TELUS International (Cda) Inc. Subordinate Voting Shares

good morning ladies and gentlemen welcome to the telus international first quarter 2022 investor call my name is jonathan and i will be your conference facilitator today at this time all lines have been placed on mute to avoid background noise after the speaker's remarks there will be a question and answer period if you would like to ask a question during this time please press star and the number one on your telephone keypad if you would like to withdraw your question please press the pound 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 Q1 2022 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, 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 would 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 considered to be useful in assessing our company's underlying business performance. An explanation of these non-GAAP measures and a 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 and regulatory filings available on CDAR and EDGAR. 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 Burek.

Thank you, Jason. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share that TELUS International has started 2022 on a very strong note. delivering a robust 19% year-over-year increase in revenue, 21% on a constant currency basis, with leading profitability and triple-digit cash flow growth. Also of note, this revenue growth achievement was organic and not flattered by prior M&A, such as our claimant acquisition, which was primarily a software platform focused on enhancing our AI computer vision capabilities. Our results are all the more meaningful when you consider our company's non-trivial scale. Moreover, we also welcomed a record 5,800 new team members to our Telus International family in Q1 to meet the acceleration in client demand that we continue to drive. On that front, we continue to see exceptional growth in Q1 with clients across our key verticals, such as e-commerce and fintech in particular, which is continuing to build significant scale, growing 40% over last year. That said, our flagship tech and games vertical was once again the highest contributor in absolute dollars this quarter, representing 47% of our revenues. The sustained meaningful growth within our tech and games vertical was largely driven by cross-selling opportunities realized by our Telus International AI data solutions team. This success was made possible because of the effective integration of Lionbridge AI and Playment that we achieved in 2021 and the focused execution of our purposeful strategy of going to market as one team. These efforts have also manifested exciting business opportunities that we've successfully secured with new clients. In that regard, our global sales team worked diligently to win new logos, and in the first quarter, we welcomed several new and exciting clients, including a major tech-enabled disruptor in the real estate space, a fast-growing fintech company, and a leading travel portal in Germany. Equally impressive are the multi-million dollar expansions in scope, services, and scale with many of our existing valued clients. Among the more notable here are our largest client, a leading social media company, and our third largest client, Google, in addition to the world's largest e-commerce company, a leading North American financial institution, and a global consumer electronics company, to name but a few. To help bring our services and technology to life, I'd like to take you through a few examples of how we are helping our clients. First up, TELUS is helping our clients develop a well-rounded approach to trust and safety as part of its broader customer experience strategy. This case study involves the work we do for a major global e-commerce brand that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer transactions through its website and smartphone application. Buyers and sellers utilizing their e-commerce platform expect to complete transactions in a safe and secure environment, and our customer wants to eliminate or at least mitigate possible fraudulent activity whilst meeting ever-evolving government regulations. With an expanding user base and growing number of listings, our client was looking to expand fraud prevention measures within its German-based operations in particular. This engagement also included the removal of copyrighted material as well as customer support for a newly implemented payment option. Additionally, the client was looking for a way to mitigate the risks involved with new German tax laws that hold online platform owners responsible for its commercial users' tax registration. This was a multifaceted engagement with a need for a holistic approach to trust and safety. Hundreds of our team members across four of our centers of excellence in Germany support this client with our fraud prevention specialists who focus on recognizing counterfeit goods, identifying the unauthorized sale of copyrighted materials, and removing illicit listings when required. Our team members also deliver broader CX support for both sellers and buyers utilizing our client's platform, including providing guidance with licensing and educating sellers on jurisdiction-specific tax requirements. As I mentioned, we also led this client's project in introducing a new payment method with our team members playing an integral role in educating the client's customers on the benefits of transitioning to the new payment system. In fact, we were this client's very first outsourcing partner in the payment space. Our team members on this account have an average tenure of nine years, and it's thanks to our team's consistently high quality of service that Telus International continues to strengthen the relationship with its global clients over the past 11 years. Our next example focuses on our AI-powered data solutions and involves a leading artificial intelligence company that serves the national security sector with a focus on robotics. This client's data is primarily used to detect suspicious activity, and our team was engaged to assist with annotating object detection and tracking data collected via drones. The challenge for our client was the poor quality of the original images collected as they were often distorted and required model assisted correction and high precision labeling. Our team solved this problem by enabling model assisted brightness correction for easier labeling through an algorithm that automatically fixed images for better clarity to support faster and more accurate labeling. We also set up seamless data pipeline integrations to upload images onto our proprietary labeling platform. We ran the real-time human-in-the-loop labeling processes, delivering faster labeling with our high-precision 2D and 3D tools. We were also able to track productivity real-time with custom dashboards that provided robust annotator productivity and performance analytics. The work at hand encompassed the labeling of 150,000 3D point cloud frames, the creation of 6 million cuboids, and the annotation of 20,000 video frames in the span of only six months. In addition to a timely delivery of the assets, we achieved a more than 95% accuracy rate for the 3D point cloud annotations and cuboid creations and more than 98% accuracy across 90 hours of video content. Our third client example illustrates how we effectively bring together our team in AI data solutions and digital solutions for a differentiated 360 degree approach to value creation for our clients. Prior to the acquisition, Our now rebranded AI data solutions team had been supporting one of our largest clients, a leading technology company with a global media platform, delivering exceptional search relevance solutions. In addition to that, our digital solutions team played an instrumental role in the development and implementation of a wellness strategy for this client aimed at supporting content evaluators faced with potentially sensitive or difficult content. With Telus International's expertise in managing our own content moderation, and AI community talent located across the globe, we developed one of the first global wellness programs for this client, incorporating industry best practices tailored to the unique confines of the search relevance program. The first phase of the project introduced a third-party wellness support provider who offered both counseling services and an online platform of resources, both web-based and app-based, to support the mental health and well-being of the AI community. The second phase involved targeted support for those who had flagged potential issues during the course of their workday. This included personalized reminders of support and customized training around the management of difficult content. The third phase introduced a proprietary resilience training program, arming remote content evaluators with the tools to proactively overcome workplace stressors. The positive results from the program contributed to an overall well-being awareness score of 96%, and a 98% satisfaction rating for the AI community as a whole. And in turn, the content evaluation program delivered strong business outcomes for the clients with exceptional quality scores and consistently impressive month-over-month attrition metrics. As you might anticipate, Telus International eats our own gourmet cooking as we look to innovate and strive to automate what should be automated in our own operations as well as with and for our clients. One such example is our digital seeds program, pursuant to which we provide every client with access to bots built by TI that greatly improve our own team members' productivity, thereby benefiting both our clients and our own bottom line. Self-service and automation in the area of enterprise data warehousing is another good example, ensuring efficient communication between our operations and corporate teams with continuous data flow through streamlined loading and data integration processes, making needed data available quickly for analysis using business intelligence tools. TI's ability to innovate and continuously improve our own productivity comes down to our individual team members, their desire to take ownership of finding ever better ways to serve customers by using technology and digital tools, many of which are built right here at TI in our iLabs group. Here, too, our unique corporate culture plays an important role. Innovative ideas originate from our diversity, inclusion, and equity efforts. To that end, we have an internal IT app store that showcases all our homegrown solutions available for team members and also serves as a portal where team members can submit their own app ideas or flag an area for improvement for an app featured in the virtual store that can be taken into consideration during subsequent app development and broader implementation initiatives. Our team members' ability and inclination to embrace innovation and technology has served as a critical factor in our successful transition to remote work throughout the prolonged pandemic. As of March 31st, approximately 70% of our global frontline team members continue working from home, along with the rest of the world, as we're experiencing site reopenings and the elimination of certain restrictions and mask mandates in many of the regions where we operate. For example, in the Philippines, We continue to steadily and successfully transition our team members back to working in our world-class facilities with an ongoing focus on ensuring their health and safety to enhance the workstation, common area sanitation protocols, and other measures introduced during the pandemic. Contrary to some of our peers in the region, we made the purposeful decision to uphold our facilities lease commitments throughout the pandemic. Our reasoning was threefold. Firstly, we anticipated that although our pivot to virtual work was successful, our team members would likely need physical spaces again one day. Back in 2020, we weren't certain if our sites would be used for work, repurposed to connect socially, or reimagined to create more moments of collaboration, innovation, alignment, and community, but we knew that we wanted to have the spaces available to explore different opportunities, including hybrid work environments. It's a journey that continues today as we work to refine how we embed flexibility into our environment for our teams now and into the future. Secondly, we wanted to ensure we maintained maximum flexibility in how we're able to serve the unique and varied needs of our diverse clients. This includes how and where they want to be served and having the ability to rapidly scale. These are significant competitive advantages over our peers without adequate physical space when it comes to expanding our new and existing client relationships and winning new business. Thirdly, as a global organization that operates in 28 countries around the world, we're often the largest employer or among the largest in many regions. We recognize our responsibility in that regard and understand that our business decisions can have ripple effects for families, communities, cities, and even broader global environments. as such our decisions aren't solely based on our needs or cost savings over the short term they're about the long-term sustainable health of the ecosystem in which we operate and although ti does not have delivery locations or clients in ukraine russia or belarus our entire global family has also been closely monitoring the invasion of ukraine since the beginning our team has shown incredible support and solidarity from collecting essential goods to volunteering and making donations. Our strength has always been in local community support with hearts and hands coming together close to where help is needed most. Our regional teams in Bulgaria, Turkey, Finland, Ireland, France, Romania, and other sites across Northern Europe organize numerous activities. Their individual acts of kindness, support, and donations are truly inspiring and epitomize our caring culture. TELUS International has also contributed to various humanitarian relief efforts spread across local charities and programs carefully identified by our European colleagues to make the most direct and meaningful impact. In addition to the generous donations made by our parent company, TELUS Corporation, and including the TELUS Future Friendly Foundation, TELUS community boards, the matching of team donations and customer giving, and in-kind donations, the joint support of the TELUS broader organization amounts to more than three and a half million Canadian dollars and counting. On our last quarterly call, I shared our environmental, social and governance approach and priorities, focused on our team members, our communities, supporting a sustainable planet for all and adhering to strong corporate governance. As a follow-up to that discussion, I want to call out that on April 13th, TELUS International published our inaugural annual report with integrated environmental, social and governance reporting for the first time as a public company. There's a wealth of information and good context for you to dive deeper into our ESG philosophy and focus areas to be found there. And finally, before I turn the call, excuse me, over to Vanessa, I'd like to highlight just some of the industry recognition that TELUS International received in the first quarter. Our company was ranked a leader in the Nelson Hall 2022 NEAT assessment for CX operations transformation, including across all three of the evaluation subcategories of revenue generation, CX improvement, and cost optimization. Additionally, we were pleased to be included once again on the IAOP Global Outsourcing 100 list for the sixth consecutive year. This list reflects the best outsourcing providers across size and growth, customer references, awards and certifications, programs for innovation, and corporate social responsibility. And we were named one of Mogul's top 100 companies for Diverse Representation in 2022. This award recognizes companies that are leading the way with respect to investing in resources and tools and implementing practices that support hiring diverse talent and placing diverse leaders throughout their organizations. These accolades, as in previous quarters, were made possible by our passionate and dedicated team members' exemplary commitments to one another, to our clients, and to the many communities where we operate. And I want to take this opportunity to thank them all once again for their extraordinary accomplishments. Thank you, team. With that, I'll now invite our Chief Financial Officer, Vanessa Canu, to take you through a detailed review of our financial results, after which I'll attune to answer your questions. Vanessa, over to you.