Alight, Inc. (ALIT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to the Allied Second Quarter, 2026 Conference Call. There is a presentation accompanying today's presentation available on the All Lights Investors Relations website. I will now read the Safe Harbor Statement. Today's discussion includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements reflect management's current views and expectations. and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Factors that may cause such differences are described in today's earnings release and in allied filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. including in the risk factors section of its most recent annual report on Form 10-K. the company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. In addition, during today's call, the company may reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable gap measures can be found in the earnings release available on the company's website. I will now turn the call over to Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer of Alight. Please.

Go ahead. Good afternoon and welcome to Alight's second quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm very pleased to have Steve Lasher, our Chief Financial Officer, joining me today. Steve joined Alight in June, so it's been a busy first few weeks for him, and we are delighted to have him on board. Included in today's discussion will be our thoughts on our second quarter, our positioning in the marketplace, new initiatives we've put in place to continue strengthening our service, delivery, and user experience, and our long-term growth strategy. We reported a solid second quarter as we exceeded market expectations, primarily as a result of strengthened project revenue and higher volumes. Our transformation initiatives remain on track as we continue to focus on strengthening our operational execution, deepening our client relationships, and enhancing our commercial capabilities. To that end, I have now had more than 180 client meetings since I took the role of CEO, and we've continued to see improvement in our renewal activity and commercial execution as a result. Second quarter revenue of $511 million was comprised of $471 million in recurring revenue and $40 million in project revenue. As expected, recurring revenue was down 4.3% over the prior year period as a result of commercial activity in 2025 and earlier. As a reminder, our lag from commercial execution to revenue realization for a substantial part of our recurring business is 12 to 18 months. This is reflected in the revenue reduction we are seeing now and expect to see for the next couple of quarters as the impact of that activity runs through our P&L. in the second quarter was up approximately 11% over the prior year period. As we've previously discussed, project revenue can be inherently unpredictable and is often the key driver behind quarter over quarter fluctuations in performance. EBITDA of $92 million, representing 18% margin in the quarter and exceeded market expectations, primarily due to the higher than expected revenue performance. We've maintained a strong liquidity position, exiting the quarter with $545 million in total liquidity, consisting of $215 million of cash and a $330 million of undrawn revolver. Year to date, we've generated $101 million in free cashflow, which includes $48 million in free cashflow in the second quarter, and we remain confident in our cash generation for the year and beyond. Our liquidity position and cash generation provides continued flexibility to drive our business forward. We made several key hires during the quarter to strengthen and bolster our leadership team, which is now largely in place. As I mentioned in June, we welcome Steve Lasher to the team as Alight's new Chief Financial Officer. Steve brings more than 30 years of financial leadership experience across the services, technology, and B2B sectors, has a proven ability to drive transformation at scale, and has the operating expertise and discipline needed at this stage of Alight's journey. In May, we appointed Dinesh Tosiani as President, Employer Solutions. Dinesh previously served as the Light's Chief Strategy Officer and has been part of Hewitt for 20 plus years. He leads the Employer Solutions business to help accelerate innovation, strengthen how we deliver value, and advance the outcomes our clients count on. As highlighted on our previous call, in April we appointed Naveen Bawaja as Chief Technology Officer. Naveen is a transformation-focused technology executive and leads Alight's technology organization with a focus on advancing innovation and strengthening execution of our technology roadmap. Beyond senior leadership, since the start of the year, we've added numerous account management and sales professionals, and have expanded our overall sales coverage with account executive coverage, now extending to 500 clients as we build greater expertise across our sales and accounts team. During the quarter, we completed the important phase of insourcing critical client service functions that had previously been outsourced. This has been a major strategic initiative for us as we look to strengthen the client experience and align the priorities of all our staff to one goal, to serve our clients with the highest possible service levels. These changes have garnered very positive feedback from our customers, as well as from industry consultants and third-party evaluators that play a critical role in us being renewed by our clients and selected by our prospects. A fundamental pillar of our long-term growth plan is the continued strategic investment in our technology and people to create consumer-grade customer experience and strengthen service excellence. We made targeted client experience investments during the quarter, intended to modernize our user experience, evolve the data layer, and improve user journeys. Our operating data layer will be the industry's first data framework to bring health, wealth, and LEAF's benefits all under one consolidated platform. It will provide employers with a view that makes benefits experiences for their participants more intuitive and easier to understand. Furthermore, we've made ongoing investments in service delivery excellence, deploying automation with the goal of improving service quality. Alight is the only integrated benefits provider operating at true enterprise scale, with a the capabilities and expertise to manage the full complexity of employer needs across our health, wealth and leave solutions. Our health solution platform is our largest portfolio and spans core health administration, navigation, enrollment services, spending account solutions, engagement services, and point solutions. Our goal is to help employees administer health benefits and manage healthcare spend while helping employees make better and more informed decisions for their health benefits. Wealth Solutions is our second largest business with $1.7 trillion in assets under administration. Our wealth platform includes a portfolio of financial and retirement-related benefit solutions, including defined contribution, defined benefits, and pension risk transfer that allow employees to better navigate and plan for their financial future. Our leaves business represents our largest growth opportunity and includes leave of absence administration, medical and disability guideline information, and short-term disability administration. Keeping up with ever-changing leave of absence regulations can be a difficult and time-consuming effort for employers and their HR teams, which is why we're here. why our tailored leave solutions assist employers in controlling costs and avoiding compliance risk. We're continuing to see strong client demand across the benefits administration space. Employers are increasingly turning to outsource providers to handle their benefits compliance, delivery, and technology needs, which allows them to focus on their core capabilities rather than managing the ever-complex world of benefits management. non-discretionary nature of benefits means that we're seeing a large and active market for our services regardless of shifting economic conditions. access to healthcare, financial planning, and retirement services remain essential and create the foundation of what we believe to be a highly resilient business model. Our combination of scale, expertise, and our relentless commitment to service excellence allows us to serve this market effectively. whether it be large Fortune 500 clients or more major street organizations. Despite our already expansive breadth of clients and partners, the opportunity in front of us remains vast, and we are energized about the prospects ahead of us. We continue to leverage and deploy AI across our organization to transform the HR employee experience and drive organizational impact with our clients and employees always top of mind. For Alight, AI's potential is grounded in the foundation underneath it. Thousands of participant interactions, deep institutional knowledge built over decades, and a platform already operating at scale with an extensive user base. It's this foundation that allows the AI tools we're deploying to be predictive, personalize, and provide actual meaningful assistance to our members, while also ensuring these tools follow strict constraints of security, privacy, auditability, and observability. With that said, we believe there are tangible opportunities across our portfolio of health, wealth, and leads businesses to leverage AI for specific tasks that enhance efficiency, quality, and user experience. We will provide additional updates on how we are deploying AI across dimensions of quality, efficiency, and user experience as our roadmap is quite extensive. While Alight has evolved with the times to strategically implement AI into our offerings, we wholeheartedly believe in a balanced approach that effectively uses AI and people in tandem. We remain intently focused on service quality. And to that end, the most significant part of our CapEx is invested in operational excellence and user experience. We have five overarching initiatives that are being undertaken under my direct oversight. First, we're building an AI native employee and employer experience with new navigation guidance and end-to-end user journey for a simpler, more modern, and more intuitive experience that makes it easier to get things done, reducing manual work, and most importantly, friction in the benefits process. The design of this is complete and we are getting active user with an expectation for rollouts next year. Second, we're building the first framework of unified data and knowledge for health, wealth, and leaves that connects systems to enable AI and orchestrate workflows leading to smarter, more personalized experiences and responses which are more resilient to AI misinformation. We are heavily leveraging AI-based development and expect to begin rolling this out next year. Third is our modernization of our service model with smarter routing, expanded self-service, and AI-enabled agents to provide clients with faster call center-based support with higher quality and more consistent resolution. A number of these enhancements are already active in our call center, and new capabilities are planned incrementally every call center. Fourth, we're enabling AI-based ingestion of client specifications, significantly automating the process of implementation, annual enrollment configuration, and off-cycle plan changes triggered by M&A activity. This improves both efficiency and service quality. The first wave of this capability goes live at the end of Q3 of 2026. Lastly, we're enhancing our file processing with greater transparency, exchange oversight, proactive intervention, and automated validation in order to achieve more reliable processing with lower likelihood of delays, errors, and manual bottlenecks. This capability is now live in our environment and enabling us to better manage our data interchange with clients and partners. The cornerstone of these initiatives are our new client service model, which aims to provide expanded client coverage with clear established ownership and our core culture and values encapsulated by the word of light. Ultimately, we believe that these initiatives align with feedback we've heard from our client base, and we look forward to successful execution of these initiatives to further drive our market leadership. I'll now turn the call over to Steve to discuss our financial results.

Thanks, Ruud, and good afternoon, everyone. I've had the pleasure to speak with some of you since I joined and look forward to meeting more of you in the coming months. now walk through our second quarter 2026 results. As we discussed in the second quarter, we exceeded expectations of revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow. Revenue for the second quarter was $511 million, a decrease of approximately 3%. We delivered $471 million of recurring revenue in the second quarter, a decrease of 4% compared to the second quarter of 2025, reflecting the impact of lower-than-desired commercial execution in prior years. Project revenue for the quarter was $40 million, up 11%. compared to the second quarter last year. As Rohit noted, project revenue can also often vary quarter to quarter and drive fluctuations in our consolidated results. Adjusted gross profit in the second quarter was $176 million, down $29 million from the prior year period, reflecting an adjusted gross profit margin decline of 440 basis points. Second quarter, 2026 adjusted EBITDA was $92 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 18%, compared to $127 million, or an adjusted EBITDA margin of 24% in the prior year period. The BDOT guidance in the quarter was primarily due to the flow-through of higher-than-expected volumes and project revenue in the quarter. Adjusted net income in the second quarter was $26 million, with adjusted EPS of $0.91, compared to $56 million of adjusted net income and adjusted EPS of $2.09 in the second quarter of 2025. We maintained a strong liquidity position and exited the quarter with $545 million in total liquidity, consisting of $215 million of cash and our $330 million undrawn revolver. Year-to-date, free cash flow was $101 million. We believe our liquidity and cash generation will continue to provide us with the flexibility to effectively pursue our business objectives. Looking forward, with our visibility today for the full year, we expect revenue to be between $2,078,000,000 and $2,098,000,000, with adjusted EBITDA between $400 and $415,000,000. As you all know, our Q3 tends to be weaker on profitability due due to an uptick in expense from investment in annual enrollment. As a result, we expect third quarter 2026 revenue to be between 469 and 479 million, with adjusted EBITDA between 55 and 61 million. This implies a significant rebound in EBITDA and cash in the fourth quarter, enabling us to set the full year expectations where we have. It is also important to note that the back half of the year represents the biggest P&L impact from the commercial activity of 2025 and prior. That said, our liquidity and cash generation remains strong, and we continue to benefit from disciplined cost management, operational streamlining, and progress on our transformation initiatives across IT and operations. We believe we have a strong foundation in place to support reinvestment in the business as we look to build momentum in 2027 and beyond.

With that, I'll turn the call back to Rohit. Thanks, Steve. It's been a pleasure to have you on the team. My first couple of quarters at Alight have been intensely busy. and they've left me increasingly energized and excited about the opportunity we have ahead. As I touched upon earlier, our leadership team is now largely in place. we made key hires during the quarter as part of our leadership transformation. Their experience and record of impact speaks for itself. Our refreshed board adds further strength to the governance and strategic focus of the company. It boasts deep public company governance experience, as well as unique and complementary financial, operational, and industry perspectives that continue to play a fundamental role in our evolving transformation. Together, we are confident that we have the right leadership team in place to guide the company through the next phase of our journey. Our long-term growth strategy is focused on three primary areas, growing the market reach of our health solution business, expanding our lead solution, and market growth in our core and adjacent spaces. We continue to make impactful strides in health solution as we explore opportunities beyond our traditional Fortune 500 client base, and we are focused on driving growth, importing solutions, and expanding our allied partner network. also making concerted efforts to strengthen our broker and consultant relationships to further penetrate the segment. In our leaves business, Alight is one of the few major players with the scaled capabilities and expertise to handle the current growing marketplace. We remain focused on maintaining and growing our position as a leader in this space as we're capitalizing on opportunities we're seeing in the marketplace, in part by cross-selling alongside our health business as applicable. Despite the depth and breadth of our services, we're consistently looking at additive and complimentary offerings in adjacent spaces. And we are utilizing our partner network where we can work to expand upon our capabilities. Additionally, we continue to see wealth as a very active space for us. We completed our 300th PRT solution and continue to provide a light financial advisory services to several of our clients and see more opportunity to broaden financial wellness and planning. As we move forward, we are concentrated on strengthening the areas of our business within Retention remains a key area of focus. As we've discussed on this call, we're making investments across a range of initiatives that ultimately drive service excellence and user experience. We've also placed an increased emphasis on rebuilding our commercial execution through addition of account coverage and increasing rigor on renewal activity. We look at our growth trajectory in three distinct segments. It is important to remember that the sales cycle are inherently long in our business, so it can take some time to see the progress we're making reflected in our numbers. We are confident that we're doing the right things to drive future long-term performance for shareholders. 2026 is where we build upon the foundation that is in place, reinvesting in our business through the support of strong cash generation. We have prioritized delivery excellence and retention while investing in the user experience, increasing our use of AI, and expanding our sales coverage. 2027 is where we expect to gain momentum and start to realize meaningful platform advantages. Our focus next year will be on achieving efficiency gains from our work to drive operational transformation in addition to seeing improvement in our bookings and renewal activities from strengthened commercial execution. 2028 is where we begin to drive quarter over quarter growth as a result of the improvements we're making across the organization. At that point, we also expect AI to have created a real and tangible impact on margin expansion. The underlying foundation through each stage is our healthy liquidity and cash generation, which we expect will continue to be a competitive advantage as we move forward. I, along with a broader leadership team, remain confident in a life's long-term outlook. The path forward is clear. Drive service excellence, deepen client relationships, and execute on our transformation agenda with urgency and discipline. Operator will now open it up for questions.

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, you may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Our first question is from Pete Heckman with.

DA Davidson. Please go ahead. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. Steve, welcome. Glad to have you on board here. we think about retention can you can can one of you talk a little bit about the retention rates that you saw for full-year 2025 and how that progressed kind of through the year and then I guess in the first half of 2026, do you feel like that number has continued to deteriorate? Has it bottomed or has it improved?.

Hey Peter, it's Rowan. How are you? Good to hear from you. Thank you. The way I've been looking at this, and as you know, right, our focus has been on pushing the renewals. The piece that we've been working on hardest has been expanding our account coverage. So we've added, as I mentioned on the call, several individuals, both on the leadership side, but also deeper in the organization to help us get better handle on the coverage of the account so we've increased the coverage from 100 to 500 what that has done is it's given us better visibility into our renewal work what I can tell you is that we're actually very encouraged by the trends that we're seeing both from a loss as well as compression side at this point of the year when we compare it to at this point last year So we feel good about where things are heading. More importantly, I feel good about the overarching pieces that I see. I'm seeing better momentum and velocity on the changes that we're making from a delivery excellence. That is very encouraging. We just held four client council meetings and four innovation days with our clients. that in total probably included about 100 to 150 total clients that we met. And the feedback that we got from there was very, very encouraging in terms of what they saw that we're implementing. And these were not just PowerPoints, but actual demos of things that are in place. So those are, I would say, the indicators that encourage me. Obviously, as you pointed out, we have a long cycle. So some of these things just take time before they show up on the P&L. Understand, understand. Okay, and I appreciate...

the company providing four-year guidance that's helpful and should help everyone get their models in line. I didn't hear you say it, but certainly I think that one of the highlights of the first half, one of the main positives has been how well free cash flow is held up on a year-over-year basis. In terms of – if I didn't hear you say it, I apologize. But did you mention at all how you're thinking about free cash flow conversion for the full year against EBITDA? Yes.

Yes, Peter, this is Steve. Thank you and look forward to working with you as you go here. When we think about free cash flow, based off the seasonality of our business, I think the third quarter is going to be a little more taxing on the business just because of some of the activities and outflows from a cash flow. perspective that we have within the business. But then you'll see that rebound within the fourth quarter. So if you look at a full year perspective, we'll probably be in that, you know, 40 to 43-ish percent conversion range when you look at it on a full year basis. Obviously, again, I'll reiterate, third quarter, we'll probably be in that, you know, 40 to 43-ish percent conversion range when you look at it on a full year basis. Quarter is going to be a little bit less for us, but you'll see a rebound within fourth quarter.

Peter, you're aware that in the third quarter, expenses go up to support annual enrollment for a bulk of our clients. So, we see that sort of trough, but then it picks up in Q4. Sure, sure. Okay, well, still, I view that as very encouraging and it compares positively to what we were forecasting.

Thank you. I'll get back in the queue. Thank you.

Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Our next question is from Curtis Nagel with Bank of America.

go ahead. Sure, just a quick one for me. Maybe just, again, kind of square the commentary on the better retention trends. I know these things take a long time to float. through given the contract cycles, but just given, you know, the pretty material step down and applied recurring revenue for the back half of the year, just trying to square again, kind of the timing and, you know, what's, you know, I guess, which contracts, you know, I guess, you know, for, for that step down, which, uh, you know, all those from last year are just, yes, again, it's, it's, it's kind of a big, uh, big step down. So, uh, just if you could square that. Yes, Curtis. Sure, Curtis, good to hear from you. As you, as I mentioned in in Q1 call last time, as well as in the Q4 call, right? We have sort of a 12 to 18 month lag in terms of what we see in the commercial activity to when it starts to show up in our, in our revenue. So, a lot of the 2027 2026. Weakness that I've talked about. is related to renewal activity that we saw in some of it in 2024, but quite a bit in 2025. So, I would say most of the 27 impact, I'm sorry, the Q3 impact is coming from that. And then some point solutions, but that's a minority of the impact.