H&R Block, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the H&R Block first quarter fiscal 2021 earnings 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 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host, Vice President, Finance and Investor Relations, Colby Brown. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss our first quarter fiscal 2021 results. On the call today are Jeff Jones, our President and CEO, and Tony Bowen, our CFO. We posted today's press release on the Investor Relations website at hrblock.com. Also on the website, you will find a link for the webcast containing today's presentation, which will be posted after this call. Some of the figures that we'll discuss today are presented on a non-GAAP basis. We've reconciled the comparable GAAP and non-GAAP figures in the schedules attached to our press release. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I will remind everyone that this call will include forward-looking statements as defined under the securities laws. Such statements are based on current information and management expectations as of this date and are not guarantees of future performance. Forward-looking statements involve certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict. As such, our actual outcomes and results could differ materially. You can learn more about these risks in our Form 10-K for fiscal 2020 and our other SEC filings. H&R Block undertakes no obligations to publicly update these risk factors or forward-looking statements. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, we'll have a Q&A session. During Q&A, we ask that participants limit themselves to one question with a follow-up, after which they may choose to jump back into the queue. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jeff. Thank you, Colby. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. When we last talked, we were in the middle of what was the most unique tax season in history. The pandemic resulted in the first-ever extension of the filing deadline and changes to nearly every aspect of our operating model. Throughout the season, our teams demonstrated agility and resilience. We adapted to an ever-changing environment, and we delivered for our clients when they needed us the most. The result was a strong finish, growing revenue 300% in the quarter and serving more clients than last tax season. We've also made progress in other areas of our business. Our results at Wave have steadily improved. as they've returned to double-digit percentage revenue growth following the initial disruption caused by the pandemic. After the close of the quarter, we also successfully issued long-term debt and signed an important agreement with MetaBank to be the provider of our suite of financial products. These developments have resulted in a great start to our fiscal year, as we continue to build positive momentum in the business. With that backdrop, there's obviously a lot of ground to cover on today's call. First, I'll talk about the recently completed tax season, providing perspectives on both our performance and the overall industry. Then I'll give some thoughts on the progress we're making on our strategic roadmap. Tony will then discuss our Q1 results and share high-level thoughts on the balance of fiscal 21. He'll also provide an update on our capital structure, including details on our recently completed debt offering, and we'll talk about our agreement with META. I'd like to start with the tax season. The majority of the season took place while the country was dealing with the pandemic. We navigated the various state and local orders and took steps to promote the safety and well-being of our associates and clients. A significant number of our offices were closed, and those that weren't moved to a drop-off model. with limited in-person interaction with our clients. The reality is that from mid-March to the end of the season, there has been no such thing as business as usual in any of our offices. This was especially true during the May through July timeframe, with around half of our offices closed and those that were open subject to various local orders. And while this time has been challenging, we've looked at it as an opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to our clients and community. Additionally, we accelerated our efforts to transform our tax business as we innovate to deliver expertise to consumers in new and exciting ways. The capabilities we've built to enable clients to digitally drop off their forms, interact with tax pros virtually, review their returns online, and sign and pay remotely, provide them with the expertise they wanted when they weren't comfortable with in-person service or when our offices were closed. And these innovations helped us engage with our DIY clients in new ways, bringing our expertise to life within our software offering. In total, our digitally enabled returns grew over 150%. It's clear that consumers are taking notice of how the expanded H&R Block platform is bringing digital capabilities to those who want assistance and on-demand human help to those who prefer to use software to file. Turning to category results, I'll start with our assisted business. We had a strong start to the tax season as we were tracking to our goals of improving our client trajectory and holding market share. Because of the impact of the pandemic and the changes we made to our operating model, we anticipated a decline in volume as well as the loss of market share. Our results, however, were strong as we finished with a small share loss. This is attributable to the agility and resilience of our associates, tax pros, and franchisees that I mentioned earlier, as well as the digital efforts I just discussed. In DIY, we also finished strong. Online growth was 10.6%. which led to total DIY return growth of 8% as we held share in the category when excluding stimulus returns. Our product continues to evolve and win accolades from third parties. And our clients love the experience as well, as net promoter scores improved again following a significant increase in the previous season. We're also seeing this in our retention rates, which improved over two points. Our strategy in DIY is working. We're pricing competitively, providing tremendous value, and people are taking notice as we continue to drive awareness. Turning to the industry, it's important to consider two key factors when reviewing the data. First, there were millions of people who filed tax returns solely for the purpose of receiving stimulus payments. we believe there are between 7 million to 8 million returns with $1 of income and are being tracked as stimulus filers. However, there are likely more who filed solely for the purpose of receiving a stimulus payment but reported additional income, making the exact number of stimulus filers unknown. The second factor to consider is paper filings, which fluctuated significantly during the last few weeks of the season, making that key piece of the puzzle unreliable regardless of these two variables there were a couple of significant learnings from this season the first is that the industry itself is strong the tax refund which is typically the largest financial transaction for most americans each year became even more important to people as they were adversely impacted by the pandemic and second The assisted category is resilient. Given the various stay-at-home orders, mandates for business to close, and the general fear of physical interaction caused by the virus, many expected a dramatic decline in assisted filings. Instead, we saw just a 40 basis point decline in assisted e-files and a moderate change in mix between assisted and DIY when excluding the estimated number of one-time stimulus filings. In fact, during the pandemic, from mid-March through mid-July, assisted filings actually increased 50 basis points, which is telling considering the circumstances. With this tax season behind us, I'd like to look ahead and provide some thoughts on our strategy. As I mentioned earlier, the work of digitally enabling our business was a key enabler of our success this year. In other words, the investments we made allowed us to adjust our operating model while still providing the expertise and service our clients expect. And these capabilities will continue to benefit us in the future. Looking ahead, our strategy is evolving and will go beyond the digital efforts we've undertaken in our tax business. We continue to evaluate and reprioritize our strategic imperatives and examine our cost structure as we remain focused on growing volume, revenue, and earnings over time. When we speak in December, we'll have more to share in addition to providing our outlook for fiscal 21. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Tony.

Thanks, Jeff. Good afternoon, everyone. With the strong finish to the tax season, our fiscal year is off to a great start. Today I'll share our results for the quarter, thoughts on the remainder of fiscal 21, an update on our capital structure, and finally, some color around our recent agreement with MetaBank. Due to our seasonality, we typically report lower revenues and a net loss during our first quarter. This quarter's results, however, improved due to the significant tax return volume during the months of May, June, and July. Before jumping into the financials, I thought it would be helpful to provide some context on our volume and net average charge performance, which we reported in late July, as well as an update on WAVE. In tax, we posted overall volume growth in the US for the third consecutive year, with a 3.3% increase in returns. This was led by continued strength in our DIY business, with a 10.6% increase in online filings. In assisted, Given that we had approximately half of our total network open and those offices were operating under a modified model, we expected a decline in return volume and a loss of market share. Our finish to the tax season was strong, however, resulting in a decline in returns of just 2.8% and a small share loss. Regarding pricing, our net average charge in DIY declined due to mix, as well as our decision to keep our free state filing promotion through the end of the tax season. In Assisted, we targeted flat net average charge coming into the year, though saw a slight decrease due to mix in our company offices, partially offset by improved pricing in our franchise network. Turning to Wave, during last quarter's call, we talked about the impact of the pandemic has had on small businesses and consequently Wave's growth trajectory. Following a couple months of flat year-over-year revenue, I'm pleased to report that we've seen progressively better results in the subsequent months, resulting in year-over-year growth of nearly 20% during the quarter. Considering the circumstances, this was a tremendous outcome and a positive sign that Waze's innovative platform continued to provide value to small business owners. The increase in tax filing volume and Waze's contribution resulted in revenue of $601 million in the fiscal first quarter, an increase of $451 million, or 300% compared to the prior year. This improvement in revenue resulted in higher variable operating expenses, primarily in tax pro compensation and credit card transaction fees. While we anticipated this increase, it was lower than expected as we managed labor more efficiently. In addition to the variable expenses, we spent more in marketing due to the tax season extension. These increases were partially offset by other expense reductions. resulted in an overall increase in operating expenses of just 30% to $448 million. Interest expense increased $11 million as a result of our line of credit being fully drawn, which I'll discuss later. The net result of revenues increasing at a greater rate than expenses was pre-tax income from continuing operations of $124 million, compared to last year's pre-tax loss of $207 million. which is typical for our fiscal first quarter. GAAP earnings per share improved to 48 cents compared to a prior year loss of 72 cents, while non-GAAP EPS improved to 55 cents compared to a loss of 66 cents. In discontinued operations, there were no changes to accrued contingent liabilities related to Sand Canyon during the quarter. For additional information on Sand Canyon, please refer to disclosures in the company's reports on forms 10-K and 10-Q and other SEC filings. With that recap of the quarter, let me provide some perspective on our expectations for fiscal 21. Before doing so, please note that our expectations assume next tax season is completed by the normal filing deadline of mid-April. Overall, we expect to see a significant increase in revenue and cash flow this fiscal year, not just compared to fiscal 20, but also in comparison to a typical year. This is due to both the carryover of tax season 20 into our first quarter and our expectation for a normal tax season 21. In addition to achieving these increases, we are also focused on driving cost efficiencies in order to fund our growth imperatives. These reductions include a hiring freeze, the elimination of merit increases, examining vendor spend, renegotiating rent across our retail footprint, and limiting capital expenditures. So hopefully that provides helpful context. We will provide more details during our Q2 call in December. I'll now turn to capital allocation in the balance sheet. Despite the unique circumstances related to the pandemic, our capital allocation priorities remain the same. At the top of the list is maintaining adequate liquidity for operational needs. We then look to make strategic investments back into the business to drive growth. Finally, we return excess capital to shareholders through dividends and opportunistic share repurchases. Given our priorities are unchanged, there are four specific areas I'd like to provide additional clarity on given recent events. Our line of credit, the recent issuance of long-term debt, our dividend, and future share repurchases. Let's start with our line of credit. At the onset of the pandemic, we drew down the full balance of the line to maximize our liquidity given the uncertainty. The draw had a six-month interest lock, which matures this month. Given the strong finish to the tax season, we had a cash position of $2.6 billion at the end of the quarter, and as such intend to pay down the full balance of the draw later this month. We anticipate returning to our normal cycle of seasonal borrowings on our line of credit later this calendar year as we head into the upcoming tax season. In addition, given the strength of our financial performance in the first quarter, We met our debt covenants and currently expect to be in compliance going forward. Turning to our recent debt offering, I'm pleased with our successful issuance of $650 million of 10-year notes at a coupon of 3.875%. We intend to use the proceeds of these notes to retire existing debt that matures in October. This was a positive result for us as we're replacing 5-year notes with 10-year notes at a lower interest rate. It's also a sign that investors have confidence in our future. Moving on to our dividend, we have continued our streak of paying quarterly dividends consecutively since going public nearly 60 years ago. As we've shared in the past, we evaluate our dividend after each fiscal year, which we did in June. This review resulted in us maintaining the dividend at its current level. To be abundantly clear, we have no plans to change our dividend payout level for the balance of this fiscal year. Our next evaluation of the dividend will be in June of next year, and while we cannot guarantee future dividend payments or what the level of dividend would be at that time, we do have a goal of increasing the dividend over the long term, as evidenced by the 30% increase over the past five years. Finally, turning to share repurchases, we have decided to resume our practice of repurchasing shares to offset dilution from equity grants. Consistent with prior practice, we will not discuss potential additional share repurchases other than mentioning they would be done opportunistically. The last thing I'd like to discuss today is the agreement we reached with MetaBank to be the provider of our financial products, including refund transfer, refund advance, emerald advance, and emerald card. MetaBank is a leader in providing financial solutions to consumers and has significant experience in the tax preparation industry. We've worked with Meta in the past and know them to be an excellent partner. Both of our teams are hard at work to make the transition as seamless as possible for our clients. From a financial perspective, we expect this agreement to result in savings of $25 to $30 million on a run rate basis, though that number will be approximately $10 million lower in fiscal 21 as we are transitioning mid-year and will incur some one-time expenses. In summary, we are off to a great start this fiscal year. We recently had a successful debt issuance and are excited to be partnering with Meta for years to come. I'm looking forward to sharing more with you regarding our expectations for the fiscal year in December. With that, I will now turn the call back over to Jeff.