TELUS International (Cda) Inc. Subordinate Voting Shares

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Telus International fourth quarter 2021 investor call. My name is Jonathan. I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, all lines have been placed on mute to avoid any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer period. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, please press star, then the number one under your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press the pound or hash key. I would now like to introduce Jason Meyer, Senior Director, Investor Relations and Treasurer at TELUS International. Mr. Meyer, you may begin the call.

Thank you, Jonathan. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for TELUS International's Q4 2021 Investor Call. Hosting our call today are Jeff Puritt, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Vanessa Canu, our Chief Financial Officer. As usual, we will begin with some prepared remarks, where Jeff will provide an operational and strategic overview of the quarter and highlights for the year, followed by Vanessa, who will provide some key financial highlights. We will then open the line to questions from pre-qualified analysts before turning the call back to Jeff for his closing remarks. Before we begin, I'd like to direct your attention to slide two of the supplementary presentation available for download on this webcast. and also available on our website at telusinternational.com slash investors. The statements made during this call may be forward-looking in nature, including all comments reflecting expectations, assumptions or beliefs about future events or performance that do not relate solely to historical periods. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to differ materially from our current projections. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Jeff and Vanessa will also discuss certain non-GAAP measures that the management team consider to be useful in assessing our company's underlying business performance. An explanation of these non-GAAP measures and reconciliation to the comparable GAAP measures can be found in the appendices of today's supplementary presentation along with the earnings news release issued this morning. I would also like to remind everyone that all financial measures we're referencing on this call and in our disclosure are in U.S. dollars unless specified otherwise. and relate only to TELUS International results and measures. With that, I will now pass the call over to our President and CEO, Jeff Piratt.

Thank you, Jason. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. 2021 was a remarkable year for TELUS International. From our first day of trading on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges, the latter of which still represents the largest tech IPO in Canadian history, To the successful integration of our game changing AI services acquisitions, each one of us across our entire organization brought their very best to deliver on our growth strategy in 2021, despite the challenges of operating during a prolonged global pandemic. As our business continues to evolve, what has remained a constant is our team's unwavering commitment to service excellence for our clients and by extension to their customers. Equally important is our commitment to the care of our team members around the world. After all, it's these highly engaged and talented individuals that breathe life into the innovative solutions we design, build, and deliver for our more than 600 global clients. Our financial results reflect the success of our team's efforts with total revenue of $2.2 billion in 2021. This represents an impressive 39% growth rate versus 2020. Our profitability also remains robust with a 38% year-over-year increase in annual adjusted EBITDA and an annual EBITDA margin of 24.6% in 2021. Given the backdrop of the broader macroeconomic environment, including possible rising interest rates and continued pandemic uncertainty, we believe TI offers an attractive destination for capital and delivers real value to shareholders to our longstanding commitment to profitable growth and focus on cash flow. Our global sales team ended the year on a high note, adding several new marquee clients in Q4 and with a replenished sales funnel, once again comfortably in excess of $2 billion. Some of the exciting brands we welcome to Telus International in the fourth quarter include a top US wireless carrier, a rapidly growing Australian software company, a large manufacturer for the global PC gaming market and pioneer in modern computer graphics, and a leading American software developer for marketing, sales and customer service. We also expanded the scope and breadth of our engagements with many existing clients, including the world's largest e-commerce company, the world's largest technology company, one of the top American cryptocurrency exchange platforms, a digital banking services company, and one of the world's largest consumer electronics companies. These represent high quality, multi-million dollar, longer term growth opportunities with expected revenues ramping up throughout 2022 and beyond. I am so pleased to see that our team's consistent delivery is being rewarded with even more share of wallet from these large global brands, further solidifying our relationships with these valuable clients. I'll now turn to one of my favorite parts of these calls, sharing some specific examples that better illuminate and bring to life how we serve our clients. I'll begin with one of our clients where we started our relationship on the CX support side, but which has since evolved to include other services across our end-to-end design, build, deliver continuum. This particular project involves the enablement of database automation for a leading healthcare app that tracks the subscriber's food intake and exercise habits. Our team is helping to automate the client's nutrition information data by building a bot platform that enhances the search process for retrieving accurate nutritional data values for a variety of food items. We're also embedding an AI-powered categorization of each food item as per our client's predefined food groupings, and we set up automation tools to remove redundant food items from data queues. We also continue to partner with this client on our premium customer care support services, encompassing several regions and languages across our global team member base, meeting this client's increasing demand for high value support as they grow their business. Another engagement that I'll highlight was for a large Western Canadian utility company that required advisory services and support to manage its transition to a modernized Microsoft Exchange platform, and in particular, an upgraded email application. The client was seeking a partner that could ensure the stability and security of their technology infrastructure transformation while augmenting technical support in the process. Our team managed this project end-to-end, transitioning the client's environment to a hybrid of Exchange Online Office 365 and Exchange On-Prem. In total, our team successfully migrated over 13,000 mailboxes while concurrently managing the registration of nearly 6,000 users to mobile solutions, unlocking an enhanced user experience for their team members, all while leveraging Microsoft's modernized technology platform. I'd also like to share some recent examples of our AI-powered solutions in action. One of our clients is the leading flood mapping platform. designed to protect the world's most climate vulnerable communities. The client's in-house machine learning team built complex 2D and 3D semantic segmentation data sets to detect water bodies in urban areas with the satellite imagery collected using multiple sensors like radar and camera and in differing weather conditions. The original images collected by the client lacked consistency due to varying timestamps and included many distortions from sensors detecting water bodies and clouds. Our solution for this client included setting up data pipeline integrations via API connectors with the 2D and 3D sensor outputs uploaded to our proprietary labeling platform. We then provided real-time, human-in-the-loop data labeling, delivering faster and more accurate results with our high-precision 2D and 3D tools. We also ensured there were advanced quality process controls at each step. In total, our team accurately classified 100,000 documents in six months, labeled and transcribed 116,000 fields, and helped automate 80% of the process. As an outcome, our advanced quality control tools and expedient feedback mechanisms ensured 95% accuracy for all data labeling outputs. We're also supporting several AI-focused projects for the world's largest e-commerce company, tapping into our AI community of more than 1 million individuals to collect quality data for our clients to train its AI algorithms. One example involves our collection of ultrasound waves for audio and video data in participating homes across multiple countries. We use highly advanced and confidential hardware and software to capture sound waves in different scenarios. such as the noise from vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, blenders, and different kinds of music or radio, while participants perform common domestic actions like moving around their homes and cooking a meal. This is a very fast-paced project with many moving parts, all managed by our team, from the logistics, sourcing, and training efforts to setup and management of collection spaces, onboarding and training of local teams, data management, and quality assurance. For each country and scope, our team successfully recruits and trains local teams, and once a project starts, nearly every collection session requires a new technical setup, as the type of home, device, and its positioning need to be carefully managed to achieve quality data collection of very specific background noises for the client's database. This is a project that requires extreme attention to detail to ensure we meet the client's requirements for collection and delivery of high-quality data to help power our client's machine learning systems. For another client, one of the world's most popular video-focused social networking services, we transcribe and annotate short audio clips in multiple languages. The client uses our AI data as a critical input to train its transcription algorithms to improve the user experience on its network, to promote transparency and safety as it relates to the network's content, and to mitigate the risk of being banned in certain countries or regions due to content regulations that are continuously evolving. While this client has several partners within its ecosystem, we're particularly proud of the fact that our team continues to set the bar for quality extremely high as we've consistently received feedback that we are this client's top performing partner for this program in terms of quality, productivity, and brand reputation management. As the challenging pandemic environment persists, we continue to enable the vast majority of our team members to work remotely. At the end of 2021, approximately 75% of our global team members continue to work safely and productively from home. For many organizations, the pandemic brought to light the critical importance of building a supportive, resilient workplace with a focus on the wellness and safety of employees. I'm very proud to say that at Telus International, This has always been top of mind since our inception. Over many years, we've developed a unique and thoughtful approach to prioritizing the wellbeing of our team members. Driven by our caring culture, we've benefited from a very early recognition of the nuanced requirements for success in some of the more complex services we choose to provide, particularly in areas such as content moderation. Our unwavering commitment to our team's wellbeing is present in the numerous in-person and virtual programs and services we provide, as well as the amenities available in our sites, such as our fitness facilities and relaxation spaces, and the medical benefits that in many cases extend to our team members' families. Our holistic approach to health and well-being is guided by a global team of mental health and workplace wellness experts that include clinical psychologists and counselors who are employed full-time by our company. These individuals are available for in-person and virtual touchpoints to accommodate those working from home during the pandemic. These health and wellness programs and services, among many others, are available to our over 62,000 team members around the world. From our engineers, to our customer experience specialists, to our content moderators and beyond, we have support in place to help our team members remain healthy, safe, and able to thrive in the careers they choose at TI. We also continuously review and assess our wellbeing programs and evolve our approach. We recently appointed Dr. Lucy Rattree as Global Director of Workplace Wellbeing at TELUS International. Dr. Rattree is a leading chartered psychologist, researcher, and author, and she is a key contributor to ensuring TELUS International continues to keep ahead of our commitment to team members and enables us to arm them with all the tools and support they need to remain successful in their critical roles. Through an annual employee survey conducted by Concentric, a third-party organization with decades of experience in employee engagement, our company's global score in 2021 was over 80%, marking the eighth consecutive year that we are ranked in the top quartile of all organizations of comparable size and global footprint. We see the benefits of an engaged team shine through in the impressive results we've achieved to date, despite the unprecedented conditions we've been operating within since early 2020. I believe this is due to many years of hard work building and fostering our caring culture. On that note, I want to sincerely thank our team members for their enduring commitment to our organization and for their contributions to yet another highly successful year at TELUS International for our customers and for our communities where we live, work and serve. Indeed, harnessing our team's minds, hearts and hands to make a difference on our planet's biggest challenges while partnering with clients who feel the same way is the basis of our environmental social governance approach. At this end, our four ESG priorities at TELUS International are one, hiring, motivating, and promoting our diverse, talented team who exceed customer expectations. For example, currently 48% of TI's workforce are women. with women representing 44% of managers and above 38% of our senior management team and 30% of our board. Two, giving back to our communities by creating a meaningful lasting impact through the efforts of our team members. In fact, since 2007, almost 225,000 TELUS international volunteers have impacted the lives of more than 250,000 people. through TELUS International's corporate social responsibility efforts. Three, supporting a sustainable planet for all, where we continue to see a decline in our company's greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption. And four, adhering to principles of strong corporate governance. TELUS International will continue to be driven by ESG priorities and principles, and I look forward to progressing our holistic and strategic approach in this regard. And lastly, Through the remarkable efforts of our team, we also continue to be recognized by third-party organizations, including just today, Telus International was named a leader on global industry analyst firm Nelson Hall's customer experience operations transformation NEAT report. The assessment evaluated each company's use of design thinking and the application of digital first principles and technologies, among other capabilities, to transform their clients' customer experience. Moreover, In December, TELUS International was named a leader on IDC's worldwide digital customer care services 2021 to 2022 marketscape. Again, external validation of our team's focus on and passion in delighting our clients. With that, I'll now pass the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Vanessa Canoe, to take you through our financial results. And then, as always, I'll be back on the line to answer your questions. Vanessa, over to you.