Dun & Bradstreet Holdings, Inc. (DNB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome everyone to Dun & Bradstreet 2023 Investor Day. I'm Bryan Hipsher, the Chief Financial Officer of the company. So starting off, I'm going to touch on the agenda today. We'll open up with a brief introduction from myself. I'll turn it over to Anthony for a company overview. Then we'll have Ginny and Neeraj speak from a North American international perspective, take a quick refreshment break, and then we'll come back. We're going to do a fireside chat with our Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Gary Kotovets; and our Chief Technology Officer, Mike Manos; follow up with a financial overview for myself; and then we'll sit down with the executive Q&A with Anthony, myself and then also our Presidents, Neeraj and Ginny. And so following, we'll have a quick break over to the Hamilton room, and we're going to run through some demos and some refreshments. And so from a demo perspective, we're going to run through about 7 different demos. And again, I was saying earlier, it's one of those things like with the data and analytics company, sometimes it's kind of hard to conceptualize what that actually means. And so we're going to run through Master Data management, Digital Marketing, Hoovers, Finance Analytics, Risk Analytics, which includes our ESG Intelligence solution; and also our Risk Analytics, which includes the supply chain intelligence solution. And then finally, into small business applications. And so really cool from that perspective and excited for you guys to meet some of the broader team and be able to see what this looks like each and every day for our clients and customers throughout the world. The forward-looking statements, I'm going to spend the next 25 minutes reading all of this, and no. So you guys can refer to forward-looking statements in the document. Clearly, we're going to be referencing some things on a go-forward basis. And so that's there for the general reading pleasure. With that, I'd like to bring Anthony Jabbour, CEO of Dun & Bradstreet to the stage and kick things off.

Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here for Dun & Bradstreet Investor Day 2023. It's really exciting to be here finally. And I know I say on behalf of our leadership team, we're very excited and very much looking forward to this day. So it's great to be here. This morning, we're going to walk you through really an update on the progress we've made so far, what we're working on right now and what we have ahead of us. All right. So let's get to it. I know most of you know what we do at Dun & Bradstreet. For those that don't, I'll just do a quick level set. We essentially deliver insights to companies so they can do commerce on a global basis. That's the simplest way to say it. Our mission is, we want to build a global network of trust. So helping businesses out there take uncertainty and drive confidence from it, take risk, turn it into opportunity and take potential and drive prosperity from it. We've been at this for almost 200 years, had 4 U.S. presidents at work here, which is always great trivia the next time. You've got trivia pursuit going on. That's a great one for you to know. The company's $2.2 billion in revenues, 39% EBITDA margins, 96% revenue retention. We've got a high percentage of the Fortune 500 companies out there that were fortunate enough to call clients. While we focus on profits, obviously, we're also very focused on doing things the right way. And by that, I mean ESG focusing on the environment, social and governance issues. We're really proud of a lot of the distinguished awards that we've won as you could see along the bottom. And more so, we have our own commercial offering with ESG Intelligence that we'll talk to you about today. I'm really excited to talk about the team. We've got a great team with deep industry expertise, a unique mixture of data, analytics, software and technology backgrounds, domestically, internationally, really proud of this team. It's the same team you would have seen at the IPO with the addition of Ginny Gomez and Mike Manos, who joined us around the spring of 2021. We made a hard push and pivot towards innovation. So the first part of our transformation was more around operational efficiencies improvement and that was around the time we're making our hard pivot towards innovation. If I can give you a sports analogy, so we've got a lot of great athletes. But the best part of great athletes are the ones that want to be part of a great team. I want to put the team first that realized teams win championships not individual performance. And we've got a great team that way, who really works hard together every day. I'd say this is an intangible what I'm going to share with you. You're going to get lots of numbers and financials and proof points throughout the morning. This is more of an intangible one, but we relocated our headquarters to Jacksonville. It's the third time I've done that in my career. There's just a lift that you get with the comradery among the leadership team. People moving to a new location, a group of us going and helping people find their new homes, giving advice as to what schools to go to, et cetera, meeting families, spending time with each other's families, really coming together at a different level I strongly believe resulted in the dramatic improvements that we've been making in this company. And I'm fortunate for this team for working together in that manner. So speaking today, Bryan, our CFO; Ginny Gomez, our President of North America; Neeraj Sahai; Mike Manos, Gary Kotovets. But we also have the rest of our leadership team here as well. We've got Michele Caselnova who's our Chief Sustainability and Communications Officer; Peter Horowitz, our Chief Strategy Officer; Rich Kulesa, our Chief Risk Officer; Joe Reinhardt, Chief Legal Officer; and Roslynn Williams, our Chief People Officer. So I encourage you to spend time with them as well at the break or during the demos. All right. Let me start with talking about our data and analytics. So for us, it all starts with the DUNS number. It's ever persistent. So a company has DUNS number, they have it forever. It's global, it's unique. And I'll tell you one of the benefits of having a company that's almost 200 years old is when you can have something like this as an advantage in your company, having a DUNS number that's so entrenched to global commerce, it's such a huge advantage for us. When we came to Dun & Bradstreet, we had 300 million DUNS numbers. And today, we have over 500 million. So what's interesting, and I'm going to give you these proof points to show you and give you like a little under the covers additional information as to how much work has been done here. It took 7 years to grow from 200 million DUNS to 300 million DUNS. Seven years to grow 100 million DUNS. And what we've done is we've doubled that growth rate in half the time. So again, really proud of the team. And as I talk about the improvements in the infrastructure that we've made, that was critical, obviously, for us to go at that speed. We look at our traditional data, it's unparalleled. We have a lot of proprietary data, contributory data. We've got a lot of great sources, and we've continued to enrich them. Alternative data was something where we thought about it. We're scratching the surface of it a few years ago. But right now, we have over 250 data sources, and you could see some of the examples here, foot traffic, geospatial, shipping, et cetera. What's exciting about that is, when you think about alternative data, it takes a tremendous amount of processing to take a large unstructured file to get a nugget of a information from it. And again, without all the groundwork that we put in to our data and data supply chain and our technology, we wouldn't be in a position to be able to leveraging it as aggressively as we are. And obviously, what that leads to is analytics. We have 60% more analytics as a company today, mostly leveraging AI and machine learning. If I give you an example with ESG Intelligence, which we'll talk about, that's a great example where we took our traditional data plus utility data, greenhouse emission data, additional risk-related data, and we've come up with an ESG score for 42 million businesses and 176 markets around the world. So again, just doing things that we never dreamt we could have done not that many years ago. When we look at the solutions that we drive from this data, it all starts with our Data Cloud. Our Data Cloud is enormous. And I appreciate you being here today for us to spend a little time for you to really understand the breadth and depth of our capabilities here. If I ask you, how many records do you think -- data records do we process every single day, 25 million? Is that a big number? Is it 100 million? Is it 1 billion? Like what means big. What would impress you? We process 100 billion a day, 100 billion data records are processed every day. It just shows you the scope and the magnitude of this Data Cloud, the leadership we have here and how we're focused every day on extending that leadership. In 2019, it was 25 billion. still a big number. But again, you could see the increase that we've driven here. Our DUNS number, what we shared, we're taking this Data Cloud and with the DUNS number help make this data actionable for our clients. And we've got use cases across the entire business landscape that could be with Finance and Risk, right? Solving problems and creating opportunities for CFOs, Chief Lending Officer, Chief Credit Officers, Chief Procurement Officers, or to the other end of a corporation, the Sales and Marketing side, working with CMOs, Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Sales Officers and it's really taking the same data, adding additional to it based on what the use case is. And you could see examples of the types of value that we can drive for our clients here. So really exciting, I'll say, business architecture for us and really sets us up for the opportunities that are out there. If we look at the total addressable market, it's significant. So we're a $2.2 billion company, and we see a $90 billion TAM, lots of runway ahead of us. If we look at the first TAM in our Sales and Marketing, the real question is who could I do business with. If I want to identify prospects out there, that map the type of ideal prospects for my business, what do they look like? How can I help get an accurate view of the clients through our Master Data management? How can I identify targets, audience targets out there that I want to market to or sell to. That's really what we do here. Which of them have intent to purchase. So really what you're seeing here is helping us solve problems where every business is going to their sellers saying, "I need you to do more with less." I'm sure every company you follow has got the same mandate, do more with less. And this is a great example of helping sellers and marketers do more with less. If we look at the next TAM, credit decisioning. So we've been leveraging data and analytics to credit decisioning for a while. It's still a very growing market. It's growing in a number of ways, more companies doing it, more companies look at that alternative data to help drive a decision. So imagine you have someone who's on the bubble, right? Should you extend credit to them or not. Well, let's look at some alternative data. What are their shipping volumes look like? What's their foot traffic look like? Does that push you over the edge or pull you back? These are the [ examples ], where we see lots of opportunities for us to drive additional forward-looking analytics into credit decision to really grow this market. And the last one is governance, risk and compliance. Question there is who can I do business with? i.e., who am I allowed to do business with? The regulatory landscape is evolving, it's harsh. There's -- in many examples, companies you think you're doing business with you not really serve all the interconnective companies tied to it, ultimate beneficial owners of those companies. So you think he may be doing business with this person and in fact, be doing business with someone else, but maybe from a rogue nation, maybe on a sanction list as an example. So these are the 3 main areas. And what's great for us is that our data set touches all 3. What else is great is what's resonating with our clients recently is we're bringing all 3 of these to our clients. So from a sales perspective, great, you found an ideal prospect that is not awesome. Should you waste your time and money selling to them? Are they going to be able to pay you at the end of the day? Could you waste your time and money selling to them if there's something you shouldn't be doing business with. It's driving all the insights that we have to make our clients faster and better. So let's look at our technology and data where we were. We had minimal investment, multiple API solutions and strategies, multiple product solutions, slow to process, couldn't move off the dime. I see in many ways, the company was stuck, right? How do you really transform when you're not stopping something, how do you do more when you're not stopping other things? And when you look at what we did, we came and made significant investments to streamline the data supply chain. We streamlined a 30%, which resulted in a 10x improvement in throughput, significant. We eliminated legacy component to really standardize our data quality upwards of 60%. I mean, the things that really matter to our clients. We applied AI, machine learning to our scores, to get more predictability. So we talked about our consumer blended score. That was an example of us taking the data we had on the business plus a consumer credit bureau poll on the owners of that business and blended them. We've seen a 15% to 20% increase in predictability. So again, just great examples of what we've done, and we see it in our numbers, right? We see it in the number of reduced calls from clients on data quality issues. It's been reduced 7x, right? Significant. So remember this when we talk about our ability on price and earning the right because of the value we're driving and the improvements that we've made. These are data points that are important. When you look at the number of contacts that we have, it went from 7 million to 58 million. Again, critical for key decision-makers. And lastly, the UBO, the ultimate beneficial ownership coverage. This is very hard stuff, right? People are intentionally trying to hide to their involvement in the business all around the world. This is hard stuff. We tripled it from 100 million to 300 million in a few years. So again, great work by the team. If we look at from an innovation perspective and solutions we're driving, again, we had little innovation. If your infrastructure is stuck, your innovation is going to be stuck, right? And that's why we focus like we did first on getting the core of the company stronger. A very slow migration strategies of optimal contracts. What we do? We made a hard shift into innovation in 2021. Our team is acting on secular trends that we see in the market. We talk about having these great clients, well, they're only great if you really engage them, right? We got the best of the best as clients, bring them in, spend time with them, listen to them. We do a lot with advisory boards, a lot of engagement. We're getting a lot of great ideas. And more so, we're getting evangelists with our clients as we work with them and we're first to launch products and they're first to adopt them. But we've been launching a lot of innovative solutions. We've launched 100 products last year, and it's really important because it drives the vitality score right? You want your clients, you want most of your revenue coming from your newest products. It's how you keep your clients sticky and engaged and upselling. Our Vitality Index is that 15%. The other thing I'm really, really proud of is look at the number of contracts that we have, a 60% growth year-over-year in contracts over 4 years in duration. So remember, when we started, we talked about we want to get to multiyear contracts for 2 reasons. Natural pricing escalators in the contracts was one. But the other was we didn't want to keep negotiating the same contract with the same client year after year. We want to get longer term. So there's no posturing throughout the year about the renewal. Let's get a long-term commitment. And now let's as we get together, let's spend time talking about new innovations that we're bringing to market, new ways that we can help our clients and that's really worked. And so what I'm excited about seeing the tenure here is now it's grown to over 4 years, and there is a significant improvement in them, in addition to migrating 20,000 clients so far. So again, a lot of great work. I'll pause there. But let's take a look at where we were, where we are now because candidly, we can all get lost quarter-to-quarter. We can get lost in the smaller measurements. If you step back and look, in a short period of time, we took a company that was stagnant, under invested in through a dramatic change. We replaced the Board. We replaced 90% of the executive team. We let 1/3 of the employees go. So imagine, your company is letting 1/3 of the employees go. We then hired half those numbers back, new skills, new roles. Definitely committed to driving a significant change in the DNA of the company. We had a lot of technology and data that we fought through. And with all of this, you could see the results. A 30% increase in revenue, a 52% increase in EBITDA. And I have to say it's factoring in $15 million of FX from last year as well. Margins almost 600 basis points improved. And from a leverage perspective, down significantly from 9x when we started to 4x. So I'm really proud of the team with these great results and really what was a very turbulent market. So if we look at what's next, what are we focused on? It always goes to macro trends that we see and working with clients because these are the pain points and the opportunities our clients see. Digital transformation is one. That's a journey that's been going on for over a decade, but we all saw through the pandemic, how it accelerated and there's no signs of it slowing. Supply chain disruption, right? When you get into a taxi or an Uber and that's what the person is talking to the -- drivers talking to you about, it's pervasive. And how many times we're talking about supply chain lows in over the last few years. The regulatory environment is growing dramatically, and it's harsh and there's a lot of concern around privacy considerations. Our clients are looking at us and leaning on us for us to help solve these problems for them. And lastly, from an environmental, social and government perspective, again, growing profits certainly takes priority for many companies. But this is not a fad. ESG is not a fad. It's not going away. It's certainly important having the characteristics that shape our overall definition of success as we go forward. So what do we need to do to capitalize on them? Well, from a data and tech perspective, we need to stay the course with leveraging our hybrid cloud environment, continue with the data supply chain modernization, leveraging AI, machine learning. We're going to continue to extend the leadership we have with our Data Cloud. And we're going to integrate with market -- other marketplaces out there to drive growth. So lots of good work. None of this is new. We've started a lot of it. We're going to stay down the course. This, we really believe is important. And from an innovative solution, we're going to innovate in areas that are high growth areas. As you could see, supply chain, fraud, ESG. We're going to enter new verticals that we see opportunity in. And we're going to drive the value pricing with our clients. Like I said, there are many examples you'll see throughout the morning of the improvements that we've made and the capabilities that we've brought to our clients, and we think that we have market permission from a price perspective. So let me tell you what the financial profile would look like. We're going to continue to grow and accelerate our growth to mid- to high single digits. We'll get our EBITDA margins into the low 40s. Our net earnings high single digit to low double digit. And we're going to reduce our leverage by 0.5 turn to 1 turn. And with the additional capital, this is a great cash flow business. We've got a very disciplined approach around capital allocation, and we'll leverage that to drive shareholder value. So Bryan will talk more about this in detail, but what I wanted to show you is that we've got a clear vision that we're executing against and very excited about. And so in summary, if I could leave you with really some key thoughts, I know we talked a lot this morning so far. We're a much improved company, a company has not been this strong in over a decade. We're delivering and doing the things we said we would to drive operational efficiencies and gains. We've got a very strong technology and data foundation for us to build upon. We've got a great client base to work with every single day. And overall, we've got a great company with great leaders that have great confidence in what lies ahead for us. So I appreciate your time this morning. Hope you enjoy the rest of the morning. With that, I'd like to invite Ginny Gomez, our President of North America, to give you an update.

All right. Thank you, Anthony. So let's go ahead and jump into an overview of the North American business. So North America is about $1.6 billion in revenue. And as you can see, we have a diverse portfolio across solutions, segments and verticals. We have very strong penetration in our mega and large segments with about 95% of the Fortune 100. We also have a growing base of small businesses and thousands of these businesses come to us every day. Typically, they need help establishing themselves or get access to credit and capital. And it's really the combination of these 2 things that give us fertile ground to sell into. North America is also the factory for our product innovation. It's where we build our global solutions, many of which have a passport to local markets and certainly near we will be talking about some of that today. And as you saw some of the numbers from Anthony specific to North America, we've launched about 50 new products and product add-ons just in '22. We've been ramping our go-to-market engine or continuing to build upon it. And it's really the combination of those 2 things that has helped us seeing 8% growth in enterprise sales. So before we talk about where we're going, let's talk about where we are. So we've had in North America basically a flat business in 2019. And as you can see, we've grown it to about 3% over the last few years. That's $124 million in revenue that we've added over the last 3 years. And while we are really focusing on growth, we didn't lose sight of the customer. So we already had great revenue retention at 94%, and we were able to push that to 96% while we're getting that kind of growth engine going. Anthony talked about the importance of multiyear contracts, and this is an area I want to spend a few minutes. Multiyear contracts were about 20% of our revenue. We've pushed it to 50% of the revenue. And what's really exciting about that is a nugget that he shared with you that in the last year alone, we had 60% improvement of those contracts going under 4-plus years. And so what that means is, a, it is vote of confidence of our customers in us; b, it's what Anthony said, like we don't have to posture every year and do a renewal every year. But what I'm also more excited about is now our sellers can spend more time upselling, cross-selling and getting new logos. And then lastly, on the Vitality Index, we were just south of 2%. We pushed that over the last couple of years to a little over 12%, 12.4% to be exact. And as we walk through some of the new products and platforms that we've launched, you'll see why that's growing and it's going to continue to grow in the future. Okay. So there were a few trends and disruptions that Anthony talked about. A couple of these, I'm not going to go through all of them. I want to highlight a few that are tailwinds for North America. So one, we will have the ability to take a leadership position in a post-cookie world. Identifiers are going to come and go and Anthony said it a few times, the DUNS is persistent. The other one, sustainability and climate risk. So this is an area it's really complex. It's evolving, it's different market to market. It's a great recipe and combination for our customers who need help. And not only are we launching new products there, Anthony mentioned ESG but we also have products and data assets for insurance and Sales and Marketing as well. And then lastly, supply chain. We're going to spend a few minutes today talking about supply chain. We also have a video that we're going to show you. We've all heard about the importance of supply chain resiliency, supply change disruptions that have been happening. And it's been impacting businesses, big and small, another great opportunity for us to help our customers mitigate risk in this area. The 2 segments that I'm going to talk about today. First is Finance and Risk, second is Sales and Marketing. So let's start with Finance and Risk. So our largest segment in Finance and Risk is Finance Solutions. And we have a flagship product called Finance Analytics, and I'll talk to you more about that in just a few minutes. This is a product and a platform. It is deeply embedded in our customers' workflows. It is mission-critical data. And what's really interesting is a couple of months ago, I was talking to a very large FI. And they mentioned to me, without your data, that would be absolutely nuclear for us. And I remember thinking that's the definition of mission-critical nuclear, I like that word. So I can't attribute it to the company, but I thought it was -- I asked, but I thought it was a very good quote. Also the fastest-growing segment that we have is risk and compliance with our flagship product, Risk Analytics. And again, I'll show you what that looks like in just a few minutes. This includes areas like KYC or Know Your Customer; KYTP, Know Your Third Party; in addition to supplier intelligence. And as we said on a few earnings calls, it's been growing double digits for the past 8 quarters. Small business is an area I want to talk a little bit about. We're really evolving path, probably what you've heard about in the past few years. We have the legacy credibility business. It was very paper manual driven. It was a lot of direct mailers. So we've kind of pushed past that and we've moved to a more, I would say, modern engagement with our customers there, more communication, more feedback and information back and forth there. We'll talk a little bit more about that one as well. I'll show you some examples of products there too. And then lastly is government. Government is primarily in our Finance and Risk segment, focused in the defense, civilian and intelligence communities. Okay. So I've mentioned the products a few times. So let's go in and see what those look like. So again, focusing on Finance and Risk. We have a similar slide I'll go through Sales and Marketing as well. So let's start from the left. We're going to work our way. Yes, left, work our way across to the right. And there's a few builds on this slide. So hang with me. So we started with the Data Cloud, and Anthony talked about the Data Cloud. It's an amazing data asset for us. That Dun's Data. It's very robust and rich. I've worked out a number of different data companies. It's really impressive what we have here. Anthony also showed all the alternative data assets and almost all of those are new for us. So when you take the Dun's data that we have and you combine it with all those alternative data sources and analytics, it's really what's powering our innovation agenda. Also, what you see here lit up are the products that we had in 2019. As you can see, focus on a few use cases. Now we've been busy over the last couple of years. So we talked about that product innovation engine. So we've been able to execute and deliver. These are not all the products. You got the website, you'll see more products. We couldn't fit them all on the screen. We got to the point where it's 2 point font, and we said, okay, that's too tiny. So this is just a sampling of some of the products that we have. We're really focused on 3 value segments. It's helping our customers cleanse and enrich their data, assess and manage across both credit and risk needs and also to onboard suppliers. I also want to highlight here, I talked about Finance Analytics and Risk Analytics, and it's important to understand that these are platforms. All of these new products and product add-ons that we've launched in addition to the ones that just aren't on the slide, they need a home. They can't just kind of be islands in the stream. You really have to think through how do my customers use these? How do I get engagement with our customers on these new products? So there are housed in our go-forward platforms. So I would say new customers that come in, they go into Finance Analytics and Risk Analytics, but Anthony also talked about the migration. The tens of thousands of customers that we've migrated are going to these new platforms, where we have the ability to upsell and cross-sell them all of these new products that we've launched. So we walk in, show the value prop. Are you interested? It's great. We just flip them on as opposed to having going through a whole new implementation. SMB, I want to talk a little bit about small and medium businesses. As I said, we're moving past that traditional legacy kind of credibility business that we've had. This is an area that we've also done a fair amount of innovation too. Just in the last 6 months, might be 7, we've launched 6 new products. And a couple of them that I'll highlight. One is the integration with Plaid, if you're familiar with Plaid, this is access to commercial banking data. And of all the customers that came in and signed up with Plaid, over 90% of them had improvement in their score, over 90%, that's huge. The other 1 is we've embedded offers directly into our SMB portal. So you come to us, you need to establish yourselves, you need access to capital. Right in that flow, we'll stay here some offers for you. And then lastly, we also created an SMB launch product. We were getting feedback from our customers that "I've established myself, but where do I go from here." So we put together a package to help our customers to say, okay, these are the next few steps that you need to take. Again, Anthony talked about getting feedback from customers. It's been a critical element to hear the need and then build products around it. This is one we launched in Q4 and right out of the gate, we had tremendous success. So then the question is, where we're going from here. So -- or really what's fueling our growth going forward. A couple of these we've talked about, and I want to highlight some of them as well. B2B fraud. What's exciting about business-to-business fraud is it follows known patterns that our customers and behaviors that are already used to on the consumer side. So think about it. It's a value prop they already understand. It's just different. It's on a business side instead of an individual side. Identity theft, misrepresentation, first payment default. When we sit down and have these conversations with the customers, they're like, "Oh, I get exactly what you're talking about." But instead of on a person, this is about a business. We also talked about ESG. So again, it's a newer market. It's growing. It's rapidly evolving. We have coverage of 42 million public and private companies. The private piece is a big differentiator for us across 176 markets. And not only do we have this data. And what's fueling also a lot of these products that we showed you that we've been able to build and deliver is, we're always thinking about additional use cases as well. So we get the data in, we have a need. Some of that ESG data, we're also using in credit underwriting and insurance use cases as well. Small businesses. There was a trend that I had a couple of slides back that said there's been 53% new business applications from 2019 to 2021. When I take that and add it to the thousands of companies that come to us every day to establish themselves or get access to capital, we're starting to create a real flywheel here. And it's flywheel on data that's really hard to get. These are newly formed new small businesses, and this data helps our enterprise customers all the way down to our smallest customers. We talked a little bit about credit underwriting. So I won't go into too much detail, but to say our clients are really moving past that traditional kind of trade credit underwriting and embracing more the use of alternative data assets because that we're layering in some of the data assets that you see here. Also last year, we launched our blended score. It's blended with consumer data score product as well. And then the last piece I'll share with you is on supplier intelligence. So this is a solution that not only visualizes the supply chain and the risk within supply chain. So I can see it but we allow our customers to take action on it, which is equally as important. They can do reroutes, find look like suppliers, if one is highlighted is maybe a little bit too risky for you. But instead of talking about it, we actually have a video that highlights the solution in action. [Presentation]

All right. So pretty exciting new product for us. It's also going to be available in the Hamilton room, where we're going to do some of our product showcases as well. So if you have more information, we'll have the product there, but we'll also have some of our experts there as well. All right. So let's go ahead and shift gears and go into Sales and Marketing. So as we said earlier, so Sales and Marketing is where our clients really can play offense. And it answers the question of who could I do business with. We now have solutions that span the entire revenue generation life cycle. Let's start with our largest solution, which is Master Data management. It's half the revenue, and it's growing high single digits. Our fastest-growing and newest segment is digital audiences that is based on Eyeota and it's -- or the acquisition of Eyeota, and it's actually growing strong double digits as well. Now on some of our prior earnings calls, we talked about some of our sales and other legacy solutions that we're really underinvested in. And one of them that we've really been focused on is Hoovers. So Hoovers is starting to show real momentum in the last, let's say, 1 year and 1.5 years, we've been leaning hard into this product. We've invested in data. Anthony talked about some of the numbers on the contact side. We really talked to our customers to understand how we can make this product more interactive, build it into the sales motion, and we've made some go-to-market improvements there as well. And I'll give you a few examples of some of the things that we've done actually right here talking about Hoovers. Similar to the slide that we had in Finance and Risk, I'm going to start to the left and kind of work my way across. So again, everything that we do focus is on the Data Cloud, again, amazing data asset to build products around. Let's start with Master Data management because it's, again, our largest segment, it's our tailwind to growth. This allows our customers to ingest, cleanse, link and enrich their data in ours. And it's a really important first step for our customers because this is data that feeds their downstream systems, it's also mission-critical. It feeds ERPs, CRMs, enterprise data warehouses. It's also highly embedded into most of our customers' processes, their compliance processes, their governance processes. So you have to think of it as a pull-through of our other products because once you're embedded in those processes and you're anchored on the Dun's data, we now have all these products that we can come back and layer right on top of it. Again, these are the products that we had in 2019. Similar to what we showed before, these are some new products that we've added over the last couple of years. Same point I'll make before. There's many additional new products. If you go to the website that you'll see. We just kind of ran out of room on the slide. We've been busy the last couple of years launching a number of new products and innovation. They're really focused on 3 key client value segments. The first allows our customers to target, then activate and engage. A couple I'm going to speak to on this slide. So one is contact match. If you look in your upper right-hand corner, you'll see Contact Match. It's new, literally just launched this quarter. And what's really great about that is in Sales and Marketing, to think about it, you have access to a company, but Sales and Marketing is all about having access to an individual as well. You really need both. And we had DUNS -- everything is anchored and based on the DUNS, but we needed to add a new anchor point to it to be based on a person as well. And so that's what we launched with Contact Match. This is also a bit of a disintermediation strategy for us because what we found is our customers were using multiple solutions, one, typically with us to anchor on a business, but they may use other solutions to an on an individual. So now we're going back to all of those customers and saying, we have the ability to anchor on both, you should consolidate down to us and most likely you'll save some money as well. On the Hoovers side, so I've mentioned this has been an area that we've really been leaning into the last couple of years. We're starting to get some real excitement around it. We've launched a series of new products. So 1 in Hoovers is Hoovers Everywhere. So again, Anthony mentioned really talking to our customers. You want to sit down, you want to have what's called contextual inquiry. You really want to understand, see them using it. What are their daily activities? What does that look like? What products and solutions are they going into and using? And with Hoovers Everywhere, we built a widget right into the browser. So if the seller is researching information about a company, they don't have to stop, think let me go into Hoovers and log in. Let me find some information. Let me go back to the website and see how it all crossfoot right into that seller's daily activities, you go up into the browser, you type in the company. We default right into the browser, all the information that we have about the company. And then furthermore, we provide you the contacts as well. And if you make a decision, this is a company I want to do business with, these are the people I'm interested in, you click on a button and it integrates the sales force as well. We've also taken Hoovers down market. So we've created kind of a skinnier version of Hoovers. We've embedded it into our SMB products into our e-commerce channel. That also has a new commercial model as well. So with Hoovers, we've been very busy. So as you can see, both with FR&S and S&MS, there's a ton of new innovation and products that we've launched last year, and we're launching this year as well. If you remember from the first chart that I showed in North America, we have a very loyal base. We're very entrenched in the upper, the mega and the large segments, our longevity 19 years. So it's great to be able to sit down and have a very different conversation with our customers about how we can add value going forward. So very similar on the S&MS side, our sales and marketing side, let's talk about where we're going from here. So I mentioned a post-cookie world. I mentioned identifiers come and go. Think about the past. It was based on domain, e-mail address, IP address, the Dun's is persistent. You want to know what businesses come to your website. We can de-anonymize it, tell you who the business is, match it to our contact data and give you a complete view of everything that's going on. We're also excited about programmatic advertising. So we were the leader in off-line before. And now with our acquisition of Eyeota, we're the leader of online as well. What I'm really excited about the programmatic advertising, especially with the acquisition of Eyeota is it's always on data. I go in, I point, click, purchase, download and I have access to it. And what's also great about this is the new channel for us. So we typically work very directly with our customers, with brands. But with this new product, we have the ability to work more directly with agencies as well. So it's a new sales channel for us, too. From a sales acceleration perspective, what we found there is we kind of had the bookends. So we had a lot of customers on the small side, we have some customers at the really big side as well. And we see there's an opportunity in the middle that we weren't kind of getting after. And so with all these new capabilities that we've added in Hoovers, we feel we have a great opportunity in the mid-market as well. And speaking of the mid-market, Master Data management. So again, a huge product for us, really excited, tons of new capability, lots of new data that we've added into it, Contact Match as well, similar to the mid-market. So what we're adding. We're going to be launching this year. We're adding a new self-guided UI, pre-defined matching and clustering capabilities as well. But similar to the demo that we just saw in supplier intelligence, we also have a demo of our Master Data management product and specifically Connect for Salesforce. [Presentation]

All right. So what's very exciting about that product is it's a little bit different than what we've done before. I think it was more batch files, bulk data going back and forth. Now we've really integrated into the sales motion, and we're able to kind of change the integrations that we have with some of these downstream systems. Also, similar to supplier intelligence, our Master Data management is a product that we're going to have in the product showcase with our experts as well. So should you have a question on Connect for Salesforce or any of our Master Data management capabilities, we'll certainly be happy to answer those as well. All right. So let's talk about where we're going growth and going forward for Sales and Marketing. So one is -- I talked -- I might be a little bit of out of sync there. Okay. Sorry about that. I think we might be a little bit out of sync. But let's go ahead and check forward. I'm going to talk a little bit about IBM and let me go into this customer. So what's exciting about IBM is there's a customer that have been with us for a long time. So they've been with us for years, actually, they've been with us for decades. They really understand the power of data and with data, how they can harness data to answer questions. Now what's exciting about IBM is they've been undergoing a transformation themselves, and they chose us to partner with. So we're becoming kind of that transformation engine at the center of a lot of these really big, large mega customers. IBM works with us in many different areas. So they work with us on customers, prospects and suppliers. And we're deeply embedded into a number of their workflows like compliance, governance and some of the regulation processes as well. But again, as I said, they're not the only customer going through this transformation. We have a lot of really large mega customers, if you remember, the North American chart that we had before. And so again, when we talk about IBM and we talk about some of these big customers, they're very much going through this transformation. They're working really closely with us. They want to anchor on a data asset that they feel can be the foundation of all of their decisions that can happen going forward, and they partner with us. And like I said, they're not the only customer going through that transformation. We are becoming the engine in the center of all of these big customers going through that transformation. And I'm thinking of us as like that transformation engine across a lot of large and mega customers. And again, we've been a great customer to work with. I'm just so excited. They've expanded their relationship with us over the last couple of years. We have big conversations with them all the time. They greatly expanded what they're doing with us. And I just -- I can't tell you how much I look forward to working with them and other big customers as well. So let's talk a little bit about where we're going. And then certainly, Bryan is going to give more details here. So I've talked to you, we kind of laid the foundation for where we're going forward in the future. From a revenue growth perspective, we're going to go from about 3% that we talked about a few minutes ago and to moving into the mid-single digits. We have great retention already. So we had 94%. We pushed it to 96%. Again, customers are at the center of everything that we do. We're going to continue to push that into the high 90%. Again, multiyear contracts. So we've made a ton of progress there. I mentioned we went from 20% to 50%, and that's going to go from 50% to 60%. And then lastly, the Vitality Index. So as you can see, we've talked about a lot of new products that we've launched, a lot of new platforms as well. We're at 12% already. We're going to push that into the 20%, and I think you've seen exactly how we can do that. And again, we really showed you some of the products and platforms. I haven't shown you everything that we've launched in the last couple of years. And so a few key takeaways that I'll leave you with before turning it over to Neeraj. A couple of things. So one, I think we have been really good stewards of our capital and our capital investments. I think you've seen our ability to execute, deliver, get new products out the door. As we've said, we have migrated thousands of customers over to our new platforms, actually tens of thousands of customers. And those new platforms are where a lot of our new innovation lives. So to the ability to get those customers to the new platform and then turn on all these new products and capabilities is something we're really excited about. As you can see, also in North America, we've taken a business that was basically flat for a long time and moved it into growth mode, and we have some great leading indicators of how we're going to get there. First is our multiyear contracts. Second, we talked about the Vitality Index. And then lastly, client retention, and we're going to continue to push and lean on that. Well, with that, I thank you for your time. I'm going to turn it over to Neeraj Sahai, who is the President of International.

Good morning. I don't have great movies like Ginny, but I promise you great stills. So I am Neeraj Sahai. I run the International business, been with Dun & Bradstreet for 4 years. And before that, I spent 30 years of my life in financial services, a lot of it in the downtown area, which the Wall Street doesn't look like Wall Street was when I grew up. But my journey with D&B has been an interesting one and like to share some of it with you during the course of the next 15 minutes and over 10 slides or so. So I'd like to give you some insight into our strategy in the International business, how it's been working over the last 4 years. What's been the outcome? What's been the result of that application of that strategy? And how has that approach varied across different markets because as all of you know, markets have different macro variables and we had different starting points. And then I'll conclude by sharing what can we expect going forward. But before I get into the main part of my presentation, I'd like to describe a bit of the structure of the International franchise. So in many markets, especially the U.K.; Ireland; Greater China, which includes Hong Kong; Taiwan and, of course, Mainland China. And the 18 countries in Europe, that includes the [ DACH ] region, Eastern Europe and the Nordics. We have 100% control through 100% equity ownership of our legal vehicles in these countries. In India, we have operating control via a majority-owned joint venture. In each of these markets, we have a General Manager. The General Manager acts as the CEO, has end-to-end control of the franchise, is supposed to grow that franchise rapidly by leveraging global assets. In about 200 countries, we have long-standing partnerships. We call this the worldwide network. These are exclusive relationships generally. Partners are committed to providing us the best possible data in the region. They are supposed to distribute our products, using our D&B brand and fulfill the needs for global data through us. This framework since 2019, there have been a few fundamental changes that we've made in this architecture. And there 2, I'd like to highlight. One is the acquisition of Bisnode and the 100% ownership of our Chinese JV. With that change, our markets that we directly control make up about 35% of the international GDP, which is twice as much as what it was when we started this journey in 2019. That means we now have unfettered access to some of the largest companies in the world in some of the largest economies of the world. The second is the worldwide network. It was a bit of an incongruent framework. We've kind of raised it to the highest common factor and re-architected it to be a driver of growth. I'll amplify a little more about it when I talk about the worldwide network. But those are 2 important changes that I wanted to bring to your attention. Now a bit about our strategy and our approach in international markets. We have transformed the international business from a loose federation of entities into a highly integrated franchise. That has a clear strategy that delivers best-of-breed solutions to clients worldwide and creates economies of scale for D&B by leveraging common platforms, common processes, common products and common data sets. What drives growth in these markets? What are the 3 sort of fundamental pillars. The first is building a powerful client franchise. What does that mean? That doing business with the industry leaders, that is winning with the winners, we are driving higher retention rates and netting together cross-border solutions for transactional clients. The second is aggressively launching our global solution set to these markets, adapting them of course to local conditions. And third is making sure that our solutions are powered by the best and richest, deepest data sets and insights. And the numbers at this -- at the bottom of the slide, I'm not going to read them, tell you about the tremendous progress we made to creates these pillars. And before I move off this slide, there are 2 other aspects that occupy in my mind and my team's mind on a daily basis. First is making sure we have common management processes aligned to growth; and secondly, balancing growth with risk management, which is very important in international markets because of dynamic regulations, because of concerns about data privacy and of course, enhanced cybersecurity risk. So the application of this strategy, which has been going on for 4 years, what does it mean as people say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And here's the tale of the tape. We've doubled our revenues over 4 years. We have doubled our EBITDA over 4 years. That means we've been driving profitable growth. And a lot of this growth is powered by new products and new data. That's why our Vitality Index has gone up from 2% to 22%. And equally importantly, sales from enterprise accounts, which is critical, which is cornerstone of our strategy, has been growing at about 20% over this time period. So really, it just shows that the playbook we are applying is correct and the playbook is working. Now I'll give you a little more color on how we worked on this approach in the different markets because as I mentioned, the different markets are at different start -- we were at different starting points, and of course, there are macro variations in these markets. So starting with the United Kingdom and Ireland. We started our journey here first because this is where we had the best footprint when it came to products and our long-standing history in these markets. Our go-to-market in the UKI is very mature, built around solution specialists and industry verticals. We've attracted some tremendous logos. We have driven high retention rates of about 90%. And we have sort of a very diverse product range in this marketplace which services the full spectrum of needs. We invested substantially in data. Now in the U.K., we have 100% coverage of the U.K. commercial universe as well as the fact that being one of the few CRAs approved by the Treasury. We have been ingest -- rapidly ingesting financial data. So in a nutshell, we have a franchise which is sort of geared to growth and sustainable growth because we have the right mix of products, we have the right mix of talent, we have the right mix of data and insights. And therefore, it's been delivering growth, double-digit growth rates for international clients. Last year, for example, our enterprise account sales in this market grew by 16%. So that's a bit of the U.K. Moving on to Europe. Our journey in Europe, which is the 18 markets in Europe -- 13 -- 18 markets in Europe, I talked about. Began in 2021 with the acquisition of Bisnode. So about 2 years after our journey began in the U.K. And we've been applying the same strategy in Europe. We reoriented the sales force to focus on enterprise clients. We created pan-European teams along industry verticals. We've aggressively been launching our new products in these markets. We launched 30 of them last year. And we obviously, like in other markets have improved and the quality and quantity of data and insights and analytics in these markets. What's happened as a consequence. Our enterprise sales have grown by 12% in these markets. D&B solutions have grown by 20% in these markets. Our retention rates have risen up to 90% in these markets. So like the U.K., we are bringing new business in, and we are keeping the backdoor locked. And we are sort of midway through our journey in this territory because if you look at the proportion of enterprise sales here, in these markets, they make about 16% of the revenue. I think if you went back to the U.K., you would see it's 34%. That tells you about the growth we're already generating and the headroom we have for both going forward. Coming to Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific, as far as we are concerned, includes Greater China, which is obviously Mainland China; Hong Kong; and Taiwan and India. The rest of the countries in the continent are covered by a worldwide network. Now traditionally, in Asia, D&B actually left a very shallow set of products in these markets. And the data sets were very, very sparse compared to what was available in these countries. As a consequence, most of the revenue came from small and medium clients built around very basic local products. We started applying our playbook into these markets, the same playbook, and we got similar results. Our enterprise accounts are growing at 19% in these markets, even faster than the U.K. Just for an example, when we took over the China market, we had one major client that we did business within that market. Today, we have Alibaba. We have China Merchants Bank, China Customs, Agricultural Bank of China, just to name a few. When it came to data, we completely changed the game in these markets. So just to give you an example, in 2019, when we started, in China, we covered about 30 million entities. Today, we cover 90 million entities, which makes up 99% of the active universe. In India, we covered about 13 million entities. We today cover nearly 27 million entities, almost double. We had, as I said, a very small product set. We aggressively launched products in these markets. And today, we have modern solutions adapted to these markets available in India and China. And the combination of data, the combination of our solution set is driving the growth into the enterprise accounts that I talked about. So in these markets also, we structured ourselves well and positioned ourselves to ride the tailwinds in these markets. Finally, coming to the worldwide network, the 13 partners I talked about. Traditionally, this framework lacked cohesion and lacked direction. As a result, what would happen is that there was confusion in the network, often response times to cross-border release -- critical cross-borders release was slow. And often, there was unnecessary internal competition. We've changed that completely. Today, we aligned as a partnership team. We know where we are going. We share common account plans, how to target clients, what our expectations are from one another. And most importantly, D&B in the past used to treat these partners as pure suppliers of raw material, just data, not as a distributor of the solutions. We have effectively changed that. We have told the partners and departments have agreed with us that they will also be judged not just by the quality of the data they provide us, but the amount of distribution they do of products and solution set. And to support that, we've launched over 10 products in our partner markets just in 2022. And the results are there for us to see. If you look at the data sets, the coverage has gone up by 52%. And if you look at the product royalties, which we get as a consequence of distributing our products, are growing in the high teens. And there's greater potential going forward as these products mature in that marketplace. Before I wrap up, I did want to talk -- I talked a lot about enterprise accounts. So therefore, I did want to give an impression, give you some insight into what that means. It's not just a question of bidding against these accounts, but how are we winning versus these accounts. So here is an example of a client, a large multinational bank, who we did business with for at least 25 years. And we used to sell them a lot of individual products. Our solutions team sat down with the client to understand their strategic objectives. And their strategic objective was, obviously, how do they harness the data internally and how do they marry it with external data and drive that data in a way through the entire ecosystem that they can solve a variety of problems. We used a Master Data solution to actually resolve those entities, marry the internal data within the organization with external data and make sure that the client has a single view of every counterparty they were dealing with. Not only that, that data and that information was embedded into their workflows and embedded into their technology stack, so they could be easily digested by the front end and the middle end of that organization. As a result of that, the client has been able to -- the frontline of the client has been able to use that data to drive better cross-sell, to improve the relationship with the existing clients and to find untapped opportunities in the cross-border world. Secondly, they've had a single view of their suppliers now. They've been able to leverage that to manage risk, to identify opportunities, to optimize spend. And thirdly, they've been able to use the data and structure the data in a way that they can meet the regulatory reporting requirements, including ability to reduce and optimize the capital requirements. So when it comes to large clients, winning against them, yes, it's a question of data; yes, it's a question of product; yes, it's a question of technology. But those are just necessary conditions. The question is to really how do you change that dialogue and how do you embed that solution into the nervous system of the client and which is what we are doing, which is what makes this business stickier. And that creates the opportunity for us to grow, especially if we are doing business with the winners of the industry. And that's why you've seen the high growth rates within the international franchise and within the clients that we want to do business with. So where are we going? Mid- to high single digits. I think Bryan will talk more about it. EBITDA margin of mid- to high 30%. We think we can easily sustain 10-plus product launches a year, and you saw the Vitality Index earlier, and we can maintain it at above 25%. What are the key takeaways? We know what playbook we have. We know that the playbook is working. We have the people, the people who know how to execute it. So we're winning in the right way, in the right markets with the right outcomes for the company. Thank you. With that, I think I was between you and the break. So go ahead, enjoy the break. [Break]

So a little break for refreshments. Gary Kotovets and Mike Manos are going to join me for a little bit of a fireside chat. So Gary, Mike, welcome to the stage.

Thank you.

I feel like we need funds.

Yes. This episode of -- yes. So maybe we'll start off, Mike, with you. Anthony mentioned some of the things that your team has been doing to strengthen the infrastructure and improve the data supply chain. So what's next on the agenda?

Well, I think -- it's a great question. I think if you think about the journey that we've talked about so far today, the common thread across all of those has been a fundamental technology transformation, both in the data supply chain and in our approach to technology overall. And I think it's kind of hard to see sometimes when you look and observe what's happening. But when you think about the transformation and you saw the numbers on increasing throughput 10x, you saw the ability for us to grow our data footprint by hundreds of percent each year without actually increasing costs, there's a bunch of really great technology. And core to that is transformation into the cloud. We'll probably talk a little bit more about that as we move forward. But part of that transformation is not just about moving to the cloud. It's a fundamental reworking of key architectures, processes internally. The fact that we've gotten off of a majority of our mainframe applications or old applications and really transformed them, the fact that we've moved tens of thousands of customers from older products to new products, those are huge and significant technology challenges that we've overcome that really put us into a great new place to continue to leverage and launch new and more products. There's an emerging trend that Gary and I call the need of speed, right? And so one of the interesting things that's happening in the marketplace, from my perspective as a technology person, is generically you would think about the movement of data and people think about data as big monolithic blocks of things that move. But within the world today, different data elements have different speeds. They move at different speeds. They move -- they get stale faster. The life -- the longevity of that data is getting more and more complex. And in some ways, it's getting more radioactive, right? So radioactivity can power a city and it could also do great damage. And when you think about the movement of data, how we store data, all of the types of things that we deal with, understanding the complexity from a regulatory perspective, et cetera, is getting hard. It's a hard problem to go solve for not just from a business perspective, but from a technology perspective, how do you build an architecture, how do you build the framework that allows the company to continue to scale and really reinvest that trust that our customers have with us.

It makes a lot of sense, Mike. And Gary, from that perspective, we just heard about all the things that Mike is doing on the technology side, right, to improve throughput, improve, right, the data supply chain. So how does that allow you to do things kind of bigger, stronger, faster from that perspective?

Well, it allows me to do a lot of different things. And Mike kind of -- I think of myself as almost the train conductor. Mike set the rails and the roads and the bridges for me. And now I'm able to kind of go at a much higher speed, right, and make sure that I deliver our customers the data in a more timely, consistent and accurate fashion. And so that's really what we've been able to achieve, right, is that ability to kind of open up and speed up our rails and speed up the time in which we provide our customers the data as well as improve the main kind of challenges that we've had in the past around consistency and accuracy, but it also allows me to bringing a lot more content. So it's not just the quality, it's not just the timeliness, but it's the capacity. I mean you've seen in some -- in terms of some of the numbers that we've shown and the kind of growth that we've experienced. I mean this is all in big part because of what we've been able to do and transform in terms of our technology.

Yes. No, absolutely. And Mike, you mentioned a catch phrase a little earlier, the cloud. And so earlier last year, I think many of the folks in the audience know that we did a relatively strategic deal with GCP. And so can you maybe expand upon what that relationship means and how you think about the cloud driving Dun & Bradstreet going forward?

Yes. I think generically, the cloud is at the core of our transformation. Specifically, the GCP deal has allowed us to really accelerate the movement, migration and transformation of our products and services. We've always been on a cloud journey. There's always been things in the various clouds. We've been very public about being a hybrid cloud approach. But the relationship that we have with Google and being able to speed that up has really driven a significant amount of change of both focus and awareness as well as on the innovation side as well in terms of working with them from a product perspective. But I think, as a tech guy, I get -- the word cloud gets a little markety for me sometimes. And so I think a lot of people think about just moving to the cloud as sort of an infrastructure play, just moving from one technology set to another and you instantly get great savings and wonderful scale. And that's not really the case, right? So in order to really take advantage of that, you really have to change the processes, how you do development, your software development life cycle. There's a lot of a lot of hard work that has to go in to make that change to work in the cloud to really realize the benefits of moving to that. And we've spent that time. We've spent that energy to make sure that as we make this transition that we're doing it in a smart and intelligent way that's allowing us to move to the new model to allow us faster transformation, as Gary talked about, from a technology perspective, but also doing it in a way that we can build on. So we've changed the way we do our development, right? We're very componentized. It's about taking features and functionality and capabilities that we may have had in this product or that product and decomposing them so that they're universally available for products everywhere. And I think that's been a key driver for us over the last couple of years. And now we're starting to really see the benefits and the tailwinds of that as we start moving forward from an innovation perspective.

Yes. And so with those benefits and tailwinds, Gary, it seems like that opens up the potential aperture for you to go out and grab some new and alternative data sets. And so when you think about kind of what's next from that perspective, how do you think about creating that next set of use cases?

So this is kind of at the core of what we do on a day-to-day basis, right, as we try to identify and qualify various, I would say, events, right, micro and macro level and think about the data sources that we need to incorporate that would kind of represent those events so that we can incorporate them those data sets into analytics and actionable insights for our customers. I mean that's sort of at the core of what we do. We evaluate hundreds of data sources on annual basis. I mean you've seen the kind of data that we brought in just in the last few years. And really it's about kind of thinking about what else is -- what else would our customers need to know in order to improve the accuracy and, what I call, precision of their decision-making, right, whether it's credit decisioning or sales and marketing. And so with all of that said, what we're seeing now is kind of 2 things. One is sort of building depth in some of our existing data assets such as financial data, climate data, which obviously we talked about the growth in ESG and how important it is to understand from a climate point of view, what impact that climate has on that particular business. As well as other kind of complementary attributes like, for example, human capital and understanding the kind of growth and trajectory that a particular company has and where it is in its life cycle and things like that. So all of those particular pieces are extremely critical when it comes down to improvements in credit decisioning, improvements in sales and marketing decisions. So that's one part. The other part is verticalization, right, or what I like to call verticalization. So there's -- if you think about kind of Dun & Bradstreet and the incredible foundation that it sits on, right, and the kind of work -- I mean we just talked about the data quality improvements that we've made and the coverage improvements that we've made. I mean we've strengthened this foundation to such a degree that I can now build cities on top of it, right, cities in terms of new data assets and new capabilities and new insights that drive our product growth. So verticals such as, for example, capital markets or verticals, for example, such as insurance, right, are areas that we're seeing opportunities for us. And so bringing data that will help us beef up those components and beef up those verticals is where we're looking into next.

Yes, makes sense. So you mentioned cities, right? You mentioned verticals. But Mike, what about countries? And so Ginny was up talking about North America. Neeraj was talking about international. We kind of had this strategy where there's a lot of initial product in North America. And then later on, we localized it. But how do you think about the technology going forward with the split between North America and international? And is there a differentiation?

Yes, not anymore. I would say that one of the key transformational things that we've done is -- and I talked a little bit about this, about decomposing our code base to feature functionality. It's been about taking those core features and globalizing them. So there's really no international versus North American products. So we've been going through our products and sort of breaking out the capabilities that we have, and we're leveraging those capabilities across hundreds of products. So we call it being globally consistent and locally relevant. Because from a product perspective, you want to have the same features functionalities and capabilities and lever them across all the different products, whether it's on the fraud and risk side or the sales and marketing side. Being able to lever those capabilities between those products is important, but you want to do it in a locally relevant way, right? We have tens of thousands of data sources that we ingest from, from Gary and his identification of what we need to be able to do. But to take that data, my technical term is munge it, right, to put it together, create the affinities, et cetera, spread that on the data side across all the different products and services and make sure that we're consistent. But -- and maybe tying back to what I talked before about a little bit of radioactivity, how that data is stored, where it's stored, how can it move, who can move it, all of this level of complexity is really locally relevant, right? It's locally relevant for us to maintain the trust that we have with our customers that we're doing things in a legal way, that we're providing the value to our customers in that way. And that has been sort of the hallmark of the transition from a technology development perspective. So there's no international versus North America. There's products. And then we work on the features or we work on the capabilities locally to make sure that we can go after them more aggressively. A great example would be Hoovers where we did the same -- we did this process with it, and we launched in 22 languages around the world relatively quickly after we got through that process, so -- which has helped really grow that product suite out.

No, absolutely. And one more thing before we flip it over to Gary. On the regulatory side, a lot of different and kind of evolving changes, whether it's GDPR, CCPA, et cetera, how do you think that differentiates Dun & Bradstreet versus a smaller or a more spot player out there?

Well, I think our global scale and reach, I mean, doing business in over 200 countries around the world, I think that when you look at the complexity that we have to work with on a daily basis, right, in terms of ingesting these data sources, making sure that we understand the challenges and understand the requirements that we have, gives us a pretty interesting and I think probably unique view in the world on having to deal with those kinds of challenges. The size of the data, the amount of data, 100 billion transactions a day going across all of these different markets and making sure that we're doing it in a good and legal and regulatory-compliant way is something that we do as sort of our base business. This is what we do every day. And I think a lot of our customers and smaller firms would probably struggle with that level of interaction. And it's complex. This is not an easy computer science exercise. This is getting up into -- as a tech guy, I talk about the OSI model, right, [ they're all and ] dirty stuff. But there's levels 8 and 9, which is sort of politics and religion, which is humans coming in and messing up perfect systems, right? And so I think that's -- and it's an interesting set of challenges that we have to be able to both develop for and then implement it from a systems perspective.

I would add to that just a little bit more. So it's scale, but it's also the -- if you think about the D-U-N-S and the persistent key and the consistency that it provides and how it's helping customers trace data, right, starting from -- historically, right, from the point that they onboarded or from the point that, that particular business got created or from the point that, that contact information was formed about the officer of that company. And then all the different particular data attributes that get added over the course of time, I mean, you could trace all of that, and you know exactly where that data is coming from. And when it landed in your particular cloud, right, local cloud or global cloud or whatever. And that allows the client to -- our customers to also be able to maneuver through the variety of different regulatory changes that are very rapidly taking over the world.

Yes. And maybe to wrap up, Gary, from that perspective, so certainly, our ability to handle regulation and compliance, not just domestically, but throughout the world, is a key differentiator. In this world, data is everywhere, right, and it's flying all over the place. How do you think about our ability to stay one step ahead of the competition?

So if we think about it kind of, I would say, very pragmatically and practically, right? One is, we listen to our customers, right? We stay in front of them, and we try to understand how their processes evolve, how their risk decisioning evolves, how their business or product and marketing and sales organizations evolve. And we try to kind of come forward or come up with ideas and whether it's a data asset or whether it's an analytic that we think will help fit their need, right? The other is -- we are -- as I mentioned before, we sort of are always on the lookout and trying to understand what are the shifts in the market and the changes that we think our clients have to be aware of. And like there's tons and tons of alternative data, but it's really not very useful until you actually bring it in and understand what you can do with it. And why that particular alternative data, whether it's foot traffic or geospatial or weather or real estate or -- I mean, I can go on and on and on. I mean there's -- you guys are all involved in a variety of different alternative data assets that you see out there and why they're important. But it's really about kind of taking that information and bringing it together with the D-U-N-S and then building an analytic around that you see that's so powerful, it's shaking ground the -- and then moving -- and then bringing forward to the client and telling them this is why it's important. This is why you should take it in. And then the third thing is, I would say, is improving their lives through automation, right? So there's a lot of -- obviously, there's a lot of technologies out there, as Mike mentioned, and capabilities. And everybody is talking about AI. And as Anthony mentioned, you have the Uber drivers talking about AI as well and ChatGPT, et cetera, et cetera. And so really it's about not just talking about it, but really taking that capability, right? And we've used a lot of that capability as well inside our own shop and externalizing it for our customers and then helping them improve their processes and automate their decision-making.

Makes sense. Well, guys, look, I mean, it's clear the amount of progress we've made, whether it's on the technology side or the data side. And clearly, those 2 are inexplicably linked. And so really appreciate you guys taking the time to go through the chat. And again, they'll both be available during the demos and after. But thanks so much, and yes, very impressive stuff.

Thank you.

Thank you, Bryan.

All right. So we're going to move into the final section, the financial overview. Since I know none of you have flipped to this section with the prepared remarks after this point, all will be kind of net new information for you. But listen, we heard Anthony, we heard Ginny, we heard Neeraj, we heard Mike and Gary talk about the inputs, right, to the operational and transformational progress that we've been making at Dun & Bradstreet. Now we're talking about the outputs, right? And so when we think about the single data cloud and our expanding solution set, what that gives us is the ability to drive 60% plus contribution margins. When we think about now the global blue chip client base that we have, when we got in here, you were talking like 80-20, 90-10 in terms of the balance between North America and international. Now that's 70-30. And so we have the ability to take really the opportunities throughout the world, not just in some of these limited markets. Subscription-based revenues with strong renewal rates, 96% gross retention, 95%-plus recuring revenues. Now 50% of our revenue is under multiyear contracts with pricing power. All of that talks about the sustainability, durability and the base that we're building to accelerate to the next level, which is what we'll talk about here briefly. And then again, when we're talking about mission-critical data deeply, I think Ginny mentioned top 200 customers with us over 19 years, right? Once we're in the technology that Mike is bringing to bear, the data analytics that Gary is bringing to bear, it just makes us stickier and stickier and more embedded. And again, that's what allows us to have these fantastic rates. Scalable cost structure, again, the ability to build it once and then bring it to market, whether it's in North America, whether it's in international, all of that creates the model that we're really looking for as we continue to grow and expand the business. So what have we done so far? We took a business that was, in essence, flat with low 40s margins back in 2020, and we began a path of organic acceleration and continued strong organic margin expansion. And so where we were at 0% in 2020, we did 3.2% in '21. We just announced doing 3.5%, 4.4% adjusted for the GSA in 2022. And then if you look at the midpoint of the guidance in 2023, it's about 3.8%, with about 4.1% adding back the GSA from that perspective. So again, steady, continued progress and acceleration on our key metrics. On the margin side, we acquired a couple of businesses, whether it was Bisnode or Eyeota and NetWise, so we're a little bit diluted from a margin perspective. But you can see already that's starting to bounce back into 2022 -- into 2023 expectations. The great thing is it hasn't been, hey, the International segment is doing this or the North America segment is doing that. They both have been progressing from that perspective. Started at different points, but progressed in different ways. If you look at North America, again, Ginny talked to being flat. That was generous. It was slightly down even in 2020. It started to grow about 2% in '21 and 2.7% in 2022. And again, in that 2022 number, that's where the GSA contract resided completely from that perspective. So really good progress, really good momentum from that side. And again, you're talking mid- to high 40s margins in the North America segment. So how did we get there, right? This is the first place. When we talked about the improvements we made in technology, when we talked about the improvements we made in data analytics, when we talked about our platform improvements, that all took that retention rate from 94% to 96%. So Anthony talks about how do you grow faster, close the backdoor, right? And so you're getting 2 points just from that perspective in improving our already great retention rates. Then we started to make some changes to the GTM side. So we changed compensation practices. We changed structures from that perspective. And we saw a better ability to cross-sell and upsell our existing solutions. And then with the multiyear contracts and starting to get that, we call it the kind of the moral high ground from that perspective. We started to implement pricing increases. And so those were the key steps that allowed us to take what was a flat North American segment into something that is now growing and accelerating from that perspective. On the international side, a little bit of a different story, right? A little bit of different mechanics that allowed it to accelerate. It started back at like 2% in 2020. In 2021, it accelerated up to high single digits, almost 9%. And then in 2022, about 5%. Part of that appeared deceleration, just because of we added Bisnode in, which we bought at 7x post-synergies. It was a minus 2% grower. Now it's growing low single digits and has the ability to continue to accelerate off of the transformation that we really completed in 2022. So again, we reorganized the business from something that was like a data collection market to now really driving solutions through there. The localization of new products, right? The benefit we had in international versus what we had in North America was we could take the solutions that we had in hand, add localized data, add localized language elements and bring those to market. When we bring things new to market, our clients and prospects take them in and now as part of the acceleration we saw very quickly on the international side. New logo additions, Neeraj has talked about it. Some of the bigger players, whether it's Barclays, Siemens, Alibaba, Volkswagen, right, we're just starting to kind of get the wheel turning on some of the larger mega customers around Asia and in Europe. And finally, the product migrations. Again, Anthony talks about doing the u***** stuff, the right stuff that sets you up for long-term sustainable growth. Getting your customers off of legacy applications allows you to do multiple things. One, it allows us to take price going forward. Two, it allows you to have a different level of conversation when you're trying to bring new innovations and you're trying to upsell and cross-sell. And so again, that's foundational work that was done throughout Europe, that's done throughout the rest of the world that's really allowing us a platform to continue to grow this business. So where are we at and where are we going, right? 2023 guidance, 3% to 4.5%, 3.8%, so roughly 4% base. And that's what we talked about. Gross retention rates, 96%. We've taken pricing that started at something that was less than 0.5%. The last year, that was closer to 2%. Cross-sell and upsell has been one of the primary components that we've been able to drive this base level of growth. New logos, and it's interesting, we'll touch on this in a little bit. But more so, I'd say on the North America side than -- or excuse me, on the international side than the North America side. And then new solution development. This was something that CapEx, when we got here, was $40 million, $50 million. And most of it was against new replatforming of the existing solution. We're now talking about bringing new innovations and new solutions to bear. And that's going to be a continuation and expansion of the overall growth algorithm. So how do we build upon that 4% and get that next couple of percent from 5% to 7%? It's really funny, one of the pieces that we're seeing here, and I think Peter Horowitz, our Chief Strategy Officer, was all over. He goes, "Look, if you add up each of the components that actually puts you at a higher end of the range. And that's right, but it's not a mechanic, right? You're going to have a little bit in more new logos in 1 year, you may have a little bit new innovation in a single year where new product takes hold, but it all starts with that base and then incrementally grows with each of these categories." so on the pricing side, we started with multiyear contracts. We started with really the inelastic products that we had in the portfolio at the time. So think about the finance solutions, the risk solutions that were deeply embedded, some of the MDM. Well, now when we're strengthening the rest of the portfolio, we're cross-selling and integrating more of that. It allows us to take price in an even more constructive manner. On the international side, a lot of that work on the migration, a lot of the work of bringing new solution into there allows us to start taking price more and more from that perspective. So we look at the incremental growth opportunity on top of where we are today of another point or 2 from a pricing perspective. On the new logo side, again, a little bit of a differentiation between North America and International. North America, we talked about, we have the biggest of the bigs, the blue-chip clients, the Fortune 500. Where do we not have it? There are 10 million small businesses in the United States that we're not doing business with today. We have about 100,000 customers in that SMB range. And so as we bring a digital GTM, as we bring product packaging, pricing delivery mechanisms that are fit for purpose, there's a huge opportunity for us to break into that segment and add new logos from the North American perspective. On the international side, well it was a little bit tilted more towards small- and medium-sized businesses. We talked about some of the bigger customers there. But you're talking about maybe like 20%, 30% penetration. So there's a large amount of customers, whether it's in Asia or Europe for us to continue to expand to on the new logo side. On the innovative new solutions. I mean we were looking forward to this day because we want to continue to talk about the new solutions we're bringing to bear, how we're looking at secular trends, how we're listening to our customers through in deep advisory boards, and how we're driving things further, whether it's business-to-business fraud, whether it's digital marketing, whether it's supply chain risk management. These are all things that are driving us forward from an innovative solutions perspective that can drive a point or 2 of growth in any given year. And then on the cross-sell upsell perspective, most of the wholesale changes we made to the GTM side have taken place. And that's where you've seen our ability to sell more what's on the wagon today. But as we think about incrementally going forward, there's still some tweaks from the perspective of -- we talked about going from a generalist model tomorrow of a specialist or specific model. When we started out and we didn't have a strong enough product set, for instance, on the sales and marketing side, we said, "Look, if you're in the account on the finance of risk, you have the opportunity to upsell, great. But now as we are bringing more sophisticated and more strengthened products, we're now shifting that over to have a sales force that's more dedicated and focused from that perspective." So again, when you're blending the two, and you think about North America growing mid-single digit, international growing mid- to high single digit. There's a powerful mechanism to take this from what is a roughly 4% grower today to something more in the 5% to 7% range in the midterm. Why is that so important? Those last couple percentage points of growth. It really allows us to continue to drive those strong contribution margins, which manifest themselves in 50 to 100 basis points of margin expansion. When we think about that flowing into EPS. And look, we've been through some pretty interesting years, right? Interest rates has kind of taken off, and you've had FX, you're there. But starting in the high singles, but really into the low double digits and double digits from that perspective in adjusted earnings compounding. That's what we're looking at from that perspective. CapEx, we came into a business that was pretty underinvested in, had some tech debt, and you saw us really hit a peak in 2022 as a percentage of revenue. And so we're looking for that to come down to 6% to 7%. And very focused on innovation versus just transformation. Net debt leverage, Anthony talked about it. We're going to turn down half a turn to a turn into that 3 to 3.5x. But this is a business that can clearly handle that. We have long-term contracts. We have very sticky products. But we're thinking about the ultimate financial flexibility of the company and having the ability to do what we need to do over the next 3, 4, 5 years, to really drive the business forward from a capital allocation perspective. And then 80-plus percent of adjusted net income, again, as we move further out and we get rid of some of these things like the pension income we've gotten rid of and lap some of these commissions items, we're really going to look to continue to drive that conversion from that perspective because, again, the next phase is capital allocation. And as we think about generating that free cash flow and we start to drive it, it's going to be continue to invest in a disciplined way to drive organic growth in the business. Repayment of debt and deleverage is clearly a top priority for us and something that's on our minds. And then it's about pursuing targeted acquisitions where it makes sense, continuing on with our dividend and then share repurchase. And so look, when we look at these, it's always like, well, is that from top to bottom and it's like, listen, if we're a business that's growing 5% to 7%, 40% plus margins, strong free cash flow conversion. And frankly, the stocks at where it's at today, clearly, that makes the last bullet quite appetizing from that perspective. And so we want to continue, though, to focus on what we're controlling and what we're doing, which is improving and accelerating in this business, continuing to strengthen an already strong balance sheet and then really driving capital allocation philosophy to drive shareholder value because, again, that's what this business is all about. And I think Anthony talked about it when you talked about the team, we're all very deeply embedded in the shareholder space, and we're all owners, right? And so from that perspective, this is a priority from our side and something that we look to drive forward over -- over the medium term. So with that, it concludes really our prepared remarks for the day. And so we're going to jump into a Q&A session. Anthony, Ginny and Neeraj, if you guys don't mind, join me on stage, we'd love to open up from that perspective.

So the [ Solebury ] team is going to roll through with the microphones amped up, and then we'll go from there. Andrew, please?

Andrew Steinerman, JPMorgan. You can imagine I'm going to ask you about the 5% to 7% in medium term. [indiscernible]Is that 5.0 or better or are we going to get like 4% or 5%. So when will we get into that range and over what period of time should we hold an [ asset accountable for in this ] medium-term framework?

Yes. Sure, Andrew. I appreciate it very much. And I think where we wanted to take the starting point was obviously off of 2023. And so when we gave the guide this year, we clearly thought about the progress we've made, transformation efforts, all of the things that the team talked about today. But also heading into what we think is going to be a pretty tough macro backdrop in the year. And so as we get out of that, that's really where we start to think about the medium-term time frame from that perspective. To your point, decimal points are very -- matters from that perspective. And so think about it as 5.0 plus from that side of the equation.

Organic?

Organic constant currency, that's right. Yes, sir.

Just to follow up on the medium term a little bit. The math would imply you can kind of get there just on the improvement in retention alone from kind of where you've been. So any other puts and takes as we think about that? Is it just some conservatism given where you've been or any offsets around that?

Yes. Maybe I'll start off and then Anthony can hit from that side. You mean on the acceleration, Kevin, from -- kind of 4-ish to 5% to 7%. Yes. I mean it's that continued progression. So if you think about the retention side, continuing at the pricing from that perspective, as a new innovative solutions come in to hold from that side, it's building blocks, right? There's no one component that's all the same, I am going to kind of jump off the page and we're putting all our eggs in a single basket. Each of these strategies that we talk about, the reason that we wanted Mike and Gary up here is because you're building in a foundation for sustainable recurring growth, right? This isn't any one year that's going to be flexed up or flexed down massively based off of macro conditions, where they're going to be around the fringes, right? There's a little bit of a tailwind, a little bit of headwind; it's really that consistent kind of chipping away that leads us to that sustainable mid-single-digit growth.

Yes. I'd say everything, Kevin, that we've been talking about has been building the layers in the foundation, so like the focus on technology and data, our data cloud. The example of migrations, they cause a lot of work and no revenue today. but they will drive revenue tomorrow. So I hope what you're seeing in all the decisions we're making is that we're making long-term decisions that build upon previous decisions and actions that we've taken. And so that's why -- and also our word matters to us. And we want to do what we say. We take it very seriously. I think back to the IPO saying it would start off in the 0% to 3% range than the next phase will be 3% to 6%. And even looking at our guidance last year, right, we came in under the midpoint, right, where we guided to last year. Many companies didn't come in the range at all, they stopped giving guidance. We fought real hard last year to stay in the range. So we're just being very deliberate and thoughtful about how we guide as to what the future looks like. Heather's got a question.