FactSet Research Systems Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the FactSet third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's 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 over to your speaker today, Rima Haider, please go ahead.

Thank you, Joelle, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to FACSET's third fiscal quarter 2021 earnings call. We continue to be in various remote locations today. We may have some audio quality issues, and we 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 will encourage all listeners to review the legal notice on slide 2, 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 to 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 and Chief Revenue Officer. And now I'd like to turn the discussion over to Phil Snow.

Thank you, Rima, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm pleased to share our third quarter results headlined by strong top-line growth. This has allowed us to increase our organic ASV plus professional services guidance for this fiscal year. Building on last quarter's momentum, we grew organic ASV plus professional services by 5.8% this quarter. The investments made in both content and technology over the past seven quarters have strengthened our product portfolio. And as a result, demand for our solutions is increasing, further supported by our clients' own digital transformation needs. Our growth this quarter was strongest with wealth managers, banking clients, and asset owners. The acceleration in ASV reflects solid execution from the sales team, who increased wallet share with existing accounts, and further improved client retention. Our strategy to build the industry's leading open content and analytics platform continues to make an impact in the market. We remain on track with our multi-year investment plan. We continue to build out our content offering with particular focus on deep sector, private markets, ESG, and data for wealth managers. Growth in workstations this quarter was driven by deep sector and private markets data especially with banks and corporate clients. The expansion of our street account coverage in Canada and Asia, as well as more fund data collection, has generated greater demand from wealth managers. And clients are using our data management solutions, which include entity mapping and data concordance services, to manage their own content. These offerings are key differentiators, often sought by asset management clients. Our migration of the cloud is progressing as planned and gives us the opportunity to build new products that support ASV growth. One example is the advisor dashboard, which is being well received by wealth managers as evidenced by new wins and solid pipeline. Clients are seeking personalized tools like the advisor dashboard that can surface insights, increase efficiency, and help users identify the next best action. In addition, we provide greater flexibility to clients by further opening up our platform. Our broad API offerings allow clients to leverage core and alternative data sets, tap into our robust portfolio analytics engine, build digital portals, and gain access to proprietary signals. We have seen strong demand for our analytics APIs as well as fundamental company data APIs for CTS. We are also seeing more data sales through cloud-based platforms such as Snowflake, and having success with CRM integrations. This growth in our digital solutions can be attributed to our technology investments. Looking at our regions, I'm pleased to say that our ASV growth rate increased in the Americas and EMEA across the majority of our business lines. The Americas growth rate increased to 6% with strength across CTS, research, and analytics. Acceleration was driven primarily by strong workstation sales to our banking clients and an overall demand for premium and core data feeds. We've benefited from an increase in hiring at middle market and bulk bracket banks due to robust M&A and equity capital markets. EMEA's growth rate accelerated to 5%, improving over the past two quarters. We experienced stronger results in research and analytics reflected in part by higher retention of our asset management and wealth firms. In addition, we captured greater international price increases as clients continue to affirm the value of our solutions. AsiaPAC's growth remained at 9%, driven largely by research and analytics. Results include strong cross-sales to asset management firms, as well as increases to global banks, who are hiring more to accommodate increased capital markets activity. The region also benefited from higher price increases. In summary, we enter the end of fiscal 21 with good momentum and have good visibility into our fourth quarter. We have a strong pipeline weighted most heavily towards institutional asset managers, broker dealers, and wealth managers, and are increasing our organic ASV guidance to $85 to $95 million for this fiscal year. Overall, we are encouraged by market trends. Clients are showing more willingness to spend against the backdrop of anticipated economic recovery. Decisions on more complex deals that had been delayed are now beginning to be reconsidered as clients look to execute on their own digital transformations. We see increased demand for enterprise-wide technology upgrades and data management as CIOs and CTOs look to future-proof their technology stacks. This gives us conviction in the long-term benefit of our multi-year investment plan and our path to higher growth. This month marks FactSet's 25th year as a public company. I'm proud to reflect on our team's strong performance, the culture of continuous innovation we have fostered, and the significant value to shareholders we have created over the years. We will continue to push ourselves to create smarter, more adaptive, and more personalized solutions that make us the trusted enterprise partner for clients. I'll now turn it over to Helen, who, as many of you know, has taken over the leadership of our sales organization as Chief Revenue Officer while continuing to serve as our CFO. She will take you through the quarter in more detail.