WNS (Holdings) Limited

Good morning and welcome to the WNS Holdings Fiscal 2022 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in 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 Investment Relations. David?

Thank you, and welcome to our fiscal 2022 third quarter earnings call. With me today on the call, I have WNS's CEO, Keshav Murugesh, WNS's 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 third quarter ended December 31, 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 20-F. 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 Murugesh. Keshav.

Thank you, David. And good morning, everyone. First of all, my sincere thanks to every one of our employees and their families, our clients, all other key stakeholders for their huge effort, their sacrifices, and their resilience during this ongoing pandemic, we sincerely appreciate it. In the fiscal third quarter, WNS continued to perform well and deliver solid financial results in an overall healthy BPM demand environment. Third quarter net revenue came in at $261.2 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 16.3% on a reported basis and 16.1% constant currency. Sequentially, net revenue increased by 2.6% on a reported basis and 3.4% constant currency. In the third quarter, the company added 11 new logos and expanded 26 existing relationships. WNS posted strong adjusted operating margin of 21.4%, and adjusted EPS grew 11.1% year-over-year. In addition, we have increased the midpoint of our full-year guidance to reflect constant currency revenue growth of 15% and EPS of $3.34. Sanjay will provide further details on our third quarter financial performance in his prepared remarks. This quarter, I wanted to highlight WNS's differentiation and solid momentum in our data and analytics practice. Specifically, I would like to discuss our strategic approach, new capabilities, the benefits we are delivering for our clients, and some key metrics for the business segment. WNS has already two decades of experience driving business outcomes through data and analytics for all our clients. Our analytics practice currently has over 4,000 domain data science and data engineering experts focused on servicing more than 120 clients, including leading brands across industries and geographies. We are focused on solving industry-specific problems by harnessing the power of data and analytics and co-creating data-driven transformational solutions with our clients. In fact, today we are seeing requirements for analytics as an integral part of every new digital BPO deal. Our data and analytics strategy has three key foundational pillars. in line with our overall corporate approach to BPM, the first key element is domain centricity. At WNS, we believe that a deep understanding of the client's specific business sector and subsector is critical to sourcing relevant data, developing and customizing algorithms, as well as AI learning models, and then translating the technical results into actionable insights for our clients. This approach also enables us to integrate and embed analytics into our broader industry-specific solutions, which address the end-to-end business requirements of our clients. Recently, we have helped a leading global retailer not only optimize their existing online advertising sales, but we have also created a completely new stream of revenue using AI-based personalizations. This unique solution was made possible by our core retail domain knowledge combined with our ability to develop personalization engines at scale. As a strategic partner, we are paid a percentage of all incremental revenues the solution is delivering. The second core component of our analytics strategy is technology-led innovation. WNS is focused on utilizing state-of-the-art cloud-based analytics and AI technology capabilities to enable data-driven business transformation for our clients. Now the importance of this pillar has rapidly increased over the past few years as customer expectations around creating differentiation and reducing cost have accelerated. To enable client transformation, WNS has invested significant resources to build a complete data engineering and management services ecosystem leveraging intelligent cloud. This capability enables us to help clients create their data strategies and data management frameworks, migrate data workloads to the cloud, and solve their data management problems. In addition, our analytics, Products and Platforms Group continues to combine WNS's vertical expertise, internally developed IP, and third-party partnerships to provide our clients with domain-centric, intelligent platforms. One platform I would like to highlight for you today is called UAP, our Unified Analytics Platform. UAP is a comprehensive analytics platform deployed across industries, including insurance, banking and financial services, and manufacturing as well as retail. The platform is cloud-based, provides end-to-end integration from data to actionable insights, and is modular in nature. It can be easily embedded into the client's existing infrastructure as a plug-and-play system or deployed in an as-a-service model. For one of the world's largest insurance companies, WNS developed highly specialized AI and ML models, including fraud, NPS, indemnity, and subrogation to manage the end-to-end claims process from first notification of loss to claim closure. These models have now become a part of our UAP platform, which is helping save the client millions of dollars in claims, as well as indemnity costs. A second analytics platform, which we have mentioned on a previous call, is Scents, our cognitive data capture and processing platform. Powered by AI and ML, Scents imports both structured as well as unstructured data, applies proprietary algorithms to generate contextualized information, and then summarizes the data to deliver actionable business insights. This proprietary platform has the unique ability to combine, cleanse, and analyze large, disparate, and complex company data sets at an enterprise level. Scents is cloud-based, has been certified on Microsoft Azure, and is now in the process of being certified on AWS. This platform has been recently deployed for 12 of our clients across verticals, including three clients in the airlines industry. Scents is enabling these global airlines to process in excess of 12 million scanned pages of airway bills while increasing accuracy and reducing the amount of manual effort and service cost by 50 to 70%. More importantly, This platform is allowing the airlines to collect tens of millions of dollars in monthly revenue which have been held up in conflict due to incorrect airway bills, thereby improving the client's revenue as well as cash flow. The third pillar of our analytics strategy is our COE, or Center of Excellence Model, which is focused on creating analytics teams dedicated to highly specialized functional requirements. The COE model leverages the domain capabilities and technology assets developed in our first two pillars to deliver unique tailored solutions and provide clients with scalable capacity which serves as an extension of their own organization. These long-term engagements are strategic in nature and establish a high-value beachhead for relationship expansion. Today, we have developed a COE model with one of the world's leading beverage companies to provide customized analytics services for new product introduction and launch. The COE has delivered significant benefits to the client, including a 25% increase in emerging market sales volumes through revised media spend a 10% reduction in television advertising expenditures and over 40% reduction in primary research cost and early visibility to emerging competition. Overall, we are pleased with the progress in the area of data and analytics and we believe our approach and capabilities are really resonating well in the market. As a result, WNS has been able to grow our combined standalone and embedded analytics revenue above the company rate, with this segment of the business now representing approximately 20% of total company revenue. In addition, because of the value-add associated with our offerings, WNS's data and analytics practice is delivering margins well above company average. Looking forward, we are excited about the healthy growth opportunities for WNS despite the potential for ongoing pandemic-related volatility and the pressure associated with tight global labor markets. Our clients and prospects are aggressively looking for strategic partners to help create new revenue streams, reduce their cost, increase operating efficiency, and improve the customer experience by digitally transforming their businesses. We believe WNS now remains well positioned to deliver these benefits by combining our deep domain expertise and culture of co-creation with state-of-the-art technology, advanced analytics, and business process knowledge. The company remains focused on delivering long-term sustainable value for all key stakeholders including our clients, employees, shareholders, as well as global communities. I would now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Sanjay Puria, to discuss further our results as well as our outlook. Sanjay?