FactSet Research Systems Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the FACSAT Q1 2022 earnings 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 the question during the session, you need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Kendra Brown. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to FACSAT's first fiscal quarter 2022 earnings call. Before we begin, I would like to point out that the slides we will reference during this presentation can be assessed 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 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 risk 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 gap 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 Linda Huber, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I want to let you all know that we are planning an Investor Day in early April, and we will be sharing more information soon, so stay tuned. With that, I will turn the discussion over to Phil Snow.

Thank you, Kendra, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Before I begin, let me start by welcoming Kendra, who recently became FactSet's head of investor relations. Kendra has worked at FactSet for more than two decades, most recently serving as my chief of staff. She brings a deep knowledge of the company and industry expertise to her new role. I look forward to working with Kendra to continue growing our investor relations program. I'd also like to welcome Linda to her first earnings call as a member of the FactSet team. We are excited to have her here and have already begun leveraging her deep financial and operational expertise as we continue to execute our growth strategy. Turning to our performance, FactSet is off to a strong start to fiscal 2022, and I'm pleased to share that this quarter had the highest Q1 incremental ASV on record. Building on the momentum from Q4, we grew organic ASV plus professional services by 9% year over year in Q1. The strong performance of our sales and client-facing teams carry forward from Q4, increasing the pace of our go-to-market strategy. These teams continue to drive increased retention and expansion rates among our existing clients while achieving a high number of new business wins. The biggest contributor to this quarter's growth were institutional asset management clients as we continue to see strength in our workstation and accelerating growth in our analytics workflow solutions. The last two years of accelerated investment in content and technology continue to drive top-line growth. We are seeing increased demand for differentiated content and workflow solutions. FactSet's leading open content and analytics platform is allowing us to meet this demand and capture more share of wallet with our clients. By client type, wins were broad-based. We saw double-digit ASV growth rates from our banking, wealth, hedge fund, and corporate clients as well as private equity and venture capital funds and partners. Our investments in content and technology, including deep sector, wealth, and analytic solutions, continue to support client retention rates and renewals across the board. Overall, we are pleased that our performance resulted in a 13% increase in adjusted EPS from the prior year period. Our adjusted operating margin of 33.6% exceeds our guidance. Linda will walk you through the details in a few minutes. We are now in the final year of our multiyear investment plan, and we remain on track to achieve our goals. Our focus is on our digital platform, scaling our content refinery, and creating hyper-personalized workflow solutions. Within our content refinery, ESG, data for wealth, private markets, and deep sector are all fueling workstation growth. We continue to grow our deep sector data, launching real estate and technology media and telecom in November. Deep sector and our investments in private markets have translated into growth and higher retention within sell-side firms. And our recent acquisition of Cobalt further advances our private market strategy by connecting differentiated data with tracking and portfolio monitoring, providing value to our private equity and venture capital clients. Our workflow solutions, which deliver efficiencies across the front, middle, and back office, continue to add meaningful ASV. Our analytics APIs are resonating with our clients, and we are increasingly integrating with cloud-based platforms. Earlier this month, we launched over 90 data sets and a number of APIs on Amazon Data Exchange, the first major data and analytics provider to do so. Our trading business continues to grow, bolstered by the recent addition of fixed income support for trade execution. This enables our clients to surface new insights and trade across asset classes with greater speed and efficiency and was a significant contributor to the growth of our analytics and trading business during the quarter. Our product teams are focused on identifying, developing, and implementing made-for-client workflow solutions for each of our client types. This has been incredibly successful within Wealth as our advisor dashboard maintains a healthy pipeline and solid client engagement for FY22. We see this hyper-personalization as a key differentiator and are committed to working with our clients to evolve our offerings. Looking across our regions, we saw continued strength in ASV growth across all our markets. The Americas was the biggest contributor as organic ASV growth accelerated to 9% supported by broad-based strength across our businesses. This was driven by strong retention and expansion among asset managers and asset owners. The region also benefited from capturing higher price increases. In EMEA, growth accelerated to 7%, consistently improving over the past three quarters. Research and advisory had a particularly positive impact, driven by improved retention among asset managers and wealth clients and strong workstation sales to new customers. Asia Pacific had another robust quarter, with growth accelerating to 14%, driven primarily by CTS. We again saw wins across many countries with hedge funds, asset managers, and asset owners driving ASV growth. In summary, I am proud of the FactSet team for delivering such strong results to the start of the year. The first quarter, as you know, is historically a slower start to the fiscal year and not necessarily an indication of our performance for the rest of the year. However, our momentum from Q4 has continued, and we are well positioned to deliver on our targets for the year. As such, we are reaffirming our fiscal 2022 guidance, and we remain confident in our pipeline and in the value we are delivering to our clients. Looking ahead, we continue to focus on three strategic priorities, scaling up our content refinery, enhancing the client experience through hyper-personalized solutions, and delivering next-generation workflow solutions for clients. And we believe that our people, culture, and performance-driven mindsets will enable us to execute on these priorities as we accelerate the pace of change. We are committed to investing in and developing the talent, experience, and skills of our team as we build the industry's leading open content and analytics platform. Finally, an important milestone in our company's history occurred earlier this week when FactSet became part of the S&P 500 Index. Our addition was in fact predicted by our S&P 500 constituents prediction signal on October 1st. Our inclusion is a proud moment for FactSet and a testament to our tremendous growth and our efforts to help our clients do their best work. Our team's creativity, dedication, and collaborative spirit make us a trusted partner, and I'm tremendously proud of their drive to create smarter, more innovative solutions for our clients. I'll now turn it over to Linda, who will take you through the specifics of our first quarter performance.