FactSet Research Systems Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the FactSet second quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference to your speaker today, Reema Haider, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Joelle. Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to FACSET's second fiscal quarter 2021 earnings call. We continue to be in various remote locations today. We may have some audio quality issues and we really appreciate your patience should we experience a disruption. Before we begin, I would like to point out that the slides we will reference during this presentation can be accessed via the webcast on the investor relations section of our website at factset.com. The slides will be posted on our website at the conclusion of this call. A replay of today's call will be available via phone and on our website. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call to questions from investors. To be fair to everyone, please limit yourself to one question plus one follow-up. Before we discuss our results, I encourage all listeners to review the legal notice on slide two, which explains the risks of forward-looking statements and the use of non-GAAP financial measures. Additionally, please refer to our forms 10-K and 10-Q for a discussion of risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Our slide presentation and discussions on this call will include certain non-GAAP financial measures. For such measures, reconciliation of the most directly comparable GAAP measures are in the appendix to the presentation and in our earnings release issued earlier today. Joining me today are Phil Snow, Chief Executive Officer, and Helen Shan, Chief Financial Officer. I'd now like to turn the discussion over to Phil Snow.

Thanks, Reema, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased with our solid second quarter and overall first half results, and the investments we've made to further advance our offerings in both content and workflow solutions are resonating. Over the past 12 months, we've proven our resilience and our ability to strengthen our value to clients, and we begin the second half of this fiscal year with good momentum, greater visibility, and continued confidence in our ability to execute. Our investments in content and technology are progressing at pace, and we see market validation of our strategy with some key wins this quarter. Our content advances, particularly in deep sector, are being well received by clients, especially across the sell side, supporting workstation growth. And our focus on digital transformation allows us to offer more personalized solutions and an increasing number of ways to deliver value to clients. The market is looking for solutions that are both easy to integrate and unite the front, middle, and back office, and we are well positioned to capitalize on this trend. Our shift to the public cloud is progressing according to plan, with the majority of our new storage and collection centers successfully migrated. This quarter, we are particularly pleased to see growth in our core workstation offering. The efforts we've made through our investment strategy are starting to drive our top lines, and we delivered a strong first half due to our ability to execute on our pipeline with continued discipline. In our second quarter, our organic ASV plus professional services growth rate accelerated to 5.5%. This acceleration was led by our sales team effectively growing wallet share with existing clients, as well as capturing a higher price increase in the Americas. This was partially offset by cancellations, largely across asset management firms. We're pleased that our performance resulted in increased adjusted operating margin on EPS, and we have good momentum going into our second half. We reaffirm our ability to deliver results within our guidance for fiscal 21 and are raising the lower end of our full-year organic ASV growth range to $70 million from $55 million. Helen will explain in more detail shortly. Turning now to the performance in our regions, the Americas growth accelerated to 6%, driven by strong sales of workstations and research and wealth solutions and data feeds in CTS solutions. Our research solutions had a particularly good quarter supported by our digital transformation and the expansion of our deep sector content offering. This was evident from wins with our large existing banking clients who benefited from our tailored workflows, which allow them a more connected and personalized experience. CTS also had a successful quarter as clients bought more of our core and premium data feeds. And in wealth, we're extremely pleased with the RBC win. This was an entirely virtual rollout, and I'm proud of how quickly and seamlessly our team integrated our advisor dashboard workflow and CRM solutions for RBC's entire wealth management team. AsiaPac accelerated its growth rate to 9% due to strong performance in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. We saw wins at institutional asset managers and data providers with our research and CTS solutions. EMEA's growth remained at 4%, with wins across the region, most notably in France and the Nordics. The region benefited from increased sales of CTS and wealth solutions to asset owners and institutional asset managers, as well as accelerating new business. Our diversifying client base continues to seek mission-critical data, and we see strong demand for our growing content offering. We're pleased with the progress we are making in the ESG market as we further integrate our ESG products into clients' everyday workflows. We've already expanded our ESG content suite with the launch of True Value's UN Sustainable Development Goals Monitor. This is in addition to a new joint offering with Ping An Insurance Group, which offers ESG metrics on companies incorporated in mainland China. Overall, we see a long runway for growth as we execute more enterprise-wide deals and believe that every touchpoint with clients today represents an opportunity to cross-sell in the future. The conversations we are having combined with our sales team's execution make us optimistic that we will continue to grow our market share long-term. In summary, our focus continues to be on achieving higher growth and providing clients with effective and efficient solutions across the entire investment workflow. We remain committed to our investment strategy and to living our purpose, which is to drive the investment community to see more, think bigger, and do their best work. And we are starting to see the rewards of the efforts we are making. We continue to push ourselves to be a more diverse, inclusive, and impactful organization. To that end, I'm pleased to say we recently hired our first Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer as part of our strategy to strengthen our organizational accountability, increase diversity across all levels of our company, and ensure workforce equity. We know we have more work to do and remain committed to furthering our efforts. I'm pleased with our progress as we strive to be the best place to work and give our employees the flexibility they need to thrive in the new normal. I'm proud of the ways in which we are showing up for one another and for our clients every day. With that, I'll now turn things over to Helen, who will take you through the specifics of our second quarter and first half 2021 performance.