MultiPlan Corporation

or earnings call. My name is Harry, and I will be your operator today. All lines are currently in a listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for Q&A after management's prepared remarks. If you would like to enter the queue for questions, please dial star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Shauna Gassick, AVP of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Harry. Good morning, and welcome to Multiplane's third quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining me today is Travis Dalton, Chief Executive Officer, and Doug Garrett, Chief Financial Officer. Jerry Ho, Chief Operating Officer, will be available for the Q&A session. The call is being webcast and will be accessed through the investor relations section of our website at multiplan.com. During our call, we will refer to the supplemental slide deck that is available on the investor relations portion of our website, along with the third quarter 2024 earnings press release issued earlier this morning. Before we begin, a couple reminders. Our remarks and responses to questions may include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements represent management's beliefs and expectations only as of the date of this call. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to a number of risks. A summary of these risks can be found on the second page of the supplemental slide deck and a more complete description on our annual report on Form 10-K and other documents we file through the SEC. We will also be referring to several non-GAAP measures, which we believe provide investors with a more complete understanding of Multisans' underlining operating rules. An explanation of these non-GAAP measures and reconciliation to their comparable GAAP measure can be found in the earnings press release and in the supplemental slide deck. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Travis Dalton. Travis?

Thank you, Shawna, and good morning to all of you on the call. Thank you for your time on this important election day in the U.S., Voting is one of the most cherished rights we enjoy as Americans, so I hope everyone gets out to the polls to cast their votes today before they close. Good luck. Today, I'd like to report out on the state of Multiplan through the third quarter of this year and provide a brief update on our multiyear transformation journey to becoming a world-class data, insights, and technology company. The latter incorporates changes we are seeing in the healthcare industry and a unique position that Multiplan has built over decades to help our clients drive value through networks, increased transparency, and reduced costs by using our products. As you can see from our earnings released this morning, our third quarter results were within our guidance range for both revenues and adjusted EBITDA. During the quarter, we executed on some key wins with four new client logos and 165 closed opportunities, while reaching $6.4 billion in identified potential savings, a record quarterly achievement for Multiplans. We continue to make progress with our core product set, data products, new markets such as provider, and deepen client engagement with our payment and revenue integrity products. Finally, we continue to manage with discipline to ensure proper allocation of capital and management of operating expenses against our outlook. A paramount importance to us is continuing to add value to our long-time relationships, driving new market penetration, and using technology to automate. A couple examples include, first, we forged a stronger relationship with Sanford Health Plan, a valued client since 2017. For Sanford, we are implementing itemized bill review pre-screen, which will increase the claims volume we analyze. Sanford is also the first partner to sign up for our IBR end-to-end automation initiative for 2025, a service improvement project that will systematically identify cases and accelerate results to our clients. Second, we solidified a strategic alliance partnership with the National Rural Health Association. For NRHA, we identified four pilot sites to initiate our products with a focus on reduced costs, greater access to care, and greater price transparency. This important relationship is progressing quickly, and we see a great opportunity to extend Multi-Plan horizontally into this market. We are committed to access and care viability in rural America. Third, as a technology company, we continue to drive internal automation using advanced tools and technology. We have been investing in our NSA products and reducing friction and lag time to drive faster performance and keeping backlog low. This benefits our clients but also creates operating leverage and cost benefits for us to invest capital in other growth areas. Additionally, we have refocused the data and decision science group under a general manager structure to ensure maximum value. We are very excited to see the positive momentum from some initial wins as we develop a targeted approach for our go-to-market plan for these high-value products. Ben Insights, which drives transparency and affordability in healthcare by using analytics and insights to optimize employer benefit plans, has a broad addressable market covering employers, providers, and consultants, and we are seeing positive market response to this product. To demonstrate the fundamental value of Ben Insights, we apply the analytics tool set for our own company with material and positive results, both reducing costs and improving benefit design for our employees. Hard ROI-based capabilities aren't always easy to discern in healthcare. This is one example of where we can bring that kind of immediate benefit to our clients. We expect to be sharing more notable sales from this product suite on our next call. Finally, our ongoing focus on cost efficiency is generating bottom-line savings that Doug will detail in his update. But we need to and will do more. The core elements of today's multi-plan that I laid out on our last call still ring true and enable our transformational path. We have great clients, core products that bring real client and enterprise value, good cash flow, and strong talent. Our stable business base and new product capabilities also provide a solid financial foundation upon which we are seeking to holistically extend our capital structure and which will further position MultiPlan to drive profitable growth going forward. We continue to make progress across all aspects of the business, as we build towards our long-term vision for the company. We firmly believe that our healthcare expertise, our agility as an organization to embrace more rigorous and disciplined processes, our strong foundations built on decades of data and technology assets, and most importantly, our integrity as a market leader will sustain Multiplan's strategic advantage over time and bring tremendous value across the healthcare continuum. For our longtime clients, I say thank you. Also, rest assured, we will continue to enhance and innovate our existing product set. Our transformation is meant to increase discipline and apply a more rigorous process around organic product development to not only address our clients' current challenges and opportunities, but also the ones to come. This, along with lateral product expansion, strategic product bundles, and value-focused pricing plans, will provide a natural expansion of our total addressable market potential. After the progress of the transformation itself, we continue to organize around the operating principles of clarity of purpose, alignment of resources, and focus on accountability. I believe more and more that healthcare is at an inflection point with affordability as a key lever that only technology can address. The last decade was focused on digitization of data and interoperability. The future will be focused not just on data, but on actionable insights that increase transparency, reduce cost, and improve quality. The challenges are many. Healthcare consumers are demanding more than ever around data at their fingertips, transparency and less opaque pricing, higher quality, better tools and automation. The operators in healthcare are facing increased regulation, medical cost inflation, employer plan cost increases, skilled labor shortages, provider risk, M&A consolidation, and the divergence of payment rates between rural and urban providers. These are but a few examples. Against that landscape, the technology partners that can bring real insights and answers to one or more of these challenges will emerge the winners. We believe we have uniquely positioned ourselves over time. That's where our clarity of purpose lies. We uphold our unique position to combine data and technology with actionable insights that positively impact transparency, cost, and quality. In order to realize our clarity of purpose, we have created a devoted team and set of fully aligned resources. The biggest resource we have is our talent. We are focused on our cultural change management to instill a mindset of urgency, focused on sustainable growth, with reinforced emphasis on the rigor and discipline in our processes. Each of our associates knows our mantra when it comes to serving clients. They are at the center of everything we do. We listen, we serve, and we problem solve. And selling is problem solving. Thus, we all sell, and that's how we will deliver value-driven growth. I continue to be impressed by the level of talent we have inside the company, but also those that we have been able to attract. I think they all see the potential here. At this point, our senior management team has been solidified, with the recent addition of Doug Garris as our CFO, Tiffany Macinchuk joining as our chief growth officer, and longtime leader Sean Crandall with new responsibilities as the GM of our data and decision science business. I am very confident in our team, the diverse set of skills and experiences it represents, and our ability to lead multi-plan forward. We also stand ready with robust legal, corporate, and government affairs teams aligned to protect, defend, and educate. Along with the promotion of our general counsel, we've added leaders to all of these teams to work alongside our marketing, communications, and lobbying teams to protect and vigorously defend our company and be an effective thought leader on regulatory and policy matters. We want to have a voice and contribute. I will touch on these endeavors later on. Along with upgrading our human resources, we're also embarking on a transformation of our technology infrastructure to not only embrace the recent leaks, such as AI, but more importantly, to make our data and analytics capabilities more scalable and expandable to meet the product and solution needs of the market in the future. This will position us well in the decade of actionable insights. Doug will share some of these upgrades in his comments. I have said many times that you are what your record says you are. I am confident that we are taking the right steps to improve. Our focus is on how our results over the next couple of years will stack up against the transformation model that we have built. This model is made up of KPIs that signal our progress towards sustainable growth. These KPIs will focus on driving value in the core, aggressively competing to win in existing and new markets, operational excellence, talent acquisition, and innovation across our products and technology. As I mentioned on our last call, we launched a comprehensive evaluation of the company and financial potential forward. Out of that effort, we have created a fundamental business framework for our transformational journey called Vision 2030, which is a strategic, financial, and operational execution roadmap meant to drive our strategic KPIs. This will allow us to align the resources, capital, and goals of the company. It is the foundation for clarity, alignment, and focus in multi-plan going forward. This process is being led by Jerry Hogg, our Chief Operating Officer, and includes preserving and expanding the three core businesses, network, analytics, and payment and revenue integrity. Achieving the full revenue and value potential of the existing white space and market potential enabled through products from our HST acquisition, and diversifying the business by accelerating new revenue growth and product innovation across the data and decision sciences portfolio, like Ben Insights and RISC models. Clearly defining our products and the financial plan associated with each will allow us to organize our go-to-market teams and add needed sales talent with proper incentives to spur our growth forward. As I prepare to turn the call over to Doug, let me provide a quick update on our corporate and government affairs. The Verity decision in August was certainly an encouraging development in our ongoing vigorous defense of similar legal claims against us. We believe these legal claims against us are without merit, and we will continue to focus on our service and product delivery. We operate in a highly competitive environment, drive costs out of healthcare, reduce balance bills, and support the regulatory goals around transparency. In addition, we will continue to engage openly and collaboratively with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to educate them on our services and the positive impact we make on the healthcare system by reducing costs and increasing transparency, no matter the outcome of the election. You will hear more about this as we continue to make progress. Multi-Plan was built on sustainable core values of character and integrity, great client relationships, and decades of service. This forms our foundation. But make no mistake, we will be rapidly impacting change for the future. The evolution of our leadership team, modernized platform, and how we go to market as a data insights and technology leader in healthcare expands and transforms our brand vision. There will be more news to come soon on this new brand emergence. I wanted to reiterate that our third quarter was what we expected. albeit on the lower end. We expect fourth quarter to run similarly and hence have provided updated guidance ranges to reflect this expectation. We are working to refine our processes with rigor and discipline as we enact the Vision 2030 plan in our new fiscal year. While the business stabilization is expected to occur through the first half of 2025, we now have more visibility into its eventual outcome and impact on financial results. We will be presenting our updated 2025 outlook on our year-end earnings call scheduled for late February. With that, let me turn it over to Doug.