WNS (Holdings) Limited

the WNS Holdings Fiscal 2022 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions for how to ask a question will follow at that time. As a reminder, this call is being recorded for replay purposes. Now, I would like to turn the call over to David Mackey, WNS's Executive Vice President of Finance, and Head of Investor Relations. David?

Thank you, and welcome to our fiscal 2022 second quarter earnings call. With me today on the call, I have WNS' CEO, Keshav Muragesh, WNS' CFO, Sanjay Puriya, and our COO, Gautam Burai. A press release detailing our financial results was issued earlier today. This release is also available on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.wns.com. Today's remarks will focus on the results for the fiscal second quarter ended September 30, 2021. Some of the matters that will be discussed on today's call are forward-looking. Please keep in mind that these forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those factors set forth in the company's Form 20F. This document is also available on the company website. During this call, management will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe provide useful information for investors. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP results can be found in the press release issued earlier today. Some of the non-GAAP financial measures management will discuss are defined as follows. Net revenue is defined as revenue less repair payments. Adjusted operating margin is defined as operating margin excluding amortization of intangible assets, share-based compensation, and goodwill impairment. Adjusted net income, or ANI, is defined as profit excluding amortization of intangible assets, share-based compensation, goodwill impairment, and all associated taxes. These terms will be used throughout the call. I would now like to turn the call over to WNS's CEO, Keshav Muragesh. Keshav?

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone. Our fiscal second quarter results continue to highlight our differentiated positioning in the BPM marketplace and our solid execution. Net revenue for Q2 came in at $254.4 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 18.7% on a reported basis, and 16.2% on constant currency. Sequentially, net revenue increased by $18.1 million or 7.7% on a reported basis and 8.5% constant currency. In the second quarter, the company added eight new logos and expanded 32 existing relationships. Hiring was once again strong in support of these contracts with the company adding more than 2,500 employees during this quarter. WNS posted strong adjusted operating margins of 21.8% and adjusted EPS grew 17.8% year over year. Sanjay will provide further details on our second quarter financial performance in his prepared remarks. This quarter, I wanted to take some time to discuss digital transformation in the BPM industry and how WNS has positioned itself to help clients leverage digital capabilities to better compete. Last month, we released the results of a joint survey conducted with Corinium, which polled 101 executives across industries to assess the state of the digital transformation journeys they were going through. The result clearly highlights that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation trends across the front, middle, and back office processes. Today, executives are looking to deploy the latest digital technologies to drive enhanced customer experience streamline operations, and improve decision-making through data and analytics. However, while 97% of the survey respondents claim they have started working on their digital transformation strategies, most acknowledge that they are still early in this process and that in many cases, they lack the needed data governance and cybersecurity foundations to properly leverage, technology, and automation. In addition, they also note that many of the technology capabilities required to accomplish their end goals, like intelligent automation, are still works in progress. The survey reinforces precisely what WNS is seeing in our business today, that the pace of adoption for digital process transformation is accelerating. and there is a massive opportunity in the coming years to help both new and existing clients with their transformation agendas. As you are aware, WNS has been investing in digital transformation to continue building our portfolio of solutions to meet this trend. Key investments include our co-creation and innovation labs, specialized centers of excellence, industry-specific digital offerings, and perhaps most importantly, the ongoing shift towards digital in our global workforce. We are excited to announce that WNS has recently opened two new state-of-the-art co-creation and innovation labs in London and New York. These centers help us engage directly with our clients via collaborative, leading-edge, digitally-focused workshops. The labs, which are being used virtually during the pandemic, enable WNS to better understand our clients' key challenges, opportunities, threats, and future requirements so that we can co-create tailored solutions designed to solve critical business problems and also meet their digital transformation needs. In addition to the innovation labs, WNS is also building function-specific centers of excellence, or what we call COEs, which combine our industry expertise and best practices, the latest digital technologies, and dedicated subject matter experts to create specialist teams that design and implement digital transformation solutions for our clients. To date, we have rolled out nine of these knowledge hubs, including insurance claims, retail banking, healthcare medical bill review, supply chain, cargo, and collections, and we plan to add an additional seven centers in the next 12 months. The combination of our COEs, innovation labs, and differentiated vertical structure is enhancing our ability to create industry-specific programs digital accelerators and solutions. These very unique offerings, which are resonating well with both existing clients as well as new prospects, allow companies to fast track their shift to digital with a ready-to-go solution. To date, we have created capabilities in key areas, including patient care management, insurance underwriting, customer experience, and data management. Many of these new offerings apply our disruptive domain-driven hyper-automation strategy that accelerates the adoption and scaling of real end-to-end digital transformation to deliver a step change in business performance. This advanced and future-ready solution brings together our industry, operations, and agile expertise with a flexible and leading-edge digital orchestration platform. The overall solution harnesses the power of intelligent data processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and APIs to deliver digital transformations for our clients, which in turn drive meaningful improvements in customer experience and business outcomes. One final area of digital transformation investment I would like to discuss is our global workforce as evidenced by the expansion of both our strategic hiring and talent management programs. Over the past few quarters, we have continued to add both depth and breadth to our digital transformation teams. We have created an experienced onshore digital transformation consulting team and advisory team in all of our key markets, including North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Client demand for these consultative capabilities is very high, and these teams are directly leading to new logo additions and relationship expansions. WNS will continue to build this team over the next several quarters in order to meet the growing transformation opportunity and further strengthen our strategic client alignment and relationships. We are also hiring key resources for our global digital transformation teams with a mix of highly specialized skills, including human-based design, user experience, organizational change management, agile methodologies, cognitive or AI, intelligent automation, computer vision, and data-driven transformation. The WNS transformation teams now cover all our verticals and horizontal units, and we have experienced leaders in place working directly with clients to assess, solution, develop, and drive this digital transformation. We are also investing in the reskilling and upskilling our global workforce for the digital world The WNS Education Learning Academy offers our employees the opportunity to become certified digital BPM professionals via both in-person as well as virtual classroom formats designed to broaden the capabilities of our people and create a digital-ready workforce. We have also created a digital futures training program designed to help middle-level and senior leaders build their digital acumen. This program is helping to improve discussions with clients regarding their strategic risks, opportunities and requirements. Through our strategic investments in people, solutions and technology, we are proactively shifting the overall profile of WNS. These investments will continue to expand in order to help our clients transform and manage their businesses to compete in a digital world. The good news is that our investments in digital transformation are resonating extremely well in this marketplace and are driving an expanded pipeline, healthy new logo addition, and differentiated value for our existing and current clients. Today, WNS has more than 40 digital transformations underway, with these clients, including 80% of our top 20 relationships. These transformation initiatives are across all our key verticals, geographies, and service offerings. Looking forward, we see an accelerating and expanding opportunity in the BPM space, driven by clients' need to leverage technology, analytics, and industry-specific expertise to transform their own business models and compete in their respective industries. While WNS is extremely well positioned to capitalize on this trend, we must continue to innovate, co-create, invest, and execute in order to deliver the business outcomes our clients require. We believe this approach has enabled WNS to generate industry-leading financial performance over the past several years and create sustainable value for all of our key stakeholders. I would now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Sanjay Puria, to further discuss our results as well as our outlook. Sanjay.