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Investor & Analyst Day 2022

Nov 16, 2022

Steven Barlow
VP of Investor Relations, EXL

Good morning. Thank you all for joining us this morning to EXL's 2022 Analyst and Investor Day. I'm Steven Barlow, Vice President of Investor Relations. This is what you're supposed to read, all that big lettering down there, while I tell you some little housekeeping rules. First of all, there is a webcast, so there will be people potentially asking questions on the webcast. For those on the webcast, your questions will come to me only. You will not be identified, so you can be very anonymous, but I will be sure to answer your questions. For those here in the audience, please remember to turn off your cell phones.

If you have any pings going on your emails that they come in, please make sure those are pretty silent and do that. Today's agenda is as follows. Rohit Kapoor will start off first talking about our data-led approach. Vivek Jetley, who runs our analytics business, will talk next. Then Anita will talk Digital Operations and Solutions. Ankor Rai will talk about data-led digital. Nalin will talk about our talent advantage that we have. Lastly, Maurizio will give us some financial information and some guidance from there. After everyone's finished speaking, we'll do Q&A, but first we're gonna roll a little video for you. Thanks for coming.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to EXL's Analyst and Investor Day. It's really great to be here together in person because the last time we met was two years ago, and that was in a virtual format.

It's great to be here all together, and I think the sun is coming out, so it's brightening up the day, and hopefully that'll brighten up everybody's outlook. We're gonna talk to you today about what we think about the market, about how EXL is positioned in the market, and how we are trying to play the game. We are also gonna share with you what our views are on our future outlook of our business. Hopefully that'll give you a good sense of where EXL is and where we are going. Two years ago, when we met, we had shared with you that we had a thesis, and the thesis was that we believed that every single business is going to become a data-led business. Well, that thesis seems to have played out in spades.

Today, when you look back, every single business is leveraging data, trying to create value out of data, and one of the best ways of creating sustainable competitive advantage is by leveraging data. We also shared with you that the pandemic has actually accelerated digital transformation. We saw that coming at that point of time. We saw companies move forward in terms of their investments and move ahead in terms of leveraging digital, leveraging data, leveraging analytics, automation. Again, that seems to have played out really, really well. The big difference is, we now believe that this is not a one-time or a temporary phenomenon, but this is a much more of a permanent and a go-forward phenomenon. Therefore, companies and clients are gonna continue to leverage data, digital transformation, and technology.

What this does is it creates a very, very big landscape for us to play in. No matter which analyst report you take a look at or which industry sizing you take a look at, it's a very, very, very large market. For us to be playing in this space is a huge opportunity. There seem to be two primary vectors that will drive this huge economic shift. The first is all about the customer experience. How can that customer experience be enhanced? How can that be a much more seamless experience? And what the expectation is of that customer, how can that be overachieved? Lots of companies are spending a lot of time and effort to make sure that the customer journey for their customers is the best ever.

The other part of this is how can you streamline operations and make that a lot more effective, make that a lot more efficient, and make that a lot more straight- through. Now, this is being done not only to support the customer experience, but in every aspect of a company's business and operation. Whether that be their supply chain, whether that be their Finance and Accounting, whether that be their customer operations, whether that be on product development, every single aspect of an organization's operations are being streamlined. Both these vectors are being fueled by a connectivity on data. Data is the linchpin that drives the creation of value across both of these vectors. Now, that's the good part. The challenging stuff is it's not easy to leverage data. It's not easy to make this change because of a number of different reasons.

Number one, most of the technology platforms and the technology architecture that exists in client organizations is outdated, it's legacy. Data sits in silos and doesn't talk to each other. Some of the data is on-premise. Not all of that is on the cloud. There's a huge amount of effort that needs to be put in to be able to make this in a very, very streamlined way. Organizations have a lot of data about their customers, about their market, about their business, but that data exists in a format that is not usable. There's a lot of unstructured data. There's a lot of data sitting in pieces. There's some elements that are missing. Huge challenges. There's a regulatory and a privacy issue.

There is a permissible use of data, and you can only use data where the customer allows you to do it or the regulation permits you to use it. That doesn't exist. Frankly, client organizations are really, really challenged in terms of how do they move forward and really make sense of data and drive their business forward. That is exactly what is EXL's positioning. Our positioning is we help our clients make sense of data and drive their business forward. We become a strategic and an indispensable partner to our clients and help them become data-led businesses. That's what we stand for. We do it in three fundamental ways. We allow them to make much better business decisions across the enterprise in real-time, in a very effective way.

We allow them to be able to deliver a superior customer experience, and that experience is making offers which are relevant, which are timely, and which are actionable. By doing both of these things, by enabling better business decisions and enabling a better customer experience, we help our clients gain competitive advantage in the marketplace on a sustained basis and allow them to grow their revenues and do so profitably. That's our mission and that's our goal. Now, the way in which we go about doing this is by leveraging what we call as EXL's data-led approach, and this is what our business is. If you boil it down, fundamentally, we do three things for our clients. Each one of these three things is underpinned by a deep understanding of data. That's the foundational layer. In order to understand data, you need two things.

One, you need to have the functional and the technical competence to understand data. We are investing heavily in terms of getting mastery on that data. The second, you need to have deep domain expertise to apply the insight from the data and create real value in practical use cases and enable this for your clients. We, again, are investing heavily in terms of that domain expertise, and it's really the intersection of the technical competence and the domain expertise that allows us to differentiate ourselves. The first, service line that we have is Data Analytics. We are a Leader in Data Analytics. It represents 46% of our revenues today. It's something that we have built painstakingly over the last several years, and we are able to offer an end-to-end capability on Data Analytics that enables clients to make better business decisions.

The second part is we help our clients on digital transformation. We help them apply technology, we help them apply analytics, AI, machine learning, RPA, changing their processes, and help them get to a much better outcome of their business. We can do this work for our clients on a standalone basis, where we are just helping them with the digital transformation, or we can do this in an integrated way, where we can take over their operations and their business and make the change to their operations and deliver the business outcome to them. That's the second offering for us, and it's really about embedding intelligence into the workflow. The third service for us is all about Digital Operations. This is intelligent operations and smart operations embedded and infused with a lot of data analytics, automation, and intelligence.

We can run this for our clients with our talent that we have and be able to deliver a really, really good experience for our clients. The key thing that has changed is it's become absolutely critical to do so with speed. One of the things which our clients struggle with is that they can make the change, but either it costs too much or it takes too much of time. We actually help them solve both the problems because we can do this at speed and at scale. We also have a view on what does it take for an organization to become a data-led enterprise. We think there are four fundamental pillars that you need to work on to enable a client to become a data-led enterprise. The first is all about Da ta access. This is about how do you break down the data silos?

How do you bring in data from different technology platforms and bring it together? This is about combining internal data and external data to create much greater value. This is about converting unstructured data into structured data so that it becomes usable. This is about shifting data to the cloud so that it can be accessed from anywhere. This is all about Data access and doing this in real-time. We've made investments and acquisitions to help bolster our capabilities in this area. The second pillar is about delivering insight to our clients and doing that at speed and at scale. Our Data analytics business does precisely that, and this is a huge strength for EXL. The insights need to be actionable, and they need to be such that they can be applied into an operating business process, otherwise it's useless.

Our focus on this allows us to be able to deliver a very high level of value to our clients. The third part of this is, even if you have the data that is accessible, you have an insight that is actionable, there's a huge amount of change management effort that needs to be undertaken, both for the end customer to adopt that change as well as the enterprise to embrace that change. We've seen this time in and time out again. In many of our clients, they'll invest in terms of the technology and in terms of the Data Access. They'll come up with the insight, but nobody uses that insight. Enabling that use and that adoption is a critical element of making sure that that value gets realized. We believe that that's a third foundational pillar for a data-led enterprise

The final piece is things are not static. Things keep evolving and keep changing. Even after you've implemented each one of these three pillars, you need to have a process by which you can constantly, and in an iterative way, keep making enhancements and changes. As much of that is self-learning and, you know, automated, that's gonna be very, very helpful, but it has to be a living, breathing, and a self-evolving system. That's what we focus on so that we can make this such that our customers have a very agile system that can respond to change, and the speed that I spoke about, that becomes effective. That's the framework, you know, that we use. Why do clients choose EXL?

Why are we gaining much more traction than our competitors or our peers or others in the marketplace? We think we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace on these three dimensions. Number one, we have a very unique proprietary data asset. This data asset we've curated over the last several years across the entire adult population in the U.S. We have 6,000 variables, and we update this data set on a daily, weekly, and a monthly basis. By combining this data asset with our client's data asset, we believe we can deliver a lot more significant value than anybody else. The second element is our talent. We have a huge talent advantage. Nalin is gonna talk about our talent advantage, but just broadly speaking, we've got 43,000 employees in the organization, all of whom are data savvy.

We've invested a lot in their training and development so that they understand, and they can align with everything that we are trying to do for the customer. Within this, we have 7,500 analytics professionals. This is by far the largest assembled workforce on data scientists in any organization across the globe. We believe that that capability that we have built out here is truly unique. Finally, we can deliver services to our clients with a very, very well-diversified geographical footprint across 50 different delivery centers. The last piece is we have pre-built solutions and accelerators. We have created capabilities which can be plug-and-play. What this allows us to do is when we get called upon by a client to make a change, we can actually implement that change very, very quickly. We have almost 300 algorithms that are pre-built.

We call that micro-analytics. These are components that can be used in terms of building a model that is customized to that particular customer. It allows us to reduce the time it takes to build these models and make the change. There's nobody else who's got that kind of a library of pre-built accelerators and these kinds of analytics solutions. Therefore, our ability to do this at high velocity and speed is much, much better. The most exciting part of this whole journey for us has been that the addressable market for us has suddenly exploded. Let me explain why. When you start to focus in on being a data-led organization, and you're trying to create value out of data, it actually allows you to do work for clients in your industry vertical, but it also allows you to take that to other industry verticals.

Over the past couple of years, we've now expanded out of the Insurance and Healthcare and banking industry verticals, which were our three primary verticals, where we today have clients in retail. We have clients which are in the sports league. We have clients in other industry verticals because we have this capability around how to leverage and create value out of data. Not only can we go into other industry verticals, we can go deeper within an industry vertical. Let me give you an example. In Insurance , in the past, we primarily used to serve clients in Property and Casualty and Life and Annuities. Today, we've expanded into reInsurance . We've expanded into brokers. We've expanded into Third-Party Administrators. We've expanded into MGAs. We've expanded into multiple geographies with our Insurance business, and therefore, it allows us to go a lot deeper, both inside a vertical and across verticals.

The second axis is about buying centers. In the past, the predominant work that we did used to be with the Chief Operating Officer. It used to be about how could we help a Chief Operating Officer reduce their cost, improve their service delivery, and enable better operations. Today, we work with the CIO, we work with the Chief Data Officer, we work with the Chief Analytics Officer, we work with the Chief Marketing Officer, we work with the Chief Risk Officer. We work across the platform, and we can help clients grow their business, manage their business, and reduce risk in their business. It's really expanded our playing field very, very significantly within a client. The last axis is about the scope of solutions.

What we are seeing is we can now do much, much bigger deals within an enterprise, and it gives us the license to be able to play end-to-end on a process as opposed to just doing a piece of work within a process. Our ability to do end-to-end work and make change which is transformational, that is resulting in larger deal sizes and much bigger client engagements and allowing us to grow faster. Today, we work with a number of clients which are leading clients across each one of these verticals. We are by far the market Leader in Insurance . We've built up a really, really strong presence in Healthcare and in banking. We are adding expertise in a number of other industry verticals that's gonna provide us the opportunity to grow for a sustained period of time.

The great part about this is that our customer satisfaction scores are the highest. We have 100% referenceability. Our ability to execute and deliver to our clients, is what makes us stand out. You've seen this, but I do need to repeat this, that our growth rate has accelerated. Because of this data-led approach, our Data Analytics business over the past two years has grown at 28% CAGR for the last two years on an organic constant currency basis. Our Digital Operations business has accelerated to 12% per annum over the last two years. We think that there is a terrific amount of momentum that we have built up out here, and what we really like is not only is the growth rate high, but the quality of work that we are doing is much higher up in the value chain.

When you combine analytics, Digital Operations, automation, and put it all together, you suddenly start to talk with the C-level executives, and you start to do end-to-end work, which is highly strategic and very, very important to our clients. We've moved up significantly in terms of the value chain at where we operate. Let me give you a client example to just illustrate the point. One of our clients is an Insurance company that basically had an issue in terms of the compliance to regulations on the work that they were doing in their claims organization. They found that they were paying a lot of penalties to the regulators because of non-compliance.

They brought EXL in and said, "Why don't you take a look at this and help us solve this problem?" In a matter of 10 weeks, we created a data lake on the cloud, which was pulling together data from disparate systems within the organization, which was enabling that data access in a streamlined manner, and was allowing us to take a look at these claims in an automated fashion. In the past, our agent would have had to go into multiple systems, each time trying to, you know, find data and try and find what was going on.

By pulling all this together, by taking, you know, data from the claims management system, from their policy administration system, from their CRM, from their financial accounting system and bringing it all together, we could actually process and take a look at these claims in real-time, 100% of the claims in a completely automated fashion. We were able to identify where there was likely to be a compliance leakage that might take place, where there might be non-compliance, and therefore preemptively deal with that issue and eliminate the non-compliance. We were able to significantly bring down the non-compliance for this particular Insurance carrier. That wasn't it. Now that we had all this data all together, you could eliminate non-compliance. We could actually predict which customer is going to complain because it's taking too long for that particular claim to be processed.

We could proactively reach out to that customer and inform them as to how that claim is being processed, and therefore elevate customer experience. We could actually predict where there is fraud in these claims that is likely to take place, and therefore take those claims and put them into a Special Investigation Unit and make sure that that fraud did not occur before the fraud might have occurred. Frankly, we were able to expand from just non-compliance to multiple other areas on customer experience, on fraud, and just getting much better data signals. Our ability to do this in an automated real-time fashion was extremely helpful to the client. You can guess what happened. The client started using us not only in their claims organization, but in their underwriting and in other parts of the organization.

It allows us actually now to do this work with multiple clients in Insurance . Frankly, we suddenly went from one small area that we were focused on, which is non-compliance, to a number of different areas within the same client, number of different buying centers and a number of different clients. It suddenly exploded the kind of work that we could do for our clients. This is what results in our accelerated growth. To pull it all together, we think EXL is an extremely attractive investment destination. We've got very strong fundamentals in terms of a large and growing addressable market. By the way, this market is very, very resilient from a demand standpoint.

This is mission-critical work that we do for our clients. Even if there is a recessionary environment that might, you know, we might all experience, we believe that our clients need to undertake this work no matter what. Frankly, our ability to help them in this kind of a environment becomes even more important and even more strategic. We have a demonstrated and proven execution experience. One of the things, you know, which we get recognized for is our ability to execute and deliver. Even though we are much smaller in size and scale compared to some of our, competitors that we compete with, we are known for our execution capability. The talent advantage that we have is enormous. We have deliberately and intentionally invested a huge amount of effort, time, and energy in terms of attracting, developing, and retaining the best talent in this industry.

The outcomes are pretty obvious. This is what we've been able to show. Our growth rate has gone up. We've improved our margins, and our EPS has also gone up very, very significantly. I'm really, really proud of the management team that we have in place today, because I believe we have a team that can scale up this business very significantly and continue to march forward. A number of the executives who you will listen to today have either grown up within EXL and become part of the management team, or we've added from the outside and integrated them into this wonderful management team. I think the depth, the experience, and the teamwork that we have is phenomenal and unparalleled. With that, I'll pass on the conversation to Vivek Jetley, who's our Global Head for Data Analytics, and talk a little bit about analytics.

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

Thank you, Rohit. I have a habit of getting these tough speaker slots, right? I always tend to follow a difficult speaker. I think today I've drawn the short straw in terms of following Rohit. First of all, let me just introduce myself. As Rohit said, I'm Vivek Jetley, and it's been my privilege to lead the Analytics business unit at EXL. I'm part of that crew that grew up at EXL, as Rohit was talking about. I joined EXL more than 15 years ago, when EXL acquired a small company to actually come in and build our analytics business. We've certainly come a long way from there. It's been my privilege to be part of the Leader ship team for that business since 2010.

Let me tell you a little bit about, you know, some of the themes that I'm gonna talk to you about today. First of all, as Rohit talked about it, analytics has been a high growth business for us. Today we'll tell you a little bit about why that growth happened and why we believe that that growth is gonna continue into the future. Why do we think that we'll have a high growth trajectory? We'll talk to you a little bit about our plans for how we are investing in the business and actually significantly expanding the addressable market for analytics by building out a solution that attacks the end-to-end value chain for our customers, that actually scales across businesses, that scales across buying centers.

We within the analytics team feel very strongly about what our demand looks like and what's the market size that we are gonna go after. Finally, we'll talk a little bit about how we are building a high- value business. What is the value that we are delivering for our customers, and how does that value translate into greater pricing power for us? How does that translate into value that's captured by EXL? Let me first state the obvious. You've seen this before, but we were a high- growth business to begin with, right? Analytics was something that was in demand even before the pandemic. We were scaling at about 15% on a organic basis. Then the pandemic happened, and the disruption happened at that point in time.

Now, we met you in November of 2020, and at that point in time, I mean, somewhat in a foolhardy way, we came and told you that even though the disruption had happened during the pandemic, we believe that the demand for analytics was gonna take a big step up. Because at that point, we told you that what the pandemic had done was accelerated some trends towards analytics adoption. As the data proves, we were proven right. We actually grew during the pandemic. We ended up growing at a moderate pace in 2020. Coming out of 2020, the business took a big step up in terms of much higher organic growth rate for us. This obviously excludes the acquisition that we've made during that point in time, which has also performed very well.

Over this period of time, analytics has actually grown four times, almost four times since 2016. We've grown to now become almost 46% of EXL's total business. So we've almost doubled our share and quadrupled our overall revenue during that time period. In a market that is so tightly driven by talent, we've actually, you know, grown our talent very nicely as well. Our talent, our total resource team has grown by about 3.4 times during that time period. Now, what you see over here is also the fact that while we've been, you know, adding on to our capabilities and growing our talent, there's another element we've delivered on. We've actually been able to take the revenue per employee up during that time period.

We are moving up the value chain in terms of the value that we deliver, and we are scaling up at a much faster pace than the market in terms of our overall growth rate. What's that driven by? It's really driven by, effectively what we are doing for our clients. We today have a very strong brand in terms of how our clients perceive us, for analytics use cases. Over the last 2 years, we've actually succeeded in acquiring more than 50 customers. Remember, part of this was during the pandemic when it was tough to go out and get a brand-new customer. We've acquired more than 50, and we continue to deliver and grow the value of the work that we're delivering for them.

Over this time period, we've actually averaged about $90,000 per employee per year in terms of the revenue that we're generating from the team. Here's the big piece. As we've done that, we've got a phenomenal level of engagement with our customers. I'm gonna quote. There's a number of different surveys that we do. There's a number of different analysts that rate our business. But the one thing for me that stands out is something that Gartner does, which is a survey of customers across the industry. They do something where they interview clients, and they get client feedback on a number of different providers for them. Over the last three years, Gartner has rated us based on customer feedback as a Customers' Choice for Analytics Service Providers for three years in a row.

We're the only company within that entire set that's actually gotten that, the Customers' Choice, kind of category 3 years in a row. There are some things that stand out even within that. Our customers this year gave us an average score of about 4.9 on 5 in terms of the quality of work that we deliver or their satisfaction with us. The one number that really stands out to me is that 100% willingness to recommend. Every single customer of ours that spoke with Gartner basically said that they'd be willing to recommend us to another customer, to one of their colleagues. That's really something that drives, the business forward, that drives, what we are doing in terms of sales growth. Let me now tell you a little bit about how we've been able to create that growth.

What is it that the customers look at when they're working with us? What we've done is try to define what we think of as the analytics value chain. This is fundamentally what an analytics customer looks for when they're trying to say, "Here's a use case that I want to solve for." It starts off with data. It always does. It starts off with saying, "Help me understand what is the data that I can capture," whether it's structured, whether it's unstructured, whether it's video, accessible, what have you. It goes into making that data usable. How do you actually unlock that data? How do you create data that's timely, that's accessible, that's easy to kind of maintain, and that's accurate and consistent?

Probably the most important part: how do you take that raw data and convert it into meaningful, non-intuitive insights that drive their business forward? You take those insights. You've still not done the last mile. The last mile is actually taking those insights, translating that into either a business strategy, into a policy, putting it into the workflow, and making sure that you actually generate outcomes from that particular insight. That value chain for analytics, which goes from Data into insights into Outcomes, is something that cuts across different buying centers, different industries, different use cases. Fundamentally, this is what we do. Over the last few years, we at EXL have really invested in building out this end-to-end value chain for ourselves and building out our capability to deliver for our clients.

Rohit already talked to you about the proprietary asset that we leverage. Now, that part of the business has grown tremendously over the last couple of years because what we've been able to do is bring our curated third-party data asset into our customers' domains, merge it with their data, help them actually unlock a number of different use cases, be it acquiring new customers, be it driving retention, be it understanding more about their existing customers. There's a ton of work that we do in terms of just leveraging data and unlocking data signals and data triggers. The second part of the business, data management, this is where we actually made that big investment by bringing on the Clairvoyant team.

We've significantly deepened our capability in terms of helping our clients integrate their data, use their data in a better way, and actually bring in the firepower with about 1,500 data engineers right now that are deployed across our client base in terms of helping them get more out of their data. Next, on the insights, this is the core of our team. This is the 7,500 data scientists and data analytics professionals that Rohit talked about. What we've been able to do over the years is build out careers for people within domains, within specific industries, where they actually become where they create their analytics journey with us.

We've got people that have been working for 15 years, 18 years within the company, and they've grown with us in terms of becoming really, really credentialed and powerful folks in terms of their prowess. Finally, the last piece. This is the one where I think we've been focused on very zealously the last couple of years. It's how do you take the insights that are produced by those predictive modelers, by the data scientists, and convert it into action? Today, a substantial part of our revenue is actually driven by areas where we take ownership of outcomes, where we deliver a value for our customer and our revenue is linked to that value. That's been one of the big themes for us as we kind of move up the value chain.

Let me give you a couple of examples of how the analytics value chain works in action for us. Let me start off with one of our largest customers. This is a leading global bank. This is probably our largest Center of Excellence team that we run for them. We work with the bank across a whole suite of areas, across products, across geographies, and we actually help them support them with flex teams on shore and with dedicated teams as part of our Center of Excellence that's located offshore. Now, this Center of Excellence has delivered over the last year about $600 million in terms of incremental revenue impact.

That's signed off by our customer and saying, "Yes, we know that this is what the teams produced in terms of a business impact." $600 million over the last year. It's created about 70-odd million in terms of expense saves. Again, these are business impact numbers that are validated by the customer. That kind of value when it's delivered, there's a tremendous amount of strength and resilience in that particular team. It's the ability to actually say, "Yes, I'm gonna use this team across the board in terms of, you know, new initiatives." In fact, what we believe is and this is part of the secret of the resilience.

In a recessionary economy, what you'll see is that the mix may change between the, you know, the front end side versus the expense side, but the team still gets deployed, still gets used for similar use cases. I talked to you a lot about our work in terms of creating accountability for outcomes, and one of the biggest examples for that is the work that we do in Healthcare with our Payment Integrity solutions. For one of the largest multi-state health plans in the U.S., our teams actually delivered a couple of years ago, we delivered about $900 million in terms of recovered payments for them. This is $900 million that got recovered by the company that they had overpaid on.

It was our work, our algorithms, and our team that had done the analysis on almost 50 million claims over the year to actually help them identify that. That's the kind of value that gets delivered on a monthly basis, and it again creates a tremendous amount of resilience in terms of the team's usage. Finally, Rohit had talked about how we are expanding into new industries and new verticals. A great example of that for me is an expansion that we've done, a new client that we acquired, which is one of the largest automotive companies in the U.S., one of the biggest brands that there is. To use the car racing analogy, for this client, we went from zero to 100 resources in less than 6 months' time.

They brought us on, they gave us a project. They said, "Show us your capability." What we were able to do was actually really wow them with what we were able to do really quickly, and we scaled up quite tremendously. That's, you know, that's the type of work that we do in terms of the value that we deliver, in terms of the stickiness, and in terms of the speed and the scale at which our teams can deploy. As we are looking to the future, what does all of this mean? Where do we take this business? How do we continue to be on a high growth trajectory? We're doing a couple of things.

First of all, for our existing business, what we're doing here is making sure that we're focused on the value that we are delivering, and we're gonna increase the portion of the revenue that's now more linked to outcome-based, more linked to As-a-Service model. For the existing work that we're doing, there's going to be a little bit more in terms of the pricing power, again, linked to the value that's delivered.

We are focused on expanding our addressable market through the new verticals, by expanding into new buying centers, by making sure that we are really zealously focused on saying, "Can we expand the pool of companies that's a target for us in terms of, you know, the analytics solutions that we can provide?" All of that is going to be driven by our brand and our ability to scale our talent. It's what Nalin refers to as our talent advantage, and our talent advantage is gonna make sure that we are never hit a roadblock in terms of our ability to scale and keep scaling at the speed that we have in terms of meeting this demand.

Finally, there's going to be a bigger shift into making sure that we start leveraging our IT in a more clearer way, more explicit way, by actually building out solutions and prepackaged accelerators and platforms that we can start taking to customers and that we can start bringing to them as a prepackaged solution. Which is gonna, I think, again, really drive our ability to serve a broader segment of the market. The end outcome of all of that is going to be to continue to push us along this journey of being a high-growth, high-value business.

It's gonna continue to push us into a high-growth trajectory, and by capturing a higher value of the value chain, we'll have the ability of pushing up the value that we capture for EXL, be it for, from new pricing, be it from a higher pricing rate card, what have you. Just to summarize, I think a little bit of what we've seen, a little bit of what we're seeing in terms of the demand for the business and the ongoing growth trend, really confirms our belief that this is going to be a resilient business through the cycle. We think that with the work that we are doing today, we're gonna continue to capture a higher share, a larger share of a really fast expanding market.

A market that's not really gonna slow down that much even through the cycle. The reason that will happen for us is our focus on scaling up our solutions to becoming an end-to-end service provider across that analytics value chain. It's going to be our ability to actually start leveraging our IP to bring in more pricing power into EXL. That's really what's gonna push us into becoming or continuing on the journey of being a high-growth, high-value business. That's, I think, the analytics story, and I'd love to, you know, take questions later on. At this point, I'd like to invite Anita to come talk to you a little bit about Digital Operations and Solutions business. Anita.

Anita Mahon
Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, EXL

Thanks, Vivek. Good morning, everyone. I am Anita Mahon. I joined EXL in 2020. Hopefully, you heard what I covered. Thank you. Kenny, who is here on Emerging and the Healthcare business. Okay. As Rohit described, and you saw from Vivek in the data and analytics side of the business, this data-led approach has really led to accelerated growth in Digital Operations and Solutions side of the business as well. We were already a top choice for our clients because of our domain-led expertise. Now that we've added the data-led approach and the data-led DNA to domain-led, we're offering more robust value propositions, which are really weaving us more completely into the fabric of our clients' operations.

This is expanding our deal sizes, making us more strategic and stickier. I'll show you how this is working out in a practical way with some client examples in just a minute, and then talk about our market positioning. Just as you saw, this data-led approach has really enabled us to step up our growth rates, actually to double our growth rate to the 12% CAGR that we've seen in the last two years. We've done this by building on the foundation that we had of our client relationships and adding to that foundation with new clients as well. We've added more than 80 Digital Operations and Solutions clients. In the last two years, we are seeing 22% growth in the top 25 client relationships.

We've seen that expansion of the foundation with an increase in nearly half of the number of $5 million plus clients that we're working with. These are typically 4- to 5-year arrangements. We think they've got the staying power to withstand any potential short-term recessionary dips that we may be facing. While we are expanding more and more into the growth side of our clients' business and their customer experience operations, our long-proven value proposition of streamlined processes, efficiency, and operational cost savings will continue to be relevant in any economic environment. Just getting a little bit behind where this growth is coming from. There has been a fundamental shift in our market. The nature of demand has changed.

Clients are looking to move faster, get more immediate value from digital innovation and AI than what they can get from IT service providers, and they're looking at their challenges and opportunities from an end-to-end perspective. Our domain expertise has been built up over many years of work in our focused industries and also in our operational domains, like Finance and Accounting, sales and marketing, compliance. The talent advantage comes from the way that we've developed and scaled globally. Our people build their Insurance careers with us. They build Healthcare careers with us. Coming through our Insurance Academy , our Healthcare Academy , we prepare nurses for USRN certifications, our Healthcare coding. You'll hear more about the talent advantage from Nalin in just a few minutes.

We've also expanded our geography of delivery locations, which lets us more easily reach and recruit strong talent, and it also meets our clients' needs for business continuity and resilience. Having come through the experience of the pandemic, more and more clients are choosing to work with us across multiple delivery locations. As part of the data-led approach, we've made significant investments in digital assets, which Ankor is going to explain in great detail just after me. But for now, just think of these digital solutions as making AI actionable within the industry and domain context in which we work, so that we can help clients modernize their operations. This combination of strengths, we think really distinguishes us from the other players in the market. We start from deep inside our client's operation.

We bring on board their strategic objectives, bring in the digital and AI that's needed to achieve those, along with the people that can make the AI really work, and then continuously improve from there. Okay, let me try to bring this a little bit to life with a few client stories. These two are about two long-standing clients that we work with. The first is a group, to expand into other buying centers and, to the point where we now support in the execution of complex operations across their end-to-end value chain. That includes doing the work on the acquisition of their new employer group clients, onboarding the clients, enrollment, policy servicing, billing claims. Over the last five years, this has amounted to an eight times expansion in the scope and the value of what we manage for them.

Since we were already embedded in their business, this client turned to us when they needed help with managing their claims intake volume. This is a manually intensive process, so we committed to both cost savings and an improved customer experience. With our solution in place, we reduced what was a 70-minute processing time by 40%. As a true measure of the improved customer experience, when given the choice, 100% of repeat users choose to go down the path of our digital solution. Now the client has awarded additional work to us, additional scope, so that we can create an enterprise-wide transformation capability with this digital solution across all of their other lines of business.

As a second example, we have even a longer relationship with this, large national Healthcare company, where we were known for our domain expertise in clinical operations and analytics, working across a whole cadre of business stakeholders. Because of our credibility and the strength and breadth of the relationship, we've been able to further expand scope and impact with the data-led approach. In one area, we've created and executed the intelligence in their centralized campaign program to influence member behavior, which is credited with generating $100 million in savings for them. That's in medical cost savings. In another area, they were coping with a really labor-intensive audit process, so we created a digital solution to streamline the quality review and the audit, removing 100% of the manual work that they had outsourced with another vendor.

The data-led approach is also helping us to acquire new clients. As the next story, let me just talk about a deal, a large deal that we won last year with a leading US retirement and life Insurance company to help them develop a whole new model that is powering the future growth for this company. They offer modern and innovative products and were undergoing a transformation to be more experience driven. They really needed help with how they were reaching a whole new generation of consumers. The expectations of their millennial customers are quite different than their more legacy customer base. We worked with them to design and implement their next gen operating model. We helped them model customer behaviors, create new customer insights, and execute end-to-end data-led operations from pre-sales all the way to administration.

As a result, they've been able to reduce their new product launch timelines by 50% from 18 down to 9 months. This is a true example of giving them speed to value, and the new model is giving them 100% transparency into the end-to-end operation. We won this new client as a result of our combination of deep industry Insurance expertise, along with the data-led offerings and digital in our ability to bring speed and accelerate their time to market. Then the last example I'll talk about is about how the data-led approach helped us to win a large deal with a new client in what is a new and growing vertical for us in retail. This client had previously outsourced, completely outsourced its customer service operation to another provider, and they were looking for a complete digital transformation.

They needed to reduce the demands on their own customer service staff and wanted to use digital engagement tools to handle less complex interactions. Of course, being a retailer, this all had to come without having any impact on NPS in the existing customer base. They were looking for someone that could improve client experience, and we showed them a whole range of digital capabilities that we had implemented with another client from another industry altogether. In things like mapping customer journeys in real-time, AI assistance to the agents, and this so impressed them, they decided to give the entire customer service operation to us, as well as the digital transformation. Through this, they're going to reduce costs by 30%, and they've actually improved NPS in the process. Okay.

The market analysts are also recognizing the value of our integrated approach. You've seen we receive a vast array of industry market analyst recognitions. You saw Gartner with Vivek, Everest, ISG, HFS, KLAS in Healthcare . Increasingly, analysts are looking at operation services with new criteria around digital solutions and intelligent operations. They're developing new studies that recognize the importance of the integration of digital into operations. We're receiving high rankings in these reports across industries, because of our unique approach and our unique combination of strengths. In this one particular new outlook, we're recognized by Everest as the Leader in this space. You can just imagine how, for an organization of our size, just how gratifying it is to be shown ahead and above of companies like Accenture.

In fact, Everest said that EXL is playing a pivotal role in modernizing the Insurance industry. We are, especially all of our Leader s in the Insurance business, we are really excited to be a part of this transformation. Just, in summary, as the operations market continues to evolve into this space where operations and digital are inextricably linked, we believe we're extremely well-positioned as a Leader in the fastest-growing part of the operations market. We've got significant runway yet to expand with our existing clients, and as I've shown you, we've proven our domain expertise and end-to-end solutions are letting us bring on new clients with larger deal sizes and continuing to penetrate further in new verticals and geographies. With the doubling of the revenue growth rate, we've got the momentum that's going to continue to propel us forward.

We think the business model's resilient and that Digital Operations are only going to continue to increase in importance for our clients. The data-led approach, the deep domain knowledge, industry-leading talent, give us really great confidence for the future of this side of the business. Now Ankor is going to go deeper into our digital strategy and our build-out, and just why that is so powerful for our clients and for us.

Ankor Rai
Chief Digital Officer, EXL

Oh. Thanks, Anita.

Anita Mahon
Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, EXL

Sure.

Ankor Rai
Chief Digital Officer, EXL

I'm Ankor Rai. I'm the Chief Digital Officer at EXL. Like Vivek, I joined EXL about 15 years back through the Inductis acquisition. Vivek and I grew the analytics business together before I took on this role. I'm gonna cover 3 areas around data-led digital today. First, how we combine data with AI analytics, design, and human-in-the-loop systems to deliver the outcomes of a data-led enterprise. Second, how this unlocks new growth pathways and value pools for both our data analytics and Digital Operations and Solutions segments. Third, the resultant expansion in addressable wallet and value capture for both EXL as well as our clients. Rohit alluded to this earlier, and I wanted to sort of start with the market problem. When we look at our clients, they have two priorities.

Either they wanna remove friction from their customer experience, which typically was called a front office problem, or they wanna remove friction from their operations, which is reduced cost, which was typically a back-o ffice problem. To us, these are two sides of the same coin. Let me talk about this with a very quick example. One of our clients, a financial services company, built a really great web and mobile experience to allow instantaneous adjudication of loans. However, this loan still took 30 days to process for three big reasons. One, even though the application process was really slick, there was missing data, and no one figured it out while the application was being taken, and it required to and fro. Second, even after the application data was clean, there was a legacy data infrastructure. It required manual aggregation to bring this data together.

Third, the rules to adjudicate a loan still required significant human intervention because the algorithms were not developed. As a result, even though the experience was great, the outcome could not be delivered. To us, the insight over here and how we solve this problem is without clean data flow from the back office to the front office and back, we are never going to be able to deliver the outcomes that are desired by our clients. Historically, the back office is typically measured in cost reduction or efficiency, and the front office is about revenue and customer experience improvement. The result is it's hard to deliver end-to-end outcomes. Data-led digital solves this problem because speed is the unifying currency. If a client's data-led operations can get a quote out to a customer quickly, it increases win rates and revenue in the front office.

If the data-led back office can adjudicate a claim faster, it improves retention and customer experience and revenue in the front office. To us, speed is really the new currency and the new metric of data-led digital. I'm gonna make this real with an example. Rohit talked about sort of the four pillars of our approach, and I'll show how this is actioned. This is one of our Fortune 500 Insurance clients. They made a commitment to their customers to improve their service levels, which is high-quality data, real-time experiences. They made a commitment to the street to take half a billion dollars of cost out. For sustainable competitive advantage, they wanted to unlock data from silos, unstructured documents, so that they could personalize customer experiences and make better decisions.

There were four key attributes of data-led digital approach, which was used here, and data-led digital is really about the differentiated use of data. First, legacy technology systems had data locked up, and a tech transformation would take too long. We built a connective data layer on the cloud to extract this data so that it could power downstream workflows. Second, we used real-time insights to decide which part of the customer volumes would we remediate versus which would continue. Customer volumes have varying complexity. They come across varying channels. Rather than building one platform to address 100% of the volume, we used real-time insights to build multiple custom AI workflows that Return on Investment for our client. Third, we built AI models upstream, so customers basically send a lot of documents in Insurance . We converted that to clean data.

However, we also went downstream and built CX screens so that the human in the loop could actually interact with the AI. Without building this downstream CX screen, end-to-end adoption would be impossible because an AI model is not enough. Lastly, the fourth parameter, no AI model works like a product. There's an iterative evolution process that needs to be activated, and the only way to do that is by creating a human in the loop along with the AI. That's how you can start at 70%, create a lot of value, and move up that curve. I wanna spend a moment talking about the momentum of our data-led digital, and you've heard Vivek talk about it. You've heard Anita talk about it. I wanted to go a layer lower. I'll discuss three areas. First, clients.

In the last 24 months, 80+ clients are experiencing data-led digital solutions. We've unlocked new buying centers. Rohit already talked about that. Our deal sizes are expanding. Second, industry analysts are recognizing the differentiated approach and impact that can be created for clients using data-led digital. The third one is very interesting to us. We've seen exponential growth in the volume passing through our AI solutions. This is important for two reasons. One, AI only actually creates impact and improves if it carries live workloads. By virtue of combining AI with redesigned workflows and human-in-the-loop systems, we're creating a sustainable competitive advantage for EXL because our AI solutions continue to improve. The second, this activates a virtuous cycle where every next client gets a better experience and more value. I wanna dig a little deeper into that by talking about three reasons why we win.

The first reason, battle-tested AI analytics deployments. We've deployed 50+ AI analytics solutions across our clients. These are not AI models. These are models connected to data, connected to actual redesign of the way work gets done within a client's enterprise to human-in-the-loop systems. These are creating impact at clients. This is important for a couple of parameters. One is the obvious one. If we've got 50+ solutions, we can take it to more clients, 50 more things to sell. But there is a higher impact which is more nuanced. Across these solutions, there is a common data that runs through it. There are common data flows that run through them. There is a business logic that is common across these, and this allows crossovers that are very unique to us. Vivek talked about it. Anita talked about it. We can start in audit.

Because the data is the same, we can cross over into CX. We can start with claims intake. Because it's upstream of a servicing process, we can get there. Not only that, we can deliver something in our data analytics business. We can deliver CX over there. That has relevance Digital Operations and Solutions. we can build a consumer collections experience, and that has relevance for B2B collections experience. This is unlocking a variety of different growth pathways for us. Second, we deliver data-led digital in three different consumption models, so that we can meet clients wherever they are. The first, Anita alluded to it, digital transformation of operations. Clients can outsource an operation to us, and we take ownership of transforming it. They get access to best of breed AI and digital and data technologies.

For us, deal sizes are larger, and it's a much sharper differentiation against the competition. For clients who want to create enterprise capabilities, we provide digital consulting and implementation services. For us, this is great because it's the quickest sales cycle, and it creates multiple entry points. Lastly, there are clients who wanna solve a niche problem. For them, we deliver Solution As-a-Service models, which is we house our solutions on the cloud, their data comes in, we deliver outcomes to them. To us, the value for us, this is a scalable business and expansion in our revenue per FTE. Finally, I wanna talk a little about how a combination of these battle-tested AI solutions, along with the three different consumption models, creates completely new value pools for us. First, it allows us to land in an area where the client has the largest problem.

I've taken three different examples to show you the variety there. For the first client, they wanted to transform customer onboarding operations, outsourced this to us, we took that on and delivered the transformation. The second one had a $150 million opportunity to build AI solutions to automate manual processing of documents. We landed there, and we took that on. For the third, they had a digital collections problem. We put our solution on the cloud and delivered the outcome to them. The result is very interesting. Because of those crossovers that we're able to create with data, it unlocked completely new growth pathways. In the first example, we started with a part of what you would call the order to cash process and expanded to all of it.

For the second one, we built an AI capability for the client on their cloud and took on the role of the enterprise data-led transformation partner. More volume came onto the AI, and we helped them with automation across the enterprise. The third, because they experienced an AI solution, they wanted to experience other AI solutions for us, so we are deploying our Conversational AI solutions as well as some of our NLP solutions for underwriting. I wanted to close by highlighting four areas of investment for us. First, talent. We have a very strong belief that the winner in this space is gonna be the one who can develop the talent rather than recruit it. This strategy worked brilliantly for our analytics business, and that's exactly what we're doing within digital, and Nalin will talk about our talent advantage over there. The second and third are related.

We're investing to build more cloud and AI solutions and investing in cloud architecture and engineering because we believe cloud is the medium of delivery of data-led solutions of the future. Finally, data-led digital is a completely new capability. We're investing in digital sales to take that to market that's specialized, as well as solutioning to talk to clients, and really design solutions that can deliver the outcomes to them. For our clients, what this means is a significantly larger impact and, as you've heard, over 70% of some of these projects actually underdeliver, so it's a much larger impact for our clients and more confidence. Second, a Return on Investment. forEXL, I think, Rohit talked about it, Vivek talked about it, Anita talked about it.

It's an expansion in our addressable wallet across each and every client, and we're expanding our revenue per FTE. With that, I'd wanna hand it to Nalin, who's gonna talk about our talent advantage.

Nalin Miglani
EVP and CHRO, EXL

Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you, Ankor. My name is Nalin Miglani. I've been with EXL for eight years, and I'm part of the wonderful team that Rohit talked about. In these eight years, I've been a proud participant and contributor to its outstanding growth, which I guess you know by numbers better than maybe even I do. Today I'm here to talk about the talent advantage that EXL has. Everybody referred to that, and that's no secret because in this hot talent market, that is an advantage either you can have or not have. I'm gonna share with you why we have that advantage.

I'm going to share with you why we have that advantage from the demand side and how we have that advantage from the supply side, which means how we have an advantage across the talent supply chain. That is at the macro level, but I'll also share with you why individuals join us. Why they join us, why they stay with us, and why they find EXL a place where they can realize the best of their talent. That, in summary, is what I'm gonna talk about when I share EXL's talent advantage. Let me start with talent acquisition. For us, we have invested in talent acquisition over many years, but over the last couple of years, we have significantly enhanced our investment, especially on the data and technology side.

What that means is that when we acquire talent, we are able to map the market, we are able to forecast the market, we are able to price the market, and then we are able to proactively source the market, all digitally. That enables us to hire in time and at scale, which means that we are not building huge benches, but at the same time, we are able to hire the numbers we need to accelerate our growth. That's in talent acquisition. Like Ankor mentioned, a sustainable talent advantage needs building talent too. Over time, we have invested in data and technology in that side of our business. We have invested there specifically in self-directed learning, where people can learn on their own, and then AI helps them learn better or learn more or learn relevant.

Self-directed learning is part of our talent development investments, but also learn anywhere, learn on any device, learn at any time. Both of these, if you combine, has enabled us again, make learning happen in time and at scale. We built that advantage, and as a result of it, we are able to make the talent supply chain work really well for us from a time, price, and scale standpoint. What really worked for us after that was our data-led strategy. Because of that data-led strategy, we are able to offer the talent that joins us the level of work that they cannot get anywhere else.

Because they work on interesting projects, they work on interesting challenges that involve what they want to be involved in, which is either big data or just data-led problem solution, or various platforms and technologies that are required to solve client problems. Once we are able to solve the client problems, we experience the business growth that which you track, which I track, and all of us are very proud of. That growth actually leads us to attract even better talent because our brand equity improves as a result of that. In short, our talent advantage is actually a flywheel, which has momentum right now. It got energy from the capabilities of acquisition and development. It got energy from our data-led strategy. It got energy from the work that we provide our talent to do, which led to the success we have.

Now the flywheel has momentum, and that is our talent advantage. I want to share with you some numbers. In just one year, these are numbers as a kind of evidence for in time and at scale talent advantage. In just one year, there's a 75% increase in the number of people we hired in digital and analytics. Our analytics business, Vivek talked about it, grew, and talent there was an enabler and an accelerator. In this hot talent market, that headline that I'm really proud of, talent supply was not a constraint for growth for EXL. In fact, it was an enabler. All of these people that we hired were in what we call in-demand skills.

Cloud, AI, CX, all of these areas which you're well aware of, we have significantly ramped up our practices in that. In cloud itself, within 2 years, we've increased the number of people we have by 10 times. If I look at our ability to hire people at scale and in time, enabled by technology and enabled by our strategy, this is the evidence of that. We have been able to also source all incoming talent from some of the good schools all across India and the U.S. We, like I said, have these really super powerful training ability enabled digitally, which we use to make them start doing very interesting work very soon. In building our own talent, again, it's technology-driven and data-driven.

In just these 10 months, 450 of our Leader s have obtained at least 1 cloud certification just by themselves. At least 1. Some have done even more. We've been able to build digital Leader ship, and the cloud certification is just 1 example of it. Our digital Leader ship comprises 3 segments. 1 is digital methodologies, digital technologies, and digital Leader ship. It is important for digital Leader s not just to know the technologies, but to be able to lead digital workforces. We built a very strong base of digital Leader ship. Rohit mentioned all 40,000 people are data aware or data proficient. That is shown in at least 3 courses, or sorry, an average of 3 courses across our entire population.

That is important because when data becomes your economic driver, both for the client and for our own value creation, it is important that all employees look at their work from that lens, and are able to create a DNA where there's innovation, suggestion, and enhancement of the work that they do for clients because they are trained and aware of what data means and its importance in all the work they do for everyone. On our digital platform, on a quarterly basis, at least 70% of our employees are engaged all the time. That is some set of numbers on how we build our talent. When this flywheel has its momentum, it also improves the employee experience because everybody loves being in a growth organization.

Growth organizations have energy, but then when they are supported by learning, intentional learning and great work, you get a highly engaged workforce. Our engagement scores are 3.9 on a scale of four, actually, on a scale of 5, and that places us above 75th percentile or in the top quartile of high-performing organizations all across the world. That is the level of our engagement that we have. A lot of it is digitally driven. We have about 300,000 transactions on digital HR in this year itself. The year is not over, but up year to date. This is important because 68% of our people either work remotely or in a hybrid fashion. We have repurposed EXL to respond to the modern workforce, both from an engagement standpoint and a Leader ship standpoint.

Our attrition compared to our competitors is therefore much lower and is dropping every quarter. Actually, in analytics and digital, our attrition is lower than pre-pandemic in a hot talent market. That is how the talent flywheel gives at every stage. Because we are an attractive employer, and because we have worked on this with intent over the last many years, our workforce is becoming more diverse. That makes working environment a rich one, as well as our engagement with client much richer. Over the years, our gender diversity in our workforce has steadily and actually impressively improved. That 41% number is one of the highest in our industry. In our Leader ship, our diversity is increasing steadily, and here is where we are working even harder, especially, at the hiring stage.

Every candidate slate that we have, it is our requirement that is at least 50% diverse. We are working on our diversity, and we are achieving gains there. We are becoming a global workforce which is digitally and data-driven. Therefore, to summarize, we have a great acquisition and building capacity, a diverse workforce, a Leader ship depth, not from a traditional succession planning standpoint, but also digital Leader ship. All the high-end work we do has created an innovative feel energy in the company, and all of that then leads to what I said before, talent being an accelerator for growth and our ability to get talent at scale and in time. With that, I'll hand over to Maurizio, who will take you through the financials.

Maurizio Nicolelli
EVP and CFO, EXL

Good morning, everyone. It's great to see everyone here. My name is Maurizio Nicolelli. I'm EXL's Chief Financial Officer. I started back in February of 2020, right before COVID. I've gotten to know everyone here through that video screen in front of my computer. It's great to see everyone here in person today. Thank you. I'll. You've heard a lot about our business and the growth opportunities that we have within our overall business in both data analytics Digital Operations and Solutions. oops, let me go forward here. you've heard a lot about our business resiliency that we have in just in both of our core segments. Nalin has talked to you about a little bit about our talent advantage.

Now let's talk a little bit about our performance since our last investor day in November of 2020, and also our forecast really going forward for the next couple of years, you know, between 2023 and 2024. A few takeaways that we'll focus on during my presentation is the growth momentum, both in Analytics and Digital Operations and Solutions. we'll talk a bit about our margin performance, how well we've done since November of 2020. Then going forward, we'll talk a little bit about our strong balance sheet as we go into 2023. Also we'll talk about guidance and just an update for you on our medium-term targets.

If we look at revenue growth, you know, over the last two years from the beginning of 2020, you're seeing strong revenue growth of 21% CAGR over that period. You know, and we talked a bit about analytics being the strong growth driver, but also Digital Operations extending itself from where we were growing between the 2016 to 2019 period. You're also seeing margin expansion since the beginning of 2020. We've grown our margins 240 basis points since the early 2020, and that's really, you know, being driven by a lot of operating leverage that we've gotten on the business over that period. Then finally, you're seeing EPS grow faster than revenues, which is core to us.

One of the big things that we have really focused on over the last two to three years is really growing EPS faster than revenues, which really entails that middle section is really growing margins over that time period. If we look at our two core pieces of our business, you know, data analytics has grown 33% on a CAGR basis since 2020, and that is just overall. It's grown 28% on a constant currency organic basis during that period.

You know, keep in mind, we bought Clairvoyant back in December 2021. We've mixed in a bit of inorganic growth with organic growth, and I'm pleased to say that the Clairvoyant acquisition, both in terms of integration and financial performance, has done very well versus our expectations that we told you back in early 2022. Secondly, if you look at Digital Operations, you know, we've grown Digital Operations at a 12% CAGR over that same time period also. It gets back to, you know, what Anita talked about in terms of what has changed within Digital Operations solutions, going from a 7% CAGR growth rate previously to 12%.

You know, we're getting into much bigger deals and much more higher value areas within Digital Operations that's really helping us build that business going forward. The one thing to focus on in terms of our overall revenue base is the annuity piece of our business, and this is a little bit of a reminder for everyone on how big our annuity-based revenue is. It's well over 80% of our overall total. You know, keep in mind, when you look at that 80% of the overall total, Digital Operations solutions is 54% of our business, and the average contract value is between 4-5 years. What that really is, it creates a very strong foundation of annuity revenue on an annual basis, you know, going forward.

When you couple that in with our analytics business and that portion of the annuity piece of that business, you're getting over 80%. When you look at the piece that's more project-based, the 19%, you know, you have to look at it with a much closer lens on that 19% because that piece of our business, which is shorter in terms of timeframe, but it is the entryway into much longer engagements with our clients. We use that shorter-term project to really gain the client's confidence, whether it's a new client or an existing client in a particular area, to really gain larger term contracts or jobs going forward. That's really almost our entryway into much longer analytics jobs or work.

When we look at our adjusted operating margins, you know, I mentioned earlier that we have grown margins 240 basis points over the last two years since the last investor day. You know, what's really driven margins during that period? One, we're getting into more profitable digital deals. You know, going forward, Ankor talked a little bit about that in his presentation. You know, we are getting more of higher value business from our clients, you know, particularly in analytics that Vivek talked about. Then also we're leveraging just our overall business. If you look at our revenue growth since the beginning of 2020 versus our headcount growth, we're growing revenue faster than headcount and that's creating leverage within our business now really going forward. You're seeing our revenue per employee headcount metrics go up.

You're seeing it go up for the overall company. You're seeing it go up in analytics in particular also. Having said that, you know, you can read the newspapers here every day and you can tell that there's uncertainty within the macro environment, you know, overall. We are seeing that, you know, constantly every day. We are still in the middle of a period of high wage inflation. You know, as you see, as you read the news articles, there's a potential recession in 2023 and 2024. We are also returning our employees progressively back to the office each month. When we look at margins going forward in 2023, we do see certain headwinds that will continue or will exist in future periods.

Having said that, you know, our margins today, our expected margins estimated at the middle of our guidance that we gave at the end of the third quarter, are still at 18.3%, and that's in the middle of a high wage inflationary environment. Some of these headwinds we're already facing today, but some of these are potential more headwinds in the future as you think about our medium-term guidance going forward. The one thing that we started to consciously focus on in early 2020 was return on invested capital to really drive just the overall business. We've grown our ROIC significantly from 8.9% to 14.6%, estimated in 2022. How we've been able to do that?

You know, I've listed here seven areas that we have really improved on to really drive ROIC. You know, I'll highlight three of them that are in particular, you know, significant movers. One is our higher profitability. You know, driving margins 240 basis points has a direct effect on return on invested capital. That's really helped us really drive this metric. Two, we've really been able to efficiently manage our asset base. You know, our asset base has been relatively constant between early 2020 and today. That's with a higher profitability, a flattening of our asset base has really been able for us to drive ROIC. Then lastly, our M&A discipline has really helped us to not dilute ROIC.

You know, when you look at the acquisition of Clairvoyant, you know, it has worked out well for us strategically, but it also has worked out for us financially in that we paid a reasonable valuation for a business that we thought that we could really integrate and grow with the rest of our analytics business. If you take a look at our leverage today, you know, we have about $270 million in debt outstanding. You know, our cash balance is higher than that, so our net cash position is right around $24 million. That gives us a lot of ability to manage in two different areas. One is to manage the environment of rising interest rates.

You know, we have the leverage there to reduce our debt if we need to going forward, you know, and also be able to manage that going forward because it's still a reasonable level of leverage on our balance sheet. Then also, it also gives us the capacity should a strategic acquisition come before us, you know, we have the capacity to be able to fund it. We still have a significant cash balance on our balance sheet. We have a revolver of $400 million, you know, that we have currently, and then we also have an accordion of $200 million on top of that. We have plenty of access to capital should an acquisition opportunity arise going forward.

In terms of capital allocation, you know, there's really three different areas that we really invest, or we allocate our capital to. One is internal investments, and we talked a lot about that earlier in our different segments. We're really use that in terms of eyeing it with a shareholder creation lens. Also we have been using more and more on ROIC or TSR metric to really evaluate the value of that investment within each of the different areas to really help drive the outcome and the value of our investments going forward. Two, we continue to review M&A opportunities that come before us. The M&A market has obviously slowed, as you can read in all the newspapers, but there's still opportunities that come to us.

When we look at M&A, we're still being very opportunistic and selective, right? When we look at M&A, there's really two real characteristics that we're looking for. It's really the strategic fit. You know, does one plus one equal four going forward? You know, how can we really integrate and strategically drive it with the rest of our business? Two, and most importantly also is valuation. You know, are we buying it at a reasonable price going forward? When you look at it in those two lenses, we become very opportunistic and selective with M&A, knowing that we're growing the business, you know, at a significant rate right now. Then lastly, we continue to allocate capital to both stock buyback and now a little bit to also debt reduction.

You know, with our increase in our stock price, we've tiered it a bit now between stock buyback and reduction in debt. We'll continue to buy back stock to offset the dilution of us issuing shares, and still be opportunistic in terms of buying back shares. In a world of rising interest rates, we will potentially reduce some of our debt, you know, depending on how high interest rates go going forward. Now let's get into a bit of guidance in our medium-term targets. When we released our third quarter earnings, we increased our guidance based on our performance in the third quarter and our outlook to the fourth quarter.

What that has entailed, if you look at our guidance at the midpoint, we're growing revenue and EPS at a 22% organic constant currency growth rate. We've had a very good year in terms of growing both top and bottom line, you know, in an environment where we started the year out very optimistically, at least the macro environment was very optimistic. We entered some very uncertain times and you read that every day in the newspapers. For us, 2022 has been a very good solid 20%+ growth year, both for top and bottom line. When we get into medium-term targets, you know, we need to start to think about, first off, medium-term targets are at least two years out.

What that means is that there's much less visibility for us going forward. You know, we have very good visibility, you know, 6 to 12 months into the year. But when you get to 12 to 24 months or more, you have much more less visibility. We're also entering into a time of uncertainty. Right? We enter into 2022 with a bit of uncertainty in terms of the macro environment, in terms of where interest rates are going, and how companies are gonna react to a potentially slower environment. Then also, that slower environment could result into a recession, whether it's in 2023 or 2024. Having said that, you know, we are coming into the year with a good amount of momentum, so it's still, you know, we still feel very confident of having double-digit revenue growth.

Back in November 2020, we told you that we had confidence in growing revenue 10%+. Now we believe, you know, in terms of our medium-term target for the next two years, we're very confident on 11%-13% growth for overall revenue. That, we've also increased our growth rates in analytics from 13%-15% back in November 2020 to 15%-18% for the next two years on a CAGR basis. Also, you're seeing the increase in our growth rates Digital Operations and Solutions. overall, given all the macro environments and the headwinds, we still see very good double-digit growth, you know, for the next two years, you know, for overall for our company.

On profitability, you know, we've talked a lot about on our calls in 2022 that we thought margins should be somewhere in the low 18% range. That's a significant increase than what we told you back in November of 2020. Back then, we said that we would grow margins to 16%-17%. This year, you know, if you take a look at the slide before that, you know, we said we are projecting 18.3% as our estimate for 2022, so in terms of adjusted operating margins. You know, going forward for the next two years, we still see margins being in the 18% range, but we're starting, you know, we talked about being in the low 18% range in 2022 and being able to build off that.

We still believe we will be in the 18% range for the next two years. Again, this is a two-year outlook. You know, you have to keep in mind we don't know what will happen. We, you know, have much less control and less visibility in year two of that process. We still believe we're in the 18% range. We're building off the low 18% range in 2022. Lastly, you know, we continue to see EPS grow double digits for the next two years, and that's an increase from what we told you back in November of 2020. Overall, you know, when you look at our medium-term targets, you know, we still believe that we are in a very strong position with double-digit revenue growth.

We're still driving profitability at, in the 18% range, and we still see, you know, a very, very good growth opportunity and prospects going into the next two years given the macro environment that's very uncertain with a potential recession in the next two years. We feel we're in a very good spot in terms of financially to really grow the business in our medium-term, you know, outlook. From there, I'm gonna ask Rohit to come up and give us some closing remarks, and then we'll take your questions.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

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

Uh-

Maurizio Nicolelli
EVP and CFO, EXL

You want to sit down?

Anita Mahon
Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, EXL

I'm just gonna bring them forward.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

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

Bryan Bergin
Managing Director, Cowen

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

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Okay. Anita, do you wanna take that?

Anita Mahon
Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, EXL

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

Ankor Rai
Chief Digital Officer, EXL

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

Bryan Bergin
Managing Director, Cowen

Okay. Appreciate that.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

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

Bryan Bergin
Managing Director, Cowen

Okay, that's helpful. Just a follow-up here. You know, you've talked about bigger deals end-to-end. Can you give us a sense of the magnitude? What do you consider to be a big deal now? You've talked about rising deal size. How has rising, you know, average deal size changed over the last, you know, three-plus years?

Anita Mahon
Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, EXL

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

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

No, I.

Anita Mahon
Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, EXL

Hopefully.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

I think that's right.

Anita Mahon
Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, EXL

All right.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

In the past, we would've looked at a large deal being, you know, anywhere between, you know, $3 million-$5 million. Now it's $10 million minimum threshold. Like Anita said, we've got now deals in the pipeline and deals that we've won which are in a $100 million-plus kind of a category of total contract value. Yeah, Puneet.

Puneet Jain
Associate Equity Research, JPMorgan Chase and Co.

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

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Okay. Maybe I'll take that, and Maurizio, maybe you can, you know, add on to that. The economic uncertainty that is there, we factor that in terms of our medium-term guidance that we've given, as Maurizio said. In terms of our pipeline and the demand side of it, we are not really seeing any slowdown in activity or any change, you know, in terms of customer behavior. We continue to, you know, see very strong demand signals both on the data analytics side as well as on the Digital Operations side. Our viewpoint is that the nature of demand might shift, where clients will be focused in a lot more on cost reduction and being able to provide much more efficiency and effectiveness to their end customer.

Their investment in technology, their investment in data, their investment in analytics is one area where we think it's gonna continue to exist. We are fortunate in a number of different ways. One, the industry verticals that we serve are relatively unaffected in terms of this economic slowdown that's taking place. That seems to be happening in other areas which are not predominantly our core industry verticals. Number two, the type of clients that we have and the type of work that we do is not really being impacted. For example, we don't have any work, either on the content moderation side. We don't have any work, you know, with, which is a large proportion on new age, you know, technology companies. Therefore, you know, the profile of that work is very well protected.

Third, there's a very broad base of a customer base that we've built up, and the number of new client relationships and new engagements that we've signed up already give us good visibility in terms of the traction that we have. We feel actually very confident in terms of our growth rates continuing to be in double digits and continuing to kind of sustain that. You know, we'll see how this thing goes on. Maurizio, anything which you'd like to add?

Ankor Rai
Chief Digital Officer, EXL

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

Puneet Jain
Associate Equity Research, JPMorgan Chase and Co.

You talked about, Maurizio, about the headwinds to margins. Can you also talk about, like, how much of a tailwind there could be by high growth in analytics, given it is like a very high revenue per employee compared to Digital Operations? Even though the gross margins might be similar, but it could still be a tailwind on operating margins perspective. Can you talk about

By high growth in analytics, how much of a tailwind that could be to overall margins over the next 2, 3 years?

Maurizio Nicolelli
EVP and CFO, EXL

Margins right now are kind of a mix of many different things happening within that one metric. You're correct. As we grow analytics faster than the overall company, the growth margins are similar to Digital Operations solutions, but because we have less employees, inherently, the adjusted margin, operating margin will be higher, right? Keep in mind, we are in a world right now of high wage inflation, and particularly within analytics, right? Where do we see high wage inflation? It's in those critical areas. It's digital, it's analytics, cloud, technology. So that is putting pressure on us going forward in terms of the analytics margin. Inherently going forward, you know, in the longer term, meaning three to five years, it should be that tailwind, you know, within margins.

Puneet Jain
Associate Equity Research, JPMorgan Chase and Co.

Sure.

Robert Bamberger
Senior Research Associate, Baird

Yes. Thanks. Robert from Baird. I guess what percent of revenue right now is value-based pricing versus FTE-based, and how much of a higher revenue and margin uplift is that value-based versus, I would say, just, you know, typical FTE-based pricing?

Maurizio Nicolelli
EVP and CFO, EXL

I'll take that. The percentage of that value-based pricing, outcome pricing, is less than one-third of our overall revenue right now, right? That's our opportunity really going forward, you know. We talked about it within analytics and also within Digital Operations Solutions, but that's still, you know, the smaller portion of our overall business or revenue base.

Robert Bamberger
Senior Research Associate, Baird

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

Nalin Miglani
EVP and CHRO, EXL

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

Robert Bamberger
Senior Research Associate, Baird

Okay, great. Maybe one financial question. The 11%-13%, does that include M&A at all in that amount?

Maurizio Nicolelli
EVP and CFO, EXL

Yeah, that is, organic growth on an annual basis, on a CAGR basis.

Robert Bamberger
Senior Research Associate, Baird

Okay.

Maurizio Nicolelli
EVP and CFO, EXL

It's all organic. No M&A.

Robert Bamberger
Senior Research Associate, Baird

Thank you.

Steven Barlow
VP of Investor Relations, EXL

Mayank.

Mayank Tandon
Managing Director, Needham & Company

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

Nalin Miglani
EVP and CHRO, EXL

Right. Vivek, you can help me here too.

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

Sure.

Nalin Miglani
EVP and CHRO, EXL

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

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

I just wanted to add a little bit to what Nalin said. A large part of the talent advantage for us for analytics comes not from hiring in the lateral market, but comes from actually building that talent ourselves. We are one of the largest recruiters of engineering talent in all the markets that we function in. In the U.S., we recruit from Cornell, from Columbia, a couple of other schools. In India, we recruit from the IITs. We are one of the largest recruiters from the IITs. The sheer volume that we bring in each year of fresh talent, and then you train them, you groom them, you keep them within the system, that actually is a large part of why that, you know, the scalability comes.

That's also part of the reason we're kind of giving them a career and building them up for a career. That also drives the attrition down.

Mayank Tandon
Managing Director, Needham & Company

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

Nalin Miglani
EVP and CHRO, EXL

For the attrition, it's difficult to predict whether it'll go down because it is totally related to the talent market. The way we are seeing is that the labor market and recession are getting delinked. Even in a recessionary environment, it is quite possible for the labor market to be hot. That is because in a recessionary market, many enterprises will still need to do digital and other work to manage their profitability. The supply side of such talent is not gonna be built up very soon in the short term. Labor market gets delinked from recession, and if that stays hot, attrition can continue to be a challenge. For us, we have to perfect our talent supply chain in a very systematic data-led way, every year and every moment.

That is what then gives us the advantage over anybody else who is not looking at that with an intent, both from a market and an individual standpoint.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Okay.

Steven Barlow
VP of Investor Relations, EXL

I've got a question here from the field.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Okay.

Steven Barlow
VP of Investor Relations, EXL

Yes, it is. With the increasing demand on talent, and you talking about the TAMs increasing, particularly in analytics, are we finding new competitors in analytics from, let's say, big IT services firms or whatnot? If you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape in analytics in particular.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

All right. That's great for you, Vivek.

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

Sure. You know, analytics has always been a very competitive marketplace. There are a number of existing entrants, and there's a number of different new entrants. I think we are not really in a place right now where we are really threatened by any of the new entrants. We're not in a place where we feel that our market share or the growth in our market share is threatened by any of the competitors. We feel pretty happy about where we are and our kind of growth trajectory and our expansion. The one thing I would call out, though, is as we are expanding into new areas, the kind of companies we compete with has increased, and the nature of the competition's kind of now different.

The folks that we used to compete with, say, five years ago, they're probably still there, but the companies that we compete with right now is probably threefold of that because, you know, the business that you're going after, the buying centers that you're going after is now so much bigger and so much more diverse. You know, I still like our odds in terms of competing against them.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Any other questions?

Steven Barlow
VP of Investor Relations, EXL

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

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

I'll address that a bit, and then I'm gonna ask Anita and Ankor and Vivek to talk about it a bit. The way we are organized is we are organized by business verticals, and we've created four businesses for ourselves. We've got an Insurance business, a Healthcare business, an emerging business, and an analytics business. Each of these businesses make independent decisions in terms of where they would like to prioritize and where they would like to focus on to take advantage of the market opportunity. We also have an ability to bring this all together and take a look at it from a lens of digital and apply that across the market and see where we need to invest and where we need to kind of build more capability.

We've also created geographic heads in different geographic markets where we serve our clients. In each of these areas, the geographic heads are the ones who are determining as to where we should push and where we should go after client engagements. You know, Anita and Vivek, you run businesses, so would you like to share, you know, how you think about it?

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

Go ahead, please.

Anita Mahon
Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, EXL

I think I'll just talk about Healthcare briefly. Like any business, we're looking at where the market is growing, you know, where we have the effect of tailwinds of market growth, and then combine that with the client position that we've got and our assets. Just as a couple of examples, as we look across the portfolio in Healthcare , we're able to help large payers optimize Healthcare spend. Coming through the last couple of years, they are all facing margin pressure. Investing in the platform capability that we use to help them with that, you know, makes sense. It helps us to improve our profitability, and it helps us serve a broader set of stakeholders in those clients and to attract new clients as well.

Another example I would bring is, you know, we're seeing more and more investment into the provider side, both among the large national payers and with funding from other sources. One of our larger clients this year is actually a multi-specialty physician group that we started working with a year into the pandemic. We're supporting them across the portfolio, Digital Operations, as well as analytics, and our risk adjustment solution for Medicare Advantage. We're also investing in, you know, tailoring our solutions for the provider market. Maybe the third area I'll mention is Medicare Advantage, because we do support the Medicare Advantage programs in many of our payer and provider clients, and the demographics are really on their side there. We're seeing that part of the market continue to grow as well.

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

For analytics, we've really been very, very deliberate in terms of how we've thought about our expansion strategy. You saw what we'd done with the value chain. Literally, for the last three years, we've actually been zealously focused in terms of how do you build out our capabilities for each part of that. The Clairvoyant acquisition didn't happen just by chance. It was. You know, we'd worked on a plan, and we'd been looking at a lot of prospects to build out that capability for a very long time. Today, where we are, there are four big initiatives or four big investment themes that we're going after. Number one, we are expanding the verticals that we're going after. Analytics probably is the easiest capability to take into a new vertical.

We are going after a number of different areas. We are expanding into CPG, which is a huge market for analytics. We're going into life sciences. We are going into more on the high tech side. There's a number of big bets that we are making of saying, "How do you expand us into verticals?" Number two, going back to the value chain, we are focused on cross-sell. We are focused on saying for our existing clients, for our existing verticals, how do we get more of that work upstream? Going after the CDO market, the Chief Data Officer, has been a big initiative for us. How do you start moving more work into the outcome-based model? That's been a big initiative. We investing in the folks that can help make that sale. Number three, new geographies.

UK and Europe continues to be a big area of focus. Over the last couple of years, we've invested in building out Australia and Asia-Pac. As that region in particular recovers from the pandemic and is just reopening from the pandemic, that's going to be a big growth driver for us. Finally, number 4 is really expanding the size of the business that we can target. We've always been a Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 type. You know, that's been our client. Today we have the capability of taking our solutions and packaging them in a form where they can actually be consumed by companies right outside that.

To go from Fortune 500 to Fortune 2000 and take a different solution-based kind of a offering to them, that's going to be a big area of focus. It's those four things. You know, hopefully we'll, two years from now, come back and report out to you on how those four have done.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Great. Any other question? Sorry. Back.

Kate Hui
Managing Director, William Blair

Hi, my name's Kate from William Blair. Can you guys touch on how successful you have been recently passing on those wage inflation challenges that you mentioned on the clients?

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Sure. Talking about price increases and, how successful have we been on that? Vivek, you wanna lead off, and then maybe, Anita, you can-

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

Sure.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Add to that.

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

As you can imagine, this is a topic that gets a lot of intense attention. This is something that we've been focused on and we've been measuring throughout the year. We've actually gone after it in a number of different ways. We've focused on conversations which, for customers where we didn't have, say, annual COLA clauses or annual escalators, we've gone back in and changed that. Number two, we've actually changed our rate cards for new customers. In fact, for analytics, we've actually revised our rate card twice already this year, and we've got another revision coming in January, I believe. Yeah. We've taken up the new rate cards for new customers up. Three, we've actually introduced new sets of positions, new roles, and taken that to customers.

Finally, four, I think it's the shift to value-based pricing. The net-net of all of that is on analytics, we've actually been able to protect the margin, and actually get price increases that are commensurate with what we are seeing on the wage side. How that pans out, you know, I'm not sure. I think what you would see next year is hopefully some of the price increases that we got this year, the effect of that, the annualization of that effect next year is going to be a big driver for us.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

Anything, Anita, you wanna add?

Anita Mahon
Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, EXL

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

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

Just to add to Anita's point, it's a discipline that we've adopted across accounts, right? And across businesses.

If you're an account Leader today in EXL, you know that pricing is an important topic and you know that you have to engage with your customer in pricing. I think that the adoption of that discipline is what makes me optimistic.

Kate Hui
Managing Director, William Blair

Great. Thank you.

Rohit Kapoor
Chairman and CEO, EXL

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

Vivek Jetley
President and Head of Analytics, EXL

Thank you.

Steven Barlow
VP of Investor Relations, EXL

Thank you.

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