electronic vehicle market while simultaneously balancing the financial challenges arising from a global economic downturn. With a mandate to reduce third-party spend, their procurement organization explored ways to reduce their spend with us just as they would with the rest of their vendor relationships. However, due to the criticality and value we deliver, they ultimately concluded that de-scoping services would have a direct negative impact on their operations and ultimately decided to maintain and expand the relationship. Through our master data management capabilities powered by the DUNS number, we allowed companies like them and tens of thousands of others to perform during all economic cycles. Now, turning to our international segment, we saw another quarter of solid 5.5% organic growth in the quarter. Our vitality index increased to 28% in the quarter, and with all markets growing at or above our internal expectations. We saw the United Kingdom and Ireland produce just under 10% growth in the quarter as demand for our modern finance and risk solutions remained elevated. We also saw continued steady improvement in Europe as the business grew 4% in the quarter with balanced growth across the region. Asia came in with low single-digit performance, which was expected as the market is dealing with some hangover from the lockdown impact in 2022 that affected 2022 sales and 2023 revenues. As the year progresses in sales pickup, we expect to see the revenues flow through and acceleration in those regions to complement the strength in our UKI and Europe markets. Overall, the performance is on track, and we continue to see the benefits of the disciplined investments in our international markets. On the sales front, the international segment continues to focus on landing and expanding more and more enterprise clients in the regions. Deutsche Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in Germany, added a compliance solution to their portfolio that is allowing them to better understand their third-party and supply chain risks. This is just one example of what we saw throughout the quarter in terms of strong demand for these solutions. The Cabinet Office of England engaged us for our compliance data blocks APIs. Public sector entities like the Cabinet Office also have the need to understand who they are doing business with and how the linkage to certain individuals, entities, or countries could impact the way they view potential risk with doing business with said companies. We also saw another strategic win with a top four bank in China. This new data driven win was a direct takeaway from a legacy provider and continues to show how our data solutions and go to market improvements are driving expansion with the largest and most complex organizations in the region. Along with the ongoing results and sales executions, we continue to focus on progressing against the strategic initiatives we laid out during our investor day earlier this year. On the technology side, we have made significant progress to start off the year. For instance, on the infrastructure side, we migrated one of our largest and most complex sales and marketing applications to our Google Cloud infrastructure. This migration has been underway for months and culminated in a near seamless transition that has resulted in significant improvements to the application's performance, throughput, and stability. We also made significant progress in terms of our ongoing modernization efforts by reducing our reliance on mainframe hardware by 50%. We have significantly reduced our use of mainframe applications and have a clear path to bringing that down to zero over the next two years. These are just a few examples of the many ongoing initiatives we have underway, which reflect our continued discipline, commitment, and execution to making the changes necessary to support the long-term and sustainable change at D&B. We also made significant enhancements to our data supply chain through architectural enhancement, as well as cloud migration efforts that led to a 50% reduction in processing latency. And while we are continuing to strengthen our foundation, we're also using cutting-edge advancements to extend and expand our analytics capabilities. In terms of linkage and matching, we have the most advanced business-to-business capabilities in the world. To further extend that lead, we're now leveraging GPT to drive enhancements in our global matching processes, which create efficiencies and, in some cases, incremental advancements in our match rates. We also have three proof of concepts in place related to new business discovery, new contact discovery, and employment counts for private businesses throughout the globe. It's early stages now, but through taking a measured approach, we can leverage the power of our unrivaled proprietary business-to-business data set, combined with TPT and other artificial intelligence advancements, to drive more and more value to our customers and prospects. I'll look to update you on all these advancements and the others on future calls. But in the meantime, know we are hard at work at driving innovation and acceleration each and every day at Dun & Bradstreet. Overall, we're off to a great start to the year, and I'm very pleased with the progress we've made to date. Our ongoing transformational efforts have helped to offset a more difficult macroeconomic backdrop. We have capitalized on the strong demand for our solutions, drove strong sales traction, maintained excellent profitability, and delivered another quarter of solid financial results. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Brian to discuss our financial results for the first quarter in more detail and the outlook for the remainder of 2023.