CGI Inc. (GIBA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our event today. We have prepared a great program for you with many Q&A sessions. But before I go further, let me take a moment and show you this important slide. As you read every word in it, I will give you a quick summary just to help you out. Some statements made on this call, on this webcast, may be forward-looking. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed, and CGI disclaims any intent or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement viewed as supplemental. And finally, all the dollar figures today are going to be in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Okay. So let's get with the show. Let me first tell you a quick rundown on the agenda for today. First, we will have our co-Chair and our CEO give you a quick update on our long-term vision and focus on growth. We will follow that with a panel on talent, which you know is very important in the current environment. While we report our results by geography, our focus today will be on industries. So after our talent panel, we will cover 6 industries intermingled with multiple Q&A sessions. We will also cap the day with presentations on M&A and capital deployment, which will be followed by another Q&A session with George, Julie and François. I hope you'll enjoy today's event, and please send in your questions as of this moment. The sooner they come in, the better. You can write your questions at the bottom of the webcast. So our first [indiscernible] Julie?

Thank you, Maher. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us [Foreign Language] Today, George and I will share with you CGI's long-term vision and focus on strategic growth. I would like to kick it off by sharing with you a little about our history, the macro trends and opportunities shaping our future as well as detail about our growth agenda and the underlying strategic imperatives we've set for ourselves for fiscal year 2022. So right from the start, our dream and constitution were at the heart of what makes us unique. The dream that you see on the slide permeates our culture and identity since CGI was founded 45 years ago. Back then, we were convinced that the world will continue to change rapidly and that technology would be at the heart of these changes. We also wanted to help our clients leverage that technology to create new opportunities for their organization [Audio Gap] technology and being aware of your emerging ones. As such, we needed to attract and retain highly talented professionals and leaders whom we call members, as they are owners of CGI. We also put in place mechanisms to constantly listen to our clients. This led us to expand our capabilities from business and strategic IT consulting to systems integration and managed services, all this supported by our IP solutions and services. In addition to our dream capabilities and constitution, our culture has 3 characteristics that make us unique. First, we are people-centered from our member ownership culture to our client proximity model and even our involvement in the communities where we live and work. Second, we are a pragmatic and size-driven company. We rely on our 45 years of experience to partner with our clients and build with actionable strategies that deliver tangible and sustainable results. And with 80,000 professionals located in 40 countries, we have the global presence and the disciplined framework to provide best short delivery excellence that our clients trust. [Audio Gap] regular consultations with our 3 stakeholders, our clients, our members and our shareholders. We also consult industry experts, our Board members and external executives to help us prepare for the future. This year's exercise was truly at [Audio Gap] believe will create significant opportunities for CGI. But today, I would like to focus only on 3. So let's start with evolving global dynamics. Even though globalization and free trade led to economic growth in some areas, it also has [Audio Gap] global supply chains. As a result, governments are seeking to become more autonomous in certain strategic areas such as biotech, data privacy, energy and also telecommunications. This will lead both government and commercial sector clients to invest substantially in the reconfiguration of their global supply chains. And we are already seeing significant demand for CGI's deep business and technology expertise in these areas and particularly for our strategic business consulting services. The second trend I'd like to talk to you about is climate change and energy transition and also innovation. In fact, according to an intergovernmental panel on climate change, it will require USD 2.4 trillion per year for at least the next [Audio Gap] this undertaking. And obviously, it will take government regulation for this to happen. So as you see, this is a major transformation going across the entire economic ecosystem. And our teams are already engaged with our clients across the world in supporting and accelerating their energy transition programs, and we are also doing our part with our own net-zero objectives. The third trend I would like to address with you relates to demographics. An aging population worldwide has a major impact on the global labor market but also on governments, especially with respect to social services. According to a recent study by the OECD for its countries, the proportion of people aged 65 or older will increase from 17% to 27% by 2050. This means the health care spending of these same countries will increase by 50%. And considering that many of them are already allocating half of their total spending to health care, they will have to rapidly find alternatives to maintain and also improve all of their citizen services. And to do so, they will need to invest massively in digitization and continue to leverage public private partnerships. Clearly, CGI is starting at the same point but all of them will undergo significant transformations in the coming decades. And to succeed, both public and private sector clients will continue to invest heavily in business information and in technology. They will have -- they will all seek to improve how they operate, deliver products and services as well as create values. Overall, we help clients integrate great business and technology value chains so that they lead rather than [ suffer ] to the volatility of the coming decades. We have been helping clients navigate change for the last 45 years [ Audio Gap ] steady approach and strong guiding principles. It is core to how CGI has always worked. Over the last several decades, we have institutionalized our know-how and best practices into what we call our management foundation. It guides but also aligns the entire organization in terms of how we partner with each of our stakeholders and how we measure our success. For example, a core program of the management validation is our strategic planning approach, which is structured to support our commitment to balance the interest of our stakeholders and ensuring we create value for all of them. It's a philosophy we have implemented for more than 30 years now. Our long-term strategic goals and priorities are reviewed every year by listening to our 3 [Audio Gap] work. With our clients, our goal is to be recognized as their partner of choice and based on the quality and our trust relationships and consistency in delivering on our commitments, and also be recognized by our clients as expert of choice for the depth and relevance of the industry and technology experience we bring to help them address business objectives. As for our members, our goal is to engage and empower them to build long-term careers with us. And for our shareholders, we remain committed to being a well-managed, financially strong company and to providing superior returns. Importantly, and in line with CGI's values, our objective is to remain an engaged and responsible corporate citizen and all of this making us a world-class end-to-end IT and business consulting services leader. I would like now to close by thanking you for joining us today and giving me the opportunity to share the passion, the pride and commitment that all 80,000 CGI members invest every day in our work with our clients, our colleagues and our shareholders. And on that note, I'd like to invite our CEO, George Schindler, to tell you more about our ambitious growth agenda.

Thank you, Julie. Hello to everyone. I'm very pleased to be here today to share the plans that we have for that growth agenda that mirrors the opportunity that Julie just mentioned is in front of us. If we look at that growth agenda, of course, digitization is at the center of what everything that we have in front of us. And when we talk to our clients and ask them what they're going through as far as digital transformation, what they need in a partner, they really come up with the following areas that we're now investing in. First and foremost, the industry experience to help them build the right future going forward. Secondly, the technical expertise and the assets, the reusable assets to help them build it right but also build it with speed. And then finally, the operational excellence to help them operate it the right way as they go through this transformation. So today's focus is CGI's growth and positioning as that expert of choice to help them in that transformation. Be the employer of choice to make sure that we have the talent in order to help our clients. And then when we realize that growth agenda, to be your investment of choice. If we go forward, then we really look at the positioning that CGI has. It begins and it ends with our end-to-end offerings. Why? It's because our clients are looking for a holistic end-to-end partner to help them with these transformations. And what we see more and more is those transformations never really end with everything that Julie just talked about that's in front of the future for us and for our clients. The digital transformations are almost continuous. And that means that we have to have that end-to-end solutions, starting with the consulting services, both on business and technology. Obviously, the opportunity to help them implement those solutions, but have reusable intellectual property to speed that up for them and then be a safe pair of hands to run and operate what we design and implement. Now as Maher mentioned, we do report our revenue and earnings on a quarterly basis. We do that by geography. That's how we're organized. But we get lots of questions, how much of your business is in digital. So in advance of this meeting, what we did is we did an analysis of the FY '21 bookings, so the fiscal year '21 bookings that happened last year, 114% book-to-bill on a trailing 12-month basis. And over 60% of those are comprised of digital services and solutions. Just as importantly, then we looked at the pipeline that's ahead of us, and we analyze that pipeline, which is much larger than the bookings and a little bit more. Again, over 60% are comprised of digital services and solutions. So we're already in this space, and now we're investing on the growth agenda in front of us. So if we go to the next slide, what you see, I'm going to go back to now, the 3 areas that our clients are asking for: first, that industry experience and making sure that we can actually work with them to help them both from a business perspective that make the technology work for their business. Hence, our 3-year plan is to grow our consulting revenue on a compounded annual growth rate basis by 15% to 20%. Highlighted today, you're going to see the vision of 6 or 7 industry digital value chains and how we're doing that and working in collaboration with our clients. Second, I mentioned technology expertise. And of course, you need to have the talented individuals and the technologies to help our clients, but it goes beyond that. They need us to help them with the tooling, the methods and the partnerships to accelerate that transformation. Therefore, our 3-year plan is to get to IP30 by 2025. That will, of course, require us to do that both on the build side, but also on the buy side. And with our global alliance partners, we're looking to expand our expertise to use them as a channel to our services, so 15,000 new employee certifications across our global partners over the next 3 years. You're going to see those digital capabilities and the various client case studies throughout the rest of today. And then finally, the operational excellence. That's clearly an important element that our clients are looking for. Can we be a safe pair of hands? But not only that, but can we do that in a cost-efficient manner? Therefore, again, our third -- 3-year plan is to have a head count increase on a compounded annual growth rate of 15% and across all of our global delivery centers, particularly in our India offshore centers. Again, you're going to see highlights today that operational discipline coming through in each of the case studies we talk about. Now on operational excellence, and Julie mentioned this, it is about our management foundation. Our management foundation is 45 year -- contains 45 years of best practices, over thousands of different pages within our digital framework that everybody can share. And what does that provide to us as a company? If you go to the next slide, what you can see is that when clients are looking to work with us. They want to have a consistency of service every time. Everywhere around the world, they work with CGI. These clarity of policies allow us to act as one company. Further from that, it also serves as our common business language to encourage global teamwork and be able to leverage best practices. We saw that throughout the pandemic, where we were able to move work between various locations to get -- to reduce the geo risk associated with the pandemic for our clients. And then, finally, of course, our clients need innovation to make their digital transformations happen. What the management foundation does for us is it frees our consultants and professionals around the world to spend all of their critical think time working on satisfying the needs and challenges and opportunities associated with our clients and not focused on CGI. And we do that through a set of principles, so we can align around the why we're doing the processes, to realign on what we're trying to accomplish and then again, sharing the best practices on the how. Now the other thing that the management foundation does is it allows us to scale through both build and buy. So if you go to the, I think, the next slide here, you'll see kind of the story of CGI going from our 2 members with our founder and going up to now 80,000-plus as we head into 2022. Nearly 100 acquisitions on the buy side to make that happen. I've already shared with you that we increased our resource capacity on the buy strategy by 25%. The plan is to have a tenfold increase year-over-year, up to $1 billion in buy strategy, metro market and/or IP capital allocation. Now you're going to hear more about that from both François and Mike Keating as they talk about, in more detail, the plan around the buy side of CGI's strategy. Now if you go to the next slide, you can see that the numbers speak for themselves. These are numbers about value creation over the last decade. And it's more than just growth. It's about profitable growth. So you see the revenue growth, but you also see a much higher growth in the adjusted EPS. Of course, driving the cash from operations at the same level so we can continue to invest in the company and provide share price accretion. We plan to do the exact same thing in fiscal year 2022. I talked about this in the earnings call just a couple of weeks ago, double-digit earnings per share accretion. But of course, more of that coming from the revenue growth given the growth agenda and the opportunity in front of us. Of course, you can do that for the shareholders, but you need to have the clients in order to bring these types of numbers in. And so if you go to the next slide, you'll see that on the client side, our satisfaction scores continue to go up. This is -- these are -- over the last 5 years, you can see the graph from 8.92 to now 9.30 on a scale of 10 but even a steeper climb when you look at innovation. And again, innovation is what's required in the current digital landscape. And so the 2022 plan is to have double-digit growth in our digital bookings that I shared with you earlier in the presentation. And then on the employee side, the satisfaction critical during this time of talent. You see an even steeper increase over the last 5 years in our employee satisfaction, and that's coming directly from the investments we're making in our talented individual around the world, and we're going to continue doing, a 33% increase in employee training and digital technologies over this next year. So as I close this out, I think it's a perfect segue to the next topic, which I'd like to introduce my colleague, Chief Human Resources Officer, Bernard Labelle, who's going to lead us through a panel discussion on the all-important topic of talent. But before I do that, I'd just like to remind everybody that we are going to be taking questions throughout the day, so please put your questions in. And then at the end of the day, I will be here joined by Julie and François to answer any final questions you might have. So until then, over to you, Bernard.

[Foreign Language] Hello to everyone. As Julie referred to, at CGI, in all we do, we are guided by our dream. So if we go on the next page, this dream contains 3 key components, summarizing our employee experience at CGI. The first one is really creating the environment where our people can succeed and find the best career opportunities. The second one is our ownership culture, where each member is invited to be part of the ownership of the company. And as you can see on this chart, 85% of our current employees have made that choice to be part of that program. And finally, we want to build a company that is there to succeed in the future and there to stay, which is a very promising commitment. We're very happy that, today, 80,000 professionals around the world have made the choice to share this dream with us. Very important to mention and connected to this ownership culture, we also invite our employees to refer candidates that they know and see and [ need ] in the market. And just to give you an idea, last year, 31% of our new joiners were a direct result of this referral program. As George mentioned, we've grown the member satisfaction and improve over the years, now sitting at 8.6 out of 10. And every year, each of these 80,000 professional have a chance to contribute to evaluate the satisfaction and share their feedback on the company overall. Learning is a key priority. George just talked about the massive investment we're making in this area. We're happy that our employees completed more than 380,000 courses just last year. And speaking about growing and developing our people, we were able to promote internally, 3,681 of them to a different role, either a more senior role in the consultancy or a management or leadership position. If we go on the next slide, speaking about our talent strategy and how we're able to support the opportunity that we see in the market. Again, as George just described, our strategy has been built on 5 key pillars, and I'm happy to have 3 of my President colleague joining me today for this panel. And they will speak very concretely about how these pillars are translating and materializing in the reality. But just to describe you a bit what we're doing, the first pillar is really to develop our existing employees capabilities. By providing them the best career opportunities that we develop with our clients, which mean, of course, rotating some of them in different roles, upskilling, reskilling, having the right tools and solutions internally to help them to grow at CGI and build their future with us. The second pillar is really to leverage the strength of our model, which is, as you know, a combination of client proximity capabilities but also our global delivery center of excellence. So we really combine the 2 to make sure that we can bring the right talent to meet our client demand. The third pillar is to attract the top talent in the market aligned with our growth strategy, recruiting new members. We were able, for instance, to recruit 18,000 new professionals just last year. So we're very active in the market as well. The fourth pillar is championing diversity, equity and inclusion. And for us, it means a very important commitment. And to be in the top quartile of our industry over the next 3 years is our aspiration. And it includes also making sure that we build the same representation at all levels in the company. And finally, the last but not the least pillar is to expand our partnerships with clients, schools and community groups. We have hundreds of those partnerships with, again, clients, colleges around the world. It's really a build in our metro market approach to make sure that we work close to our clients in each geography where we are established. So let's see now it materializes in our operations with a quick world tour. So we'll have a North American, European and Asia Pacific perspective with 3 of our Presidents, and I'm pleased to welcome first Stephanie Mango based in Washington, DC. Stephanie, welcome. And Stephanie, I think a lot of people are asking us, are you really facing a challenge right now? Is there a talent war I think we recognize the challenge, but we're able to leverage all those pillars that I just described. So can you tell us how this lands in your region?

Absolutely. Thank you, and hello, everyone. Yes, you can't look at the new stream these days without seeing something about the great resignation, the war for talent, the power of the employee. And there is definitely an acute challenge in the market that's different. And there are some ripple impacts to the pandemic that we know we haven't even felt yet, and we're all trying to predict what those are going to be, and CGI is not immune to those ripples. However, the ripples are a little bit smaller for us because of the strong foundation that we're built in those pillars that you just went over. One of the ripples that we're starting to see, and don't know the full force of yet, is the impact of the pandemic on the progress that we've all made on diversity, equity and inclusion in technology and really in all fields. And what our foundation has allowed us to do is to focus on strengthening our current practices and really to innovate, to take advantage of the market conditions. So we're successfully hiring talent away from any other organizations. And as a result, while our attrition rates have ticked up, just like everybody else's have, we've continued to stay below the market averages. So to attract a diverse pool of members, in the U.S., we have a number of key innovations that we've been focused on. The first one is we started a new apprenticeship program in the past year that targets a diverse set of communities. Over 70% of the apprentices come from a protected or diverse background. We expanded our partnership with hiring our heroes for our military veterans. We expanded our recruiting overall with campuses, including the focus that we have on minority-serving institutions and on the resource groups that we have with campuses where we already have a strong partnership. Lastly, we've also been having some fun letting our member resource groups have Instagram takeovers, providing prospective members more insight into life at CGI than they've actually had in the past. Then it's all about developing our members once they come on board to retain them. And throughout the day, you're going to hear a lot about our culture and our unique organizational model. We keep it very simple and we keep it flat. That alone helps create value for members in their career, drives autonomy and innovation and keeps leadership close to what's happening. So we applied [indiscernible] islands to all of our processes. We try to make sure everyone has a meaningful seat at the party. And to that end, all of our executives are active in our member resource groups. We have a lot of career champion paths and programs. And this year, in the U.S., we made a number of adjustments to our benefit packages, into our holidays. And recently, we implemented a broad mentoring program between early career members and our most senior executives, myself included, to encourage the exchange of ideas. We're really benefiting already from incorporating our insights from the digital natives to benefit our clients. And these are just a few of our latest innovations from the member experience.

Thank you, Stephanie. And I think what you described in terms of the market conditions and the turnover, and now we are able to attract, is very consistent to what we see globally. And I would say that's the beauty of our model, leveraging proximity and living in the communities and building strong connections. And Torsten, I think, especially through the member referral program, you have really made significant progress in that area. Torsten?

Yes. So from a European perspective, I can only repeat what Stephanie already shared with us. The current talent market is certainly a difficult one. But as we all know, with every challenge, there is also always an opportunity. And our opportunity in CGI is clearly the strength of our CGI model. Our ownership culture that Julie already shared with you and Bernard mentioned, this culture built around the dream is very, very attractive for existing and for new members who really want to build and grow something. For example, leaders in CGI or joining leaders, they can come and build their own business even within CGI, supported by our framework, the management foundation and the power of the team within CGI. And as a result, our leaders right now are hiring like hell. Almost 600 new hires, signed up only in my unit since this fiscal year, just started 2 months ago. And also on the other side, experts, if you don't want to be a leader, but expert, they can grow their own expertise in business or technology in CGI or doing both. And as Bernard just said, a very strong indicator of this powerful model is at the end our member referral rate. The fact that our own members ask their former colleagues and friends to join CGI in some units, even up to 60% of all hires, it doesn't only help us in quantitative terms but also in terms of the quality of those new members and of course, also regarding the retention of existing colleagues.

Thank you, Torsten. I think you also connect with -- we talk about universities and colleges and having our own internal academy as well. So this is something that you also leverage as part of this effort.

Yes. Absolutely. I mean the member referral book, of course, is not the only way to attract new talent. For example, we work closely with local universities at all our locations to run very specific CGI graduate programs. In Central and Eastern Europe alone in my unit, we have at this very moment, more than 200 students enrolled in such programs, mostly in dual studying models. And that is in areas like artificial intelligence, data analytics, software engineering and other disciplines. And while those students spend usually 2, 3 days at the university, and that includes Saturdays, they also engage in some of our client engagements already. And they really built practical experience that they can then later use when they become real members and consultants within the CGI company.

Yes. And I think, again, that's the beauty of the strength of our model, the organizing principles of our business model, where we're really building a presence in the metros and connecting in the communities where we're living and growing the company. Moving to George. George, of course, our APAC President, of our APAC Global Delivery Centers of Excellence. George, talent war is also for you an opportunity since your operations are really a key hub for offshore but also innovation. How do you manage the challenge in your part of the world and make it an opportunity?

Yes. Thank you, Bernard. So as you said, our offshore delivery centers are a key component of CGI's global delivery model, and they complement our strong client proximity. So as our clients have been accelerating their digital transformation, what we're seeing is a significant increase in demand for our offshore delivery services. And as you said, the increased demand is something that's across the industry, and it's led to a very hot talent market, especially in our main geography here, APAC, which is India. And as my colleagues have said, CGI is not immune from any of these challenges of the talent market. Elevated attrition, significant increase in hiring higher salary demands, supply and demand imbalance that makes hiring a challenge and also leads to higher costs. Now what are we doing as you ask, to manage the situation in APAC? A lot of management focus on this issue has allowed us to manage the challenges effectively and meet our objectives. So despite the challenges with talent, I can report today that our offshore operations had double-digit year-on-year revenue growth in the most recently completed quarter. And let me just answer your question and mention a few steps that we're taking. And as George said earlier, we have a management foundation that drives operational excellence and consistency of operations across the company. So a lot of these things are going to sound very similar to what my colleagues, Torsten and Stephanie, have touched on. But a few things that we are doing here, we've accelerated our digital reskilling programs by leveraging our CGI academia platform. And by this platform, our members are able to complete predefined digital learning journeys. And our learning hours are up significantly, and this reskilling has enhanced our ability to meet the demand for digital skills. And then we've also implemented a very strong robust rotation program, and that allows us to move skilled and experience members to areas of high demand. And this, again, reduces our reliance on external hiring. We've also rapidly scaled up our hiring capacity last year. We hired the most new members ever in our APAC operations, 35% higher than the year before the pandemic and 48% more than the year of the pandemic. And while what we have found is that joiner ratios are a big challenge, especially in India right now. We've been able to stay above the industry average. Our own ownership culture and our overall member value proposition has allowed us to attract sufficient talent to meet demand. And Torsten talked about our very robust member retention program, and this is a big accelerator here because our joiner ratios for candidates referred by our members are much higher than those that we hire directly from the market. So this strong hiring throughput has resulted in net headcount increase in our APAC operations by 14% compared to levels before the pandemic. And these results really give us confidence that we can continue to meet the accelerating demand for our services. Another thing that we are doing is ramping up our graduate onboarding training and deployment. We've doubled the planned intake of graduates during our fourth quarter. Most of these graduates are now -- they're done with their training and they are available as part of our talent supply. And that's going to allow us to drive even more rotations to meet demand. And also, I see questions around costs. One of the ways that we manage our cost is by ramping up graduates, which help us to really keep our overall cost levels in balance and keep our margins at the levels that we used to. So finally, Bernard, we've managed our attrition through strong employee engagement. Our member satisfaction levels in APAC are above 9 out of 10, and we've also implemented various targeted retention measures. Our members appreciated the way that we took care of them during the pandemic. And we're beginning to see very early signs that attrition may have peaked and is slowly starting to ease. So those are just some of the things that we've been able to do to keep our operations going and navigate through all of the challenges in the talent landscape. Back to you, Bernard.

Yes. Thank you, George. Great ways certainly to achieve the aspiration that George shared with us a few minutes ago on how we want to grow in your space. That is really fantastic. And you referred to academia because I think it has been one of our great achievement and driving of member satisfaction. And we are very often asked, okay, but we've been to difficult times. How were you able to still increase the level of satisfaction of all your employees? And I'm curious to hear your perspective on this, Stephanie, Torsten and George. As we showed, we really increased even in the last 2 years where we could have thought, "Well, there will be a disconnect or people not meeting every day?" Are we able to still maintain strong communication, I think it has been a factor. But Stephanie, anything you'd like to raise in terms of what we have done to stay very close to our people and build stronger member satisfaction?

Yes. I think George actually summarized a lot of them in his comments, right? It's been about focusing on making sure we're continuing to develop our members, making sure we're staying very close to them. We actually did a fair amount of training of our leaders when the pandemic hit. We had some members who continue to deliver on site for our customers and then a lot of members who obviously went remote during the lockdowns. And so for the leaders who are new at managing those members, we train them on how to lead geographically dispersed teams and how to stay in close contact with those members. And so teaching those leaders how to lead was an important part of it. Keeping everyone close and then doing the rotations and keeping business as usual has been a key part of that.

And maybe let me add to that because, as you know, we focus on 3 stakeholders in CGI: our clients, our shareholders and our members. So -- and in times as a pandemic, focus is even more important because the direct channels to those stakeholders are a bit limited due to less in-person meetings. So we used all other channels that are possible to still engage with them, and that's not only about teams and our technology. It's also about certain ways to -- with video broadcasting, with certain events where things can be celebrated still and a lot of other activities throughout the year that kept us close to our members. And we think about really to act like a family. As we are family owned, CGI is at the core such kind of business. That's how we see also the relationship to our members and keep that as close as possible.

Thank you. And George, I think that's a bit what is consistent with what you have seen, right, in your...

Yes, absolutely. And I think just to pick up from what Torsten and Stephanie said, our management foundation has got the member partnership management framework, which comes built in with certain checkpoints that ensure that we are constantly connected with our members. And especially during the pandemic, our managers, they really took care of our members as they went through some very difficult times and ensure that they were taken care of. And again, if you put it all together, and that environment is really what allows us to keep those satisfactory scores up.

Thank you. So thank you to the 3 of you. Unfortunately, I think we're running out of time. We can feel the passion. I feel we could speak for hours, but let's pause here on that topic and turn over to Serge.

Thank you so much, Bernard, and thanks to all the colleagues for that panel on a critical topic. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to anybody is in Asia. Thanks for joining us today. I'm super excited to facilitate this upcoming segment, and I'll talk to you about that in a second. But before let me cover a couple of housekeeping items. We've got a couple of questions whether when you can ask questions and whether we're live. Since the last couple -- since the last couple of presentations, we are live, by the way, and you can submit your questions throughout the presentation throughout any presentation. Actually, for the next little session of the 6 presenters, I'm going to be taking some of your questions and then giving them back to the President. So please go ahead and send us your questions as we go forward. For our section, let me kick it off by sharing with you a couple of topics here. So first of all, if you heard what our CEO, George said earlier, he talked about this notion of industry and technical expertise as well as operational excellence. What we believe for the next several decades, there are several elements that are coming together that are making the next wave of growth quite impressive but also a little bit different. For the first time in our history, we're connecting the physical, virtual and, in some cases, yes, it's a little bit freaky, the biological world, like we've never done before. And that creates a tremendous amount of opportunities, risks to management opportunities. And if you think about those components, we think it's critical more than ever to master both the industry expertise as well as technology, and we think we're extremely well positioned to do that. Let's talk about that a little bit. Let's start with the industry aspect of it. So for the last 45 years, CGI members, employees, we call them members, have been sitting side-by-side in close proximity with our clients. Not only have they been working on technology but they have an understanding and learning everything about the business aspects of our clients. This is key for us. We dilute that -- distill that knowledge and bring it up to understand what's happening and bring more value across all of our geographies. In addition to that, we have set up, and you'll hear from our President shortly, who many of them chair what we call industry cabinets. They lead hundreds of experts, world-class experts across the world in understanding what's happening in their own vertical industry. But as you all know, a lot of ecosystems are now crossing across industries. So they also synchronize across industries, and you see that in some of the examples that our leaders will provide shortly. And last but not least, the combination of those 2 things, working closely with our clients and being very disciplined and rigorous in understanding what happening by industry and across industry, has helped us create dozens of accelerators, blueprints, industry-specific blueprints that allows us to understand what's happening in each industry and across industries, intellectual property, you'll hear about that shortly and, more importantly, frameworks and accelerators because as you heard from Julie earlier, agility, speed to market, speed to value is going to be key. And that combination of that industry expertise enables us to accelerate that speed to market. That's the industry aspect of it. Now if we go to the next page, how do we map our -- what is our perspective on digital transformation or the notion of technical expertise? First and foremost, we have learned over time that digital and technology continues to evolve almost with every single introduction of new technology. But we've fed that information, we fed that knowledge from our interacting regularly with our clients. So not only have we created that expertise by interacting with our clients and working and having our own perspective on these digital technologies. But once a year, we take the time to meet with over 1,700 senior executives, both technology and business of our clients, so that we are connected, and we're basing our insights on what it takes to do digital transformation based on input directly from our clients, one of our key stakeholders. So we stay away from the hype. Prior to coming to CGI, I was a client of CGI and most of CGI's competitors. And one thing I appreciated the most is this notion to stay away from the hype and working on accessorizing and doing the right things to truly transform our business. So what have we learned from those leaders that are producing business results in their sectors, in their industries? Well, there are 4 characteristics I'll share with you today very quickly. First and foremost, they work on business model and organizational elements before even looking at technology. Are we aligned? Do we know the why? Are we doing applicable innovation, not me-too innovation? Second, are they looking at their transformation holistically between business, IT, internal silos or even beyond their own borders of their company or their business or, if it's a government agency, beyond the borders of their government agency? Are they looking at their digital value chains end-to-end? And just like we look at a structured supply chain, you'd have to look at it all the way to the end, modernize it, simplify it, protect it, particularly in the case of digital? And last but not least, we've noted that digital leaders care about things like privacy, sustainability and cybersecurity more than others. And that's how we've configured both our own experiences but also the input from our clients to have a unique posture on this notion of holistic digital transformation. By the way, let me take a quick question that came in as we were chatting. [ Georgina O'Toole ] asked the question, "George earlier mentioned to our analysis around our growth, our pipeline and what portion of that is digital." And again, our definition of digital is very similar to what you heard there. It is the high-end strategic consulting and helping our clients understand what it takes to create organizational agility not just working in agile at scale, working at small, agile squads or agile at scale. Yes, that's very important. But it goes beyond that. It goes into organizational agility. So any of those services are in that framework for us. Of course, any services around end-to-end digital modernization, you think about the front-end UX, advanced UX, advanced interaction in terms of customer interaction but that's not enough because that's only accessorizing. Then you have to do the bridging and create agile architectures that link back to legacy systems. We're putting that chain together so that it brings value, end-to-end, rather than just accessorizing with a little bit of machine learning here or a little bit of mobile application there. Those are, for us, the definition of end-to-end digital. And of course, you have to protect that end-to-end supply chain with baked in, as our CISO likes to say, baked in cybersecurity and protection to that. So happy to chat some more about this digital definition with you all. Now I'm going to start this next section of our presentation today. And I'm truly excited because what we're going to do is we're going to fly all over the world virtually. We're going to hear from different senior executives at CGI. They're all going to be Presidents. We're going to talk about each one. Each one will introduce themselves, tell you a little bit about their background. But more importantly, they're going to spend some time sharing with you what are we doing in these different industries and that intersection where we create value for our clients between industry and technical expertise. So let me kick it off by going over to Washington, D.C. and bring back Stephanie, who is President of our U.S. Federal business, back to the virtual screen to lead us through what we're doing in government. Over to you, Stephanie.

Thank you. Hello again, everybody. I'm excited to be back on the stage to talk about one of my other passions, the public sector, and how CGI is supporting public sector across the globe. Let me start with a few things you may not know. So if you can go to our first slide, if you voted in the 2021 London Mayoral or London Assembly Elections, then you were one of the millions who did. What you may not know is that behind the scenes, the CGI team was managing the electronic count of the votes in one of the most complex local election landscapes in the United Kingdom. Next slide. Did you travel into or out of the U.S. recently? CGI worked with the U.S. State Department supporting the production of 20 million U.S. passports and 5 million U.S. visas for 70 countries last year. CGI enables State to efficiently process visa applications at U.S. embassies and consulates, leveraging our omnichannel customer relationship management and business process solution named CGI Atlas 360, which includes a self-learning automated chat robot, appointment scheduling, workload optimization, decollection and biometric data collection. Next slide. These are just 2 data points about CGI in the public sector. We have a proud heritage, a partnership with global public sector going back 4 decades, working across all levels, central and federal, provincial and state and local. One of our strengths is understanding the connectivity between the levels of government and the necessary flow of funds and data between those levels. We work across multiple and diverse government sectors from health to defense and intelligence to collection services, driving the change from traditional ways of working to digital future with over 25,000 consultants globally. We bring global scale from strong local proximity-based relationships, partnering with our top clients for decades, in some cases, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of State for over 40 years and law enforcement across the U.K. for 35. Just a few examples of the 2,900 clients we serve across the world. Let's go to the next slide, and let's talk about what's driving the public sector. While governments are all in different places with different drivers, there are commonalities, as Julie pointed out this morning. Improving the citizen experience and the health of populations is high on the agenda of governments around the world. Our governments are faced with a really complex set of challenges right now. We've got a lingering global pandemic and all the resulting economic impacts that are happening. We have an aging population, putting an increased strain on an already stretched health and social services infrastructure. We have increasing cyber threats coming from many different vectors. We have an intensifying pressure to decarbonize and protect our environment, and we have increasingly high expectations from really digitally knowledgeable citizens who simply want more from their government. And all of this is happening against the backdrop of years of underinvestment in technology, increasing the pressure on these siloed organizations that have disconnected legacy infrastructure in a lot of cases. And governments really just can't work in these silos anymore removed from what's happening behind their own walls. Collaborating on a shared mission is really the way forward. So though there are significant common challenges across the public sector, and this is where CGI comes in. We've partnered with these organizations, and we believe in their mission. I'll make it a bit personal for a minute. I've been serving the U.S. federal government for 26 years now. I'm committed to helping them solve these complex challenges. I view them as my challenges to solve. As a taxpayer, as a citizen and as a parent, I don't want to leave them all for the next generation to figure out. I'm proud to work for CGI that's an integrator with a proven experience and scale to drive the change that the government needs to make now in order to make us successful in the future. So what are we doing? At CGI, we drive and enable collaborative government and collaborative government happens at many levels. Within a department or ministry across departments or ministries within one level of government and then among varying levels of government within a country or even among governments like within the Five Eyes community. So let's go to the next slide. And here, let's talk about with the collaborative government that has a holistic view and you really need to provide the right levels of privacy and cybersecurity and meet regulatory requirements. And CGI has considerable experience, bringing this holistic view and in a secure way. Some examples: in Estonia, where the digital court system allows for simultaneous data exchange between police, prosecutors, courts, prisons and many other agencies; in the U.S., where we support the exchange of environmental data between all levels of the public sector and the private sector; in the U.K., where CGI runs the police national database with over 4 billion searchable records that's accessible by any individual police force across the U.K.; and in the EU, for GAIA-X, a European initiative for Secure Data Exchange, CGI is currently designing several of the use cases. And those are just a few. CGI also has IP developed on blockchain technology for secure data exchange for health care, intelligence and other data. Next, looking at greater business agility. It requires innovation in the right technology such as scalable, repeatable platforms and interfaces. Again, CGI has significant experience in this area. During the pandemic, we delivered rapid connectivity between the National Health System and Ministry of Defense Medical Systems to enable multidirectional flow of COVID-19 vaccination data for service personnel and their families. Another example of agility is CGI built the schooling platform used throughout municipalities in Scandinavia, including in Oslo. Our portal and our applications enable continued schooling during the COVID lockdown. Next, let's talk about simplifying and scaling. Our award-winning e-procurement system called EVA, for Virginia Department of Commerce, which is where I'm from, provides a centralized online purchasing hub for state and local agencies. CGI helped modernize the platform with next-generation technologies that enables the Commonwealth to meet their business goals now and in the future. And simplification of processes and systems is key. But we all know simplification of the user experience is what's really required. As the digital natives continue to come online, their expectations are really high about how easy it is to get things done. So in Canada, the Memorial Hospital Center on the Kahnawake Mohawk Indian reserve that serves the health care needs of the vibrant community of 8,000, CGI is helping the center reinvent and digitize its entire outpatient care journey. The hospital will improve the collaboration between health care professionals and the doctor-patient relationship and doctors are going to have one-click access to the patient's entire medical record, really improving that user experience. Now through all of these stories and all of those first 3 boxes, the continuous threat is data. We are helping our government customers become true data-driven organizations. For example, after Hurricane wreaked havoc in Puerto Rico and New Jersey, we deployed our natural disaster recovery solution that enabled recovery programs to move quickly, getting people and communities the support they need to recover while holding the various federal and state level stakeholders accountable for providing transparency to over $20 billion funds dispersed in these 2 locations. As a second example, in Estonia, the environmental agency is able to use earth observation methods, preprocessing satellite data, integrated with desktop weather forecasting tools to publish accurate ice maps, increasing transportation safety and the efficiency of its fleet icebreakers, keeping routes and ports open, which is critical to commerce. And finally, getting to the last box, consider the mix and diverse ecosystems that are created when we do all of these things, allowing enterprises both big and small to thrive and work together, delivering really forward-looking projects such as smart cities, which brings me to a case study I want to share with you. Let's go to the next slide. CGI is partnered with the City of Edinburgh, to achieve their vision of becoming one of the smartest cities. This agreement includes the deployment of CGI's Sensor Insights 360, which is a real-time data platform, delivers an end-to-end approach to the Internet of Things, with data insights, processes and tools required to achieve real transformational change. It reduces the complexity of IoT and easily identifies ways to improve operational efficiency while proactively monitoring and managing critical services. It's going to be implemented through a smart city operation center. And with it, we'll have benefits that include things like proactive estate management, creating better services and neighborhoods for our citizens, enabling healthier and safer social housing with increased sustainability and regulatory compliance, improving lease management through the utilization of smart bins, sustainable recycling and route optimization and using data to drive more real-world efficiencies. CGI, together with the council has already started its smart city work by implementing Edinburgh Learns for Life, a unique digital solution to transform learning and teaching in its schools. And if you're interested in learning more about this, I think there's an open session to learn more with the council on Friday. If you can go to the next slide. My second case study is about the Bavarian State Ministry. And here, the Ministry of Justice really wants to better serve its citizens through digitization and innovation. And under this contract, CGI is going to advance the ministry's 220 locations across Bavaria, with end-to-end services that simplify and digitize both business and IT processes, enabling the digital administration and optimization of citizen services. In the end, the pandemic has accelerated the need for governments at all levels to collaborate with each other and to accelerate their technology adoption to enhance and simplify the experience for their stakeholders and that positions CGI well with our deep relationships, our mission and technology expertise and our ability to bring all those pieces together, secure them and simplify them. We're looking forward to continuing to help transform the public sector. Thank you, and back to you in the studio.

Hey, Stephanie. Thank you so much for that overview of all the stuff happening on the government. Listen, before I let you go and hand off to the next person, I got a question. We got several questions here. Obviously, there's a lot of talk of some fairly significant economic stimulus plans in the works in the U.S. Can you comment on that a little bit, particularly how are we positioned as CGI for those investments?

Absolutely. So there are really 2 big stimulus packages that are in the works that have already happened. One is the Infrastructure and Jobs Bill. That one officially became law about a week ago, and it's focused on really rebuilding the core infrastructure. So roads, rails, bridges, but it also has in expanding access to clean drinking water, high-speed Internet and other investments in the communities. The second one is also known as the Build Back Better bill. And that one passed the House last week. It still has some more iterations to go through, so it's not actually a law yet. And this one represents a large portion of the current administration's economic agenda. So it's got a lot of the climate stuff in it, the tax changes, the subsidies and a new family leave program. So for both of these bills, a lot of the money is going to flow through to state and local governments, some of it directly to the taxpayers through subsidies and tax credits. There's still a lot of opportunity for CGI in there. Our opportunity is really in the management and administration of all of the new programs that are being created in cybersecurity, which is where there's a lot of money flowing through as well and the IT solutions that are required. We are well-positioned with our long-standing relationships with environmental protection agency and health and human services for the new climate and health care programs. With our current cyber work, we're already providing a cyber shared service for 60 small government agencies and 6 large departments. And so that cyber funding, we're well-positioned for that. And we've got a significant footprint in financial budget and procurement management and a footprint in grants management where a lot of the funding is flowing through as well.

Thanks a lot, Stephanie. So in summary, we're not going to lack work either in North America or in the European government. Thanks so much for your time and sharing all those thoughts with us Stephanie. All right. Now we're going to cross over the ocean and head over to Paris. Is Laurent on the line? [Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language] Laurent is the President of our Western and Southern Eastern Europe and Laurent is going to take us through what we're doing in the retail, consumer and services space. Laurent, over to you, please.

Thank you very much, Serge. [Foreign Language] Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. [Foreign Language] And I led our Western and Southern Europe strategic business unit as well of our global retail, consumer and services industry cabinet. I am very, very proud to lead this industry, which is where I started my career, 23 -- 26, 3 years ago. And it's just because this industry is really, really exciting and changed very fast. All of us are customers. And we all know what it's like to have a poor shopping experience, especially when we are disappointed by unpleasant or inefficient services. We will no longer patronize that retailer. And so our job in CGI is to help our clients ensure their customer keep coming back and become loyal advocates of their business to accelerate their growth. And so I'd like to start with an example of an outstanding services we delivered last year. During the lockdown, never as there have been a more important time to ensure high-quality services. And then remember, again, the day after French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced the first pandemic lockdown, our consultants went into action. For Carrefour, one of the world's top retailer, we help them services 120 more orders than the day compared to the previous record. And it had to work on March 17, not March 18, neither March 19. It has to be March 17, the first day of the lockdown. We think the following months, we also -- we helped them services, 70% more orders breaking the previous work of 900,000 order. So in a synthesis, we help this client quickly and quickly scale to meet the needs of its customer in real time. And so now let's talk about our footprint across this industry. Retail consumer services is part of our manufacturing, retail and distribution segment, which represents 24% of CGI revenue in fiscal year '21, and we are experiencing selling booking growth, 20% year-over-year. We have a strong footprint across all industry segments, including grocery and mass retail, luxury, household and consumer goods. And one particular advantage we have in helping clients optimize their digital value chain is our CGI retail suite, which is a retail management solution that cover all of retailers' core business needs. 50% of the 100 largest European hypermarket use this software to manage their operation. Also, we have 3 innovation centers where we run immersive workshop with our clients. Here, they really work in the shoes of both their clients and their employees through a natural digital store and try different ways of using new device and software. And so what is our vision for now and also for tomorrow? For quite some time now, the industry has been focused on delivering multichannel strategies, followed by cross channel and then omnichannel strategies. Yet many organization continue to struggle while -- with keeping customer promise and offering world-class experience. The industry is very exciting industry, still have a lot to achieve to transform their business and become a digital enterprise, including having a comprehensive understanding of the customer, providing seamless front-end experiences, fulfilling goods through an agile supply chain and delivering a consistent set of offering across channel. During the pandemic, customers turned to online retailing and this will remain the case. At the same time, employee expectation has evolved. The big resignation trend affects this industry more than most as it relies significantly on in-person employees. For example, the hospitality sector struggle to find workers and organization are forced to reduce operating hour. Just think of the scale of change this industry is going through and how this affects each one of us in our day-to-day life. Products and IT supply chain has been disrupt, and most organizations continue to face costs or shortage problem. Container and full price -- fuel price are creating volatility and the shortage of IT resources are further distributing this industry. Last but not the least, up to this, the sustainability revolution, it is very, really strong revolution. Growing customer and regular lottery mandates to reduce the impact of climate change required industry leader to accelerate the pace of transformation once again. And so to help our clients successfully address this challenge, we offer a unique set of end-to-end services. Here, you see 5 key offerings that are helping to drive both our client growth and our growth. First, the CGI retail suite I mentioned earlier, cover clients' merchandising needs from end-to-end. This solution is an omnichannel by design to satisfy customer needs no matter how they prefer to buy. Next, using our industry blueprints when clients accelerate their digital transformation and improve legacy systems through IT modernization as a strategic offering. With our business and IT computing capabilities, we advise clients on how to achieve efficient and rapid progress while mitigating risk and managing the required cultural change and technology impact. In all case, transformation required deep data management to unlock access to information and realize the benefits of artificial intelligence. So moving to the cloud is a strong enabler. However, it's regard first we're thinking the entire data architecture. Otherwise, the benefit will be lost. Now with the acceleration of sustainability as a top business priority, we offer numerous way to help clients measure and manage their emission and involves our business model to achieve net-zero targets. In each case, we leverage our end-to-end services and industry expertise to optimize their entire digital supply chain. When it comes to third party solution integration, a strong partner network is particularly important to help our clients and CGI growth. Solution integration has been a core business for us since our funding, and we continue to offer and maintain a comprehensive range of relationship with large software vendors, niche player and also start-up to keep covering the world digital supply chain. Then with an independent vision based on the customer needs, listening to them, we select the best solution to the benefit of our clients, and we are very fast in adopting new and emerging solution to bring innovation to them. Our global delivery center supports this solution organized by business functions like e-commerce, customer relationship management or supply chains and inside our industry organization. So the combination of our solution and expertise and industry understanding is key to bringing value to clients. Let me now provide you with an example on how we help clients accelerate digital across their value chain. In 2021, we signed a global master service agreement to accelerate the global consumer good brands move to the cloud adoption of automation and the transformation of their core business processes. Their satisfaction is very high, and we have multiplied by 4x the volume of services delivered to them in only 1 year. So we expect strong growth to continue, including the expansion of our services locally to follow our client decentralization strategy and act as an extension of their organization. Our ability to help this client accelerate their performance is due to our approach of providing expert advice and timely service locally while dropping upon the diverse global networks that bring forward the right talent, innovation and scale from across the globe. For these clients, our local relationships are in Canada, France, the Netherlands, Germany and the U.S. with global delivery provided by our experts in India and in Portugal. So we definitively leverage our worldwide capabilities for this customer. Unless -- and last -- sorry, but not the least, let's explore further our IP CGI retail suites. As I shared earlier, we offer a comprehensive range of service to meet retailer needs. This include our CGI retail suite that is implemented within 45 clients ranging from those with just a few stores to those with thousands. We see significant growth for the CGI retail suite particularly as the hypermarket model undergoes significant change in the very near future. Our solution is designed to manage all formats, including the store, convenience store and supermarket, enabling each to provide services that range from dropshipping to ship from store to delivery and return anywhere. Our solution cover 100% of the merchandise needs. Today, CGI Retail suite operates in 17 language and 22 country and is present on every continent. In Greece, for example, for a do-it-yourself retailer, we replaced a complex system made up of several well-known software application in just 7 months. We deploy the full stack of CGI Retail suite solution from the purchase office to online retail, encompassing the entire supply chain. Another example in Canada. We increased the client productivity by up to 200%, thanks to the solution in-store pickup model. With the lack of worker posing significant challenge in this industry, sorry, enabling in-store pickup model is one of the way we ran significant competitive advantage to our clients. I've been very pleased to share our vision of this exciting industry retail sector and experiencing in helping to transform this. The work we do each day helps our clients meet the digital expectations of their customers and to build a better future for us. Definitely [Foreign Language] I would like maybe to conclude my presentation to thank the thousands CGI member who are working daily to support our customer in this industry. [Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language] Thank you, Laurent, for giving us a good tour of what's happening in that space. And with that zoom on Retail suite really, really interesting IP to help some of our clients going forward. I do have a question for you. Earlier, Bernard and the colleagues talked about talent as it impacts our own talent. The question we have here is how does -- how do you help your customers, particularly in this space, who are also getting a lot of challenges. We hear about it in the news. We're having hard time bringing people back to work. It's the same in Europe, I assume. How are we helping them in this space at all?

Yes. Thank you, Serge. And it is a discussion that we have many time with our customer as they really face shortage resources in their industry also. And so the 2 main topic that they highlight during the discussion is that the tools that we provide to them really give productivity, productivity to their employee. And it is an example that we gave. In Canada, for example, we improved our client productivity in the store up to 200%. Though in confidence, they need less people to do the daily task. And there are many other initiatives. As I said, listening to the customer -- listening to our customer need, we are looking for the best solution ever in the market and even sometimes, some started. And that helps also productivity like electronic shelf label, reception, automation or in our warehouse and so on. The second topic that I would like to highlight is that, as we know, that employee satisfaction is really key. And we are doing for ourself, we also work with our customer to help them to increase their employee satisfaction. And based on the tool, listing to the customer experience to the user experience, when they use CGI implementation, we improve employee satisfaction as we are doing inside CGI for our own employee. So we have many examples, but in the synthesis, a lot of productivity. We have the best tool and we help our customers to help their employee satisfaction. I want to talk [indiscernible].

Well, no, what's interesting about that, you heard George talk about the management foundation earlier. But essentially, where we stay really well connected with our 3 stakeholders, our clients, our employees, who we call members, and our shareholders. And what you're suggesting as well, Laurent, what we're doing is helping clients do the same from their perspective with their own employees applying that. Thank you. [Foreign Language] We'll see you back at the question panel. There's another question panel coming up later, where I might have some more questions for you. And to everybody in the audience, please, if you have any other -- we're receiving quite a bit of questions, please send them in. And most of these Presidents will come back with a larger panel at the end of this segment to just answer more of your questions. With that, we're going to flip back and take a flight heading west back over to Washington, D.C., and I'm going to introduce Tim. Tim is the President of our U.S. Commercial and State Government business in the U.S., and he's going to talk to us about the banking sector. Tim, over to you.

Thank you, Serge. It's good to be with you all this morning. To my friends in the U.S. who are participating from the U.S., I wish you a happy Thanksgiving in a couple of days. If you're like me and your in-laws are showing up in just a couple of days, you got to get a move on. And I noticed in today's Wall Street Journal in the business section, right below the fold, there's an article about the hunt is on for Thanksgiving ingredients. So if you need to refer to that to overcome your concerns about the turkey supply chain, that's the place to do it. But now I will execute the time-honored pivot from turkey to banking. And I'm excited to share with you CGI's banking story. At CGI, banking is big business. We work with 15 of the top 20 global banks to include the -- all of the top 10 European banks, 9 of the top 10 U.S. banks and all of the large Canadian banks. In fact, our top 4 Payments clients move over USD 21 trillion, the equivalent of USD 21 trillion every day. To put that into context, that's the entire U.S. gross domestic product every 24 hours. At CGI, we have hundreds of certified robotic process automation consultants, over 1,000 advanced analytics and artificial intelligence experts around the world, helping our clients become more efficient and leverage their data more effectively. For one of our long-standing Nordic clients, we help make RPA a key part of their process and operations development. Thanks to CGI, we help drive efficiency gains of up to 50% for them. And finally, our Wealth360 Fund accounting solution currently supports the management of $1.14 trillion assets under management or about 60% of the Canadian mutual fund market. Whether it's payments, lending, wealth management or trade, banking is the industry that makes commerce possible, providing the liquidity of the networks and the financial instruments to make markets run while protecting banks and their clients from financial crime. At CGI, we provide solutions to our clients that run the full gamut of the banking sector from retail or consumer bank to corporate bank and capital markets. We've been at the forefront of payments innovation since 1969 when we reviewed the design of the SWIFT network and developed SWIFT interface solutions for clients. In addition to helping design the SWIFT network, we've built fraud investigation databases for national fraud prevention services, and we drive interoperability between global trade finance platforms and blockchain technologies as well as manage interbank funds transfer systems. When we talk about our intellectual property, it's interesting to know that we help some of the largest organizations in the world increase their collections by up to 20% and recover over $1 trillion every day. We process nearly 2.5 million trade transactions every year. And nearly 200 banks, large corporates and asset managers use CGI's treasury and asset management software. So you add all that up and financial services accounted for about 22% of CGI's revenue in fiscal 2021. In addition to our accelerators around consulting and intellectual property, we have numerous other accelerators that help speed banks along their transformation journey and achieve their business goals. So our environmental, social and governance hub, which falls under our sustainable finance offering, reconciles internal, operational and external ESG climate data for banks, investors and regulators. Our Banking Academy trains CGI members on both the what and the why of banking, enabling them to make greater contributions and command higher billing rates on banking projects. And our human center design team, which we're now calling our human-centered experience team, enables our banking clients to better understand their customers and employs key issues and make decisions on how to better support them. So the pandemic and the push towards digital transformation has been a tremendous force in driving the evolution of banking around the world, with rising customer expectations and legacy environments colliding to create challenges for our banking customer. In this world, clients and their customers want everything now, whether it's a payment service or account information. And they expect the experience to be seamless whether it takes place in one channel or many. So an example, customers use mobile banking, probably you all do, to get instant information about their accounts as well as move money and make payments. Mobile banking has become a key part of the retail bank digital experience and is an area where a good design can enhance customer value. The opposite is also true. The challenges to that design can make the customer experience more difficult. The good news is that we've solved this problem at CGI. One of our clients, Regions Bank, had a mobile app that had only a 2-star rating in an app's store, so they brought us into help. We provided an end-to-end solution that included requirements definition, development, test automation and deployment. After being refreshed, the app displayed a new look and feel with a streamlined interface, enhanced customer value-driven functionality and a more easily maintained modular code base. The app was ranked #2 in U.S. banking mobile app satisfaction among regional banks by J.D. Power just 6 weeks after launch. And it's refreshed every 1 to 2 weeks and as of Friday, had a 4.8-star rating in the App Store. We also found that our banking clients and their customers were looking for agility. Many of our clients are looking to the cloud as an effective platform for gaining access to new capabilities, especially in the payments market. And for a good part of last year, it was difficult, if not impossible, to go on site to complete implementation. So to keep our client on schedule and migrating off their legacy Fed wire and ACH solution before they lost support at year-end, so there was a time crunch, time-sensitive, we completed a fully remote cloud-based deployment of our All Payments 360 solution in only 4 months and 1 week. The extra week was because the Federal Reserve was closed for the weak of Thanksgiving. So accelerating digital transformation through application modernization and cloud migration to support business outcomes and improve customer experience. That's what we're talking about. Another example, a customer in Quebec wanted to go cloud first, they are to migrate to legacy data centers. CGI established a cloud foundation team and migrated 80 applications on time. We're focused on enabling data-driven decision-making as well through advanced analytics and automation to help banks, their clients and their partners unlock new insights and create greater efficiency. Cash flow can be a challenge even in the best of times and knowing when you may run low on cash gives you time to slow spending as well as boost balances. We're working with our clients' data science team to harden and implement machine learning models that can help predict when a customer's balance will fall below set low cash thresholds and alert clients in advance so they can take action needed to avoid overdraft fees. We talked with our clients about innovation. For example, the M&A process can be tricky, especially once the deal is closed, given the documents that needed to be signed and set as well as the payments that needed to be made. One of our corporate banking clients wanted to transform their M&A escrow and payments capabilities. So we co-developed an application to handle these post M&A activities and eliminate paper-based transactions and brought the offering from idea to launch in only 9 months. We leverage our consulting capabilities to drive innovation across the bank to create value and new revenue streams. For example, we manage the innovation arm for a top 5 U.S. bank, and we create an environment where digital leaders can collaborate more efficiently. And finally, we're focused on protecting data and networks against financial crimes like fraud and money laundering as banks extend their reach further into the digital domain. I'll close with a couple of specific case studies. HSBC, Hong Kong Singapore Banking Corporation is the biggest trade finance bank in the world, facilitating some USD 740 billion in trade annually. The trade transformation program that we're working with them on is replacing HSBC's core global trade and receivables finance platforms to facilitate the digitalization of the bank's global trade business streamline their operations and enhance third-party integration, keeping HSBC at the forefront of global trade finance technology innovation. Based on our Trade 360 solution, the new infrastructure is helping HSBC further drive its market leadership and innovation agenda. It leverages and converges different emerging technologies for HSBC's clients, including distributed ledger, APIs and Internet effects that will help HSBC further enhance its customer service through higher levels of digital engagement. So far, HSBC has seen a 34% increase in digital transactions and automated 88% of the steps required to issue a standard guarantee resulting in a 22% reduction in global FTE. They also saw revenue growth more than 5x the market average. And I'll pause here, I saw a question come in from Georgina O'Toole about how we standardize processes across the globe and make sure what works well in the U.S., maybe is working well in the U.K. and in France. This project is a good example. Trade360 is a platform that we originally developed in North America and rolled out to North American clients, but now have had a lot of success because it is something that's common globally, rolling it out globally. And on this particular project, we have people in Hong Kong, in London, in India and in the U.S. supporting HSBC through this rollout. I'd ask you to think back to March of 2020. Everybody was sent home, it was like somebody threw a blanket over the entire world almost. Small businesses in airports, train stations and downtown office buildings, so gift shops, barbers, restaurants, hotel bars saw their customers literally disappear overnight. So the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, as it's called, was an important part of the U.S. government's program to help small businesses retain their employees during the pandemic. And the loans that were part of the program ultimately could be forgiven assuming the business hit target employee retention goals. One of the challenges that the market encountered was a combination of manual processes in a portal that had performance challenges. So the U.S. federal government used the small business administration to administer this and relied on the commercial banks to be the loan processors for all these small business owners. As you can imagine, there was a deluge of loan applications as small business owners were desperate after 4 or 5 weeks of reduced business to get funding to save their businesses and retain their employees. So for a couple of key customers, we came up with a rapid approach. One of our approaches was developed 3 unattended RPA bots via the UiPath orchestration tool that pulled loan applications in the queues and validated the loan data and submitted that loan into any transaction. We did this in a matter of days. In fact, for 1 of our large banking customers, the SBA was still deciding policy. We went through an agile process to stand them up, actually went live on Sunday, even though they weren't going to go live until Monday and processed 100,000 loan applications on Sunday. That's how much the demand was. Our solution had a 90% loan submission success rate compared to 50% to 60% rate in the industry. And combined, these 2 banks granted over $13 billion in PPP loans to small businesses. And finally, at 1 of these banks, due to our commitment to helping them succeed, our business has increased in fiscal 2021 more than 20%, thanks to our strong partnership with them. Yaghi with that, I'll turn it back to you.

Thanks a lot, Tim. If I may, Tim, I had mentioned a little bit earlier before coming to CGI. I was at a bank, and I love that example you just gave because to just tie it back to what we discussed earlier, truly agile digital value chains are able to not just do the front end, the mobile application or a modification or a little bit of machine learning or move some stuff to the cloud but they are able to quickly days and weeks in the example you gave, pivot and adjust to customer demand and manage very high transactional volumes. So I just wanted to make that link back for the audience around managing, optimizing and securing those digital value chains end to end. You have to manage end to end. So thanks for sharing that. I do have 1 more question for you, Tim, before we roll off. So we keep hearing in this space about challengers. We're hearing about fintechs and entrants into the market space. Another thing we hear about is distributed ledgers, blockchain and their impact potentially on clearing and settlement for our IP that's around trade, are there anything we're doing in that space? What are we doing in that space to help enable our clients with that hype capture value from some of these emerging technologies.

Yes, it's a great question, Yaghi, and obviously more complex than it I've seen. But we have a point of view, along with our clients that really the future is about an ecosystem-driven model for trade finance. And along with our clients, we think that really, that means focusing on 3 core pillars. One is an API-centric approach to technology solutions. So basically, they're the framework driving interaction between applications and networks. And without modernizing core banking architecture, notably the system of record for trade finance transactions, banks will struggle to connect seamlessly to these external networks, which brings us to the second core pillar, which is interoperability between networks. Banks have to have that API connectivity. And basically, it means that using existing standards wherever possible, to make sure that they can access that breadth of networks and partners. And then third pillar, focus on strategic partners. The first 2 pillars provide the foundation for that, with the right network, consortia and fintech and technology partners to deliver the real value back to the bank for those customers. So our Trade360 solution provides these capabilities to allow banks to be the center of the ecosystem and enhance their value proposition to their customers.

Tim, thank you so much. We'll see you back for question period. We had a couple of more questions are coming in for this industry. I'm sure if we have a chance, we'll send you some more. So thanks again for sharing with us what's going on in that space. Okay, everybody, it's time to refresh your coffees, your teas and if it's the evening, maybe your glass of wine, and we're going to take a 10-minute break, and we'll be back in 10 minutes sharp from now to continue with 3 other industries with 3 other presidents. So see you in about 10 minutes. Thank you very much. [Break]

Welcome back, everybody. From the rig, I hope you enjoyed that video on some of those customer testimonials. Once again, I am now going to head back east over to Frankfurt to say hello to Torsten. How are you, sir?

[Foreign Language] I'm fine. Thanks, Yaghi. [Foreign Language] So no worries everybody. I will continue speaking in English, and you will hopefully understand it well. So you know already, I'm running the Central and Eastern European business in CGI. But I also serve as the global manufacturing Chair, and I'm really glad about that because, at least from my point of view, it's actually the best place to be. And I'd also like to explain why that is. So first of all, our clients in this industry, they really build great products, and everybody of us uses them every day. But at the same time, this industry really undergoes a huge transformation, driven by fast increasing demand, in particular from developing countries, but also in parallel, those manufacturing companies. They also have to handle rising issues with the supply chains. And I've seen some questions coming in, we'll cover later on that topic. And above all of that on top, there is also the fact that these companies are more or less responsible for a major part of the global CO2 emissions. And almost all of them have committed themselves to reduce their carbon footprint in the coming years. So to handle this significant industry disruption, many manufacturing companies at the end have to reinvent themselves. And obviously, this represents a huge opportunity for us in CGI. As we have the client experience, as you have seen already, and I will show you a bit more about that, we have the thought leadership and we can provide the end-to-end digital services, which is really needed by them to drive and manage this huge transformation. So in manufacturing, we really cover the whole spectrum of this industry, it's across the process manufacturing, sub industries as well as what is called discrete manufacturing. But I'd like to rather go a little bit deeper and illustrate our work by an example in particular, how we really put innovation in front of a client. And this may sound even a little bit like science fiction, but it is a true reality. And it combines what you see on the left side of the slide, the mining industry with what is shown at the bottom around aerospace technology. It's about LKAB, which is Europe's largest ore mining -- iron ore mining company based in Sweden. And for them, we have developed a solution that captures real-time imaging data and video data, and we are using autonomous drones to get that, and they are equipped with scanners and cameras to generate that video footage. And those drones are then flying into the mine shafts and they are building 3D augmented reality content, which is then used by LKAB to blend the maintenance and the extensions of those mines and to also secure the safety of their workers. So it's really a perfect example on how digital technology can be used if to transform business like them, which exists in centuries already. And of course, it also shows which role CGI is playing right now in those transformations. And as you can also see on the right side of the slide, we have the scale and the deep industry knowledge that is really required to help these clients to innovate and also then to generate more revenue growth. Now when we move on, I said that these clients, these companies really are not just facing an evolution, it's really a true revolution. And we thought a lot what that really means for them. And this slide basically represents our high-level view on how they will need to transform. So first, there is a shift from products to a much more client and services focus. And here, I have a pretty recent example because I've spoken to a senior executive of a car manufacturer. They call themselves OEMs. And this guy in this OEM, he said to me, well, in the past, we didn't even sell products. We just distributed cars to dealers. So they didn't even know their clients, their customers. And obviously, this is changing dramatically. They have to shift even now to mobility services and really getting away from the product mindset. And linked to that, those companies, they have to embrace data as the core of their business and working to automate the decision-making processes to evaluate the data and using the data insights. And here, I want to share an example of a company, a client called MEYER WERFT. They built huge cruise ships, global cruise ship operators and we help them to reduce the production time of the hulls of these huge ships by 75% by optimizing the logistics of those big, very big hull parts to bring them at the [ right point ] in time at the side of the production, and we leveraged AI and data analytics technology to make that happen. And then finally, all these manufacturing companies recognize the importance of the ecosystem approach. The market conditions really requires them to collaborate with partners [Audio Gap] they've never been linked before. A good example here again is around autonomous driving and connected mobility in the automotive sector. But it's also across the whole manufacturing industry and even regulators require that ecosystem approach, for example, when thinking about managing the supply chains in a global way. So these drivers, they bear some challenges. But again, they also generate new revenue streams, and they reinforce the need to optimize costs and then, at the end, also to increase business agility. Now based on that thinking and that point of view, we thought how can we address those needs. And we have developed what we call our CGI unified manufacturing blueprint. And this is really a model, an approach, a set of tools and methodologies and products that we are using to help the clients to transform and to achieve or meet those challenges that I was currently talking about. And through digital integration and guided by CGI's proven transformation methodologies, we can really help them then to unify their value chain in a digital way and their wider ecosystems and also move more rapidly towards sustainable practices. And I'd like to highlight just a few of these 5 building blocks in this blueprint, just to illustrate a little bit what we're really doing there in -- yes, on the ground basically. The first one I'd like to talk about is about the alignment of business and IT. And here in manufacturing, we also talk about OT, which is operational technology or basically the hardware, the machinery in the plants. And here, when we talk to our clients, and you might know, we talked to several 1,600 clients every year in our voice of the client surveys. This survey basically shows that only half of the manufacturers have an enterprise-wide digital transformation strategy. And the data in this survey also shows that there is a gap in the alignment between business and IT and OT. So we support those clients to close those gaps and to achieve a higher alignment in that area. And I'd like to provide an example here, which is from Michelin, the world's second largest tire manufacturer, I guess everybody knows them. And they have launched a huge transformation program themselves, which is called Engage, and we are playing a major role in this engagement in this transformation program. And we advised Michelin to not just measure the result of this program by looking at technology as it is as many other companies are doing still that, but to also look at the business results, the business outcome, the achievements in terms of value that is generated and that was fully adopted in the model. And even CGI is measured by the contribution that we achieved towards those business results. The second building block I'd like to talk about is the connectivity issue. And that is basically caused by the fact that almost all manufacturing companies still have huge legacy environments, centuries, decades-old, including proprietary devices and machines without any interfaces, which leads to disconnected assets and unknown or inaccessible data. Now to get those devices connected, you need to apply an IT/OT modernization approach, which really leverages all the digital technologies that are available like IoT and cloud and others. And at the same time, there is, of course, a requirement to bring IT and OT together. So it's really converging right now and many manufacturers actually become software companies, which alone, of course, creates a huge opportunity for us in CGI. And then another example is around the data-driven factory because when all this connectivity challenges are solved and you have access to the data, then the next step is, of course, how to leverage that and how to use the data to optimize, for example, the production or the supply chain process. And here, I have a pretty recent and interesting example. And I've seen the questions around supply chain shortages coming in. And you're all aware, I guess, about the shortages in microchips and supply of semiconductors. And that alone creates huge challenges for many, many manufacturing companies. And we thought a lot about how can we help them? How can we mitigate that risk for them or help them at least. And we came up with an AI-based bot solution that is used to refer or to look at the spot markets for semiconductors and then advise on how and where to order those available chips. And this solution is now used by a global OEM, which is really managing his and their whole supply of semiconductors by using the technology, including even the ordering process. So and that helped, of course, a lot to mitigate that chip crisis in a significant way. Now in addition to those 5 building blocks, as you can see on the bottom, there are also some enablers like business agility, digitalization, of course, and the sustainability and ecosystems. And I'd like to cover ecosystems first, and then I'll finally come back to sustainability in a minute. But let's talk a bit about what ecosystems really can offer to clients when they adopt that thinking that mindset. And here, I'd like to talk about another example from Michelin, which we can see on the next slide. Michelin decided that they also want to shift from a pure tire production company to a company that is leveraging the power of data. And they came up with a model that is called the DDI program, driving data through intelligence, which is, first of all, offering a mobile app to a community of drivers so they can use that to and then they get advice on how to improve their driving behavior. But then in addition to that, the data that is then collected is also shared with ecosystem partners, like, for example, Colas, the world leader in road construction or BNP Paribas as a finance and insurance provider for payers to service -- payers to drive services. So this example really well shows how data can be used in a much more advanced way than it was considered before. Now let's move to my final example. And here, I want to talk a little bit about the sustainability aspect. And I mentioned earlier that in particular, for manufacturing that plays a major role in their transformation. Now when we talk about the automotive subsector in particular, I think it's clear that it's not just about setting targets to reduce CO2 emission. It's really now to make a change to make it happen to put concrete measures on the table to make a change. And in automotive, around 1/3 of the emissions are actually generated during the production phase of a car. And we can expect from recent market service that in the next decade around the demand for new cars will rise by about 70%. So that means the shift towards electric cars with renewable energies or electricity coming from renewable energies will not solve the problem alone. We need to fix it at the production -- in the production phase. And we thought a lot on how we can help in that respect. And besides many other solutions, we decided or many other activities, we decided to come up with a specific solution for the so-called circular economy use case. That's an existing idea, but the technology that is today only available can really help to solve that issue by creating an end-to-end solution that is connected really throughout all the players in the sector in this -- basically in this ecosystem. So we are building this together with BMW. It's a technology platform that will allow them to create digital twins, not just for a car, but for all parts or major parts in the car and then to exchange that data, for example, with recycling companies so that they can recycle parts or with other companies to reuse them. And there's a byproduct besides avoiding waste, of course. It also, again, addresses the current challenges in the supply chain of raw materials because the factor of reusability is highly increased. And by implementing that approach, not just we, but all analysts we've talked to expect that the reduction of CO2 emissions in the production phase can be up to 90% by implementing the circular economy approach. Now the solution is, of course, IP-based. It uses the European sovereign solution GAIA-X that Stephanie mentioned before, it will be operated as a service. And so finally, we are really contributing to reduce CO2 emissions in this sector in this industry in manufacturing in this particular sector, even close to 0. And we are proud to be able to help to make this world a better place. And obviously, it's the best place and the only place to be. So thank you very much, and back to you, Yaghi.

Torsten, thank you so much. So I want to go back to what Julie mentioned in her introduction. She mentioned some very large numbers and investments that are needed for this energy transition. It's actually colossal the amount of effort that everybody has to do. I wanted to congratulate you, Torsten, with our client partners for this initiative because it's going to take people rolling up their sleeves and finding very tangible things to do really hats off to you and your team for that. Torsten, before I let you go, I want to send you a question that has come in from Daniel Chan. Torsten, to what extent are the supply chain constraints benefiting or inhibiting your manufacturing and distribution business?

Yes. Happy to answer that question. I think I referred a little bit to it already. And again, the same applies what I said earlier. It's a challenge for our clients. Obviously, some of them have even to reduce production because of lack of supply parts. But at the same time, it's also an opportunity because we can help them. We can come up with solutions on how to mitigate that challenge. The semiconductor example is a good one by leveraging even AI and machine learning technology in a bot to achieve that. And also the final example on the circular economy addresses as a byproduct, as I said, those challenges. So we always think about what can we do around those challenges and what could be our role in helping our clients to mitigate those risks. And so at the end, we rather see the opportunity, although we clearly see some impacts in our clients because of slowdowns of productions. But we -- from all the discussions we have so far, we can also see that they expect in the start of the next calendar year that the situation will improve and will get back to normal at some point in time.

Thank you, Torsten. Let me send you 1 more question. I think we have a little bit more time. So folks are already talking out there about Industry 5.0, smart factories and so on and so forth. Can you share with us a little bit our posture, our position on this whole notion of smart factories in the future of manufacturing? You covered it a little bit in your deck, but this is an additional question for you.

So indeed, the connectivity of all these elements in a factory can help a lot to optimize the production process. In the past, the systems were all a bit -- they were not connected with each other. The data was separate in separate systems. So with the smart factory, everything will be connected, is connected. And then of course, the production process can be optimized based on that. Just as an example, we help 1 or the global sports car manufacturer [ EDAG ] in transitioning their production in a cloud environment to allow that access to all the production data at every point in time in the whole cycle and then to reuse that data to really optimize and accelerate the process. So with the technology that is today available, it's clearly a benefit that we can work and use then in respect of our clients to improve everything that they have in their plans right now.

Thank you so much, Torsten. Thanks for the presentation, and we'll see you back at the question period just a little bit later on. All right. Speaking of energy transition, I'd like to now fly back to Washington, D.C. virtually and introduce you to Dave Henderson, who is President of our Global IP solutions. And Dave, how are you doing today?

Doing great, Yaghi How are you?

excellent.

I don't have a newspaper like Tim to prove that I'm live. I was just going to ask him to just stop on this floor. He sits right above me.

He can just come into the feed and say hello.

He could. He can come in behind me here. So.

All right. Well, I'll hand it over to you to talk to us about our work in energy and utilities.

All right. Thank you very much, and hello, everyone. So as Yaghi mentioned, like all of my colleagues, I wear multiple hats here at CGI. So first, and why I'm presenting today for energy and utilities as I head up our Global energy and Utilities industry team, and that's comprised of 18 industry-focused executives and really many teams around the globe who are focused on energy and utilities and really what CGI is doing in the industry in all of these geographies. And so it's a tremendous wealth of information and industry expertise that we come together to take advantage of. I also have worked in oil and gas and in utilities as a consultant for over a decade. And so that certainly gives me some affinity and experience in the space and why I'm excited to be leading that industry cabinet. But I'm also the Head of our Global IP Solutions. And this is a newly formed organization for CGI, where we are really looking to leverage and take better advantage of the 203 solutions, and you've heard of many of them today as -- and you'll hear about more as we continue to go throughout the day. But we have a tremendous wealth of IP solutions that really embody what we do as a company, and we're able to capture our expertise and do things in a repeatable way for our clients with delivery excellence and with insights that are gathered again, through that industry cabinet and put into the IP. But this is a great opportunity for us to really take advantage of those IP assets globally as well as the deep subject matter expertise that surrounds each of those solutions. So this is a great opportunity for me to talk about both of those hats because we have a great portfolio in energy and utilities. Let's go to the next slide. So 2 trillion energy market transactions. And as you've heard today, you've probably heard a few things that you didn't know about CGI, but we processed 2 trillion energy market transactions a year in 10 countries and across 14 markets. Clients trust CGI and because it requires a tremendous amount of trust for a company like CGI to be working with these market operators to facilitate these transactions. And so we have to bring everything we have to successfully facilitate these highly complex and dynamic markets and it includes a mix of electricity, gas, water and hydrogen. So next slide. 40 million homes powered by sustainable energy. We have been engaged in helping our clients who are engaged in renewable energy for quite some time, really manage those -- the renewable platforms that they have, the renewable sources that they're bringing to market through our renewable energy management solution. And that's helping us bring efficient, sustainable and reliable power to 40 million homes on 3 continents. So we're clearly doing things at scale in the market. These are just a couple of examples and we can talk a long time about all the really cool things we're doing globally. But let's talk -- let's go to the next slide and we'll talk a little bit about how we're approaching the value chain. And so we do see this convergence of the energy industry and the utilities industry. We've been playing in both for a very long time. We have deep expertise in oil and gas across the entire spectrum of the oil and gas value chain as well as in -- with electric utilities. And so now this convergence that's happening with the new energy economy and the energy transition that's happening. And certainly, the headlines that we're getting on a daily basis from COP 26 and all of the -- really the initiative and the momentum now that's starting to push the industry and an industry that hasn't really been able to move very quickly in the past is now really facing a lot of change. And how do you manage that change and how do we continue to help our clients really now with that global expertise that we have. So we have 8,000 energy and utilities consultants helping [ 650 ] clients globally, again, big numbers. We do things like manage 57 million meters in the U.K. We're driving 250 million fuel cards in -- with the large oil and gas clients in Europe. We work in upstream. So clearly, we're involved in the operations of our clients. And so how do we -- and I think it's imperative upon us to pull that expertise. It's a responsibility we have to pull that expertise that we have, the experience that we have and bring that forward to our clients. And we do that with a range of services, as you've heard today. We do it with business consulting. We do it with systems integration. We do it with applications and our ability to help deliver on platforms and partner platforms. But we also do it with our IP. As I mentioned, we have 23 IP solutions in the utility space, and that represents a real deep, I think, well of expertise that we can really share globally. But we're leveraging that IP in the core of our clients' operations. And so again, this is very, very mission-critical to our clients that we understand their mission what they have to do to deliver to their clients and to their shareholders and the regulators but we do cover the entire value chain and this dramatic transformation is really, again, kind of forcing what has been, by and large, I think, a pretty monolithic kind of approach to these big things and has been traditionally focused on stability and production to now these companies have to be much more agile. And so they have to -- be able to more rapidly adapt to what's happening with their customers and their customer expectations as well as the mandates that are coming through the market and through the regulators and through the governments and through really global initiatives. So whether we're helping total reduce their CO2 emissions and improve their ROI by optimizing their tanker routes through our business consulting services or we're expanding our market -- we're getting into green credits and carbon credits with the trading experience that we have in electricity, gas and hydrogen or we're rolling work crews and routing them more efficiently with real-time information to the trouble spots on a network or on a pipeline or on a wind farm with our OpenGrid360 solutions. We're continually bringing that experience that we have globally across this value chain to bear for our clients. So if we want to go to the next slide, we'll talk a little bit about how we're doing that and really how we're leveraging some of our depth. So as I mentioned a moment ago, in this industry, our clients have typically responded in a somewhat reactive manner, right? It's -- you're managing it out, you're replacing an asset when it fails. And so you want to sense of this asset fail and you do a lot of centralized planning. And all of this is important because these are big things that need to work and need to work reliably. So we understand that sustainability, safety, security and resilience are really table stakes for our clients. At the end of the day, we have to make sure that we're supporting those objectives for our clients because it's incredibly important in this industry to keep -- always keep that front of mind. But now they have to operate more end to end. They need to operate across these various, what maybe, were silos in the past. They have to understand more about what's happening and really create exchange data in a consistent and an accurate and in a potentially real-time way across this ecosystem. And so that's a big shift because many of our clients have not been geared to do this. And so we're helping them with really -- certainly bringing what we've been doing across the globe in terms of helping clients be more agile, helping them leverage data insights. And really, what do you need -- what can you do when you have better data, you can leverage that to drive your asset management and really create ROI and asset management. You're delivering a better customer experience. The expectations of customers and consumers today are very, very hot. And it's only being in mobile and online and what my expectations are of my bank are the same expectations that I have of my utility. And when I go to refuel my car or my vehicle, whether that's electric pump or a gasoline pump, that experience is really, really important. And so we understand that and we're able to bring in, I think, our experience across multiple industries. But in the electric industry, but 1 of the ways -- but we have to start with the data. So in the electric industry, we've built a solution called OpenGrid360. And it took advantage of solution that we had built in the U.K. called the integrated network model. And we essentially use that as an underpinning for all of our operational systems that we have operating in North America and in Europe. And we brought those together into an overarching solution called OpenGrid360, where we can take better advantage of the data that's being produced every day by our asset management, by our clients' asset management systems, by outage management, by the ability to sense on the networks and bring that data in. There's massive amounts of data that's coming in. And so you have to be able to manage that data in order to really get to the point of being able to deliver insights. And so we brought an approach to our clients that allows them to rationalize that data to access it and to create those data stores. We've done it in oil and gas as well, a solution we call Pivot, which again, is not only about bringing that data for our clients use, but it's also -- they have to have the ability to share. They have to share that data with their -- in the ecosystem in order for the value chain to work efficiently. But they also have to share it from a market and an operation standpoint but from a market standpoint and with end customers. And so there's a great opportunity there, and I think we're really focused on how to -- our responsibility and opportunity as a company that plays across the value chain to really bring that insight and that expertise back to our clients. One of the other areas where we're doing this is when we have that data together, and we brought it together across fragmented systems, we can deploy -- we can better deploy IoT. We can leverage machine learning and AI to anticipate failures in the network and the pipeline in the wind farm and that increases uptime and production. We have a solution called miles that we're -- that's in use today with a large Canadian utility that's doing proactive fault detection. So this is no longer waiting till something fails, and everybody wants to be more responsive. But you've got to -- it takes a lot of work and a lot of data, and we have to leverage both machine learning and AI to really build the algorithms to anticipate when something is going to fail, so that we can roll trucks ahead of time. The other thing that we can do and you'll hear my colleague, Tara talk a little bit about is really leveraging some of the things that are coming out of other industries, but like space. Earth imaging and Earth observation is a great tool that all of our clients, many of our clients can leverage to monitor and better maintain their networks. When we can integrate that data into the overall data repositories and data frameworks that our clients are using. And so that really does allow us to provide insights that they can act on. Next slide, please. So we're -- next slide come?

I hope so.

All right. Well, I'll -- so how are we accelerating our growth. And really, it comes down to 4 things. We're changing the conversation. So when we engage our clients, we really are trying to and working with them to focus on business outcomes. Certainly, we have the technology, firepower, we have the expertise and subject matter expertise. But we must understand what are the business outcomes that are desired. And we have to be on the same page with our clients. So saying that is not the same as really understanding that and being aligned on what those business outcomes are. So we work with our clients. Tim mentioned human center experience design. As an approach to engage our clients upfront. You want to -- so you want to implement some technology, you wanted it. Let's make sure that we all understand what the objectives are. And so we will work shop with our clients to front end these very complex engagements. We'll talk to them about what's required to actually get to the transformation that many times they brought to us and say that they want to achieve. And it's more than just the technology. It's about being able to manage large complex programs. We do it in many other industries but it's the ability to not only do that but to define the governance and how we're going to implement these types of big changes upfront. That creates safety and security for our clients because we are really trying to address those initiatives upfront. We also can leverage our cross-industry experience and innovation, as I mentioned a moment ago. So we have many examples where we're able to bring our experience and cross-pollinate, if you will. And that is also a core charter of the new global IP solutions team. So where we are looking to really leverage the assets that we have in an integrated way across the globe. And then I think our end-to-end view of delivering value throughout the industry, that really does give us a unique point of view. We can help our clients with strategy that is truly informed by what's worked and what hasn't in the industry. We do go end-to-end. We start with the strategy, and we deliver and we have -- we are rolling trucks every day for utilities around the globe. We are facilitating millions -- trillions of transactions every year in the energy markets. And so that experience informs the types of solutions that we bring to our clients. So when we bring all these things together, we can deliver real transformation, and we can continue to grow our market share. Next slide, please. So this is a great example of the business consulting side of what we do at CGI. We had e-mobility and is really impacting our large electric clients as much as it's affecting our oil and gas clients. And in this case, our business consulting team helped a very large electric utility become a leader in the new energy economy. They were faced with having to meet new government mandates and new energy mandates, and they needed us to assist them on how to define the journey to support electric vehicles more successfully in their market. And so this absolutely helped the client with the road map. And now they see themselves as a leader and out in front of the government and regulatory mandates with competitive products. And so -- and then when we can start with business consulting, when we can start with really helping clients drive the strategy, then we can also participate in what's happening downstream from that and because we have a great context now plugged into with strategies. Next slide. In Finland and in collaboration with the Finnish market operator, Fingrid, we designed and built the energy market systems. We built a centralized information exchange solution for the electricity retail market. And this data hub was founded on the latest version of our rules-based central market solution platform and it really did help accelerate Finland's move to sustainable energy. And this is also an example of leveraging cross-industry expertise because of the massive number of transactions that we are processing and working with and managing in that market and in other markets, as I mentioned earlier. We look to our banking colleagues and real-time banking, we know that -- and we have -- as Tim talked about, we have a number of deep, deep solutions in the banking space. But we looked at what are we doing in real-time banking, what's happening there? How do we leverage some of that technology, not necessarily even CGI's technology, but what are the techniques to process real-time banking transactions and how do we transfer that over to the utility space. So hopefully, this gives you a little snapshot of what we're doing in the utilities and energy space. And so thank you for listening, and I think we're well positioned for market growth as the industry transforms. It's creating a tremendous amount of opportunity, but we are helping our clients stay focused on all of the things that are coming at them and more citizen and consumer-centric sustainable model. And so with that, back to you, Yaghi.

Thanks a lot, Dave. Thanks for giving us an overview of this industry that's going to keep transforming and changing, right, for a long time. Before I let you go, I do have a quick question for you that's in here. What's CGI doing to help sustainable business transformation for oil and gas companies, particularly?

Yes. I alluded to it maybe a couple of times, but really specifically, we're in a great position because we have been helping, again, electric operators and everything from generation to distribution to managing to the ISOs and to the network operators. So we have great experience in that space. And we've been able to really take that expertise as our very, very large oil and gas clients and -- midsized oil and gas clients, obviously, see that they need to shift into more renewable energy. And it's -- and that is accelerating. I don't think any of us thought 3 years ago, 5 years ago, that it would start accelerating at the pace that it is today. But it's clear. The world is moving very quickly to nonfossil fuel-based energy production, whether that's, again, solar, wind. But it's all, in some way, in most cases, generating electricity, which we manage and we help our electric clients manage. And so when we're looking at utility electrification and our renewable energy experience, we can bring that both through our IP. And so we've been able to take -- one of the things that's unique about CGI, is that our IP solutions, we look at those, there's certainly a very industrial strength production solutions. But those are assets that we can take and then really shape towards the opportunity that we have in adjacent markets or in markets that are converging like energy and utilities. And so we've been able to take our renewable energy management solution and leverage that as oil and gas companies start to buy wind farms and they buy renewable sources. We have developed essentially an extension of our CMS system called Agile Dx, which is -- which really is focused on managing hybrid. And so again, as we see our -- the entire ecosystem of clients moving towards renewables, decarbonization, we are absolutely right there with them and bringing all of the assets that we have to bear in the utility space over to our oil and gas funds.

Thanks so much, Dave. And once again, thanks for that presentation, and we'll see you a question period. All right. Before I hand it over to our last presenter, just a quick reminder, we have already a lot of questions for a question period. If you have anything else, you're curious about, just please send them in. Now let's head over to London, U.K. I'd like to introduce Tara, who's the President of U.K. and Australia. She'll tell us a little bit more about that. Tara, over to you to talk to us a little bit about a very unique and exciting industry for us at CGI. Over to you, Tara.

Thanks, Serge. Hello, everybody. And yes, happy Thanksgiving from me as well to our American colleagues. Good news, Tim, I've just checked there's loads of turkeys here in the U.K. Bad news, we've got no truck drivers, so we can't move them to you. So [indiscernible]. Okay. So let's talk about space, everybody. Space is very dear to me as a sector. Some organizations tell you that they were born in the cloud. We -- certainly, in the U.K., we were born in space, actually, the very first project over 40 years ago that was done by ourselves was with Cambridge University and European Space Agency, and it was a space program. So we have a long and very proud tradition of working in space, which has spread across Europe and indeed the globe, as you'll hear from me in a second. I am Chair of the Space Industry Council, which has 40 members on the council who cover the whole of the CGI globe. So we're very glad to have such an enthusiastic group of people to talk about space. Okay. So let's have a little look. Next slide, please. When you think about space, I want you to think about it in 2 ways. So when the majority of the traditional space that you think of is referred to as the mission, yes. So the mission is something we start with that second. And then the second half of more newer language associated space is referred to as the space data. So we've got about the mission first. So the mission is all about rockets traditionally, and it was traditionally, indeed, the governments of various countries around the world that we're interested in going to space, sending rockets up there. And CGI has had a role for a long time to help in those missions in so much as we fly satellites, and we've been involved in over 200 satellite flights in the last 40-odd years. And by that, I mean we tend to do the software, which is referred to as the ground segment. So we're responsible for getting those -- the satellites and the rockets up in the air. And then once they're up there, we control from the ground. Now the second part -- the second point that's interesting here is which -- it means that actually the weather data that you see. So if you watch for example, you'll see something that talks about is coming from which is the satellite network where the data is made available, for example, CGI works very heavily on the data. It ingests the data from lights and then makes it into something that is viable so that you can use that data in order to make predictions, and that's used by governments as well as TV presenters, for example. And we've always been involved in the systems that underlie the weather data and the imagery that comes from it. So the lot of the data that comes out of these systems is quite difficult to do much with and our expertise is to take that data and then convert it into something that's meaningful and pass it on to other people. And then the third point here in the Digi noise is around the Galileo satellite constellation. There's about 30 or 40 satellites that belong to Galileo, which is the European constellation that's up there. And we control those satellites from the ground. We fly them, and that's particularly interesting at the moment, as you'll have read in press recently with some space debris having been created by our Russian colleagues meaning that some of the satellites have had to change course, et cetera. We track the course of the Galileo satellites, and we moved them all so on moved slightly out of and all the whole constellation needs to readjust. And that's something that, as you can imagine, involves a lot of math and a lot of technical skills, which CGI has a lot of very clever people. You often hear that, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to do this. Yes, yes, you do need to be a rocket scientist to do a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here. So mission has always been important. Interestingly, others have come into the mission in recent years, as you'll know. So we actually are the ground segment partner for a company called OneWeb now. And OneWeb will be sending up significant hundreds of satellites indeed, I think, next week is a major launch date for them. So the number of satellites is only growing, both from governments but also from the private sector and more and more satellites going up there. We'll need more control, and it will be more congested as I'm sure you will be aware. So this is definitely a growth area, and we've seen it in many ways, more governments are playing, as I'm sure you know, but also more private industries coming in to get involved in the mission. So the mission is very, very important. If you understand the mission, then you can move on to understand the data. So let's have a look at my next slide. And the data in itself actually impacts everything in your life. So we are all surrounded by space data all the time. So when you get up in the morning and you're having your breakfast cereal, everybody's farm equipment now that collects all the crops is all using RADAR satellite imagery in order to do that. Around the world, space -- the controlled space data is actually more intrinsically involved in everything that we do that I think a lot of people understand. And as a result of it, it is kind of moving into that space of being critical national infrastructure. You obviously -- you watch television, you're very aware of the fact that a lot of those images come from space. But I'm sure you're also thinking when you have your coffee in the morning and you're going to pay for it and you dab your card as times referring to, this all involves space and space data and the telephone satellite system that our Armed Forces use, for example, when they're in remote places that all intrinsically relies on satellites in order to make calls and keep themselves connected. And as we've said, the weather is totally controlled by the data that comes from the satellites that are orbiting around us. So I think my point to you here is that space data is growing all the time and the dependency on space data and all the different sectors that need it is becoming more important, as Dave just said, from a utilities point of view, we're seeing the utility sector more and more relying on space data. And the ability to ingest that data and to make some digital twins and use of it is something that CGI has become very, very good at because by understanding the mission, it puts you in a perfect position to take the mission and then apply it to the date. Next slide, please. So when we think about -- if you look at those lines along the top, you'll say that these are all the typical spaces that space exists in. And I suppose the key point really is that we have actually tripled our space business in the last 5 years. And by our space business, I'm really referring to our mission-based space business. And I have -- we have about 1,000 people who work on the mission now in CGI. But for every 1 person working on the mission, there's a ratio of 3 to 5 people that are working in the broader layers that are underneath this diagram around cybersecurity, digital transformation, et cetera. So -- and we're seeing that grow at the same rate -- so for everyone in the mission in the broader space. So this is a really hugely growing sector. And I think having a unique position of understanding the mission has put us in a position that I know a lot of other people would find very desirable. And a lot of our people who work in the mission side of things, of course, are secure cleared because a lot of that work is for our governments, et cetera, and it's the sort of work that you need not only high-end digital technology and mathematical skills, but you also need to be a trusted citizen and able to deal with the data accordingly because you've got the level of clearance. So these people are very special, and we're lucky to have them with us and most of them have been with us for a while and it's a growth sector for us. When you look along the top, you'll see, we talked about navigation earth observation. These are our ways of taking the data and ingesting it through imagery and then bringing that towards the downstream applications. And then more so in recent times, we moved into the 5G in space area as well. You may have seen a press release from us last week where we discussed the fact that we've got partnership with the European Space Agency and ourselves and a number of trained operators in the U.K. And between us all, what we're doing is we're using 5G technology to fill in the gaps on the rail network where you no longer can use your phone or you lose that film when you're watching on Netflix as you move along sort of thing. We're actively looking at pilot there to prove the 5G from space can fill in those gaps, which I'm sure you'll understand that once you've cracked that particular problem, then it will apply to quite a few other areas. As I said before, service business support that underpins the core space areas is only getting bigger and growing. And it's the understanding of the data that comes down from the downstream applications and applying it into different industries. It's interesting. So we've got digital twins that model food and crop production in different parts of the world and then use digital twin in order to model what might happen with changes in weather, et cetera. So you can imagine how important that is from planet point of view, also working on wildfires and looking at wildfire data been taken from space to see what the patterns are there and whether or not governments like in Australia can do something slightly different in order to maybe combat future wildfires, which, I guess, we all know that there'll be more of those. So it'd be good if we could get ahead of that. So there's a lot of taking machine learning and analytics and buying those high-end technology skills on top of the data in order to model and do what if analysis. So let's have a look at the couple of case studies that I've got to share with you. The first one is something that's called and this is on the mission side of things. And this is from our colleagues in Germany. We had an acquisition of a group of people who called who came to join us a few years, 2, 3 years ago. And they brought plans to with them. They were also in the ground segment space alongside ourselves. And what we've done is taken the best of what we have and try to pull out the bits of software that you could use in the ground segment and others who are newer coming into the sector could use again so looking at the mission analysis and the operational preparedness. So taking some of the generic but high-end, high-tech stuff and making it into a product. We believe this will travel over to North America. And CGI's space sector dominance has largely been out of Europe, but we are with the attention now in Canada and the U.S. on doing more in space that we can help take some of the technology and the know-how that we have certainly around the mission and plant is a really good example of that. and see whether or not we can take that over the states, not just to the government, but also to the large number of private sector people who are interested, particularly in flying constellations of satellites less than doing the kind of observation and looking at Mars, et cetera, tends to be more like lower orbit satellite arrays that they're interested in, but they all need this sort of software. So this is something that's quite unique to us, we believe that would travel. Okay. And then my second case study, this is more close to home for me and also close to for us all have the privilege of going to COP26 on behalf of CGI a couple of weeks ago. And we launched a project that we've been working on with a group called Project who are responsible for looking at looking after basically the C graph that grows around the coast of the United Kingdom, and that is a fantastic resource that can set carbon out of the atmosphere 30x faster than the rain forest. And it struck me and struck all of us that we could help them. Sure we could help them by volunteering, and we could help them by giving them a little bit of money. But we could really help them by using some of our space technology to see if we could assist them in knowing where the fields were, what state they were in and generally help them on something that up until now, they've had to do through flying drones and getting in boats and putting diving equipment on basically and heading off there to see what the state of the fields were. So we work with project and with Cardiff University and ourselves, and we've taken data from again, which is obviously the satellite system that takes pictures around the all the time. So we've got to cut a data every day for them, and they can see patterns. And again, using our AI and machine learning, we're able to model what the fields are looking like and then they can work out which ones that may be under attack because of light industry or just generally over fishing, et cetera. And indeed, we actually found a couple of areas around the coast that they weren't aware of as well based on the math that we had. And in order to agree what are the algorithms were that we were needed, we obviously work closely with the university to look at the data. And then basically, as you peel back the ocean layer by layer virtually in order to work out what the grass was and then agree the math applies. So now that we've done that for them, we're going to take that over to Australia, which is obviously my other geography seem the most logical place to go next. But it seems a really good way of linking back to the fact that space becomes more and more important to us all from looking after the planet point of view. And therefore, if CGI can do something meaningful here, in this way, it helps identify other uses of space data. And underpinning all of this, we have a bit of software called Geo Data 360, which is IP that we've used on those other 2 case studies I mentioned as well around tracking the forest fires and also looking at crop growth in Africa. So it's software that basically invests data. And then you give us a puzzle or a problem, and we apply that to the data in order to work out the what-if scenario is. So that's my parting thought for you. Space is only growing. And in the space of the planet and the future of the planet, I think it will be a pivotal thing and a really important role going forward. Back to you, Serge.

Thank you so much, Tara. It's always impressive to me personally to think about how today with technology we can take imaging data from space to have a positive impact on energy transition. So congrats to you and your team for that initiative and many others. Tara, before we move on to Q&A period, if I may, just send over a question to you. In this unique space, excuse the pun. In this unique area or segment, how would you approach growth beyond organic growth in terms of acquisitions? Who do you target? How does it work? Can you tell us a little bit more about this?

Because obviously, we had SCISYS joined us recently who we were partnering with a long time before we acquired them, and that's been fantastic. If it's quite a small industry from the mission side of things, and we do all know each other in one way or another. So I do feel that the areas where we've got a bit of white space around the actual the actual technology on the mission itself. So we're on the ground, but we're not actually on the rocket. So the OT side of things, we have some technology there, but not as much as we'd like. So that's an area of direct interest for me. And then when you look more around the analytics and kind of AI as a service using space data than the companies that operate in that space that have high-end math skills would be very complementary to us as well because it's really -- it's in that space where a lot of the clear thinking goes.

Thank you so much, Tara. Once again, thank you for giving us that overview of what we're doing in space. Now what we're going to do, everybody is I'm going to invite all of our 6 presenters plus most of our executive team that our own way or other cover all of our industries across the world. We've also invited back my colleague, Bernard Labelle, because we have a couple of questions on talent. I'm not going to take the time to introduce everybody. You see all their roles and responsibilities on the screen, but we're going to start jumping into some questions that have come in. Some of them are back. I see his scar so must be getting cool over there in Paris. Welcome back, everybody.

All right. Let's kick it off. Dave, I'm going to get ready to send you a question here. There are several questions that came in around IP. I've combined several of them. So Paul from RBC, Thanos from BMO. Can you help explain how CGI would reach its objective by 2025 IP30 in light of the company, plateauing in the low 20% range? Couple of other comments here. How much of an untapped opportunity remains in taking existing IP and exporting and importing it. That was covered by a couple of the colleagues a little bit earlier. And how much focus is there relative to developing altogether, a brand-new solutions. So Dave, I know we got a lot of questions also before the conference. So I do think we have 1 slide to put up for you. But in addition, you're obliged to answer the new questions that have also come in, Dave. So I'll hand it over to you.

All right. Well, thanks, Serge. And yes, I mean I told you we needed an entire session on IP. So I'll give a little bit of a pitch here because this is obviously an area that's very strategic for us. George mentioned in his opening, the goal to achieve IP by 2025. But also, he also mentioned the investment that we're going to be doing in M&A. And so if I start on the left-hand side of how we're creating IP, it really does start with our clients. It starts with -- almost all of our IP has been -- had some level of co-creation with our clients. And that really, I think, is an important, again, characteristic of how we deliver and how we engage with our clients because we're building something that is meant to work today and out of the box. And it's not -- if you build it, they will come type of R&D, we're in a think tank and trying to build stuff, we are building with our clients, and that gives us really, really deep and relevant insights about what the needs are today. We do stay ahead of the curve, though, by looking out on the road map horizon to make sure we're continually bringing in features and the functionality and that are focused on, again, back on delivering those business outcomes. So that co-creation model that we have with our clients is really important to, again, helping us expand our portfolio of IP. Then we also have an innovation program. We're looking at where there are gaps in what our clients are doing today. And when we're seeing industry gaps, and the example that I used earlier about taking our integrated network model that had been developed in the U.K., we have merged it with our open grid solutions and really created something new and innovative. And so that is -- and that was to address really a gap in the market around data management and data and how do you bring data insights through the operational systems and support that we do today. And then lastly, IP around from an M&A standpoint. But just like most of our IP has been cocreate with clients, most of our IP has -- and certainly in the last 15 years or so, a new IP has come in through our M&A. And so we are looking for companies that have IP as part of their portfolio. It's really a great fit for CGI when we see companies like that and as was mentioned earlier, a number of the IP or a lot of our retail IP and utilities IP, a lot of that has come in through mergers that we've had. So that's going to be really important that we continue to execute on the M&A aspect of this to really continually bring that in. One interesting fact that George highlighted in the analyst call was that our IP -- recently acquired IP through our mergers had been growing at a very, very rapid clip. And that is because when we have -- when you bring in IP and you plug it into a company that understands IP and understands how to leverage IP and you're plugging it into now what generally is maybe a smaller company without the same access to markets, without the same access to the local relationships that we have through our proximity model, it's a real catalyst for growth. And so we're very excited to do that. And I think you'll continue to see that as we spend all that capital money that George put out there in his earlier slide. And - but we have to be able to take advantage of it in a part way. And I think that, that talks speaks to our unified approach. So from a solution strategy, I won't read all of these things, but you can see it's really the end-to-end of what do we need to understand, what do we need to manage as a global company and do it in a consistent way. And so as long as we can do that, we're going to really be able to take advantage of these IP assets and bring that -- and continue to bring value to our clients. But it really takes a strong collaboration model. All of the presidents on this call are great collaborators were are linked in how do we leverage the great IP assets that are running in their geographies today and how do we share those IP assets. And so we have a global architecture committee that started now look at how do we share componentry of our IP to answer one of the questions. And we're seeing a lot of traversability, if you will, especially in some of the platform-type approaches around AI, machine learning. We have a number of products, if you will, that we're being -- supporting accelerators we're able to plug into our data fabric technology. We're really working hard on getting out in front of that and how to leverage really, again, back to how do you manage access data and rationalize it and bring it to bear on the -- at the point of need within these large enterprise is very, very important. So Serge, you have to tell me if I answered all the questions or if I'm still...

I think you have very well covered, Dave.

Thank you.

Thanks for that. Next question, I'm going to send over to you, Mark, so heads up, Mark. Are your banking clients increasing their IT spend? What is your preliminary view on how much their spending may grow in 2022? This is from Jason at Bank of America. So let me send that over to Mark, who is our Chief Business Engineering Officer, but also chairs the banking cabinet. Mark, are you there?

I am. Thank you, Serge, and good day to everybody. And Jason and I spent 7 -- almost 8 years working at Bank of America in Charlotte. I know you're based out of New York, but great organization. So I would say, yes, spending is going up. I would give you 2 or 3 data points there. One, I think most of the industry analysts, many of which are on this call are predicting somewhere between 5% and 10% year-over-year increase in IT spend. So certainly, there's a data point there. Secondly, our VOC, our Voice of Client that was referenced, we ask people what their intentions are relative to increased decrease, flat year-over-year spend, and our Voice of Client would suggest that, again, yes, the IT spend is going to go up. And then the third thing, I would say, it's down to real conversations that we're having every day with real clients. Everybody is looking to spend more money. I would tell you it's in the pursuit of revenue growth, the digitization agenda that's been talked about throughout the course of this morning. But they're also spending to reduce long-term operational expense. So I think CapEx is up. But I think over the long haul, some of those back office functions and some of those operational positions, they will be looking at efficiencies over time. But long answer to question, yes, IT spending is going up in the banks.

Thanks so much, Mark. Next question, I'm going to hand over to Helsinki. So are get ready here. In the industry coverage you presented earlier, you mentioned the insurance industry. Can you talk a little bit more about your expertise and what's going on, some of the interesting projects you've done in this industry? Lena Marie is our President for Finland, Poland and Baltics based in Helsinki. So I'll hand it over to you,

Thank you, Serge, and good day for everyone. Great to be here. So as Serge mentioned, so I'm chairing in the insurance council in CTI as well. And this industry is very close to my heart because in Finland, our market share is over 60% in insurance IT services. Insurance industry is extremely interesting from IT perspective in insurance sector IPs in core of all the operations and 1/3 of the client cost our IP related. CGI is partner for insurance clients across the world. So we deliver transformational consulting and implementation services, provide digitalization and cloud transformation. We improve efficiencies with managed IT solutions, and we have 4,500 interment consultants locally in proximity units and in close centers of excellence in India, Poland and Lithuania. We cover the main insurance sub industries like property and consult, life and pension help agents brokers. And we deliver solutions rate-base, which enables real-time generation of policies, uses a sophisticated modeling tools. And it is deployed across the world in broker organizations. And CGI is working with partners to improve insurance competitive position and transforming legacy applications into modern platforms. To mention some other examples, proper pay solution for health care claims, auditing and recovery which delivers advanced algorithms to identify claims with high potential for recovery. Security to protect patients help information, technology to recover improper payments to preserve health care funds and revenue. For insurance company, local in Finland, we have built help mobile telemedicine service for local cable customers to access health care such as treatment services and referrals. Thank you for the question. And back to you, Serge.

Thank you, Yes, lots of opportunities in that industry, which tends to be in terms of investment pace and cadence a little bit behind some of the others, but we're seeing a lot of uptick there. Thank you for sharing that. Laurent, this questions -- there's 2 questions I'm going to send over to you some quick questions on retail suite. So heads up. Two questions, 1 from Richard from Vancouver. Can you talk about where the CGI retail suite came from? Did you acquire it? Or was it developed internally, right? And I have a second part. Also another Richard though, but this Richard is for a national bank. When it comes to digital transfer -- pardon me, sorry, I went to the wrong one. Georgina, pardon me. I'll go back to the Richard Financial Bank a little bit later. My mistake. Georgina, regarding Retail Suite, do you see similar offerings on the market? Or are you primarily competing with bespoke development? So summary, 2 questions, did you buy it? Did you build it? And two, who are you competing with or impeding with custom shops? Over to you there, Laurent.

Thank you very much, Serge. Before to answer to your question, I want to reinsure all of you. So is coming in France. So we are going to have some in the ad and came in France. And yes, for my friend, I will continue to work my scarf. No issue regarding that. And regarding your question, where CGI retail is coming from. In fact, it's coming from the 3 best way to build an IP. We buy last year on the merger and acquisition, the company was on the heart of the retail in So maybe some of you know that in there is a lot of strong retailer. So first, we buy a company. Second, in fact, we merged with the tonnage that we have and the CGI retail set that we have developed in North of France. And for the one who know also the north of France and rail, there is a lot of strong retailer. And for those 2 parts in with and Retail Street in line, both solutions were based on a co-building with some of our customers. So very strong, very strong in the retail area based on the best place to be in France for the retail market. And regarding your second question, so yes, we are competing against some in-house specific development sometime, as said, as we are one of the real leader in the market -- in the retail market, yes, we are also competing against some of our, let's say, ecosystem. Nevertheless, I do not want to make some advertising for some of our ecosystem. We just give you some clue of who we are competing with. So one of them is coming from U.S., starting with So maybe you can find which competitor we are competing against. And the second one is coming from Germany, starting with an S. But what is interesting is we are not competing only, we are winning against the leader. And so definitively based on what -- on the first question of Richard, I think, we have to understand how we have built the CGI retail suite IP solution based on the best process in the world. And so we are competing against also some of our best partners, but sometimes, unfortunately for them, we are winning definitively a lot of time against this partner and ecosystem. I hope that you are fine with the 2 clues that I give to you. I'd come back in France with just now is starting in 3 days.

Thank you very much, Laurent. And by the way, for all of my colleagues and some of you have met in a previous from all the third-party analysts, if you have not double-clicked if I can say it that way, on the retail suite IP, please take a look. I think you'll see that why mentioned we're competing in some of the Tier 1 partners there. So thank you very much, Laurent. Good luck with snow. I hope it doesn't shut down the city. All right. I am going to go back to Richard from National Bank, are there differences geographically in terms of talent war? Now we've talked talent wars by geography. We talked about this in the panel. So let me choose 2 different individuals here just to hear so that the audience can hear different perspectives. I'm going to start in North America with Tim, if you can cover it, please, President of our U.S. CSG space, and then we'll go over to Tara to get a perspective from the U.K. and Europe. All right. So Tim, we'll hand it over to you.

Thanks, Serge, and thanks, Richard, for your question. We've always had in our management foundation and business model to deal with differences in geographies. We have a global delivery model that encourages us to put the right pieces of our project in the right places. So I guess, suppose it's oriented around where you are. But if I'm in the U.S., I've got an offshore alternative in Asia-Pac, in India, mainly. I've gotten nearshore alternatives where I can use my centers of excellence in Halifax in different places in Quebec. And then here in the U.S., we've got onshore options. We have 8 onshore centers of excellence each with their own set of expertise each with a partnership with one or more local universities where we and get graduates and hires in the areas and skills that we need that help guard against some of the regional pressures for certain skill sets. And finally, what's happened in the last 20 months, we all have clients who would say that's a great capability. But for this project, for this effort, I want to see everybody every day. Now if you think about it, in many cases, though we do have people and Stephanie mentioned this as well that have been on site with our clients throughout the pandemic, many who were prior have been working remotely. So our clients have gotten used to that. So now when we are asked to fill another 20 positions for a client, we can say, well, we could do that here in proximity or we could fill those positions in one of our centers and get the skill that we need but also probably a better rate for you. So there's a lot more openness from our clients to that now than maybe there was 20 months ago, and it's really given us a great competitive advantage in terms of dealing with whatever you want to call it the talent war. How about you, Tara? How is it over in the U.K.?

Yes. Thanks, Tim. I totally agree with you. I think all the good things that you guys are doing around the University, et cetera, we also do. I mean my top tip to everybody is that the best recruitment strategy you can have is to keep the people you've got. So I think people now more and more in their lives post-pandemic want purpose, and they want to know what they do matters, which is why it's important that we listen hard and that we create bespoke plans for all our members now based on their own individual career journeys and allow them to move from one pathway to another and get the training they need and develop their careers in the many stages of their careers at CGI rather than feeling as though they have to leave in order to move on or moved to something different. So we spend a lot of energy working with each and every individual member on their personal journeys and handcrafting plans for them. So I'd say that's top tips from me. I know that my colleagues in Europe are struggling with needing people with the right language skills for their geography. So if you're looking for folks based in Finland, then they will need Finnish or they'll need Swedish and Sweden, et cetera, or French. So that adds to the pressures because you can't use the release valve of offshoring because you need to have people who have those high-level skills. I know our team over in the Philippines have done some excellent work at scaling up in other local languages in Europe to help alleviate some of that pressure. But if people are needed on site and with the necessary languages, then it makes it harder for us all to move people around, even if we have the skills, we might not have the language. So I think that's particular challenge on Mainland Europe. But I would just go back to the fact that looking after the folks that you've got is my top tip to you can add people. But if you're adding to replace and then adding to grow, a lot harder than just adding to grow.

Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Tara. Guy heads up. This question is going to get over to you. The transportation industry was hit particularly hard in the last couple of years. How is it emerging in the post-pandemic era in who is our Canadian President and also Chair of our Transportation Logistics cabinet to pick that one up.

Thanks for the question, Serge. So I've been at CGI for now 31 years, started in the transport industry. I followed that industry very closely and around the world, all the solutions and everything else. So you probably all saw what happened during the pandemic and also the climate change that is still happening. So Richard and we have a tough time trial the past stuff that happened So you saw that all the planes were landed, and it was really big tough situation on our all the airplanes and so on. And added to that, all the climate change that is happening and will happen as well. So there's a lot of attention put on transport and logistics because of the CO2 emission and everything else. And you probably saw around the table, all my colleague there, there's a link with transport and that takes some all the way. So from energy to manufacturing with Thurston, electric cars and so on and also with space and all that data. So it's very at the center of everything. So we're really working on lots of solutions that we offer to our clients so far. So if we look maybe just to sector -- passenger sector, of course, has been hit very strongly. It's starting to pick up, as you can see, but this is all related to public health changing restrictions. So you saw that every logistics that happens around that closing borders, open borders, asking for if everybody are double vaccinated. So the game here is really change management, all the way. All those companies are knocking on our door to help them do the change management as fast as possible. And then we even saw that business traveling is not where it was before, but it's picking up and more locally, but internationally more and more. On the cargo side, which is happening, which is key. On the supply chain side, you probably saw everything that happened in the past couple of years even pre-pandemic when we saw the ships being stuck somewhere on the river or trains, the stuck as well because there was population stopping them from going from Point A to Point B. So this is really something that we're working very hard with our customers on. So if we're looking at that very widely worldwide and the changes are faster than they were before. And there's a lot of initiatives that are being taken with those customers that were part of it. So we're helping them to reduce their carbon footprint. We have a system for artificial intelligence and different type of system withdraws and so on, but also with the IP that you heard about on base side. So maybe just to -- and we're involved in airline trips, ships and trucks, but maybe a very short example on the truck side, as you've seen, we have a system that then to lower their cost, but also be more and more efficient to make sure that the trucks go from Point A to Point B and they're full and to maximize the room that they're taking. And you probably heard that also I was hearing while I was driving to work this morning that even some companies are saying, let's make sure that groceries and food are delivered at home within an hour. So imagine that traffic -- the additional traffic this will generate in cities and the pollution and everything else. So of course, with the system that we have, we'll be able to optimize those routes to make sure they are efficient, but also to reduce the carbon footprint. So it's really an exciting segment to be here now and we have lots of solution, and this is an industry that is going to grow very fast in the coming years. So very happy to lead that industry from Canada, but for the rest of the world as well.

Thank you so much, Guy. John, heads up this question is coming your way. Tell us a little bit more about the management consulting capability at the strategic level? What are you doing? What are you planning to do? So I'm going to hand it over to John Karnblad, who is our President of our Scandinavia business. John, over to you.

Thanks, Serge. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I'm up here in the north, in the Stockholm area. It's really dark this time of the year. So we're looking forward to lighting up the candies and pouring ourselves a log, which is the Swedish version of All right. So to the sub topic then. I mean, we have a history of 45 years in helping our clients based on the management consulting services. And we base those services on facts, not hype. Facts that come from our interaction with our clients, like our voice of our clients program. We then turn those tax into insights they can act on. And I believe we have heard several good examples today where management consulting and digital expertise hand in head have helped our clients results from their investments. And our plan is to grow our management consulting services across our geographies and industries, helping our clients to future growth and sustainable value. And we primarily help our clients in 4 areas: business strategy, defining and executing a purpose-driven strategy to respond to change, to create value and also to design business and operating models; human center transformation, where we use human center design and cultural transformation approaches to empower our people and to create adaptive and digital-ready organizations; customer value and operational excellence is our third area, and that's where we help our clients to redesign their products and services and the way they interact with their own clients physically and digitally; and last but not least then the digital leadership and CEO agenda, where we help our clients to build a path towards digital leadership for them to achieve results from their digitization strategies. On top of that, we also see an increasing demand to help our clients within the ESG area, starting by helping them understanding the sources for their carbon footprint within their entire supply chain. Our management consultants, along with data experts, help our clients to get these facts as a starting point for their journey to carbon reduction. So overall, it's really exciting to have this capability as an integrated part then into our end-to-end services.

Thank you so much, John. And for our final question, I'm going to leave Scandinavia, Sweden, Stockholm and head over to Bangalore, heads up, George. A quick question for you. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you go about helping clients with cloud transformation, what are your best practices, approaches around cloud. I know a lot of the speakers talked about cloud optimization, transformation transitions. George is our President for our Asia-Pac business. George, I hand it over to you for this question.

Yes. Thank you, Serge. So as we are clouds become an essential building block of growth and the cloud operating model is rapidly becoming the preferred approach for IT operations, we've picked that up in our voice of our client survey, where a lot of clients are migrating applications with cloud, but they're really about 25% to 30% there and there. The feedback we have from our client base is that over the next 2 years, they'll be migrating another 40% of their applications to the cloud. And in terms of CGI, where we play in that space and our offerings are really cover continuum, all the way from consulting services to design, to transformation, to rearchitecture, migration and then efficiently governing the new cloud landscape. So we've developed or established cloud centers of excellence around the world, including in my region in APAC, where we have built modular factory-based launches and these create value by leveraging our hybrid cloud-based best practices or templates, tools, frameworks to drive the cloud transformation. And while we follow the standards prescribed by the leading hyperscalers, we are agnostic in terms of which cloud environments our clients pick, and we also developed a lot of our own and accelerators to support cloud migration. So if you heard all the industry presentations, you're all sprinkled with many, many examples of where we done a lot of cloud transformation, but I'll just touch on maybe a few more. And for a leading U.S. bank, we transform their commercial lending suite, leveraging cloud-native technologies, including implementing DevOps workflow for seamless continuous integration and development. For a major European airline, we successfully migrated several critical applications to the cloud, providing a 30% savings in infrastructure costs and a 50% reduction in turnaround. For our European consumer goods and retail clients, we successfully migrated their applications to Azure and modernized them using the Azure platform as a service capabilities while aligning with industry security standards. And then maybe the last one on site here is a large North American telecom provider where we conceptualized, architected and implemented multiple telecom business services for ordering, billing and logistics by leveraging cloud needed technologies such as microservices, containers and DevOps. And this has significantly enhanced the ability of this client to rapidly migrate business functions to the cloud in addition to reducing release times and cost significantly. So -- and then another important way that we are enabling clients cloud transformation is by moving our own IP to the cloud and offering them to clients in a SaaS model, our open 360, advantage, trade and several other IPs are now offered in that model. So I'll just stop with that, Serge, and send it back over to you.

Thank you, George. Thank you,. Yes, that's a really component architectural component. The future of most of these value chains is to compose and integrate multiple components and our IPs are part of that agile architecture. Thank you very much, George. are this questions heading over to you. I'm going to take 2 more questions. We're going to go slightly over, but there's a lot of questions. And then Bernard, I'm going to finish with you, okay, afterwards. So just a heads up. What is CGI's position in the telecommunications and media sector? So Ramana is our senior executive responsible for one of our most strategic accounts, but also chairs our communications and cabinet. Now we're going to hit over, I think, Ramana, you're in Toronto today. So over to Toronto. Over to you.

Thank you, Serge. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. We don't have a going on to round. It's too early. But other than that, we're doing fantastic in this industry. We have more than 25 years of experience globally working in many of the leading telephone and media telco companies as well. Obviously, there are multiple assets within a telco and media company we support where we do our systems integration services, our managed services. If I just simplify it into 3 verticals within each of those telco and media, you'll see our approach as end-to-end. Obviously, we support the IT organizations where we do OSS/BSS management end-to-end, essentially their whole order to cash, chain flow and then all the systems underneath that. We do modernization. We do cloud migration. We do systems integration of various systems within that vertical. And of course, we also support their customer-facing organizations, typically, where they -- through their enterprise markets or business markets, these are other industry verticals where it's becoming a huge future revenue growth for them in terms of offering value-added services on the top of their connectivity services. So we, as a systems integrator with our skills in project management architectures, we help the enterprise markets of the telcos to actually do revenue growth in that. And of course, last but not the least, payroll internal technology network organizations, in the past, there used to be more of a hardware-oriented organizations 20 years ago through network equipment providers. Now they're becoming more software organizations. And obviously, that's where our talent comes in. So we're doing fantastic in that.

Thank you so much, Ramana for that. Really appreciate it. And for our last question today, I'm going to head over to Paris. Bernard is normally based in Montreal, but he's traveling in Paris. Bernard, I have 2 questions for you. The first 1 is from Martin from IDC. I think we already covered it, but I'm going to share with you in case you want to add to it, and then I'll cover both topics. So from Martin, you've talked about the importance of talent recruitment and retention of key staff, apart from upskilling and reskilling, what concrete measures have you taken to build retention in Europe? That was already covered. I don't know if you want to add a little bit more to that. The second question on this all important topic of talent for you is, Bernard, can you talk about if the current environment of higher wages is affecting our ability to hire the right skill set?

Yes. Thank you, Serge, and thank you, Martin. I'll try to take the 2 with only Yes, we see some increase on the side. And for us, it's never a cost problem. It's always a value creation opportunity. And as we grow, especially in the digital services, we see our clients ready to recognize that value with the appropriate rates. So it is something that we're managing quite well, I would see. But at the end of the day, it's not just a compensation discussion and our member value proposition or employee value proposition, if you prefer, is way more than that. We do have a few really good programs from a compensation perspective, including the ownership plans that we described earlier, where 85% of our members are actual shareholders of the company. The member referral program is another one, a lot of flexible benefits program tailored for each region given the reality is different in those regions and including also early career compensation program to support the efforts that my colleague describes. But again, it's more than compensation. It's also about career development, growth and development. And as we said, we have implemented a few tools that are really allowing our members to build their career and to develop their skills and to learn what they need to stay highly relevant to our clients and also a lot of recognition programs. We talked about the management foundation earlier. George talked about it. Tim talked about it. It's really embedded in our culture Members are a real stakeholder, and they have their own set of processes and best practices. It's not conceptual at all. It's real practices that our leaders can really implement, and we do train our leaders through what we call the one-on-one seminar to make sure that they are equipped to be real CGI leaders and be really mini CEO of their business and manage their people the right way. And finally, it's the culture. The organizational culture of the company, again, where we treat our people as owners. We foster the member health and well-being is something that also be high on the agenda, especially over the past 2 years, we have really leading -- leading the way as an employer to equip our people to face any issue or make sure that they were staying well, given the environment. So we adopted a very comprehensive approach, and that's how we're making progress and success as my colleagues described earlier.

Thank you so much, Bernard. I'd like to take a moment and thank all of you, the panelists, for the time you've taken out to do 3 things, in my opinion. George talked about them at the beginning, share with the audience, our industry depth and expertise, share how we find that intersection with technology to create value and wrap it all up with operational excellence structures frameworks. Thank you very much for your time today. I wish you a good afternoon or good evening or good wine if that's relevant to you. Thanks, everybody, and good night to George, actually, it's quite late over there. Thank you so much. Everybody, that covers pretty much all we wanted to do in terms of questions and answers. If we did not get to your questions, if you're interested about any one of these topics, please reach out, at the end of today's session, you'll see how to reach out to us, and we'll make sure we get your questions. We'll come back to you and have a discussion. I hope you enjoyed this session. We are now going to take a 10-minute break, and we'll come back right after for the continuation of our session today. Thank you, everybody. [Break]

Great. So we're back with the program, and in the next session of the program here, we're going to talk about M&A and capital allocation, followed by a Q&A session with George, Julie and François. So to kick things off, I'm going to hand the baton now to Mike Keating, Senior Vice President of M&A at CGI, who will discuss the very positive plan that George talked about this morning, about $1 billion investment in M&A and tell you more about that. I'll hand it over to Mike.

Okay. Thanks, everyone. Happy to be here. Thanks for joining. I think I'll start just with a few basic topics today. I'll walk you through the highlights of our buy strategy, explain a little bit about the approach we take to M&A, specifically around the sourcing of potential targets, and then I'll pivot a bit to some of our recent M&A activity. And when I talk about the buy strategy, I think many of you are aware, but our simple goal there is to double the size of CGI over the 5- to 7-year period with 50% of that growth coming from the merger activity. So to really guide that approach, we do have a few key principles. Many of these elements you've heard about in various parts of today's session. But when you think about the items that makes CGI resilient, those items are aligned with how we think about our M&A activity. They're listed here. Obviously, I think you all know, we stay very focused on our geographic footprint and growing based on a metro model, but aligned with that is our range of services. And I'll get into some detail and some examples of how the M&A helps us to continue to develop that range of services. Of course, we look at the industry sector mix. You heard about that today, both globally and within each metro market. More to come on that topic as well. All of this is aligned, as you'll hear from François, with how we manage CGI to be financially strong. Of course, the merger activity is supported by that financial strength. You'll hear in several ways today how the M&A activity supports and hopefully accelerates the growth of each of the CGI metro markets. And that's aligned also with our goal of going where our clients need us to be, expanding geographically in alignment with what those clients need and when they need it. And then also suddenly, the merger and acquisition approach here takes the culture very seriously, not just to have cultural alignment per se, but of course, good cultural alignment with a potential merger does increase the chances of a good transaction and a good integration. But very critically, we want to fully integrate the mergers that we conduct. We want to bring them all the way in. And not every firm can do that. And so we take that criteria very, very carefully, very seriously as we think about how to proceed. But bottom line, you'll hear this multiple times today, we are positioned now. We have the financial capacity and the market position to accelerate the pace of the merger activity. So let's go back to the concept of the metro markets. When you see the image on the right here, the idea is that as we grow each one of CGI's metro market operations, mergers can help in different ways along the course of that metro's development. When you look on the left, we typically think about 3 types of mergers. One is what we call a metro market merger, which is proximity-based. It's there to help at the earlier stages of the growth of a metro. Part of the philosophy is that gradually we want that metro to mirror the IT spending by industry sector over time. These metro market mergers can help with that development and help with that growth. As a metro practice grows and they're able to have more, let's say, credibility in the market, more scale in their local market, we also look to IP-based growth accelerators, those IP-based mergers have some examples of those coming up to share with you. But the idea is that we diversify along the range of services in addition to the industry verticals. And then finally, when metros reach their fullest stage of maturity, they are prepared to take on the very large managed IT and business process services work with clients. That's a good time for some of the transformational mergers to really help with that stage of development. And that could be transformational for a metro or in the largest sense, transformational for CGI. So we do look at all 3 types of mergers, and we hope to accelerate all 3 types. This chart is meant to simply get the point across that today, we focus on 16 main countries where we see that concentration of enterprise clients in about 200 key metro markets. That's not to say we wouldn't expand the countries with time as our clients have requests for additional countries to join the mix, but today, we are looking at about 16 of those. And I'll go a little deeper on that. Here, you can see each 1 of the 16 countries. And we look for the metro markets that have that enterprise client concentration. You can see by country, for example, we see 6 of them in Australia. We see 109 of them in the United States. And next to that, you can see that by our own standards, we have scaled up our proximity offices to a degree in about 40 or 41 to be precise, of these metro markets. So of the 200, there are nearly 160 where the M&A activity can offer us a chance to bridge the gap to scale, to reach every metro market and to serve those clients in those markets at scale. So quite a lot of activity to come, in particular, where we focus in the United States, the U.K., some of the larger areas. In some countries, we are very close to being at scale in some of the main metros. But it's not limited to geography, the way we focus on our M&A activity. On the top here, you see a simple summary of how we think about our range of services. We think about the business and strategic IT consulting. You heard that from John Karnblad. Of course, we think about the systems integration that we provide across all industries. We look at the managed services and cutting across all of those types of services in combination with them is the IP-based work, the intellectual property solutions and services that we position as accelerators. And of course, in addition to thinking about the types of services that a merger target might bring to us, we try to align those services by industry vertical. And so we think specifically, for example, about which IP targets might help us in utilities or in retail or in life sciences. All of these lenses are things that we apply on top of the metro market and geographic focus that I spoke about before. And so each merger can offer different ways to develop different items in this list of considerations. So as a reminder, CGI completed nearly 100 M&A transactions since 1986. Here, you see some of those, about 12 -- we've actually done a few more than 12 in the last 4 years, but here, you see 12 of them. I'll draw your attention to a few just to go back to the point of the mix of types of mergers that we're looking for. You'll see here, for example, several that we would call a metro acquisition, ckc Group, for example, on the top there in Braunschweig in Germany, Another example of that was Sense Corp just a few months back, about 6 months ago in St. Louis in the United States. IP-based mergers are an important part of the mix, and we intend to accelerate those as well. Some examples from the past 4 years include Sunflower, which was helping to grow our IP portfolio in the U.S. federal government space, SCISYS in 2019 was a combination. It was both a metro play to develop some of the U.K. geography, also helped us in very specific verticals like the communications and media space, and also brought with it an additional component of IP solutions to add to that portfolio. SCISYS was an example of that. Meti was an example of that in the retail space. And then most recently, I'll call your attention to the pace we're setting now in October of 2021 to kick off this fiscal year. We closed 2 transactions, one, the vertically focused transaction of ARRAY in the federal space, again, in the United States. And more recently, CMC, which was really more about the Spanish metro markets, but also a concentration of banking key client relationships in that geography. And CMC, as you see here, is an example of what you can expect from us. This year was about 1,500 members clearly focused in a geography where we were not yet at scale, and it brought with it some very key client relationships, with clients such as Santander, Telefonica, et cetera, the ones you see here. It was also a mix of service types. So a considerable amount of outsourcing or managed IT services and a considerable amount of systems integration as well with a little bit of IT and business consulting mixed in, very focused on the geographic expansion of the Spanish market and a good size. And I think if you compare this size in terms of the member headcount you see here to some of the others in the past slide, you'll see that there's an increase in the trend. This is a good example of how we want to continue the pace. And we can expect to see more that resemble this structure, the size, the sort of footprint, if you will, in the coming weeks and months to come. But in addition to all the criteria that I just explained, along the lines of geography, et cetera, we're often faced with the question of what are you countering in terms of the valuation trends in the market? And so here, as an example, some logic to support the ability to consider higher valuations. We really do believe that we have proven the ability to integrate efficiently. That's after nearly 100 mergers. We've got those lessons learned. We know how to bring in members and clients into the company efficiently and generate a good ROI in the process. With that ability -- with the ability to really drive the synergies and execute for the shareholder, generate a high ROI, which we've really mastered and with the ability to use that M&A activity to catalyze growth in metros, a great example of that would be the really rapid growth of our Pittsburgh metro, where we've had 2 related mergers in the past 4 or 5 years. Those capabilities position us to consider new types of targets. So as an example, we understand that when it comes to, let's say, IP-related services firms, it's possible that we might see some higher valuations on some of those firms. Because of the abilities above, we can consider some slightly higher valuations as long as we are convinced that, that merger target will really generate sufficiently high ROI for the shareholder at CGI and as long as we've got a clear line of sight to an effective integration. But we're positioned to consider those for IP. We're positioned to consider slightly higher valuations when we identify a really highly valuable client relationship as part of the merger, folds right into the high ROI for the clients. And also finally, the transformational geographic expansion, like what you saw with CMC, we are willing to consider higher valuations in certain cases when we see that truly transformational potential of the merger. And so I've gone through quite a bit here. I just tried to orient you to give you a sign of things to come. But if I leave you with one main message, it is that we are now prepared to accelerate all of this type of activity, not limited to the examples you've seen on this page, but we are ready for more and we are ready to pick up the pace. And so with that, Maher, I think...

Thank you, Mike. Yes, we do have a lot of questions, but I do want to remind our listeners to please send in your questions. We still have time to take them in case you have any. But Mike, I have a question from Daniel Chan at TD Securities. He's asking, significant headcount increase in global delivery centers that we're talking about, I think George mentioned that in his presentation, will you achieve that through organic? Or are you open to acquisitions to build out your presence more in Asia?

It's a good question. Again, I'll go back to a couple of basic principles. We always try to go where our clients need us to be. And so with time, we'll continue to consider additional locations for global delivery purposes like that example. I think it's also important to call out that even some of our more recent mergers bring with them components of additional global footprint. I didn't stress this in my prior example, but for example, when we talk about the merger with CMC, CMC brought with it, in addition to the Spanish footprint, some Colombian presence, and that's a highly valuable presence for certain North American clients. And so taking that as an example, we would plan to not only be open, but to conduct more mergers like that and to bring with them components that expand the geographic footprint for global delivery purposes. So yes, that's a piece of the puzzle.

Great. And I have another one for you, Mike. This is from Richard Tse from National Bank. Would you say your M&A focus is more on metro market acquisitions at this point in time? Or large transformational deals are still important for CGI?

The answer is both. We always want to focus on the metro market for the simple reason that aligns with our client-centric approach to everything. And so we continue to receive every day ideas that come from the metros and from the clients in those metros. So that will always be a part of the focus. At the same time, we are very ready in every structural way, every financial way to conduct one of the more transformational mergers, and we're actively, actively exploring those at all times. I think it always has to be about the right time and the right return, but we're always prepared for that.

Okay. Great. Thank you, Mike. I'll have -- I'll hand it over now to François Boulanger, our Chief Financial Officer, to tell you more about our capital allocation strategy and how we see our balance sheet going forward with M&A as well. François?

[Foreign Language] Hi, everyone. Happy to be here with you today to talk about capital allocation. So we'll go through a couple of slides. And -- but first, before going actually in the allocation of our capital, I just want to do -- first a recap of our financials -- our Q4 financials that we went out publicly 2 weeks ago, with the results. So hopefully, you all saw them that strong, again, EPS growth for the quarter, 14.8% on a non-GAAP basis, but 44% on a GAAP basis. So very, again, strong results on EPS accretion. Acceleration of growth with a 6.4% growth in the quarter, again, so good results on the growth side. Cash still strong with $527 million of cash generation in the quarter. That's an increase of 7.1% for the quarter, finish with a DSO of 45 days, so on the target. So a great job of the operation to continue to be close to the clients and be sure that we are collecting our cash on time. And finally, book-to-bill and finish the full year with a book-to-bill of 114.2%. So very strong booking for the full year. And naturally, it will fuel our future growth -- revenue growth in the future. So pretty good results on the book-to-bill ratio. And talking about growth, if you're looking at this slide, as we indicated at the beginning of the last year that we said that we plan to come back to growth starting in Q3. So that's what happened with 3.5% growth with the acceleration now in Q4 of 6.4% growth. So we came back even surpassing what we were doing before the pandemic. So great, great results on that side. And we still think and we've a strong belief that this momentum will continue in 2022, and I'll come back to you with that in a couple of slides. A recap for the full year. So $12.1 billion of revenue for the full fiscal year with a GAAP accretion of 28.8%. So again, very strong results on the EPS accretion for the full year. $2.1 billion of cash generation. So that's actually -- $177 million more than last year and representing 17.4% of revenue. So very good cash collection. A healthy backlog of $23.1 billion, representing 1.9x revenue. So again, fueled by our strong bookings in the year. Net debt of $2.5 billion, representing leverage ratio is just over the [ 1 ]. So very healthy leverage ratio. And finally, you see the results of our capital allocation over the last year. So 14.9% of return on invested capital. And -- so very good return. We're expecting to continue to be at the 15% and perhaps even a little bit higher future years, okay? On this slide, to give you a recap of how we created the accretion for the year. So here, I'm presenting it on a non-GAAP basis, so really coming from the operations. So 11% of EPS accretion. So we did alluded at the beginning of the year that we would do double-digit EPS growth even on an adjusted basis, and we were capable of creating it. 64% of it came from the operation, the revenue growth and really the operational excellence. We were able to increase our EBIT from 15.3% to over the 16% in the year. So very strong results on that side. And 36% came from the share buyback that we did in the year with the headwind of the currency, also that penalize us by $0.05, but still with that capable to create 11% accretion year-over-year. So great results on that side. The expectation for next year, again, George alluded, we're expecting again to do a double-digit EPS growth. A lot more coming from revenue growth, that's what you saw for 2021. And while still capable to produce close to the 16% EBIT margin, even including all the investment that we want to in our talent, like Bernard and the team -- they discussed about it. So despite even these -- all these extra investment, we still think we are capable of producing still close to 16% EBIT margin, okay? So that's on the results for the full year. On the capital allocation by itself, you see what we did deploy last year and the years before. And just to come back to our priorities, as you know, our first priority has always been to investing back in the business, more importantly, in IP. You see our investment in the past. We were able always to produce 2.5% to 3% of our revenue -- back and investing back in the business. So you heard Dave Henderson when he talked about IP. It's a big focus in the next year. So naturally, we are expecting to invest more in IP in the future. M&A. So yes, talking at $1 billion. You heard it from George. You heard it from Mike also. We have a big funnel. We are pretty convinced that we're capable to achieve these numbers. And just to answer also a question from Paul Treiber that was asking, is it including or not the transformational one? It's not including the large transformation one for CGI. So it's really what Mike was talking about, the metro market ones that we have across our 200 metro market that we're targeting, and we think that we'll be able to achieve that, a good start in the year 2 in 2 months. So with that already done and what we see in the funnel, we're pretty comfortable to say that we'll be able to do this year. And again, depending on where we are, our third priority would be debt repayment or share buyback. We don't have that much of debt repayment to do next year. So for sure, share buyback will still be in our strategy for next year on the capital allocation side, okay? Here, another big milestone that I want to talk to you that we were capable to achieve this year. And again, for Mike, in M&A, another tool in our tool set, for future M&A, especially the transformational one. We went on the market and go to have a public debt. So we sat down with Standard & Poor's and Moody's to see what kind of rating that we were able to have. We finished with a BBB+ or BAA1 under Moody's. So that's a strong investment grade rating, pretty proud of it, and that will give us the flexibility for future acquisition and still paying a very low interest rate. So pretty good -- pretty happy with these results. You see what we did as a start. We went in the U.S. market and pick up $1 billion of U.S. of new debt. We had for -- overbooked 1.9x and with 63 different buyers. So pretty good results on that side. And a couple of days after we went to in the Canadian market and pick up another CAD 600 million, overbooked by 4x and having 77 different buyers. So very good results and very happy about this new debt that we were capable to pick up. What did we do this debt -- what we use the majority of it to prepay a $1.25 billion of term loan that was due only in 2023, but decided to pay it in advance. And with that, so before this payment, we had a maturity of a -- weighted average maturity of 1.6 years. Now we increased it to 4.7 years. So pretty good on that side, with 90% -- more than 90% that is fixed interest rate and pretty good price for this fixed interest rate. So again, no large payment in the next year. And so we are capable of using the cash generation for next year for naturally new acquisitions, okay? Talking about acquisition in one way to keep our strong balance sheet is that we're having the discipline. And every time that we're doing large acquisitions to deleverage very fast after this acquisition. And I'm showing you 3 examples in 2006, we actually bought back 100 million of shares of CGI. At that time it was a large investment and naturally needed to leverage the balance sheet and discipline also already after to deleverage very fast. Did the same thing in 2010 with the Stanley acquisition. And in 2012, we went as far as 2.5x as a leverage for the Logica acquisition and with, again, the discipline of deleveraging very fast the years after. And you see where we are today, 1.1 or 1.0x leverage. So we have a lot of space. Just to give you an example, if we want to increase it to 2.5x, we would be able to tap on the market an extra $4 billion of new debt for acquisitions. So we had the space to leverage a lot more if needed. And I'm not taking in account the EBITDA that would come -- that would come with new acquisition. So even we would be able to go further or higher than the $4 billion. So again, very strong balance sheet and a lot of space if we need more liquidity. And finally, you see the track record of our capital allocation in the past. From the last 15 years, we were able to, again, having a CAGR of EPS accretion of more than 15%. And you see it in the share price. We were able to increase the share price by a 15% CAGR for all these years. So again, pretty good results. And we are convinced that we will be capable to continue that in the future and thus creating wealth for all of our shareholders. So that's for the last presentation. George and Julie will join me now for the final Q&A, and Maher will have the -- we'll do the moderating.

Yes, I will. They appeared like magic.

That's good.

And so I'll start -- a lot of questions, and unfortunately, we have something like 25 minutes left, but I'm going to try to bring together a few questions together so that we can tackle more of them as we go along. So I'll start maybe first with the question for Julie. Julie, we have a question from Thanos at BMO and Howard at Veritas. So I'll summarize them together in one swoop. It's basically given that we've all become more accustomed to Zoom meetings and that, I presume, many of our clients are continuing to spend more of their time working remotely rather than in office, how does that affect the competitive edge provided by your proximity model? Does proximity matter as much as it used to?

So thank you for the question. The short answer is, yes, the proximity model is still a strong differentiator of ours. As you know, we have built our trusted relationship throughout those 45 years of existing at CGI because of that model because we are close to our clients. We want to make sure that we're close to them -- close to the decision-making as well and so on. And because of that trusted relationship during the pandemic, it was really easy for them to call us back and making sure that we help them through their challenges through the pandemic. And we see as well through that model, our CSAP, Client Satisfaction Appraisal Program, their score keeps increasing year-over-year. And we truly believe that this model is even more important these days. We see people going back to the office. We see hybrid modes and so on,, but really a strong relationship with people and human interaction and personal interaction, it's more and more relevant these days. We have people working on their environment and at home and so on. And we see people working more in silos. We want to make sure that we increase innovation, creativity, knowledge-sharing and it's through those personal interactions that could happen. So still relevant, and we'll continue to leverage it definitely.

Thank you, Julie. Maybe this one for George. So George, this is a question from Richard from Vancouver. He's asking about CMC, and he's saying basically, how do you recognize the business where they have metro market focus, but also work across several industries? How do you integrate and align across industry and geography at the same time? I guess maybe Julie also maybe could look at that?

Sure. Well, I mean I'll start and maybe, Julie, you can jump in. But our primary sort is by geography. And the reason we do that is because -- and we saw this during the pandemic that certain industries are affected by outside factors differently. And so during the pandemic, healthcare, government rose. Other industries maybe had more of a downside. And we're actually able to move people back and forth between some of those industries. That's why geography is important to us. But right underneath geography is we have the industry expertise. And you just heard a great example of that throughout the day of how we have these industry councils. And so most of the people live within an industry, but they serve one geography. So that integration is very easy for us and natural for us.

It's well answered.

Great. We'll get more questions then like that. François, in terms of capital deployment, will the increase in M&A reduce your buyback ability?

No. Good question. Like I was saying, we did generate like $2.2 billion of cash last year. I don't see why we would not be able to generate the same level of cash this year. We are investing back, let's say, $400 million back in the business. So we have $1.8 billion capable of deploying on merger and acquisition and share buyback. And like I said, we had the capability even to go to another $4 billion of new liquidity if we want to be like at the top of the leverage that we want to be at 2.5x. And so -- and that's despite of even not taking into account the new EBITDA that we would have from the acquisition. So we have a lot of liquidity to be capable to tap in if needed. And so the increase of volume that we want to do in M&A won't have any necessary impact on our ability to do some share buyback.

Okay. Great. George, this is from Derric from Societe Generale. I think the general questions I've been getting personally is when we talked about the 60% digital bookings and the 60% digital pipeline, this comes in the same bucket. Basically, how much of your revenue comes from traditional infrastructure managed services? And what's your expectations for that?

Sure. Well, if we look at -- we just think about infrastructure services, that number was overall infrastructure services. That number went from about 19%, 20%, a couple of 5% maybe years ago, down to 10% to 12% in the current environment. And that's all of our infrastructure services. If you break that down a little bit further, a smaller piece of that, a much smaller piece of that, but a growing piece of that is actually in digital advisory, where we're taking some of those in the traditional infrastructure space, and they're helping our clients imagine and re-architect their solutions for the future. So and we think that infrastructure will always stay right around that 10% to 12%, but of course, be more and more in the digital technologies as well.

Okay. Great. Julie, we have a question here. Can you discuss the current valuations that you see in the market and if they have been the reason for the lower M&A spend last year?

Thank you for the question. So yes, valuation have gone up for a certain group of companies, and we've seen that during the pandemic and now. But valuation is not the main reasons why we -- it's a no-go for us when we want to do an acquisition. We -- the no-go criteria could be type of services, the size, but most importantly, the cultural fit as well. We want to make sure that when we integrate new companies, it makes sense for us as well as for our clients. So yes, obviously, valuation is part of the picture in the analysis. But most importantly, we -- the aspect of the long-term earnings accretion and the return on investment that Mike had just discussed earlier is also a good component. So yes, we are willing at looking at a higher multiple, but we needed to make sure that it really brings value to CGI and to our clients as well.

I think that answers Richard's question from National because he was asking, CGI has historically been very disciplined when it comes to valuation for M&A. How has the heightened valuation environment impacted or changed the way you look at M&A? I think that you answered that question just right now. So I move on -- a lot of questions are coming in. So keep sending your questions. That's good. Thanos from BMO is asking, can you speak to the M&A integration process? Do you have centralized integration resources that are involved in each acquisition, leveraging the best practices learned from prior deals? Or is it largely decentralized by necessity? George or Julie.

Well, do you want to start?

No, go ahead.

So we do have people across the organization that are helping to do the integration. It's important to understand that when a BU leader or [indiscernible] Group President, is integrating -- or she is integrating a new company, she or he is responsible for that integration. But obviously, we do have a kind of a center of expertise within corporate with -- that Mike Keating is leading at CGI. And this is where we keep all the knowledge, all the lessons learned, the practices and the know-how of doing integration. So typically, we would team somebody in Mike's team, which is at corporate level, with the operation people to make sure that we don't lose what we have learned and we're efficient in doing integrations.

Yes. Maybe what I would add and what Julie and team have created over the last few years is we have a pretty robust now playbook. So we're not dependent on the central resources. We can actually do this at scale, but that playbook then is that repository, and we refresh that after every single rotation.

François, you're up. This is a question that came in from an investor, no name, but I'll ask it. You mentioned that in fiscal year '22, you expect the majority of the EPS growth to come from revenue growth versus margin expansion. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Thanks for the question. What I was saying, we did finish with a 16% EBIT. So very strong results on that side. While we still have some region of the world that can improve on this metric next year, and that's the expectation. For sure, also, like I was alluding and what you heard this morning is that we're doing also investments in new lines of business or in the IP, in the talent. And so that will naturally put a bit more expenses in the books versus what we had this year. Travel is starting to pick up now, and we're visiting more client personally. So this is a headwind. But at the same time, we have tailwinds coming from, for sure, some of the region that will increase their EBIT margin year-over-year. So that's why we feel also -- and you saw the acceleration of the growth, 3.5%, 6.4% in the last quarter, that we will continue on this momentum, and we will see some good growth in 2022.

Thank you, François. This is for George, and it's a combination from a question from Stephanie Price at CIBC and Richard Tse from National. Richard has been on fire, sending a lot of questions. Can you talk a bit about CGI's focus on profitable growth versus the tight labor market? So basically trying to figure out if the tight labor market might impact our organic growth or slow it down? And also, could it impact our margins?

Yes. So I don't know which one was Richard, which one's Stephanie. But look, you've heard a lot about the demand side. And then, of course, that impacts some of the supply side. But I'll focus on the demand. It's a good thing to have a stronger demand side opportunities. That's why we spent the time. You heard how we're approaching talent holistically, making sure that we hold on to our people, as [ Tara ] said, but also attracting people in different ways as Bernard and Tim Hurlebaus and others talked about. So we actually like this environment. Yes, we need to be focused on talent and we are, but the growth environment is a positive one for us. On the bottom line, I think Bernard actually talked about this very, very well. Yes, there are some rate pressures or some salary pressures on the cost side. But because of the value of the digital transformations that our clients are undergoing and what we're helping them with, we're able to recoup that from our clients through rates. And that's not just new projects, but we have that built into most of our managed services contracts, have the ability to recoup those types of cost increases when it's impacted by inflation and other activities, which is what's happening right now. So no, in a nutshell, we see this as a positive environment.

Okay. And maybe this is for Julie, Rob Young from Canaccord. Julie, you mentioned culture as being a very important factor for M&A. He's asking if there are -- what are the other important common issues that prevents us from making large transactions?

Well, like I mentioned, maybe type of services as well when it's too low end, geographies where we're not established. We like to follow our clients where they are. So sometimes that could be a criteria as well. The way that people are compensated, are they fully aligned with serving the clients? Are they client-focused or are they member -- employee-focused and so on? But type of services make sure as well that they understand their industry, where we are in as well. So we want to make sure that we integrate those type of business as well.

Great. Paul Steep from Scotiabank. He is asking, could you provide your perspective on your view towards considering the potential to acquire businesses that have a transaction-driven business model such as payroll business? Or is this a lower priority, with the focus on more traditional IT services in our -- as M&A candidates?

Yes. Maybe I'll start with that one. We're always looking at every type of business that's complementary. When we look at transaction-based services, we're usually looking at that in conjunction with intellectual property that we own and/or a potential merger target could also have as part of their portfolio. So we're looking for it but not as a discrete service.

And just following up on that for François from Kevin at Desjardins. Can you talk about the financial metrics for an IP-based transaction? Are we willing to pay a much higher multiple for revenue or EBITDA because we have not done so in the past, what changed? What are the reasoning behind the look for those kind of applications now?

Okay. Thanks for the question. First of all, just to reiterate, when we're talking about IP and buying IP firms, it needs to be IP that is bringing services also. We won't buy an IP firm just for the IP, we need to be convinced that it will bring services or, first and foremost, a service company. And so the IP is to help to fulfill a need of our clients and not just sell IP for IP. So that's the first thing important. For sure, IP, we need -- we will pay higher -- as you know, the valuation are higher. And higher you pay, the return needs to be there, and we'll expect a lot more revenue synergies than if we're going with just an IT or a service company firm. So the expectation is that we will have a higher growth with an IP firm. And a good thing now that since we are across the world, our distribution channel for this IP is a lot stronger now. And so we're capable of doing it across the world. So that's, I would say -- the foremost criteria is that, can we sell it across the world? Do we have the right distribution channel? And can we believe that we'll be able to grow faster this IP? And if the answer is yes, we won't be shy to pay at the right price for it.

All right. George, this is a $100-million question. At what level of organic growth do you believe CGI can sustain in the next 2 to 3 years?

That is a fabulous...

It's a loaded question.

That is a fabulously loaded question. Well, we spent the day talking about what we do believe is a growth environment, but also the positioning that CGI has over the next few years. And of course, I began the day by outlining some of the specific goals and targets that we have to achieve some of that growth. So no, we don't give revenue guidance in the market. But suffice to say, when François just answered the question and even in his presentation, that we're going to get more of our growth, the double-digit earnings per share growth from revenue growth. It gives you an idea of certainly where we're headed. But I'll be happy to update you on that growth progressing over the next several quarters and years.

All right. You managed through that question brilliantly. So one more question is from a private investor. I'm not saying the name. In which region -- maybe this is -- maybe we could have asked that during the talent panel, but in which region is it the most challenging right now to find and retain qualified software developers?

Yes. I don't have a specific geography. One, I think you see that geographically, we're in a global world. We serve a lot of global clients. And the equation is pretty much acute in all areas. Of course, it depends on the geography, and it's really even micro level different metros within larger geographies. But suffice to say, it's happening on both sides of the ocean.

All right. And one last question. I'm not -- we still have only a few minutes, but I'll take one more for Julie. In near your presentation, you mentioned the goal to potentially deploy $1 billion. What gives you the comfort to provide such a target?

Thank you for the question. So let me start by saying that when the pandemic hit, what we have decided as a group is to take a step back in what -- and look at what the market was impacting and just really analyze on what would be the best way to strategize on that on the situation. A couple of months after, we decided to start back our activities in M&A. And since then, we have increased our initiatives in looking at targets. We are also looking a bit broader in terms of capability. So because of all of those activities, what happened is that we have a much more richer pipeline now in terms of M&A. And what François has mentioned also as well is that we do have a strong balance sheet that put us in the confident place that we'll be able to do either niche acquisitions or transformational ones. And I believe that we're on the right path with the last 2 acquisitions that we have done with CMC and ARRAY last October. So we are at the pace that we were looking for.

Thank you, Julie. Thank you, George, Julie and François. George will have a few more words to finish off the day. George?

Thank you. Thank you, Maher, and thank you to yourself for the facilitation here at the second part of the day and [ Chadi ] for the facilitation at the early part of the day. I'd like to thank all of you for attending. Thank you for your interest in the company, and thanks for your engagement with our leaders around the world. It's been a pleasure to share some of our plans with you. And also, I hope you got the opportunity to see that ownership culture that Julie started the day off with, the management foundation that I described, to see it living through some of the case studies and through some of the engagement with our leaders around the world. It is a significant differentiator and it's how we're going to continue to scale the company. And speaking of scaling the company, clearly, our Build and Buy strategy is alive and well. And hopefully, you heard not just the demand environment, but the positioning of CGI and the investments that CGI is making in -- playing into that growth agenda that we have set out for ourselves, whether it's intellectual property, consulting services and everything in between. We have the digital talent and the assets to play into this growth agenda, both from a build side. And then as you heard François and others talk about today, including Mike Keating, we have the firepower and the balance sheet and the strategy to continue to accelerate on the buy side as well. So again, thank you for your attendance. I look forward to updating you on this growth agenda, as I said, in the quarters and the years to come. Thank you.