Global Business Travel Group, Inc.

good morning and welcome to the american express global business travel second quarter 2022 earnings conference call as a reminder please note today's call is being recorded i will now turn the call over to vice president of investor relations barry sievert please go ahead sir hello and good morning everyone thank you for joining us for our second quarter earnings conference call this morning we issued an earnings release which is available on our website at investors.amex global business

Relations webpage. We would like to advise you that our comments contain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, including the duration and effects of COVID-19, industry trends, cost savings, and acquisition synergies, among others. All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. More information on these and other risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issued this morning, our registration statement on Form S-1, and the related perspectives filed on July 19, 2022, and our other SEP filings. Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain presentation, and in the earnings release. Participating with me on the call today are Paul Abbott, our Chief Executive Officer, Martine Giroux, our Chief Financial Officer, and also joining us for the Q&A session today is Eric Bach, our Chief Legal Officer and Head of Global M&A. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Paul.

Well, thank you very much, Barry, and welcome to everyone. Thank you all for joining us today for our first live earnings call as a public company. I'm going to start my section with the second quarter 2022 highlights. And of course, listing as a public company in the second quarter was a significant milestone for the company and really marked the beginning of the next chapter of growth for American Express GBT. I'm pleased to say business travel transactions continue to recover in the quarter, reaching 76% of 2019 pro forma levels in June. And also pleased to say we reported positive adjusted EBITDA of 47 million in the quarter. New sales momentum continues to be very strong. Over the past 12 months, we've signed 4.2 billion of new wins, and equally important, maintained very high levels of customer attention. Overall, a strong first half performance in 2022 and the continued share gains that we see give us the confidence to raise our full year 2022 guidance once again. So we reported strong second quarter revenue and earnings. Revenue totaled $486 million, up 217% over Q2 2021. Our positive adjusted EBITDA result was driven primarily by the strong recovery of business travel and of course continued cost discipline across the business. The transaction recovery for the second quarter reached 69% of 2019 pro forma levels and the revenue recovery reached 65%. As I mentioned and which we're going to discuss in more detail, the continued strength in the recovery of business travel and our share gains give us the confidence to raise our full year 2022 revenue guidance to a range of between 1.8 billion to 1.85 billion and raise our full year adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of between 90 and 100 million. Following the impact of the Omicron wave in the first quarter, the business travel recovery has demonstrated very strong momentum and we continue to see the benefits from our share gains. Second quarter transaction recovery was 69% of 2019. That was an impressive 22 percentage point improvement over the first quarter of the year. And from March to June of this year, transaction recovery improved 14 percentage points to reach 76% in the month of June. And we've continued throughout the quarter to see strong demand for business travel despite some of the supply constraints and more challenging macroeconomic conditions. We believe very strongly that Amex GBT has a significant runway for growth. And what we are currently seeing in this environment is that the value we deliver to customers only increases. It increases an environment where there's greater travel complexity and rising prices. Our commitment to industry-leading service and savings continues to set us apart from the competition. And our new wins performance, I think, really demonstrates the strength of our differentiated value proposition. At new wins performance over the last 12 months through the end of July, increased to $4.2 billion of new wins, representing 11% of 2019 pro forma TTV. SME transaction recovery continues to be particularly strong. The recovery in the month of June for SME customers reaching 84%, driven by a stronger recovery in the SME segment and our new wins momentum in the SME segment across GBT and Agencia and Ovation. Some of our recent major new wins contributing to this $4.2 billion of new wins includes a top five global financial services company. I'm pleased to say that's JPMorgan Chase. And I am delighted to say that we'll have the privilege of serving JPMorgan from the third quarter of this year. Equally important, of course, customer retention. And that has been very stable over the last 12 months through the end of July. at 95%. So moving on to the margin expansion levers that we have. We've discussed before we have two very important levers for margin expansion and we are on track to deliver both. The 109 million of synergies from Agencia and the 235 million of permanent cost savings. We remain on track to exceed the 25 million of Agencia synergies that we expected in 22 Based on the actions that we've already completed to date, we have achieved 65% of the full 109 million of synergies on a run rate basis. Turning to the 235 million of permanent cost savings, as we've discussed before, these actions have already been fully taken. And the continued cost discipline that we saw in Q2 is in line with the expectations required to deliver the increased guidance for 2022. So, as I mentioned, business travel certainly has strong momentum. Transaction recovery reaching 69% in the quarter, 76% in June. And these trends continue to reflect what we previously discussed, companies returning to travel and the easing of COVID-related travel restrictions around the world, as well as our continued share gains. That sharp rise that we saw in the second quarter in terms of the return of business travel certainly drove an acceleration of our recruitment efforts to ensure that we are best positioned to deliver on our customer expectations. Particularly looking forward as we prepare for what we believe will be a busy period for business travel from September. So we continue to invest in expanding our digital channels and our voice services to make sure that we're providing the powerful backing of Amex TBT to our customers through what is a period of greater travel demand and increased travel complexity. Overall, as you've just heard from us, as I know you've heard from the GDSs and the major US airlines, I think the second quarter proved that the demand for business travel is very strong. So let's take a look at the recovery trends compared to 2019 pro forma in a little bit more detail. There are clearly some segments that are outperforming. SME customers continue to lead the recovery, and hotel transactions are recovering at a faster pace than air. In the second quarter, SME transactions reached a strong recovery rate of 77% for the quarter, which is 15 percentage points above the global multinational customer recovery of 62. Hotel transactions reached 78% recovery for the second quarter, And that's 14 percentage points above air at 64. So as we saw in the first quarter, hotel transactions recovered 26 percentage points versus the 21 percentage points for air transactions. So we continue to see hotel outperforming air. You'll also see on the page here the dynamic in domestic and international travel has shifted in the last few months as restrictions in many areas around the world have been relaxed or removed completely. You'll see now the international recovery has now largely caught up with domestic recovery for the first time since the onset of the pandemic. And then finally here on a regional basis, EMEA volumes have dramatically improved since January of this year and are currently leading the recovery. Our Asia-Pacific recovery has also continued to outperform. And that's due to, in particular for us, restrictions being removed in countries like Australia and Singapore. So moving on to the significant runway for growth that we have. And I mentioned, of course, our new wins earlier in today's presentation and our customer retention rate. We are the leader in a very large area. and very fragmented 1.4 trillion industry. And our value proposition continues to strengthen our leadership position. And we believe that the service and the savings that we are delivering right now in this environment is even more valuable to our customers. And we see it in the sales pipeline. It's more than 100% recovered versus 2019 pro forma. We're seeing very high levels of new wins worldwide and in many regions, record levels of new wins. So our new wins value, the win-loss ratio, and the momentum in SME, and the very stable high levels of customer retention, I think really underscore the strength of the value proposition that we're delivering to customers. Now, a very important part of that value proposition are the investments we're making to strengthen our product and technology solutions. Let's move on to talk about our product and tech innovation in the quarter. Delivering unrivaled value, choice, and experiences to customers supported by the powerful backing of MXTBT is what differentiates us in the market. And our product and technology investments play a significant role in ensuring that we deliver this value and deliver continued momentum across the business. let me highlight some of the product and tech achievements from q2 preferred extras is the unique negotiated rates that we have on our platform that deliver significant savings to our customers and we continue to extend all of the preferred extras content to the agency of platform delivering unrivaled value to agency customers we continue to invest bringing our customers on rival choice in the quarter we expanded our expert auditor pre-trip approval solution this allows us to accommodate more types of content improve the reporting and also make sure that there's better more consistent messaging out to travelers around the world we discussed this area before it's very important to us we continue to invest in serving customers in their channel of choice we've extended our servicing capabilities our ai chat capabilities to include WhatsApp, Google Chat, and Apple Business Chat. And in addition, in the quarter, the agency of customers can now be serviced within the Slack channel. We make new gender-neutral non-binary choices available in Neo, our digital travel and expense platform. We also enhance the Amex GBT mobile app experience with single sign-on capabilities. and the continued rollout of our AI chat automation, including the introduction of the virtual assistant to our clients in the UK. So all of these features are very important in helping us to deliver an unrivaled experience to our travelers. Finally, here we continue to improve the efficiency and the agility of our platforms. Recent highlights include the completion of the migration of all Amex GBT applications to the public cloud. which allows us to deliver faster deployment of new capabilities and improve the efficiency of our overall technology performance. We also completed the deployment of the OneGBT platform to our primary markets. Now, the OneGBT platform, as the name suggests, creates one standard, simplified travel counselor toolset that improves the efficiency, and the consistency of the service we deliver around the world, again, improving the customer experience. So that completes my review of the second quarter highlights. I'd like to hand it over to Martine to review how we're accelerating our earnings power through the agency of synergies and the permanent cost savings, and of course, to review the Q2 financial results in more detail. So Martine, over to you.