Why don't we get started, everyone? Good morning. My name is Jeff Schmitt. I cover wealth tech stocks here at William Blair. I'd like to introduce today SS&C Technologies. They're a leading provider of Enterprise Software and Outsourcing Solutions for the financial services industry. We have with us today Brian Schell, the CFO, to discuss the business. But before we begin, just for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. With that, I will turn it over to Brian. Thank you, everyone, and I appreciate everyone coming here this morning. So what I would like to do is just, again, provide a general overview of who we are. Some of those more familiar with the stock, you know, might find a little bit, like I said, more high level, but that's okay. That's kind of what I'm trying to do here. Again, I encourage you to read the Safe Harbor Statement, which I've already passed up. But what I'd like to do is just kind of, you know, as we talk about who SS&C is at the highest level, regarding what we do for financial services. We do have a group that does provide support and services for the healthcare industry as well, but again, it's a small part of our business. But again, mission-critical, cloud-based software is what we do. We think it's very sticky revenues, and we'll show you kind of our growth prospects, what we do, what we see, and what we think makes us gives us a competitive advantage. The slide is, you know, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the specific services and what we do here. You know, what we provide, our market position, our approach, our competitive advantage. And the first thing to point out here is if you don't know about us, is, you know, our number one ranking in alternative fund administration and mutual fund transfer agency. Again, that's a kind of our dominant positions. If you look at how we group our revenues and when we talk about this, those two, I'll call it categories, is about 50% of the business, right there. So that gives you a sense of the dominance of our position and the overall composition of the firm and the revenues. The chart is, while there's a lot on here, it's a, it's a wonderful overview because if you look at, you know, the 10 kind of boxes below, it kind of gives a little segments of the things that we do and providers for the financial services, and healthcare, administration and the pharma, right? So the investment and loan fund accounting, you know, we do a lot of outsourcing for the middle and the back office. We provide a lot of data and data analytics that loops back through to the clients themselves. I mentioned the transfer agency business, which is large. We support the front-office trading, the virtual data rooms, both for transactions, whether it be debt capital markets, M&A, equity capital markets. It's a lot of reporting solutions that we provide from a compliance and tax standpoint, regulatory. I mentioned the healthcare, and there's a lot more around what we do around processing claims. This is not us being a healthcare provider per se, but more supporting as a technology provider to the healthcare and pharmacy industry. And then the last one there is the intelligent automated solutions. Right now, this is more around robotic process automation with the Blue Prism transaction that we completed a couple of years ago, and what we've been able to do there is to help people gain efficiencies and capacity within their organization. Actually, this is something that SS&C has done internally pretty significantly to help us grow our margins. So there's a complete suite of offerings that we have here. A couple other points before I leave here is that you're gonna hear recurring, as I mentioned this, is the that we are a technology company, right? This is the heart of what we do as far as part of our competitive advantage in helping us drive our margins in what we do. The fact that we are independent also frees us from potential channel conflicts of providing services that other, I'll call it, competitors that may be in a peer banking industry that might be trying to provide these services. We don't have that same conflict, and we'll mention, and we think that's actually relatively important. Just very brief, again, you know, we're listed on NASDAQ, operate 114 offices in 90 cities globally, over 26,000 employees. Something a little bit more unusual, but, our Founder and CEO believes very strongly in equity compensation and driving that in very deep in the organization. We were recently doing some recruiting, and he made the statement is that, "You know, this is not a good place to work unless you want to get rich." His idea is that driving that equity deep into the organization to create alignment with a very, I'll call it, pretty junior levels in the organization relative to a lot of other organizations. The other thing, a little bit on the middle section there, just again, we do own and operate a private cloud. We do actually operate a couple of data centers to help support that, and we have a pretty diversified revenue stream across a number of clients. And the-- roughly the top 200 recently did the-- pulled this number, the recently, the last couple... Our top 200 clients is about 50% of our revenue base. So it's relatively diversified, but we do obviously have a large section of the big clients that are obviously very important to us. Then the last are just kind of the fun facts of as far as what we do, as far as the number of clients, $3.4 trillion in assets under administration, the 45 million accounts on our transfer agency platform, and the millions of healthcare claims processing using our pharmacy solutions. If you look at our go-to-market strategy, and again, you'll continue to hear this as a theme, is, you know, what our primary focus is in working with our sales and technology group is really more about solving problems, and primarily in the most complex of organizations. It's not just creating something and then hoping to sell a better mousetrap. It's focusing on what their needs are, what their complexities are, and, you know, how do we help them do this? Because we're at scale, a lot of times they are not. And so that's our focus as we go into helping them solve, you know, their problems so that they can focus and do what they do best. I would say that the other thing is that we try to do that through technology. We do have scale, we do have a lot of, quote, "operations and processes," but obviously the best solution long term, both from an efficiency and from accuracy and everything else, is continuing to try to leverage our technology to do that, whether it be through the software licensing process, the overall servicing, or the overall just complete outsourcing, completely. If you look at. And this is probably my favorite slide coming up here, is we call it our value proposition, but really it's, it's our competitive position and why it matters. And I mentioned early on about being a technology company, and why is that important? We serve a lot. We have a primary software, we particularly as an example here is Geneva, that is probably the gold standard for fund administration that other firms, our competitors, use, sometimes in-house, sometimes to sell their services as well. We get that feedback from all of those clients about how do we continue to enhance. We own that software, so we know we can make those changes. We can prioritize those changes. We don't have to wait on somebody else to make enhancements, to make changes. We control it. We can come do that, and we're getting feedback from, like I said, a lot of our client base to be able to continue to enhance that that can benefit all. So that when we actually make $1 of investment in that technology, then that leverages across our entire client base, not just one single client or, you know, not just for their own internal operations. So we think that gives us a real competitive advantage, is owning that technology. And I think part of that mindset also is we've been able to deliver some other very strong software solutions, including Black Diamond, which is really scales, primarily servicing the RIA market. We think also, I mentioned earlier about our private cloud, having infrastructure there that helps support that also gives us quite a bit of control, that we don't have to rely on some of the other larger players to be able to make the changes or put in some of the security that we wanna be able to put in, overall. The other thing I want to mention then is, again, I mentioned this a couple of times as far as recurring theme here, is the proven ability to execute. And what I mean by that is we are able to handle a tremendous amount of complexity, whether that be the largest firms having some type of hybrid approach, multiple asset classes, multiple geographies, incremental funds. We know that kind of the life cycle of, say, for example, a hedge fund, is they start out small, they have a group of leaders, and maybe they want to create a different fund, different focus. As they continue to increase those number of funds, for example, they realize that, "Hmm, our off-the-shelf solution, maybe Excel spreadsheets, does not work once you get to a certain level of complexity and their success," and they realize there's a lot of effort here, there's a lot of complexity, we might need to look elsewhere. The larger players already realize this, and so they're using us. And as we look at where a lot of our growth come from, is come from some of our, mostly our largest clients. As they continue to expand, as they continue to increase our complexity, this is where we do really well, and this is where you see us continuing to, to thrive. The other thing is the independence here. Again, making this important point, right? There is no channel conflict. If there's a bank competing, also trying to provide some services, a lot of times, maybe to another large bank, there is no worry or concern. It's like, "Well, they're gonna have my data, they're gonna have this." It's we're independent, right? So we think that's very important also, overall. As we look at this, again, very briefly, I would call this as just more of our brag page as far as all the things that we do. There's a lot of, you know, acquisitions that have occurred over time, that you might recognize with respect to Intralinks and how dominant share it has. The global debt manager, as far as the commercial paper, you know, automation and transfer agency processes for supporting commercial paper, DBC with managing debt structures on the municipal bonds. You can see there's a lot of names here, a lot of things that we do, that's supporting some of the biggest players. Very briefly, again, Q1 almost feel stale in these, in today's world, as far as where we are, given that we are last month of the second quarter. Just again, brief overview of Q1. Again, strong first quarter with 5.3% revenue growth, 4.7% of that was organic if you adjust out any acquisition activity or FX. A metric that is not on here that we want people to start paying closer attention to is our financial services recurring revenue growth rate, right? If you look at our software-enabled services and the maintenance revenues, you've seen a nice continued growth rate over the last several quarters. Q3, almost 6%, Q4, 6.9%. This last quarter, 6.5%, right? And that's about 85% of our revenue base is in that category. So we're seeing a nice continuing growth rate there. The reason we look at that is that we still have quite a bit of licensing revenue that can be lumpy, right? Because of rev rec in 606, there's certain accounting treatment that you may have to make an accelerated revenue recognition over a longer-term contract that may not be as repeatable quarter- over- quarter. So we tend to look at what's the most stable base there that we can try to measure and provide that metric to investors. And the other thing that obviously, that we also like to see is growth on the bottom line, right? You love to see that margin efficiency and seeing that margin on the incremental revenue, really accelerating, and that's when you see the higher growth rate in the, the earnings overall. As we briefly look at capital allocation, you can see that the company's been pretty consistent in its approach and what it says it wants to do. We've talked a lot about how we, because we have a tendency to, we've used debt to, lever up, to, try to generate, incremental shareholder value, and primarily in our M&A transactions. Paying off some of that debt has been part of the strategy. So you see that, in this first quarter, heavier than what we normally might do, you'll see it was dedicated to, to debt reduction. And, but I think what you'll see for the rest of the year, and what we've indicated is, it tends to be a little, it's gonna be a little bit more skewed towards, share repurchase activity. And, the other thing that, that we do is, as you look at our dividend right now sitting at $0.24 quarterly, we don't have a huge payout ratio. We do think it's important to provide a dividend, but it's not a primary focus of our capital allocation approach, but it is there, and it is something we'll look at on an annual basis. On the debt paydown, given, you know, where sometimes where people say, "Hey, your stock's undervalued, why aren't you buying back more stock?" and but what we do think is important is to actually not ignore the debt, given that we wanna be in a position from a leverage ratio standpoint, that should an acquisition opportunity present itself, we wanna make sure that we have the appropriate amount of capacity to be able to go and get it, as far as continuing to try to build shareholder value. So at a certain threshold, it may not make as much sense, so it's a math that we look at all the time as far as evaluating the impact of debt reduction and the impact of share repurchase. So just know that, it's something that we look at, but the leverage ratio now being under 3 is a very, very comfortable position that we look at. Not on the slide, but I will mention, we recently refinanced our debt stack. We had a maturity coming due in April of 2025, so inside of that 12-month window. So we went to the market and refinanced a little over $4.5 million as a result of an upsizing of the strength of the response that we had when we were in market. So what we're able to do is extend maturity by about almost four years. We diversified our secured, unsecured mix, as well as our floating versus fixed rate. So it turned out to be a fairly strong reception and execution, and slightly reducing our annual interest expense. But the primary focus of doing that was actually doing it to extend the maturity overall. And so it was a very successful transaction with 0 OID, and that's great from a cash flow perspective. Again, strong history of M&A. It's something that's always top of mind for us. You know, you look at the track record of growing margins and cash flows as a result of the acquisitions as we look at and we bring them into the SS&C umbrella, and then looking to leverage and integrate those across our operations. You'll see that, you know, because overall, we like to look at it, expanding our overall capabilities to our clients. The most recently one being Blue Prism there in 2022. We utilized that, that's a robotic process automation that I mentioned earlier in the intelligent, you know, automation. And we are probably the, if not the largest, the second largest client of Blue Prism, and using that in our own internal operations. That's enabling us to actually continue to gain efficiencies as we've looked at those processes that we have, that can be enhanced with efficiency, with accuracy, with using, you know, intelligent automation, with using those processes. So that's something that we then offer, that then we can go in and be even that much more competitive to our clients by utilizing those tools. If we, I mentioned this earlier about, you know, paying down debt, and this was probably a slide I put in for the most recently for the lenders presentation when we do the refinancing. Again, just shows the history that it's important to maintain a strong relationship and credibility with the Debt Capital Markets. Is that, hey, we're gonna ramp up, we're gonna use it to finance a transaction we think is gonna create shareholder value, but we will then focus and pay down to make sure we get into a back to a more comfortable zone. So these are a couple of, I'll call it leverage points and data points of completing a transaction and then delevering before the next transaction occurred. So you can see that, you'll see that spike up to 4.5-5 x, and then delevering back down to, you know, roughly under three. Again, creating a, kind of a, that nice capacity to be able to go in, given the level of cash flow, that we're able to generate across the organization. And, so that's I think it's important for everybody to see and understand as far as our approach overall. Dig into a few more financials, as we kind of wrap up here in the next 10 minutes or so, you know, it's a very high-margin business at the end of the day. And as you look at, you know, our history over time, is that over, as we, as we've been able to expand our revenue base, we've been able to expand margins. Now, you're like, "Well, that's interesting, Brian, but what happened in 2022?". And, and you'll see this also on the, on, on the earnings. The 2022 was a transaction where we bought Blue Prism, and at the time, Blue Prism was essentially slightly negative on an EBITDA basis, but it had a really nice revenue base. Bill Stone had a vision of what this could do for us, and turns out he was right. Which obviously you get to this level and, you know, you make more bets that are right than not. And that actually hit an impact on our margins overall in 2022. This is also when you start seeing a little bit of the inflation impact on a lot of wages and a lot of healthcare, and things that actually hit the margins a little bit harder than expected in 2022, but very explainable. Not trying to create excuses, this is just kinda what happened within the business. As we grew through that in 2023, we tried to accelerate those margins to where we have an expectation around 2024 to, quote, "Restore and trying to get back up to that 40% level," as what the midpoint of the guidance and the analyst assessments are as far as achieving that more positive trajectory on EBITDA growth. It's important for us to, as we grow that revenue base, is to continue to be increasingly efficient across the board with Blue Prism, with our scale, and, but not ignoring the OpEx and CapEx investments that we need to continue to make, to make sure that we're also looking at revenue growth in 2025, 2026, and 2027. That's important for us to look at it for the long term as well. So you're seeing that implementation of the digital workers and increasing that margin is still important to us. As we look at revenue retention, you'll see that it's consistently above 95%. There'll be some adjustments, you know, quarterly. It was a little bit of a dip in Q1, but I think that was - we can explain that as a little bit more noise, but overall, we're just continuing to see that nice trajectory of increasing revenue retention rate. And it's again, it's based on a rolling 12 months, overall, and we don't include acquisitions in that until their tenure is over, over a year. Overall, from our adjusted EPS, again, I mentioned the slowdown in 2022. As you look at that, this rate is more of an impact of the interest rates, honestly, when you start seeing some shorter-term interest rates floating up, it had a pretty significant impact on overall EPS. Most of the debt at this time was floating rate, and so it really hit the bottom line pretty hard from an EPS standpoint. We calculated it was over $0.40 a share, actually. And so you look at that, and you'd see a little bit more of a normalization from where you were to 2021. And but you're seeing that, kind of that growth trajectory coming back up, similar to what I talked about on the EBITDA margin slide, right? So we're seeing a nice looking a positive trajectory in revenue growth rate. You're seeing that in 2024, we also expect some of the fewer headwinds. We think a stabilization of the interest rate. So I think that's only positive at some point during the future. You see the healthcare, which we haven't spent a lot of time on during this presentation, which again, is more about providing that technology kind of behind the scenes for healthcare claims and pharma claims. And we've had a couple of known client losses that occurred a few years ago that are rolling off and will have less of a negative impact on a go-forward basis. So again, positive expectations running around for going forward for 2024. And the last slide that we have in the presentation overall is more around where we ended with guidance. You know, as far as both Q2 and for the full year, you'll see, which is easier to see in the earlier slides about the trajectory of being a more positive growth rate, overall, and continue to have positive, organic, revenue growth, margin expansion, and an increase in overall cash flow, more broadly. I know that the Q&A is more reserved kinda for, I think, another venue, but, I, It's kind of all I had today. Thank you. you. Yep, right. Yep. Appreciate it. it. And the breakout is [inaudible]. So thank you. Thank you. Yep, appreciate it. Yep.