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

Good afternoon. My name is John, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the SS&C Technologies Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to [ Chand Madaca ] of Investor Relations. You may now begin your conference.

Welcome, and thank you for joining us at our Q4 and full year 2024 earnings call. I'm [ Chand Madaca ], Investor Relations at SS&C Technologies. With me today is Bill Stone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rahul Kanwar, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Brian Schell, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, we need to review 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 purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of 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, February 6, 2025. While the company may elect to update these forward-looking statements, it specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. During today's call, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to comparable GAAP financial measures is included in today's earnings release, which is located in the Investor Relations website -- Investor Relations section of our website at ssctech.com. I will now turn over the call to Bill.

Thanks, [ Chand ], and welcome, everyone. I want to welcome [ Chand ] to the Investor Relations team as she steps in while my daughter Justine is on maternity leave, who I'm sure she's listening in, maybe with my grandson who's now 10 days old. Anyway, our fourth quarter results were strong as we set several quarterly records, including a record for adjusted revenue of $1.531 million (sic) [ $1.531 billion ], up 8.4%. Our earnings also set quarterly records with adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.58, up 25.4%, and adjusted consolidated EBITDA of $599.1 million, up 6.5%. Our quarterly adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin was 39.1%. Our fourth quarter adjusted organic revenue growth was 7%. Performance was driven by continued strength in GlobeOp, our Wealth and Investment Technologies business and our Global Investor and Distribution systems businesses -- services businesses. GlobeOp saw new business growth with experienced strength in the wealth-focused software like Black Diamond, and GIDS outperformed due to large client volumes and continued growth in its non-transfer agency services. Additionally, the Health business finished the quarter above expectations with 2 deals that were pushed from Q3 into Q4. Our recurring revenue growth rate for Financial Services was 7.4% for Q4 and 7.2% for full year 2024, which includes all software-enabled services and maintenance revenue. Fourth quarter cash from operating activities was $486.6 million, up 25.3% from Q4 '23. Our cash flow conversion percentage was 101%, and we bought back 4.9 million shares for $365 million at an average price of $74.46 per share. We continue to believe share repurchases are the best use of our capital, absent high-quality accretive acquisition. In December, we announced an initial strategic lift-out agreement with Insignia Financial to deliver superannuation member administrative services in Australia. We're in the final contract stages within Insignia and expect a lift-out of team members in Australia to occur early in the second half of this year. We are bullish about our opportunity in Australia, where we have a 5% market share of the 22 million superannuation fund accounts. I will now turn it over to Rahul to discuss the quarter in more detail.

Thanks, Bill. We had another strong quarter with organic revenue growth of 7%, reflecting the underlying strength of our business. Turning to some business highlights. Wealth and Investment Technologies grew 6.8% for the quarter. The Black Diamond Wealth Platform is growing in the mid-teens. In the investment management industry, Genesis had a year of milestones. We modernized accounting, reconciliation and trading capabilities and merged development efforts for Aloha into the Genesis development team. Our fund administration business, GlobeOp, saw many new business wins in 2024, contributing to organic growth of 8%. Battea contributed an additional $21 million in revenue for the year. In 2025, we see continued opportunity driven by retail alternatives and private markets industry growth. Q4 was also a record bookings and revenue quarter for Intralinks due to solid deal count trends, greater deal length and technological advancements in our offering. Our Global Investor and Distribution Solutions business had another strong quarter and brought in greater revenue at our largest clients in addition to new business wins. I'll now turn it over to Brian to run through the financials.

Thanks, Rahul, and good day, everyone. As noted in our press release, our Q4 '24 GAAP results reflect revenues of $1.53 billion, net income of $248 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.98. Our adjusted non-GAAP results include record revenues of $1.531 billion, an increase of 8.4% over Q4 '23, and record adjusted diluted EPS of $1.58, a 25.4% increase over Q4 '23. The adjusted revenue increase of $118 million over Q4 '23 was primarily driven by incremental revenue contributions from the WIT, GlobeOp, GIDS and Intralinks businesses. The acquisition of Battea contributed $17 million, and foreign exchange had a favorable impact of approximately $2 million. As a result, adjusted organic revenue growth on a constant currency basis was 7%. Our core expenses increased 8.3% or $72 million, which excludes acquisitions and on a constant currency basis. The primary driver of the increased expenses was an increase in incentive, compensation, commissions and wages. Adjusted consolidated EBITDA was $599 million or 39.1% of adjusted revenue, an increase of $37 million or 6.5% from Q4 '23. On a full year basis, adjusted consolidated EBITDA was $2.281 billion, an increase of $173 million or 8.2%. This resulted in a margin of 38.8%, an improvement of 50 basis points compared to last year. Net interest expense for the fourth quarter of '24 was $113 million, a decrease of $6 million from Q4 '23. Adjusted net income was $402 million, up 26.2%. And adjusted diluted EPS was $1.58, an increase of 25.4%. An increase in the average share price drove the diluted share count up to 254.5 million from 254.1 million at Q3 '24. As Bill mentioned several quarters ago, we continue to strategically evaluate our tax rate, which has been at 26% for several years. We looked at what our adjusted tax rate represents and believe it is appropriate to make changes to the way we have computed the rate. The revised effective rate more closely aligns with how we evaluate our financial performance and is more consistent with our peers. As a result, we've revised our full year 2024 non-GAAP effective rate to 23.1% and new effective tax rate attributable to increased deductions related to equity awards, implementation of prudent tax planning strategies domestically and internationally and the mix of earnings in our business jurisdictions. This change increases our reported adjusted EPS by approximately $0.21 in 2024. We will continue pursuing appropriate tax strategies to realize additional benefits going forward. SS&C ended the fourth quarter with $567.1 million in cash and cash equivalents and $7 billion in gross debt. SS&C's net debt, as defined in our credit agreement, which excludes cash and cash equivalents of $155 million held at DomaniRx, was $6.6 billion. Our last 12 months consolidated EBITDA used for covenant compliance was $2.3 billion. Based on net debt of approximately $6.6 billion, our total leverage ratio was 2.89x. As we look forward to the first quarter and full year 2025 with respect to guidance, note that we will continue to focus on client service and assume that retention rates will remain in the range of our most recent results. We'll continue to manage our expenses with a cost disciplined approach by controlling and aligning variable expenses to ensure efficiency, increasing productivity to improve our operating margins, leverage our scale and create capacity and effectively investing in the business through marketing, sales and R&D to take advantage of future revenue and earnings growth opportunities. Specifically, we have assumed foreign currency and interest rates to remain at current levels. We anticipate our full year adjusted tax rate to be 23% to 25%. And as we previously indicated, we will continue to evaluate our tax strategy going forward. As we release our quarterly results in 2025, we will display 2024 adjusted EPS results using the lower adjusted tax rate for the sake of comparability, capital expenditures to be 4.1% to 4.5% of revenues, which is consistent with 2024 guidance and actual results, and a stronger weighting to share repurchases versus debt reduction, subject to changes in market conditions or financing needs. For the first quarter of '25, we expect revenue to be in the range of $1.474 billion to $1.514 billion and 4% organic revenue growth at the midpoint, adjusted net income in the range of $348 million to $364 million, interest expense excluding amortization of deferred financing costs and original issue discount in the range of $104 million to $106 million, diluted shares in the range of 254.6 million to 255.6 million and adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $1.37 to $1.43. For the full year 2025, we expect revenue to be in the range of $6.085 billion to $6.245 billion and 5% organic revenue growth at the midpoint, adjusted net income in the range of $1.431 billion to $1.531 billion, diluted shares in the range of 253.7 million to 256.7 million, adjusted diluted EPS in the range of to $5.64 to $5.96 and cash from operating activities to be in the range of $1.448 billion to $1.548 billion. And now back to Bill.

Thanks, Brian. We closed out a strong 2024 with a record fourth quarter, record revenues, record earnings, record cash flows and a record amount of share repurchases. We had a lot of momentum carrying on into 2025, and we're excited to execute on our plans for investment and growth to deliver long-term shareholder value. I'll now open it up to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Jeff Schmitt with William Blair.

In the Healthcare business, clearly, the tailwind is gone. But could you provide us with more details on client wins in the quarter? And how does the pipeline look for '25?

Hopefully, you meant headwinds are gone?

That's right, headwind. That's right. I'm sorry.

Good. I hate to get confused this early. We won a couple of big license deals in Q4 that really improved Q4 revenues, and we have a lot of momentum there. It's still -- it's big health care companies, and they can tend to be very deliberate in their purchases. But we have some great technology, and we have some great pipelines, and we have some huge health care companies that we're making progress with. So I think that we have a lot of opportunity. It is difficult in health care to be able to really project on a 90-day basis on these enormous insurance and health care companies. So we try to be as prudent and not too conservative, and we try not to stick our neck out too far. So we're optimistic and we're very optimistic on a longer-term basis.

Great. And then could you provide us with an update on the cross-selling efforts with Battea? And how big do you think that revenue opportunity could be?

I think we currently have 75 opportunities -- active opportunities that we have with our current clients. I believe we have already closed somewhere 15, 20 of them, 15 or 20 others. And so I think it could be a pretty large opportunity. I have read some stuff in the industry that says class action lawsuits doubled in 2024. So that would tend to be opportunity for us. And we're looking at the business to grow high single to low double digits. And so it should, in 2025, be upwards to $100 million, $110 million in revenue.

Your next question comes from the line of Alexei Gogolev with JPMorgan.

Bill, 3 months ago, when you provided us with the fourth quarter guidance, expectations for organic growth at the midpoint was below 3%, and you delivered around 7% organic. It sounds like based on what you said in the prepared remarks, there were some deals that slipped from 3Q into 4Q. I was wondering if there were any other surprises in the quarter. Maybe better demand environment or perhaps some deals that closed earlier than expected?

Alexei, I think the business -- a number of the businesses performed very well. And I think that the close rates on the opportunities we had was maybe a little bit better than we expected. And as we said, the Healthcare business also brought in a couple of pretty large license deals. So I think overall, the whole business was a little stronger than we expected. And when things start hitting on a number of cylinders, the business looks pretty strong.

Perfect. And also, kind of directionally, have you had a chance to maybe consider within the team with Rahul and with the rest of the team around recent decision by the European Commission to cut the corporate reporting requirements by almost 1/4? Do you view regulation or deregulation as a risk to your either regulatory business or filing business? And what sort of long-term view do you have for where the industry is heading?

Alexei, I think there's puts and takes on all of this kind of stuff. And the less regulation there are of our clients, the faster they grow. The faster they grow, the better for us. Do we make some money by helping them with regulation? Of course, we do. But we would much prefer them to grow than to be overregulated.

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Perlin with RBC Capital Markets.

Congrats on a good quarter and obviously on your new grandchild, Bill. I wanted to spend a moment, if I could, just in terms of thinking through the investment cycle. You've invested a lot in products and solutions over the past 12 to 18 months. And that's obviously starting to play out in the organic growth. I'm trying to understand kind of the building blocks that you have for the 5% organic growth at the midpoint for '25. I know Healthcare turned positive. And like you said, there's some lumpiness to the license deals, but it seems like it's going to be just a lot more sustainable at those levels. And I just want to kind of get your thoughts on what your view is there and maybe the key components to that.

Yes. I mean, Dan, you've been around SS&C for a while, and you understand that when we are heavily weighted towards licenses, then it's pretty lumpy. When we are bringing in large-scale services business, it tends to grow as more and more of their accounts, more and more of their portfolios, more and more of the services we provide start going live. So we can have a client that's going to pay us $20 million a year and it doesn't ramp up for 2, 3, 4 quarters. It might start at $2 million, $3 million a quarter and $6 million to $8 million and then $10 million to $15 million and then gets $20 million. And so it's that kind of a business. It's just that we have increasingly larger footprint around the world. And 5, 6 years ago, we were spending $200 million to $250 million on sales and marketing. Now we're spending $550 million to $600 million on sales and marketing. We think some of it works. Sometimes we wonder, but we think some of it works.

Yes, totally seeing the results. So one other just quick thing, if I could. Bill, I've heard you at conferences also speak about the superannuation opportunity in Australia, and you've got this lift-out. Would you mind just maybe spending just a minute kind of level setting what you think of that market, how big it could be? I know you said you got 5% market share, so there's a huge opportunity. But I'm just not as familiar with who the major players are there and what that competitive dynamic is and therefore what your real opportunity is.

Yes. Again, we've been in the Australian market for quite a while. And I think that the superannuation has been built based on some acquisitions that we've done like Iress and then also about the capabilities that we built out in our own development cycles. And they call superannuation the wall of money. So I think it really is a pretty brilliant national program that Australia has put in. And it is something where we think we have the best technology, and we think we have a really good team. We have some really great customers. And those are the kinds of things that really are the ingredients of increased growth, increased client access to our technology and increased profitability for us.

Your next question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann with D.A. Davidson.

Sorry, someone poked their head in, so I hope someone hasn't already asked my question. But in Insignia Financial, can you talk about that deal a little bit, whether you've included anything in your 2025 guidance? And then if you could maybe size a little bit in terms of what should we be thinking about in terms of like an annual revenue contribution?

Pete, I don't know if we want to get quite as granular as an individual client's contribution. But it's a very large deal. It would be probably in the top 20 in our client base, and top 20 at SS&C is a pretty big fish in our book. And -- but there's a lot of work to be done, and we need to focus on that client satisfaction and giving them increased capabilities as they become an increasingly large money manager and retirement manager for a bunch of Australians, and that's what we're focused on. And they've been a really great prospect, and we've moved a very long on way. And like I said, it should be a very significant client for us. And we're going to get most of the revenue from them in the second half of '25 as we hope to get contracts finalized by the end of this quarter and begin the entire implementation process in Q2.

Okay. And then just in terms of this most recent acquisition, FPS Trust, I didn't ping Brian yet. I haven't got any ideas in terms of like sizing or price. Would you characterize that as a relatively small tuck-in deal or something a bit bigger?

It is a small tuck-in deal, but it also gives us a real capability that allows us to really leverage what we've done with Trust Suite and other things of the merging of some of the stuff with the Intertrust acquisition and Black Diamond and other things where we have really had a focus and are getting quite good...

Your next question comes from the line of Kevin McVeigh with UBS.

Let me add my congratulations to you as well, Bill, on your grandson. I guess if you -- the midpoint of 2025 was 5%. What would be the low end of that organically? And what would be the high end of that? And any kind of factors as to what gets you to the low end as opposed to the high end?

I think in general, the way we bookmark these things is roughly $80 million in revenue on either side of the number. So I think that's -- that $160 million is probably a reasonable range. I think as Bill said earlier, what we feel good about is we have all of our businesses performing reasonably well, right? And so there's a lot of strength in that combined business. And as we're bringing solutions together across the company, we think that we have more sales opportunities, both for new clients as well as getting deeper with current client base. So there's a lot of positive. But really, to answer your question, the things that make us go a little bit towards the lower end of the range versus a little bit towards the higher end of the range really does come down to new sales, timing of implementations and making sure we get those converted and live fast enough for them to make a meaningful difference during the course of the year and a little bit organic things or macroeconomic things like deal volume and Intralinks and fund flows in fund administration. But those are generally speaking, not as important as the first 2.

Super helpful. And then just real quick. Obviously, the Healthcare business looks terrific. It sounds like that was some software sales. Is that a pretty good proxy? Like is there any type of leading indicator that, that leads to maybe larger contracts? Or how do you think about 2025 or going into '26? Or is that kind of independent?

That's probably mostly independent, Kevin. But I do think that what is going on in health care is that they're under pressure because the loss ratios in medical have gotten more expensive for them. And they're looking for ways in which to have lower operating expenses, and DomaniRx and a few other of our technologies are quite good at being able to manage your expenses. And that's something where they're going to have to do it because the entire health care ecosystem is going to be probably turned a little bit upside down as this new administration starts to make changes to the Medicare and Medicaid systems. And I don't think they're going to lower them -- lower the expenses, but I do think they're going to focus on efficiency and effectiveness.

Makes a lot of sense. Congratulations on the really terrific results.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Schmidt with Citi.

Congrats on the organic growth here. It's great to see. Maybe just dig into GlobeOp for a second. Nice to see the acceleration there. Maybe we could just unpack the drivers this quarter over the past few quarters across price markets, hedge funds, real assets, any callouts in terms of the growth drivers. And obviously, middle and back office, where the opportunities are.

I think a lot of it is just -- it's a continuation of what we've seen in the last couple of years. So private markets, private credit, real estate continues to be very strong for us. And in that space, in particular, it's both opportunities with existing very large funds that are letting us in now and giving us more and more as well as new funds that, for the most part, outsource on day 1. And we still think there's a lot of new opportunity in that market. Our hedge fund business is also performing and performed really well in 2024, and that's a combination of new client wins as well as we're now fortunate in the sense that we have some of the biggest names in the industry, and they have tended to attract almost a disproportionate share of the fund allocation. So our clients are getting bigger. That helps us. We're winning more, and we have a pretty broad opportunity across both hedge and private markets.

That's great to hear, Rahul. Appreciate that. And then maybe just 2 other questions, separate areas. I'll ask them upfront. Just GlobeOp, how to think about the range of outcomes for '25 in terms of baking in. And then just separately, obviously, automation continues to be a big opportunity for you guys. Just maybe give us an update in terms of where you're at in terms of automating key functions. And I know some of that is reinvesting in product, et cetera, but where we're at in terms of that initiative.

Yes. Just building on what Rahul said, I mean, we honestly believe that we're the best fund administrator in the world, both for hedge assets as well as private assets, whether it's equity or credit or others. So having the expertise that we have and the clients that we have who are demanding, which improves us. When you play in the biggest games, you get better or you don't get to play in the biggest games anymore. So most of the large-scale macro hedge funds are our clients, and I believe we will continue to have them as our clients. And as Rahul said, as they get bigger, they get some real star portfolio managers. And those star portfolio managers sometimes spin out, and that helps us a lot again. That's what we always say that we much prefer that our clients grow and that they get overregulated. We are much more in really helping our clients access new markets, have the range of what they want to invest in always at the broadest level if there are clients and that there are no geographic limitations if you're a client of us. So we think those are very valuable to people. And I think that we have won a lot of business because we have invested very heavily in being able to deliver those capabilities.

Got it. And then just on the automation side?

That's primarily been driven by Blue Prism. I think we're up to about 1,550, what we call digital workers. And the savings for us are moving above $150 million towards $200 million in savings. And another thing we've done is if you look at it, I think about 5, 6 years ago, we spent, like I said, $200 million, $250 million on sales and marketing. Then we spent $550 million to $600 million on sales and marketing. If you look at R&D, it's very similar, where we're spending way more than we did 5 and 6 years ago. And it's a little bit because we decided to rather than drive up our margins, we wanted to reinvest in the business and try to drive organic revenue growth. And you got to do that with new products, new services, and it's not without risk of its own. Not that we don't build great software. And oftentimes, we're successful in building great software. And other times, we're not quite as successful in building great software. So it's a difficult business, and we focus on it, and we think that's something that gives us competitive advantage and will continue to give us competitive advantage.

As there are no further questions at this time, that concludes the Q&A session for today. I would now like to turn the call over to Bill Stone for closing remarks.

Again, we really appreciate you all being on the call. And I knew I had to bring up my new grandson so you wouldn't pick on me. But I think we had good enough numbers so that we didn't have to worry about that too much, and you're going to have to have another one soon. So anyway, I really appreciate you being on. And I think that it's always amazing when it's only Rahul and I have to answer and Brian doesn't. That must mean he had really good numbers in the quarter. Enjoy your week. Thanks for being on. Bye.

This concludes today's meeting. Thank you for your partition. You may now disconnect.