Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (BR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Looks like we're ready to go. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming. Excited to have up here next Broadridge. Ashima Ghei, thank you very much for coming. As many of you may know, we actually just launched coverage on the company 2 weeks ago even though I've followed you guys for quite some time but finally got it over the hump. So thanks for joining us so quickly after we launched.

We're glad you started.

I don't think you've been at this conference before. So maybe just to get us started, maybe for everyone's benefit, since you haven't been here before, why don't you just give us a brief overview of the company and then we'll dive into more detailed questions?

Sure, happy to. Thanks for having me here, Alex. I'm going to do 2 things. I'll give a little overview of the company and the business model and I'll also talk a little bit about our financial model. I think that would be helpful. So to start off, Broadridge is a $26 billion market cap global fintech. And we operate as a scale business really on the intersection of asset managers, corporate issuers, capital management, and wealth management. We essentially provide the core governance that's required for corporate issuers, asset managers, think about things like Board of Director elections, other communications. And we provide the critical technology that powers wealth management and capital markets. We're about $6.5 billion in total revenue, $4.2 billion of which is recurring in nature. We report our results across 2 segments: the ICS segment and the GTO segment, but we really think about our business across 3 franchises. The first of which is the ICS franchise or the governance franchise, which is about $2.6 billion in recurring revenue. It's been growing at 8% CAGR over the last 5 years. And here, we run a unique network that essentially connects the corporate issuers and the asset managers with their retail and institutional investors via the bank broker data network. And having that unique network allows us to fulfill all their governance needs. We've also branched out of that core business into more services like data-driven fund solutions. We provide corporate communications beyond just the governance side, as well as governance for the issuers on their shareholder engagement as well. So that's our first franchise. The second franchise is capital markets, which is about $1 billion in total revenues. It's been growing at about 15% over the last 5 years. And here we provide the core technology that services the capital market. It allows them to do trading operations. We do this across front office, middle office, back office and really focused across asset classes, across geographies. And then finally, our third franchise is our wealth management business, which is about $600 million in recurring fee. It's been growing at a CAGR of 10% over the last 5 years. And here, we service the wealth management divisions for whether it be large banks, RIAs, independents and where you provide the core technology that enables them to modernize their wealth management suite, make their advisers more productive and help grow their business. So that's just a brief overview of our businesses. As I talk about our financial model, at the core of it, our financial model is a very simple one. It's allowed us to deliver strong consistent growth over the last decade. If I look over the last decade, we've had recurring revenue growth of 10%, earnings growth of 13%, and strong total share -- top quartile total shareholder return of 19%. But the core of our financial model, it starts with recurring revenue. We target recurring revenue growth of, I should say, for the '24 to '26 period, we're targeting recurring revenue growth of 7% to 9%. You add on to that the operating leverage that's inherent in a scale business like ours, it allows us to create investment capacity, deliver margin expansion and deliver on strong, consistent and sustainable 8% to 12% earnings growth. Add on to that growing dividend, balanced capital allocation and you're looking at strong shareholder returns overall. If I could just break into that model a little bit, right? The recurring revenue part of it, the 7% to 9% recurring revenue because that's the linchpin of where it all starts is focused on 5% to 7% organic revenue growth and about 1 to 2 percentage points coming from tuck-in M&A strategy. The 5% to 7% recurring revenue growth is largely driven by revenue from sales. We count on about 6 percentage points of our organic revenues coming from revenue from sales. And we've seen that over the last decade, we've delivered consistently about 6 points. The balance comes in through things like position growth, trading volumes, et cetera, that adds to our organic, and then 1 to 2 points from M&A, like I said. Margin expansion, also we feel pretty good about. We've delivered about 70 basis points margin expansion over the last decade every year, which really allows us to get to the earnings growth. Add on to that, that we are a capital-light business model. Our free cash flow has typically been at 100% in the past. Last year, it was 102%. It allows us to really balance our investments across organic, inorganic, fund a growing dividend, find capacity for if we have the right candidate for strategic tuck-in M&A, and do share buybacks as required. And all of that's paid quite well for us. It's a consistent business model, it's a simple business model, and that's allowed us to kind of -- that consistency has allowed us to do something that not many players do. We actually lay out 3-year outlooks and we talk about our growth within those outlooks. We're in our fifth 3-year outlook right now. It was in the '24 to '26 period, and we're on track to deliver against the outlook. I should probably wrap with this year. We just -- another thing that's not so common about us is we're a July-to-June fiscal cycle. We just closed our Q1 books. We did our earnings last month where we raised our recurring revenue guidance from 5% to 7% to 6% to 8% and reaffirmed our earnings guidance of 8% to 12% and our sales guidance of $290 million to $330 million. It's on a strong track.

Very good. It certainly seems -- that's very comprehensive, so let's see if you left anything for me to dig into. But actually starting with, like you said, the biggest business, the regulatory communication business, you mentioned position growth in the mid- to high single digits over the medium term. So maybe you can just unpack that a little bit. What gives you confidence in that and talk about the long-term trends that are supporting that?

Yes. We've seen strong position growth, right? If I look over the last decade, we've seen consistently mid- to high single-digit position growth. And if I break it down, it's everything. We're seeing more investors come into the marketplace. We're seeing investors invest in more products. We're seeing overall accounts per product so we're seeing it across the board. And as we broke it down, there are a few themes that we're seeing in the long term and frankly we're continuing to see even now. The first theme I'll call out is what we call democratization of investing, right? You're seeing an advent of new retail investors come into the marketplace. It's driven by -- think about the new products that have come into the marketplace, right? You're seeing zero cost apps, you're seeing more self-service apps. You're seeing ETFs come into the marketplace. That's introducing the new a genre of investors into the marketplace, and I don't see that going away. We're also seeing more innovation. We're seeing things like managed accounts. We're seeing pass-through voting. All of that is driving more position growth as well. That's not generically for position growth overall but it's definitely a theme that's driving it. If I think about equity position growth specifically, where we've seen mid- to high single-digit growth, we're seeing much more growth coming from managed accounts. And now if I think about the next wave or a form of managed accounts, which is direct indexing, I would expect that trend to continue. Managed accounts today are about half of our total position growth, and they're growing double digits so a theme that's continuing. The second theme -- the third theme I'll call out is more related to funds where we're seeing a growth in passive funds. That's a theme that's also been consistent over the years and we expect that to continue.

Very good. Maybe taking the same question a little bit more into the near term, and we actually wrote about this in our initiation, but investors have obviously been on the sidelines here in this higher interest rate environment. But I think since the election, we've seen investors seem to be a little bit more active again, moving off the sidelines. So is that something you think could benefit position growth maybe in the near term? So maybe not as much as we saw in COVID but we saw that trend back then. So it feels a little bit similar but yes, I don't know what you're seeing so far. Maybe help us.

Yes. I think you're right, Alex. We're certainly seeing good activity in terms of position growth. I'll just back up. When we initially start doing our views for the year, we think about the long-term trends that I just spoke about, right? When we anchor on mid- to high single-digit position growth -- equity position growth for funds, we were anchoring more on mid-single-digit position growth. As we go through the year, however, we've got a pretty robust testing methodology, where we actually test the actual number of positions that we have with different issuers, and we compare it to how many positions they had back when they did their last meeting, right? And we kind of do that weekly. We track that. So yes, we are seeing some impacts off the heightened activity that you're suggesting. We are seeing equity which I shared that for the balance of the year, we expect to be mid- to high single-digit equity position growth. I would say we are towards the high side of that now. For funds, we're still seeing mid-single-digit position growth but that's all informed. And that's -- since we're already seeing those trends, we've kind of baked those into our outlook as we're going through.

And then maybe staying on the near term here and I think it's something you haven't talked about earlier, but the one revenue source that you have is event-driven revenues, which can be a little bit more sporadic. So you noted that the second quarter should be a fairly large quarter. So maybe you can just remind us what is driving that and if there's any change in your expectations.

Yes. For those who don't follow event as much, so event fees, by nature, are fees that we get out of events that are nonrecurring, right? It's mutual fund proxies, contests, those kind of events. Typically, for us, event fee ranges year-to-year. It ranges between $200 million to $300 million, give or take. Last year, it was $285 million. It was about 4% of our total revenues for the year. So as in our earnings last month and before we've shared that we expect Q2 to be a heavier event or a stronger event quarter, given some activity that we were expecting, sitting where we are in Q2, we're seeing heightened overall event activity. And we're expecting to see a mutual fund proxy event in the later half of the year. So sitting where we are today, I would say 4 things about event. One, I would expect Q2 for event to be a record Q2, given the level of activity that we're seeing. Two, these event fees typically come at high margins. And as a result of that, I would expect this to be a higher second quarter from an earnings perspective. We're now expecting the first half of the year to be just under 30% of our annual earnings. Three, typically, you would see these kind of event activities also coming with a spike in distribution revenue with our postage revenue. Given the success that we've had with digitization and the fact that we are sitting on fund positions, about 80% of them are digitized right now, I'm not expecting that kind of spike in our distribution revenues in second quarter in spite of the event activity. And then four, I should remind you, typically, we look at events like this, kind of event activities like this to fund investment, to create an opportunity for us to fund investments over the course of the year. So that's what we would expect to do over the course of the year, but we would expect it to be higher -- the earnings to be higher in Q2.

Fantastic. Thanks for the helpful update here. And then maybe the last one on the ICS, the regulatory side. Just more, I guess, bigger picture, like any new initiatives that you are particularly excited about as you think about that business going forward? Anything new that you're -- that could support the growth over the next few years that we should be focused on?

Lots to be excited about, Alex. Lots of new initiatives, right? We spoke about TSR, we spoke about the huge success we had on TSR sales. So it's one of those instances where regulation actually drives opportunity. We are simplifying shareholder engagement, driving engagement. Similar way in pass-through voting, right? We're now providing pass-through voting services to over 100 funds, which really helps the funds engage with their eventual shareholders. Enhanced D&A activities, we're doing a whole bunch on the data and analytics side. We did the recent acquisition of AdvisorTarget, which is expected to fuel that. We're really personalizing our investor experience with our wealth and focus, right, our digital customer communications capability that is really exciting and looking at moving that forward. We're investing in front-end user capabilities on our issuer business, creating it a one portal, a one streamlined field for them to access all our entire product suite. I feel quite excited about a bunch of things. And we have like various other initiatives I'm not ready to talk about yet, but expecting strong growth, in line with our 5% to 7% recurring revenue.

So why don't we move to the GTO side then for a second, starting with capital markets. Bigger picture question, but again, similar to what I just asked you on the other side here. What are you most excited about in that business maybe from a both near-, medium- and longer-term perspective?

Yes. So in capital markets, our strategy is really to help simplify and innovate the trading operations of our clients. The way we think about it is we're in the front office, back office. So what does that do? Front office helps our clients drive revenues, right? We want to help them drive revenue, optimize their revenues. Back office, we help them simplify their operations, drive their costs down. And the fact that we're working across the front to back allows us to really -- allows them to reduce their vendors, consolidate their spending and really manage the operations end-to-end. This strategy has done really well for us, specifically after we acquired BTCS a couple of years ago where we anchored on the front office part of it more. And if I look back, right, recently, we announced that we converted a long-time BTCS client, a Scandinavian bank that was on the front office. Now they're back office with us, too. We have a bunch of clients that we've announced that we are consolidating vendors doing the whole front to back. We're launching -- we announced that we're launching into different asset classes with our futures and options offering as well. That is allowing us to really go across multiple asset classes, again allowing our clients to consolidate across vendors. We feel quite good about that. And plus, we're doing a bunch of innovations as well, right? Some products that we've spoken about is BondGPT, which uses AI on our fixed income side. OpsGPT is another one that we've announced. So all of this innovation is really helping fuel the capital markets growth. We feel good about it in the short, medium and long term.

Good. Taking that question a little bit more near term again. You mentioned actually yourself earlier that trading volumes can be a swing factor in that business. So I don't know if you're aware but I also cover the exchanges so we track volumes pretty closely every day. And it seems like the quarter is actually off to a pretty good start. Are you seeing the same thing? Anything that could drive incremental upside to what you've talked about maybe in the last quarter? Or is it just not big enough to move the needle?

Yes. Definitely seeing the same thing. We're seeing trading volumes, trading volumes are absolutely a tailwind for us. Having said that, trading volumes are about 1/3 of our GTO business, right? So I do want to temper the excitement associated with that. And within the 1/3 of our GTO revenue, I would say about half of it is -- half of our trading revenues are more volume-based or band-based, step band-based. So it's not a true paper trade. So I wouldn't expect all of it to move in line with the trading activity that we are seeing. And we did see some of this -- in Q1, we saw about 10% growth in trading activity that we shared. Some of that since we've seen that coming, it's kind of baked into our outlook as well. So feel happy about it. Would temper it down just a little.

No. Very, very, very good. Shifting gears to wealth. Wealth, definitely an industry that we like the structural backdrop. Given where I work, that makes sense. So can you maybe talk about how you can capitalize on that attractive end market? And anything that you're particularly excited about in the medium term here to support those growth rates?

Yes. We quite like the structural backdrop, too, right? Lots going on there. Think about it. You've got all these asset-based -- asset fee-based models now. What is that doing? That's creating a need for advisers to do product differentiation. It's creating a need for them to stand out amongst the others. You've got -- we've spoken so much about the generational wealth transfer, right? Wealth is moving from the baby boomers to a much, much more digital native population now. So there is a need for modern technology. They don't want to wait 2 days to get their statements, right? They want to be able to look at the apps themselves. And then finally, we are also seeing an advent of new products. And with this new product, there's a greater need for new disclosure requirements and there's more pressure on disclosure requirements. As you know, Alex, we've been investing in our wealth platform. We've been investing in our wealth suite. And we've created a much more modern technology suite, where we have component-based architecture, right? We've got different modules that really cater to those needs. It caters to how we can personalize the investor communication, how we can improve adviser productivity or how we can operationalize -- digitize and operationalize the -- for wealth managers and really make their cost efficient. We think those investments are ripe for the marketplace right now. It will allow wealth managers to pick and choose different modules that would work with their needs, at certain times, incorporate them within the -- using APIs, incorporate them within their solution set. And we think that could really bear good fruit for us in the medium to long term.

Good. Maybe just speaking of wealth, you just, a couple of months ago, closed the acquisition of the SIS business. So can you talk about that business and how that actually fits into your broader wealth strategy?

We like the Canada market. Canada is a really attractive market for us. It's not different from the U.S., right? Canadian firms also want to drive digitization. They also want to get into multichannel, multiproduct capabilities. So there's a lot of parallels with the U.S. market versus the Canadian market. And we have a strong presence already in Canada. We have a leadership presence in it. We service 5 out of the 6 large banks in Canada. What's most attractive to us for the Canadian market is all the investments that we've done in the U.S. on our wealth platform. And with the acquisition of SIS, we have more clients that we could potentially bring that innovation to. We could bring those new products, the modular suite of products to the Canadian market as well. And that is quite attractive, where we feel good about the opportunity.

Good. And then maybe just a bigger picture question across the whole business. You actually said in your earlier remarks that it all starts with sales. So you had record sales in fiscal 2024, I think 1Q '25 as well. So maybe just a quick update what you're seeing in terms of demand, again, both in the near and medium term.

Yes. We're quite happy with our sales, right? We reported $57 million of closed sales for the first quarter, which was up 21% from last first quarter. And this is when we had $342 million of record sales last year. Honestly, we're seeing sales in a lot of the areas that we're investing in, right? We spoke of last year's sales, we spoke about TSR, right, total shareholder regulation. We had good sales from that. We're also seeing good sales on the digital side. We are seeing sales in our Wealth InFocus platform, which is really about digitizing communications. We're seeing growth in front office BTCS, like the old Itiviti side of it. We're seeing growth in wealth. We're seeing some of the modular growth across the wealth business as well. So essentially, all the areas that we are focused on, we are driving -- we're seeing good growth. Our pipeline stands strong. We feel good about our $290 million to $330 million sales guidance for the year, given where we are with pipeline, so right now, it's about similar to where we were last year around the same time. And we are still sitting on a $450 million backlog, which is essentially revenues that haven't yet converted, which gives us good certainty into at least the near to medium term, right, because those revenues convert over a, call it, 1- to 2-year period.

And then while on sales, maybe you can quickly talk about maybe the pricing strategy more broadly? It doesn't seem like price is a big part of your growth algorithm. You didn't mention it earlier, I don't think, which is a little bit different to most of the companies I cover. So maybe you can talk about why that may appear different and if it actually could change in the future.

Yes. You're right, Alex. It's not a big part of the growth algorithm is the way we think about it right now. Pricing probably comes into that remainder after the revenue from sales portion of it. For us, new sales is really the big driver, right? We've delivered -- we -- like I said before, we've seen about 6 percentage points come from new sales every year. We have what we call a land-and-expand strategy, right? What we like doing is entrenching our sales within our client space, selling new products, simplifying their life more, simplifying their operations more. And that strategy has borne well for us. Yes, we do have some pricing increases like CPI kind of pricing increases, which essentially helped offset some of the impacts from concessions that we see across those businesses. I should also remind you, about 25% of our revenues are in the regulatory business. In the regulatory business, the fees are regulated, right? So by design, there's no direct pricing coming through here. But overall, the algorithm, the land-and-expand sales-driven strategy, having a more robust suite of products has served us well. And that's what we're looking at in the short term.

I'm being mindful of the time but maybe we can squeeze 2 more questions in. So again, that last question maybe goes hand in hand a bit with margins, the margin expansion you mentioned. So you are focused on margin expansion from here, but some people have argued to me in the last couple of weeks that maybe your margins -- well, they're low relative to some of the peers. So is that fair? Do you think there's more room for margin expansion going forward? Or how do you think about the margins overall?

Yes. We feel really good about the margin expansion that we've driven. If you think about it, right, I spoke about the 70 basis points every year on average over the last 10 years. That's pretty good margin expansion. And remember, our strategy is to drive sustainable, consistent growth while creating investment capacity and driving margin expansion, right? So it goes hand in hand. We were just talking about sales, how sales is such a big driver of our revenue, our success. Sales doesn't come without product innovation. Sales does not come without having the right kind of products that they would want to invest in. And that's where you have to balance out the investments versus margin expansion very carefully. Our view has been on investing in the right offerings, creating the capacity to invest in the right opportunities while driving continuous margin expansion. And I think it's -- we've been able to effectively do both. It's hard for me to comment on pure margins. I will say, and you know this, a significant portion of our revenues are distribution revenues, which are passed through to no margins, right? So if you look at our 20% margin, if you take out the impact of distribution, you're looking at more the high 20s, not 20%. So just to call out.

Fair enough. And then maybe just broadly here again, but as you think about both revenue and cost, this conference is TMT and AI. So maybe briefly, how do you think about AI? How does Broadridge think about AI? Is there a vision for the company? What areas do you see the most opportunities? I don't know if we have enough time for that, but...

I'm going to do the flyby version. We are committed to being a market leader in the AI space. We have the right data. We have the right technology. We've built our suite across the large data set we have. We've used all the large LLM models, built it around the data. The things we're focused on are, I would put it in 4 buckets, right? New AI products, enhancing our current AI -- current product suite with AI offerings, driving productivity, think about our own internal things, right, onboarding, how can we use AI to make things better? And then four, governance and safety because it's critical data that we are dealing with, and we want to make sure we're doing it right. We spoke about a few of the products, right, BondGPT, OpsGPT, those are the stand-alone products. There's a whole ton more. I've got 50 initiatives where we're really incorporating AI into our existing products, driving more effective growth for those products and making sure we're doing it in a safe way is paramount for us while we're improving productivity as well. So we're committed to being the market leader. Too early, I don't think I can count on revenue or expense savings coming out of it. The investments associated with AI are all baked into our views, but we feel very excited about the opportunity.

We're technically out of time but I did have another question on M&A strategy. You talked about it earlier. Was there anything else that we haven't talked about on the M&A side?

We covered the highlights, right? We do count on 1 to 2 percentage points of growth, revenue growth coming from M&A. Our strategy in the past has been about acquiring products or acquiring talent, right? And that's been a big part of it. As we're getting more and more mature, we're investing in a lot of our products. We feel good about our product suite. So we are very cautious and considerate in what we acquire. Any acquisitions that we make, we want to make sure are clearing our internal hurdles, that are accretive to the organization. And we look at capital in a very balanced way. If there are the right kind of M&A candidates, we would acquire. Otherwise, we would look at share buybacks.

Makes a lot of sense. Thank you for addressing that as well, and thanks for coming to the conference. Hope to see you again.

Thanks for having us, Alex. Thank you very much.