Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome SS&C to the Jefferies FinTech Conference here. With me today, I have Rahul Kanwar, who's President and COO, and I also have Justine Stone, who's Head of Investor Relations, and I'm Surinder Thind, the Lead Analyst for technology and information services. Welcome, guys. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Where I would like to start is, obviously, everybody wants to know what's going on currently. Maybe we can talk about the current demand environment. More specifically, I think in Q2, you commented that you continue to have a positive outlook for the remainder of the year. Can you maybe elaborate on that, what that really means, maybe how sentiment has evolved over the year, and how you would describe the current environment in the broader context of historical demand? Absolutely. And Surinder, thanks for having us, and we really do appreciate it. As we look at kind of the year and the remainder of the year, but also where we are as a company, I think a lot of the work that we have done over the last three, four, five years is starting to bear fruit. So whether that's investment in sales and marketing, whether that's investment in product plan and technology, R&D, making sure we're paying attention to the customers. And what that really does is there's always a range of outcomes, right? And so you can have a really good outcome, and you can have a maybe less attractive outcome. And what it really does is that where we are right now, we feel like for the next several quarters to maybe a year or two, we have pretty good visibility into what we're trying to achieve, right? And the visibility comes from having sold clients. It comes from having late-stage deals in our pipeline that we think are likely to happen. It comes from implementations that are about to go live. So lots of things that we can have reasonable certainty. And look, we still need to execute. Those outcomes are still possible. But I think as you continue to get better at execution, where you think you'll land up gets that much more attractive. And I think that's really all we mean. We mean that the fundamentals are strong. What that allows us to do is it allows us to withstand a certain amount of uncertainty in the environment, whether that's the macro environment, the political environment, things that are happening globally, and still feel like what we're doing is mission-critical. People have to have it. And we ought to be able to do reasonably well. That's helpful. And then just from a big-picture perspective, it sounds like with all of the investments that you have made, without not talking about guidance, but are we kind of where you want to be in terms of is this kind of like a mid-single-digit framework that we should be thinking about because we go back to Investor Day? Is that the framework that you're kind of alluding to when you say that you're executing where you want to be? I think so. I think what we talked about at Investor Day was exactly that, right? And we talked about it over a couple of years. As time passes, if we're doing the right things and we're continuing to make progress, we would expect to kind of continue to march along that path. That's really where we feel we are. And once again, I'll just stress that some of this is trial and error, right? You try some things. They don't work out. You try again. Hopefully, what you end up with is better management, better product plan, better roadmap, more focus on sales and marketing. Never perfection, but lots and lots of progress. And that's where we feel we are. That's helpful. And then it also appears that with some recent acquisitions and additions to the company, there's maybe a bit more seasonality in the business. Is that a fair characterization? And is there maybe any way to quantify or think about that seasonality? Yeah. So I think the thing that at least the way I think about it is I kind of think about quarters and forecasts and ranges and things like that. There's always a degree of variability. I don't know that that degree of variability has changed dramatically. Look, we always have some license we need to sell in the course of the quarter. There's always some volume-based metrics, whether that's how many data room deals we can have in Intralinks or how much order flow goes through Advent or kind of what that final AuA number is. We like to think that all those things are relatively small. But most of what we're talking about in terms of commentary is, okay, why are you 25 basis points or 50 basis points or 75 basis points less or more? So kind of the narrative focuses on kind of stuff that's really small. I think the only exception, and it's a relatively small piece of our business, is we did acquire Battea last year. Battea is a little lumpier than most of the rest of our business, which just means that we have pretty good visibility into what we think we'll do for a year. We don't always have as much visibility coming into the year as to what quarters that'll kind of fall into. But just to give you a sense of magnitude, Battea is less than 2% of our revenues. That's helpful. And then maybe moving on to international performance, you've talked about some of the strength that you're seeing in Europe, in Australia, in the Middle East, with maybe even some increased win rates. So can you help us understand what's driving the success? Maybe talk about the investments that you've made in these regions and what the plan is for scaling some of that success. Sure. So international expansion has always been a part of our strategy and has been something that there's a lot of opportunity. There's always been a lot of opportunity in the U.S. It's kind of the biggest financial services market and remains today probably our biggest opportunity. But we've seen in the past probably three years or so a lot more opportunity internationally. And some of that is from the investments that we've made. Opening offices in Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi allows us to work more closely with the Capital Market Authority and the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority. And we've seen continued success. We have some flagship clients in the region, and that drives more business for us there. And there's obviously a lot of sovereign wealth money in the Middle East region. And we've seen success within the GlobeOp business, within our GIDS business, and within our wealth and investment technologies business units in that region. APAC also is a big area for growth for us, and particularly Australia has gotten a lot of airtime. I think a lot of that, as our global investor and distribution business has gotten stronger over the past few years, it's opened up more opportunities. So where we did have a small presence in Australia for a long time, we've really been able to gain a more operational presence there. We won a couple of big clients. We now have probably a couple of thousand employees in Australia that are working to serve that industry. So I think good things to come. I think the Calastone acquisition also that we expect to close in Q4 also presents more international expansion opportunities as well in Australia, in continental Europe, in the U.K. and also they have some presence in Brazil too, which kind of opens up the Latin America market for us. And then when we think about the international business and just kind of in the context of everything that you've elaborated on, it sounds like this is going to be an engine for growth for a very long time as we kind of look forward to a big part of the opportunity going ahead. I think that's right. What we're seeing is that the things that those clients are looking for really around the world are very similar to the things they're looking for here in North America. Obviously, there's some degree of local nuance, whether it's local regulators or language or whatever the case may be. But an investment accounting system still needs to process securities, and an investor relations function still needs to interact with end clients and those kinds of things. And in a lot of ways, being as global as we are and having invested as much in our products, the features and functions that we bring to local markets is dramatically different than what they have access to. So that helps with the demand part of the equation. So it just sounds like being a premium provider here in the U.S. is providing you with a competitive advantage as you go into the international markets. Is that a fair characterization? I think so. I think that's a big part of it. And then to the point that Justine just made, we've had in a lot of these markets that we're going into, we've had operations for a long, long, long time. So it's not like we're going in for the first time or we have no local knowledge. We're already there, but we have an opportunity to dramatically expand. Thanks. And then maybe switching to the alts business here, GlobeOp obviously continues to generate some really strong growth. It was above 7% organically this past quarter. Maybe could we disaggregate that a little bit? There's a lot more different parts to that business now as you've scaled different parts. Maybe talk about the private markets part of the business, which I think you said was growing more than 10%. Can you keep that up? How big is that segment now? And then you also talked about your retail alts business growing more than 20%. Just any color that you can provide there would be helpful. Sure. And anytime you're thinking about that business, the challenge with kind of the decomposition is the lines increasingly get blurred, right? Because most of the large customers that we're in have hedge funds, private equity funds. They've got some exposure or would like some exposure to retail. And so that's a part of it. I think a big part of how we think about that business is what we've really done is we've put ourselves in a place where if you're a really large alternatives money manager and you're looking for somebody to help you with your operations or your fund administration or something, you're going to consider us, right? And then as you get deeper into what you'd like us to do for you, you'll be interested in our private equity capabilities. You'll be interested in our real estate capabilities, so on and so forth. So coming back to kind of the numbers, and this is pretty rough, but I'd say maybe 35%-40% of our business is what we would call closed end in some form. So private assets, private capital, real estate, infrastructure funds, things like that, things that look like traditional private equity, even though the asset private credit. Hedge funds is a big part of the business, more than half. And then retail alts is kind of a small, but importantly growing fast. Just folks are looking for ways to raise capital. So that's maybe 10%-15%. In general, over the last several years, private capital has the pace of growth in our private markets business has been faster than our hedge fund business, but our hedge fund business has remained strong. Retail Alts, at least for the last couple of years, has been even stronger than that. Then just moving on to obviously M&A and capital allocation, which is always an important part of your strategy. With the recent announced acquisition of Calastone, you're taking leverage up to maybe I think it's about 2.7x by year-end, maybe when the deal closes. How does this actually impact your capital allocation strategy in the near term? What does it mean for things like share repurchases and debt paydown? I'll take that one, so we're very comfortable operating at a 3x leverage ratio, and our strategy will likely not change if we're kind of operating in the same general environment. We're always opportunistic when it comes to acquisitions, and we like to look at everything. And I think Bill said on the earnings call that we have the capacity to take leverage up to four and a half times maybe at the maximum. And that gives us a few billion dollars in potential M&A or opportunities or what we can deploy. Not to say that that's something that's in the pipeline or something that's likely to happen, but we're always willing and we're always kind of ready to look at something and to act on something if we're really interested and if it is a good opportunity for us and kind of meets all of our criteria. Our strategy doesn't likely change. I mean, we'll take up the leverage a little bit. We'll continue to pay down debt and buy back our shares opportunistically. We've been operating more as a probably, I don't know, 60/40 share repurchases to debt paydown in the last 12 months or so, kind of depending on where the stock is trading, depending on the cost of debt, or these are all kind of just factors that we look at. I think we still feel that even at kind of our stock approaching these all-time highs, we still feel like we're undervalued. Got it. So if I was to just summarize the messaging here, it sounds like at or around three times leverage, below that, the strategy doesn't really change. And it sounds like even with the stock approaching kind of these all-time highs, you're very comfortable about being continuing to be relatively systematic on the share repurchases. Correct. I mean, we don't have any plan in place, so it is always opportunistic. We buy on the open market. But we just upped our buyback authorization to $1,500,000,000, and I think we intend to use it. That's helpful. And then just in terms of the pipeline or the opportunity pipeline for acquisitions, can you talk about that? I think on the call you mentioned you have the ability to do an acquisition of upwards of about $5,000,000,000. What would you potentially target, or what are you targeting in that pipeline? And then I assume that even with all the stuff that's pending, you're still very active in looking through across the spectrum. Yeah. And sort of part of it is that we're, as Justine just said, opportunistic, which sort of means we look at everything, right? And so we almost never start with a predefined set of criteria as to, Look, here's something we would like to buy, because we think that maybe tends to narrow the focus unnaturally, and you end up overpaying or getting a little too interested in something that might be out there. So I wouldn't, I think, to the point that was just made, I don't know that we've got a several billion-dollar acquisition that is even remotely imminent. But we have the opportunity, and we're going to keep looking because we think that those looks are, one, they're helpful because they eventually help to narrow the pipeline, and we end up with good acquisition candidates. They're also a really good way for our business unit heads to continue to evaluate what's out there. And I would just add that in terms of financial criteria, what we look for is we want it to be accretive to growth. And I think you've seen that in the last few acquisitions that we've done, accretive to our top line revenue growth. And we want them to be able to get to, if they're not already there, to be able to work their way to a 40% EBITDA margin. That's helpful. And then maybe moving on to kind of the concepts around AI, automation, obviously there's a lot going on. Maybe just start with Blue Prism here. And on the call, you kind of mentioned your first AI agent sale to an insurance client. You gave a number of metrics around that, about 80% approval in kind of the manual effort. The accuracy rates went up to 99. 6%. Can you maybe talk about a bit more detail about that insurance client and what that means in terms of maybe future opportunities? Yeah. I think that particular sale was for credit agreements. So basically, AI agents being able to read through pretty complex unstructured documents and pulling out the necessary information that whoever's looking at it is looking for. Historically, what we've done with just RPA and kind of pre-AI automation is you can teach the machine to do whatever you want, but within a set of parameters. And as soon as a document looks a little bit different, that RPA would break or there would need to be human intervention. So with the AI, it allows the human to stay hands off, and the AI intervenes, or the AI can read through and understand the document and bring out the relevant information. So that was kind of this one case. It was our first sale. We have about 20 different kind of instances or AI agents within SS&C that we've deployed and are working on similar things that we could also turn around and sell to our client base, so that's kind of our strategy today. Today, we're calling SS&C Customer Zero, so we're kind of building things for ourselves, working it into our own operations, and then we're kind of the proof of concept or we're the case study that we can go along and sell that, so I think that's a huge differentiator for us compared to our kind of RPA and AI competitors in this space, and we have access to the source code for all of these major systems: Geneva, Black Diamond, Genesis that the financial services industry uses, but we can kind of work AI into that, so I think that that's kind of our big opportunity here. And then, just following up on the Blue Prism offering, where when the acquisition was made, the focus was on RPA. Obviously, we've moved beyond that at this point with generative AI. Can you maybe talk about some of the investments? It sounds like, Rahul, in your earlier commentary, you talked about all of the investments that you've made. It sounds like there's a lot of near-term investment in Blue Prism as well. How do we think about where we are in the product cycle for that? Is there a lot more coming? Is that perhaps your near-term area of focus, or how should we think about that? Yeah. No, it's definitely an important area of focus. One, just simply because from a macro standpoint, it's a really hot market, right? And we're in that market in a big way. And so we, of course, want to take advantage of that. The other thing that I would just a little bit of almost a reality check to some of the hype about generative AI. Generative AI is really, I think, transformational and one of those great technologies that's going to dramatically change everything over some period of time. What it doesn't do well is reconcile your portfolio, right? And so it's just a little our foundation in RPA, which is numerical workflows that are complicated, that are very systematized. They occur the same way every time. That's still a really, really good business for us. What we've done is we've taken advantage of some of the newer technologies to be able to create things that make it easier for human beings to deploy that functionality, right? So now you can teach the, in effect, our version of the ChatGPT what you want to do with your workflow and have it do it for you. Or to Justine's point, when it hits a roadblock, the machine is smart enough that it can actually go think about it and figure something out and come back to you and say, Do you like this? as opposed to, Okay, stop, error, let's go fill that. And so this whole thing about agents and AI agents, it's truly that. It's goal setting. It's saying, I want to reconcile my portfolio, or, I want to communicate with my counterparties, or, I want to interact with my investors, or, I want to handle my incoming calls, or whatever the case may be. And as our algorithms become more sophisticated, it can do more and more and more of that. The biggest advantage we have is we're a really, really large-scale processor of these kinds of transactions, right? So to the Customer Zero point, we're a lab, right? So we can produce things that are live tested and already working. We can get a faster rate than some of our competitors, but obviously it works ongoing. I would just also add too that governance is a huge part of our offering too. We're dealing with sensitive information, probably the most sensitive information in financial services and the healthcare industries with our clients. We need to make sure that their data is protected. We're not just putting these things into an open-source model or ChatGPT. We've built SS&C's AI Gateway, which kind of protects the data internally. It's something that the gateway we can also sell separately as a license to our customers too that want to be able to use AI safely and kind of generative AI safely. Switching from external-facing uses for Blue Prism, maybe talking about yourself, Customer Zero, today you've saved approximately 2,500 jobs, I think, through the internal deployment. Can you talk about what that really means? Are you redeploying some of these folks? Is there a lot more that you can do internally as maybe the capabilities expand? How do we think about looking forward in terms of headcount and so forth at SS&C? I think that we view it as an opportunity for us for the next five or 10 years, right? So we kind of, and maybe beyond, but there's no limit yet that we've hit where we don't think we can keep doing this, which is we're just not replacing attrition at the rates that we previously would. And what that has meant for the last couple of years is headcount has for the most part outside acquisitions or lift-outs or something stayed pretty flat as revenue has grown. And we think that will continue. If anything, we might even gain some momentum in certain areas and go a bit faster than we have in the past. Most of what's happening is that we're, as I said, we're a processor at scale, millions and millions and millions of different kinds of transactions every single day, which almost by definition occur in much the same way, or they couldn't occur at all, right? You can't process millions of transactions at scale if you don't have a repeatable process. That repeatable process does lend itself to AI, whether that's robotic process or machine learning or generative AI. We're in the process of deploying that. We're doing that in a pretty methodical way. We're not trying to be disruptive. We think what it does is for our employees, while it's change and nobody likes change, it does free them up to do better things, more intellectual things, things that are probably career-enhancing, and so that's been all really positive for us. And then, when we think about the impact of all of this automation on the margins, you mentioned the 40% adjusted EBITDA target. You've been there in the past. You're moving towards that now. Can you maybe talk about what the longer-term potential might be with this technology? Is it maybe a little bit higher than you have in the past now that you have it? And is there any way that you can, for the investors out there, assist with understanding how much is coming from the technology and how much margin expansion might be from operating leverage and so forth? Sure. Look, we're at, I think what we've said in the past, which we think holds today, is we think we can get 50 to 100 basis points of margin improvement every year for the foreseeable future, right? So obviously, at some point, we break through the 40 and we keep going. But as I just said, I don't think we've identified any structural reason why that wouldn't just keep going for a long time. It's a mix of a lot of different things. One are sort of the traditional ways of expense control more than anything else, managing vendors, making sure sales and marketing expense is productive, things like that. And those things will continue and they'll always be helpful. But by far, our single biggest expense is payroll, right? It's employees. Having a degree of control over the increase in that employee base is something we haven't had traditionally. Our opportunities to manage expenses is probably even better than it has been. And then generally speaking, when we think about the employee base, you guys have a very global footprint. Does the technology maybe change what the footprint looks like or it starts to shift in certain directions, maybe more people in India, less people in India, or more in the U.S., less in the U.S.? How do we think about just conceptually what changes might be on the horizon? Yeah. Look, I think for many, we would say traditional employers, what they have done is they have offshored, in effect, the lower-level jobs, right? If you kind of look at our competitors in industry, that has tended to be what they've done. So if you had that kind of a business, what you would think would happen is that degree of offshoring, whether it's India or somewhere else, would probably reduce a little bit because you'd start to automate at the kind of work your way up. Ours has always been a little bit different. One of the reasons why we've had really strong retention in far-flung parts of the world, and we have a really motivated and excellent workforce in India, as one example, is because we've always just treated that as it's the same there. We do 100% of the work in India just like we do 100% of the work in New York. We have junior fund accountants sitting in New York, and we have junior fund accountants sitting in Mumbai. And that's how we like it because we want to be able to create career paths and progression and so on and so forth along the way. So for us, I don't know that the mix really changes. The mix changes for us more with what's going on in the labor market more than anything. What's inflation? What's retention? How easy is it for us to attract talent? Those kinds of things. But we don't really think that the technology changes it very much. And then maybe one more on AI. Just moving beyond Blue Prism, but thinking about the technology a bit more holistically, does the introduction of this technology maybe start to change your competitive positioning in the sense that maybe is it easier for others to try and cross the moat that you guys have built up? Can maybe we talk about that? Or maybe does this increase the moat given the scale that you operate at and what maybe you can do? I think a lot of these things are continuations of things that have happened in the past, right? So when we talk about being Customer Zero with respect to AI, we're also Customer Zero with respect to our fund accounting technology, right? And that's the world's leading technology, whether it's Advent, Geneva, or some of the other products. And so around that, I think what happens is the latter. I think these things are hard to build. They require millions and millions of real use cases and lots of IP. And once you build them, in some ways, the tools themselves make that competitive positioning stronger and stronger because they evolve from there, right? I think there's a reason why some of the generative AI companies have the valuations they do because folks realize just how hard it is to get to that point. We think as it relates to financial services and healthcare, that's the path we're on. Okay. And then one more, I guess I forget to ask this, but on headcount itself, when you think about talent acquisition itself, does that change the game to some extent in the sense of your ability to attract talent, to retain talent? Does that mean there's more choice out there for you now if you don't actually have to increase headcount at the historical pace? Yeah. No, it does. It completely does. One, because we're not hiring at quite the same rate, but we're still in all the labor markets around the world, we can be a little more discerning, right? So our filter is just a little bit narrower, and we have a little more time, which makes a big difference. I think for the incoming, for the candidates that are looking at SS&C as a potential employer, we're a lot more attractive. I mean, we've always been a good place to work, but we're a lot more attractive now than we were three, four, five years ago because what we're saying to you is that in general, you will be doing higher-level work, right? You'll use your creativity. You'll use your problem-solving skills. You'll be on a career path. We're going to pay you well because by definition, if you have an automated process, it generates a lot of cash, and it makes us pretty profitable, and we have the ability. We've always been really good at making sure large percentages, more than half of our employee base, has equity in the company. So that ownership mindset, and we'll continue to do that. So what we have seen over the last couple of years is our retention rates are stronger, and our ability to attract talent has improved. That's helpful. And we see we have a few minutes left, so I want to sneak in one on Intralinks and maybe one on healthcare. Can we just get an update on Intralinks? Maybe there's some commentary before about this idea that maybe activity has been picking up in the second half of the year. We're now a month and a half plus since you guys did earnings. Can you talk about just an update on that part of the business? Sure. So Intralinks has had really strong performance over the past couple of years despite some lower M&A volumes in the marketplace. And that's because we've been doing things like rolling out some new products and services for those VDRs. The deal rooms have been staying open longer for complex deals, and we get paid as long, whether there is a deal that closes or as long as the deal room is open and players are kind of kicking the tires, we get paid for that amount of time. So it's time. It's documents that put in, and it's people accessing it and doing stuff with that document. So that's kind of the usage fee that we charge. The past couple of quarters, activity has slowed a little bit. Deal rooms have closed, and we're just kind of in that cycle where it's kind of bottomed out for us, and we expect it to pick up again in the second half of the year. So we're starting to see more activity. The deal M&A globally has started to pick up a bit, and we've seen announcements, and there will just be a bit of a lag for when Intralinks starts to see that activity as well. So it's not going to end the year quite like we did last year, but again, I think we've bottomed out, and we'll start to see it reaccelerate based on kind of deal volumes that we're seeing, bookings, and kind of other metrics that the team follows. Yeah. And I think to that point, Q4 would likely be better than Q1 and Q2, and we're sort of in the middle of Q3. So Intralinks has been a strong business for us for a long time. It's nice to see that even in a macro environment that's less than perfect, they can sort of hold their own and grow modestly. And then the second this starts to pick up, we ought to see some pretty sizable acceleration. Got it. And then last question, just on healthcare. Can you maybe talk about the opportunity pipeline and in order to kind of like the visibility you would have into 2026 at this point, I mean, with the idea that do you have to win some deals in 3Q, and that's what you can convert into 2026, or is 2026 effectively set given that a lot of vendors have that January 1st start date that they like for conversions? I think it's a little bit of both. There's some deals that we're pretty close to now that we think will positively impact us in 2026 if they come to fruition, and then there's a fair amount of deals that we're working now that are really 1/1/27 starts. Got it. But those are kind of the larger deals that we're talking about. There's always smaller deals that we can sell with healthcare, additional services to our existing clients, etc., that will positively impact the current quarter or kind of more in the short term. Okay, guys. That actually takes us to time. So thank you very much. All right. Thank you. Thank you.