WNS (Holdings) Limited (WNS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning. My name is Puneet and I'm from JPMorgan Payment Processing and IT Services team. Glad to have here with us WNS, Keshav Murugesh, you all know, CEO of the company; and Dave Mackey, SVP Finance and Head of Investor Relations. So welcome both of you. Really glad to have you here. So the format of this presentation is going to be fireside chat. I'll start with a few questions, and then we'll open up for the floor from questions from audience.

So Keshav, like for benefit of investors who might be new to WNS or may not be as close to story. Can you talk about the company, it's positioning, why you win in the BPO market space?

Sure. Thanks, Puneet. So first of foremost, we're one of the pioneers in the space running global operations, technology operations and analytics for companies across the globe. What we do is we work in the middle office and back office and quite often in the front office as well with a number of our global clients, delivering for them, business transformation, cost leadership, analytical insight, all on the basis of some great pricing models and outcomes that we deliver to them. We are close to about 60,000 people across the globe. We deliver from about 14 countries at this point in time and 64 development centers. We go to the market vertically organized, which is unique because we like to present ourselves as people who understand business domains exceedingly well. And around that, we run operations as well as we create capabilities for companies. And across the years, this company has weathered many storms and seen many moves. Remember, the time of the Asian crisis, the Brexit, COVID, the financial crisis. We've seen technology waves come and go. And each time, we have created an opportunity out of what was perceived to be a threat for the industry. As a company, we have traditionally delivered strong double-digit growth across many years. And the other thing about us is we are very stable in terms of delivering strong profitability. So that's really what we are.

So let me ask like it's -- like WNS is like in somewhat of like of an unfamiliar terrain right now. Like for the last 10 years, like I've covered the name since your IPO. And for the last 10 years, especially since you joined Keshav, like you have had such strong track record of delivering, like producing industry-leading growth rates, great track record of beat and raise. Yet like this year or the last couple of years, it seemed different, like just lowered your quarterly annual guidance in the last quarter. So what's driving this? Like tell us -- talk to us like why investors should not worry that this could be like a structural problem, and it's more of a cyclical problem and should not -- will not worry about that in 1 or 2 years from now?

Sure. So I really would focus on that 10 years of track record that you spoke about and the fact that this is a very stable long-term business. Having said that, one must understand that in business, sometimes you come across the perfect storm. So first and foremost, I must say that the underlying fundamentals of this business continue to be very, very strong. The pipeline for growth continues to be very strong. Demand globally continues to be very strong. Demand for each of our core businesses continues to be very strong. We're seeing customers want to transform themselves by leveraging people like us who understand domain digital as well as data extremely well. Data is becoming far more impactful for the long-term. And in that whole journey, people who understand core domains and then can leverage the data to give actionable insight are in demand. So WNS will continue to do well, I think, for the long-term. In this last year that you focused on, we've had what I think is at perfect storm. And hopefully, at the end of this perfect storm, we have now weathered it and we should be coming back. And I just want to remind everyone that we had probably 3 issues that companies sometimes face and we faced it. We had one large health care client overnight decided to get out of a business and in a small element of their business with us they in-sourced as well, but it was something that we couldn't foresee at all. The second is on one of our clients in the OTA side. I mean the OTA side has seen some significant change in the recent past. And a lot of it is driven by their own business momentum as opposed to anything else. And the third was with some of our digital clients working in one particular area of our business, a significant transition from onshore to offshore based business. So while it impacted revenue for us, it didn't impact profitability. So I would say a combination of all of this must have taken out close to what.

Almost 16% of revenue.

16% of revenue in this last 1 year, Happy to say at this point in time, after taking down guidance last quarter, we believe that we are coming back to growth. We believe that, that perfect storm is more or less over at this point in time. So we've signaled something like 2% or 3% growth for Q3, and we expect to continue to perform and get back to growth. And we should assume that over a period of time, this company will once again lead the industry reasonably soon in terms of growth rates based on what we will demonstrate in Q3 and Q4 of this year.

No, that's great to hear. So let's talk about AI risk. Like that is like one of the key questions we get from investors who are looking to invest in space for long-term and worry about like that potential risk as AI can automate a lot of business process work, right? So how would you respond to some of those concerns? Like you talked about OTA client. We hear often that automated chatbots, AI-driven chatbots are taking share. So how should we think about that as a risk to what you do? And what would be your response?

So Puneet, if I may just remind you and your audience again that across the years, technology has always been seen more as an opportunity, not a threat for us. Right? And each time we have leveraged technology to deliver higher productivity to our customer base. And at the end of it all, in spite of delivering that productivity as well as cannibalizing some of our revenue, seeing some of those headwinds, we've always delivered industry-leading growth. So at this point in time, after machine learning and RPA and AI, AI has been around from 1950. So it's not new, right? But it's -- I think the generative AI part that you're more focused on. We, again, see that as something that we will leverage in our business in order to make our people more productive, to make processes smarter, more fit for purpose and give higher impact to our clients. The important thing I must mention is that at this point in time, what we can do is really train our people around some of the models. And at this point of time, WNS has trained close to 22,000 people in terms of the basic use of generative AI models so that they can leverage it to provide better outcomes to clients or just deliver some of the processes faster. So a lot of it is being leveraged to become smarter internally, right? As far as clients are concerned, the conversation still continues to be around digital transformation, cost leadership, revenue accretion. These are 3 areas that WNS is very good at. They don't really care about AI or generative AI or what technologies we use, that is more internal to us, right? And one of the things that we are openly telling our clients is that we want them to understand that these are technologies that have huge potential for the long-term in terms of making some of the processes that their end customers see much smarter, more importantly, from our point of view, we are excited about this because we see generative AI as over a period of time once the hallucinations and some of the other problems we have with this technology gets addressed as opening up a new TAM because if you look at our business at this point in time, probably 25% of the industry is really penetrated and there's a large white space out there which is not penetrated. We actually think that with some of these changes in technology and aggressive use of some of these technologies, our ability to go after areas that customers do not want to manage themselves and who understand that we are better capable of investing in these areas gets addressed. So at this point in time, I'll just tell you that we have almost 60 clients of ours interacting with us number of POCs being created. Generative AI now starting to slowly make its way in terms of some revenue momentum. And at this point in time, we believe that about 5% of our revenue will be Gen AI oriented in this year. But it's a journey that we are excited to participate.

Yes. That's a very good answer, like I have like a few follow-ups, if you will, on that. So it's interesting you talked about like that it will create like the new TAM. It will expand the TAM. And I guess that's what we saw when RPA was picking up some 7, 8 years ago, more clients outsourced to take advantage of RPA. How should we think about like BPOs penetration rate today, like how much of work outsourced already versus being done in-house that you can potentially take share from?

You want to go ahead?

Sure. So I mean if you listen to the industry experts, the advisers, the analysts, what they'll tell you is that the BPO/BPM industry is somewhere between 25% and 30% penetrated. And to Keshav's point, not only does to tools like Gen AI create the opportunity to expand the overall pie, the addressable market. But what we saw with RPA and what we believe will also happen with these new technologies is the ability to accelerate the adoption of process outsourcing. So one is, yes, there's more things that we can take over because of these tools. But the other is the more impactful that these tools are on existing books of business, the more we believe it's going to drive people who haven't outsourced, who haven't leveraged technology, who haven't transformed their businesses to have to find a partner like WNS to help them with their journeys. So it's not just the expansion of the addressable market. It's also the acceleration in adoption.

And if I may just add, if you just look at generally how the industry is continuing to be shaped while third parties like us continue to see growth momentum, continue to see a lot of activity from a sales point of view, continue to create excitement in the minds of our customers in terms of the whole digital transformation journey from their point of view. The reality is that a number of customers are also following a blended approach, where they're also creating their own captives in countries like India or the Philippines, South Africa, whatever. And that shows how much of demand or pent-up demand is still available in this industry, which we can get after. And again, if you look back in history and you look at the background of companies like us or our peers, both Genpact and EXL, they ultimately came from captives going third party. So in the long-term, we also believe that when the -- this phase of captive creation gets undone. It's something that you see every 4, 5 years. Suddenly, there's a big move and then suddenly, they all get taken out. I think that will again benefit the third parties at some stage because companies will also want to focus on what is core to them, as opposed to what is noncore.

Yes. Let me ask on that. Like I've just been amazed by like the news flow around all those GCC or the captive centers, especially in India, you mentioned like what's driving that? What can undo that? Like what could be -- how do we know that it is cyclical? Like is it like when supply gets tough, those captives start move back automatically to outsourcing. What can undo this huge change that we have seen?

All the risks that you believe impact all of us are far more intense with many of these captives. Now there are some large captives that have run for many years very successfully, right? But there are I'm pretty certain that there are many of them that are being created that will also run very well. But there are many small mom-and-pop shops being created, 500,000-person centers, which over a period of time, will face all the problems that all of us as third parties face, the problem of talent, the problem of attrition, the problem of managing all of these people, the problem of scale, the problem of creating a global kind of footprint. More importantly, giving the experience to talent of working for different brands and carrier progression, which is the only reason why talent stays with you.

I would also add to that, that while the experience in a lot of cases in the short run can be positive, especially around cost, what a lot of organizations will find especially U.S. organizations is if the culture of the company is not familiar with running global operations, their ability to sustain that momentum will be extremely difficult.

No, it makes sense. Great responses, both of those. So let's go back to your AI strategy, right? So it seems like you are essentially arming your employees with AI tools -- Gen AI tools, to make them more productive in delivering client processes, right? How should we expect like that to change contract structures? Like is [ T&M ] or still like the right model? Like do you expect it to change to more transaction-based or outcome-based contracts?

So first of all, again, back to the fundamentals of the business, sales pipeline continues to be very, very strong, which means clients and prospects are looking to dramatically transform how they are running their core operations, right? And that's really benefiting us and obviously, our peers as well over a period of time. That's first. The second is there are all these new technologies that are being created and being unleashed. And a number of customers in the past made the mistake of going after RPA licenses or -- and then realizing over a period of time that they needed companies like us to implement those licenses for them and implement the programs for them, right? And I think at this point in time, with generative AI, we are seeing a lot of our customers saying, we would rather work with a firm that understands our domain intensely, understands how to leverage the data that we have because all of them have data, it's unstructured, and they need someone to help pull it all together and can help us create a better bang for the buck, so to speak. And therefore, from our point of view, the first phase is all about how do we enable our internal talent in order to be smart enough with the help of some of these tools and technologies in order to make processes smarter, that delivers on the top line and will deliver on profitability for us, right? The second is, over a period of time, as customers get comfortable with some of these models, it will allow us to move the model away from a traditional input led model to much more of an outcome-based model. And if you recall our history, we're probably the leaders in terms of non-FTE markets, right? It's in the DNA of this company that we focus our people much more on delivering outcome-based pricing models and stuff there. And if you recall, over the last 3 or 4 quarters, we spoke a lot about focusing a segment of our sales team on some of the large deals that we were talking about. A lot of these deals are completely focused on outcome-based pricing for our clients, which means our need and ability to use great people, great technology, superb understanding of domain, a huge amount of analytics but deliver on an outcome-based pricing basis. I think with the use of some of these technologies, our ability to keep moving the model to different pricing models will obviously be accelerated. It will also mean cannibalization of a bit of our revenue. But if you look at the history of our company, we have always delivered on productivity targets and cannibalized our revenue in order to grow at industry-leading levels. So I think that will continue.

And some of these deals that you're seeing in your pipeline, like are these -- like who's doing that work right now? Like is it like clients are bundling different business processes together to create like a larger deal? And then second, like are these projects or the contracts that -- for some of those deals like are clients ready to renegotiate some of those contracts midway through like the deal term of whatever, 3 to 5 years to take advantage of AI. Like how are clients thinking about like there is this new tool, which is -- which can drive significant productivity saving. But I have a contract with yourself or any of your peers that will go on for another 2 years. Do they wait for 2 years? Or do they come -- go to their vendors or peers and say that, hey, I need to take advantage of AI, help me reduce cost of this product?

Puneet, it is still early days. I think at this point in time, it is I think from a board level kind of a discussion on the client side, generative AI has now come down as a realization that this is a technology that is here, and it is there to stay for a while. And therefore, they're all figuring out what is the best way to leverage it in order to create -- to first of all, stay in business, right, and at the same time, grow their business and be smart in terms of how they are growing their business. Look, at this point in time, a number of clients are looking at how generative AI is actually going to impact their own business, right? And I think many of them are still figuring that part out. As far as how we will leverage generative AI in order to deliver better impact in terms of operating efficiency for them. At this point in time, I think it is very early days. All of them are still focused on POCs, as I mentioned, 60 customers interacting with us on POCs, 5% of our revenue. But the reality is all of them are still figuring out where this should be. Today, the biggest need for most of these companies continues to be cost takeout. Let's not forget the fact that irrespective of what the stock market has done in the last few days or whatever, companies are very stressed. There are wars going around across the world, supply chains are still squeezed. China has its own problem. And therefore, companies still have this issue of help me with my cost, help me with my digital transformation kind of journey, help me to generate new sales. That's what WNS stands for. That's what we are good at. I think at this point in time, the focus continues to be all of this. Coming specifically to the large deals, I think what we found is that over the past few quarters, we said we're pretty good at doing what we have always been good at. But we said the market is changing dramatically and with generative AI and some of these new technologies being unleashed, customers will want to interact with smart people and smart partners who can help them dramatically change large components of how they run their company -- companies and create much more of a variable cost model for them. And that's the genesis of the large deal kind of group that we created. And again, I'm excited about it because we're probably one of the few companies that has created that group. We have not taken our eyes off the ball in terms of the small $1 million, $3 million, $5 million deals. But anything beyond a $10 million, $15 million deal, we classify as large deals, and we have put a full new team behind that. And these are people -- I've created Chief Growth Officer profiles inside each one of our core strategic business units. And leading them is another senior person that I brought from outside essentially who has executive connect, who's articulate, who can do a 3-slide pitch to a CEO or a CFO or a CXO profile and more importantly, can bring the entire power of WNS together avoid conversations with procurement, take the conversation directly to the CEO on the other side and take charge of large components. So many of these -- I mean, we spoke about 3 deals that we signed 2, or 3 quarters ago, one that we signed 2 quarters ago, we didn't sign anything in the last quarter. But there are a number of deals in the pipeline that are being played out at this point in time. The one thing I'll mention about them is they are complex, they are large. They need a lot of attention at the top of the house on the other side. And therefore, being absolutely certain about when they will get signed is difficult for us. And that's the reason why we took it out of guidance this time. But I think this is the exciting big change that we are seeing in terms of our business momentum.

Yes. But opportunity is still there. So it's not this year that is next year...

It will continue for a long time, I would say. And I think this whole generative AI story will play out because one of the things we tell all our customers is even if you are focused on cost and transformation, focus a lot on what this technology can do for your business and can do for how your business is run. And one of the things I tell people is that if you're not investing in this 3 years from -- if you're investing in it, maybe 3 years from now, you may be a little disappointed that you didn't get the great outcomes you wanted. But if you are not investing in generative AI now, probably 3 years from now, you'll be terrified because the people who invested in it will be ahead of you, right? And I think that's the psyche behind how we are investing in it.

And I think relative to Gen AI as well, I think it's important to understand that when we look at where we are today in terms of the use cases, the proof of concepts, the capabilities that we've been able to create, we actually think we're in a position to be able to lead our clients because the reality is some of the ideas, some of the things that we've been able to prove out in terms of what these tools can do, are things that clients are very interested in, but the reality is they're not ready for, whether that's getting their data to where it needs to be, getting their infrastructure where it needs to be, managing the behavior change and the disruption that comes with leveraging these kinds of technologies. So there's a lot more to this than dropping a tool into a client environment and getting a benefit. And we saw that with RPA, as you mentioned. But this is more transformational, but also more disruptive.

Yes. Makes sense. At this time, like are there any questions from audience.

Thank you guys for being here. I just had a quick question on -- you guys were talking about the OTA client that is shifting a bit more digital. I'm curious if you see other verticals where there could be also this risk of maybe chatbots coming in and taking over some of that business and what cannibalization opportunities you're pursuing to kind of try to offset that?

Sure. I think relative to chatbot specifically, the biggest risk is going to come in the CX space, the customer service space. For us and in what Keshav was alluding to, specific to the online travel space, the interesting thing is the move towards automated servicing, the move towards chatbots is not about improvements in technology. It's not about AI, it's not about Gen AI. It's about the client wanting to save money. And if you look at what's happening the net impact is really on the end customer that if you want to get a hold of a live human to address your problem, you're going to be on hold for 30 minutes instead of 3 minutes. And this is a conscientious decision that they've made you'll see very similar things if you look at Spectrum and Comcast and a number of these other types of companies. But the reality is it's not about improvements in the technology, it's about a business decision to push towards these kinds of channels. For us, we see that risk in other parts of our business is extremely low. We don't have a lot of CX overall as a company, where we do, it tends to be part and parcel to an end-to-end process. So it's the front of -- end of an insurance claim, for example, but our exposure to stand-alone CX work as a company is extremely low.

So some of this more -- first of all, thank you guys so much for being here. Great to learn about what's been going on. So as it relates to like that insurance claim example, would you mind just walking through maybe mechanically the pieces there and like your assessment of the ability or lack of ability for some of these generative AI-driven software programs to replicate the capabilities that your company executes in servicing that claim?

Sure. I think overall, what we'll see as things evolve is the ability to build not just AI, but AI and generative AI into reusable components for these clients. So what our objective would be is to create within a claims process functionality that we can take customer to customer. The thing is when you look at things like claims management, every client is going to be different. The underlying system of record that runs that business is going to be different. The tools and technologies that, that client has invested in, in their front, middle and back office is going to be different. Our job becomes an optimization job. But what we're going to have to do is work with the tools and technologies that the client is using, in many cases, with things like sales force, some of that capability is being built into the tools and technologies that, that client is using. So this is going to evolve over time. You're going to see Gen AI impacting different parts of businesses in different ways. But we're also going to see things like within claims management, areas where AI works better than Gen AI. Because AI is much more rigorous and much more structured in what it does, if you want flexibility, creativity, then Gen AI is a better solution. But I think it's going to be hybrid. And again, our value proposition is because we understand insurance, we understand claims management. We work with multiple clients in this space. We've got the ability to come in, understand your problem and solve it.

We are out of time. But let me quickly ask like your very quick response on what should we expect as potential impact or benefit to your business from the outcome of U.S. elections, or if there is going to be an impact at all?

Well, if nothing else, more positivity, I guess, in the minds of decision-makers and CEOs, like elections normally don't have much impact on our business because the reality is we are in the boring business of delivering profitability, transformation, top line growth, profitability, revenue accretion to clients, right? Elections normally don't have much impact on our business. But recall that there's a war situation outside. There's a very stressed ecosystem from an economy point of view. And I think a positive result, a decisive results the way we saw in the U.S., for example, will probably get CEOs to be a little more relaxed in terms of their decision-making. And I'm hoping for that, but I don't expect any significant change.

That's good to know. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you.