ExlService Holdings, Inc. (EXLS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Thank you all for joining us this morning to EXL's 2022 Analyst and Investor Day. I'm Steve Barlow, Vice President of Investor Relations. Behind me or over here, he will be -- while I tell you some little housekeeping rules. First of all, there will be -- there's a webcast. So there will be people potentially asking questions on the webcast. For those on the webcast, your questions will come to me only. You will not be identified, so you can be very anonymous, but I will be sure to answer your questions. For those here in the audience, please remember to turn off your cell phones. And if you have any pings going on your e-mails that they come in, please make sure those are pretty silent and do that. Today's agenda is as follows. Rohit Kapoor will start off first, talking about our data-led approach. Vivek Jetley, who runs our Analytics business, will talk next. Then Anita will talk about digital operations and solutions. Ankor Rai will talk about data-led digital. Nalin will talk about our talent advantage that we have. And lastly, Maurizio will give us some financial information and some guidance from there. After everyone's finished speaking, we'll do Q&A. But first, we're going to roll a little video for you. Thanks for coming. [Presentation]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to EXL's Analyst and Investor Day. It's really great to be here together in person because the last time we met was 2 years ago, and that was in a virtual format. It's great to be here all together. And I think the sun is coming out, so it's brightening up today. And hopefully, that will brighten up everybody's outlook. We're going to talk to you today about what we think about the market, about how EXL is positioned in the market and how we are trying to play the game. And we're also going to share with you what our views are on our future outlook of our business. And hopefully, that will give you a good sense of where EXL is and where we are going. So 2 years ago when we met, we had shared with you that we had a thesis, and the thesis was that we believe that every single business is going to become a data-led business. Well, that thesis seems to have played out in spades. Today, when you look back, every single business is leveraging data, trying to create value out of data. And one of the best ways of creating sustainable competitive advantage is by leveraging data. We also shared with you that the pandemic has actually accelerated digital transformation, and we saw that coming at that point of time. We saw companies move forward in terms of their investments and move ahead in terms of leveraging digital, leveraging data, leveraging analytics, automation. And again, that seems to have played out really, really well. The big difference is we now believe that this is not a onetime or a temporary phenomenon, but this is a much more of a permanent and a go-forward phenomenon. And therefore, companies and clients are going to continue to leverage data, digital transformation and technology. What this does is it creates a very, very big landscape for us to play in. No matter which analyst report you'll take a look at or which industry sizing you take a look at, it's a very, very, very large market. So for us to be playing in this space is a huge opportunity. There seem to be 2 primary vectors that will drive this huge economic shift. The first is all about the customer experience. How can that customer experience be enhanced? How can that be a much more seamless experience? And what the expectation is of that customer, how can that be overachieved? Lots of companies are spending a lot of time and effort to make sure that the customer journey for their customers is the best ever. The other part of this is how can you streamline operations and make that a lot more effective, make that a lot more efficient and make that a lot more straight through. Now this is being done not only to support the customer experience but in every aspect of a company's business and operation. So whether that be their supply chain, whether that be their finance and accounting, whether that be their customer operations, whether that be on product development, every single aspect of an organization's operations are being streamlined. And both these vectors are being fueled by a connectivity on data. And data is the linchpin that drives the creation of value across both of these vectors. Now that's the good part. The challenging stuff is it's not easy to leverage data. It's not easy to make this change because of a number of different reasons. Number one, most of the technology platforms and the technology architecture that exists in client organizations is outdated. It's legacy. Data sits in silos and doesn't talk to each other. Some of the data is on-premise, not all of that is on the cloud. And there's a huge amount of effort that needs to be put in to be able to make this in a very, very streamlined way. Organizations have a lot of data about their customers, about their market, about their business, but that data exists in a format that is not usable. There's a lot of unstructured data. There's a lot of data sitting in pieces. The data, there are some elements that are missing, huge challenges. There's a regulatory and a privacy issue. There is a permissible use of data, and you can only use data where the customer allows you to do it or the regulation permits you to use it. That doesn't exist. So frankly, client organizations are really, really challenged in terms of how do they move forward and really make sense of data and drive their business forward. And that is exactly what is EXL's positioning. Our positioning is we help our clients make sense of data and drive their business forward. We become a strategic and an indispensable partner to our clients and help them become data-led businesses. That's what we stand for. We do it in 3 fundamental ways. We allow them to make much better business decisions across the enterprise in realtime, in a very effective way. We allow them to be able to deliver a superior customer experience. And that experience is making offers which are relevant, which are timely and which are actionable. And by doing both of these things, by enabling better business decisions and enabling a better customer experience, we help our clients gain competitive advantage in the marketplace on a sustained basis and allow them to grow their revenues and do so profitably. And that's our mission, and that's our goal. Now the way in which we go about doing this is by leveraging what we call as EXL's data-led approach, and this is what our business is. If you boil it down, fundamentally, we do 3 things for our clients. Each 1 of these 3 things is underpinned by a deep understanding of data. So that's the foundational layer. And in order to understand data, you need 2 things. One, you need to have the functional and the technical competence to understand data. We are investing heavily in terms of getting mastery on that data. The second, you need to have deep domain expertise to apply the insight from the data and create real value in practical use cases and enable this for your clients. We, again, are investing heavily in terms of that domain expertise, and it's really the intersection of the technical competence and the domain expertise that allows us to differentiate ourselves. The first service line that we have is data analytics. And we are a leader in data analytics. It represents 46% of our revenues today. It's something that we have built painstakingly over the last several years, and we are able to offer an end-to-end capability on data analytics that enables clients to make better business decisions. The second part is we help our clients on digital transformation. We help them apply technology. We help them apply analytics, AI, machine learning, RPA, changing their processes and help them get to a much better outcome of their business. We can do this work for our clients on a standalone basis, where we are just helping them with the digital transformation or we can do this in an integrated way, where we can take over their operations and their business and make the change to their operations and deliver the business outcome to them. So that's the second offering for us, and it's really about embedding intelligence into the workflow. And the third service for us is all about digital operations. And this is intelligent operations and smart operations embedded and infused with a lot of data analytics, automation and intelligence. And we can run this for our clients with our talent that we have and be able to deliver a really, really good experience for our clients. The key thing that has changed is it's become absolutely critical to do so with speed. One of the things which our clients struggle with is that they can make the change, but either it costs too much or it takes too much of time. We actually help them solve both the problems because we can do this at speed and at scale. We also have a view on what does it take for an organization to become a data-led enterprise. We think there are 4 fundamental pillars that you need to work on to enable a client to become a data-led enterprise. The first is all about data access. This is about how do you break down the data silos, how do you bring in data from different technology platforms and bring it together. This is about combining internal data and external data to create much greater value. This is about converting unstructured data into structured data so that it becomes usable. This is about shifting data to the cloud so that it can be accessed from anywhere. This is about -- all about data access and doing this in realtime. We've made investments and acquisitions to help bolster our capabilities in this area. The second pillar is about delivering insight to our clients and doing that at speed and at scale. Our data analytics business does precisely that, and this is a huge strength for EXL. The insights need to be actionable, and they need to be such that they can be applied into an operating business process. Otherwise, it's useless. And our focus on this allows us to be able to deliver a very high level of value to our clients. The third part of this is even if you have the data that is accessible, you have an insight that is actionable, there's a huge amount of change management effort that needs to be undertaken, both for the end customer to adopt that change as well as the enterprise to embrace that change. We've seen this time in and time out again. In many of our clients, they'll invest in terms of the technology and in terms of the data access. They'll come up with the insight, but nobody uses that insight. And enabling that use and that adoption is a critical element of making sure that, that value gets realized. So we believe that, that's a third foundational pillar for a data-led enterprise. And the final piece is things are not static. Things keep evolving and keep changing. So even after you've implemented each 1 of these 3 pillars, you need to have a process by which you can constantly and in an iterative way keep making enhancements and changes. And as much of that is self-learning and automated, that's going to be very, very helpful. But it has to be a living, breathing and a self-evolving system. And that's what we focus on so that we can make this such that our customers have a very agile system that can respond to change and the speed that I spoke about that becomes effective. So that's the framework that we use. But why do clients choose EXL? Why are we gaining much more traction than our competitors or our peers or others in the marketplace? We think we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace on these 3 dimensions. Number one, we have a very unique proprietary data asset. This data asset, we've curated over the last several years across the entire adult population in the U.S. We have 6,000 wearables, and we update this data set on a daily, weekly and a monthly basis. By combining this data asset with our clients' data asset, we believe we can deliver a lot more significant value than anybody else. The second element is our talent. We have a huge talent advantage. Nalin is going to talk about our talent advantage. But just broadly speaking, we've got 43,000 employees in the organization, all of whom are data-savvy. We've invested a lot in their training and development so that they understand and they can align with everything that we are trying to do for the customer. Within this, we have 7,500 analytics professionals. This is, by far, the largest assembled workforce on data scientists in any organization across the globe. We believe that, that capability that we have built out here is truly unique. And finally, we can deliver services to our clients with a very, very well-diversified geographical footprint across 50 different delivery centers. And the last piece is, we have prebuilt solutions and accelerators. We have created capabilities which can be plug and play. And what this allows us to do is when we get called upon by a client to make a change, we can actually implement that change very, very quickly. We have almost 300 algorithms that are prebuilt. We call that micro analytics. These are components that can be used in terms of building a model that is customized to that particular customer. And it allows us to reduce the time it takes to build these models and make the change. There's nobody else who's got that kind of a library of prebuilt accelerators and these kinds of analytics solutions. So therefore, our ability to do this at high velocity and speed is much, much better. The most exciting part of this whole journey for us has been that the addressable market for us has suddenly exploded. Let me explain why. When you start to focus in on being a data-led organization and you're trying to create value out of data, it actually allows you to do work for clients in your industry vertical, but it also allows you to take that to other industry verticals. Over the past couple of years, we've now expanded out of the insurance and health care and banking industry verticals, which were our 3 primary verticals, where we today have clients in retail. We have clients which are in the sports league. We have clients in other industry verticals because we have this capability around how to leverage and create value out of data. Not only can we go into other industry verticals, we can go deeper within an industry vertical. So let me give you an example. In Insurance, in the past, we primarily used to serve clients in property and casualty and life and annuities. Today, we've expanded into reinsurance. We've expanded into brokers. We've expanded into third-party administrators. We've expanded into MGAs. We've expanded into multiple geographies with our Insurance business. And therefore, it allows us to go a lot deeper, both inside the vertical and across verticals. The second axis is about buying centers. In the past, the predominant work that we did used to be with the Chief Operating Officer. It used to be about how could we help a Chief Operating Officer reduce their cost, improve their service delivery and enable better operations. Today, we work with the CIO. We work with the Chief Data Officer. We work with the Chief Analytics Officer. We work with the Chief Marketing Officer. We work with the Chief Risk Officer. We work across the platform, and we can help clients grow their business, manage their business and reduce risk in their business. So it's really expanded our playing field very, very significantly within a client. And the last axis is about the scope of solutions. What we are seeing is we can now do much, much bigger deals within an enterprise, and it gives us the license to be able to play end-to-end on a process as opposed to just doing a piece of work within the process. So our ability to do end-to-end work and make change which is transformational, that is resulting in larger deal sizes and much bigger client engagements and allowing us to grow faster. Today, we work with a number of clients which are leading clients across each one of these verticals. We are, by far, the market leader in Insurance. We've built up a really, really strong presence in Healthcare and in Banking. And we are adding expertise in a number of other industry verticals that's going to provide us the opportunity to grow for a sustained period of time. The great part about this is that our customer satisfaction scores are the highest. We have 100% referenceability. And our ability to execute and deliver to our clients is what makes us stand out. You've seen this, but I do need to repeat this that our growth rate has accelerated. Because of this data-led approach, our data analytics business over the past 2 years has grown at 28% CAGR for the last 2 years on an organic constant currency basis. And our digital operations business has accelerated to 12% per annum over the last 2 years. We think that there is a terrific amount of momentum that we have built up out here. And what we really like is not only is the growth rate high, but the quality of work that we are doing is much higher up in the value chain. When you combine analytics, digital, operations, automation and put it all together, you suddenly start to talk with the C-level executives. And you start to do end-to-end work, which is highly strategic and very, very important to our clients. So we've moved up significantly in terms of the value chain at where we operate. Let me give you a client example to just illustrate the point. One of our clients is an insurance company that basically had an issue in terms of the compliance to regulations on the work that they were doing in their claims organization. And they found that they were paying a lot of penalties to the regulators because of noncompliance. So they brought EXL in and said, "Why don't you take a look at this and help us solve this problem?" In a matter of 10 weeks, we created a data lake on the cloud, which was pulling together data from disparate systems within the organization, which was enabling that data access in a streamlined manner and was allowing us to take a look at these claims in an automated fashion. In the past, agent would have had to go into multiple systems each time trying to find data and try and find what was going on. By pulling all this together, by taking data from the claims management system, from their policy administration system, from their CRM, from their financial accounting system and bringing it all together, we could actually process and take a look at these claims in realtime of 100% of the claims in a completely automated fashion. And we were able to identify where there was likely to be a compliance leakage that might take place, where there might be noncompliance and therefore, preemptively deal with that issue and eliminate the noncompliance. And we were able to significantly bring down the noncompliance for this particular insurance carrier. But that wasn't it. Now that we had all this data altogether, you could eliminate noncompliance. We could actually predict which customer is going to complain because it's taking too long for that particular claim to be processed. And we could proactively reach out to that customer and inform them as to how that claim is being processed and, therefore, elevate customer experience. We could actually predict where there is fraud in these claims that is likely to take place and therefore, take those claims and put them into a special investigation unit and make sure that, that fraud did not occur before the fraud might have occurred. So frankly, we were able to expand from just noncompliance to multiple other areas on customer experience, on fraud and just getting much better data signals. And our ability to do this in an automated realtime fashion was extremely helpful to the client. You can guess what happened. The client started using us not only in their claims organization, but in their underwriting and in other parts of the organization. It allows us actually now to do this work with multiple clients in insurance. So frankly, we suddenly went from one small area that we were focused on, which is noncompliance, to a number of different areas within the same client, number of different buying centers and a number of different clients. So it suddenly exploded the kind of work that we could do for our clients. And this is what results in our accelerated growth. So to pull it all together, we think EXL is an extremely attractive investment destination. We've got very strong fundamentals in terms of a large and growing addressable market. By the way, this market is very, very resilient from a demand standpoint. This is mission-critical work that we do for our clients. Even if there is a recessionary environment that might -- we might all experience, we believe that our clients need to undertake this work no matter what. So frankly, our ability to help them in this kind of environment becomes even more important and even more strategic. We have a demonstrated and proven execution experience. One of the things which we get recognized for is our ability to execute and deliver. Even though we are much smaller in size and scale compared to some of our competitors that we compete with, we are known for our execution capability. And the talent advantage that we have is enormous. We have deliberately and intentionally invested a huge amount of effort, time and energy in terms of attracting, developing and retaining the best talent in this industry. The outcomes are pretty obvious. So this is what we've been able to show. Our growth rate has gone up. We've improved our margins, and our EPS has also gone up very, very significantly. I'm really, really proud of the management team that we have in place today because I believe we have a team that can scale up this business very significantly and continue to march forward. A number of the executives who you will listen to today have either grown up within EXL and become part of the management team or we've added from the outside and integrated them into this wonderful management team. I think the depth, the experience and the team working that we have is phenomenal and unparalleled. With that, I'll pass on the conversation to Vivek Jetley, who's our Global Head for Data Analytics and talk a little bit about analytics.

Thank you, Rohit. So I have a habit of getting these tough speaker slots, right? I always tend to follow a difficult speaker. So I think today, I've drawn the short straw in terms of following Rohit. First of all, let me just introduce myself. As Rohit said, I'm Vivek Jetley, and it's been my privilege to lead the Analytics business unit at EXL. I've been -- I'm part of that crew that grew up at EXL, as Rohit was talking about. I joined EXL more than 15 years ago when EXL acquired a small company to actually come in and build our Analytics business. And we've certainly come a long way from there. And it's been my privilege to be part of the leadership team for that business since 2010. So let me tell you a little bit about some of the themes that I'm going to talk to you about today. First of all, as Rohit talked about it, Analytics has been a high-growth business for us. And today, we'll tell you a little bit about why that growth's happened and why we believe that, that growth could continue into the future. Why do we think that we'll have a high-growth trajectory? We will talk to you a little bit about our plans for how we are investing in the business and actually significantly expanding the addressable market for Analytics by building out a solution that attacks the end-to-end value chain for our customers, that actually scales across businesses, that scales across buying centers. So we, within the Analytics team, feel very strongly about what our demand looks like and what's the market size that we're going to go after. And finally, we will talk a little bit about how we are building a high-value business. What is the value that we are delivering for our customers? And how does that value translate into greater pricing power for us? How does that translate into value that's captured by EXL? So let me first state the obvious. You've seen this before, but we were a high-growth business to begin with, right? Analytics was something that was in demand even before the pandemic. We were scaling at about 15% on an organic basis. And then the pandemic happened, and the disruption happened at that point in time. Now we met you in November of 2020. And at that point in time, somewhat in a foolhardy way, we came and told you that even though the disruption had happened during the pandemic, we believe that the demand for analytics was going to take a big step up. Because at that point, we told you that what the pandemic had done was accelerated some trends towards analytics adoption. And as the data proves, we were proven right. We actually grew during the pandemic. We ended up growing at a moderate pace in 2020. But coming out of 2020, the business took a big step up in terms of much higher organic growth rate for us. And this obviously excludes the acquisition that we've made during that point in time, which has also performed very well. Over this period of time, Analytics has actually grown 4x, almost 4x since 2016. We've grown to now become almost 46% of EXL's total business. So we've almost doubled our share and quadrupled our overall revenue during that time period. And in a market that is so tightly driven by talent, we've actually grown our talent very nicely as well. Our talent -- our total resource team has grown by about 3.4x during that time period. Now what you see over here is also the fact that we -- while we've been growing our market, while we have been adding to our capabilities and growing our talent, there's another element we've delivered on. We've actually been able to take the revenue per employee up during that time period. So we are moving up the value chain in terms of the value that we deliver, and we are scaling up at a much faster pace than the market in terms of our overall growth rate. So what's that driven by? It's really driven by effectively what we are doing for our clients. We today have very strong brand in terms of how our clients perceive us for Analytics use cases. Over the last 2 years, we've actually succeeded in acquiring more than 50 customers. And remember, part of this was during the pandemic. When it was tough to go out and get a brand-new customer, we've acquired more than 50. And we continue to deliver and grow the value of the work that we're delivering for them. Over this time period, we've actually averaged about $90,000 per employee per year in terms of the revenue that we're generating from the team. And here's the big piece. As we've done that, we've got a phenomenal level of engagement with our customers. So I'm going to quote, there's a number of different surveys that we do. There's a number of different analysts that rate our business. But the one thing for me that stands out is something that Gartner does, which is a survey of customers across the industry. So they do something where they interview clients, and they get client feedback on a number of different providers for them. Over the last 3 years, Gartner has rated us based on customer feedback as the customer's choice for analytics service provider, 3 years in a row. We're the only company within that entire set that's actually gotten that, the customer's choice kind of category 3 years in a row. But there are some things that stand out even within that. Our customers this year gave us an average score of about 4.9 on 5 in terms of the quality of work that we deliver or their satisfaction with us. But the one number that really stands out to me is that 100% willingness to recommend. So every single customer of ours that spoke with Gartner basically said that they'd be willing to recommend us to another customer, to one of their colleagues. That's really something that drives the business forward, that drives what we are doing in terms of sales growth. So let me now tell you a little bit about how we've been able to create that growth. What is it that the customers look at when they're working us? So what we've done is try to define what we think of as the Analytics value chain. So this is fundamentally what an Analytics customer looks for when they're trying to say, "Here's a use case that I want to solve for." It starts off with data. It always does. It starts off with saying, help me understand what is the data that I can capture, whether it's structured, whether it's unstructured, whether it's video, accessible, what have you. And then it goes into making that data usable. How do you actually unlock that data? How do you create data that's timely, that's accessible, that's easy to kind of maintain and that's accurate and consistent? And then probably the most important part, how do you take that raw data and convert it into meaningful nonintuitive insight that drive their business forward. Then you take those insights, you've still not done the last mile. The last mile is actually taking those insights, translating that into either a business strategy, into a policy, putting it into the workflow and making sure that you actually generate outcomes from that particular insight. So that value chain for Analytics, which goes from data into insights into outcomes, is something that cuts across different buying centers, different industries, different use cases. Fundamentally, this is what we do. And over the last few years, we at EXL have really invested in building out this end-to-end value chain for ourselves and building out our capability to deliver for our clients. Rohit already talked to you about the proprietary asset that we leverage. That part of the business has grown tremendously over the last couple of years because what we've been able to do is bring our curated third-party data asset into our customers' domains, merge it with their data, help them actually unlock a number of different use cases, be it acquiring new customers, be it driving retention, be it understanding more of their existing customers. So there's a ton of work that we do in terms of just leveraging data and unlocking data signals and data triggers. The second part of the business, data management. This is where we actually made that big investment by bringing on the Clairvoyant team. We've significantly deepened our capability in terms of helping our clients integrate the data, use their data in a better way and actually bring in the firepower with about 1,500 data engineers right now that are deployed across our client base in terms of helping them get more out of their data. And next, on the insights, this is the core of our team. This is the 7,500 data scientists and data analytics professionals that Rohit talked about. What we've been able to do over the years is build out careers for people within domains, within specific industries where they actually become where they create their Analytics journey with us. We've got people that have been working for 15 years, 18 years within the company. And they've grown with us in terms of becoming really, really credentialed and powerful folks in terms of their progress. And finally, the last piece, this is the one where I think we've been focused on very zealously the last couple of years. It's how do you take the insights that are produced by those predictive models by the data scientists and convert it into action. Today, a substantial part of our revenue is actually driven by areas where we take ownership of outcomes, where we deliver value for our customer and our revenues linked to that value. And that's been one of the big themes for us as we kind of move up the value chain. Let me give you a couple of examples of how that -- the Analytics value chain works in action for us. Let me start off with one of our largest customers. This is a leading global bank. This is probably our largest center of excellence team that we run for them. We work with the bank across a whole suite of areas, across products, across geographies. And we actually help them support -- support them with flex teams, onshore, and with dedicated teams as part of our center of excellence that's located offshore. Now this center of excellence has delivered over the last year about $600 million in terms of incremental revenue impact that's signed off by our customers and saying, yes, we know that this is what the teams produced in terms of a business impact, $600 million over the last year and has created about $70-odd million in terms of expense saves. Again, these are business impact numbers that are validated by the customer. So that kind of value when it's delivered, there's a tremendous amount of strength and resilience in that particular team. It's the ability to actually say, "Yes, I'm going to use this team across the board in terms of new initiatives." In fact, what we believe is this is part of the secret of the resilience. In a recessionary economy, what you'll see is that the mix may change between the front-end side versus the expense side. But the team still gets deployed, still gets used for similar use cases. I talked to you a lot about our work in terms of creating accountability for outcomes. And one of the biggest examples for that is the work that we do in Healthcare with our payment integrity solutions. For really -- for one of the largest multistate health plans in the U.S., our teams actually delivered on -- a couple of years ago, we delivered about $900 million in terms of recovered payments for them. This is $900 million that got recovered by the company that they had overpaid on. And it was our work, our algorithms and our team that had done the analysis on almost 50 million claims over the year to actually help them identify that. So that's the kind of value that gets delivered on a monthly basis. And it again creates a tremendous amount of resilience in terms of the team's usage. And finally, Rohit talked about how we are expanding into new industries and new verticals. And a great example of that for me is an expansion that we've done, a new client that we acquired, which is one of the largest automotive companies in the U.S., one of the biggest brands that there is. And to use the car racing analogy. For this client, we went from 0 to 100 resources in less than 6 months' time. They brought us on. They gave us a project. They said, "Show us your capability." And what we were able to do was actually really wow them with what we were able to do really quickly, and we scaled up quite tremendously. So that's the type of work that we do in terms of the value that we deliver, in terms of the stickiness and in terms of the speed and the scale at which our teams can deploy. So as we are looking to the future, what does all of this mean? Where do we take this business? How do we continue to be on a high-growth trajectory? So we're doing a couple of things. First of all, for our existing business. What we're doing here is making sure that we are focused on the value that we are delivering. And we're going to increase the portion of the revenue that's now more linked to outcome-based, more linked to as-a-service model. And for the existing work that we're doing, there's going to be a little bit more in terms of the pricing power, again, linked to the value that's delivered. We are focused on expanding our addressable market through the new verticals, by expanding into new buying centers, by making sure that we are really zealously focused on saying, can we expand the pool of companies? That's a target for us in terms of the Analytics solutions that we can provide. All of that is going to be driven by our brand and our ability to scale our talent. It's what Nalin refers to as our talent advantage. And our talent advantage is going to make sure that we are -- never hit a road block in terms of our ability to scale and keep scaling at the speed that we have in terms of meeting this demand. And finally, there's going to be a bigger shift into making sure that we start leveraging our IP in a more clearer way, more explicit way by actually building out solutions and prepackaged accelerators and platforms that we can start taking to customers and that we can start bringing to them as a prepackaged solution, which is going to, I think, again, really, really drive our ability to serve a broader segment of the market. The end outcome of all of that is going to be to continue to push us along this journey of being a high-growth, high-value business. It's going to continue us -- continue to push us into a high-growth trajectory. And by capturing a higher value of the value chain, we'll have the ability of pushing up the value that we capture for EXL be it for -- from new pricing, be it from a higher pricing rate card, what have you. So just to summarize, I think what -- a little bit of what we see, a little bit of what we are seeing in terms of the demand for the business and the ongoing growth trend really confirms our belief that this is going to be a resilient business through the cycle. We think that with the work that we're doing today, we're going to continue to capture a higher share, a larger share of a really fast expanding market for a market that's not really going to slow down that much even through the cycle. And the reason that, that will happen for us is our focus on scaling up our solutions to becoming an end-to-end service provider across that Analytics value chain. It's going to be our ability to actually start leveraging our IP to bring in more pricing power into EXL. And then that's really what's going to push us into becoming -- or continuing on the journey of being a high-growth, high-value business. So that's, I think, the Analytics story, and I'd love to take questions later on. At this point, I'd like to invite Anita to come talk to you a little bit about our digital operations and solutions business. Anita?

Thanks, Vivek. Good morning, everyone. I am Anita Mahon. I joined EXL in 2020 as chief -- sorry. It didn't -- well, now it sounds loud. So hopefully, you heard when I covered -- thank you. So [ Kinney ], who is here on Emerging and the Healthcare business. Okay. So as Rohit described and you saw from Vivek in the data and analytics side of the business, this data-led approach has really led to accelerated growth in the digital operations and solutions side of the business as well. So we were already a top choice for our clients because of our domain-led expertise. And now that we've added the data-led approach and the data-led DNA to domain-led, we're offering more robust value propositions, which are really weaving us more completely into the fabric of our clients' operations. This is expanding our deal sizes, making us more strategic and stickier. So I'll show you how this is working out in a practical way with some client examples in just a minute and then talk about our market positioning. So just as you saw, this data-led approach has really enabled us to step up our growth rate, actually to double our growth rate to the 12% CAGR that we've seen in the last 2 years. We've done this by building on the foundation that we had of our client relationships and adding to that foundation with new clients as well. We've added more than 80 new digital operations and solutions clients. In the last 2 years, we are seeing 22% growth in the top 25 client relationships. And we've seen that expansion of the foundation with nearly an increase in nearly half of the number of $5 million-plus clients that we're working with. So these are typically 4- to 5-year arrangements. So we think they've got the staying power to withstand any potential short-term recessionary dips that we may be facing. And while we are expanding more and more into the growth side of our clients' business and our customer experience operations, our long-proven value proposition of streamlined processes, efficiency and operational cost savings will continue to be relevant in any economic environment. So just getting a little bit behind where this growth is coming from. So there has been a fundamental shift in our market. The nature of demand has changed. Clients are looking to move faster, get more immediate value from digital innovation and AI than what they can get from IT service providers. And they're looking at their challenges and opportunities from an end-to-end perspective. Our domain expertise has been built up over many years of work in our focused industries and also in our operational domains like finance and accounting, sales and marketing, compliance. And the talent advantage comes from the way that we've developed and scaled globally. Our people build their insurance careers with us. They built health care careers with us, coming through our Insurance Academy, our Healthcare Academy. We prepare nurses for US RN certifications, our health care coding. You'll hear more about the talent advantage from Nalin in just a few minutes. We've also expanded our geography of delivery locations, which lets us more easily reach and recruit strong talent. And it also meets our clients' needs for business continuity and resilience. And having come through the experience of the pandemic, more and more clients are choosing to work with us across multiple delivery locations. And as part of the data-led approach, we've made significant investments in digital assets, which Ankor is going to explain in great detail just after me. But for now, just think of these digital solutions as making AI actionable within the industry and domain context in which we work so that we can help clients modernize their operations. This combination of strength, we think, really distinguishes us from the other players in the market. We start from deep inside our clients' operation. We bring on board their strategic objectives, bring in the digital and AI that's needed to achieve those along with the people that can make the AI really work and then continuously improve from there. Okay. Let me try to bring this a little bit to life with a few client stories. So these 2 are about 2 longstanding clients that we work with. The first is a group [indiscernible] to expand into other buying centers and to the point where we now support the execution of complex operations across their end-to-end value chain. So that includes doing the work on the acquisition of their new employer group clients, onboarding the clients, enrollment, policy servicing, billing claims. Over the last 5 years, this has amounted to an 8x expansion and the scope and the value of what we manage for them. And then since we were already embedded in their business, this client turned to us when they needed help with managing their claims intake volume. This is a manually intensive process, so we committed to both cost savings and an improved customer experience. And so with our solution in place, we reduced what was a 70-minute processing time by 40%. And then as a true measure of the improved customer experience when given the choice, 100% of repeat users choose to go down the path of our digital solution. And now the client has awarded additional work to us, additional scope so that we can create an enterprise wide transformation capability with this digital solution across all of their other lines of business. And then as a second example, we have even a longer relationship with this large national health care company, where we were known for our domain expertise in clinical operations and analytics, working across a whole [indiscernible] of business stakeholders. Because of our credibility and the strength and breadth of the relationship, we've been able to further expand scope and impact with the data-led approach. So in one area, we've created and executed the intelligence in their centralized campaign program to influence member behavior, which is credited with generating $100 million in savings for them. That's in medical cost savings. In another area, they were coping with a really labor-intensive audit process. So we created a digital solution to streamline the quality review and the audit, removing 100% of the manual work that they had outsourced with another vendor. And the data-led approach is also helping us to acquire new clients. So as the next story, let me just talk about a deal -- a large deal that we won last year with a leading U.S. retirement and life insurance company to help them develop a whole new model that is powering the future growth for this company. They offer modern and innovative products and were undergoing a transformation to be more experience-driven. They really needed help with how they were reaching a whole new generation of consumers. The expectations of their millennial customers are quite different than their more legacy customer base. So we worked with them to design and implement their next-gen operating model. So we help them model customer behaviors, create new customer insights and execute end-to-end data-led operations from presales all the way to administration. As a result, they've been able to reduce their new product launch timelines by 50% from 18 down to 9 months. This is a true example of giving them speed to value, and the new model is giving them 100% transparency into the end-to-end operation. So we won this new client as a result of our combination of deep industry insurance expertise along with the data-led offerings in digital and our ability to bring speed and accelerate their time to market. And then the last example I'll talk about is about how the data-led approach helped us to win a large deal with a new client in what is a new and growing vertical for us in retail. So this client had previously outsourced, completely outsourced its customer service operation to another provider. And they were looking for a complete digital transformation. They needed to reduce the demands on their own customer service staff and wanted to use digital engagement tools to handle less complex interactions. And of course, being a retailer, this all had to come without having any impact on NPS in the existing customer base. So they were looking for someone that could improve client experience, and we showed them a whole range of digital capabilities that we have implemented with another client from another industry altogether and in things like mapping customer journeys in real-time, AI assistance to the agents. And this so impressed them, they decided to give the entire customer service operations to us as well as the digital transformation. And so through this, they're going to reduce costs by 30%, and they've actually improved NPS in process. Okay. So the market analysts are also recognizing the value of our integrated approach. You've seen we received a vast array of industry market analyst recognitions. You saw Gartner with Vivek, Everest, ISG, HFS, class in health care. But increasingly, analysts are looking at operation services with new criteria around digital solutions and intelligent operations. And they're developing new studies that recognize the importance of the integration of digital into operations. And we're receiving high rankings in these reports across industries because of our unique approach and our unique combination of strengths. So in this one particular new outlook, we're recognized by Everest as the leader in this space. And you can just imagine how for an organization of our size, just how gratifying it is to be shown ahead and above of companies like Accenture. In fact, Everest said that EXL is playing a pivotal role in modernizing the insurance industry. And we are -- especially all of our leaders in the insurance business, we are really excited to be a part of this transformation. So just in summary, as the operations market continues to evolve into this space where operations and digital are inextricably linked, we believe we're extremely well positioned as a leader in the fastest-growing part of the operations market. We've got significant runway yet to expand with our existing clients. And as I've shown you, we've proven our domain expertise and end-to-end solutions are letting us bring on new clients with larger deal sizes and continuing to penetrate further in new verticals and geographies. And with the doubling of the revenue growth rate, we've got the momentum that's going to continue to propel us forward. We think the business model is resilient, and that digital operations are only going to continue to increase in importance for our clients. So the data-led approach, the deep domain knowledge, industry leading talent gives us really great confidence for the future of this side of the business. So now Ankor is going to go deeper into our digital strategy and our build-out and just why that is so powerful for our clients and for us.

Thanks, Anita.

Sure.

I'm Ankor Rai. I'm the Chief Digital Officer at EXL. Like Vivek, I joined EXL about 15 years back through the Inductis acquisition. Vivek and I grew the Analytics business together before I took on this role. I'm going to cover 3 areas around data-led digital today. First, how we combine data with AI analytics design and human in the loop systems to deliver the outcomes of a data-led enterprise. Second, how this unlocks new growth pathways and value pools for both our data analytics and our digital operations and solutions segments. And third, the result in expansion in addressable wallet and value capture for both EXL as well as our clients. Rohit alluded to this earlier, and I wanted to sort of start with the market problem. When we look at our clients, they have 2 priorities. Either they want to remove friction from their customer experience, which typically was called a front-office problem or they want to remove friction from their operations, which is reduced cost, which was typically a back-office problem. To us, these are 2 sides of the same coin. Let me talk about this with a very quick example. One of our clients, a financial services company, built a really great web and mobile experience to allow instantaneous adjudication of loans. However, this loan still took 30 days to process for 3 big reasons: one, even though the application process was really slick, there was missing data, and no one figured it out while the application was being taken, and it required to and fro; second, even after the application data was clean, there was a legacy data infrastructure, it required a manual aggregation to bring this data together; and third, the rules to adjudicate a loan still required significant human intervention because the algorithms were not developed. As a result, even though the experience was great, the outcome could not be delivered. And to us, the insight over here and how we solved this problem is without clean data flow from the back office to the front office and back, we are never going to be able to deliver the outcomes that are desired by our clients. Historically, the back office is typically measured in cost reduction or efficiency. And the front office is about revenue and customer experience improvement. The result is it's hard to deliver end-to-end outcomes. Data-led digital solves this problem because speed is the unifying currency. If a client's data-led operations can get quotes out to a customer quickly, it increases win rates and revenue in the front office. If the data-led back office can adjudicate a claim faster, it improves retention and customer experience and revenue in the front office. So to us, speed is really the new currency and the new metric of data-led digital. I'm going to make this real with an example. And Rohit talked about sort of the 4 pillars of our approach, and I'll show how this is actioned. This is one of our Fortune 500 insurance clients. They made a commitment to their customers to improve their service levels, which is high-quality data, realtime experiences. They made a commitment to The Street to take $0.5 billion of cost out. And for sustainable competitive advantage, they wanted to unlock data from silos, unstructured documents so that they could personalize customer experiences and make better decisions. There were 4 key attributes of data-led digital approach which was used here. And data-led digital is really about the differentiated use of data. First, legacy technology systems had data locked up and a tech transformation would take too long. We built a connective data layer on the cloud to extract this data so that it could power downstream workflows. Second, we used realtime insights to decide which part of the customer volumes would we remediate versus which would continue. So customer volumes have varying complexity. They come across varying channels. Rather than building one platform to address 100% of the volume, we used realtime insights to build multiple custom AI workflows that could accelerate return on investment for our client. Third, we built AI models upstream. So customers basically send a lot of documents in insurance. We converted that to clean data. However, we also went downstream and built CX screens so that the human in the loop could actually interact with the AI. Without building the AI -- without building this downstream CX screen end adoption would be impossible because an AI model is not enough. And lastly, the fourth parameter, no AI model works like a product. There's an iterative evolution process that needs to be activated. And the only way to do that is by creating a human in the loop along with the AI. And that's how you can start at 70%, create a lot of value and move up that curve. I want to spend a moment talking about the momentum of our data-led digital. And you've heard Vivek talk about it. You've heard Anita talk about it. I wanted to go a layer lower. So I'll discuss 3 areas. First, clients. In the last 24 months, 80-plus clients are experiencing data-led digital solutions. We've unlocked new buying centers, Rohit already talked about that. Our deal sizes are expanding. Second, industry analysts are recognizing the differentiated approach and impact that can be created for clients using data-led digital. But the third one is very interesting to us. We've seen exponential growth in the volume passing through our AI solutions. This is important for 2 reasons. One, AI only actually creates impact and improves if it carries live workloads. By virtue of combining AI with redesigned workflows and human in the loop systems, we're creating a sustainable competitive advantage for EXL because our AI solutions continue to improve. But the second, this activates a virtuous cycle where every next client gets a better experience and more value. And I want to dig a little deeper into that by talking about 3 reasons why we win. The first reason, battle-tested AI analytics deployment. We've deployed [ 50-plus ] analytics solutions across our clients. These are not AI models. These are models connected to data, connected to actual redesign of the way work gets done within a client's enterprise to human in the loop business. These are creating impact at clients. This is important for a couple of parameters. One is the obvious one. If we've got 50-plus solutions, we can take it to more clients, 50 more things to sell. But there is a higher impact, which is more nuanced. Across these solutions, there is a common data that runs through it. There are common data flows that run through them. There is a business logic that is common across these. And this allows crossovers that are very unique to us. Vivek talked about it. Anita talked about it. We can start an audit. Because that data is the same, we can cross over into CX. We can start with claims intake because it's upstream of a servicing process, we can get there. But not only that, we can deliver something in our data analytics business. We can deliver CX over there. That has relevance for digital operations and solutions. We can build a consumer collections experience, and that has relevance for B2B collections experience. So this is unlocking a variety of different growth pathways for us. Second, we deliver data-led digital in 3 different consumption models so that we can meet clients wherever they are. The first, Anita alluded to it, digital transformation of operations. Clients can outsource an operation to us, and we take ownership of transforming it. They get access to best-of-breed AI and digital and data technologies. For us, deal sizes are larger, and it's a much sharper differentiation against the competition. For clients who want to create enterprise capabilities, we provide digital consulting and implementation services. For us, this is great because it's the quickest sales cycle, and it creates multiple entry points. Lastly, there are clients who want to solve a niche problem. For them, we deliver solution as a service models, which is we house our solutions on the cloud, the data comes in, we deliver outcomes to them. To us, the value for us, this is a scalable business and expansion in our revenue per FTE. So finally, I want to talk a little about how a combination of these battle-tested AI solutions along with the 3 different consumption models creates completely new value pools for us. First, it allows us to land in an area where the client has the largest problem. I've taken 3 different examples to show you the variety there. So the first client, they had a -- they wanted to transform customer onboarding operations outsourced to us. We took that on and delivered the transformation. The second one had a $150 million opportunity to build AI solutions to automate manual processing of documents. We landed there, and we took that on. For the third, they had a digital collections problem. One problem, we put our solution on the cloud and delivered the outcome to them. The result is very interesting. Because of those crossovers that we're able to create with data, it unlocked completely new growth pathways. In the first example, we were started with a part of what you would call the order to cash process and expanded to all of it. For the second one, we built an AI capability for the client on their cloud and took on the role of the enterprise data-led transformation partner. More volume came onto the AI, and we helped them with automation across the enterprise. The third, because they experienced an AI solution, they wanted to experience other AI solutions for us. So we are deploying our conversational AI solutions as well as some of our NLP solutions for underwriting. So I wanted to close by highlighting 4 areas of investment for us. First, talent. We have a very strong belief that the winner in this space is going to be the one who can develop the talent rather than recruit it. This strategy worked brilliantly for our Analytics business, and that's exactly what we're doing within digital. And Nalin will talk about our talent advantage over there. The second and third are related. We're investing to build more cloud and AI solutions and investing in cloud architecture and engineering because we believe cloud is the medium of delivery of data-led solutions of the future. And finally, data-led digital is a completely new capability. We're investing in digital sales to take that to market that's specialized as well as solutioning to talk to clients and really design solutions that can deliver the outcomes to them. For our clients, what this means is a significantly larger impact. And as you've heard, 70% of some of these projects actually underdeliver. So it's a much larger impact for our clients and more confidence. And second, a speed to return on investment. For EXL, I think Rohit talked about it, Vivek talked about it, Anita talked about it. It's an expansion in our addressable wallet across each and every client, and we're expanding our revenue per FTE. So with that, I want to hand it to Nalin, who's going to talk about our talent advantage.

Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you, Ankor. My name is Nalin, Nalin Miglani. I've been with EXL for 8 years, and I'm part of the wonderful team that Rohit talked about. And in these 8 years, I've been a proud participant and contributor to its outstanding growth, which, I guess, you know by numbers better than maybe even I do. So today, I'm here to talk about the talent advantage that EXL has. Everybody referred to that. And that's no secret because in this hot talent market, that is an advantage either you can have or not have. So I'm going to share with you why we have that advantage. I'm going to share with you why we have that advantage from the demand side and how we have that advantage from the supply side, which means how we have an advantage across the talent supply chain. That is at the macro level. But I'll also share with you why individuals join us, why they join us, why they stay with us and why they find EXL a place where they can realize the best of their talent. So that, in summary, is what I'm going to talk about when I share EXL's talent advantage. So let me start with talent acquisition. For us, we have invested in talent acquisition over many years. But over the last couple of years, we have significantly enhanced our investment, especially on the data and technology side. What that means is that when we acquire talent, we are able to map the market. We are able to forecast the market. We are able to price the market, and then we are able to proactively source the market, all digitally. And that enables us to hire in time and at scale, which means that we are not building huge benches. But at the same time, we are able to hire the numbers we need to accelerate our growth. So that's in talent acquisition. But like Ankor mentioned, a sustainable talent advantage needs building talent, too. And over time, we have invested in data and technology in that side of our business. We have invested there specifically in self-directed learning, where people can learn on their own. And then AI helps them learn better or learn more or learn relevant. So self-directed learning is part of our talent development investments, but also learn anywhere, learn on any device, learn at any time. Both of these, if you combine, has enabled us, again, make learning happen in time and at scale. So we built that advantage. And as a result of it, we are able to make the talent supply chain work really well for us from a time, price and scale standpoint. But what really worked for us after that was our data-led strategy. Because of that data-led strategy, we are able to offer the talent that joins us, the level of work that they cannot get anywhere else because they work on interesting projects. They work on interesting challenges, challenges that involve what they want to be involved in, which is either big data or just data-led problem solution or various platforms and technologies that are required to solve client problems. Once we are able to solve the client problems, we experience the business growth that which you track, which I track and all of us are very proud of. And that growth actually leads us to attract even better talent because our brand equity improves as a result of that. So in short, our talent advantage is actually a flywheel, which has momentum right now. It got energy from the capabilities of acquisition and development. It got energy from our data-led strategy. It got energy from the work that we provide our talent to do, which led to the success we have. And now the flywheel has momentum. And that is our talent advantage. I want to share with you some numbers. In just one year, we -- and these are numbers as a kind of evidence for in-time and at-scale talent advantage. So in just one year, there's a 75% increase in the number of people we hired in digital and analytics. And our Analytics business, Vivek talked about it, grew. And talent there was an enabler and an accelerator. So in this hot talent market, that headline that I'm really proud of, in this talent -- hot talent market, talent supply was not a constraint for growth for EXL. In fact, it was an enabler. And all of these people that we hired were in what we call in-demand skills. So cloud, AI, CX, all of these areas which you are well aware of, we have significantly ramped up our practices in that. In cloud itself, within 2 years, we've increased the number of people we have by 10x. So if I look at our ability to hire people at scale and in time, enabled by technology, enabled by our strategy, this is the evidence of that. And we have been able to also source all incoming talent from some of the good schools all across India and the U.S. And then we, like I said, have these really super powerful training ability enabled digitally, which we use to make them start doing very interesting work very soon. In building our own talent, again, it's technology-driven and data-driven. In just these 10 months, 450 of our leaders have obtained at least one cloud certification just by themselves, at least one. Some have done even more. So we've been able to build digital leadership, and the cloud certification is just one example of it. Our digital leadership comprises 3 segments. One is digital methodologies, digital technologies and digital leadership. So it is important for digital leaders not just to know the technologies, but to be able to lead digital workforces. So we've built a very strong base of digital leadership. But Rohit mentioned all 40,000 people are data-aware or data-proficient. And that is shown in at least 3 courses -- or sorry, an average of 3 courses across our entire population. And that is important because when data becomes your economic driver, both for the client and for our own value creation, it is important that all employees look at their work from that lens and are able to create a DNA where there's innovation, suggestion and enhancement of the work that they do for clients because they are trained and aware of what data means and its importance and all the work they do for everyone. And on our digital platform, on a quarterly basis, at least 70% of our employees are engaged all the time. So that is some set of numbers on how we build our talent. But when this flywheel list has its momentum, it also improves the employee experience because everybody loves being in a growth organization. Growth organizations have energy, but then when they are supported by learning, intentful learning and great work, you get a highly engaged workforce. Our engagement scores at 3.9 on a -- 4 actually, on a scale of 5. And that places us above 75th percentile or in the top quartile of high-performing organizations all across the world. That is the level of our engagement that we have. And a lot of it is digitally driven. We have about 300,000 transactions on digital HR in this year itself. And the year is not over but up year-to-date. And this is important because 68% of our people either work remotely or in a hybrid fashion. So we have re-purposed EXL to respond to the modern workforce, both from an engagement standpoint and a leadership standpoint. And our attrition compared to our competitors is, therefore, much lower and is dropping every quarter. Actually, in analytics and digital, our attrition is lower than pre-pandemic in a hot talent market. And that is how the talent flywheel gives at every stage. Because we are an attractive employer and because we've worked on this with intent over the last many years, our workforce is becoming more diverse. That makes working environment a rich one as well as our engagement with client much richer. Over the years, our gender diversity in our workforce is steadily and actually impressively improved. That 41% number is one of the highest in our industry. In our leadership, our diversity is increasing steadily, and here is where we are working even harder, especially at the hiring stage. And every candidate slate that we have, it is our requirement that it's at least 50% diverse. So we are working on our diversity, and we are achieving gains there. So we are becoming a global workforce, which is digitally and data-driven. And therefore, to summarize, we have a great acquisition and building capacity, a diverse workforce, a leadership depth not from a traditional succession planning standpoint, but also digital leadership. And all the high-end work we do has created an innovative field energy in the company. And all of that then leads to what I said before, talent being an accelerator for growth and our ability to get talent at scale and in time. So with that, I'll hand over to Maurizio, who will take you through the financials.

Good morning, everyone. It's great to see everyone here. My name is Maurizio Nicolelli. I'm the EXL's Chief Financial Officer. I started back in February of 2020, right before COVID. So I've gotten to know everyone here through that video screen in front of my computer. So it's great to see everyone here in person today, but thank you. I'll -- so you've heard a lot about our -- oops, let me go forward here. So you've heard a lot about our business and the growth opportunities that we have within our overall business in both data analytics and digital operations and solutions. You've heard about the business resiliency that we have in -- just in both of our core segments. And Nalin has talked to you about -- a little bit about our talent advantage. So now let's talk a little bit about our performance since our last Investor Day in November of 2020 and also our forecast really going forward for the next couple of years between 2023 and 2024. A few takeaways that we'll focus on during this -- during my presentation is one is the growth momentum, both in analytics and in digital operations and solutions. We'll talk a bit about our margin performance, how well we've done since November of 2020 and the go forward. We'll talk a little bit about our strong balance sheet as we go into 2023. And also, we'll talk about guidance and just an update for you on our medium-term targets. If we look at revenue growth over the last 2 years from the beginning of 2020, you're seeing strong revenue growth of 21% CAGR over that period. And we talked a bit about analytics being the strong growth driver but also digital operations, extending itself from where we were growing between the 2016 to 2019 period. You're also seeing margin expansion since the beginning of 2020. We've grown our margins 240 basis points since the early 2020. And that's really being driven by a lot of operating leverage that we've gotten on the business over that period. And then finally, you're seeing EPS grow faster than revenues, which is core to us. One of the big things that we have really focused on over the last 2 to 3 years is really growing EPS faster than revenues, which really entails that middle section is really growing margins over that time period. If we look at our 2 core pieces of our business, data analytics has grown 33% on a CAGR basis since 2020. And that is just overall. It's grown 28% on a constant currency organic basis during that period. Keep in mind, we bought Clairvoyant back in December of 2021. And that's -- so we've mixed in a bit of inorganic growth with organic growth. And I'm pleased to say that with the Clairvoyant acquisition, both in terms of the integration and also financial performance, has done very well versus our expectations that we told you back in early of 2022. And then secondly, if you look at digital operations, we've grown digital operations at a 12% CAGR over that same time period also. So it gets back to what Anita talked about in terms of what has changed within digital operations solutions going from a 7% CAGR growth rate previously to 12%. We're getting into much bigger deals and much more higher value areas within digital operations. That's really helping us build that business going forward. So one thing to focus on in terms of our overall revenue base is the annuity piece of our business. And this is a little bit of a reminder for everyone on how big our annuity-based revenue is. It's well over 80% of our overall total. And keep in mind, when you look at that 80% of the overall total, digital operations solutions is 54% of our business. And it is -- and the average contract value is between 4 and 5 years. And so what that really is, it creates a very strong foundation of annuity revenue on an annual basis going forward. And then when you couple that in with our Analytics business in that portion of the annuity piece of that business, you're getting over 80%. When you look at the piece that's more project-based, the 19%, you have to look at it with a much closer lens on that 19% because that piece of our business, which is shorter in terms of time frame, but it is the entryway into much longer engagements with our clients. We use that shorter-term project to really gain the clients' confidence, whether it's a new client or an existing in a particular area to really gain larger term contracts or jobs going forward. And that's really almost our entryway into a much longer analytics jobs or work. When we look at our adjusted operating margins, I mentioned earlier that we have grown margins 240 basis points over the last 2 years since the last Investor Day. So what's really driven margins during that period? One, we're getting into more profitable digital deals going forward. Ankor talked a little bit about that in his presentation. We are getting more of higher-value business from our clients, particularly in Analytics that Vivek talked about. And then also, we're leveraging just our overall business. If you look at our revenue growth since the beginning of 2020 versus our headcount growth, we're growing revenue faster than headcount. And that's creating leverage within our business now really going forward. And you're seeing our revenue per employee headcount metrics go up. You're seeing it go up for the overall company. You're seeing it go up in Analytics, in particular also. Having said that, you can read the newspapers here every day, and you can tell that there's uncertainty within the macro environment overall. And we are seeing that constantly every day. We're still in the middle of a period of high wage inflation. We -- as you see, as you read the news articles, there's a potential recession in 2023 and 2024. And then we are also returning our employees progressively back to the office each month. And so when we look at margins going forward in 2023, we do see certain headwinds that will continue or will exist in future periods. Having said that, our margins today, our expected margins estimated at the middle of our guidance that we gave at the end of the third quarter are still at 18.3%. And that's in the middle of a high wage inflationary environment. So some of these headwinds we're already facing today, but some of these are potential more headwinds in the future as you think about our medium-term guidance going forward. The one thing that we started to consciously focus on in early 2020 was return on invested capital to really drive just the overall business. And we've grown our ROIC significantly from 8.9% to 14.6% estimated in 2022. And so how we've been able to do that? Listed here are 7 areas that we have really improved on to really drive ROIC. I'll mention 3 of them that -- I'll highlight 3 of them that are, in particular, significant movers. One is our higher profitability. Driving margins 240 basis points has a direct effect on return on invested capital. And that's really helped us really drive this metric. Two, we've really been able to efficiently manage our asset base. Our asset base has been relatively constant between early 2020 and today. And so that with a higher profitability, a flattening of your asset base has really been able for us to drive ROIC. And then lastly, our M&A discipline has really helped us to not dilute ROIC. When you look at the acquisition of Clairvoyant, it has worked out well for us strategically, but it also has worked out for us financially and that we paid a reasonable valuation for a business that we thought that we could really integrate and grow with the rest of our Analytics business. If you take a look at our leverage today, we have about $270 million in debt outstanding. Our cash balance is higher than that. So our net cash position is right around $24 million. So that gives us a lot of ability to manage in 2 different areas. One is to manage the environment of rising interest rates. We have the lever there to reduce our debt if we need to going forward and also be able to manage that going forward because it's still a reasonable level of leverage on our balance sheet. And then also, it also gives us the capacity should a strategic acquisition come before us, we have the capacity to be able to fund it. We still have a significant cash balance on our balance sheet. We have a revolver of $400 million that we have currently. And then we also have an accordion of $200 million on top of that. So we have plenty of access to capital should an acquisition opportunity arise going forward. In terms of capital allocation, there's really 3 different areas that we really invest or we allocate our capital to. One is internal investments, and we talked a lot about that earlier in our different segments. And we're -- we really use that in terms of eyeing it with a shareholder creation lens. But also we have been using more and more on ROIC or a TSR metric to really evaluate the value of that investment within each of the different areas to really help drive the outcome and the value of our investments going forward. Two, we continue to review M&A opportunities that come before us. The M&A market has obviously slowed as you can read in all the newspapers, but there's still opportunities that come to us. But when we look at M&A, we're still being very opportunistic, selective, right? So when we look at M&A, there's really 2 real characteristics that we're looking for. It's really the strategic fit, does 1 plus 1 equal 4 going forward? How can we really integrate and strategically drive it with the rest of our business? But two and most importantly also is valuation. Are we buying it at a reasonable price going forward? And when you look at it in those 2 lens, we've become very opportunistic and selective with M&A, knowing that we're growing the business at a significant rate right now. And then lastly, we continue to allocate capital to both stock buyback and now a little bit to also debt reduction. With our increase in our stock price, we've tiered it a bit now between stock buyback and reduction in debt. We'll continue to buy back stock to offset the dilution of us issuing shares and still be opportunistic in terms of buying back shares. But in a world of rising interest rates, we will potentially reduce some of our debt depending on how high interest rates go going forward. Now let's get into a bit of guidance in our medium-term targets. When we released our third quarter earnings, we increased our guidance based on our performance in the third quarter and our outlook for the fourth quarter. What that has entailed if you look at our guidance at the midpoint, we're growing revenue and EPS at a 22% organic constant currency growth rate. So we've had a very good year in terms of growing both top and bottom line. In an environment where we started the year out very optimistically, at least the macro environment was very optimistic. And then we entered some very uncertain times. And you're starting -- and you read that every day in the newspapers. But for us, 2022 has been a very good, solid 20%-plus growth year, both for top and bottom line. When we get into medium-term targets, we need to start to think about, first off, medium-term targets are for more than 2 -- or at least 2 years out. And so what that means is that there's much less visibility for us going. We have very good visibility 6 to 12 months into the year. But when you get to 12 -- to 24 months or more, you have much more less visibility. We're also entering into a time of uncertainty, right? So we enter into 2022 with a bit of uncertainty in terms of the macro environment, in terms of where interest rates are going and how companies are going to react to a potentially slower environment. And then also that slower environment could result into a recession, whether it's in 2023 or 2024. But having said that, we're coming into a year with a good amount of momentum. So it's still -- we still feel very confident of having double-digit revenue growth. Back in November 2020, we told you that we had confidence in growing revenue 10% plus. Now we believe in terms of our medium-term target for the next 2 years, we're very confident on 11% to 13% growth for overall revenue. And that -- we've also increased our growth rates from -- in Analytics from 13% to 15% back in November of 2020 to 15% to 18% for the next 2 years on a CAGR basis. And then also, you're seeing the increase in our growth rates for digital operations and solutions. So overall, given all the macro environment and the headwinds, we still see very good double-digit growth for the next 2 years for -- overall for our company. On profitability, we've talked a lot about on our calls in 2022 that we thought margins should be somewhere in the low 18% range. And that's a significant increase than what we told you back in November of 2020. Back then, we said that we would grow margins to 16% to 17%. This year, if you would go -- if you take a look at the slide before that, we are projecting 18.3% as our estimate for 2022 in terms of adjusted operating margins. Going forward for the next 2 years, we still see margins being in the 18% range, but we're starting -- we talked about being in the low 18% range in 2022 and being able to build off that. And so we still believe we will be in the 18% range for the next 2 years. But again, this is a 2-year outlook. You have to keep in mind, we don't know what will happen. We have much less control and less visibility in year 2 of that process. So we still believe we're in the 18% range. We're building off the low 18% range in 2022. And then lastly, we continue to see EPS grow double digits for the next 2 years. And that's an increase from what we told you back in November of 2020. So overall, when you look at our medium-term targets, we still believe that we have -- we are in a very strong position with double-digit revenue growth. We're still driving profitability in the 18% range. And we still see a very good growth opportunity and prospects going into the next 2 years, given the macro environment that's very uncertain with a potential recession in the next 2 years. So we feel we're in a very good spot in terms of financially to really grow the business in our medium-term outlook. From there, I'm going to ask Rohit to come up and give us some closing remarks, and then we'll take your questions.

Thanks, Maurizio. So just in closing, we think EXL is very well positioned where we are, and our data-led strategy is resonating very nicely in the marketplace. It does 2 things for us. One, it expands our addressable market, and it allows us to remain a defensible business. We think we've got very good fundamentals in our financials, where we can grow our business in double digits. We can maintain our margins and grow our EPS in double digits as well. We're excited about what the opportunity has in front of us despite the uncertainty, and we look forward to marching forward. Thank you all for being very patient in listening to us. I'm going to ask all my colleagues to come and join me up here, and we'd love to take any questions that you might have and address those.

And in terms of questions, I'm going to really rely much more on my team to answer them because I think you've heard me and Maurizio enough and you hear us all the time, but it will be great for you hear from people who are actually driving the business. So any questions that you want to put up? I know that there are some questions that have come on the webcast as well. Let's go ahead, Bryan.

Bryan Bergin from Cowen. Appreciate all the color. I wanted to start, so as you look at digital ops growth and really the acceleration that you've shown there, were there modifications that you really had to make in the go-to-market engine and the sales force? I understand you have the integration of the solutions in the domain. But what did you have to change in sales to open up these new buying centers?

Okay. Anita, do you want to take that?

Sure. But it's really a joint answer, I think, between Ankor and myself because what we've done is to develop our digital consulting capability in a centralized way in Ankor's team. And then there's kind of a 2 in the box model, where someone who's been working with the client for many years, they may have -- they may be the client executive or having account management relationship. They certainly can navigate the clients' organization, but they do that by starting with our digital expertise and bringing in the folks that really know digital. And that lets us be a little bit more proactive in how we pitch, where do we think a digital intervention is going to make a difference and really be valuable for the client. And I don't know if you want?

No, I think, Anita, you've covered it. I'd just summarize it. I think there are really 3 big changes. First, the sales process has become more consultative because you're actually working with different buying centers. The solutioning has become more design-oriented and more end-to-end because you are not tackling one problem, but you're actually showing the impact across the board. And the third is the actual sort of conversion process is a little more proof point-based versus believe me. And what we mean by that is there are demos, there are referenceable solutions and capabilities that actually create that conversion.

Bryan, what I would add to that is our conversation with our clients have also got elevated. So now the conversation is with the C-level executive because we're talking to them strategically about the change that we can bring about and the business impact that we can drive for them. And so it's less tactical and far more strategic.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just a follow-up here. You've talked about bigger deals end-to-end. Can you give us a sense of the magnitude? So what do you consider to be a big deal now? I know you've talked about rising deal size. How has rising average deal size changed over the last 3-plus years?

So one thing I will say, I don't have the metric on our -- across all of the deals that we signed. But when we look at large deals internally and we're trying to govern and manage the sales force to prioritize those, we look at $10 million and above as a total contract value as being really meaningful. But some of the deals we talked about as examples today go far above that. So we've seen multiples that get into $40 million, $60 million, $70 million and even in excess of $100 million now. And you can...

No, I think that's right. In the past, we would have looked at a large deal being anywhere between $3 million to $5 million. Now it's a $10 million minimum threshold. And like Anita said, we've got now deals in the pipeline and deals that we won which are in a $100 million plus kind of a category of total contract value. Yes, Puneet?

It's Puneet from JPMorgan. Given like the uncertain macro economy, can you talk about how should we think about like an impact of a potential recession on the medium-term targets, specifically for next year? Are you seeing like clients breaking down some of those large deals into smaller chunks or any delays at all in your pipeline?

Okay. So maybe I'll take that, and Maurizio, maybe you can add on to that. So the economic uncertainty that is there, we factor that in terms of our medium-term guidance that we have given as Maurizio said. In terms of our pipeline and the demand side of it, we are not really seeing any slowdown in activity or any change in terms of customer behavior. We continue to see very strong demand signals, both on the data analytics side as well as on the digital operations side. Our viewpoint is that the nature of demand might shift where clients will be focusing a lot more on cost reduction and being able to provide much more efficiency and effectiveness to the end customer. But their investment in technology, their investment in data, their investment in analytics is one area where we think it's going to continue to exist. We are fortunate in a number of different ways. One, the industry verticals that we serve are relatively unaffected in terms of this economic slowdown that's taking place. That seems to be happening in other areas, which are not predominantly our core verticals. Number two, the type of clients that we have and the type of work that we do is not really being impacted. So for example, we don't have any work either on the content moderation side. We don't have any work with -- which is a large proportion on new age technology companies. And therefore, the profile of that work is very well protected. And third, there's a very broad base of a customer base that we've built up. And a number of new client relationships and new engagements that we've signed up already give us good visibility in terms of the traction that we have. So we feel actually very confident in terms of our growth rates continuing to be in double digits and continuing to kind of sustain that. And let's see how this thing goes on. Maurizio, anything which you'd like to add?

Yes. Just one thing to add, and Rohit kind of already answered it, but it's already factored in our guidance. It's the reason why I showed you the slide of 22% organic growth in 2022 and 11% to 13% growth for the medium-term targets, right? So we have factored in an uncertain environment and also a potential recessionary environment going forward. And that's why you see the difference between the 2. But again, we're -- as Rohit said, given the macro environment, we're still very confident to grow between 11% to 13% even in that uncertain macro environment.

And then you talked about -- Maurizio, about the headwinds to margins. Can you also talk about like how much of a tailwind there could be by high growth in analytics, given it is like a very high revenue per employee compared to digital operations? And even though the gross margins might be similar, but it could still be a tailwind on operating margin perspective. So can you talk about by high growth in analytics, how much of a tailwind that could be to overall margins over the next 2, 3 years?

Margins right now are kind of a mix of things happening within that one metric. You're correct. As we grow analytics faster than the overall company, the gross margins are similar to digital operation solutions. But because we have less employees, inherently, the adjusted margin, operating margin will be higher, right? But keep in mind, we are in a world right now of high wage inflation and particularly within analytics, right? So where do we see high wage inflation? In those critical areas. It's digital, it's analytics, cloud, technology. So that is putting pressure on us going forward in terms of the analytics margin. But inherently, going forward, in the longer term, meaning 3 to 5 years, it should be that tailwind within margins.

Robbie from Baird. I guess what percent of revenue right now is value-based pricing versus FTE-based? And how much of a higher revenue and margin uplift is that value-based versus, I would say, typical FTE-based pricing?

So the percentage of that value-based pricing, outcome pricing is less than 1/3 of our overall revenue right now, right? And so that's our opportunity really going forward. And we've talked about it within Analytics and also within digital operations solutions. But that's still the smaller portion of our overall business or revenue base.

Yes. That makes sense. And then maybe do you guys have a target at all for just revenue per employee over time, given the fact that you're continually automating your services? And I guess, if you do, what would the target be looking forward?

So we do have an internal target in terms of improving revenue per headcount as we go forward. And that's a very deliberate and a conscious strategy, but that's not something which we have publicly disclosed or committed to.

Okay. Great. And maybe one financial question. The 11% to 13%, does that include M&A at all in that amount?

Yes. That is organic growth on an annual basis or on a CAGR basis. It's all organic and no M&A.

Mayank?

This is Mayank Tandon from Needham. I wanted to ask you about the analytics piece. Who are you hiring? What are the skill sets that these analytics folks have? And then also could you break out attrition between the analytics piece and the ops piece as well?

So Vivek, can you help me get...

So in analytics, traditionally, we hired people who did modeling. Now we are hiring more and more people who know machine learning, can build on cloud and also AI, so -- also development people. So that's how the mix is changing. As far as the analytics attrition is concerned, it is for this quarter, below our overall attrition, which is 34%. So I think it is around 29%, 30%.

So I just wanted to add a little bit to what Nalin said. A large part of the talent advantage for us for analytics comes not from hiring in the lateral market but comes from actually building that talent ourselves. So we are one of the largest recruiters of engineering talent in all the markets that we function in. In the U.S., we recruit from Cornell, from Colombia, a couple of other schools. In India, we recruit from the IITs. We are one of the largest recruiters from the IITs. And that -- the sheer volume that we can bring each year of fresh talent and then you train them, you groom them, you keep them within the system, that actually is a large part of why that -- the scalability comes. And that's also part of the reason we're kind of giving them a career and building them up for a career that also drives the attrition down.

So 2 quick follow-ups. So in terms of the overall attrition, when the company was more traditional BPO, I think [indiscernible] used to be like in the low 30s. So given the mix of business today should we expect the steady state level to be much lower, longer term. And then also, I just wanted to ask you about more are the supply pressures now easing, given demand is moderating for a lot of digital-type work? Still very healthy, but maybe not as strong as, say, the last 12 months, 18 months. So any comments around that as well?

For the attrition it's difficult to predict whether it will go down because it is totally related to the talent market. And the way we are seeing is that the labor market and recession are getting delayed. So even in a recessionary environment, it is quite possible for the labor market to be hot. And that is because in a recessionary market, many enterprises will still need to do digital and other work to manage their profitability. And the supply side of such talent is not going to be built up very soon in the short term. So labor market gets delinked from recession. And if that stays hot, attrition can continue to be a challenge. So therefore, for us, we have to perfect our talent supply chain in a very systematic data-led way every year and every moment. And that is what then gives us the advantage over anybody else who is not looking at that with an intent, both from a market and an individual standpoint.

I've got a question here from the field. So with the increasing demand on talent and you're talking about the big -- the TAMs increasing, particularly in Analytics, are we finding new competitors in Analytics from, let's say, big IT services firms or whatnot? So can you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape in Analytics, in particular?

All right. So that's straight for you, Vivek.

Sure. So Analytics has always been a very competitive marketplace. There are a number of existing entrants, and there's a number of different new entrants. I think we are not really in a place right now where are really threatened by any of the new entrants or we're kind of -- we're not in a place where we feel that our market share or the growth in our market share is threatened by any of the competitors. So we feel pretty happy about where we are and our kind of growth trajectory and our expansion. The one thing I would call out though is as we are expanding into new areas, the kind of companies we compete with has increased. And the nature of the competition is kind of now different. So the folks that we used to compete with, say, 5 years ago, they're probably still there. But the companies that we compete with right now is probably threefold of that because the business that you going after, the buying centers that you going after is now so much bigger and so much more diverse. But I still like our odds in terms of competing against them.

Any other questions?

So in the presentation, you talked about the TAM increasing everywhere. How do you decide where to push your resources as you look ahead? There seems to be so many opportunities, but how do you think about it internally in terms of strategy, and where is the right place to make your investments?

So I'll address that a bit, and then I'm going to ask Anita and Ankor and Vivek to talk about it a bit. The way we are organized is we are organized by business verticals, and we've created 4 businesses for ourselves. So we've got an Insurance business, a Healthcare business, an Emerging business and an Analytics business. Each of these businesses make independent decisions in terms of where they would like to prioritize and where they would like to focus on to take advantage of the market opportunity. We also have an ability to bring this all together and take a look at it from a lens of digital and apply that across the market and see where we need to invest and where we need to kind of build more capability. We've also created geographic heads in different geographic markets where we serve our clients. And in each of these areas, the geographic heads are the ones who are determining as to where we push and where we should go after client engagement. But Anita and Vivek, you run businesses. So would like to share how you think about it?

Go ahead, please.

So I think I'll just talk about Healthcare briefly. So like any business, we're looking at where the market is growing, where we have the effect of tailwinds of market growth and then combine that with the client position that we've got and our assets. And so just as a couple of examples, as we look across the portfolio in Healthcare, we're able to help large payers optimize care spend. And coming through the last couple of years, they are all facing margin pressure. So investing in the platform capability that we use to help them with that makes sense. It helps us to improve our profitability, and it helps us serve a broader set of stakeholders in those clients and to attract new clients as well. And another example I would bring is we're seeing more and more investment into the provider side, both among the large national payers and with funding from other sources. One of our larger clients this year is actually a multispecialty physician group that we started working with a year into the pandemic, and we're supporting them across the portfolio, digital operations as well as analytics and our risk adjustment solution for Medicare Advantage. So we're also investing in tailoring our solutions for the provider market. And maybe the third area I'll mention is Medicare Advantage because we do support the Medicare Advantage programs in many of our payer and provider clients. And the demographics are really on their side there. So we're seeing that part of the market continue to grow as well.

So for Analytics, we've really been very, very deliberate in terms of how we thought about our expansion strategy. You saw what we've done with the value chain. And literally, for the last 3 years, we've actually been zealously focused in terms of how do you build out our capabilities for each part of that. The Clairvoyant acquisition didn't happen just by chance. It was -- we worked on a plan, and we've been looking at a lot of prospects to build out that capability for a very long time. Today, where we are, there's 4 big initiatives or 4 big investment themes that we're going after. Number one, we are expanding the verticals that we're going after. Analytics probably is the easiest capability to take into a new vertical. So we're going after a number of different areas. We are expanding into CPG, which is a huge market for Analytics. We're going into life sciences. We're going into more on the high-tech side. So there's a number of big bets that we are making of saying how do you expand us into verticals. Number two, going back to the value chain, we are focused on cross-sell. We are focused on saying for our existing clients, for our existing verticals, how do we get more of that work upstream. Going after the CDO market, the Chief Data Officer, has been a big initiative for us. How do you start moving more work into the outcome-based model? That's been a big initiative. So we're investing in the folks that can help make that sale. Number three, new geographies. U.K. and Europe continues to be a big area of focus. And over the last couple of years, we've invested in building out Australia and Asia Pac. As that region, in particular, recovers from the pandemic and is just opening -- reopening from the pandemic, that's going to be a big growth driver for us. And finally, number four is really expanding the size of the business that we can target. We've always been a Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 type of -- that's been our client. But today, we have the capability of taking our solutions and packaging them in a form where they can actually be consumed by companies right outside that. So to go from Fortune 500 to Fortune 2000 and take a different solution based kind of offering to them, that's going to be a big area of focus. So it's those 4 things. And hopefully, 2 years from now, we'll come back and report out to you on how those 4 have done.

Great. Any other questions?

My name is [ Kate ] from William Blair. Can you guys touch on how successful you have been recently passing on those wage inflation challenges that you mentioned on the clients?

Sure. So talking about price increases and how successful have we been on that. Vivek, do you want to lead off? And then maybe, Anita, you can add to that.

So as you can imagine, this is a topic that gets a lot of intense attention. This is something that we've been focused on, and we've been measuring throughout the year. We've actually gone after it in a number of different ways. We focused on conversations which for customers where we didn't have, say, annual COLA clauses or annual escalators, we've gone back in and changed that. Number two, we've actually changed our rate cards for new customers, introduced new -- in fact, for Analytics, we've actually revised our rate card twice already this year. And we've got another revision coming in January, I believe. So we've taken up the new rate cards for new customers up. And three, we've actually introduced new sets of positions, new roles and taken that to customers. And finally, four, I think it's the shift to value-based pricing. The net-net of all of that is on Analytics, we've actually been able to protect the margin and actually get price increases that are commensurate with what we are seeing on the wage side. How that pans out, I'm not sure. But I think what you'll see next year is hopefully some of the price increases that we got this year, the effect of that, the annualization of that effect next year is going to be a big driver for us.

Anything, Anita, you want to add?

Just -- I mean, we're following the same playbook. But I would say -- what I would add is that the clients are actually more responsive to this conversation than we anticipated that they would be. Even some clients where rates have been held for multiple years, understand the environment and have -- we've been more successful in getting the in-year rate increase and then the ongoing -- the agreement to an ongoing COLA increase. And some of the areas where we're more fee-based like per member per month kind of fees, we've been able to raise those as well...

But I think -- just to add to Anita's point, it's a discipline that we've adopted across accounts, right, and across businesses. So if you're an account leader today in EXL, you know that pricing is an important topic. And you know that you have to engage with your customer in pricing. I think that the adoption of that discipline is what makes me optimistic.

Good. Any other questions? All right, if not, we'll stop here. And please do join us for lunch, and we can continue to have a conversation on a one-on-one basis. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you.