Verisk Analytics, Inc. (VRSK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
March 2, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Charles Peters
analystAll right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to the continuing schedule of day 2 for the Raymond James 42nd Annual Institutional Investors Conference. This year, like so many other events, we're doing this virtually, as everyone knows. And I really am honored to welcome back Verisk, the management team from Verisk to present before a conference. They've been a participant in our conference for, oh boy, I want to say maybe 10 years or so. And really, it's been one of the -- of my companies, one of the more popular presenting companies. And this year, certainly with some of the challenges that they've reported, I anticipate that there is going to be strong interest. So let's start. From -- so from management, we have Stacey Brodbar, who serves as the Investor Relations Officer; and then Lee Shavel, who is Group President and Chief Financial Officer. [Operator Instructions]
Charles Peters
analystSo there is a lot of ground to cover over the course of the next 40 minutes. And I know we're going to spend a big chunk of time dealing with the Financial Services business and the Energy business. But before we get there, I thought we -- I'd like to give you the opportunity to talk about the biggest piece of business for Verisk, which is the Insurance business. It's been doing -- performing very well, and I'd like to get your perspectives on what the key drivers are growth for that business, the sustainability of the growth of that business. And how the margin outlook for that business?
Lee Shavel
executiveExcellent. Well, Greg, first of all, thanks to you and Raymond James for allowing us to participate in this conference once again. I really consider it one of the best venues to meet with investors, talk about the business, and really the turnout that you receive continues to be really exceptional. And I think that the last time Stacey and I were traveling, it was actually on our way down and back from the conference. And I never thought that I would necessarily say that I'm looking -- would look forward to spending a full day in the Cabanas within the major ballroom with all of the buzz of conversations. But I have to tell you, I genuinely miss that opportunity to get in front of people and to see everybody at the conference. So we'll make do this year, but hopefully, by next year. And well before that, we'll have the opportunity to begin meeting face and face with investors again. But with that, let me turn to your question, Greg, specific to the Insurance segment of the business. And you're absolutely right, we continue to be very pleased with the resilience, the strength of the growth opportunity reflected in our Insurance business across both the underwriting and the claims side, and the 2 elements that continue to drive our growth in that business. The fundamental secular trends that enable us to grow our revenues and our profitability, well in excess of generally the insurance industry growth rates, is that we have rapidly growing numbers of data sets that have relevance to the insurance industry. So the supply of what we have to work with in informing the insurance industry about their risks, about their underwriting, about their claims, processes, costs and the rest continues to grow. And we simultaneously have increasing demand from the insurance industry in a variety of areas for the application of these new data sets to help them become more efficient, more effective in what they're doing. And that is something that we experience across almost every one of our product sets. And our opportunity from an investor standpoint is to continue to invest behind those opportunities to develop a new product, a lot of that investment is in the form of internally developed software that adds a new feature, implements a new data set, integrates with an API for our clients that we can monetize effectively across all of our industry relationships. In addition, there is an underlying economic equation that works in our benefit, and that's something that we take very seriously, and that is investing on behalf of the insurance industry. Our ability to make investments in gathering data sets, standardizing them and utilizing them for benchmarking and other purposes is something that we can do much more efficiently for the industry than if they were to do that individually. And that's a fundamental value proposition that I think supports our ability to grow and support this industry because of our scale, our relationship and our points of interaction. It's something that we try to use to inform our growth strategy across all of our industry sets, but it's probably most powerfully in place in insurance. So in 2020, we clearly had growth that was influenced at one level by the pandemic, and in that regard, we certainly saw, among some of our COVID-sensitive revenues in insurance, our claims, analytics department, our travel insurance department, certain elements of our underwriting areas clearly felt some of the pressures of the pandemic in that context. But in our non-COVID-sensitive revenues, we continue to see very solid growth rates across the business, reflecting those secular trends. Further, I would note that over the course of the year, we saw the Insurance segment showed the most recovery. And in fact, in the fourth quarter, we actually saw an improvement in our year-over-year growth rates in our COVID-sensitive revenues, reflecting on a faster recovery and less influence of the impact of this pandemic on the Insurance business. And so that certainly puts us in a position as we go into 2021, while we will still have a pre-pandemic and a post-pandemic quarter comparison in the first quarter. I think we move into the remainder of the year, we will have very, very solid comparisons relative to 2020 that will give us the opportunity to demonstrate recovering growth on that front. So those are some of the longer-term, secular influences that remain very much in place and some of the shorter-term challenges that we think will continue to drive the business. The final thing that I will say and echo some of Scott's comments on the earnings call is that we've been very pleased with the performance of a number of our acquisitions, including the FAST acquisition, the Franco Signor acquisition, where our focus has been looking at businesses where we can make an investment and then leverage either our distribution strength, our technological and data science capabilities to really add value to these entities. And so far, we have been meeting or exceeding our original expectations on that deal, which through the disruption of the pandemic and a lot of renewed operations, we think, is a tremendous accomplishment. So Greg, hopefully, that's enough on the -- or that addresses your question on the Insurance side, but happy to drill into that further.
Charles Peters
analystWe're going to -- one more. I'm going to close out the insurance discussion with one more question because this comes up a lot in the insurance industry. You have insurance brokers and underwriters report, in part, improving either EBITDA margins or expense ratios due, in part, to the reduction in T&E. And your margins in your Insurance operations certainly expanded faster than your organic. So first, talk about what's transient, what's permanent there? And then segue into just the organic revenue, long-term targets for not only the Insurance business, but then we can branch off into the other segments as well.
Lee Shavel
executiveSure. Thanks, Greg. So our fundamental long-term model for the Verisk Enterprise as a whole is to deliver 7% organic constant currency revenue growth. And through the implicit operating leverage within our business to deliver 7.5% or higher EBITDA growth against that revenue growth, reflecting the operating leverage. And those targets remain in place for our business. In 2020, we clearly saw the impact of the pandemic, which pulled our growth rates down slightly from where we were relative to our target. But as you alluded to, a variety of cost steps that we've taken enabled us to actually improve our operating leverage. And so because we were able to manage our headcount very closely, we were able to reduce T&E -- effectively eliminate T&E. We have an incentive cost structure that is responsive to our performance against our revenue and EBITDA growth rates. We were able to deliver substantially higher EBITDA growth across all of our businesses as a whole, but it fundamentally was a fact that we saw some cost benefits emanating and some cost controls in this environment that allowed us to elevate EBITDA growth. Effectively, expense growth, we were able to control below a lower revenue growth. Now as we move into 2021, we are expecting that there will still be pandemic-influenced effects on our revenue growth. Although we would expect that as the pandemic recedes and as we are looking at kind of post -- after pre-pandemic comparisons, that we'll see recovery in a number of our revenue streams. We also expect, along with that, simultaneously, a normalization of some of our cost factors, meaning that some of the controls that we put in place on headcount, we will begin to normalize. T&E should, with any success in moving away from the pandemic, begin to normalize. And certainly, our incentive structure will be responsive to improvements in our growth rates. So that well put us in a position where we have potentially higher growth rates in expenses relative to the prior year as we normalize. And that's critical because a lot of our opportunity to sustain our growth rate requires putting people, putting capital against those growth opportunities, and we believe that's the right long-term decision for the business and for shareholders. Although the consequence, it will probably be in 2021 that some of the operating leverage gains that we made, particularly on the T&E side, some of that will come back. And so as we've talked about in some of the more recent quarters, we had about a 200 basis point benefit simply from T&E. Now we don't expect all of that to come back, and we're going to try to hold on to as much of that as we possibly can. We're also going to try to calibrate our headcount growth to the revenue growth experience over time. And so our objective will be to try to hold on to some of that operating leverage, but I think the normalization factor will certainly cause our margins to give up a little bit of that advantage. That being said, I think our expectation is that we still will be between our 2019 margin levels and our 2020 margin levels, reflecting some of the permanent gains that we've made since then.
Charles Peters
analystExcellent. And this is a great segue because I think you talked about 7% targeted organic revenue growth for your segments. So let's pivot to the Energy business because that business had some obvious pressure last year. Do you think that business can grow again? Can you -- let's just talk about -- let's spend the next couple of minutes talking about the outlook for the energy business, given the challenges you reported last year. And how you're thinking about it? Especially in the context of your new role as Group President.
Lee Shavel
executiveYes. Thank you, Greg. So I think we certainly remain very convinced of the secular growth opportunities in the Energy industry as a whole, meaning that we continue to see both those twin engines of growing data sets of relevance to the industry and increasing demand by players in the Energy industry for those data and analytics, which will support that growth overtime. Now near term, we are experiencing the more intensive cyclical impact on our business, particularly in our consulting business, which is, we have characterized in our group of 15% of our revenues that are more COVID sensitive. But let me talk first about the subscription-oriented elements of the business. Now our thesis for, since we made the acquisition, has been to take what were great research and consulting businesses, where the Wood Mackenzie brand and expertise is respected around the globe, and to utilize those data elements in a way to provide more data and analytics services to our client base and expand that client base, opening up new channels of growth and improving the operating leverage of the business. And the team there has made tremendous strides against that goal in a variety of ways, but probably, most prominently in the investment and the implementation of our Lens platform. The Lens platform has served as a cloud-based data environment in which we have been migrating our data sets into that platform to allow our clients to interact with it directly, to facilitate our ability to associate data sets across commodity groups and Energy groups, both on the supply and the demand side and to be able to find new ways to create analytics and monetize that. And probably one of the most practical pieces of evidence that we have of the value of that platform is that the Wood Mackenzie team has demonstrated the ability to secure pricing improvements in our renewing contracts that are reflective of the value that we've invested. In some cases, we've had high single digits and other low double-digit price increases, reflecting the value that our clients see in that platform, and what they're able to utilize it for both to broaden their exposure to what's happening in the energy industry and to improve their productivity as they analyze this environment, particularly as the energy transition becomes increasingly important to how any participant in the energy market performs. So in 2020, notwithstanding all of the pressure that we felt from the pandemic and the decline in commodity prices, we were able to achieve organic revenue growth in our subscriptions over that period as a function of that investment. And I think that's indicative of what our opportunity is as the energy industry adopts more and more data. So we feel as though that's a great accomplishment, certainly muted by the experience that we've had understandably in our consulting business, where that business has been down roughly 30% year-over-year at a consistent level. But we expect -- we are currently feeling more engagement on the front end of that pipeline as our clients either encouraged by improving asset prices or by anticipation of greater energy demand as we come out of the pandemic. So we are hopeful that we see in 2021 some improvement in that, but it has been stable. And then longer term, we also are very excited about the opportunity that PowerAdvocate is pursuing on the cost side to help our clients understand their OpEx spending, their capital spending to improve their overall efficiency. Certainly, in this environment, that's going to be an ongoing focus for them. So overall, I think we remain very constructive on the opportunity for the energy business as we pursue this broader goal of really playing a similar function as we do in the insurance industry to the energy from where we sit.
Charles Peters
analystGreat. And I'm going to try -- there is a question on the side here, and it does, in part, relate to the energy business. But obviously, it can be a broader question to all 3 segments. But let's focus on the Energy component for the time being because that's where you are. Can you talk about some of the competitive landscape? I think IHS acquisition of Platts last year was something that was out there that create some change in the marketplace. Also, there is a question here, did you look at any parts of IHS when S&P bought it?
Lee Shavel
executiveYes. So -- and so just to be clear on the entities. So S&P, who owns Platts, acquired IHS as a separate entity. And so let me put those in context. So first, we have a great deal of respect for both S&P and Platts and IHS. I do want to make a differentiation, and I think a lot of investors that are familiar with Wood Mackenzie franchise and the IHS franchise will appreciate this. Wood Mackenzie has always been primarily focused on commercial value of the participants and the entities in the Energy industry. And it comes from their heritage as originally a research and brokerage firm, but what they're focused on is, what is the commercial value implications of trends in the Energy industry. What are the impact on the value of assets that contribute to the value of these entities. And IHS really specialized in a lot of detailed operating data that was incredibly valuable and useful and a great franchise, but really more focused on the engineering and the operating side. There were areas of overlap between the two, but we, kind of, were pursuing very different missions in terms of how to utilize that data. So that's by way of saying that the acquisition by S&P, from our perspective, doesn't impinge on our commercial opportunity and the focus of what we're doing. We're going to continue to stay very focused on energy and looking for ways to advise our clients and our companies on what's happening within the industry as a whole. So it's -- I think the point that I want to make is that we don't see it as having a material impact on the competitive environment based upon what we understand the businesses to be.
Charles Peters
analystGreat. And thank you for clearing up my question for me. Just a final question on Energy. And that is -- let's go against the broader corporate targets where you're looking for 7% organic growth longer term and slightly better than that expansion in your margin. And can you talk about how you think about the energy business in the context of those corporate, large targets? And specifically, I guess, you got to break out [indiscernible] the subscription and the consulting piece because obviously, one can really come back at the right time and see the numbers.
Lee Shavel
executiveRight. No, thanks for the follow-up on that, Greg. I wanted to incorporate that into the answer. And so certainly, we have to kind of factor in some of the cyclical elements into this. And so our consulting business is going to see variability in those growth rates, given that cycle. We would expect over time as we grow the other areas of the business that becomes less of an influence on our overall growth rates, but it's -- undeniably, it has a factor in the growth performance in any given period. What I would describe in terms of the energy business as a whole against that target, we continue to believe that 7% organic growth within that business is achievable over the long term, as we continue on this journey of identifying new data and analytics businesses. And what I would point to is that within that business, if I were to look at our Energy transition business, our chemicals business, the metals and mining, the impact, if I were to isolate Lens as a product set -- and I think it's important to make it clear, it's a platform that we are extending our existing data sets through. But if I were to think of that as a product, we clearly are generating growth within that business. And I would add PowerAdvocate to that over the recent past of generating growth rates that are higher than that target. We have some more mature businesses on the established research side that are very valuable businesses, but they're obviously lower than that. And our expectation is that as we continue to develop internally as well as finding externally businesses that have great penetration opportunity into the Energy industry space that the mix will shift where we'll have more of those high-growth businesses that lift our growth rate as we execute against that opportunity in the Energy space. So naturally, in 2021, we're still going to be feeling those pressures, but beyond that, we'll continue on this mission of developing those higher growth opportunities, particularly comprehensively across the Energy transition. And this is where the Genscape acquisition is incredibly important to us because it's providing real-time data on the -- on relative flows of energy across the power grid, which is very relevant. So it's kind of a tying together, which opens up new analytical and commercial value analysis opportunities. That's the way I would think about it. We're on a path. We've demonstrated progress in subscription growth and higher growth businesses that should allow us to achieve that longer-term organic growth target.
Charles Peters
analystExcellent. And I think this is a good time, we're going to segue into Financial Services. And I know you wanted to spend some time talking about that. Before we do that, there was an announcement about the shift in management in terms of your promotion to Group President. Before we go on to Financial Services, this is actually related to that. Can you talk about the management changes? What it means? And currently, now that you're in part responsible in looking over Financial Services, what your views are there, please?
Lee Shavel
executiveSure. And Greg, it's -- first of all, I'm very flattered to have the opportunity. I'm flattered to have the opportunity to work alongside Mark Anquillare, who has been a great partner to me as we've work together on the business. But the fundamental decision was that as I think we've really brought the finance organization into a very strong place, implementing our capital allocation model, the return on investment-oriented framework, improvements in our treasury, procurement, Investor Relations side, we feel as though that part of the business is in very solid shape. I expressed interest in finding ways that I could be helpful to the rest of the business. And we determined that perhaps, it would be a good opportunity for me to supplement some of those experiences with the operating experience in the Energy and the Financial Services business, which I'm delighted to have and to work with these management teams that I've spent a lot of time with as the CFO. So what does it mean? Well, I certainly think it means that there is a fresh set of eyes that look at the business with a financial perspective and a focus on where are we investing, how are we creating value, what are the right long-term decisions for and how we proceed against these opportunities. And I'm looking forward to working with [ teams ] to better understand that and really build kind of a bottoms-up perspective to complement kind of the top-down analysis that we're looking at. So that really is -- at this stage, the primary focus is in understanding and evaluating without any preconceived notions about where the businesses are at this stage.
Charles Peters
analystExcellent. So this is a perfect time to pivot to the Financial Services business. It's in turnaround mode. It seems like you still have a couple of tough quarters in terms of comparisons to deal with. Talk to us about your perspectives on the business that they obviously just -- you just reported of what you think the next couple of quarters are going to look like? And ultimately, I mean, you've introduced a level of capital discipline and investment discipline into Verisk. I think a lot of shareholders appreciate. At some point, if the business isn't there would Verisk consider selling it?
Lee Shavel
executiveYes. So let me start, and I'll work to your question overall. So one thing that I think everyone certainly appreciates is the extraordinary quality of the data set that we're very fortunate to have in the Financial Services business, the value and the potential to monetize that. I also want to point out that we have tremendous data science expertise that emanates from that business that we've been able to leverage across our business into the Lens platform at Wood Mackenzie in a variety of ways, as we have dealt with much larger data sets on the insurance side, particularly in the telematics area as well as at AIR, in our risk modeling business, as we're ingesting a lot of new data streams. So there is fundamentally that equation of increasing data sets, increasing demand for clients for that business. Now I certainly understand and appreciate that the results in the fourth quarter were clearly a sequential step down from the third quarter, and there were some environmental influences as well as some structural influences that contributed to that. And I wanted -- we spent a little bit of time on the earnings call talking about it, and I want to spend a little bit more time. Clearly, there are elements, such as in our bankruptcy business where bankruptcy levels are depressed. Personal bankruptcies are down about 30% year-over-year as a function of the level of government support. And so that has been a factor. Lower advertising due to less physical advertising on billboards and buses and subways has influenced that business from a growth perspective. And as I talked about, the banks pulled back a little bit, anticipating some higher credit losses on the level of project analysis work that we would typically expect in the fourth quarter. So all of those reflected on the pandemic influences that I think are understandable, but which we fundamentally understand as a temporary impact that should recover as the pandemic recedes. And we knew at the outset that we had a higher level of exposure to our revenues within that business than any other business and that it may be a slower recovery time. Now that is part of what contributed to the 14% decline year-over-year in revenues in the fourth quarter, but it was only about half -- roughly half of that amount. The other portion of that related to what we referred to in the earnings call as contract transitions. Some of them were contracts that we had, for instance, in our bankruptcy business, where we had a reseller relationship decided to exit that relationship, which had an influence. But we also had some restructuring of contracts to shift our approach in the business from a more upfront oriented revenue realization to realizing the revenue by structuring the contract in more of an ongoing and recurring basis. And so what that precipitated was a reduction in near-term revenues which is -- which will naturally be felt in that existing -- in that current period, but an extension of those revenues over a longer period. And the combination of those effects, which are finite and determined, contributed approximately the other 7% of the decline that we reported in the fourth quarter. And to kind of give some sense of that ongoing impact, we expect that element to continue proportionately to have a similar impact over the first 3 quarters of 2021, at which point in the fourth quarter, those transitions will have fully anniversaried and will no longer be a structural headwind within the business. Now with those 2 pieces, the final thing that I wanted to say is, all of that has obscured fundamental progress that the management team has made in building organic subscription growth. And while it's not tremendous growth, we actually saw in the fourth quarter year-over-year organic growth, and for the year as a whole, aggregate growth in our subscription revenues, which we certainly think is evidence of the progress against the most important element of our business and the most sizable element within it, but it's clearly been kind of overwhelmed by the near-term impacts of the pandemic and some of these structural changes. So hopefully, that gives a little bit more context. I think the upshot is, look, 2021 will continue to face the impact of the pandemic. Hopefully, that abates over time. We have the structural changes that will exist at approximately the same level through the first 3 quarters, but will be eliminated in the fourth. And then we will have underneath that ongoing growth in our subscription business as we pursue and continue to invest in the opportunities to leverage our data sets.
Charles Peters
analystGreat. And one adjacent question to that. It was sort of asked by one of the listeners is, as you go through this process of evaluation, is it possible that you consider streamlining some of the portfolio? We -- at times, we'll see other companies do sort of like mini restructuring, things like that. Is there anything -- I guess, everything is on the table at this point, but is there any color you can add to those questions?
Lee Shavel
executiveYes. And thank you for circling back to that, Greg. I was focused on the detail, but I did not mean to avoid that. For all of our businesses, we are able to look at the level of return that we're generating, our projections, not just in the current year, but what do our long-range forecasts represent. We're always subjecting those to scrutiny and to challenge. And if we feel as though there is an opportunity for us to achieve greater value for our shareholders within those businesses rather than owning them, then we have to be subject and open to that discipline. At this point, we continue to believe that the opportunity, particularly as we get cyclical recovery, remains promising. But we're also mindful of valuation levels and activity within the sector, and as I indicated in terms of the responsibilities, we're going to take a very clear-sided analysis of where we stand, where we're investing, what our returns are and where can we create the most value for shareholders.
Charles Peters
analystRight. And as I said, one of the other questions, you've introduced a level of capital allocation kind of approach to capital, investment in capital, investment initiatives that the discipline has been a welcome change for the company and for shareholders. Talk about capital allocation, if you will, and what your view is, in the current environment and also maybe include in the couple of minutes left some comments around the M&A environment.
Lee Shavel
executiveSure. And thanks for kind of teeing it up in that way because first of all, we look at capital allocation on as holistic a basis as we have, by which I mean, we want to deploy capital at scale wherever we see the best returns within the business. And one of the fundamental value creation elements that I see that attracted me to Verisk at the outset was the opportunity to deploy capital across a wide variety of opportunities within our existing businesses where we could leverage that existing presence, scale, industry expertise to generate high internal rates of return. And the business has, I think, a great track record of demonstrating that opportunity. Simultaneously, we also don't want to miss opportunities to deploy capital within acquisitions where we think that we can generate a good return, and specifically, create more value by leveraging our distribution capabilities to the Insurance or the Energy or the Financial Services industry, leverage our data, scale and capabilities to improve product sets or integrate them into our existing product sets. And so we will simultaneously look across both of those ranges. We generate a lot of capital, and we're looking for where we can deploy that capital to generate returns in excess of our cost of capital. The balance between internal and external is going to be driven by returns, but also the supply available to us. In the M&A market, we continue to see a lot of new ideas, new companies, but valuation levels remain very high. There is obviously a lot of enthusiasm for kind of high-growth, data-oriented businesses, which makes our discipline all the more important so that we aren't simply chasing a trend and accepting the valuation levels as a rationale for us to make an acquisition. And that's where I'm probably -- Greg, and I appreciate your comments earlier, I'm probably most proud of the progress that we've made in our M&A diligence and execution front, where we require the business units to sponsor a transaction and really have accountability for delivering on the specific benefits and value creation and synergies that we believe at the outset. And I think that shift our focus on integrating effectively, leveraging our resources and assets where we can has created improved performance in terms of certainly our performance against our original expectations, but also specifically, in achieving what we think are attractive returns and appropriate returns of capital on that investment. So that overall is how we try to balance it, very excited about what we can do internally. We're going to continue to stay engaged on the M&A side. We're particularly excited about what we've accomplished with FAST, with Franco Signor so far. You've recently seen the acquisition of Jornaya, which adds an additional analytical tool kit on the marketing front that we think will be very additive across our Insurance and Financial Services franchise. And we'll constantly be subjecting our businesses to the discipline of returns to make sure we're allocating that capital. And wherever we can't generate good returns, we'll be returning that to shareholders in the dividend, which we increased as well as share repurchases.
Charles Peters
analystExcellent. And we only have a minute left. So I wanted to give you a cleanup. One investor asked about -- just a quick answer on the energy business, how much is consulting versus subscription on a revenue basis for 2020? And then also, if you could give us just a quick summary of sort of how you're thinking about CapEx for 2021?
Lee Shavel
executiveYes. So I think the proportion in Energy is roughly 80% subscription, 20% consulting within that business. And there are some consulting elements at PowerAdvocate, so that's a blend across all of the businesses within Energy and specialized markets. With regard to CapEx, we came out with guidance in the fourth quarter earnings call. That reflects a slightly higher level of CapEx spending that is a function not of a change in our capital intensity, but due to delays from the pandemic, there were some real estate-related CapEx associated with our centralization of our locations in London and Boston that got pushed out into 2021 from 2020 due to some of those delays. So we continue to expect to bring down our overall CapEx intensity overtime relative to its peak when we were investing more heavily in some of our aerial imagery businesses.
Charles Peters
analystOkay. So we've hit the 40-minute mark. And before we close out this Zoom conference, I thought I'd just give you a final opportunity to leave, If there is any, parting last comment or two that you'd like to make to audiences listening in. I wanted to give you that opportunity.
Lee Shavel
executiveWell, thanks, Greg. I would say, the one thing in light of where we are in the moment and given kind of where kind of the market response to our fourth quarter results, I would just reemphasize the secular growth drivers for all of our businesses, on the data sets and the analytics front, remain very firmly in place. The insurance business continues to find great opportunities to develop growth and invest in growth. The energy business, we continue making clear progress in our path of becoming more data analytics, more growth oriented as we open new channels there as well as operating leverage. And in Financial Services, we're clearly feeling the pressure of the pandemic, but we've been making very clear progress, both contractually and from a financial perspective to put this business in a position where I think its underlying growth opportunity remains very, very evident. And we appreciate your patience as we go through that, but all of those strengths of our business remain very clearly intact.
Charles Peters
analystExcellent. Well, thank you very much for your participation, Stacey and Lee. And thank you for everyone for listening in, and have a great afternoon.
Lee Shavel
executiveSuper. Thank you, Greg.
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