I am Brian Bergen, cover IT services and payments at TDCON. Thank you all for joining us. Very pleased to have WNS with us for the next fireside chat. With us, we have Arijit Sen, CFO, and David Mackey. You have EVP Finance and Head of the IR. Thank you both for being here today. Thank you. Pleasure. WNS is a digitally led business process management services company. It combines deep domain knowledge with process expertise and newer technologies to transform and run client operations. It's a specialist in a range of industries, and it leverages a 60,000+ global workforce with primary delivery locations in India, in the Philippines, and South Africa. Guys, again, appreciate you being here. Dave, we've talked to you many times in these forums. We now have the pleasure with Arijit to join, so we appreciate that. Just Arijit, given you're newer in the role of CFO of WNS, can you just talk about maybe how you see the key differentiation for the organization versus competitors? Also, then dovetail that to kind of your key roles and responsibilities in the organization. You've been in a couple of different seats, right? Just talk about that dynamic first from the background. Sure. So So I've been with WNS for 15 years. I've done a multitude of roles across the company. Before this, I was a Corporate Financial Controller where we were actually managing all aspects of finance. And I've had the privilege of working closely with Keshav, and I was as well CFO in the last 15 years and most of the strategic sort of stuff that we've done in the organization. From that perspective, I joined the company about $300 million, and we are significantly bigger now. It's been good. It's been a good journey. Of course, now the roles are significantly larger. It's exciting to be here and talk to all of you as well. Yeah, in terms of how we are different, look, we've always gone to market saying we are a vertically led company, right? That story still stands. We are, from our perspective, domain is very, very critical. We are domain led. We lead domain along with technology analytics and create industry-leading solutions. That's our forte, right? Vertically led, vertically oriented, combining technology and analytics. Technology and analytics for us is a key component of a solution, right? Any solution that we offer has all the three components. That's how we bundle it in. If you look at our business today, when we say vertically led, insurance is our biggest vertical. More than a quarter of our revenue is actually on the insurance side. We work in eight industries. We have deep domain in all those eight industries. If you look at it from a horizontal play, our biggest horizontal is what we call industry-specific services, which is basically where we create solutions which are specific to the industry, right? Say for example, in the insurance, it could be claims processing. In healthcare for North America, it could be benefit utilization. In shipping, it could be processing documentation for shipping clients. I could go on and on. That is our core competency, right? We combine that with technology and analytics and create a very compelling solution. That to me is the key differentiator. All right. If we package that then in a sound bite for the investment proposition around WNS, take that to the next step then. Yeah. Look, the key here is, and we've had some conversation with some of you today, right? For us, it is we are looking at AI, GenAI, and now agentic AI, right? The way we're looking at these, these are components for us as an end-to-end solution to the business proposition we bring to our clients, right? We do not go to our clients saying we will give you a GenAI solution. We go to the client saying, if this is what you're looking for, this is a solution, and this solution will incorporate best-in-class technology, best-in-class GenAI combined with the domain understanding we have of business. That is the core proposition, right? One of the things that we are very proud of is the fact that our non-FTE business mix is not more than a quarter of our business is non-FTE, right? That also helps us because when we create the solutions, we are actually able to tell clients that we will lead you to a certain outcome instead of getting work done about what is an FTE data and so on. That is the proposition that we bring to clients. Okay. Yeah. I think when you look at to kind of deep dive into what domain means for us, right? It's the fact that in order to design processes and to automate processes that deliver the kinds of results and the kinds of outcomes that our clients are looking for, the critical component is to understand the process, to understand the workflow, to understand the operations of that company. Because you can understand AI and GenAI and digital and data till the cows come home. The bottom line is if you don't understand how that business operates, creating a solution that drives the kinds of outcomes the clients are looking for isn't possible. We actually are excited to see that what we've built and what we've created as a differentiator in the company, we believe has become critical to what everyone is now seeing as a way to drive the kinds of results and the kinds of revenue growth that are required. Yeah. To actually get scaled adoption of those solutions. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Okay. When we talk about growth performance here, and before we get into the current demand, I think it's important to kind of frame what's been moving through the company here the last two years. There's been a lot of different, I'd say, large client choices that have masked otherwise underlying growth in the broader portfolio that's acting better. When you kind of just step back and think about what you reported in fiscal 2024 and what you're looking at growing in 2025, just talk to us about that reported versus the true underlying if we pull out some of these large client decisions. Yeah. Let me start, and then Dave can pitch in. Look, I think you have to look at our business. Look, we've had three idiosyncratic client issues, right? That actually created a disproportionate sort of headwind for our business, right? If you pair it out, and let's look at last quarter. If you look at sequential quarter-on-quarter growth, right? Q3 and Q4, we grew sequentially. We told the street, and we grew sequentially 3% Q3 and Q4. If you look at Q2 itself, which is the quarter in which we actually had the impact of large healthcare client rundown, if you exclude the impact of the large healthcare client, even in Q2, we grew, right? The point I'm trying to make is that the growth for us has been there. It has just got masked by the disproportionate impact of the three clients, right? If you look at last year, we went and said that we've actually won the maximum number of new logos last year, right? That is the growth, sort of, that is the attraction, the new business we saw last year, right? We announced new logos, we large deals, sorry. We announced two in the last quarter. Again, the growth momentum is there, right? When you look at the guidance for FY2026, we've said it's 9%, 7% organic, and 2% inorganic. In that 7%, there is also a 2% headwind because of those two client issues, right? If we exclude that, then even for FY2026, our current guidance is actually 9% organic, right? I think that puts us pretty much in the sort of leading growth trajectory amongst most of the peer-set companies here. I think that's the underlying story, Brian. Year on year will be a metric to be challenged in Q1 because we had in Q1 of last year, we had the impact of the large healthcare client. As you start going on to Q2 and Q3 onwards, you'll also see the year-on-year metrics also showing very dramatic sort of differences in terms of outcomes. Okay. As you lap that in one Q, the optics certainly start to improve there. Yeah. The optics are improving. And again, just to kind of reiterate what Arijit's talking about here and to put some context to it, over the last two years, we've grown the business about 10% in total in the face of a 15% headwind from these client-specific issues. So X those issues, this business has grown on average 12.5% per year, which would put us amongst the industry leaders. So certainly these things did happen, and we have to face that reality. But the bottom line is that underlying momentum in this business has been there, continues to be there. And the reality now is, as you look at Arijit's point, the Q3 performance, the Q4 performance, the guidance into fiscal 2026, high degree of visibility to getting back to that high single, low double-digit growth rate despite what's been a choppy macro. Yeah. Okay. Through this, Brian, we've also ensured that our profitability is upheld, right? We ended last year at 19% operating margin, which again, to us, is one of the leading amongst the industry, right? That gives us confidence that the underlying financial is also healthy. Last year, we did a significantly aggressive share repurchase because we thought that our stock was fundamentally undervalued, right? We did an aggressive share purchase. We did extensive capital expenditure last year. We did an M&A. Despite a client-specific headwind, we actually kept investing in the business. We've sort of leveraged our balance sheet. We've stayed true to our capital allocation philosophy. From that perspective, from our perspective, it gives us a very good headspace going into this year because investments are ongoing. We are seeing the growth momentum back. I think with Dave said, we have 90%. We've announced 90% visibility to guidance, which is what historically we used to do, which also gives a lot of confidence for this year. Okay. Okay. Very good. Let's talk about some of that client conversation that's driving that level of growth. In those new engagements that you're pursuing, what are the top priorities within the client base? Also, talk about the pace of their decision-making. How has that evolved? Yeah. Look, let me separate this, right? There are, and I've had some questions today about large deals, right? Look, on the large deals last October, we said that we are not able to predict the closure pattern of large deals because of the very nature of these deals, right? These are deals at a fairly complex level. They're multi-tier. They involve multiple levels of decision at the corporate exec level, sometimes the board level. There's a fundamental change management activity at the client level. Predicting the closure of these deals for us is difficult. That's why we took a call last year that we will only include these deals in the guidance once we sign them. That's on the large deals. For our run rate business, which is the $1, $3, $5 million deals, we are seeing a lot of conversations. There is a clear need for clients to look at cost optimization, transformation, looking at how to change the processes using GenAI. Those conversations are happening, right? The outcome is that is the sort of new logo win we talked about last year, right? That pipeline is churning, right? Again, all of that is leading to the sort of guidance that we are talking about this year. Short answer for me is that on the large deals, yeah, there is a lot of conversation. The deals are real, but the timing of it is not known. The run rate, $1, $3, $5 million deals, we are seeing good momentum. There is a lot of conversation. The market opportunity is real, and we are feeling quite optimistic. I also think it's important to understand that historically, we never used large deals as a catalyst for growing, right? We've traditionally been able to grow this business, high single, low double digits, through expanding our existing relationships and bringing in new logos that are $1, $3, $5 million to start. To the extent that we can continue on that cadence and sign a couple of large deals over and above that, we're kind of viewing this as almost a separate sales channel. The approach is different, and the cadence is different. The reality is we think it creates additional opportunity for us, some this year, but more so into next year because the large deals that we sign this year, by the time they ramp, aren't going to generate meaningful dollars this year, but they create good visibility to very healthy year-over-year growth. Okay. As far as the size of these, I mean, do they vary in a big way? Are we talking kind of 10, 20, 40? How large of an ACV type of size you're talking here? The large deal, our definition is a minimum of $10 million of annual contract value. Some of these deals are actually in excess of $100 million. Okay. As far as this becoming part of the conversation now in the last year plus, did something change in the market? Is it just a natural evolution of your organization as you've gotten bigger? Talk to us on where we are talking about large deals now. We actually, look, it was a concerted effort for us to get in that space. We made some investments. We've had some senior leaders who are looking at that space, who are talking to client CXO. For us, that's an additional challenge of growth, right? Like Dave said, historically, we played in the one, three, five. We said there is a potential for us to curate and co-create deals, the $10 million+ space. To me, that's a separate channel. When all this comes together, I think when we have a healthy mix of one, three, five, and $10 million deals, then I think the runway momentum is going to be fairly more positive than where we are today. That's the opportunity if you ask me. Yeah. If you get the muscle going on getting these, converting these, all of a sudden we're lapping that. As we start closing more, I think we'll also have a sense of pattern predictability so we can model these even more effectively, right? That's the. Hopefully, we get less macro uncertainty. Yeah. Are you seeing anything different by industry or geo based on behavior right now, just amid the daily tweets? Not really. No. I don't think so. Okay. I mean, yeah, I think overall, if you look at our core business, 90% + of what we do, right? It's automating processes. It's transforming processes. It's delivering business outcomes. Clients need this independent of what's going on in the macro. The second thing is these things all save money. The reality is if the clients made a strategic decision that they need to find a partner to help them get their business from A to B, the fact that we do that and save them money is independent of the macro environment. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Brian, you look at our business, right? Again, about half our business is North America, and the remaining half is actually sort of covered over Europe, APAC, and U.K., and so on, right? We have a nice balanced portfolio, right? While we're not seeing any impact of the conversation right now, even from a portfolio perspective, we are nicely balanced that potentially tomorrow, if something were to come up, at least we have a 50/50 sort of split between the geographies, right? That also gives a little more sort of cover and sort of in terms of where we are versus our peers who are potentially probably more one geo-specific. It is not just geographic diversification, right? If you look at, Arijit mentioned earlier, our largest vertical is insurance, and it is 25-26%. We are very well diversified across verticals, across horizontals, across service offerings, across geographies. From that perspective, we have also got a healthy degree of protection. We do not have heavy customer concentration either. Our largest customer is 6% of revenue. I feel pretty good about the opportunity. Okay. Okay. When you look at the opportunities around larger deals, does it bring in adjacent service capabilities versus the traditional offering that you've had? Is there anything new and different there? No. I don't think so. I mean, I think, to be honest with you, what clients are looking for is our ability to solve problems. And what those problem-solvings have to include is our demonstrated experience, demonstrated capability. So it's not like we're trying to sell something new that we haven't sold before, right? The models are a little bit more non-FTE than traditional businesses. There's more technology, more automation, more integration in these deals. But the results and the outcomes and the types of things that customers are looking for us to deliver are not fundamentally different than what we're doing today for our customers. Okay. So it doesn't necessarily require, let's say, an IT services motion adjacent to it. Absolutely not. None of the kind of work we are playing in. Look, the other thing is, as we are closing these large deals and given the kind of stakeholders we are interacting with, for some of the deals that we are sort of ramping up, we are seeing a lot more follow-up conversations around other areas as well. That is the interesting part, right? Because we are talking at the exec levels. There is an immediate need for us for them. As we stabilize processes and they get to know us, we are seeing more conversations in other adjacent areas. That also creates more opportunity for us. Okay. Okay. Now, as we bring it back to numbers, 7% or so organic, 9% adjusted for that, two points. When you talk about the visibility to that number, give us a sense on where that stands currently versus where you were in the past. Also, let's say we do get a more encouraging spending pattern from clients. How much discretionary activity could contribute here for you in fiscal 2026? Look, when we said 90% visibility to guidance, what we mean is if you look at our revenue, 90% of the revenue is today signed from the clients, and we have got projections covering to that amount. That is what we mean with 90%, right? Historically, we have seen, barring the previous year, we have always gone in with a 90% visibility to the guidance historically, right? We have talked about this publicly as well. In all these cases, when we started the year with 90%, we actually met, in some cases exceeded, the guidance. That gives us a confidence that a historical basis of projection works, right? That is the core of it if you look at it from a guidance perspective. Okay. And then discretionary activities. You've had some acquisitions that have helped you there. Talk about what's happening there. The discretionary portfolio of our business is about 10-11%. It is unlike some of our other peers which are in the news recently. Our discretionary expenditure is therefore that much lesser, right? If the macro situation improves and that spend goes up, that means a further tailwind for our side. From a risk perspective, because 10-11%, it is not going to disproportionately make an impact to our guidance should the macro deteriorate further, right? That is the way we are looking at it, right? 90% visibility for us gives us confidence that we have a good runway to meet the numbers. Discretionary being low double digits means that any macro event will not have a disproportionate impact on numbers. That is the way I will put it. I do not know if you want to add anything. No. I was just going to say, and more importantly, I think when you look at the visibility, right? The visibility does not assume that we have to go out and sell X amount of projects to hit that number, right? To the extent that we have projects that we are executing on now that are contractually committed, that is included in the 90%. We do not need the macro to improve, and we do not need to sell more discretionary work to hit our numbers. All right. At that midpoint, you're effectively assuming a stable backdrop. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Which is where we've been for two years now. Yep. Okay. All right. Let's talk about just GenAI demand. Talk about how that has progressed. I think the last call you said are roughly 20 clients that have deployed GenAI solutions. Can you just elaborate on that? What are common use cases? What are you seeing across the base? Sure. I think what we've seen is really two different categories of use cases as it relates to GenAI. The first would be about productivity and cost reduction, right? How do we take what we're already doing and leverage a tool like GenAI or now increasingly Agentic AI to make that more efficient, right? To require less labor to deliver the same set of services. I think this is where, by and large, the Wall Street community has been heavily focused in terms of their knowledge and understanding of GenAI. What I would tell you is when you look at the GenAI use cases and you look at the things that our clients are asking for us to do, there are as many, if not more, use cases that they are looking at exploring that are about creating new capabilities, that are about changing how they go to market, that are about new revenue streams. I think while the world seems to view this as a productivity tool, our clients are looking at this as a potential way for them to create differentiation, create competitive advantage, and go to market differently. When you look at use cases, obviously we are seeing things like Agent Assist, where we use a tool to help agents who answer the phone be more efficient and more effective in what they do. We're also seeing opportunities in GenAI and use cases in GenAI about medical summarization, where we can create new opportunities and offerings, about ways for us to manage shipping and logistics and bills of lading, leveraging a tool that can help fill in gray areas on unstructured data as it comes in. We're seeing great opportunities kind of across the board with GenAI. The challenge, as I'm sure you're aware and as you're hearing from other folks, is that in a lot of cases where we have these capabilities and we're ready to deploy them, our clients aren't ready to integrate them and implement them at scale. Lots of. What are some of the factors? I guess what's the most common factor there that's causing some aversion or slow? I think there are three factors, right? One would be the fact that their data or their infrastructure is not ready. The second would be perceived risk, right? Nobody wants to be first. The third would be all the things that you're hearing about cost of compute, about data privacy, cybersecurity, about discrimination and bias in the underlying model. There is the risk component to it. There is the cost component to it. Then there is the practicality of the things that they need to do to be organizationally ready to leverage what these tools and technologies are capable of. Yeah. Brian, I talked about it initially as well. For us, GenAI is another component of the solution set, right? It is not that we are going and telling we will build GenAI for you. What we are saying, our solution sets incorporate GenAI components. Because we know the operations, we are able to train those models in the areas where it is required. I think that is the fundamental difference, right? That is where the use cases are saying we are seeing traction. That is the model we are also adopting with Agentic AI, right? Now we are also seeing how to integrate some amount of Agentic AI into a solution set. That is the approach that we have done historically. That is the way we are looking at the entire GenAI thing, right? How are you approaching that from an IP standpoint? Do you think about enabling your workforce to be more efficient? We will create tool sets. For example, we'll create a solution set for the shipping industry, for example, which talks about a certain effective way of managing the entire shipping documentation, which is an exhaustive process. For us, the IP is a solution set. And the IP will have many sort of components of technology, AI, GenAI, Agentic AI. For us, the IP is a solution set. We will go to tell the client that this is the solution for you to generate, run your shipping document. Look, shipping has historically been a very outsourcing-averse industry, right? We are seeing even products like this are creating enough excitement in an industry which is historically not outsourced. That is the sort of IP, core IP. I'm just taking shipping as an example. We are building similar IPs in all our industry sets. That is what I said is industry-specific processes, which is not the 40% of business. That is why we are able to create IPs because we understand the process and we are able to integrate the technology and analytics into creating a solution. That is the IP. I think to look at the IP and say that, yes, there's a product, if you will, that's been created, the reality is we do not want to sell products. What we want to sell is productized offerings or productized solutions. How do we wrap our services around what that tool is capable of doing? I think the best way to look at it is almost as reusable components. How do you create pieces that you can pull to create a solution for a client and integrate those together with their existing technology environment as well as services to create an outcome? That also gives us a lot of headroom, Brian, in terms of looking at non-FTE sort of commercial models, right? Historically, more than a quarter of our business today is actually non-FTE. We think from our immediate peers that, again, I think we are, I think that is an advantageous number for us. Some of these solution sets actually help us move away from the FTE business into more transaction outcome UTP sort of models, right? That is how this also helps. Yeah. To make sure you gain the value there as that happens. Sure. Okay. Naturally, in the market, there's a lot of concern in the services space, cannibalization arguments, things like that. What do you think is misplaced in that argument? I think it's a couple of things, right? One, I think, A, as I mentioned earlier, the fact that these services and solutions are solely about cost reduction, automation, productivity, right? Versus new services, new solutions, new capabilities. I think that's one. The second is that while we know that certainly if we deploy more technology or better technology into our existing book of business, there will be some downward pressure on same-store sales. The reality is if you look at what these tools and technologies are doing, there are two huge benefits, right? One is it expands the addressable market. The scope of what clients are willing to let us do that they wouldn't let us do previously because we have technology-enabled services and solutions expands, right? That kind of goes to your question about the use cases around generative AI. To have a medical summarization tool and to sell that to a customer that they would not have even considered it or known about it prior. The second, and I think the bigger opportunity, is when you look at our industry, it is 25%-30% penetrated. To the extent that these tools and technologies and the services that are wrapped around them create competitive differentiation, drive compelling outcomes, what it is going to do is force the 70%-75% that have not partnered with a services company to have to leverage that capability in order to be competitive. If we can use a GenAI tool to reduce the amount of time it takes to process an insurance claim from 14 days to 10 days and improve customer sat from a three to a four and reduce the amount of fraud, right? How long before the companies that have not done these kinds of things are going to be knocking on our doors to do this? The logical offset to some downward pressure as a result of productivity is an expanding addressable market and an acceleration in adoption. We've talked about, I mean, different automation cycles in the past giving productivity. Are you seeing any notable difference in the increment of productivity with Agentic, GenAI and Agentic versus an RPA before? I think the opportunity is bigger, but the actual implementation and integration at this point isn't. Right I think it was much easier for a customer to move to an RPA-led solution than it is for them to move to a GenAI, Agentic AI solution. I think, Brian, the addressable market is what we should look at, right? It is not a zero-sum game where we are all companies of the same pie. I think almost 65%-70% is under-penetrated, right? That is the opportunity. Like Dave said, if GenAI leads to competitive advantage, it will force more and more clients to actually look at ways to make them as part of the solution set. That is when it gets really interesting for companies like us. That is the opportunity. To your point, Brian, we know from the RPA experience, and RPA in its earliest stages was not much different than a glorified Excel macro, right? We know that clients struggled to implement and integrate RPA tools themselves. They did not know how to change the process. They did not know how to change the skill sets. They did not know how to clean the data so that the tool could process them efficiently. GenAI is that on steroids. If clients could not figure out how to do RPA themselves, there is no way they are going to figure out how to use GenAI themselves, which means the need for a company like ours just goes up dramatically. Fair. Okay. I'm going to pause. Any questions? A minute and a half. Good. Yeah. You talked a little bit about the large clients that have been ranking down. Can you talk about, if you back those out, can you talk about a little bit of the performance that you've seen within the top 10 client cohort in the past year? How is that trending? How's that been trending in recent months, like March and April? Just any sort of trajectory comments? Yeah. Look, I think if you strip out the client-specific issues that we've had, again, what you'd see is that we were growing low double digits the last couple of years. I think what you'd see is that within the top client base, there has not been a material change in customer concentration. The reality is our clients are growing with us, which is what we want to see. Okay. Last topic, we'll talk cap allocation. So an acquisition this past year. But as you look forward here, it sounds like Cheripo acquisitions may both be on the table. Kind of talk, what are your priorities? And I think last year you did about $150 million in stock. You talked about that opportunistic approach. How are you thinking about things today? Look, see, our capital allocation model, Brian, is very consistent. There are four things we will do. One is the share buyback. Second is tuck in M&A opportunities. Again, we always look at M&A from a capability addition perspective. That will keep continuing. We look at capital expenditure, both in terms of infrastructure augmentation as well as developing some of the solutions we talked about, right, which are client-linked solutions. Fourth is, of course, scheduled repayment of our debt, right? Last year, like you rightly said, we did a very aggressive share repurchase because we think that stock is fundamentally undervalued from where it should be. We did very aggressive repurchases. Our repurchase anyway for this year is already ongoing as we see. If you ask me from a capital allocation philosophy, we will continue to deploy our balance sheet in those four areas. Like I said, last year, despite our sort of revenue pressures, we stayed true to our capital allocation philosophy. We think even this year we will continue to stand by it. All right. right. Very good. We're going to leave it at that. Thank you both for the time. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.