SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (SSNC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our 2021 Analyst Day. I'm Justine Stone, Head of Investor Relations for SS&C. And we've got a great program for you here today. I just wanted to get started and read the safe harbor statement. Please note that various remarks we make today about future expectations, plans and prospects, including the financial outlook we provide, constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. After actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of the various important factors -- risk factors on our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, which is on file with the SEC and can also be accessed on our website. These forward-looking statements represent our expectations only as of today, October 20 -- or sorry, not October, November 10, 2021. And while the company may elect to update these forward-looking statements, specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. We'll be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to comparable GAAP financial measures can be located on our Investor Relations section of our website at ssctech.com. I have a slide up of all of our impressive speakers that you'll be hearing from today. We'll have Bill, Rahul and Patrick and Anthony, our CTO, kind of give a general overview of our business, financial overview, strategy and our technology strategy. We'll have a short break, and then the rest of the business unit leaders will present their respective business units. So without further ado, I welcome up Bill Stone, our Chairman and CEO.

Thanks, Justine, and thanks, everybody, for coming out this morning. As many of you have commented already, it's kind of nice to do something that is sort of the old normal. I'm not quite sure what the new normal is, but this seems a little bit like the old normal. So I'm just going to give some brief remarks around what we're doing and why we're doing it and where we think we're going over the next several years. And I think that the team that you're going to hear from today is the best in the business. We're more than willing to be compared to our competitors, old ones, new ones, newly public ones and any of the others. So we are proud of what we've done, and we intend to continue to execute. So who are we? How this happened? I've started this company in 1986. In 1986, we did $86,000 in revenue. 2021, we'll do over $5 billion, I think. It's not Google. It's not Apple. It's made me a few bucks and a few other people. So it is something that we have focused on pretty completely, if I can get back. So we have almost 25,000 people worldwide. We train and continuously collaborate to bring additional solutions and capabilities to our clients. It's expertise. If you're going to do derivative mortgage-backed securities, you better know what prospective and retrospective is. A lot of people that you buy stuff from don't have a clue. So we focus on the functionality and want to make sure that our clients have pure straight-through processing, right? So that you don't have work arounds. I think there's a new company out there now called clear work around, right? So I think the difference between us is that the functionality is there if you need syndicated bank loans or you need to interest derivatives, if you need performance, compliance risk. There's all kinds of things that all of you are insatiable in your needs. And so what we try to do is make sure you have access to your data and you have the ability to move quickly with confidence, right? You move quickly when you have confidence in the data, and you hesitate if you don't believe the data. So we focus hard on making sure things are reconciled, things are accurate and things are delivered on time. We have over 20,000, I think, customers now -- 20,000 around the world. So we have offices throughout Europe, throughout Asia and throughout North America. And we're proud of what we've been able to do. The largest companies in the world use our stuff and are demanding just like you. So we continue to focus on that. Our strategy is pretty simple. The first thing is excellent customer service. People call us, they get answers. They don't get put on hold. They don't get transferred to another country, right? So we believe -- if I could stay here for a second, that excellent customer service is a key to all things good. Second thing is you've got to deliver solutions. People come to us to get solutions. They don't come to get us -- get more problems. They bring us their problems. Our job is to solve them. And we bring together the top people in the country and in the world to come up with the most creative ideas, the most cost effective, the easiest to implement. And that's what we do as a business. We're accountants in general. My background is with Peat Marwick, what they call it KPMG now, I'm dating myself. -- right? Our President, Rahul Kanwar, was with Eisner, another CPA firm. That's expertise, and then we marry it to technology. And all of the people that you talk to today have an understanding of the technology and the ability to deliver massive amounts of data in a concise way on time. The key to having all this data we have is that you get analytics, you get the ability to push analytics through to our clients in lots of different ways with lots of different data. So we're pretty impressed with what we've been able to do and what we'll be able to continue to do with the analytical frameworks and the things that we're doing in order to produce new products and new services that are quite valuable to our clients. I think the top 20 asset managers already use our analytics on being able to sell into additional mutual fund companies. And I think that's something that we'll be able to do completely because having that technology allows you to go through those reams and reams of data and be able to deliver something that is pretty valuable to our clients. We think being flexible, some people say, well, we're SaaS, one size fits all. But if you ask your investment managers or your Capital Group, or your Fidelity, or your Janus Henderson, or your Millennium, or your Soros, you're different. Generally, that's what makes you successful. Cookie cutters start to go down in their ability to have performance, their ability to differentiate. So we need to be able to meet that flexibility requirement so that people can be different and offer different ways in which to deliver performance. Everything is getting digitized now. It's not going to change, right? Things are going to go faster. It used to be more slower with compute power doubled every 18 months. Now in certain technologies, compute power doubles every 90 days. When do you get on the train, 90 days later, you're 50% effective. 180 days later, you're only 33% effective, right? So you got to get on the train, you got to know when to get off the train. Not simple. You need partners that study this all the time, and that's what we do. That's why we can execute, right? You got to be able to execute. You can have all the talent in the world, but if you fumble, it's not good if you drop the pass, right? If you can't remember the play, if you don't know what your role is. So that's what we do as a company. We're consultative, we listen, we try to come up with solutions and then we deliver. And we're independent, right? As I tell people all the time, don't use your fund administrator and your prime broker, your fund administrator and your custodian. If someone's going to rob me. They're going to have to collude. It's not just going to be one company. It's going to have to be 2. And that usually doesn't happen. And that's the key thing in internal controls is what they'll tell you, separation of duties, right? Don't have the people writing the checks to reconcile the bank accounts, right? That's not a good practice. So that's what we do as a company. We have this world-class technology, and I stole this slide from Anthony Caiafa, who you'll hear from in a few -- he can explain it a lot better than me. But what it does is it shows what all the inputs and all the outputs and then what we do in the middle, right? So that you have the ability to have information at your fingertips in a cyber secure way, using microservices architectures and other architectures and artificial intelligence and machine learning and natural language processing and robotic process automation, all the buzzwords. There's more change happening in technology in the last 5 or 6 years since the mid-'80s. The mid-'80s is when Novell networks first came out. PC networks. That's really what we use now. It's a little different. They call it cloud, but it's just a request going out to a farm full of servers getting your information and delivering it back. When they first came out with the Internet, there wasn't any interface. So people didn't use it very much. Now people can't live without it. It used to be if you left your home and forgot your wallet, it was the end of the day. Now it's if you forget your iPhone, right? So the world just changes and you have to stay adaptive to it. And you have to be able to do these things in a way that is delivered in a clear and concise ability. And that's what we've done with all of our technology across all of the products and services. Sure, we have a lot of products and services. We have a lot of demand. Our clients are sophisticated. They want answers and they want to answer kind of on demand. So that's what we've been able to do as a company. When you look at this 40-plus fund administrators, they run the same software we do. You get that one later. 9 out of the top 10 prime brokers. We do 95% of all the municipal bonds are structured on our software. $2 trillion in regulatory filings. This is a big, sophisticated company with lots of solutions that our clients rely on. Most of them are critical. They have to do them if they're going to be in this business. They don't have a choice. It's not a nice to have, right? It is the entree. And that's what we do, right? So we -- the top 20 largest asset managers, right? Do our distribution solution. So they get statistics on who are buying what. What's the most important areas. And that's something, again, that we've done as a company for the last 30 years. I know these numbers probably are in the middle of your portfolios as far as statistics are concerned, but we're pretty proud that we've had cash flow from operations since we went public in March 31, 2010, grow at a 30% CAGR. That's over 10 years. Our stock performance at 23%, EPS 24%, adjusted revenue growth at 28%. That's not over a quarter. It's over a decade. And that, again, is what allows us to keep and continue to deliver solutions to our clients. You have to invest in your businesses in order to be able to grow your businesses. And at SS&C, we invest in and we invest heavily, both in our people, our process and our technology. The world's changed a lot. I don't know about you, but I didn't know what COVID was. I do now. COVID, people will work from home. Are we demanding everyone come back to our offices? No, we are not. Our workforce is the most important asset we have. We're going to do what it takes to satisfy our workforce. Our workforce understands they're going to do what they have to satisfy our clients. And if we satisfy our workforce and satisfy our clients, something tells me good things will happen to our shareholders. And we're quite shareholder-friendly. So 2020 was an odd year, very odd. And we got through it. We were able to move thousands and thousands of people to home. We were able to deliver to our clients and meet the objectives of our clients. A number of the large financial services companies that have operations in India said it was a disaster. It wasn't for us. Those are our people, our employees. We use very few contractors. The reason we use very few contractors is we want to pay our people. We want to be responsible for their bonuses. We want to be responsible for their equity awards. We want to be responsible for their raises, not some third party that gets to decide. If you work with us, we don't triage. You work with a third-party, Bill called. Bill who? Bill Gates? Bill Stone? Who? They don't know. They've got tons of clients that they have to triage around. But if I call Anthony and I say, hey, Bill's on the phone. He knows what Bill it is, right? So that is something, again, that drives the business forward. It maintains an entrepreneurial culture vis-a-vis a corporate bureaucracy. M&A and SPACs and all this stuff you see has driven asset prices to heights never seen before. So you got to be careful about what you buy. You got to be careful about what you do. You got to think, right? You have to do your due diligence. You have to know. And again, that's something we pride ourselves on. We have -- as it says here, already signed 12 clients with $5 million plus in annual revenue. We've become a place where $5 million is pretty normal for a deal. When I started $5,000 was a hero deal, right? So there's a lot of change that happens over time. Winning competitor business. So we've taken 250 deals from our competitors since the beginning of 2020. You see all kinds of new start-ups with more assets. Our average deal size is up over 50%. Our deal counts is up 25% since pre-COVID 2018, 2019. And our lead volume from our website is up 30% from 2020. Those are trends that indicate that our business is strong and that we're going to be able to continue to execute. We understand it's about the numbers. Revenue growth earnings per share growth, cash flow growth, all in an environment of risk and compliance and ESG. How do we get organic growth? And as you see all the business unit managers and Patrick and Rahul talk about this is that we get it -- I was trying to stay on the same slide. But everybody knows that the world is getting wealthier, that helps us. More and more launches helps us. Larger launches help us. COVID caused a lot of our clients to reevaluate how they operate. Do they really have first-class infrastructure to go along with their first-class asset allocation or strategic asset allocation or stock picking or strategies for investment returns? Most of the people are in charge of them, money management organizations are money managers. They're not generally technologists or accountants or compliance or HR or all the other ones. So they've all started to reevaluate, do we want people who are experts? We hire 2,000 or 3,000 accountants a year. Our customers might hire 2 or 3. We ought to get better at it. We just think that all the trends in the businesses that we operate are going in our direction. I think the technology has changed the platforms that we all use, whether you're using a bot, whether you're using a -- something that checks every 5 seconds or every 3 seconds, so instantaneously. You have information overload. And it's our job to put it into concise buckets that you can use in ways that you want to use it and allow you to actively go after it. And then we have the best sales force in the industry, the biggest and the best. They're aggressive, they're smart, they're capable and they win it. And we think those things are important. And we're going to continue to think they're important. Even as we get more and more woke. Of course, I try to wake in the morning. If I do that, then I can be woke, but I got to wake first. But we're pretty proud of our sales force, and I meet with our sales force every couple of weeks. It's energizing. We've won a few deals. We're going to win a few more. I got to talk about ESG for a minute. We are pretty environmental friendly. We don't pollute. We take care of all of the used machines. We dispose of in a very environmentally responsible way. We take care of our employees to a huge extent in every way we can. We have very good health plans, and we think we pay well. In today's world, everybody seems to be paying well. So it's great. It's great for the labor market. It's good to pay more. People earn it. And I don't ever feel bad about it. So I think that's something that we want to focus on. We want to be an ethical company. We want you to know that's who you're working with. We're going to do the right thing no matter what it costs. We engage with our customers across everything that we do. We have more and more board oversight. It's not the greatest thing in the world, but it's something that's very important. And it's something to embrace and be able to articulate what we're doing and why we're doing it. And same thing about cybersecurity and your data, protecting it, testing our resiliency. So those are the things we're doing as a company. I think over the next several years, you're going to see it increasingly play out in our numbers. And we look forward to working with you over the next number of years and meeting with you again at the next Analyst Day. Rahul?

Great. Thanks. So as you can see, and as Bill mentioned, 20,000 customers across the financial services and health care industries. Maybe we'll use the computer. And I think a couple of key things here. One, if you look at the businesses kind of in the middle of this, many of these would be great stand-alone companies on of their own, right? We've got the world's biggest fund administration business. We've got the leading hedge fund technology. We've got the biggest transfer agency business. There's any number of them, right? So really what makes this incredibly special and I think what you'll hear from many of the business unit heads that are going to talk to you today, is how we collaborate and bring it all together to deliver solutions to customers so that the whole is really a lot better than the sum of the parts, right? That's the true value in this, and that's what we've done for a long, long, long time. There are also several things that are happening in the world today that are making this really much more positive for our business, right? One, everything is getting more and more complicated. More asset classes, more digital, more geographical regions that people want to go invest in, regulators asking for more information, investors asking for more information, there's a lot of demands on our customers, right? So when we say they rely on SS&C, that's truly how we think about it. There are things we're doing every day that they need to have to get to the next level in their businesses. And that's what we're doing for our customers. We'll talk about talent a little bit over the next few minutes. What we do as a company is we deliver expertise and we deliver technology, right? So that requires us to have the expertise and be able to have a sustainable process to develop that. And I think we've got some differentiating ways in which we do that. And you got to have scale. These are big customers with big problems. We need to solve them around the world. We need to be able to process tens of millions of trades every day. We need to be able to deliver thousands and thousands of data and analytics and all kinds of things that folks are using to run their portfolios every day. We're processing 1 billion claims in our health care business. Folks need to have data that comes out of that, analytics that come out of that, things that help them optimize what they are doing. And so that's really our business. And as I think will become clear today and it's becoming clearer, there's a lot of opportunity. So this is a little bit about how we're organized, and you're going to hear directly from many of the people on the stage about some of their initiatives. And really, the thing that I would highlight here is the talent. A little bit building on what Bill said, we really do think we have the best management team in the business, right? And a lot of that comes from -- there's a whole host of different kinds of experiences here. Some of these people came to us from acquisition and they had seen how different businesses operated. Some of them have developed their careers within SS&C. They work well together. And they're responsible for building in their groups the kinds of talent that we need to be able to really take care of our customers and offer them a superior experience. So some of the ways in which we do that and some of the ways in which we make sure that this talent cycle keeps operating to our advantages, one, we're in financial centers around the world, right? So we have access to labor markets around the world intentionally, right? As Bill said, we don't use a lot of contractors. We like to have employees that work for us, that are motivated and operating in the same ways that we do. And whether that's in London, whether that's here in Times Square, whether that's in Toronto, whether that's in Mumbai, we are in those markets and our ability to have in the middle of what is a global talent process and a hot labor market, our ability to go out and hire thousands of people every year is truly a differentiating quality. Then it's the development of that talent, right? It's the training process, and we have a proprietary training company that does a lot of our employee training, and we'll talk a little bit about that. And the ability to motivate them, give them interesting work to do, build things that engage people right? They get to be creative, they get to advance in their careers. They get to -- we pay pretty well, but we also have stock and equity through more than half of our company, right? So there's a lot of things that tie people to SS&C and create this entrepreneurial culture that then translates into good customer service, good sales execution, lots of innovation. A little bit about how we're doing coming out of the pandemic. As we mentioned in -- so every time I click it goes forward one, then it comes back, at least we have the pattern down now. So I think what -- we're in a pretty good place. We've been -- part of the resilience in our business is we were able to pivot really quickly, right? So in March 2020, we really moved 100% at home and did not have impact to customer deliverables or things like that. And that's a little bit -- and Anthony will talk a little bit about how we're set up, but that's a testament to the technology infrastructure and how automated we really are. What we've been able to do since as kind of a path back to whatever that end state might be is our offices are open around the world. We're leaving it up to employees as to how they use those offices. We were really encouraging them to be used as collaboration spaces. We want people to come in. We want them to have meetings. We want them to brainstorm and have ideas, and then we're flexible about as to where they want to work as long as the work gets done. And the work has been getting done. People have done a great job over a long period of time, and we're really happy about it. And that flexibility gives us that recruiting advantage that we're talking about. So we're in labor markets around the world. One of the first things people ask in an interview is what's your policy on hybrid and where we can work and so on and so forth. And we're fortunate to have a business that people can work anywhere they would like to. And as long as they're somewhat committed and they take it serious, they can do a great job and be very successful in their careers here. So talent is a big part of that, and our post-pandemic operating model is set up to maximize our opportunity to engage that talent. So from a customer's point of view, it's information. It's information all the time wherever you want it, right? So it's on your mobile device, it's on your -- it's on a web portal on a desktop. It's an API that some program you wrote internally in your organization needs to consume data. It may be direct access to data. It may be deep links directly into our databases. However customers want to get data, that's what we're doing. So we're taking in inputs. We're taking in transactions. We're taking in all kinds of things. We're adding to it human expertise and machine expertise, and we need to be able to deliver back to them in a way that they would like to consume all the time, right? That's the value in this. It's harder to do than it sounds, but that's really what this is all about. And a little bit, it isn't one-size-fits-all, right? So there's -- there are 2 things going here, push and pull that's really healthy. One is you have to have scale, right? You have to have a network effect. You have to have thousands and thousands and thousands of customers populating your security master, right? And then you got to be able to take the attributes of those that are common and spread that across your business so that as we get bigger and as we get more and more customers, the data set keeps getting richer, right? So that's a competitive advantage. At the same time, it's got to be bespoke enough so that when you are, as Bill pointed out, Millennium or Soros or any of those other ones, you can have your own tags. You can have your own ways in which your process. You can have us configure and deliver those systems in a way that meet your requirements. And I think that ability to kind of find that balance between those 2 things is something that we've been really good at for a long, long, long time. It's also systems that grow with you, right? So they're modular. You can sign on for fund administration services and then open a data room or go out and use our regulatory services or our tax services and maybe perhaps you want to have distribution through a retail channel and then our transfer agency business or our Black Diamond business, there's a lot of different ways in which you can interact with SS&C. And what that really means is for these customers, we are strategic. We're not a point solution, right? We're not -- we don't deliver 1 thing or 2 things or 3 things. If you were to go through our top 100, 200 customers, you'll find they use 7, 8, 10 of our products, right? And that's really all of this interoperating together to create an ecosystem that people want to buy into. And when they buy into it, we get the opportunity to not only be a trusted partner, but also grow with them. So how do we keep doing what we're doing, and if anything, accelerate. It's a little bit -- it isn't that complicated. We're well set up. We have great foundation. We have lots of things, but it takes focus, right? It's a little bit like Bill talked about. We've got to pay attention to our customers. So we try to take these things and turn them into systematized processes so that human beings can really excel at them, right? So we've got a customer monitoring program. We meet with each customer on at least a 90-day kind of cadence. We write down what they tell us. If we have a follow-up, that goes into a system. It gets aged, it get tracked, and it gets finished. It's used to improve our systems. We've been doing that for a dozen years, right? So it's those kinds of disciplined type things that we really excel at, which then translates into great execution, right? And that's what we're going to keep doing. We've talked about talent, and that's one of the differentiators. The other one that Anthony will spend more time on as well all the business unit heads is people are truly building new products here. They get to be creative. They get to be excited about what they're doing. It's not the same thing every day. And that makes it so that we get to hire the best, right? And because we are in labor markets once again, around the world, we get to hire the best around the world. And those different points of view really improve our products. So I think if we do those things, if we pay attention to our customers, we continue to focus on our employees, continue to build and improve the product set, then we've got a path to really great growth prospects over the long term. So just switching gears for a second. We want to talk to you about our -- some of our sales initiatives. I think in particular, really, the overriding theme here is that we are spending a lot more energy on the coordinated enterprise sale, right? So when I mentioned that our customers use 7, 10 of our products, we want to make sure that the new customer, the next customer, whether that's an asset manager or an insurance company or a bank, deals with us in that consultative way so that we can present a solution. That's really -- when we talk about our deals getting bigger, that's what's happening. What's happening is we get to take much -- many more of our products and services and present them in this integrated way where it's not a point solution. We're an integral part of their operating infrastructure. So that's what we've been working on. It requires expertise in the sales process, it requires more discipline, it requires more collateral, it requires making sure that the products and services interoperate in the way our customers would want us to. And that's been what we've spent a lot of time and energy on over the last several years. And really coming to fruition in the kinds of things we're seeing in our sales pipeline. So deep training expertise, not just for our developers and our operational accountants and things like that, but also for our salespeople. So we're using our own courses. We have our own courseware company. We're using that to build the kinds of things that we would want to teach them to -- this time have worked out, to talk to our clients about, and that's working really well. And so I think just to conclude, across the company, we feel really good about our opportunity. We're already a trusted partner to 20,000-plus people. We have a great set of products and services that are increasingly becoming integrated and becoming holistic solutions that we can sell at higher and higher price points. We're focused on taking care of our customers. We're focused on making sure that our employee base remains very, very strong, very engaged in our recruitment processes and things like that are going extremely well. And we're training our sales force in all the good things we're doing across the company, so they can go talk to our customers. And all of those things done reasonably well, we think will lead to a pretty good outcome. Thanks.

Okay. I'll try this now. So I'm going to focus on our business model, and how that business model drives growth on the top line and expanded operating margins and very predictable and high cash flow generation. I'll go back to the first slide. So when we look at our business, there's multiple ways to look at it, but there are these 5 major categories that have very distinct pricing characteristics. And these pricing characteristics result in very predictable revenue, stable and has got built in growth drivers. So our alternative business, which is about -- I think it's about $1.6 billion in total. About 75% of it is our alternative services business, which is priced based on assets under administration at our clients. And those clients are either built quarterly or monthly. They've got built-in minimums in all their contracts and growth drivers as their assets increase. There's also some fixed fee license deals in there, those tend to be typically 3-year contracts with built-in escalators and price increases at the end of the contract, very predictable revenue. Our institutional and traditional asset management business, it's about $1.9 billion. The vast majority of that is the transfer agency business, I think it's about $1.1 billion. That's priced basically by number of accounts that we're servicing and also transaction volume. There might be some special transactions that we do. And in addition, it's also our institutional business that we sell traditional term license and perpetual licenses to the clients. Wealth Management, which is about $600 million, that's also asset-based. It's typically a fee-based on assets or a number of accounts. And then our health care business, which is about $400 million, that's also a transactional-based business typically. It's either volumes of prescriptions, or under medical claims, it could be a number of members that are serviced under the plan. So that pricing model and our proprietary technology and the complexity of the business that we deliver drives very high margins. I think if you look at the chart, in 2008, we acquired -- we made 3 major acquisitions. We acquired DST, Intralinks and Eze and our margins were a little under 37% at that point. And over the next 3 years, with our revenue growth and cost control and consolidation of these businesses, we drove margins up over 400 basis points. And all that results in EPS drivers in our business. over the last 5 years -- I mean, Bill mentioned the last 10 years, but even over the last 5 years, we've had about 25% CAGR growth in our EPS. This year, year-to-date September, we'll be at about 19%. And all this has been driven by revenue growth, a very disciplined acquisition strategy, cost controls, deleveraging our business and reducing our interest costs after the acquisitions, and most recently, by reducing the share dilution with our stock buybacks. On a geographic distribution and currency, we also have a very stable business. The vast majority of our business is in the Americas at about 77%. But 84% of our total business is denominated in U.S. dollars. We have some foreign currency that affect our business, mostly the British pound and the euro and the Canadian dollar. But we're typically naturally hedged because the cost structure of that business is also in the local currency. And the other thing we focus on in our business is cash flow. Bill gets the cash flow statement every Friday. And if I don't get it to him by noon, I get about 2 e-mails. So it's very important to our business. We have our -- our finance department is very focused on collections and our business unit leaders are very focused on collections, and that results in very high cash flows. And over the last 5 years, we've averaged about 111% of adjusted net income and operating cash flow. And it's pretty consistent year by year. There are some years that we've had a little different effect. In 2018, we had those major acquisitions, and we had some cash flow related to those acquisitions. And in 2019, we had a payment for a major royalty agreement that improved cash flow. But overall, cash flow is very consistent year-to-year and very consistent on a quarterly basis. We also -- with that cash flow, we work very diligently to invest that cash flow to return value to shareholders. And our number one priority typically is acquisitions. We've got a very disciplined acquisition strategy. And our focus is that those acquisitions return value to shareholders. We also focus on paying down our debt to delever and derisk our business. And we've instituted a dividend a few years back, and we -- our target is to be -- have about a 1% yield on our dividend. And most recently, in the last couple of years, we've been accelerating stock buyback. As we've reduced our debt leverage, we've returned more capital through stock buybacks to our investors. So a quick view of our deleveraging history. We did a couple of major acquisitions in 2012, 2015 and 2018. And we immediately focused on deleveraging our business. And so we've taken our leverage post-acquisition from about 4 to 5x to as fast as possible, down below 3x. On our margin improvement target, we typically target about a 50 bp operating margin improvement in our business annually. Over the next couple of years, we see certain areas that we can target to improve our cost structure. We currently have a large facilities footprint about -- we spent about $145 million. This year, we started reducing our footprint as we've had kind of a flexible work schedule home and work for our employees. We think we can reduce at about 15% to 20% over the next couple of years and further in the subsequent years as some of our leases expire and we can consolidate our facilities. Also in travel expense, I think as people have come to realize, I think video technology can start replacing travel and we think we can start reducing our travel expenses from what it was post pandemic. We also target every year productivity improvements. That's measured by revenue per employee. And we typically have a 2% to 4% target of productivity improvement. And this year, year-to-date, we're at about 3.5% as we've seen our revenue accelerate. And then we look at other areas for cost control, like vendor consolidation, IT infrastructure and various other spending controls. I think most of you are pretty familiar with our full year guidance. But I think what's important is to look at how our business has been accelerating this year, right, from the guidance we initially gave at the beginning of the year to the guidance we just recently gave after the third quarter. At the midpoint of that guidance, we're seeing a 4.9% improvement in our revenue, about $233 million; 7.8% increase in EPS; and a 10% increase in diluted shares -- diluted EPS. As -- so we're carefully managing our business for revenue growth, cost controls and cash flow generation, and we're clearly seeing our business accelerate this year. I think I'll turn it over to Anthony. Thank you.

Thanks. So today, I'm going to cover a couple of things within -- throughout the engineering update for SS&C. The theme for kind of what I'm going to cover today is going to focus on a lot of the new technology and innovation that's going on within the groups. And without a good foundation and a strong foundation to empower all of the engineering teams, it's pretty difficult to achieve good innovation and a lot of the new products that we push out. And some of the key things that we'll cover are really going to be the culture for SS&C, some organizational structures that happened, and then a lot of the investments in technology and security that we've done over the past couple of years. So first and foremost, our engineering organization, everybody has a few core principles that they focus on every day and that's deliver, scalable, stable and secure software to all of our customers, modernize and standardize and automate everything, right? So we want every engineer at SS&C to have a voice so that they are heard. And then there's -- you're not just avoiding anything, but you're always looking at where we could improve, where we can make things better and where we could make things faster. Okay. It doesn't skip. So our organization is -- overall is designed for innovation, right? So the picture shows that every BU has a divisional BU CIO. So now those CIOs are responsible for all of the technology implementation, the innovation, hiring the engineers, training the engineers and kind of bringing them into the SS&C family of tech. Some of the big things that we do within that is we have a lot of cross collaboration. There's a lot of tools that have been deployed, a lot of communication and collaboration platforms. And we also have a program that we call global pods, that give the engineers the ability to communicate with one another, join like -- different technology groups like you could pick Kubernetes or Java or COBOL or some of these other languages that everybody has interest in. And they can come together, build focus on building standards, best practices and just really share, reuse and learn from one another and build a really good foundation and really good community of engineers throughout the organization. And then at the top level, we have a centralized IT enterprise engineering organization. And they really focus on building out infrastructure as a service, our past platform, they help all the different BUs and all the different tech folks with overall architecture and design of all of their platforms. They help with security oversight. So they make sure that when we are developing, we're developing everything as secure as it possibly can. And then they do a lot of the shared services and the common services that all of the developers need, right? So it cuts down on time of the developers having to focus on building some operational expertise because we have an organization that does all of that for them, and they do it globally. And it's -- it has really given us the ability to push a lot of new developer tooling and everything at a much wider base. And then one of those big things for us and a lot of that -- one of the big foundations is an infrastructure that we've invested a lot of money and a lot of time and over the past couple of years. So we -- SS&C owns and operates data centers. We want to operate them globally. And one big component of our data centers is this private cloud. So we've had engineers that have built a system where the initial focus has been how do we make infrastructure abstracted to a point where it could be as developer-friendly as possible. And how do we make sure that everybody that interacts with this infrastructure can move quickly, build quickly and not have to wait for the resources that they need to build new applications. So this infrastructure is full -- feature-rich user interface and user experience. Everything is fully API-driven. So when an engineer comes in, they will always interact with the top layer. And this -- the bottom layer is all managed by the infrastructure team and nobody has to worry about it. So no longer waiting for resources, waiting for servers. It is a full cloud platform that is -- that we drop in all of our data centers around the world now. And the infrastructure is extremely consistent, so it makes it very easy to deploy a new data center. It takes days instead of months. And this infrastructure is, by the end of Q3 of '22, will be SOC2 compliant, which will be huge for a lot of the software that's deployed onto this platform. Another area that I think is really important is our security. And now this is kind of how we did in '21. So the security organization goes through thousands of DDQs a year. And that's answering all the different RFPs, all the different questions, all the different security questionnaires that come in from all the organizations. And we have daily threat briefings. We do global testing. We have BSOs that are aligned to every different business unit. And we have hundreds and hundreds of penetration tests that go on all year long. So we have red team and blue team exercises, which essentially means that red teams are bad actors and blue teams are good actors that are trying to defend all different portions of the infrastructure. And next slide, we'll talk about kind of the -- a lot of the tooling that we're using. But the big thing here is that we have a security group that goes through 3 million-plus lines of code in '21. They're constantly looking at the code, constantly looking at everything that's going on to ensure that everything that we've been doing is secure. So our information security practice is using the state-of-the-art tooling that exists out on the market today, right? We have a global SOC SIM that is 24/7, 365 days a year, eyes on glass. So we have individuals that are sitting in either -- now they're sitting remote. But originally, we're sitting in secured rooms that we have within our facilities and within our data centers. And they're watching all of the threat intel feeds that are coming in from the outside. A lot of the other components that you see here is, one big piece is in '21, we've automated our compliance and GRC tooling. That has been a big focus area. And on top of that, we have quite a bit of other state-of-the-art tools that everyone is using now in the industry. Mandiant, FireEye and GitHub does all of our code scanning. And again, our code is being scanned all day long every day. Proof point for exterior protection. And the nice part about this is that we've simplified our stack, right? And the simplification of the stack gives us the ability to see all alarms, all alerts and everything that gets fed out of our technology environment. Here's just an overview of some of the new products that are being pushed. And a big theme that you'll see here is that all of the infrastructure previous to this and the security, it's all embedded in everything that you see here. And a big thing that you'll notice is everything here is cloud native. We're using AI and machine learning across the board for everything. Everything is microservices-based. We are using all of the latest Kubernetes, containers, Kafka, all of the different big data systems and all of the orchestration components that every organization is using today. That's how we build the foundation of all of the technology here at SS&C. So as it's scalable and secure, it's -- we have the ability to deploy it as much and as far as we need to. Everyone gets a break.

Thanks, everyone. We're going to take a quick 10-minute break to get the rest of our speakers mic-ed up, and then we will dive into our business unit head presentations. And we will open it up to Q&A at the end of all the presentations, both virtually and in person. So, thank you. [Break]

Hi, everyone. If you could take your seats, we're going to get started again. So we're going to go through several of our biggest and most exciting business units that we have. We ask that you save all your questions for the end of the session, and we'll be taking questions both virtually through the webcast platform and from our live audience. So I'd like to introduce Ken Fullerton, who heads up our SS&C GlobeOp Hedge Fund Services.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Ken Fullerton and I oversee the Hedge Fund Administration business within SS&C. To begin with, SS&C is the world's largest fund administrator with over $2.2 trillion in assets under administration, of which the hedge fund component is a little shy of $1.4 trillion and contributes about $800 million in annualized revenue. We have our very diverse client base with over 1,300 unique clients covering various investment strategies, asset classes, geographical locations and fund structures, everything from commingled funds, managed accounts, private clients, asset allocators and managed account platform providers. The last 12 months, we've seen some healthy growth in both AUA and revenue, and we've also witnessed a change in the complexion of our client base. Hedge fund managers, private fund managers are now offering hybrid funds. So essentially an amalgamation of the 2 fund structures combining the typical hedge and the typical private equity funds. We've seen managers, who historically would only offer commingled funds now offering managed accounts in response to investor demand. And we have managers, who are now venturing into different asset classes and investment types. And this has all been precipitated by the manager's pursuit to attract new capital and retain existing capital. Some of the key differentiators that we feel are competitive advantages for us noted here. I'll just touch upon a couple. As Rahul said, we own and operate our own technology. And more and more of our clients and their investors demand information more frequently and more transparently. And we have the capability to provide that information based upon the technology platform that we operate in. It also enables us to be -- remain more nimble in responding to client requests, the increasing investor demands and the ever-changing regulatory landscape. We have over 5,000 global professionals, and we tend to be, as Rahul said, in the large financial centers around the globe. And the combination of that allows us to provide a true follow the sun operating model and a highly customized high-touch service for our clients, resulting in a high level of client satisfaction. Some of the trends, the graph on the left is the SS&C forward redemption indicator. We published this monthly, and it represents the -- our clients, investors forward redemption notices into the funds on the SS&C platform. It generally serves as an indicator of the level of confidence in their allocations towards the hedge asset class. And you can see over the past 12 to 15 months, that sentiment has been largely positive. The graph on the right illustrates the assets under administration growth. Again, part of that is obviously due to, as I just mentioned, a more positive bias towards the hedge asset class, but certainly a reflection of significant organic growth, new clients coming on the platform, performance-based AUA growth and existing clients launching new funds on the platform. Again, a strong indicator of client satisfaction. The managers are continually under fee pressure, whether it be from wage inflation, the development of custom portfolios in response to investor demand, the increased regulatory burdens or just overall pressure from investors to lower fees. So managers are continually evaluating -- reevaluating and making decisions about servicing the function that they currently perform in-house, and looking to leverage other providers such as SS&C. Some of the areas of increased interest in terms of outsourcing are around treasury, middle back office solutions and technology services. Managers are -- have been compelled to find alpha in areas that were often overlooked, which has brought treasury operations to the forefront. Managers need to know at any given time where they stand with cash resources, margin and collateral commitments, security financing. And if they do this effectively leveraging SS&C capabilities, they can transform an operational burden into operational alpha. Middle back office solutions. Clearly, SS&C is well equipped to handle the large outsourcing mandates around investment accounting and operations, but also very flexible and equipped to handle some of the more bespoke one-off type of services, whether it be around loan administration, collateral management, regulatory filings and many, many more. Around Technology Services, consistent with the theme of just being cost-conscious -- expense-conscious, managers are looking to address the technology spends, right, particularly in noncore competency facing technologies, asset management -- risk management. So they're looking to derive scale, leverage expertise around the deployment and the management of technology. And again, SS&C is well positioned to support these increasing trends. And part of that is our continued investment in technology. Some examples and folks mentioned before around artificial intelligence. We've developed our own proprietary natural language processing tool that reads structured and unstructured data from third-party portals, e-mails and digitizes that into an easier, digestible or consumable format. We use that across various operations. Our loan operations team uses to read thousands and thousands of agent notices on a monthly basis. And again, digitizing that into a much easier consumable fashion within the underlying applications. We also use it in the fund of funds business as well in a similar fashion. We've employed machine learning, of course, various operational deployments reconciliation, trade processing, wire processing and utilizing that technology and it allows us to identify the historical patterns and trends and offer -- the technology offers recommendations and in many cases, corrective actions for those defective transaction that we may receive. And these 2 technologies really form the basis of a new technology initiative within the Fund Services group. We referred to it as GoCentral and they're referred to it last week on the earnings call. And GoCentral is designed to provide operational efficiencies, improved timeliness of processing by providing more transparency around the NAV production cycle, NAV anomalies and overall reducing operational exceptions. In addition, we've also enhanced how we interact with our clients, clients, the investors. We've deployed self-service features and capabilities in our investor-facing application called GoBook Investor. Again designed to aim facilitating a more seamless transaction processing on behalf of the investors, specifically around capital activity, facilitating the ease of getting into and out of the fund, right? So I think -- when I think about the competitive advantages and the trends we're seeing, both within SS&C and of course, the industry at large, coupled with our continued investment into the people, the process, the technology, it makes us feel quite comfortable and quite frankly enthusiastic about the outlook of the business. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Bhagesh who's going to cover the private markets section. Thank you.

Nice to meet you all. My name is Bhagesh Malde from on the Private Markets business at SS&C. Just to take you through a little bit of what's been happening in my business over the last year. In the middle of the year, we combined our Real Assets business with our Private Equity business. And we did that for several reasons. One is that our clients were organizing themselves in a similar fashion, bringing those businesses together. The Real Assets business, which we started 4 years ago, had gained a lot of momentum in the marketplace and had its own reputation. And we felt it was a good time to bring those 2 together to achieve more scale. What the combination gave us is a stronger combined management team, a far greater global reach and bigger scale as well. And we saw more and more clients over the last year buying combined services across private equity and real assets. You can see the stats on the business here. Revenue growth continues to be good in 2021. Private Equity business is growing at a double-digit percentage growth rate and the Real Assets business at about double that rate. What we've achieved this year is create more scale. We've really focused on expanding our bench of talent in Europe and Asia. Both of those markets are growing at around 20% revenue growth for us, and we think there's a lot more to gain from those regions. We've had a lot more competitors appear in the marketplace, a lot of them diversifying outside of hedge funds into the private market space. And what we've been doing is more and more -- added more and more product to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. And I want to talk about that in a second. A little bit on the industry trends. These graphs are from PitchBook and they represent half a year of 2021. So don't be deceived by the last column there. Debt funds, real estate funds and other real assets funds are all set to equal or exceed the capital that was raised in 2020. Private equity, you can see, is having a fantastic year and is set to exceed its record of 2019. So the backdrop for my business is very strong from an industry trend perspective. However, even in 2020 where it was a little bit depressed, it didn't affect our pipeline at all. Our pipeline increased in 2020. Quite often, what happens is when our clients experience some pressure, they tend to outsource more and look at more efficient options like SS&C. So I have a lot of confidence for the next several years that no matter what happens with fundraising, my opportunity space will keep increasing. And I think that's sort of only compounded by the fact that managers are getting more and more competitive with each other in servicing their clients, the end investors, and the desire to improve the investor information leads them into our arms where we have lots of technology solutions that can really help them. The other trends at the bottom of this slide, ESG requirements, data integration, retail alternatives and expansion into other asset classes also falls into SS&C's favor. We have, as you just heard from Ken Fullerton, very strong hedge fund servicing business. So when complex hybrid clients come to us looking for tailor-made solutions, we're probably the best provider in the marketplace to combine elements from our hedge fund platform with our strong capabilities in private markets and create a world-class solution for our clients. So that's an expansion area we're seeing. More and more of the clients are pushing out into retail alternatives. And there again, the harnessing the energy of SS&C, we tap into Nick Wright's business where we're the biggest transfer agent in the world. And we can really provide that comprehensive solution to clients that are going after a retail client base from a traditional perspective where they only focused on institutions. Talk a little bit about the key initiatives I have for this year and beyond. Business is good, right? So we want to do more and more. I talked about differentiating ourselves from our competitors. And we're expanding our product set. We're introducing new solutions like data analytics, drawing upon the treasure chest that we have inside SS&C in terms of capabilities and really harnessing that towards the private markets audience. We've expanded into middle office services for private markets clients where we go down below the fund structures just above the investment level. Again, something that our competitors don't do. We're trying to give our clients an edge over their competitors by improving the information they can give to their investors and by making their middle office and back office more efficient. So when you combine all of those capabilities that we have, it makes us pretty much the best provider in the market right now. So for us, I think the simple task was to increase distribution. We've been doing that with Eamonn Greaves and the global sales force that Bill mentioned by really expanding the number of salespeople focused on the private markets industry. And that's really helped us greatly increase the size of our pipeline. We're very optimistic about 2022. So we're adding more salespeople in Europe and Asia, which are our fastest-growing markets as well. I think the combination of real assets and private equity also has been able to create more scale for us. So we've got deeper management bench in all regions. The technology capabilities that we have inside the firm have allowed us to do more straight-through processing, reduce risks for our clients, and give us an edge in the marketplace. Also in that same vein, we've looked at intelligently at areas that we can functionalize in a smart way, and we found more and more opportunities to do that. Partly, we do that by learning from our colleagues on the hedge fund side and bring more frequent processing into the private market space where traditionally that didn't happen. The third element here is innovation. I talked about the expansion into the retail alternative space. And most industry pundits predict that, that element is going to increase to $2 trillion by 2025. An example of that is Blackstone, who raised 25% of their capital from the retail market. And we see more and more of our clients trying to emulate that and we have ready-made solutions to allow them to do that. Another area where we've been benefiting is by working with our colleagues in SS&C and Intralinks. We've been approaching the market in a joint fashion. We cross-sell to each other's client base. We've been learning how to do that this year, and that's part of the expanded agenda for 2022 as well. In terms of international expansion, I mentioned already, we see a big opportunity in Asia and Europe. Those are small regions for us today, and they sort of mirror overall SS&C penetration of those regions, but I also said they are the fastest-growing markets for me. I think our competitors are softer in those regions. We're much stronger. So we've been building our management teams and our distribution capabilities in those regions. Anything we see -- the greatest growth opportunity space we see is also in the credit space. And again, it's another area where we distinguish ourselves from our competitors by combining the solutions that we have within the firm, primarily from Ken's hedge fund servicing group and loan servicing groups as well. In terms of what we're focusing on, also for next year, we see a big increase in the secondaries market in the private markets plant base. And a lot of the leaders in that industry are talking about launching large secondary platforms, and we're positioning ourselves to address those. And I'm out of time. Thank you. Going to hand over to Nick Wright.

Good morning. Nick Wright, Head of Global Investor and Distribution Solutions. You may have sensed a slightly different accent. So hopefully, that still works with everybody, but we'll go through this. So the business line, along with -- you're going to hear from Kevin after me, came out of the legacy DST business. Traditionally, transfer agency, but has evolved more into generally servicing the end investor. So whether it's an end investor investing in a mutual fund or a wealth management practice or a platform, that's the business we're in. And we do that in lots of different ways, and I'll talk you through how we do that. We have a great set of clients. Bill talked earlier about the largest asset managers in the U.S. globally, and they are our clients. And we're fortunate enough to have them as clients, a number of those clients are actually the same firms that a number of you work for right now. So -- and then we've had really good momentum recently in terms of managing to renew those clients. So you heard Patrick talk about the revenue and how that flows in. Just this morning, we've had one of our largest clients renewed with us for another 10 years. And that's that revenue sticks with us, and we'll talk about that as we come forward. So some real momentum in that space. And then in terms of where we are now as a business, one, obviously, you want to retain the clients you've got; secondly, you want to gain new clients, but you also want to move up the value chain, and a whole lot of what we're talking about. Now we've got those relationships. It's working. It's working well. How can we bring the massive breadth of product that we have in the broad organization into play. So the industry trends, you'll see here, market share, we called out U.K. and the U.S. because where we've got most, we are the dominant player in that transfer agency space. It's a critical business for us. We invest a lot. So I'll talk to you about some of that, that we do on the technology side and how we do that, but also in the people. We employ a lot of people. We've got the market-leading expertise all around the world and doing that and driving it forward and taking it to the next level, and we'll continue to invest in that. But there are a couple of trends, right, in this space. A number of you will invest in mutual funds. And then you may say, "Well, actually, I want to put it in a brokerage product. I'm going to go via a brokerage platform or I'm going to put it into a retirement product." And Kevin will talk about some of those things. But globally, those end investors are shifting where they're going. We're in a great position that it doesn't matter to us where they go. Whether they stay in a unit trust in the U.K. or move into a [indiscernible] superannuation business in Australia, we've got all bases covered. And the fundamentals are the same. It's about making sure the end investor, when you interact, that you'll get in the service you want and that's what we're focused on. So yes, all of us are focused on servicing our clients. But critically, we're focused on serving our clients' clients, and that's where I spend most of my energy as we look to do that. And then Bhagesh talked about consolidation in the industry, right? Lots of that in the last week, I think we've seen 3 large traditional asset managers announced they're in talks to acquire alternative managers. We are, with my world, Ken's world, Bhagesh's world, we're uniquely positioned to cover all of that. So exciting trends ahead. In terms of -- I was arrogantly thinking, I'd have this control over these slides, but we're all as bad as each other, I guess. So just call out four main initiatives we're working like the rest of us, we've got to put up 20 different things on here that we're working about. But these are four pretty consistent themes. One's around technology. You'll have seen when Anthony spoke, one of the initiatives was called lyric, and that's our initiative to modernize the technology, not modernize because it doesn't work, right? You talk to our clients, they love the functionality. They love the resilience of it. They love that it always works. But modernize it and get it on to more modern technology so we can globalize it more, so we can be true 24/7 as we move forward, so we can future-proof. 2 years ago, we wouldn't have known what the world was going to look like right now. Right now, we don't know what it's going to look like in a years' time, let alone 5 years' time. But what we can do is build the technology and the solutions that we've got every base covered. And that's really what we're looking to do there. We touch on the digital capabilities. Digital is critical to us, and we've got leading edge doing all the things you'd expect with, be it selfie, onboarding or all of those sort of things. But equally, being omnichannel. And what we mean by omnichannel is, let's make sure there are still people out there who want to send in a letter, there are still people out there who want to pick up the phone. We've got a team of people, roughly 6 million pieces of post a year. We get in, we process that. Now that's one of the few things that, of course, we needed people to work through the pandemic and come into our office. And our teams have done a fantastic job around that. We're answering roughly 2.5 million phone calls a year. So evolving into web chat, those sort of things. So -- however that end investor wants to engage with us, whenever they want to engage with us, that's what we're doing, and that's what we'll continue to do and build it out. Geographical expansion. Similar to Bhagesh's point, we called out U.S., U.K., we've got great capabilities elsewhere in Europe and North America, but we want to build out more and we'll look to do that, especially in Asia Pacific. We've looked at Australia, other places, and we'll build that out as we go. So excited about that. Integration. Rahul called it out as a theme earlier. Lots of what we're doing across the business lines as we talk to asset managers, wealth managers, what we're looking to do there. The example here where we talk about the $200 million in your deck is really where my world is working with Karen and Steve's world around providing an end-to-end proposition for wealth managers. So we provide all the front office technology, we provide all the digital interface for advisers and the investors, and we provide all the back-end processing support around that. We're also in Christy Bremner's technology organization. We've partnered together. We're talking to a very large multinational where we've signed up to do work with them across multiple different things. And then that consolidation with the alternative space. So lots and lots we're doing in that space. And then the last one I'd call out here is really around the life and pension propositions. So this is really around insurance, and this was a key area for us. And Patrick touched on his slides earlier about we are still acquisitive and we've integrated lots of acquisitions. Capita is a good example of that. It's given us extra capability, and we're really seeing that build out in terms of how we move forward from here. So lots of exciting things. We're pretty proud of the business right now. I'm going to pause there. I'm not allowed to ask you for questions, but delighted to take any later. And with that, if I can see him, I'm handing over to Kevin. Thank you.

Good morning. I'm Kevin Rafferty, General Manager of Retirement Solutions. I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about how excited we are about our business. It's been an amazing couple of years of growth and we really see some of the trends that are going on in the industry as something that's really going to continue to build upon our ability to execute and to grow the revenue of the business. I mean, how can't you be excited about a business that all of the major products in the industry are based off of IRS tax codes? So you have a 401(k)s, 403(b)s, 457, so it's extremely exciting. But in all seriousness, I mean, when you really step back and look at our business over the last couple of years, our team has worked really hard on positioning us for growth. And what that then allowed us to do is to sell some of the big deals that we've sold over the last 18 months because we had referenceable clients, which not only was important for our business, but just generally referenceable relationships across SS&C, and we were able to leverage both Bill and Rahul and some of these large opportunities that we were working on. And as consumers, we've come to expect personalization, personalized cost-effective solutions in our daily lives. And that's no different in the workplace savings programs that are exist today. So our focus is on providing the engine to power workplace savings and help millions of Americans pursue a more secure retirement. And when you start to look at our business and what we do, we help facilitate the processing experience for participants. And I think Nick mentioned that it's the end investor. And in our case, that's the plan participant, and you -- if you own a 401(k), plan sponsors, the advisers during each phase of the retirement life cycle. And we also then get involved, including working with the participants as they move into that decumulation phase, which is related to when they start to take their money out and then we help them to make decisions to ensure that their assets are going to last for a lifetime. So we're really excited about the types of things that are going on in the business. We had a big year in 2020. We had a very successful and strong year on execution in 2021. The growth, the number of participants, the metrics of the business continue to grow in an exciting way. And our real competitive advantage in the space is that we have -- the breadth of our solution is far outweighs any of the competitors in the space. And I'll touch on that in a moment and why that's important. But when you look at it, it goes beyond record keeping into tools for the adviser, communication tools for the participants. And it's also tied into our robust financial wellness platform and some of the work that we're doing with kids on taking that product into international markets as well. From a trend perspective, I mean, this is a business that really does base a lot of its activities and the things that have gone on, especially in the last couple of years off of the trends and the regulatory environment. If you look at the industry itself, up until 2019, the last major legislation that affected and drove the industry from a retirement perspective was in 2006. And then in 2019, the Secure Act came out and allowed us to really become more flexible with multiemployer plans and pooled employer plans. And what that drove was the opening of 401(k)s for smaller businesses. And the new legislation that's coming out in Secure Act 2.0 is going to take that further because it's going to deal with automatic enrollments into that same size clients. So if you really look at it, it's small businesses and who participates in the marketplace. So that's when you're going to see not only the assets get driven up in the marketplace, but also the number of participants and people that can participate and whether it's a 401(k), if you're in a corporate environment or a 403(b) or 457 if you're more in a government or not-for-profit type organization. So I wanted to spend a minute just kind of talking about the growth that we've had over the course of the last year. We signed 5 new record-keeping clients in the past, call it, 18 months. It's going to grow the revenue of the business significantly as we bring those plans onto the business. But more importantly, what it's done with those relationships is it's allowed us to continue to invest in a significant way in our products. Each of the clients that we've signed up has allowed us to put additional revenue in those deals that then helped us fund hiring new developers, hiring new support people. And again, I'll talk about one of the examples in a minute where they also -- we lifted out a number of their employees to become part of our team to then support the business overall. So when we really look at the digital solutions and the capabilities that we're providing in the marketplace, it really touches on everything, the participant, the plan sponsor and the advisers, and it's really growing in a significant way in terms of our investment in that area. And as I mentioned earlier, we're working on a project with Nick's team on global financial wellness to be able to expand the breadth of that product offering as well. The other thing that's important about the industry is around -- again, this is tied to some of the legislation and some of the flexibility that this has allowed, but it's getting into what we reference as decumulation or retirement income solutions. We've always had a solution around retirement income, but it really hasn't had as much uptake as the growth that's now taking place and the number of prospects that we have that we're working with on those sizable deals. And that's all tied to the decumulation phase when you get to retirement and you really look at it from a baby boomer perspective and the demographics and how that's getting driven into the marketplace and why that's important to us. And one of the other things we did just to make sure we could deal with that is we created a partnership and created an industry utility with Income America and then partnered with Nationwide and Lincoln Financial as the insurers as well as American Century and Prime Capital to help us really drive the products out to the industry. And we see that potential growth is going to be significant over the next couple of years. The other part of the business, and this again is tied to what's happening with the expansion of 401(k)s and also, to some extent, is what's happening in the marketplace as it relates to everybody's change in jobs and stay away from a great resignation, but some great migration maybe to different jobs. That's really driving our rollover business, and you see -- starting to see a significant amount of activity in that area for us as well. Now our product today is designed to really deal with the end participant. We have partners that focus on that, but it's really driven by what a specific participant will do and move from a business. So it's a $20 million business for us, but it's not a significant size of the business when you start to look at what other activity starts to take place in that space. So we're expanding our solution to be able to handle the -- and work with the adviser-driven marketplace, which is really going to help the growth of that particular product area. This case study, I wanted to share this because it ties into a couple of the large deals that we signed last year and very similar in the same respect that it really was driven from our ability to provide referenceable clients that had similar experiences. But quite frankly, not quite as large as these 2 particular deals that I'll mention here in a minute. This one specifically was -- is in the public sector space and is an organization that was running a platform in-house from one of our major competitors. Their cost controls were out of whack. Their ability to upgrade the technology was kind of strained and they were really struggling with how they -- what they were going to do to be able to move their business forward. They had an initiative to re-brand the business focus in a much broader way. And so we engaged with them, spent about 2 weeks with them really, deep dive, understanding some of the things that we could do. And out of that came a need to not only take advantage of the capability, the breadth of the capability that we offer beyond just record keeping, but also then the amount of money that they've helped to fund additional development for our product areas. So this was a great opportunity for us. We're in the middle of implementing the solution right now. Things are going really well. It's something that we're really happy about. We have one that's of similar size that we're working with, that's an insurance company, and their same kind of thing. They had a legacy platform. They wanted to expand into the adviser-driven market, and they needed a solution that had breadth and capability for us to be able to help them with, and we were able to do that. So excited about the business. It continues to grow, and we're really looking forward to the next several years. With that, I will turn it over to Karen and Steve.

Hi, all.

Good morning, everyone. We can't tell the difference. I'm Steve Leivent.

And I'm Karen Geiger and we are the Co-General Managers of the Advent business.

So we figured we'd start off by giving you a little bit of an overview of what the Advent business looks like today. At a high level, we support 4,300 clients, a little over $500 million in total revenue. We're really focused on 3 primary segments of financial services to ensure we provide the accounting systems, the trading systems and the ability to communicate with end clients. And we do that for the wealth management segment, asset managers and, of course, the alternative manager market. Black Diamond, it's really the tip of the spear of our wealth management-focused business. We consider it the leading platform for advisers to be able to engage with their clients. AIS might be a new term that you haven't heard. It is an acronym for the Advent Investment Suite, really Advent's original mission and what that is, it's a re-branded capability sold as a suite, which is basically APX and Moxy, our accounting and trading system for SMA managers and loan-only asset managers.

And Geneva is our platform that is targeted to the alternative managers market. And then the last one that you see there, Genesis is actually a newer platform. It's a cloud-native platform upon which we're building a lot of our new capabilities, particularly targeted at the asset management market. And it's also going to be providing the technological underpinnings for our modernization efforts of many of our legacy systems.

We figured we break up a little bit of the market landscape into sort of 2 main buckets. The first one and the chart you're looking at on the left, it's data that we lifted from the 2021 survey report. And basically, what it is talking about is the growth of the independent adviser and what we've seen in that marketplace. And so the summary here is that we've seen assets controlled by independent advisers grow at a little over 8% on a compound basis over the last 2 decades. And today, there are around 30,000 independent advisers, 17,000 that are ultimately regulated by the SEC and another -- I'm sorry, 13,000 regulated by the SEC and another 17,000 that are state regulated. So there's a lot of tailwinds to our business focused on advisory. But within those tailwinds, we're seeing a bunch of other trends, right? Probably no surprise that we're seeing a lot of M&A in the space. There's some private capital that has entered into the market and is really aggregating smaller independent advisers to create a national brand. And we're really focused on creating or maintaining our relationships with the leaders in this space because we think that this is a trend that's going to continue for the next several years. We're also seeing the role of the adviser shift from what used to be primarily money management to sort of focused on the holistic needs of their clients and everything related to financial decisions. And so a lot of our development that goes into our products are really around that shifting responsibility. And we'll touch on a little bit of that later. Third major trend is we're starting to see some large enterprises, national banks, wirehouses that would have historically built solutions for their adviser base. And they're starting to come to us to talk about what we can offer. And I think that that's really a trend that they're seeing the success in the independent market. And we're one of the leaders in that space. And so if you need to bring something to your adviser base quickly in order to retain them, they're looking more frequently to Advent. And then lastly, we're seeing disruption of sort of the wholesaling model. So every large asset manager is looking at options for digital distribution. And what we're excited -- what makes us excited about that is we think it's another opportunity for a stand-alone revenue stream, given the size of the client base that we now serve today. So all of this really sums up to say, we're pretty bullish on the advisory business and our opportunity to continue to win business and to continue to grow here. We think our reputation will help. Today, we support a little over half of the top 100 advisory firms as ranked by Barron's in 2021.

Okay. I'll cover some of the trends that we're seeing on the asset management and alternative side. Very similar to what Ken talked about, continuing to see the impact of fee pressure on profitability even, as there are record highs in assets under management in the firms. And we actually see this as an opportunity for us and something that we're well positioned to capitalize on because what firms are doing in the face of this is turning to technology solutions and evaluating outsourcing. So from an outsourcing perspective, we've seen this trend really accelerate since the onset of the pandemic. So for our business, these firms are still looking to license technology from us, but they're wanting that delivered as a service. And that service can be on a spectrum. They can be just the hosting of the software. So we don't want to have our own servers anymore, you take the software and you manage it and monitor and upgrade it. Or it can go all the way through to business process outsourcing. So we're seeing a lot of demand. It's growing demand for Advent to take on some of the tasks that are not in the firm's core competency. So that could be data management, handling the daily custodial or prime broker downloads, could be reconciliation. It could be handling exceptions. So we see a lot of momentum and that's a growing area of our business. On the technology side, we also see this as a trend that's accelerated over the course of the pandemic, where there's a lot of digitization happening around workflows that used to be more manual in nature and even pre-pandemic, maybe paper-based. And now e-mail-based where we're seeing -- especially the front office users, they are looking to be able to self-service. The data that they know is already in their system, but they may not have ready access to it. And not only do they want the access to the data, but they want analytics. They want a seamless user interface where they can interact with the data, gain insights to help them, make better decisions and to better support their customers. So you'll see us responding to that trend in the new offerings that we're bringing to market. So we'll just go to the next slide and talk about some of those initiatives that we are investing in align with the trends that we're seeing. So the first one is pretty broad. Cloud is almost not worth mentioning anymore because it is the presumed default. Even the largest institutions that we interact with a few years ago were not ready for that, but now it's cloud first. So everything that we are building new, we are doing on one of our cloud-native platforms, of which we have 2 main ones. The first is Black Diamond that was always cloud-native. And the second is the Genesis platform that I mentioned. The first capability that we went to market with on the Genesis platform is a rebalancing and order creation tool that we call Genesis Portfolio Management. So that's been in the market for a few years. And now we are starting to build that platform out more. And the next application that we're going to bring to market is an insights solution, also aimed at front office users to have those analysts gain those insights to help with decision support and client servicing. The next initiative is really to continue to invest in our Geneva product to really maintain this gold standard that we have. We have a lot of momentum. Just in the past year, we added 2 of the top 20 hedge funds. And we -- our win rates are really strong with Geneva and often that's in conjunction with our Eze business. So it's the Geneva for accounting, it's Eze for OMS. So we expect that momentum to continue. And so we invest a lot in R&D for Geneva. So really what allows us to continue to win. We've seen competitors come and go, but where we are really strong is on our asset coverage, which is really difficult or impossible to replicate. And that technological scale that Geneva was built for, designed for from the start. And then every year, we are continuing to develop and release enhancements into the market so that we can really maintain our position with Geneva.

Okay. Third major initiative, like many of our peers in the organization, we're really focused on cross-sells, but not only cross sales, but integrations that create value for our customers. So as an example, for many years, we've been selling Eze OMS and Geneva side by side and really starting to bring those to market as a suite. But more recently, we've been focused on things like tax optimizer side-by-side with Geneva or RCI side-by-side with Black Diamond. And if you're not familiar with RCI, it's a leading compliance tool set that was part of the DST acquisition. But we're even going one step deeper in certain cases. So we launched something called the SS&C Trust Suite earlier this year. That's powered by both Black Diamond and Innovest. And we're really targeting trust companies and banks, and we think we have a solution that should be able to displace some of the legacy technologies currently deployed in those organizations. So I think for the last ones, we're going to hopefully show you a little bit of technology. Do you want to take...

Yes. Thank you. The first is really just we thought pictures speak louder than words sometimes. So the first is just an example of how we are using technology to offer elevated and cost-effective service to our customers. We talked about this trend towards outsourcing. And this is our Advent Outsourcing Services console, the client base and console that allows clients to see the status of the daily tasks of the exceptions. It allows them to have that transparency and the control that they want to continue to have. And they're going to get that from us as a third-party provider.

And lastly, the fifth initiative is really leveraging the existing Black Diamond client relationships and reputation to continue to go upmarket into those wirehouses and banks that I referenced earlier. What you're looking at here is some of our latest capabilities. We call it a Client View. It basically is a single pane of glass that an adviser can use to get all the details that they might need about their client at their fingertips. And not only does it have native information that is rendering from our platform, but we're pulling in content from other SS&C systems like Salentica and RCI, and even have the ability through APIs to pull in and render content from other leading adviser-focused systems like planning applications. So I think that's it. I think we'll turn it over to Ken and Bob. Thank you, everyone.

Hello, everyone. This is Ken Bisconti and Bob Petrocchi. We're in charge of leading the Intralinks business unit. How many folks here have worked with Intralinks, used our platform, logged in -- hands could go up a little higher. So for those of you who don't know us, we are a leading SaaS fintech provider for deal makers, banks, alternative investment ecosystem. Because we are a fintech, Bill said it was okay [indiscernible] ties today, so we appreciate that. But basically, we facilitate strategic transactions like mergers and acquisitions, capital raise and investor reporting. We do it by securing and enabling the flow of information. And we do it at an extremely high volume. Our platform has transacted over $34 trillion worth of strategic initiatives. We have about 6.6 million users on the platform. And at any particular time, we have about 16,000 deals running on the platform. So yes, there's a tremendous amount of volume. But one of the things that we've taken very seriously and have done effectively over a long period of time, is securing those transactions. So high volume but extremely secure. We also have a consistent track record of delivering profitable growth. This year, we are forecasting to grow the business at over 20% and north of $400 million. It doesn't happen without our 1,100-strong employees across 15 countries where distributed business with a highly capable team of people doing a lot of great work. And Bill, Rahul and everyone has talked about customer interactions being top of mind for us. So the way we interact with our customers in very active, very high-pressure deal situations is extremely important. The other thing we're really excited about is the fact that we are starting to see a lot of synergies and go-to-market technology investments with the larger SS&C organization. Bhagesh's team has been one of our strongest channels for our alternative investment offerings.

As Bob mentioned, our offerings have been cloud-native since inception. The Intralinks brand is synonymous with virtual data rooms in the marketplace. But we've been building an expanded portfolio of offerings for all of our markets, for banks and corporates, for alternatives, for capital raising. Today, about 1/3 of our revenue is actually not related to M&A-based use cases. And also in the M&A-based use cases, we've been building an expanded suite of both vertical and horizontal solutions that bring some of our expertise and best practices to bear in verticals like energy or popular horizontal use cases like IPOs. And we, uniquely, as one of the vendors serving this space, connect the ecosystem between banks, including advisory, with private markets and corporates. That integrated and interdependent ecosystem is one of the things that differentiates the Intralinks brand.

So a little about the markets that we serve, banks, advisers and strategic corporates are where we focus our business. But within that sector, we really focus on the entire deal life cycle, starting with deal sourcing and then road show, deal marketing, all the way to capital raising. A large chunk of our focus is on M&A due diligence, and also right through the post-merger integration. What that brings us is a high degree of diversification. So even when the M&A markets ground to a halt in the middle of COVID, we were still able to grow the business by shifting our focus to areas that were hot and topical, bankruptcies and restructuring being one, secured data transformation. Transfer with programs like PPP was another. So we're able to move that and pivot pretty quickly to it. COVID has also created a need for more virtual tools within the platform. So the first thing we did was quickly integrate Zoom, and we'll continue to do that. We're also investing heavily in AI technologies all the way through the platform, really, with the lens on just helping our dealmakers us be more productive and gain any competitive advantage they can to make sure that the deals are successful. We're also starting to see a much higher demand for managed services. So people within the ecosystem start to look at what nonstrategic functions within a deal process can we outsource to a trusted adviser. So the first place where we're seeing a lot of traction is AI-enabled redaction services, but we're testing out 2 or 3 other really exciting options, and the uptake has been great. If we think and pivot for a second to the market outlook. So the first half of the market -- or the first half of the year, the markets were extremely active. So all-time high in deal volume and deal value. Based on what we're seeing, that trend will continue. There's still a ton of dry powder in the private markets and a lot of debt raising, which is going to be good for investors.

Yes. And if we think about the private markets, that's been a space that we have been targeting and addressing for a number of years now. The private markets, of course, had been generating a lot of interest, and there's been a lot of investment flow towards private markets. For us, we have a business, besides deal execution, we've been the most popular platform for fund raising. We have about 750 GPs or so who actively use us for fundraising processes. And we have over 800 who use us for fund reporting processes. And those have been very popular because of some of the unique flexibility that we provide to GPs, especially in private equity, in a lot of the different requirements that their LPs demand. We have about 225,000 LPs that regularly log in to the Intralinks platform, which has made us the most popular reporting mechanism in the private equity space. We have seen not only more interest in investment in this space, but LPs are demanding transparency and better insight, and they're looking for standardization like ILPA-based reporting, et cetera. We've been supporting that. We've also been building an integrated front office suite for GPs. So we provide, today, fundraising, fund reporting, deal execution, portfolio monitoring. We've been bringing other technologies from other parts of SS&C business units like InvestorVision And e-Investor into our suite. We've been enhancing that. We also uniquely have been serving the ability to not only self-manage but use external administration. Bhagesh's team has already brought about 200 new clients to the latest version of InvestorVision. So we use both the Intralinks go-to-market as well as the fund admin teams to bring more people into the fold, and we've been able to expand that portfolio.

I think traditionally, our platform has been known for providing data without giving folks really the power to use that data for actionable insights. And a lot of the investments that we're making now are going to help us propel that to even higher value proposition for our customers.

Yes. So if we look at our key initiatives. The first thing that we hear from our clients is that a lot of their processes that they use today, even for M&A transactions and even fund reporting, tend to be fairly labor-intensive and not as modern as you might expect. So the banks, advisers, corporates are all looking for better insights from us. They're looking for AI and ML technologies for things like document processing. Bob mentioned earlier, redaction services that we provide. We use AI to look for things like social security numbers or unique PII and redact it from documents. Very, very valuable, especially in large due diligence use cases. Buy-side teams are looking for assisted review, again, from AI-based technology and natural language processing to help identify looking across -- looking for areas of concentration in customer segments where they might have to review thousands of documents to identify risks or opportunities. And so we've been using those technologies. We're also using RPA. Bill mentioned that earlier. So robotic process automation. We're using that for some of the very volume-intensive provisioning and also document movement that we do as well. So a lot of innovative technologies focused on expanding our portfolio and modernizing the way that people work. Secondly, we focus on customer experience. So for us, especially when we're doing 250 deals a week, people look at the end-to-end customer journeys, right? Their expectations today are set by consumer technologies. So when they're coming to our SaaS platform, they're expecting frictionless journeys. They're expecting confidence in deal execution. We have over 250 people around the world today that do things like support and white glove service. But we also do multilingual multichannel communication to our customers for both support, for provisioning and cross-selling to them. And we're working on expanding that. We're working on better insights and more proactive communication to them. And Bob mentioned a little bit earlier, there's a demand in the marketplace for managed services. So bringing our best practices and our expertise in anything from TMT deals, FSS deals, et cetera. We know how to structure those, how to provision, how to organize them, and there's increasing demand for more services that we can provide and take off the banker's hands.

So last initiative I would mention is tried and true for us. That's investing aggressively in our go-to-market team. And one of the things we are the most proud of is our go-to-market organization. We have about almost 300 sellers globally worldwide who are going to do about 16,000 transactions this year. So we look at that as an unbelievable opportunity. We have a process where we'll see markets every year and then the following year if we see the right traction, we'll start to invest in it more. So we will continue to do that. The other thing that's apparent to us is we have the ability to manage and leverage, really, a BoxOne marketing strategy where we're taking new products and running them through our existing sellers. So we will continue to do that. And also, we have an opportunity to take some of our offerings and drive deeper into our current territory. So we have a lot of growth opportunity looking at the market and how we're segmented. The other thing I would say that's increasingly important is the speed of execution for deals that everything is kind of at a very slow pace. There's a lot of conversations. Then it goes to a fever pitch, so we have to be able to help transact quickly for our customers. And we've spent much time thinking about that process and figuring out how to automate it. And we've seen a lot more sophistication in the way we're able to transact, even through this year, with a high transaction volume. And we will continue to consolidate IT infrastructure and leverage the investments that Anthony and others have talked about earlier.

Okay. I think we'll now transition to Danny and Tori on the health side.

I'm Dan DelMastro and I run the SS&C Health as well as DomaniRx for SS&C. So SS&C Health, we are a market-leading information technology and services company that calls on the target markets of commercial health plans and government programs. And you can see in the right-hand side of the slide that we do just under over $375 million in revenue. And we have over 200 customers on that revenue stream. And in that revenue stream, there's a plethora of products that we offer, full-service PBM business, Medicare Advantage BPO business and stand-alone businesses as well as things like fraud, waste and abuse, real-time claims, real-time benefits to the plethora of real-time market segments that we sell to our customer base, depending on the suite of products that they ask for or demand for. So we've got pretty much our whole base covered. We process 463 million where it says pharmacy claims. And the importance of that, and I'll come back to that a little bit later. The importance of those pharmacy claims is the fact that we can process Medicare, Medicaid, commercial and exchange. Exchange, meaning, you probably know it as Obamacare. We process all 4 of those, and we've been processing those things for years and years and years. And all of our competitors -- well, there are some of the process the same. And I'll talk about that a little bit later on through the program about the newbies that have jumped in this game 3, 4, 5 years ago, how they can compare themselves with us or try to compare themselves with us. So the next key initiatives that we focus on is sustainable growth with new logos. We are knocking on everybody's door all the time to try to get new logos, new customers, new health plans, new opportunities to grow our business. You'll see the -- we have a reseller agreement that says an ACG System with Johns Hopkins. We've had that for 20 years. We've just renewed for 5 years. And we're very, very proud of our relationship with Johns Hopkins. This ACG is an analytics program for population health, which is really, really important in the long-term health of our clients and our patients and our members. The enhanced product offerings, we'll be constantly building new technology, digital platform providing members with digital experience. And our latest and greatest, SavantRx, is our formulary tool that we developed in-house, which will just do more things to give us an advantage in the marketplace and who we sell to. Our first enterprise client go live, which is something we've never done before. The 3 years since we've had this business, we bought from DST, and prior to them, when it was Argus, no one's ever had an enterprise client. What's an enterprise client? It's a client that allows us to process their medical claims and their pharmacy claims. First one ever, which tells a story about why SS&C Health is on the rise and why we're doing as well as we're doing and the excitement that we're going to share with you on the next slide. This is DomaniRx. DomaniRx, if you followed us, Mr. Stone announced that July 15, 2021. It was the birth of a joint venture, along with 2 of our partners, which I'll talk about in a second as well. DomaniRx is a platform, cloud-based, totally agnostic plug-and-play technology and API-driven. And the importance of that, the importance of that is the fact that people who are -- want to change platform, to change programs, who want to give -- that are having not necessarily total eases with their existing platform. But migration, implementation to another platform is costly, time-consuming, very expensive and it interferes with their members' experience. We're building this platform with plug-and-play technology that will allow anybody's health plan that wants to give us a chance to do business with DomaniRx the opportunity to do it faster, quicker, for a lot less money and a lot less heartburn so that the member experience, which is really, really important here. This was built around the member experience. Now we partnered with a company named Humana, which is a payer, which is a Medicare giant. This was formulated in October of 2019 with SS&C leadership and Humana leadership in Louisville, Kentucky. That's when the first content was discussed. We left that meeting. We had numerous ones after the fact where it was going to be Humana and SS&C as the joint venture consortium. As we continue to try to get through this, we brought another partner on named Anthem, a giant in the Medicaid space and a giant in the commercial space. So now we have a giant in Medicare, a giant in commercial, a giant Medicaid, and we have SS&C technology. Who builds software better than Bill Stone? What technology company in the health plan space build software better than us? The answer is nobody. Nobody. Now there's been a lot of companies that have jumped on in the last 3 or 4 or 5 years. They don't even have their own platforms. They jump on AWS, which is Amazon or Microsoft and they rent spaces in the mainframe. We own space on mainframe. The investment is the private cloud technology. So along with the new technology that we are building, we feel no one can compete. We've been processing -- remember, I'll go back to that slide about what we process. These newer people have committed to this space with us. Well, they're going to process Medicare in a year or 2. Or well, they're going to process Medicaid in a year or 2. We've been processing this stuff from its inception. Who knows how to do it better than us? The answer is nobody. In the last 5 months, when Bill announced the DomaniRx JV was live and well, my phones are ringing off the hook with bankers and private equity groups and everybody telling us how they're so -- they want us to look at this company, they want us to look at that company, they're going to give us an accelerator. We don't necessarily need that right now because we're pretty god**** good at what we do. Bill Stone has been building software for 35 years, and you know what his track record has been. So we're looking at everything. We're looking at all the options. But for me, personally, I spend my time in the C-suite, with our customers, with our potential customers, with our competitors. And the same questions all come about, what's going on with DomaniRx? Where are you guys? What are we doing? We'll be processing with all the claims in 2022. We'll be testing in 2023. And our future is unbelievable for what we've developed, what we're starting to develop, what we're finishing to develop. But more importantly, I think, is the fact that we've got 2 companies, not just the DomaniRx. We've got SS&C Health that's going to be on the same platform. And why is that an advantage to us? Because not every customer out there necessarily wants to be embedded with Anthem or a Humana. Maybe they feel they compete with them, like they do with the big 3. We give them an option. The option is the same platform, migrate your business to SS&C Health. We're not going to compete with you. We're a technology and software company. That's what we're building. That's what we're selling. Advantage, us again. So I know we're running out of time here. So in closing, I'll leave you this one thing. I call on CEOs all the time, that's all I do. And I try to preach the gospel on what we're building, where we're going to be. And when I leave that room, that question for that CEO is, can you afford to migrate your business to SS&C, to Domani? But the real question is, can you afford not to? That's what you should be thinking about. Anyway, thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Danny. So we are going to set up for a Q&A session. We'll have Bill, Rahul and Patrick up here on the stage. And if you have direct questions for our business unit leaders, we can do that as well. So just give us a couple of minutes to get that set up. And if you are with us virtually, there is a question box on the bottom right of your screen, and you can ask a question through there, and we'll address it as they come in. So thank you and just give us a couple of minutes.

All right. So I wanted to open it up to questions from the audience, questions from our virtual audience. Is there anything? We'll start with Alex?

Alex Kramm, UBS. A couple of questions on the -- you had a slide with that 5% plus organic growth rate over time, including the 100 basis points of pricing. So first of all, is this -- should we understand this as medium-term guidance? What's medium term? Or is this, as you see the business going forward and then maybe more specifically, given some of the business that you talked about that you signed this year, is that also a good run rate to think about for next year, 2022?

Yes. I think what we're saying is that we think that we have some momentum, which obviously has been exhibited in the last couple of quarters. We also have, as you heard from the business unit managers, that there's a lot of tailwind that they have. So we would think that over the medium term being, say, 2022 and 2023, that we would be looking for mid-single digits as a growth target with maybe 4% to 7%, 5% to 8%, something like that, as a target.

And then just one quick follow-up. One of the things, quite frankly, I was hoping for today, you have this great flywheel of alternatives, institutional, wealth, health care, targeted how you break down your business. As we think about that, again, 5% plus that you just talked about, around that flywheel, how should we be thinking about the different businesses, how they are positioned for growth? I guess what I'm trying to say is what businesses are growing faster, what business are growing a little bit slower in terms of the medium-term outlook, and as specific as you can be, obviously, would be helpful.

Yes. I think as you saw on the business units that presented today that the hedge fund and alternatives business, both private markets and real estate would look to grow in excess of 10%, right? As I would say that the Intralinks businesses as well in that category, although there could be some more volatility given the M&A space that we have in there, but it looks pretty strong at the present. And then I think also the Advent business, including Black Diamond, is also going to grow high single digits to maybe low double digits. And then the slower-growing businesses would be probably our transfer agency business would be in the -- and closer to the 3%, 4%, 5% growth business. And certain sections like, we think, retirement is probably going to grow a little bit higher than that. We would say that some of our targeted solutions are going to be in the lower 3% to 5%. But I would say overall, almost all of our businesses will be on a growth trajectory over the next 2 or 3 years.

I think that's how we get to the kind of the 5% to 8% that Bill just talked about for the company as a whole.

We have a question submitted through the platform from Michael Young with Truist Securities. There's a lot of discussion about the value prop of SS&C relationships across multiple products and sectors. And over the past year, we've heard more discussion of pricing power. In what segments do you see the most ability to increase pricing? And how long does it take to achieve these increases?

Well, we started an initiative 2, 2.5 years ago on systematically going through our client base and kind of passing through what everyone sees as wage inflation and other cost drivers. And any of you that use Oracle, Microsoft or any other technology, you realize that we were kind of pikers when it comes to raising prices. They walk in and ask 20% from us. So we learn from them. We don't learn quickly enough, but I think we have a pricing power across our different businesses. I think it is important that we add value so that most of what you heard of today was everything that we're innovating on. So that when we want pricing increases, they also see that they're getting value increases as being partners with us. So I think we have pricing power across our businesses.

Jonathan Lee, Morgan Stanley. Given I'm sitting next to Frank, I think it's fitting that I ask you about M&A. So we've always known you to be sort of focused on outsourced R&D. How are you thinking about the M&A pipeline at the moment, especially with valuations where they are? And how are you thinking about balancing that with your internal R&D?

Well, I think we have done, in our opinion, a very good job with the acquisitions we've done, whether it's Advent or it's GlobeOp or it's DST, right? We have driven value, and that's in our DNA. When prices get to multiples of revenue rather than multiple of earnings or multiple cash flow, then you better be a little service factor, you're going to be -- you're going to be multiple of downward trajectory in most of the things you do. We try not to buy things where they're priced to perfection. If they're priced to perfection, it means that we have to be perfect, and we are not. We are very good and we are very capable but -- and I talked to a private equity guy that's doing a bunch of these roll-ups and has outbid us on a couple of things. And I just say, look, sometimes prices get to be at points where we don't want to stomach it. And if you're willing to go a few rounds and outbid us, good, we think you overpaid, right? So in our operation, if you saw the compound annual growth rates we've had, that's 10 years. It's years we've done a bunch of acquisitions, it's years we haven't done a bunch of acquisitions. And I've said for 10 years that if we don't do big acquisitions, you'll watch our organic revenue growth go up. Because when we do big acquisitions, all the people you saw here today, work on it. Because if you don't put your best people on those acquisitions, it gets ugly and it gets ugly fast, right? So we put really talented people. And if you put them all there, you can't put them on individual deals and that. And people say, "Well, can't you walk and chew gum?" And I say, "Look, it's a little more difficult than walking and chewing gum." And we want to protect our franchise. We want to protect our shareholders. We don't want to have dips in our cash flow. We don't want to have dips in our earnings, we don't want to have dips in our revenue. And I think that, that has proven to be pretty effective. Patrick said earlier that I get a cash report every Friday. After 25 years, catch them who lied. Not that any of our people would lie, but cash doesn't, right? And when people aren't paying you, there's 1 of 2 reasons. They don't have any money or they're mad at us, right? So we need to pay attention to that, and we need to react quickly. I read something that somebody sent me from LinkedIn, a customer of ours, this morning on the way here. I quickly called him. And he quickly read me the Right Act, which I quickly read to a couple of other people. But I got that at 8:45 in the morning, and he got a response by noon. That's SS&C. That's how we operate from top to bottom. You pick up the phone, and you answer your client. Those are the people who pay us. So that's how we operate across. And on acquisitions, there's a few -- we would like to buy things that places like Morgan Stanley want to get rid of, like we'd love to buy your fund administration business, and we'd be such a great home. But that's what we like to buy. We like to buy businesses where large organizations have decided they're not strategic. But what is strategic to them are those customers. Because they -- Morgan Stanley would do a lot with those different hedge funds or private equity funds. And so they're very concerned about who takes over. And some of these companies that are seemingly growing really, really fast through acquisition, I don't think of Morgan Stanley would want to stick their customers in there. They want what you saw today, expertise, commitment, training, development, innovation. So that's what we look at for in our acquisitions. Any more questions?

I think Alex has one.

I'll keep them going. Yes. One, sorry to be boring on the financial side. But Patrick, maybe I didn't hear us all the way. But like on the margin comments, I think you talked about what was $145 million real estate, $65 million in T&E. So first question on that, is that what you're incurring this year in 2021? And then second question on that, I think you said in total, about I think, $50 million or so that you think you can take out there. So what's the time line in terms of taking out that $50 million on the real estate and the T&E side?

Well, on the real estate side, we started reducing our footprint this year. We didn't get much benefit this year because a lot of those reductions were implemented later in the year as some of those leases ran out or we could consolidate space. So I would say that we would probably see about half of that savings in '22 and the other half of those savings in '23 of over 15% and 20% of the $145 million.

And then on the T&E side?

On the T&E side, I mean I think we'll -- it's obviously down this year, right, because no one is traveling. So I think we'll see an increase this year. But from where we were in past years, we'll see approximately that reduction. And then I think we'll continue to get some productivity improvements that will also reduce costs. And Anthony has committed to some infrastructure cost savings.

And then maybe I'll just ask one last one here from my end. I guess, on the competitive front, I don't know if that's come up a lot, but you obviously mentioned the 250 wins, if I remember this correctly. So I guess the question is, it doesn't sound like you're losing a lot, but maybe you can just talk about a little bit where you're seeing the most competition. You talked about pricing earlier. It seems like you can take pricing, but what businesses you see the most price pressure potentially. So maybe just a little bit more holistically on the competitive environment. Where are you winning the most? Where is the most competitive pressures and where are the potential pricing pressures, if at all?

Well, I mean, obviously, we have tough competitors around the world in all kinds of areas. I would say that when you start looking at the businesses, if you looked at our fund administration businesses, both hedge and private assets, we have a pretty stiff competition from the State Streets, the Bank of New Yorks, the JPMorgans, the Citcos, I would guess are the 4, maybe Northern Trust would be the fifth. And you have some new ones like Sony and Apex, and I think they're likely to merge or at least they have announced it. But a lot of times, these places that grow real fast and don't really reinvest in the business. That's some of the 250, right, is that satisfaction goes down. And if you don't watch it, then a lot of your talent is at risk. So that's really who we see in fund administration, and we think we have some pricing power, and Ken's one of the guys who have done a great job as far as doing that. The Intralinks business, both in the VDR side and the other stuff that we do in the Intralinks, we have some competition from places like Data Site and Donnelly and a few others. But it's -- to me, it's distinctly obvious that Ken and Bob know what they're doing, and we're adding innovation across things. And I think we're getting some pricing power throughout that, and we think that that's going to continue to grow, and we're going to continue to take market share. Health care, after Danny conquers the world, I think we should be able to have some pricing power in health care. And I think, more importantly, is that we looked at every potential technology that was out there to acquire rather than to build and to say the prices were ridiculous was to be the understatement. So we think we're really on the right path, and we're in a huge market that has every demographic possible going towards it. And so we're optimistic about that. And that with the partners like Humana and Anthem, as long as you can manage it, right, you got a couple of pretty big, pretty sophisticated, pretty probably political organizations that have to be managed. And it takes a lot of skill and a lot of effort, and I think we've been working hard on that, and I know Rahul has worked hard on it throughout this thing. But we went from unhappy clients in DST Health where we have happy clients in SS&C Health, and it's because we paid attention, right? We paid attention and we answered the phone. We came up with solutions. We committed and we delivered. And I think the same thing what you saw with Steve and Karen that there's lots of opportunities in the Advent and Black Diamond business. The wealth management business is obviously a fast-growing business with -- I think Wells Fargo bought A.G. Edwards 7 years ago and a lot of the contracts with the A.G. Edwards brokers were 7 years. What happens after 7 years, they become RIAs. And that's traditional in the wirehouses becoming both consolidators and then fragmentaters. This thing happens all the time, and I don't think that's going to change. And again, across our businesses, the things we're doing, obviously, what Kevin Rafferty was talking about in retirement or all the rest of them. And I just think that there's so much opportunity, it's just execution.

So we got a few more questions in virtually. The first one is from Adam Brenner from Oribel Capital. If you're able to grow mid-single digits revenue, how should we think about earnings growth, including capital allocation? Can SS&C target mid-teens earnings growth inclusive of buybacks?

Well, we can target anything we want. The question is, can we hit it? But we ought to be able to. If we can get the 7% -- 5% to 8% revenue growth, we ought to be able to grow somewhere in the teens on earnings per share, and we've obviously been able to do better than that. And I think that we will continue. Our business is not going to be any different over the next 5 years than it was over the past 5 years. Hey, if COVID -- there's more COVIDs or there's more pandemics and stuff like that, we have to deal with it. But we don't deal with it in a vacuum. Every one of our competitors has to deal with it, too. And in my opinion, we'll deal with it better. So I do believe we can get to a mid-teens EPS growth over the short term and the medium term.

Another question comes from Michael Young from Truist Securities. Can you talk more about the holistic international expansion opportunity that was mentioned in several segments. Is each segment driving their own expansion? And would M&A be a desired way to accelerate this?

I think it's similar to what we talked about in the U.S., it's a similar approach. There's both a business-specific approach where Karen and Steve or Nick or any of the other business unit heads have their own sales teams in the regions and they're going after customers. And that process works pretty well. But increasingly, we are collaborating and targeting some of the larger opportunities with a full suite of our products and services. So it works the same way overseas as it does here in the U.S. And looking at acquisitions in those markets is absolutely a part of that.

And the platform that Anthony and the other business unit CTOs are doing allows us to have a platform that allows us to go across the world. And again, that's pretty valuable to our multinational clients.

The next question comes from Michael Cestas from Turtle Creek. Bill mentioned the margins typically range between 40% and 44%. Today's presentation, it's 50 basis points of expansion per year. If you continue to see organic margin expansion, would we ever see margins above 44%? Or would SS&C look to increase investments to drive growth rather than continuously expand the margins.

Well, I mean that's the -- that's the wisdom, right? That's the art, that's not the science, right? You want to invest when you see opportunities that is more attractive than expanding your margins and giving back shareholders through buybacks and dividends. And then the opportunities you might have by investing. So we're not tossing nickels around like the manhole covers. If our people need money to invest in opportunities, yes, we ask questions and we ask good ones. But when they're prepared, they get money. And we're not at a dearth, right? I think Patrick's numbers showed about $1.350 billion, $1.375 billion in cash flow this year. That's a lot of money that you can do a lot of things with. It gives us a lot of optionality. And this question about what you would do, whether you'd expand your margins. If we expand our margins above 44%, are we going to get paid for it? I doubt it. So we would prefer to find ways in which to use that capability to accelerate revenue growth.

And a somewhat related question from Bryan Engler from Kovitz Investment Group. How do you expect your R&D investments to evolve over time? Where you must focus on expanding your expertise? And are there projects that you would consider taking on even if that meant a temporary reduction in profit growth?

Well, again, of course, you would, depending on what the opportunity is. If the opportunity is high enough, then you pour money into it. But be circumspect. Large-scale development of software is one of the hardest things humans try to do. And everything that we try to do is not going to come out in a success. So we're going to try to be wise. And so where we see great opportunity that needs great resource, well, we're lucky we have it. And we will spend it. But again, we're going to be analytical and try to be wise about it and try to be as scientific as you can in an art business. So I think that's our approach, and it's no different than capital allocation. Why do more here, why do more here? Our term facility is 175 basis points plus LIBOR. LIBOR right now is 21 basis points or something like that, right? So we're paying $1.90 or 196 basis points for $4 billion. I tell Rahul, let's take some risk, right, 2% money. You can't make money when you get 2%. You know we have 40% margins. Why don't we make some money? So that's a kind of an awfully good backdrop on what we've been able to take advantage of. Now we spent $8.5 billion in 2018. We got about $3 billion in revenue and about $1 billion in EBITDA, a little better. Try to do that now. Maybe $8.5 billion will probably cost you $20 billion. So we like to think that we're judicious when we do this and we pounce when we think it's a really good idea. And we're circumspect when we think it's stratospheric on price.

Next question is from Surinder Thind from Jefferies. What is the risk to your medium-term organic growth projections at this? Is it all macroeconomic? And how do you think about the upside versus the downside of your ranges?

Well, obviously, things are not all macroeconomic. We have to -- we run a micro business, right? So we have to take care of our people. We have to take care of our customers. We have to have wise initiatives and we have to execute on those initiatives. From a macro standpoint, I mean, it's been a pretty weird 18 months, 20 months. Is it going to continue to be weird? Probably. So I think you have to react under those circumstances and recognize that our workforce is our #1 asset, and we have to take care of them and make sure we have safe environments, and we have to nurture the way back into the office if that's what we decide to do. Not demand. What people have recognized is those people are valuable in their own right, in their own room at home, and they can do a lot of work from that standpoint. That really wasn't in our Lexicon 24 months ago. But it is now. People are starting to say they really don't like to commute 2 hours each way. No kidding, right? But you couldn't do it before. But you can now. And there's a lot of companies that will let you. So you got to recognize that's the competitive marketplace, and we have to operate in that competitive marketplace.

Next question is from Peter Heckmann from D.A. Davidson. With the fund administrators that have been using Geneva over the years, have any of them started to second source with another software provider, like, for example, SimCorp? For those that second source, what portion of their AUA are they running on a challenger platform?

I mean, Karen may have more, but I have not heard of anybody running a challenger platform on Geneva. And SimCorp is primarily on long-only asset managers and primarily big pension funds. So we don't really see them in the alternative space. And we don't see them at all in fund administrators that I know of.

Yes. And I see Karen shaking her head as well. It hasn't been something we've seen.

Another one Pete Heckmann. This summer, the company announced they have moved about 50 insurance carrier customers to the new singularity platform. Has SS&C won any net new customers with singularity or have the wins primarily stemmed from migrations platforms like our CAMRA platform?

No, we've won a number of net new clients on singularity that were not previously on CAMRA or MAXIMIS or PORTIA or any other platform we have. So we have a lot of confidence that it's selling to big insurance companies not exactly -- not going to get much whiplash. I can assure you that, it's much more like one of those station wagons with the wood paneling, right? So it takes a little while to turn a corner. But we've won a number of them. I think we're up over 60, 65, 70 singularity clients now. And we have won some very large, very, very well-known names with $100 billion in assets and over. And we think we'll do very well against Clearwater around.

From Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Raymond James. Could you please provide some commentary on the size, growth trajectory and competitive landscape for Eze?

Yes, I'll take a shot at it. Think as the size and competitive landscape as pretty similar to what we see in our alternatives business and maybe in our Geneva business. Karen talked a little bit in her presentation about how a lot of the Advent sales that we've had are in combination with Eze software. So Infusion is a competitor. We compete against Bloomberg at times. There's a couple of other order management systems. But our advantage is it truly is fully integrated with our fund administration offering and our back-office offering. So if you're going to set up a new firm we can be really strategic and help you take on all of that infrastructure in one place. So that's worked pretty well. Yes, I was just going to say from a growth standpoint, we would expect similar mid-single type digit growth for Eze.

And I think Eze development organization is bigger than an Infusion's organization. So when it comes to innovation, it's not only having capable people, it's having enough capable people and really good management. That's what builds great technology. Because it's difficult. And you're dealing with primadonnas in a development sense that are very valuable everywhere. So it is something where it takes a lot of skill and a lot of management and patience. You've got to lead. And I think that's something that we do pretty well. And I think as win rate against Infusion is 55-45, and I think they've had a lot of customer problems, and I think that we are going to take advantage.

From [ Nishi Mani ] from ExodusPoint. Are some of your smaller SaaS competitors using a grow-at-all-cost strategy to undercut you on price? How do you evaluate the trade-off between growth wins and pricing?

Well, again, we sell to people who are in highly regulated industries, right, that are also generally very, very well paid. And as I'm always explaining to people when the calls come to me or I'm making calls for our sales force. Look, we're both in the transportation business. They're on a horse, we're in a jet. Yes, you're going to pay more, but you're going to get there faster. There's going to be fewer stops and it's going to be worth your while, and we're going to show you why this is very valuable. Occasionally, someone's going to decide that I got enough time, I'm getting on old Betsy and riding across the country on that horse. But not many people that are smart enough to run big asset managers and big hedge funds want to ride a horse across country. So we don't look at it as a way where -- yes, we face pricing pressure from competitors from time to time, but it's a value proposition. Somebody making as much money as a lot of these hedge funds make, they ought to buy the best, right? Because that's what protects their franchise. And I think that's where they see us pouring money into things that are going to help them protect their franchise.

From Andrew Schmidt from Citi. Could you discuss what is driving the average deal sizes up recently? Is it larger client wins? Are clients consuming more products in the initial sale? Or are there other factors?

I think it's both of those things. It's primarily as you kind of saw throughout the course of the day, our various products and services are a lot more collaborative, a lot more integrated. We're going after big enterprise sales where we can offer multiple products and services. So it's definitely, we're doing more for those customers, and therefore, there's more revenue. But it's also the -- this is now a big company compared to a lot of the people that we're competing against, and we have a lot of scale. So bigger and bigger organizations are looking at us as a viable strategic partner of them. And it's both those things.

Yes. And scale is not just the number of people, it's also geographic that we have these talented people like Nick in London, Jude in Sydney, or Mr. Chow in Beijing or whomever, right? We have people over the world that are a consistency, a quality, a capability, backed by a publicly traded company with, in some ways, massive amounts of capital, at least for this space, that there's not stuff that we have to back away from. We just have to choose between great opportunities.

And I think we'll close out with a couple of more questions on capital allocation. So from Surinder Thind at Jefferies. Can you talk about your capital allocation strategy if it were to remain in a multiyear environment where valuations are elevated? Would you commit to larger dividends? Is there a minimum leverage ratio we like to maintain? And in that case, does all excess cash go to share repurchases?

Again, I don't know that we have -- it's not as formulaic for us as it apparently is for Surinder. Of course, he's not doing it. We are. So we're trying to allocate the money to the best way we think, right? Obviously, if you have a debt facility that is 175 basis points, plus 21 basis points of LIBOR. And you have a stock that generates $5 a share in cash and the stock is trading at $80. It's obviously economically way better to buy back shares than it is to pay down that debt. At the same time, right now, I think we're at 2.96x on a total leverage basis. So we're not in -- and I think our interest coverage ratio is maybe 10, something like that. So we're not in any way, shape or form in any -- we are doing what we think it lies. We're not being forced by anyone, by any credit agency or anything like that. But -- and as he rightly pointed out, most assets are at stratospheric pricing levels. And so going into the M&A market right now seems to be a little dicey. So we're trying to be a little circumspect.

And the last question from Pete Heckmann of D.A. Davidson. Given high M&A valuations, would SS&C ever consider divesting any of our businesses?

Does he have a number?

No number on here that I can see.

Once again, right, I mean we have a lot of great businesses, and we've got a lot of great managers, a lot of great capability. As I say, people probably would want you to divest the ones that are growing fastest. So why don't we divest all the ones that are growing fastest. And then Rahul and I and Patrick can sit there and break rocks for another few years. That doesn't sound very attractive to the 3 of us. So we'll probably look at things and if people come in with 20x revenue on something, I hope the wire is ready. But that's not likely to happen, and I think we can execute with what we have now, and we're happy with what we have. But certainly, we have a number of very attractive assets in our portfolio. Thanks, everybody.

All right. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. And if you have any questions or feedback or additional comments, please send me an e-mail, and we'll get back to you. Thank you.