Greetings, and welcome to the Black Knight third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Steve Eagerton, investor relations at Black Knight. Thank you. You may begin. Thanks. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Black Knight third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining me today is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Anthony Jabbour, and Chief Financial Officer, Kirk Larsen. Our results were released this morning, and the press release and supplemental slide presentation have been posted to our website. This conference call is being recorded and will later be made available on our website. This call will include statements related to the expected future results for our company and are therefore Forward-Looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to a number of risks and uncertainties. The risks and uncertainties that Forward-Looking statements are subject to are described in our earnings release, Form 10-K, and other SEC filings. Today's remarks will also include references to Non-GAAP financial measures. Additional information, including reconciliation between Non-GAAP financial information to the GAAP financial information, is provided in the press release and supplemental slide presentation. This call will be available for replay via webcast through Black Knight's investor relations website at investor.blackknightinc.com. I'll now turn over the call to Anthony. Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. Simply put, the third quarter was an outstanding 1/4 for Black Knight as we once again delivered strong financial results and executed against our strategic growth initiatives while focusing on integrating the acquisitions we've made over the past 18 months. Before I provide an update on our business, I'll hit highlights on the financial performance and outlook. In the third quarter, we delivered organic revenue growth of 10%, with strength across both segments and outperformance compared to the market as it relates to origination volume-related revenues. Adjusted EBITDA growth was 19.5% and adjusted EPS growth was 15%. As a result of the outstanding third quarter performance and outlook for the 4th 1/4, we are raising our full-year guidance for revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EPS for the third quarter in a row. We also bought back $100 million of shares in recognition of strong cash flow and our stock trading at levels that we believe is meaningfully below its intrinsic value. Based on the ongoing successful transformation of our business, we are updating our long-term revenue growth expectations to 7%-9%, an increase from our prior view of 6%-8% that was in place since our IPO 6 years ago. Next, I'll discuss how our ability to deliver new innovative offerings and integrate our solutions has led to our strong sales success. As we've discussed on prior earnings calls and in other meetings with the investment community, a central point of our strategy is to deliver innovative products to further strengthen our end-to-end suite of offerings across the mortgage life cycle and then integrate those offerings so our clients can benefit from a more efficient, integrated suite of solutions, and their customers can benefit from a greater value proposition in terms of functionality. I continue to be proud of how our team has delivered these new innovations with urgency, and I thank our clients for their insights and continued partnership as we continually develop new solutions. Let me give you a few examples of recent new innovations. Earlier this year, we launched our Underwriter Assist solution, which uses AI-enhanced automation and advanced decisioning capabilities to quickly and efficiently review loan package documents, thereby reducing the overall cost to originate a loan. Underwriter Assist reduces manual review from the underwriting workflow to improve efficiency and supports effective decision-making by underwriters. Also, for our lender clients, we've added an innovative pipeline monitoring functionality to our Optimal Blue PPE. This new functionality continuously monitors for loan scenario data changes that could affect pricing or eligibility, and then validates pricing and eligibility for each change. This allows lenders to provide even greater pricing accuracy and reduces manual intervention. For our servicing clients, we continue to add new innovative capabilities to our Servicing Digital platform. As an example, we recently added the ability to track home care information, like when repairs are done, and create schedules for regular home maintenance and store relevant information about your house. We plan to use this home maintenance data to make our AVM even more accurate. For example, if we know a house has been maintained well, that data can be added to a condition-adjusted AVM to reflect a higher value for the home. We will also be enabling connections to insurance marketplaces, giving customers the ability to browse and select insurance policies directly within Servicing Digital. These enhancements and integrations strengthen the value of Servicing Digital by creating more reasons for customers to return to their servicer's app, which increases both retention and satisfaction, decreases customer service calls, and gives servicers another channel to cross-sell new products to their customers. As part of our growth strategy, we selectively pursue acquisitions, and then we integrate those businesses and their offerings into our ecosystem. This enables us to offer more market-leading products to our clients and allows the clients of those acquired businesses to benefit from our comprehensive solutions, our continued investments, and our ability to develop and deliver new and innovative offerings. As I mentioned last 1/4, we have integrated our Collateral Analytics AVMs, the Optimal Blue PPE, and our advanced loss mitigation solution into Servicing Digital. Since then, we've integrated the recently acquired Surefire CRM and marketing automation system into Empower, LoanCatcher, and our recently relaunched Capture solution, which makes each of these robust solutions even more powerful. LoanCatcher, our broker loan origination system, is now integrated with our Loansifter PPE, which provides brokers access to products and pricing across hundreds of wholesalers so they can find the best price for their customers. We have also loaded historical data from eMBS, a business we acquired this summer, into our Rapid Analytics Platform, and we'll continue updating this data monthly. We have identified opportunities to enhance McDash data with data from eMBS, and that we're in the process of enhancing these datasets. These are just a few examples of how our focus on innovation, integration, and urgency drive all that we do, and our clients are keenly interested in what we are delivering. Last month, we attended the MBA's annual convention. We had many valuable meetings with clients and prospects. Interest in our offerings continues to increase, and our clients are excited about how we are integrating our solutions to make their operations more effective and help them deliver a better customer experience. Next, I'm going to discuss how our innovative and integrated offerings have led to successes in all segments of our business. In our servicing software segment, we signed 4 new MSP clients in the third quarter, and we've signed 12 new MSP clients through the first 3 quarters of this year. This is already more clients than we signed in all of 2020. At the end of the third quarter, we had 21 new client MSP implementations and existing clients adding new loans to their portfolios in progress, representing an incremental 2.1 million loans. One of those implementations, Caliber, went live this past weekend of October. The implementation went very well, and we are thrilled to have Caliber live on MSP. In origination software, we've been focused on executing on our strategy to create a comprehensive end-to-end suite to digitize the origination process and increase efficiency through automation and artificial intelligence to reduce the cost to originate a loan. Today, we continue to execute this strategy as we add more innovative solutions from point of sale to PPE to remote online notarizations. As we continue to successfully execute against this strategy, we are seeing significant sales success. In fact, let me share some of our sales stats across origination software. We signed 16 Empower clients in the third quarter, bringing our totals to 20 new clients through the first 3 quartes of the year. We added 50 new clients to our PPE solution in the third quarter, which brings the total to 145 for the year. We also signed 6 new AIVA deals in the third quarter, which brings total AIVA sales to 22 for the year. From an eClose perspective, we signed 7 deals this 1/4 and a total of 26 deals for the year. Finally, the Surefire team, which joined Black Knight in July, closed 12 marketing automation deals in the third quarter. As interest rates continue to climb and origination volumes are slowing, investors are focusing more on managing MSRs. Our hedge platform helps those investors manage hedge positions, mitigate interest rate risks, and maximize profitability. We signed 3 new clients to our hedge platform in the third quarter, which brings the total to 27 new clients for the first 3 quartes of the year. To further illustrate the strength of our ability to cross-sell our comprehensive solutions, we bundled our PPE with 6 clients who signed Empower agreements in the third quarter. Because Optimal Blue has developed strong and trusted relationships with its clients, we're able to cross-sell additional solutions to these clients. We also sold the new Capture offering to a top 25 servicer. As a reminder, our Capture product monitors leads from various databases and identifies loans with the largest economic incentive to refinance, obtain a home equity product, or get a purchase loan. This servicer used Capture to develop a refinance solicitation list based on personalized rate and term for each customer. This was based on a test case of just 36,000 loans, of which 6% of the consumers applied for a loan. With the average origination profit on a new loan of approximately $2,000 for the MBA, this company potentially earned over $4 million on originations. We continue to see the strong sales success across all the product lines in our data and analytics business. Specifically, we are seeing a great deal of momentum with our larger clients around our AVM offerings as they focus on implementing a consistent and high-quality valuation solution. Lenders are realizing significant savings by using the same valuation from the loan solicitation through origination, especially for home equity lines of credit and portfolio analysis. In addition to reducing costs, using a consistent AVM across the entire process results in a lower risk to the lender. Staying with valuation, the FHFA recently announced that they would allow banks and mortgage lenders to use desktop appraisals instead of in-person home valuations. Which was a practice that started during the pandemic. In the spring of 2019, we introduced solutions and workflow tools that can assist appraisers prior to conducting the appraisal or while conducting a desktop appraisal, and allow homeowners to submit data to help with the appraisal. Additionally, the data and analytics teams focused on identifying datasets that we can bring together to deliver enhanced insight and create competitive lead generation, customer retention, and risk mitigation strategies has led to strong data sales. As we continue to innovate and enhance our Rapid Analytics Platform, interest from audiences across the mortgage and capital market segments continues to grow. In summary, during the third quarter, we had very strong sales, delivered more innovative solutions, and added value to our current offerings by further integrating new solutions we've introduced and the acquisitions we've made. We continue to make progress implementing the clients we sign and providing superior support during and after implementation. I'll now turn it over to Kirk to go through the details of the financials and our raised outlook for the year. Thanks, and good morning, everyone. As you heard from Anthony, the third quarter was an outstanding 1/4 for Black Knight, and we are very encouraged by the continued momentum across each of our businesses. With that said, I'll take you through the details for the third quarter and our raised outlook for the full year. Turning to slide 3. On a GAAP basis, revenues are $378 million, an increase of 21% compared to the prior year 1/4. Operating income was $83 million, an increase of 39%. Operating margin was 22% compared to 19%. Net earnings attributable to Black Knight were $53 million compared to $128 million, and diluted earnings per share was $0.34 compared to $0.82. The prior year period included a Non-cash gain of $88 million or $0.56 per diluted share as a result of Dun & Bradstreet's initial public offering and concurrent private placement. Net earnings margin was 12% compared to 37%. Turning to slide 4. I'll now discuss our adjusted results for the third quarter. Organic revenue growth was 10%, which included a modest headwind of $3 million or 90 basis points from lower origination volumes. To put the origination volume effect in perspective, our revenues that are sensitive to origination volumes represented 9.5% of our total revenues in the third quarter, and they were down 8% compared to a market decline of 21% as reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association or MBA. Adjusted EBITDA was $185 million, an increase of 19.5% compared to the prior year 1/4. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 48.9% compared to 49.5%. Adjusted operating income was $148 million, an increase of 23%. Adjusted operating margin was 39.2% compared to 38.6%. Adjusted net earnings were $93 million, an increase of 15%, and adjusted earnings per share was $0.60, an increase of 15%. Turning now to slide 5. I'll discuss results in our Software Solutions segment. Third 1/4 revenues for the Software Solutions segment increased 23% to $320 million. Organic revenue growth was 10%. Our servicing software solutions revenues increased 9%. The growth was driven primarily by higher usage-based revenues on MSP, new clients and sales of new innovative solutions. In origination software solutions, revenues increased 66%, including revenue from the acquisition of Optimal Blue, as well as growth from new clients, the network effect in Optimal Blue, and new innovation sales. Organic revenue growth was 14%, reflecting approximately 4 percentage point headwind from origination market volumes. EBITDA increased 20% to $183 million, and EBITDA margin was 57.1% compared to 58.4% in the prior year 1/4. The margin contraction was driven by revenue mix and increased investments in innovation and client support. Operating income increased 24% to $150 million, and operating margin was 46.9% compared to 46.6%. Turning to slide 6. Third 1/4 revenues for the data and analytics segment increased 10% to $58 million, primarily driven by strong sales execution across nearly all business lines and revenue from an acquired business. Organic revenue growth was 7%, reflecting approximately 4 percentage point headwind from origination market volumes. EBITDA increased 14% to $21 million. EBITDA margin was 35.8% compared to 34.5%. Operating income increased 16% to $17 million, and operating margin was 29.1% compared to 27.7%. Adjusted EBITDA for the corporate segment in the third quarter was a loss of $19 million compared to $15 million in the prior year 1/4. Turning to slide 7. I'll walk through our balance sheet highlights. At the end of September, we had cash and cash equivalents of $78 million. Total debt principal was $2.497 billion. We had revolver capacity of $663 million, and our leverage ratio was 3.4 times on a net basis. During the third quarter, we repurchased 1.4 million shares of our common stock for $100 million on average of $73.32 per share. As of September 30, we had approximately 8 million shares remaining under our share repurchase authorization. Turning now to slide 8. I'll walk through our outlook for the full year 2021. We have once again raised our guidance based on a strong third quarter and confidence in the outlook for the 4th 1/4. For the year, revenues are expected to be in the range of $1.466 billion-$1.472 billion, which represents raising the midpoint of the range by $14 million. That translates to reported growth of approximately 18%-19% and organic growth approximately 9.5%-10%. Adjusted EBITDA is expected in the range of $720 million-$724 million, which represents raising the midpoint of the range by $12 million. Adjusted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $2.34-$2.36, which represents raising the midpoint of the range by 9 cents. Turning now to slide 9. Additional modeling details underlying our outlook are as follows. We continue to plan for incremental foreclosure-related revenues to be delayed until the first 1/4 of 2022. With the strong origination volumes in the second 1/2 of the year compared to our prior expectations, we now expect no impact from volumes on a full year basis. As a reminder, we experienced a tailwind of approximately $7 million in the first 1/2 of this year, a $3 million headwind in the third quarter, and expect a $3-$4 million headwind in the 4th 1/4. In addition, we expect interest expense of $83 million-$84 million, adjusted depreciation and amortization expense of approximately $145 million, excluding the net incremental depreciation and amortization resulting from purchase accounting, adjusted earnings attributable to Non-controlling interests of approximately $20 million. This relates to the portion of Optimal Blue that we don't own. We expect an adjusted effective tax rate of approximately 22%, which is at the low end of our prior guidance due to higher expected research and development credits. We expect full year weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 156 million. I also wanted to briefly discuss the raise to our long-term revenue growth guidance. Our continued strong performance and underlying momentum have led us to take this step. If you compare the business today to where we were 3 years ago, the strength of our continued innovations, accelerating platform sales, and the structural benefits of acquisitions give us confidence in our ability to drive long-term revenue growth of 7%-9%. That concludes my remarks. I'll now turn the call over to the operator for Q&A. Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for your questions. Our first question has come from the line of Ryan Tomasello with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Please proceed with your questions. Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the questions and congrats on the strong 1/4. Thanks, Ryan. appreciate the prepared remarks on the long-term guidance increase, but was just hoping to put a finer point around some of the variables that are really needle moving in terms of the higher conviction in the outlook. You know, perhaps the specific areas you'd call out across the business, and what range of growth the new guidance includes for the 3 major segments. Then I guess just more broadly thinking about the operating environment for the next 2 to 3 years. How are you thinking through navigating the business within that new 7%-9% range inclusive of the mortgage volume headwind that's likely to occur next year, as well as just broader competitive dynamics which clearly have evolved materially over the past few years, particularly in the originations business? Thanks. Maybe what I'll do with that one is I'll take the competitive landscape first, and then you can, you know, Kirk, give me updates on the longer term variables. What I'd say, Ryan, in terms from a competitive perspective is we're very excited with the momentum we continue to make in this space. Our strategy is proving to be the right strategy of innovate and bring a lot of capability to markets, integrate them tightly to provide the real value to our clients and their customers, and do it all with urgency so that we're there when our clients need us. That is working exceptionally well. You know, I keep reminding our team not to be distracted by any one competitor and any one silo of this industry, but focus on our end-to-end. That's what our clients run end-to-end businesses. We need to help them continue to find opportunities or to mitigate risks in their business. That's you know proving to be exceptionally you know powerful value proposition. We're gonna stay focused on that. It's a winning formula. Kirk, if you want to give some guidance around the variables in the long term. Sure. Ryan, there's a few things I would comment on. The first is, as it relates to volumes, we like to think of long-term growth rate exclusive of volumes, because as you know, origination volumes are a relatively modest percentage of our total revenue, sub-10%. They certainly can move around from period to period, but over time, they moderate and I think revert to a mean. As we think about that 7%-9%, it really is we're looking at that on a volume neutral basis. If you think about the businesses and what growth rates we're expecting from those, looking forward in servicing, we'd be thinking of that in the area in the mid-single digit area, given its scale and our outlook for that business, which we think is terrific. For origination, we look at that as a double-digit grower in light of the assets and the runway that we see there, both from a loan origination system perspective, where you've seen terrific sales. You think about all the other solutions that we've added around that, and you think about how we've taken that business from being a loan origination system and a vendor network to really an end-to-end origination software suite, both through internal innovation as well as through acquisition. We think the outlook for that business is outstanding. For our data and analytics business had tremendous success there. Team's doing a great job. We've taken that from really what was really a low single digit grower to what has been, frankly, a high single digit grower and double digit grower organically of late. We're looking at that for the long term as a kind of mid-single digit plus growth area. And all those pieces go together to fit into that 7%-9%. I'd trust the 7%-9% in a different way as well, just to give you a little bit of extra color. You think about what the components are. A very simple way to think about it is that our annual price escalators and our loan growth on MSP, kind of organic loan growth, not new clients, but that offsets the very modest attrition that we have, which is typically sub 2%. And so those really offset. What that means is that sales is what will drive the growth. And if you think about what would comprise that, 2-1/3s to 3-quartes of that would be platform sales. Think Empower, think MSP and some of the other platforms that we have. And then the remainder is innovation and cross-sell. And if you think about that component, innovation, why do we have conviction about raising this long-term growth rate? One of the key drivers is innovation and the success of the new solutions and what that has driven, and not only in isolation of the product revenue, solution revenue that they drive, but it helps drive platform sales. That really is what one somewhat begets the other. But you really can't. You can think of it in either way as well. That's really what gives us confidence around raising to that 7%-9%, is the momentum around innovation, momentum around platform sales that gets us to those higher expectations. Great. Appreciate all that color. I guess just as a Follow-Up, last 1/4, you called out incremental investments that you were making in the second 1/2 of the year to capitalize on various growth opportunities across the business. Is it possible to quantify what absolute level the guidance reflects in terms of that spend, and if there have been any changes to that thinking? As it relates to my first question, you know, clearly the 7%-9% top line framework is helpful, but are you also able to provide any context around a bottom line framework, including margin expansion and earnings growth? Sure. On the first part, we haven't quantified the specific investments that we've made. You could expect that we would have expanded margins in our typical area in the absence of those investments. Frankly, right now, they're part of the cost structure. They're. We talked about those being not just in-period investments that would then go away, but being investments in resources that become part of the business, part of the cost structure going forward. We haven't quantified what that is specifically. As far as the rest of the long-term framework, we continue to expect margin expansion both at the EBITDA level and frankly, accelerating. You saw that we disclosed an operating margin metric this 1/4, an adjusted operating margin metric to really highlight the. We're growing revenue. We're gonna grow EBITDA faster. We're growing revenue. We're gonna grow operating margins faster than operating income faster. We're growing EBITDA and really scale down to that mid-teen EPS growth that we've spoke of, and that frankly you saw this 1/4 as well. The rest of the framework hasn't changed. We really just wanted to clarify where we think the revenue growth expectations are and the rest would flow from there. Great. Thanks for taking the questions and congrats again on the strong 1/4. Thanks, Ryan Tomasello. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Campbell with Stephens. Please proceed with your questions. Hey, guys. Good morning. Congrats on the continued success and the momentum of the business. Thanks, John. Hey, I know we're gonna have to wait for the 2022 guidance as far as, you know, the total rev and profit ranges. But if I just kinda double-click on the foreclosure revenue, that still feels like a little bit of a black box. I think you guys did $50 or 50-ish or so million in 2019. Just hoping if you can provide maybe just some high-level direction around the kinda level of foreclosure rev recovery next year and how that might ramp, starting in 1Q. Sure, John. I think there still are a fair number of variables there, and so maybe it is a black box as you described. Where we stand today is there are rules that are from the CFPB that are preventing foreclosures until at least the first 1/4. There certainly is a backlog of seriously delinquent borrowers, but with where home prices have gone, that certainly could mitigate some of that. As you look out, there certainly could be a backlog of seriously delinquent borrowers that will end up at least with the start of foreclosure process after loss mitigation. You know, we would expect that it would recover to the point where there's just ongoing activity from borrowers that go into seriously delinquent status, and then the foreclosure process starts. It's not all a backlog, but potentially going forward, it's really as much of a just new entrants into seriously delinquent status and then eventually foreclosure. I mean, if I were looking at this, you know, as we sit here today, we still see a path over the next couple of years of volumes getting back to those levels of 2019. The exact timing and pace of that, I think we're still waiting to see what happens when they're allowed to commence in the first 1/4 and see what that looks like. Suffice to say, we will do what we always have done, which is tell you what we know when we know it. As we bring forward guidance for 2022 in February, we'll tell you exactly what we're assuming. We can all watch what happens together, and we'll keep you updated as we see things moving. This is another one where while we like continue to get closer, there's still enough variables that it's difficult to call. Okay, that's helpful. Great work on Caliber. I know that was an important strategic initiative for you guys. I don't know what you guys can say here, but I'm curious if there's anything to call out just relating to their recent acquisition and maybe any kind of plans to consolidate platforms. Well, thank you, John. First of all, the team's very focused on it. We're excited with the results that we had together with the Caliber team. You know, I'd say we've got a great relationship with NRZ overall, including Shellpoint. You know, with any large servicers that are out there, we're in constant contact with them. Like I said, we believe that our MSP platform is the right solution, you know, for the market, and we continue to demonstrate it through, you know, lots of innovation and integration that we bring to it. As you'd imagine, you know, we are in pursuit of them and other large servicers not on the platform today. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you, guys. Thanks, John. Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Mihir Bhatia with Bank of America. Please proceed with your questions. Hi, thank you for taking my question. Maybe I just wanted to make sure I go back to the long-term organic growth guidance change just to start. If I understood it correctly, I think historically it used to be price escalators at about 1.5% organic growth. Loan growth was 1%, and then new sales was the remaining 3%-5%-ish. That got you to your 6%-8%. Is the new guidance basically that new sales are gonna be what drives is what's moving up in the new guidance? Or is there like, am I mixing and matching? No, it absolutely is higher expectation for new sales that is raising. Really, if you look back to when we first introduced the 6%-8% back in 2015 in connection with the IPO, a revenue growth bridge at that point would not have had an innovation line. It would have had a platform sales line, it would have had price, it would have had loan growth, it would have had an attrition assumption. What's incremental today is really the innovation bar or step in that guidance. That's really where that change comes in. It's new sales. Got it. Those innovation sales, do they typically happen when contracts are up for renewal, or did they always happening throughout the year, even just like, you know, I'm not talking about like, you know, big one-time innovation, like maybe where you acquire something. I'm talking of just like general innovation that you're doing. When do you actually capture the value for that innovation? Is any of it given as part of the base contract, and then, you know, when the contract renews, you price up again for it? Is it always any innovation is charged for? Well, what I'd say any innovation does have a charge attached to it. Whether we bundle it into a broader deal, you know, for a new client or at a renewal, you know, obviously, you know, we decide. The key thing is we're in constant communication with our clients, even if they're 1/2way through their contract about these new innovations that we can bring to market. That's the part, you know, that's exciting, is if you think about innovation, it drives growth directly from that innovation. As Kirk mentioned earlier, it also helps sell platforms by selling that innovation. By constantly having a, you know, a stream of it, there's always a reason, you know, for our account executives to be meeting with our clients and always communicating. The more you do that, obviously the more opportunity that you discover, you know, for both us and our clients. It's a constant, you know, throughout the life of the contract and certainly at the beginning or renewal of a contract as well. All right. Thank you. Just a couple quick ones from me. First is, in terms of Servicing Digital, can you tell us how many of your clients or rather what percent of the client base or the loan servicing are now getting like, you know, using Servicing Digital and some of those bigger innovations? Sure. We have 28 Servicing Digital clients that are implemented. Over 1/2 of the loans that are outstanding are actually implemented on Servicing Digital at this point. There's still some in implementation that would get us to kind of 3-quartes of the total loans would be signed up to Servicing Digital. Perfect. My last question is just on capital allocation share repurchases. Obviously, you did some this 1/4, and I think for some shareholders, I'm sure that was nice to see. I guess my question on that is, you know, your share count still did increase a little bit this 1/4. Is the idea with the buybacks to mostly offset the dilution, or is it more of a value-based call where you just think your shares are cheap? And given your leverage, how much capacity do you think you have here in the near term to continue executing on it? Well, you know, really for starters, you know, we believe our stock is trading meaningfully below its intrinsic value. It's certainly not reflecting the results we're delivering, the robust outlook that we have, just, you know, what we see on the inside of the company in terms of a company building on momentum and great relationships with our clients. That was the reason, you know, for this in the third quarter. What I would add to that, to your comment of are we buying to offset the dilution. The shares that we acquired or repurchased in the third quarter significantly exceeded our annual grant of equity. We do not look at it as necessarily offsetting dilution, but just we look for the highest value we can create through allocating capital. The share count didn't come down as much as you may have expected in the 1/4 because of the timing of when we were buying. We don't buy in a quiet period, for example. It was later in the 1/4, so it'll be overweight towards future periods. Got it. Understood. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Jeffrey with Truist Securities. Please proceed with your questions. Hi, good morning. Appreciate you taking the question, guys. The innovation call-out, I think is really helpful in terms of appreciating how you're innovating the platform. I wonder on a couple of specific points. Anthony, can you talk about some other potentially emerging life of loan solutions? I'm thinking about cyber, for one and any thoughts on product development there, and also progress on integration of AIVA into MSP. Yeah. Those are 2 great ones, Andrew. From a client's perspective, on cyber specifically, we've got a very thorough cyber program in place here. As you think about why, often I highlight over and over integration, the power of it. It's really if you imagine a world where every vendor did one thing and a client had 6 contracts, 12 contracts every time they wanted to really revamp their platform, you now have that many more data points of risk. You have that many more regression testings you have to perform when any one of those vendors upgrades the system. There's just a lot more complexity that gets introduced, and cost, and impact to the end customer. One of the key values that we rarely talk about, I appreciate you asking the question on, you know, buying more from Black Knight in an integrated manner is it dramatically reduces the cybersecurity risk because it's all, you know, within our data cloud. It's something that we take very seriously. We wouldn't look at necessarily offering products to our clients from a cyber perspective. We're not a cyber technology company, but we've got a very, very strong program. As you can imagine, with the scale we have, regulators are constantly in our buildings working with us, and, you know, we're very strong that way. It provides that type of security for our clients, getting it all in one place in a very secure manner and limiting the number of ingress and egress points that they'd have. To your second question on integrating AIVA to servicing, it's absolutely something that we are looking at doing. There's, I think, a lot of opportunity for us to extend that, and we're gonna continue to do that, Andrew. Okay. Look forward to updates on progress there. Kirk, could you just quantify for us the amount of acquired revenue in the 1/4? It's actually in the press release, in the tables. Steve, do we have the exact amount with us? It's in the footnotes, Andrew. We can share that. We can look that up on a Follow-Up call. It's in the footnotes to the schedule in the back. All right. I'll pay better attention next time. Thanks. Thanks, Andrew. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from the line of Tien-tsin Huang with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question. Thanks so much. Really great results, for sure. Just, I want to ask on the backlog growth and software business qualified pipeline, that kind of thing. Obviously, I know you don't take the decision to raise your long-term revenue growth outlook very lightly here, so you must be very confident in all those things. Can you give us a little bit more on the growth in the backlog and the qualified pipeline, especially on platform deals? From a quantification of the backlog, it continues to be very strong, Tien-tsin, and growing. You can see why it is with the number of sales we've had, you know, up to 12 MSP deals this year and 20 Empower deals. That isn't necessarily in part. The backlog number isn't what would give us confidence in raising our long-term growth outlook, but 'cause it certainly points to what will drive growth for the next 1-2 years. It certainly is more the momentum. What gives us confidence is really more the momentum in the sales and the momentum in the innovation that gives us confidence in the long-term growth rate. You're right. We don't take that raise lightly at all, given our nature. I would say that certainly does give us confidence. So we'll continue to evaluate providing a backlog number, but we feel good about what that looks like heading into 2022. Understood. I know Andrew sort of asked about it, but just thinking about bundled or integrated sales versus point solutions providers, 'cause there are a lot of digital players that do the latter, do you think there's a pendulum shift in any way towards more point solutions versus bundled or fully outsourced end-to-end? Just trying to understand how what you're hearing from clients and what they value. Well, you know, Tien-tsin, you know, I tell you at the MBA conference that took place, you know, we had a lot of great conversations with a lot of great clients and prospects and, you know, certainly feel the momentum of what we're offering is resonating. I don't, look, you know, we're mindful of every, you know, siloed competitor out there. From a client perspective, again, what I said earlier, that power of integration, and we're the only ones in our industry that can go end-to-end in our space. Across them, you know, each of those areas, whether it's servicing, originations, data and analytics or secondary market technologies. We've got leading products in those markets. We're not asking someone to compromise one of the components to get an integrated suite. They're all winning in their own right. Furthermore, we're integrating them tightly, right? You know, if you think of the Surefire acquisition we did, it's already integrated into our Optimal Blue PPE. So monitoring pipelines of originations coming or monitoring a servicing, you know, portfolio, identifying you know candidates for refi with a personalized offer, handling that last mile, you know, to the client. Instead of just sending a file to our clients, handling it through Surefire, having Surefire populate through Servicing Digital and it being more automated. That's the power. You've seen it in the core banking industry that they have in terms of being able to bring lots of capability together and make what's a very complex technology architecture simple for clients. We're the only ones in our space that can do that. We're focusing on it relentlessly, and we're focusing on our client service relentlessly. You talk to our clients and they know how much we value them. Like I said, I think that's just a winning formula for us in the space. There'll be point solutions that will constantly come up. We're focusing on, you know, the broader issues for our clients and the strategy's been working. We believe it'll continue to work very well. Yeah. Thank you. No, I value your thoughts. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, Kirk. Thank you, Tien-tsin. Thank you, Tien-tsin. Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Dominick Gabriele with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your questions. Hey, great. Thanks so much for taking my questions and, a lot of good commentary already. You know, if you just think about the net of your innovation products, the margin on those products compared to the existing base when you're thinking about that incremental step up in revenue long-term guidance, how do those 2 compare to one another? I just have a Follow-Up. Thank you. Well, you can imagine as a new product is introduced and gaining scale that it won't be at the same margins as, say, MSP, for example, or the Optimal Blue PPE, given the difference in scale. We look at all of our products and yes, there's a cost to develop, there's capital investment. Then over time, given that all of our solutions are software as a service, highly leveraged capabilities, the incremental margins are very attractive. Over time, we would expect them to get to levels that are accretive to the total company margin. Certainly there's a path from inception through maturity that it would take to get there like it would for any new product. As they scale, like I said, the incrementals are very attractive. Maybe you guys can just take us through sort of some of the investment areas and how the product mix of the new sales can sort of affect the margin over time as we look towards, you know, 2022 and 2023. That'd be really great. Thank you. There's, you know, like I said, a steady stream of these activities that would contribute. You know, a number of them, like, you know, Optimal Blue we said is approaching our software solutions margin already. As we look at some of the new capabilities we've built with Underwriter Assist or pipeline monitoring, if we look at Servicing Digital, and that might be a good one for us to expand on. You know, we look at that as another platform now. It's got the scale, the eyeballs from end consumers on a constant basis. What more can we do with it? We talked about being able to manage contractors online and maintenance of a home. As we just kinda tie it all in together, what all these things are doing are helping sell the overall integrated platform, which is at, obviously very attractive margins. You know, from a longer-term, midterm, you know, perspective, I just say, that everything that we do, we're doing at scale. We're building it in a thoughtful multi-tenant, you know, way and to drive the margins that you would expect and we would expect of the business. From our clients' perspective, the beauty is they're also saving money as we're expanding margins and doing more together, you know, through the innovation and the integration. Great. Actually, maybe I can just hop in one more. If we're looking at the adjusted EPS guidance, the 11%-12%, and as you think about your longer term, you know, EPS potentially accelerating from these levels, given the long-term guidance, you know, how do buybacks fit into your EPS growth assumptions as we look ahead? Thank you very much. Sure. What I would say is that capital allocation certainly fits into that guidance. That capital allocation could be in the form of debt repayment, could be in the form of share repurchase, could be in the form of acquisitions. We think about which bucket that will be in, we certainly can model it as anyone could, as to how you get there and what those trade-offs could look like on a long-term basis. As we think about it in any given period, we would expect capital allocation to be accretive to EPS, and again, drive it from EBITDA's growing faster than revenue, operating income's growing faster than EBITDA. As we leverage the capital structure, EPS grows faster than income from operations. I wouldn't peg necessarily a specific percentage to relate to share repurchase, just by virtue of if there are acquisition candidates that we would want to take advantage of acquiring, we would do that. With everything focusing on growth and responsible capital allocation. It really, in any given year, could depend, Dominic. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Patrick O'Shaughnessy with the Raymond James. Please proceed with your questions. Hey, good morning. I guess sticking with the capital allocation topic, can you maybe provide an update on your outlook or appetite for incremental bolt-on deals at this point? Sure. You know, like I said, our focus, you know, first is always going to be on innovation that we can bring to market. You know, that's something we've communicated well, you know, to all of our colleagues in the company, be creative, find ideas where we can do a simple add-on that's a great return. I'd also say, you know, we've got work underway, you know, finishing our integration to the 5 deals we completed, you know, in the last year and a 1/2. Look, we're always going to look for ways that we can help create value for our clients and shareholder value. The beauty with our scale right now is that pretty much anything that's an opportunity out there comes across our desk. You know, culturally, I think we've done a good job with the acquisitions that we've made, bringing them into the company. From an employee perspective, an acquired company, they'd be part of the Black Knight family, equal to any Black Knight family member who's been here, you know, for a very long time. We're excited about that, and we'll always be on the lookout for that. Great. Thank you. Clearly, innovation has been a theme of this call. How actively are you guys looking into potential use cases for blockchain technology within your solution set? I ask this in light of one of your servicing competitors announcing a blockchain initiative during the 1/4. Well, thank you, Patrick. The one thing I'll, you know, correct as we talk about innovation on every earnings call, 'cause it really is the foundation, you know, for our company and the revitalization of our growth. On the blockchain side, look, we've spent, you know, when you get into a cab and the driver talks about blockchain, you know, it certainly has the buzz, and we've certainly focused on it, spent time talking to all of our clients, every, you know, major player in the space. You know, for the most part right now the feedback is, it's a good solution looking for a problem. We're constantly looking to see if there would be a good use for it. That's how I've defined it right now in terms of as we look at what's going on, how it'll help our clients drive revenue, improve their margins or stay compliant. Those are the key things every leader is looking at in terms of running their business. We're not finding those use cases popping to the top of the table. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Please proceed with your questions. Hey, good morning. Thanks. I guess just starting off here. When you think about the workflows of the origination process that you're addressing currently with AI, how far along are you relative to what it could look like if we thought about the next 3-5 years? Is there a lot of room to move beyond areas like document reviews, et cetera? Are we generally in the earlier innings there, just given the level of inefficiency in the market? Yeah, Steve, I would say we're in the early innings of it. Because what happens as you get into it just kind of continues to morph. You can continue to find more and more ways to drive value and add value. The beauty of it, you know, in terms of working with our clients, as they see the innovation being introduced and they can see, you know, the efficiency increasing as well, there's obviously interest in, you know, more and more that we can do in the space. Overall, I'd say we're in the early innings of it. Okay. Then one more. Just, I wanted to ask kind of what investments you've been making on the sales capacity side. Has the growth in sales momentum you've been seeing mainly been driven by increasing productivity and some positive impact, I would assume, from enterprise-focused sales motions? Are you also adding to the sales force capacity here? Yeah. We're constantly focusing on, you know, our sales capacity, and there isn't a significant increase. Mind you, we do an acquisition that has a sales force that comes along. Really where we've been successful, like I said, you know, I think on previous calls, it's the sales culture. Everyone sells. I always, you know, tease our Chief Accounting Officer in the office with an Empower deal. Also, as we're coming more and more together, each group is helping cross-sell for the other group, and we're getting the efficiency and productivity out of it more than we're hiring people. You know, just in terms of putting raw numbers at it. We're getting a lot more efficient and productive with it as well. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Kaczmarek with Zelman & Associates. Please proceed with your questions. Hey, guys. I wanted to ask about the impact of overall inflation on revenue. Can you just remind us of some of the details on the cost of living or inflation component on the long-term contracts, particularly on MSP? I think you've mentioned that they're pegged to a customized inflation index in the past, but can you give us a sense of the contribution to scheduled revenue increases in the current 1/4, say versus a year ago, from the COLA adjustments? Sure. It's about 1% revenue growth for the total company in any given 1/4. The way that it is generally calculated is, yes, it's an index, but it's a 2-year average. We do them all at the same time each year, so it's January each year. We do it for all of our clients at the same time. It's a trailing average of the prior 24 months. We wouldn't see what's happening right now. We wouldn't necessarily see a significant effect as you look to the next year. As it averages in, we would see that weighted in. Given where the floor is on our annual price escalators, you know, I'm not sure that it's going to be something that you'll necessarily notice in the results, because hopefully we're in what is a transitory period, but we'll see what that ultimately is. The averaging in is what would push the benefit out of it. Okay. It's applied in January, and then would that be immediately, you know, impacted to like, on the run rate revenue from each client then if it did move meaningfully? Yes. Yep. All right. Everything else, all my other questions have been answered already, so thanks a lot. Thanks, Kevin. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Anthony Jabbour for any closing comments. Thank you. In closing, we're very pleased once again with our outstanding results. I'd like to thank our clients for their trusted and strong partnership and my colleagues for their focus on providing superior support to our clients and one another. Thank you for joining us on the call and your interest in Black Knight. Enjoy the rest of your day. This does conclude today's teleconference. We appreciate your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Have a great day.