All right, great. Well, thanks for everyone showing up here again. As you know, my name is Dan Perlin. I head up the Fintech practice here at RBC, and I am delighted to have Broadridge with us today. From the company, we have Tim Gokey, who's the CEO. So Tim, thank you so much for being here, fighting the traffic, as it turns out, but you made it on time, and as Edings was just telling us, you know, this is how they level set expectations, you know, tell them they're gonna be late, and then beat numbers. So it's a good track record to establish here, also on conference timing, so we appreciate that. You know, Broadridge is a company that's pretty well known, but it's also complicated. And so what I thought, if you wouldn't mind, is just starting with an overview of the business to kind of level set for everybody, and then we'll dig into some of the details from there. Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to think we're a very simple business. We're gonna, we're gonna flush that out right now. We're about a $24 billion market cap, global Fintech. We serve asset managers, capital markets firms, wealth managers, and public companies. We provide a lot of the infrastructure that serves those industries in sort of corporate governance and regulatory communications. We provide a lot of that as basically an industry utility, especially for boards of directors elections, and we provide technology platforms on a SaaS basis for wealth management firms, capital markets firms, and to a lesser extent, asset management firms. Yep. We have a pretty good growth track record. Over the past 10 years, we've grown our fee revenues an average of 10% a year, our earnings an average of 14% a year. Yes. Our multiples re-rated a little bit during that time frame, so TSR, 22%, which is probably not the go forward promise, but I think we can deliver top quartile returns over a long time. Yes. You know, all of that really starts with being fundamentally a growth business. Yep. We think we are that. We're basically a network business, connecting broker dealers, asset managers, individual investors, public companies, really in a network to facilitate corporate governance, communications, and some of the back-end technology. That provides us a really interesting client base, with a really big market opportunity. If you look at the things that we do, that our clients do, that is vended, is about $60 billion that they spend, with vendors, and we have about $4 billion of that, so a lot of opportunity in the vended space. Yes. Then if you look at the total market, including unvended, is over $200 billion. So there's a big market opportunity for us, and we think we, you know, we can capture that as long as we're good enough, and so we spend a lot of time on thinking about our business, how we continue to reinvest in it, how we continue to bring new capabilities to market. You know, a lot of the things that we're in are pretty arcane areas. Mm-hmm. and so we have a lot of knowledge that positions us really well, I think, to have a view into what's happening and a view into what our clients are gonna need over time. And there's some big trends, sort of shaping that. You know, if you go down area by area, there's lots of stuff going on, but I think the biggest sort of, you know, larger scale trends that we talk about, we always talk about democratization of investing. Sure. Which is really the cost of investing coming down over time, the amount of product innovation continuing, bringing more people, more products at lower cost and being more engaged with investing. Mm-hmm. That creates a lot of tailwind for the governance side of our business, but also for the wealth management side of the business. Yep. There's also the digitization of how people interact, and we think we're really at the forefront of that, and that's a nice driver for us. There's the ongoing really increase in data and analytics and how that's now playing into AI. Mm-hmm. You know, we sit on a lot of data and can help our clients create value from that. There's the ongoing modernization of wealth management and how that business is evolving. And then regulatory change is just, you know, it's an ever constant something the industry needs to deal with. Mm-hmm. What we largely do is mutualize costs around things that are really important and critical, but are less differentiating. Regulatory change is a key thing that people want to sort of do at lowest cost as possible, and we can do that once on behalf of the industry. You know, it's a real, real positive driver for us. Yeah, no. So we've really positioned our business to try to get in front of those trends across the three franchises that we have, and I'll just briefly cover our business franchises. So there's the governance business or ICS business. That's our biggest business, about $2.5 billion. Over the past five years, it's grown about 10% a year. And that is... That's really that core, core network. We're really driving that position growth. We get paid per position that we manage. Yep. And, that's a core driver. Also, new products and product innovation in the core governance area, things like tailored shareholder reports and passive voting- Mm-hmm. and things like that. But also in some of the areas where we help issuers with their annual meeting process, with data analytics, with retirement. All those are sort of in our investor communications business. Yep. Then our capital markets business, which is about a billion-dollar business, that's been growing—that has grown at a 14% rate. That includes an acquisition in there. Mm-hmm. and there, we provide technology platforms front to back with the acquisition a couple of years ago of Itiviti, now Broadridge Trading and Connectivity Solutions. Yeah. We're playing in the front end, we're playing in the back end. We think we have a real opportunity to help our clients simplify their infrastructure, but also drive innovation. Yeah. ... and we've been doing that with digital ledger technology and applying AI and lots of cool things that I'm sure, sure we'll talk about. Yeah, absolutely. And then the wealth management side of the business, just under $600 million business, that's been growing about 10% a year as well over the last five years. The big news there is really the completion of the platform that we were building with UBS, which we think can really, again, come back to simplify. We'll probably talk about in more detail, but simplify some of the challenges that wealth managers, wealth managers face. So we're excited about that. All of that plays into a pretty simple model for what we believe is delivering top quartile total returns to shareholders, which is, you know, the investment grade. Yep. do a level of internal investments that we need, pay a dividend, which would grow with earnings. It's grown double digits in, I'm not sure if it's nine of the last 10 or 10 of the last 11, but, you know, pretty much every year except for the, for the pandemic year. Then, that leaves money left over for, some combination of M&A or share buyback. Yeah. M&A has been an important growth driver for us over time. Talking, you know, a whole series of tuck-in acquisitions. I'm sure we'll talk about that. But if you look sort of over the past decade, it's averaged about 50% of that extra cash going to M&A versus going to share buybacks. And we don't. That's not a top-down allocation. It's really, we look opportunity by opportunity, and we find things that meet our criteria and will provide strong returns. We'll execute on that, but we don't let cash build up, and so we'll return that to shareholders. And so, with that, we think we can provide, you know, really good capital allocation, and really drive good, good, strong shareholder returns, based on that core growth model. Yeah, and you've demonstrated that for a number of years now, so there's lots of proof points to believe that that can continue. What I wanted to start with is, you know, there's a lot of questions around just what you're seeing from a macro perspective in the current environment. You know, I think you said recently around the earnings, you know, clients are being careful with their spending. Yep. So, like, define careful. Like, what does that mean? You know, I think that, the environment is pretty dynamic. Yeah. And our clients are, I think they're feeling optimistic, but they're also looking out at all the big macro risks that there are, and so they're being careful. Yeah. And, now, if you contrast that with a year ago, where I think the lights were all sort of, you know, firmly on red, and they were doing only things that were absolutely necessary, I think if you compare that to this year, they're still being careful, but they're really executing on things that will drive growth, reduce cost, or meet regulatory needs. Yeah. So we've had, you know, I think, much more sales momentum this year than last year. Now, at the beginning of the year, was just a buildup of things that spilled over. But as we go into the second half of the year, we are seeing people execute, you know, for growth, whether it's some of the front office things, for cost, whether it's some of the digitization of communications, for regulatory, whether it's tailored shareholder reports. Mm-hmm. We can go through all of our product areas, but we're just seeing a lot more flow of opportunities. So, you know, I think we've talked about sales guidance of $280 million-$320 million, which would be, I know, something like 30% above last year, which was a low year. But that would put our, our sort of compounded sales growth rate sort of back into the double digits, which is- Mm-hmm. -really where we think it should be. Okay. Nope, that makes sense. When you think about a lot of things that you're talking about here really resonate in terms of the concept of just durability. Yep. But the business is like, it's changed over the past several years. Like, you've added some things, and you've expanded in certain areas. So how do you think about the durability and visibility also of the business in its current construct, relative to maybe some of the performance you would have done two, three years ago? Yeah. You know, we think of every client as being a 99-year client. And so that really gives us a way of thinking about how we the service we provide to clients and how we reinvest in what we think their needs are gonna be in the future. And we're always thinking about our business in terms of the core businesses we have today, the things we have that are real businesses that we're growing, and the things that we're developing for tomorrow. And if you think about that sort of life cycle of activities that we're doing for our clients, you know, that's how we think about making sure we sustain really, really good long-term growth. Mm-hmm. When I think about durability, coming back to the market size I talked about- Yeah. and how low our penetration is, really, of the opportunity that we have. So a lot of the durability is making sure we keep increasing our capabilities at a level to take on, you know, more difficult, more complex assignments. And you know, I always tell people internally that as long as they're good enough, the opportunity is infinite. Yeah. The real competition is usually our client doing it for themselves, and they have so many other things on their plate, that if they are confident we're gonna do a good job, they're pretty happy. Yeah. to have someone, someone take it on and utilize some of that change cost. Yep. So I think that market size is, you know, a big driver for us. There are those sort of growth macro trends that I talked about, whether it's democratization of investing or acceleration of trading or digitization of communications. Mm-hmm. Those are all things that are gonna go on for a long time. Yeah. And I think continue to be, continue to be drivers for us. And then we're always innovating. And whether that's, you know, Distributed Ledger Repo or applying AI to fixed income or pass-through voting. You know, we're trying to be on the forefront for our clients so that they see that as their needs evolve, we're going to be right there for them. Yep. I just want to make sure we clean up one thing on the implications of timing for, like, the annual meetings, a little bit of a push in the last quarter. We keep getting questions around it. I know you feel really certain about it, so maybe just share a minute about why you feel so confident that those numbers are gonna, are gonna come back in the fourth quarter. Yeah. So, the annual meetings, you know, are mostly in the spring, mostly in, sort of late April, May, a little bit beginning of June. We send out materials in advance of that, you know, so literally, the peak days for communicating with investors about the meetings that are coming up is the last week of March and first week of April. Yep. And so, any timing that affects those days can materially affect our results between the third and fourth quarter, but has no impact on the full year. So last year, Easter fell in April. Yeah. This year, it fell in March. That changed the way companies, you know, arrange things just, you know, by a few days, but that made a material difference. I mean, not a ridiculously large difference, but a difference. Yeah. We feel confident about it because those meetings have already happened. Yeah, exactly. That's the point. And, um- I just want to make sure you say that. And so, you know, we have 100% visibility on that at this stage. Cool. Okay. You know, in the spirit of putting capital to work, you did this recent acquisition of Kyndryl's Securities Industry Services business. So, you know, I guess a couple of things there. Strategic rationale for doing so, any kind of metrics you can put around it to kind of frame it for investors, and then your long-term expectations about, you know, how you think that business is going to perform? Yeah, it's a, you know, it's a really nice business for us. So, wealth management, we said, just a little under $600 million business. Mm-hmm. About a third of that is Canada, where we have a really nice market position in Canada. And this business is a business that has been, you know, we've talked about for literally 20 years in terms of, you know, would they be more logical together? And it was owned by IBM. IBM never really felt they wanted to transact on it. With the spinoff of Kyndryl from IBM, you know, Kyndryl's really focusing on, Yeah ... focusing on its core business. They're important business partners for us, so we're able to have a very proprietary conversation with them, which is, you know, when you go back over the 40+ transactions that we've done over the past 10 years, a large proportion of those, half are, have some proprietary element to them. So that's one of the things I think that helps us be successful with M&A. Yep. So when we look at it, it's really giving us access to a couple of, you know, the significant institutions up there where we had a relationship, but not as significant a relationship, and this is going to open that up a lot more. Yep. It is going to enable us with that to bring many of the wealth components that we're... You know, we started in the U.S., that we're in the midst of bringing to Canada anyway- Mm-hmm. -now bring that to a larger, larger base of clients. So we think there's a really nice, really nice synergy there, really nice uptick for the Canadian wealth market. Yep. Nice uptick for us. And, so we expect to earn, you know, really nice returns on this. From a scale perspective, we paid just under the order of $200 million, and it will add to our... I think what we said is add to our three-year growth rate, sort of, you know, 50-100 basis points. And you can sort of do the math on that, but it's, it'll be a nice revenue pick-up when it happens. And we're not putting it into any of our guidance at this stage because it is a carve-out. So there's some work to do on that. There's some work to do just going through regulatory approvals on the Canadian side. Yep. We don't... You know, we're just saying mid-calendar year, but really, until we have that for sure, then we'll include it in guidance and be more specific. Okay. One other thing I just wanted to clear the air on, you, you do have this kind of CFO transition that's occurring. Yeah. Maybe if you could just speak to that for one second, and then we're going to dive into some of the more long-term topics. Yeah. So, Edmund Reese has been our CFO the past four years. Fantastic guy. I'm sure many of you met him. Very good with, you know, explaining our story. And he has a fantastic opportunity at Aon. And, you know, I'll miss him, but I couldn't in good conscience say this isn't a great opportunity. Yeah ... for you. I think we always knew he was someone that, you know, super talented, super capable of being a Fortune 100 CFO that would be with us for, you know, three-five years. I was hoping for five. But five. But he brought a lot of benefit to us- Cool ... while he was here. The good thing is he built a really strong team and really started thinking about his succession from the time that he arrived and brought in some really good people, including Ashima Ghei, who's going to be the interim. Yep. And so we feel really good about our ability to carry forward and feel really good about building on, you know, some of the things he's brought to us. That's great. Well, thanks for, thanks for clearing that up. So let's talk about some of these long-term secular trends. You kind of highlighted them a little bit, but like, you know, the idea of increasing investor engagement, right? That's a pretty material thematic for you guys. So talk to us about, the industry component of that, but then also the things that you're helping to drive within that industry dynamic. Yeah, I think, you know, when you think about industry engagement or investor engagement, it is, you know, there are a couple of pieces to that. Mm-hmm. One is, you know, we're, we're big believers in investor disclosure and in the sort of hundred-year mutual understanding between regulators and industry that, you know, we'll let you innovate as long as there's, there's good disclosure. Mm-hmm. I think that's been really good for investors, it's been really good for the industry, and that paradigm has been very healthy. So, making sure that investor disclosures are clear, engaging, increasingly digital, you know, as we transition to a digital world, that is still, you know, as good as it has been, I think that's a, you know, important part of engagement.... Another part of engagement is around the whole voting process. Mm-hmm. Again, making sure that's easy and clear. Also, I think the innovation you're seeing now is pass-through voting. Yeah. A lot of the you know large especially passive asset managers are under pressure to make sure that they're not sort of taking a stand one way or the other overly influencing companies. So one of the ways they're trying to get out of that is by passing the voting rights along which is to institutional shareholders is pretty straightforward because they have voting platforms. They're probably already voting those issues so they can vote them. Yeah. For retail investors, it's a little bit trickier, but we've seen some good innovation there over the past year. We're helping drive that. So those are both, you know, examples of how we keep engagement moving forward. All this in the end, in terms of drivers for us- Yeah. comes back to position growth. And, you know, the thing that really is the driver for us is how positions grow. I'm not sure if we're gonna talk more about, you know, the drivers of that, but, you know, when we do some of these things around the edges, it's not so much we get paid for that thing, but it keeps the whole ecosystem healthy, and then we get paid over time through position growth. Yeah. Well, maybe just elaborate on that. I mean, it's a good, it's a good segue into, again, durability of that. Why would that continue? How does the market aperture kind of open up so that there's more opportunities for those position growths- Yeah. -to continue? Well, we've, you know, what we've seen over the past, decade or more is position growth in sort of the mid to high single digits. And when you decompose that, it's really how many people out of it have a position, and how many positions, or how many accounts are there and how many positions per account, is it? And the account growth is really driven by, by demographics and, a little bit by penetration of the number of people who have accounts. Mm-hmm. We've seen the number of individual investors that own stocks going from something like 49% to 59% over the past decade. So there has been a little bit above population growth on that. And then the other piece, which is the bigger piece, is positions per account, which is just around increasing diversification inside individual accounts. And so we've seen the number of positions per account growing. If you think about a... Let's say, you're saying, you know, mid- to high single digits. Let's say you take, I'm gonna call it, quote, 6% as an average across all of that. Mm-hmm. Then that would be sort of one-two of account growth, and call it, you know, 4+ of position growth, positions per account. And then one last but important inside that is a big driver of that diversification is the growth of managed accounts. Mm-hmm. That obviously has been a huge trend in wealth management. You know, most wealth managers are still really trying to push their clients towards managed accounts. That's been growing double digits, and about half of positions are in managed accounts today, so that growing at double digits gives nice- Yeah. you know, sort of mid-single-digit growth, you know, as a base, right now. Okay. Let's talk about the data asset that you have. As you said earlier, like, this is one of the bigger drivers. And we can maybe talk about AI as how you're using it, but I'm more interested to know how you're gonna leverage the data that's inside of Broadridge to, ultimately continue to drive growth for the business. Yeah, I think that is... I think that is a real opportunity for us. I think it is, it's not one that we've fully harnessed yet. Yeah. It's, first of all, our clients' data, and we're very, very careful about that, and meeting all of their safeguards and thoughts that they have about the proprietariness of their data that's on our platform. And then at the same time, they, you know, are asking us: How can we add more value to that? Mm-hmm. That's the balance that we always try to strike. I think the ways that we've been doing it with, particularly with, derived data and aggregated data, to especially provide visibility to asset managers into what's going on in wealth management, and, what are the flows, where the assets are, where do their sales... You know, asset managers have a hard time, for instance, even knowing, where to pay sales tax. Mm. something as simple as, you know, yes, there's $X billion with Merrill Lynch, but here's where it actually is. You know- Right. Something as simple as that to as complex as, you know, here, then, let's take all the global flows, retail, institutional, across all the product types globally, look at all the macroeconomics and all the levers around that. Use AI to say, you know, if this is what you believe the macroeconomic scenario is gonna be, here's how that's gonna flow across products and where the growth areas will be over the next three years, you know, within a high degree of precision, and you can play with the dials on that to sort of design your product strategy. Yeah. And, you know, that's our latest, latest product. We're applying AI to that, you know, big backlog of people wanting to sign up for that. So it's the whole range from basic reporting to really very predictive AI driven. That's awesome. And let's talk about some of the, I would call them, I guess, segments or divisions. So specifically around capital markets, I mean, really strong, 8% revenue growth. You know, BTCS was really strong. I just wanna make sure we understand kind of all the like levers of growth that you have to pull there, or maybe not pull so much, but just there are tailwinds for you for that to continue. Because here again, like, the theme is the sustainability, and that seems to be an area that's been incredibly strong for a long period of time, so. Yeah, I think... So capital markets, about $1.5 billion business. Yep. I think we are, we're pretty differentiated in this business in terms of the capability that we bring to market, relative to others. And again, the strategy is around simplification and innovation. In the front office, it's simplification because so many of our clients have infrastructure that's built up, by asset class, by region. They'll have 30 different order management platforms- Mm-hmm. Across the different desks, it's been mostly a desk-level decision. And so, how do we help them bring that together, make it more productive? And that's where the, you know, what we're doing with Itiviti is a great, great, great step forward. And a great example of that is the opportunity that we talked about on our last earnings call, where we're partnering with one of the largest global investment banks- Mm-hmm. around taking all that into a global multi-asset class platform for derivatives. Yep. And, you know, that also plays with, there's, you know, a lot of that market today, the biggest player is what, you know, what was Fidessa is now ION. Mm-hmm. Not a player that many of our clients really like to do business with, and many of them have, you know, active projects on to try to move away from them based on the way they do business. So it's a great opportunity for us to take share, but also to, you know, about half the market is vended, so also to help people simplify their internal infrastructure- Yep. - in the front office. Five, five minutes left, gentlemen. Okay. How many you say? How many did you say? About four or five. Okay. Five? Just gonna finish my next sentence in four or five minutes. Similarly, in the back office, the same thing, lots of platforms, you know, by area, by region. How do we help them simplify that? And how do we simplify front to back? You know, many companies have, you know, very different data model in the back office than the front office, lots of breaks between that, and so there's a big simplification opportunity. Yep. The innovation side of things is, again, I think tokenization will be a big topic over the next 10 years. Yeah. What we're doing with digital ledger repo is a first step into that. What we're doing, applying AI with very creatively named OpsGPT, as a way to apply AI to the... generative AI to the operations departments, I think. You know, it's, it's sort of a very logical solution, but we have more ability to invest in it than any one provider, any one bank does. Right. Doing that on behalf of many is a great opportunity for us. Okay. All right. And let's move on to wealth and investment management here. Here, another very successful quarter in terms of revenues. Maybe just talk about the interplay of rolling on UBS and then E-Trade rolling off, and then what that kind of trajectory looks like once it's all kind of set and done. Yeah. So we said that the revenues from bringing on UBS was about, will be, or are about $75 million a year. Yep. We've also said, and we've talked about for a while now, because Morgan Stanley acquired E-Trade three years ago, that grew quite a bit during the pandemic- Yep. in terms of how big that was. Yep. We helped with that transition. We took on some other things from Morgan Stanley, but net-net, in terms of what's reported in this segment, the loss of that, as it just converted over this past year, is, you know, a good proportion of what we took on with UBS. Not the full thing, but a good proportion. Mm-hmm. That will annualize really in the third calendar quarter. Yep. So it'll be a little bit of a drag, you know, in this next fiscal year. Yep. And then we'll be done with them. Okay. Just for sake of time, I want to open it up to the audience, if they have any questions. If not, we can keep going. Yes, sir. Yeah, what is the take on the new trends in style, like blockchain and things like that? Behind the eye of... On that, Blockchain. Yep. So I'll repeat it. Blockchain. So just blockchain is kind of the question, and how do you, how do you think about that in terms of your business? Yeah. I think that there are already specific use cases where it can be very helpful. And I'm just differentiating blockchain from crypto. Crypto is its own whole topic, but blockchain is a technology. We think that there will be asset classes where tokenization becomes important. And, you know, that's why we've been investing in it for repos. We're doing about $80 billion a day in repos right now. We, you know, have a really good roadmap on that to, we've been doing. You know, starting with internal repos, it's amazing how much the repo market is just inside the same institution between legal entities. But now we're doing real-time bilateral repos. There's gonna be a big market for sponsored repos, so just the repo opportunities can be nice for us. But we think that's a precursor of other things. Cool. Just a last question to wrap up on is, is really now your free cash flow conversion rate back to 100%? That wasn't always the case- Yeah. But you've been pretty consistent there now. And so that brings back to the decisions about capital allocation, buybacks, dividends, M&A. It sounds like the M&A conversations you've had, like, the environment seems better, maybe, than it has been in a little while. So just, lastly, just how are you thinking about putting some of that free cash flow to work? Yeah. So yes, historically, we've been 100% free cash flow conversion company. We went through a couple of years where we made some pretty significant investments that- Mm-hmm. That took that down. And we're sort of back to 100, which is what we expect going forward. And so that's gonna give us, you know, a fair bit, you know, even after dividends, a fair bit of cash to reinvest, either in share buybacks or in M&A. Yep. Over the past couple of years, we've been... You know, M&A has been an important growth driver for us over time. Just, you know, in our, in our long-term growth model, we talk about recurring revenues growing 7%-9%, and 5%-8% of that, organic one-two M&A. So we've done 40 transactions, but they're small tuck-in transactions around product capabilities. Yep. We've been out of the market the past couple of years as we were paying down the debt from the activity acquisition. That, you know, fortuitously corresponded with a time when really there was nothing to buy because PE firms had sold everything on the shelf three years ago. So there are lots of PE firms readying lots of things for markets right now. What we don't know is what price those things are gonna transact at. Yeah. I think, you know, the whole market is sort of, you know, waiting to see sort of what clearing prices will be. You know, we have a really good organic growth opportunity. If there are things that, where the clearing price is such that it's an attractive IRR for us, then we'll transact, and we can incrementally add to that. If it's not, then we can stick with organic growth. So we do view it really as very bottoms-up underwriting, opportunity by opportunity, build versus buy. And, you know, in the past, we found some really attractive things that added. And, if we see that in the future, you know, we'll transact. Otherwise, we'd never let cash build up. We do buy back shares to do that. And I'd say, you know, in my long-term growth algorithm, I think of five-eight organic, one-two through M&A, giving us seven-eight, with operating leverage, you know, grow earnings at, you know, call it 10, but, you know, eight-12 is the range. Yep. Buy back a point of shares, pay a dividend, let's call it, you know, a little under 2%, and that can deliver, you know, over the long term, low double-digit TSR, with low volatility and, you know, high protection around that, in a very sustainable way. Yep. Yep. It's a great story. It's a great story. Thank you so much, Tim, for being here. Thank you. Thanks for sharing it with us. Thank you. Thank you.