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Citi 13th Annual Fintech Conference

Feb 28, 2024

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Thank you for joining me. I'm Andrew Schmidt on Citi's FinTech Research Team with a focus on FinTech software. It's my pleasure this morning to host SS&C. With us today, we have Brian Schell, who is the CFO of SS&C. Brian, thanks so much for joining us.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Great. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

I think I always like to kick off for people in the audience. Some of the people in the audience are familiar with SS&C, but there's a lot of people who aren't. Maybe you could just provide an overview for people who are new or revisiting the name.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Sure. So I think I kind of lead off with some of our strengths. Well, who are we? We're not necessarily a retail brand name, so to speak, but the largest provider of fund administration services to the hedge fund industry, to the PE industry, the largest mutual fund transfer agent. As two of those, that's probably in excess of, you know, that's probably close to $2.5 billion of the $5.5 billion roughly we have just in those two lines of business. And it's 85% is software-enabled services as a kind of as you think about the recurring revenue model. There's about 5% related to the healthcare vertical. Very high percentage of our revenue is repeating as we kind of think about what separates us.

And I would say one of the key kind of differentiators and one of our competitive strengths is that owning that end-to-end technology solution from the front office to the back office and everything in between and owning that technology stack. Because not only do we license a lot of the software to some of our clients, but we use it, right? We use it for all of our clients. And so that learning and being able to control those changes is all part of it. So probably 27,000 roughly people across 30 countries, I think, something like that. So we're pretty all over, primarily U.S. as far as a revenue standpoint. Next, I would say is probably Europe and then with quite a bit of sourcing done in India as well.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Got it. Thank you so much. And you've been on the job for over six months now. I know you came in, investors were very excited about you coming aboard. Maybe you talk about your biggest learning since you joined and what factors have either been different or the same versus your expectations?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah, I think about that in probably I'll call it three different buckets per se. And I would say the top line is the independent evaluation because I'm sure nobody's going to come in here and tell you that they're not valued highly enough. So I'll just leave that. So anyway, so if you look at the opportunity, I look at the revenue top line. And as we work through it, I think there still continues to be revenue opportunities. And I know it sometimes it's hard to capture and do, but I think it's an opportunity for it because we haven't spent as much time on it, but I think we're starting to crack the case on it is a real revenue synergy.

As we look at some of our largest clients and you span across the different services we provide from the front to the middle to the end of the process and whether that be the financial reporting, any of some of the healthcare solutions, some of the reconciliation, some of the robotic process automation, everything along the way. There are services that we look at these providers or these clients that we don't provide today that are very natural for us to provide. And so I continue to be encouraged that that is a big opportunity for us. And we've started to put more and more resources towards solving that, leveraging that as part of more of an integrated, I'll call it, sales approach and client service approach.

And we can say, yes, we can do that, but also then that leads to my next point is I'll call it efficiencies, right? There are some technology efficiencies as we look at the code, we look at some of the ability to make it more seamless between some of our products. Now again, that's a longer-term nature that has significant long-term benefits from a sourcing of your staffing as well as efficiency overall and retention. So I think there's an opportunity there also on the, I'll call it even our own back office opportunity to make things more standard and consistent that are underlying it. So I see a lot of that revenue opportunity synergies. I see the back office/cost opportunities.

And then the third element of that is the efficiency and it's, again, more longer-term is we've seen some of the benefits of some of the digital workers that we have put into place. And I see that continuing to create capacity for us longer-term and helping to facilitate margin growth and still also allow incremental investment to grow the top line.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Got it. Super helpful. And you answered my next question, which is broader organizational changes and you alluded to some sort of your own back office kind of FP&A changes in there as well.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Correct. So that's part of the, I'll call it, some of the things that we're doing is enabling that business to be able to react a little sooner. I think we've always been very tight on some of the, I'll call it, the accounting controls and processes. This is more about how do we take a look at it and kind of build that, I'll call it, decision support infrastructure with the data and make it as much real-time as we can to really enable some of the sales or some of the pricing to take a look at actually you can make this pricing investment per se because the cost of that revenue might be this or, you know, hey, you actually don't have to go that high or actually we need to go higher because that's not profitable revenue for us.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Right. So more organizational intelligence, sharing of data across the platform, really integrating kind of the information that you have.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Correct. Correct. It's not sexy, but it's literally, and it takes a little bit of time to build, but it can be very powerful.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

What does it take if I take it just one step down, what does it take to get there? Is it a systems issue? Is it an organizational question to really, you know, because it sounds simple, but obviously, you know, integrating data across the organization and making better decisions based on that is non-trivial.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Correct. So I would say there's a couple. It is both. So there is a, I would say, a talent pool mindset that there are people that specialize in doing this for organizations and how do you create a not just a CRM system and say, go figure it out. There are people who actually do this and here's how you can make it tangible to actually make it part of your sales process. The other part is even on the, I'll call it even the general ledger, right? So we are not consistently on, for example, Workday, which is where our primary and we're moving to.

So that data flow, whether it's coming from some of our billing engines, from the pricing engines, making that consistency and allowing that to flow in a consistent manner, I think helps enable that data and feed in a similar connection and data format into more of a BI tool.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Got it. Super helpful. And I don't think that's an area that's well understood. So appreciate that. Maybe we could just briefly turn to the Outlook and get that out of the way for FY 2024. I think investors were pleasantly surprised with the organic revenue growth for FY 2024, but some questions around visibility. Maybe we could just disaggregate this into top and bottom line expectations. I think starting with top line, maybe at a high level, could we just walk through the major businesses and expectations for 2024 and anything you'd share on underlying drivers?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah, sure. So if we look at where did we see the strong revenue growth just coming out of 2023 for 4Q? And you start obviously some of the top of the list items, you see the strength of the Intralinks business. We continue to see that double-digit growth rate opportunity into 2024, right? There's a lot of positive things that was doing. And I see a lot of organic growth there from I think there's increasing behind the scenes a lot of M&A activity that's supporting that growth, even though we haven't seen a lot of prints of here's what this deal occurred, particularly with the current administration. But anyway, so there's a lot behind the scenes that are going on. And so we've seen the strength of Intralinks. We've seen a double-digit increase. We saw it with Blue Prism.

So we'd continue to expect to see a high single-digit, low double-digit growth rate coming out of Blue Prism with the intelligent automation with RPA. We continue to see some of the strength coming out of the alt business, right, particularly being driven by the private markets as that continues to grow. I would say the other thing that's helping is some of our more traditional licensing business, I think, is poised to continue to grow as we look at that cycle. And I think we have fewer negatives, honestly. I think we saw the healthcare business still report results as a result of some client losses that were announced a few years ago and some of that trailing revenue stream from a comp perspective. So that feels to have bottomed out as well. So you just have fewer negatives also that's coming in.

That was a bit of the issue with some of the licensing business that happened in 2023 that 2022 was very, very strong from that standpoint. Overcoming some of that, putting that in place sets us up nicely for a positive trajectory for a higher organic revenue growth rate in 2024 than 2023.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Yeah. No, that makes sense with healthcare trending, well, stabilizing, and then of course GIDS or DST sort of growing as well, which is great. Maybe we just think about just the range of outcomes, top and bottom of the sort of the revenue outlook. So what drives the top end versus the bottom end? And I think question I think that people ask is what level and this ties into the visibility question, maybe you can comment on this, but what are the recurring revenue assumptions versus licensed revenue or periodic that's embedded?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. So part of it is a little bit of math, I'll say, and is that an increasing part of our top line is software-enabled services. And we know that second line of the licensing and professional fees is chunky, as we know, and can be gauged or the revenue recognition from ASC 606 requires the reporting to some extent on some of those items. And it's great revenue. Don't get me wrong. Love it. We want to get that sale in. But the comparability and if I can perfectly structure a new contract or a new renewal perfectly over the four quarters for the next five years, that's great. But unfortunately, that's not the way it happens. And sometimes you'll have chunkier years. 2021, excuse me, 2022 was really strong. And 2023 had less of that. So you have a bit of a comp issue.

But given that's a smaller part of the overall top line, that should have less variance. And so that's why we feel I think I feel a little bit better about that overall growth rate because we have a little bit more visibility to that more recurring nature of the top line of the software-enabled services and how that looks. And so that's part of some of that, I'll call it, visibility to it. And as we look at but if you look at that second line on the licensing, there are a lot of renewal opportunities coming into 2024 more so than 2023. And I think that will help drive some of the higher than lower.

To your point of, well, what makes you happy to hit the lower end or higher end of that range, I think we have when we went through our overall forecasting process and we look at it and establishing targets for folks, we look at what do we know has already occurred as far as our baseline? We look at those high confidence, medium confidence, and low confidence, lower confidence opportunities. That kind of led us to be able to put out the growth rates that we did.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Great. This sort of where you started in terms of using data better and to form decisions, is that filtered into the outlook at all or is that still a little bit earlier?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

That's still part of the outlook. I think that we will continue to refine. And as we set, I'll call it a parameter or a framework to help, I'll say, inform some of that forecasting process. And you can never necessarily factor in all macro events by any means. But in the further out you go, obviously, the more uncertainty there is. But collecting that data now, trying to establish that framework and building that over time, hopefully will continue to improve that forecasting process.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Okay. Very helpful. And then, before we get into sales cycle and some of the more meaty segment-level detail, just on margins and expenses, I think there's a lot of optimism around, obviously, RPA and the benefits that it can bring from a productivity perspective. But maybe we could disaggregate sort of at least the way the current outlook is set up between savings from digital workers in general. There's other areas of efficiency, not just digital workers. And then also level of reinvestment that's currently assumed.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. So the digital worker, it's a real thing. To quote Jamie Dimon, "AI is a real thing." And so we've seen that improvement. We've seen particularly our larger, I'll call it GIDS fund administration that use a lot of concentrated labor around certain processes and being able to digitize that, so to speak, as far as the repeatability and the consistency around reconciliation, reporting, compliance reporting.

There's an immediate win. Once you program it, get it in, you just need less labor at the end of the day. I'd say that fell into the bottom line. I really think that helped drive some of the margins. Now, I think we had a little bit of conflicting noise with that with some of our healthcare costs, some of our litigation costs that ate into some of that margin benefit. Large organizations, that happens. And then let's hope we can manage that.

That's less of the case. I'd say the next phase of that. We continue to see that benefit. That's not necessarily going away. But the next phase of the digital worker, to your point, is we see that creating more capacity. It may not be an immediate headcount elimination per se, but it does create more capacity that I may not have to go out and hire the next person as quickly to support incremental client service or revenue growth. So over time, that should help build that margin expansion. I don't see it, and you've seen it in our guidance. We're trying to be conservative and we're not baking it in 2024, but we do think it exists for a longer term because I think it's the next phase is building that capacity. It's a step function.

Even as we introduce in our own, I'll call it, finance back office, right? We can improve processes from 3 days down to 2 hours. It doesn't mean that person's job goes away. It just means as you can continue to build those, they get more capacity to do some other things or I don't have to hire the next person. So that takes a little bit of time to build those processes on. And then you really start seeing the margin expansion.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

That's very helpful. So it's more about kind of multi-year path, sort of building capacity this year. Obviously, there's a benefit this year, but it builds over time.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yes. And so yeah, so we went after the low-hanging fruit right away. We saw that benefit. We still think there's opportunity to drive some margin. It just may not be as significant early on, but I think it continues to build.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

And then I think one thing you mentioned on the earnings calls, there is some reinvestment this year. Maybe you could talk about the and some of it, I think you alluded to in terms of capacity, but maybe the areas of reinvestment and the flexibility associated with those areas because I think some of it is, for lack of a better word, discretionary.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

It is. Absolutely. And that's part of the when you work with the board and their contingency planning, what's it look like? It's like, well, what if things don't go the way that you expect them to go and what would you do? And so it obviously is all around the discretionary, right? So we look at here's our, I'll call it, for lack of a better word, our R&D spend around product improvements, around some of our incremental sales efforts, not as much around the marketing dollar per se. It was like, oh, I'm going to kill that Super Bowl ad. That's not the space that we play in, but more around some of those, the efforts around the incremental people.

So I think it's going to be around the people and the technology spend and the projects that we have and how many of those enhancement projects are we going to take on now that, as many in the room know, you have to commit to that investment spend before you actually receive the dollars. That takes some level of confidence. The increasing level of confidence that some of that revenue generates allows you to reinvest in that investment spend to drive revenues in 2025, 2026, and 2027. It's primarily around the technology spend and that product innovation and what we're seeing. You've seen a commitment, for example, to Domani, right? As far as the healthcare side and what we've done there.

But we have equally high spend in what we're doing around GIDS, around the alt business, and being able to really facilitate some of the growth rates that are going on there.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

I want to get to GIDS and alts in a second, but just maybe at a higher level. This is difficult because it's very aggregate. Just sales cycles, pipelines, things like that. How have those been trending recently?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. So I think we feel good about our pipeline. I think you heard Bill starting to talk about this on the earnings call, probably going back to the 3Q earnings call, that we're starting to feel a little bit more confident and we're seeing more there. I think in some of 2023, we do see the cycle lengthen a bit. And so I think we're feeling better about maybe that's tightening a little bit. Again, going back to the math, it's a little less critical to certainly on the licensing business because it's a smaller part of the business, still material. And we feel good about the pipeline for 2024. There's more renewals that we see that we feel good about. We tend to do better on renewals per se.

So that looks better in 2024, say, than 2023, similar to maybe what a 2022 kind of looked like. I think with that, there's obviously still uncertainty, but I think the uncertainty is probably narrowed to some extent. I don't think people are the uncertainty is more around, well, rates are going to fall, but do they fall five rate cuts or is it down to two? But at least there's a direction there. It feels like there's more caps as an example of, hey, I think maybe we're through it. We're not sure exactly when it happens, but people, I think, are feeling better about where we stand. So that level certainly, certainly helps us.

And I'm sure, which we can cover, which is positive across the board as far as the businesses, whether it's fund creation, all along the way that it's our ability to support new revenue growth.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Got it. Good segue into talking about the alts business, which has been a nice growth driver. Maybe talk about just where we're at in terms of hedge funds, private markets, real assets. Maybe starting with hedge funds, obviously, back office has been a pretty good opportunity over time. That's fairly well penetrated. Then we move into middle office. Maybe there's some front office opportunities in some of the smaller funds. But I think generally speaking, is it existing client growth, fund launches? Is it penetration? Can we talk about the hedge fund business for a minute?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. I would say it's, I'll call it all three as far as where that goes, right? So we are seeing some fund launches. And a lot of times those fund launches are within the already larger, I'll call it, fund complexes. And that's where we will do very well, right? And it could be it could be a slightly different asset class that their offerings become kind of across the board. And only a few, maybe only one, can actually provide the complexity of those large managers and keep it all consistent within their systems. And they can get leverage internally as well. So we like it when it happens there because that's kind of our sweet spot. And so we're seeing the fund launches within the complex funds. The private market PE continues to expand, particularly on the private credit as well.

That's just been purely more launches. I mean, that's just that is new firms as well as existing firms deciding they want to be in it. Then just the pure growth of the funds that are already in it, the expansion because of the opportunity that's there. So it's been kind of across the board. Then the last thing I'll say is that we look at different opportunities. We do see firms wanting us to outsource it completely as well as they move into it as they're seeing their margins compress, their costs compress. If it's a point of parity, why would you do it internally? Let's go to scale. Let's go to somebody like SS&C and outsource that to them, lift it out, and let us manage it at a lower cost than they might be able to do on their own.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Super helpful. I also think there's some optimism around that, as you mentioned, kind of private credit. I think you alluded to this, but are you seeing that show up today in terms of fund launches, asset gathering, and things like that in terms of the clients you serve?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. We're still seeing that the largest percentage growth driver within that business continues to be very strong.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Fantastic. Maybe we can move on to GIDS. I think a pleasant surprise has been the stabilization of that business. Maybe talk about what's driven the stabilization and the visibility from here because I think to your point, that flipped from a negative to a stabilization and now to perhaps a positive going forward. Maybe talk about the aspects.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. I think that it's been happening over time, right? I think we got the strengthening of the leadership team, I think a little bit more of a sales focus. And I think where we've seen some of the strength has continued to come from is I think the U.S. market's been, if you think about the TAM, hasn't really expanded. So it's hard if you're not necessarily rising with a tide there. So you need to try to create market share. And that's almost been a headwind. And I think where we've seen the wins come and the growth come has been internationally, right? So we announced one of the superannuation funds in Australia. We did a nice big sum of work out of South Africa. So we continue to see wins outside the U.S. that's helping to drive that international growth.

So that's where we've kind of seen much stronger growth rate, smaller part of the business, but a nice benefit as we continue to expand in Australia and other APAC regions. So I would say that's call for that stabilization, we'll call it. The fourth quarter was aided by some special work that we're not necessarily expect to repeat. Could that type of revenue occur in the future? It could as we build up that, I'll call it, consulting type of skill. But that's not necessarily how we're kind of building our growth rate guides.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Not the baseline assumption, right?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Correct.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

That less recurring revenue portion. Got it. Okay. Maybe if we and you answered that question on special product revenue. Thank you.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

I didn't think it was going to come.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Yeah, it's good. So on Intralinks, I mean, that was a standout. I think it was 90% growth in the fourth quarter, pretty standout. Some of that is M&A volumes, as you alluded to, but another piece is kind of other products that have been billing out, private equity communication portal, things like that. So how much is sort of M&A volume versus growth in other businesses?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. It's still primarily going to be M&A volume. But it goes back to the incremental services also within that is and here's where it's actually a real case of using AI is we've been able to offer the service of being able to go in and summarize documents at a high degree and based on the level of detail before people want to dig in, right? Because it's data rooms and the amount of complexity they're going in. So there's some real strong tools that are starting to gain some traction. The point about the, I'll call it the PE firms and the people using it, that goes back to the initial grid that I talked about as far as the cross-sell opportunity, right? Cross-sell sounds hard, but in a way, you're like, well, you PE firm need this service. We have a solution right here.

So just making that happen, making that known, making that aware, it's there. It's not a stretch. You're servicing this, but why do I have to go to here to get it done, right? It's something that's a natural lift that we're seeing. So we're excited about that opportunity, but it's still being driven by the M&A side.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Got it. Yeah. You mentioned an interesting thing, which is obviously the application of AI to deal documents. Good way to slip that technology in there. It's great. Got to highlight it.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

That's right.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

So can you talk a little bit more about that more broadly? Is that basically, I have a deal document and I have some technology that can sort of peruse the document and basically summarize key points, things like that, which can obviously save a lot of time?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

It can save a lot of time and then allows person where they want to focus, right? As they can summarize, you can have some senior people being able to see the key points. You can then say, here's I want to dig here. You can flag issues that you're highly concerned about, either from a regulatory compliance or legal perspective that may not have surfaced, that might be buried. It's there technically that I think that helps. And so that cuts down your cost significantly of having to go in and everybody read every single thing. And maybe someone was falling asleep at 11:00 P.M. or 1:00 A.M. and they're like, oh, I just kind of missed that section. Yeah, yes, I covered it. So we know those type of things can be really beneficial for people to dig in.

You could also use it as the supplier site of maybe you may want to start redacting some things as well as far as some of the items that are there and before it goes into it that may be off limits. So all of those things, we're seeing some nice elements to it.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

That's awesome. I appreciate that product-level detail. That's great. Maybe we dig into healthcare a little bit because I do get a lot of questions. Not a huge portion of the business, but it has been a drag over the last year or two. How should we think about the revenue trajectory this year? Is this more of a stabilization year? Are there opportunities for growth? Obviously, Domani Rx is a big opportunity. 2025 beyond, I think there's a question mark around 2024 trajectory.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. I consider it more of a flat-ish year. And as we've, I'll call it kind of, I'll call it a bottoming out as stabilizing, I think, is the right word that we've kind of think about it, right? I think there are growth opportunities. I don't believe it shows up in revenues as much in 2024 because you're building the book. And a lot of times, onboarding some of the major, major clients takes time, right? You get the commitment, but it doesn't mean it shows up in revenues. So I do hope that it's a proverbial bouncing off of 2024 with an upward trajectory. I think Domani is one of those core platforms that it had to get done. Platform conversion is never a lot of fun, but it's gone extremely well. We continue to onboard clients.

It's not a revenue growth because it's revenue that already exists from the other platform, but the performance continues to do very well. I think there's a lot of noise right now that's going on with pharmacy platforms that's in the news. I believe that an independent system like ours can be very well strategically positioned to help facilitate maybe some concerns that exist out there. We, like I said, we're still excited about it. It's just not something I can point to in 2024 and say that's going to be a double-digit revenue growth driver.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Understood. Maybe before we go higher level in terms of longer-term revenue and margin, I'll go just talk about Blue Prism. I think the long-term target for that business historically has been double digits. Fourth quarter did decelerate a little bit. Is there maybe just a question about demand in financial versus non-financial verticals? Is there enterprise distraction in terms of maybe AI versus RPA? Talk about just what drove that growth and how you see demand trending.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. We haven't seen necessarily that change. I don't know if it's as, like I said, the high single digit, low double digit. So I think you're in the cusp of that 10% range. So it's like, is it that much of a difference? And the base is growing. So sometimes the incremental revenue, obviously math hasn't caught up as much as maybe what the earlier growth rate was, but it still continues to grow. So we're still seeing demand. We're still seeing the implementation. Our next wave is we think about intelligent automation is continuing to add the larger data set learning elements to RPA and some of the AI elements to it. So we still think there's going to be continued to be demand. We're still a big user of it. We're still expanding our use of it within SS&C internally. So we still think it's there.

But like I said, some of the work that we did in 4Q, we think will help build for 2024 to bounce off of the 8.6% growth rate in the fourth quarter.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Perfect. Okay. Yeah. And look, I agree. I think it's intelligent decisioning, which has elements of AI, obviously, as well. It's not just plain RPA and robotic processing.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Correct.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

That's the way I would think about it. Yeah. Got it. Cool. Thank you. Maybe just thinking about revenue algorithm, I know SS&C in the past has talked about kind of a mid-single digit revenue trajectory, which is roughly where the midpoint is, kind of like the lower end. Are there any gating factors in your view, if you think about just a bottoms-up analysis of the business? Are there gating factors to growing consistently at that mid-single digit revenue growth range?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

No, I don't think so. I mean, particularly as more and more of the revenues are concentrated into that software-enabled services, it's a positive and a negative. It sometimes might be a little harder to bump the acceleration from whatever, call it that mid-range to 10 in any one year because of the size. And if that's the business we get, revenue recognition doesn't quite happen that way. There could be $hundreds of millions of dollars deal contracts, but that's not necessarily what gets realized depending on how it's the service that we're providing. So no, I just think it's a nice kind of build as we move forward. So yeah.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Same question on margins. I know we asked this on the earnings call, but just view on margins, obviously 40%, it kind of been the sort of the unofficial kind of ceiling. How do you think about the scale in the business over time, especially as you kind of start to grow revenues more meaningfully?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. I don't see that as the ceiling, I'll be honest. I believe that particularly on the different lines that we're in, maybe some of the more competitive lines, it might be just because you may not be able to price X, Y, and Z to be able to get that incrementally. But more broadly in some of where the growth that we're seeing, and like I said, longer-term, the use of the digital worker and not needing the five extra people for the next $1 million of revenue is I see no reason why we can't continue to get margin on the incremental revenue that's exceeding that gets there, right? I think we have been intentionally reinvesting some of that to drive that. I believe it's best for us to build long-term shareholder value is getting that longer-term revenue growth rate.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Yep. No, I would agree. Maybe a closeout question. No conversation is complete without a capital allocation question. So I guess just on the M&A environment, I think, Bill, it did seem like on the fourth quarter call, he expressed a little more optimism around the deal pipeline, mentioned things like fund administration opportunities, maybe even a lift out. Is there anything you can talk about in terms of just how you're thinking about M&A, pipeline opportunities that you see?

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. I mean, I think M&A has always been, I'll call it, at the forefront of helping to drive, like I said, I mentioned it again, the shareholder value at the end of the day. And if I can drive that incremental growth engine through M&A, we would value that, right, at the end of the day. But it's got to be the right price. I think Bill has shown a lot of discipline around not overpaying and seeing an opportunity to grow the revenues and the earnings side of that as part of the SS&C franchise. So that will always be something that's going to be on our radar that we won't hesitate to explore. I think he was more positive on it because not necessarily that we're getting ready to announce a deal tomorrow.

It's that I think we're starting to see valuations come down that have been more reasonable from our perspective, necessarily, than here's what our pipeline looks. So us to be continuing to maintain discipline around price and opportunity and make it strategic, I think that's where you hear the excitement.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Now, based on our conversations yesterday, I think a lot of people were hoping for a target-rich environment in 2024, but we'll see if that plays out.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Right.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining. Thank you, Brian. This has been a great conversation.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Great. Thank you.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

Thanks for being with us. Appreciate it.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yeah. Thanks.

Andrew Schmidt
Analyst, Citi

All right. Thanks, a lot.

Brian Schell
EVP and CFO, SS&C

Yep.

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