SS&C Technologies - Q1 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Thank you for standing by. My name is Krista, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the SS&C Technologies First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Justine Stone, Head of Investor Relations. Justine, you may begin your conference.

Justine Stone (Head of Investor Relations)

Welcome, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm Justine Stone, Investor Relations for 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 the 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 our 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, April 25th, 2024. 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 section of our website at www.ssctech.com. I will now turn the call over to Bill.

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Justine, and thanks, everyone. Our first quarter results are record adjusted revenue of $1,435,800,000, up 5.3%, and our adjusted diluted earnings per share were $1.28, 12.3% increase. Adjusted consolidated EBITDA was $556.8 million for the quarter, a record high for our Q1, and our EBITDA margin came in at 38.8%. Our first quarter adjusted organic revenue growth was 4.7%. The first quarter revenue acceleration was driven by strength in our alternatives, retirement, Intralinks, and ALPS Advisors businesses. Our recurring revenue growth rate for Financial Services was 6.5%, which includes all software-enabled services and maintenance revenue.

For the three months ended March 31, 2024, cash from operating expenses from operating revenue was $180.5 million. We paid down $79.9 million in debt in Q1 2024, bringing our net leverage ratio to 2.95 times and our net secured leverage ratio to 2.02 times. We bought back 800,000 shares for $52.9 million at an average price of $63.24. The internal deployment of Blue Prism digital workforce across SS&C continues to go well. The 150 basis point year-over-year increase in our EBITDA margin can be attributable in large part to this initiative. A recent Forrester study found an average SS&C Blue Prism client, so our return on investment figure of 330% over three years.

The key benefits include business growth, improved productivity, compliance, cost avoidance, and improved employee experience and retention. As one of the largest users of Blue Prism technology, we are experiencing these results firsthand. Earlier this month, we held our first delivery [audio distortion], which was held at the Fairmont in Windsor, in the U.K., hosting over 250 clients. The enthusiasm and energy over the two-day event was evident, and we've received universal positive feedback. I'll now turn the call over to Rahul to discuss the quarter in more detail.

Rahul Kanwar (President and COO)

Thanks, Bill. Our business had a strong quarter with notable strength in Intralinks, retirement, and Wealth and Investment Technologies. We saw improvement in software purchasing and long-term renewal decisions in Q1, which positively impacts our software businesses. This past quarter, we combined our Institutional and Investment Management, or I&IM, business with Wealth and Investment Technologies, led by Karen Geiger and Steve Leivent. This change allows us to align several of our software products and services geared toward banks, insurance companies, and wealth and asset managers. Our objectives are to enable accelerated innovation, take advantage of scale to deliver enterprise solutions, and benefit from a consistent sales and marketing process. We also combined our retirement business with Global Investor and Distribution Solutions in order to deliver a seamless customer experience to our shared clients, and once again, take advantage of greater scale and resources.

Initial feedback from our customers on these changes has been very positive. We continue to progress on optimizing our cost base and strengthening our offering through use of Blue Prism and other AI and automation technologies. In our fund services business, notable capabilities include intelligent automation that processes over 2 million loan notices each year, enabling customer interaction and support requests through our internally developed large language models... and a variety of other advanced protocols. I will now turn it over to Brian to run through the financials.

Brian Schell (CFO)

Thanks, Rahul, and good day, everyone. As noted in our press release, our Q1 2024 GAAP results reflect revenues of $1.35 billion, net income of $158 million, and diluted earnings per share of $0.62. As Bill noted earlier in the call, our adjusted revenues were a quarterly record, $1.436 billion, up 5.3%, and adjusted diluted EPS was $1.28, up 12.3% versus Q1 2023. Adjusted diluted EPS includes $0.03 in dividend income received on investments previously excluded from adjusted earnings. Going forward, reported adjusted diluted EPS and guidance will include dividend income. The adjusted revenue quarterly increase of $72 million was primarily driven by incremental revenue contributions from alternatives and Intralinks.

Acquisitions contributed $3 million, and foreign exchange had a favorable impact of $6 million. As a result, adjusted organic revenue growth on a constant currency basis was 4.7%. Our core expenses increased 1.9% or $16 million, excluding acquisitions and on a constant currency basis. Adjusted consolidated EBITDA attributable to SS&C, defined in note three in the earnings release, was $557 million, or 38.8% of adjusted revenue, an increase of $48 million or 9.4% from Q1 2023. The 38.8% EBITDA margin reflects a year-over-year improvement of 150 basis points. The 150 basis point margin expansion reflects the positive impact of both revenue growth and disciplined expense management.

Net interest expense for the first quarter of 2024 was $116 million, an increase of $4 million from Q1 2023. The average interest rate in the quarter for the amended credit facility, including the senior notes, was 6.86%, compared to 6.21% in the first quarter of 2023. Adjusted net income, as defined in note four in the earnings release, was $324 million, and the adjusted diluted EPS was $1.28. The effective tax rate used for adjusted net income was 26%. Despite the quarterly share repurchase activity, a higher average stock price drove the diluted share count up to 253.3 million from 252.1 million for Q4 2023.

SS&C ended the first quarter with $413 million in cash and cash equivalents and $6.7 billion in gross debt. SS&C's net debt, as defined in our credit agreement, which excludes cash and cash equivalents of $95 million held at DomaniRx, was $6.4 billion as of March 31st. Our last twelve-month consolidated EBITDA used for covenant compliance was $2.156 billion as of March 2024. Based on net debt of approximately $6.4 billion, our total leverage ratio was 2.95 times, down from 3.05 times at year-end. Our secured leverage ratio was 2.02 times as of March 31st.

$3.5 billion of our Term Loan B matures in April 2025, and we are currently evaluating our debt financing options, looking to go to market in the near future. As we look forward to the second quarter and the remainder of the year with respect to guidance, note that we will remain focused on client service and assume that retention rates will be in the range of our most recent results. We will continue to manage our expenses with a cost discipline approach by controlling and aligning variable expenses to ensure efficiency, increasing productivity to improve our operating margins, to leverage our scale, and effectively investing in the business through marketing, sales, and R&D to take advantage of the future growth opportunities ahead of us.

Specifically, we have assumed foreign currency exchange will be at current levels, interest rates to remain at current levels with the potential of a couple of short-term rate declines in late 2024. Our refinancing will not materially impact our interest rate expense, but is obviously subject to varying market conditions. GAAP tax rate of approximately 26% on an adjusted basis, which is unchanged from prior guidance. Capital expenditures to remain at the 4.3%-4.7% of revenues, which is unchanged from prior guidance, and a similar historical weighting to share repurchases and debt reduction. For the second quarter of 2024, we expect revenue to be in the range of $1.412 billion-$1.452 billion. Adjusted net income in the range of $295 million-$311 million.

Interest expense, excluding amortization of deferred financing costs and original issue discount, in the range of $112 million-$114 million. Diluted shares in the range of 253 million-254 million, and Adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $1.16-$1.22. For the full-year 2024, we are raising revenue guidance by $7 million, and we expect revenue to be in the range of $5.695 billion-$5.855 billion. Adjusted net income in the range of $1.242 billion-$1.322 billion. Diluted shares in the range of 252 million-255 million.

Adjusted Diluted EPS in the range of $4.93-$5.17, and cash from operating activities to be in the range of $1.302 billion-$1.382 billion. Our updated 2024 guidance reflects our strong results in the first quarter, with a continued positive outlook for the remainder of the year. That also reflects our cost discipline approach and expected margin expansion over the course of the year. Now, I'd like to turn it back over to Bill for final comments.

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Brian. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank a long-term director, Mike Daniels, for his dedication and support. Mike has been on our Board for over 10 years and will not stand for reelection. He's been an important advisor during this time, seeing SS&C grow from $700 million in revenue to over $5.5 billion. We wish him well in his future endeavors. We've had a strong start to 2024, and we're working hard to maintain this momentum. I'd like now to open it up to questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. If you are called upon to ask your question and are listening via loudspeaker on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. And please ask one question and one follow-up, and for any additional questions, please re-queue. Your first question comes from the line of Dan Perlin from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Dan Perlin (Managing Director)

Thanks. Good evening, guys. Just a quick question on the organic growth trends. They, they look like they continue to improve here, and I'm just wondering if you can maybe help parse this out, given the current environment we're in and maybe some of these incremental kind of go-to-market strategy changes or maybe fine-tuning points. So how much of the kind of improvement and maybe expected improvement going forward is in kind of just overall demand picking up, Bill, versus kind of sales execution or product realignment and maybe some of this go-to-market motion that's changing for some of these other business segments? Thanks.

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

Well, I think, Dan, and nice to hear from you, we, we have had an awful lot of development work done in our, in our businesses, and we've created a number of new solutions for our different clients, and that's getting traction. You know, particularly our, our trust product, OmniTrust, that we married to our Black Diamond. So now wealth advisors can also handle trust, trusts, which is important as, as their clients, you know, start to move money to their, to theirs- to their children and, and others, and, and I think that's been a big opportunity for us. And we've also done a number of other things where, where our delivery to our clients has been improved and our, our execution on the implementations has also improved.

And so I think a combination of those things, some more discipline on the pricing, and we're still winning. You know, we're still winning big deals, and as they go live, I think our financial picture will look, you know, brighter as we go through the year.

Dan Perlin (Managing Director)

Yep. That's great. Just a quick follow-up. The $0.03 in the quarter that's related to this dividend income, just, I guess, a couple of things. One, was that originally contemplated in kind of the original guidance you gave for 2024? And the $0.03, obviously, going forward, these are going to be adjusted. So if it wasn't, what's included now? And maybe you can just walk me through what the mechanics of that are. I might have just missed it. Sorry. Thank you.

Brian Schell (CFO)

Yeah. No. This is Brian. Thanks. The $0.03 was not part of the original guidance. As we look through the appropriate components of adjusted earnings, we felt like these investments were appropriate to be included. The last year, if you look at it for presentation purposes, you'll see we actually included it in last year's EPS numbers as well. So you can see it on an apples-to-apples basis. So on a go-forward basis, it's there. We think it's appropriate and try to bring any visibility or clarity we can to the numbers.

Dan Perlin (Managing Director)

Should we be using $0.03 a quarter as kind of the run rate?

Brian Schell (CFO)

No.

Dan Perlin (Managing Director)

I did see the year-over-year comparison was adjusted, but I just want to make sure I'm not getting over my skis or over-adjusting or under-adjusting.

Brian Schell (CFO)

Yeah.

Dan Perlin (Managing Director)

Thanks.

Brian Schell (CFO)

The big, I'd say, contribution to the year is actually just the first quarter. I would say for the remainder year, it probably rounds to probably another $0.01 overall for the next three quarters. So it's not a huge adjustment, but we just thought it was relevant, given how we reflected the rest of our investments, and various interest income items, to be included in our overall, adjusted results.

Dan Perlin (Managing Director)

Got it. And just to be clear, it's $0.01 for the remaining three quarters, not $0.01 per quarter?

Brian Schell (CFO)

Correct.

Dan Perlin (Managing Director)

Okay, that's great. Thank you so much.

Brian Schell (CFO)

No problem.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Schmidt from Citi. Please go ahead.

Andrew Schmidt (Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, Bill, Rahul, Brian, thanks for taking my questions here. So quick question on the revenue outlook. It looks like the upper end came down. Just curious, you know, what drove that and how that might tie into the organic growth expectations for the remainder of the year?

Rahul Kanwar (President and COO)

Yeah, Andrew, I think the only thing that happened. We're actually, you know, at least as optimistic about the remainder of the year as we were at the start. I think the only thing that happens is, as we get closer, you know, the ranges get tighter, we get a little more precise, right? So that's really all that's happening. I think the midpoint is actually higher than it was the last time we gave guidance.

Andrew Schmidt (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Perfect. Thank you for that, Rahul. And then, maybe we could talk about just the visibility of the organic growth. Obviously, you know, we narrowly, we're reading a lot of questions. If you could-

... you know, characterize kind of how you build that up and, you know, whether what you have sort of in the queue, if you will, for organic growth is sort of high versus moderate versus low, how you would rank the opportunities there? Thanks a lot, guys.

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, I would say right now, as of April 25th, you know, that we're, you know, probably stronger than cautiously optimistic. You know, we're, we're—we tend to be accountants. Cautiously optimistic is, you know, kind of for most people, you know, wildly optimistic for us, you know. So I think, you know, the natural conservatism, you know, sometimes gets the best of us, but we have a lot of business that we sold in the first quarter that we have not recognized yet. But it's already sold. We've already got some of the cash. It's coming in, and we think we have lots of opportunities.

Andrew Schmidt (Equity Research Analyst)

Perfect. Very constructive. Thank you very much, Bill.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from Alexei Gogolev from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Alexei Gogolev (Executive Director)

Hello, everyone. Bill, could you elaborate on the combination of divisions that was discussed? What does that mean in terms of cross-sell opportunity, R&D investments into products to make sure that they speak better to each other? And perhaps, is there any room for margin upside from, from the combination of those divisions?

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, we feel that, you know, we're, you know, 27,000 people. We have 140 offices in 40 countries. We deliver over 100 products and 100 services. So it is operating a large business. And the more we can concentrate like products in, you know, the business units that are most apt to create new product, create new service, create ways in which to deliver those products and services, and then also be able to leverage, you know, all the corporate services that we have, whether it's marketing, it's sales, you know, different implementation teams.

You know, all that type of stuff, we think is really much more effective when you take, you know, asset management and products for large-scale asset managers and put all those products under Karen Geiger and Steve Leivent, for instance. And then also then have go-to-market strategies for each one of those large segments. And I think the same thing is true when we, you know, we took retirement and put it in with the, you know, the global distribution or the global investor and distribution business. You know, I think we get leverage. We get, as Rahul said in his remarks, you know, we get some leverage, we get some scale, we get some better chances to cross-sell, and we're again pretty optimistic about the result of that.

Alexei Gogolev (Executive Director)

Thank you, Bill. And, Brian, could I also ask you a quick question about the components within alternatives division? What was the growth of private markets in the quarter?

Brian Schell (CFO)

The private markets side, 10%-ish, was the number of private.

Alexei Gogolev (Executive Director)

Thank you.

Brian Schell (CFO)

Mm-hmm.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann from D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Peter Heckmann (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I have several kind of related questions on the healthcare segment. Could you give us an update on the progress of DomaniRx and any additional conversions that have occurred year to date? I was curious, I don't think we see the numbers based on your explanation, but, you know, Change Healthcare, which is one of the prescription processing hubs, had a malware attack, and I was curious if that affected the healthcare business at all in the quarter. And then lastly, you know, would you expect that healthcare segment to be up or down revenue-wise for the year?

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, that's pretty insightful, Pete. Good to talk to you. Yeah, Change Healthcare has been a nice supplier of revenue to us that we'll start to—you'll start seeing in the second quarter, you know, somewhat in large chunks. So we're—we've already sold it. We're already delivering. We have a number of pretty big scale clients, including some of the large-scale drug manufacturers. So, you know, we're optimistic about where we can go with this. DomaniRx has held up great throughout the four months it's been in production. We get almost no defects. We get great client feedback, and we have lots of new business that's going to go on at DomaniRx over the next eight or nine months. And we're optimistic about our pipeline.

Peter Heckmann (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Great. Great. And so just in terms of, like, the revenue growth for the year, do you think we can get back to positive revenue growth this year, or we'll be thinking maybe more 2025?

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

... I think we'll be positive this year. And, you know, whether we do $295-$300, you know, probably somewhere in that vicinity. And, you know, the one great thing about healthcare is that there's lots of revenue to be had, so you just need to go execute. And if you do that, you're in pretty good shape.

Peter Heckmann (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Fair enough. All right, thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Schmitt from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Jeff Schmitt (Research Analyst)

Hi, good afternoon. Are you still getting price increases kind of above normal in any of your businesses? And how much did pricing impact organic growth in this quarter and the last?

Rahul Kanwar (President and COO)

Yeah, I think, you know, as we're getting more disciplined, as Bill pointed out, and more methodical about this process, you know, what we've also been able to do is put the price increases in the contracts on an automatic basis. So it's not, you know, as much of an effort and everybody expects them. So in 2023, we think we got about $150 million in price. Our expectation for 2024 is, you know, probably a similar number. There's a little bit of art as much as science with the renewals and, you know, what constitutes price versus upsell and those kinds of things, but that's about what we would expect for the year.

Jeff Schmitt (Research Analyst)

Okay. And then just back on alternatives organic growth, I think it was 5% or 6% in the quarter. You'd mentioned the private market slowed. I think it'd been growing over 20%, it dropped down to 10%. What sort of drove that slowdown? I mean, I think you were getting—I thought you were getting 5% or 6% price increases there last year, but what sort of drove that slowdown?

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, I would, you know, make sure that we all understand the jargon we're using. You know, when you talk to private markets, that's a number of different flavors of private. So private credit in the first quarter growth probably grew significantly more than 10. But when you put it with private equity and maybe our real estate business, then it all averages out maybe to 10. But private credit has been quite strong.

Rahul Kanwar (President and COO)

Yeah, maybe another way to look at it is if you look at the AUA change, you'll see we're at, you know, $2.4 trillion. So there's really nothing in the underlying growth of any one of those areas where, you know, it's not growing at least as well as it was before. As a matter of fact, we think our hedge fund business is growing better than it did last year.

Jeff Schmitt (Research Analyst)

Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of James Faucette from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

James Faucette (Managing Director)

Thank you very much. Just wanted to quickly check on from a capital allocation perspective and M&A pipeline. Bill, there's clearly capacity here for some leverage, and you called out a senior hire to assist with M&A last quarter. What does the deal pipeline look like right now, and what kind of assets should we think about you targeting?

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

Well, I don't think we're looking anywhere differently than where we are today. And so I think you guys at Morgan Stanley and a number of others, UBS, you know, advised AssetMark and GTCR. You know, AssetMark would have been a target for us as well. And I would say those types, you know, those types of companies could be targets. I think that things that are in fund administration, we'd still buy and buy pretty quickly. And I think there's opportunities. Again, we've probably done five or six lift outs, and I think we would continue to do those.

James Faucette (Managing Director)

Got it. Appreciate that, that commentary. And then I wanted to ask kind of a technology-related question, especially tied to the transfer agency business. Some of the asset managers we talk to or look at their transcripts and other public commentary are speaking to the impacts of tokenization and their ability to drive down transfer agency costs. Do you think that's more anecdotal in nature? Or how should we be thinking about medium- to long-term growth outlook of your transfer agency business more broadly?

Rahul Kanwar (President and COO)

So we're seeing a little bit of that. Most of what we're seeing is, clients piloting certain things that they wanna do in a tokenized format, and we have a couple of clients that we're collaborating with. But right now, it's not, you know, it does not have a significant impact on our business. And honestly, you know, it's probably too early to even view it as, you know, any kind of a significant trend.

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

And the other thing I think, James, is that, you know, what we have done is take our transfer agency and our capabilities in alternatives administration. So now retail alts, you know, we combine those two things, and we're not selling you one or the other, we're selling them as a bundle. So if you just want our transfer agency and wanna give your administration to somebody else, we're not taking that business. So that discipline and that ability to have a product that is superior, and then making sure that we're the beneficiaries of that superior technology when we sell it. So that's been a pretty good market theme for us as well.

James Faucette (Managing Director)

Got it. Appreciate all the comments.

Operator (participant)

If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Kevin McVeigh from UBS. Please go ahead.

Kevin McVeigh (Managing Director)

Great. Thanks so much, and congratulations on the results. Hey, anything to call out? I mean, the Intralinks growth was really, really terrific. I think it was 23%, you know, obviously a big, big, big increase. Anything to call out that drove that?

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

I really think that they continue to innovate on their primary virtual data room business. I mean, they add AI into that. They do, you know, really smart searches. You know, they brought out a redacting agent to be able to help. You know, you get so much data and so much paper in those data rooms, it's important to have ways to be able to collate it and search it quickly. So that's been pretty effective, and it's been very resilient. So I think, you know, we're optimistic for all of 2024, and we don't see things slowing down even after that.

Kevin McVeigh (Managing Director)

That's super helpful, Bill. And then just the AUA, you know, my math, it looks like it increased 3% sequentially. You know, this versus flat sequentially last year and almost double the percentage increase sequentially over the last couple of quarters. Anything to call out there? Because obviously, it hasn't been a great market, and it seems like there, there's been some real nice incremental growth there.

Rahul Kanwar (President and COO)

There's been, there's been, pretty broad-based growth across all of our alternatives, right? So, so in the, in the hedge funds, we did see some market benefit, but we also saw the benefit of, you know, winning a number of new deals. Private markets, as Bill just said, you know, continues to be really strong for us, and, and we've added a number of clients there. So, you know, the, the AUA doesn't correlate always exactly with revenue because the yields are different depending on the kinds of funds and assets we win. But overall, the trend is pretty positive.

Kevin McVeigh (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

That concludes our question and answer session. I now turn the call back over to Bill for closing remarks.

Bill Stone (Chairman and CEO)

Again, we appreciate all of you being on the call today. Again, we feel good about the first quarter and recognize that's 25% of the year. So, we still got work to do, and we're hard at it. But we appreciate the support, and see you in 90 days.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.