SS&C Technologies Holdings Inc (SSNC) 2020 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the SS&C Technologies Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings call. (Operator Instructions) Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. (Operator Instructions) And without further ado, I would like to welcome your host for today, Ms. Justine Stone. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Hi, everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings call. I'm Justine Stone, Investor Relations for SS&C Technologies. With me today is Bill Stone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rahul Kanwar, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Patrick Pedonti, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, we need to review the safe harbor statement.

Please note that various remarks we make today about future expectations, plans and prospects, including the financial outlook we provide, constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of the safe harbor provision under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the risk factors section of the most recent annual report on Form 10-K, which is on file with the SEC and can also be accessed on our website. These forward-looking statements represent our expectations only as of today, February 10, 2021. While the company may elect to update these forward-looking statements, it specifically disclaims any obligation to do so.

During today's call, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to comparable GAAP financial measures is included in today's earnings release, which is located in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.ssctech.com.

I will now turn the call over to Bill.

Thanks, Justine, and thanks, everyone, for joining. Our results for the fourth quarter were $1.206 billion in adjusted revenue, it's down 0.5% and $1.13 in adjusted diluted earnings per share, which is up almost 5%. For the full year, we had $4.681 billion in adjusted revenue, up 0.3%, and $4.30 of adjusted diluted earnings per share, up 12.3%. Our adjusted consolidated EBITDA was $475.8 million for the fourth quarter, and our adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin was 39.4%.

Our Q4 adjusted organic revenue was down 2%, and for the full year, our 2020 organic revenue was down 0.5%. As expected, we had weakness in our large licensed software business in the fourth quarter, but our alternatives business are interlinked and our Eze business grew nicely, and the DST business saw improvement from the previous quarter.

Operating cash flow was 1.84.7 million -- [1.84.7] (sic) [$1.184.7] billion for the 12 months ended December 31, 2020, up 10% if you exclude a onetime $250 million upfront license payment paid in the second half of 2019. $1,184.7 million represents a 103% cash conversion rate on our adjusted net income of $1.146.8 billion.

We put cash to good use in 2020. We paid down $738 million of debt, bringing our secured net leverage ratio to 2.31x and our total net leverage ratio to 3.39x. We bought back 3.7 million shares of common stock at an average price of $6.99 for a total consideration of $227 million.

This year, we faced many challenges which were unprecedented in our 35-year history. SS&C adjusted quietly and with authority. We moved 99% of our workforce to remote, supporting clients with expertise and resources. We continued to meet our deliverables, engage with our prospects, and we built and deployed solutions. We have continued to see success with our newest products, as Eclipse ended the year with 170 clients more than doubling its client base. We have leveraged Algorithmics capabilities and developed a scenario as a certain pandemic specific analytical tool (inaudible) infection rate, susceptibility and death rates into the investment scenarios based on movements in equity, fixed income, FX and commodity markets.

In SS&C Health, we successfully launched our flu pilot program with the support of our internal call centers. This program provides outreach to SS&C Health clients in order to enhance the rates of flu vaccinations. We developed a similar COVAX program focused on ensuring the successful completion of the COVID vaccine series for members receiving the vaccination from SS&C Health partner pharmacies.

While 2020 was a tumultuous year on a global basis, SS&C performed with distinction. We were able to outperform estimates, collect our receivables, delight our customers and generate more revenue than any year in our history.

Like many in the financial services industry, we earned revenue on float. In 2020, this revenue was down $20 million or over 75%. We overcame all difficulties and posted $4.3 million -- 4 point -- $4.30 in adjusted earnings per share, 12.6 above the $3.83 per share in 2019; 47% above the [2.92] in 2018, and 122.8% above $1.93 in 2017, that numbers we think.

I'll now turn the call over to Rahul to discuss the quarter in more detail.

Thanks, Bill. As you noted, we had a strong quarter with a broad-based lift in revenue from Q3 across many of our business lines. DST, SS&C Health, alternatives, Interlink, regulatory and Algorithmics all posted improved performance in Q4.

Our alternatives business grew 5.5% in Q4 and 5.7% for the year. Clients remain optimistic about their growth outlook, which is reflected in our data, including the capital movement and other indices we publish.

Bill mentioned the rapid adoption of Eze Eclipse in his earlier comments. And in Q4, we launched the Eze app, powered by Eclipse, and made it available in iOS and Android App stores in November. User adoption and design collaboration for the app's next phase have been strong.

Intralinks has seen substantial growth since the recovery of the M&A market in the back half of 2020. We remain very focused on driving technological differentiation in the virtual data room space in the context of a strengthening M&A environment. Despite the challenges of 2020, we ended the year with accomplishments to be proud of and set up our business with strength ahead. During the year, we made several executive appointments, including Dan DelMastro, Head of SS&C Health; Karen Geiger and Steve Leivent, co-Heads of SS&C Advent; Kevin Rafferty, General Manager of SS&C Retirement Solutions; Nick Wright, Head of Global Investor & Distribution Solutions; Chris Madpak, Head of Tax Services for SS&C Globe Op; and hired and promoted numerous other senior executives. These executives are working with our customers and prospects driving change and defining new products and services to fuel future growth.

We continue to invest in our sales and marketing organizations and are seeing success gathering leads and interacting with prospects using digital and virtual platforms. Under the direction of Eamonn Greaves, our Global Head of Sales, we launched a comprehensive solutions program that brings product and service owners together across SS&C to develop integrated and targeted offerings. These solutions are geared to our clients' specific needs and focused on their asset classes, structures, regulatory and end customer requirements and other business objectives. We have seen early success with clients selecting multiple products and services and anticipate that this new effort will drive further collaboration within SS&C and distinguish our offerings in the marketplace.

Now we will mention some key deals for Q4. A $1 billion hedge fund launch chose our hosted Geneva solution along with Geneva World investor and e-Investor; a large U.K. wealth manager chose to transform their operations using our Global Investor & Distribution Solutions and Advent software; an existing retirement customer bought AWD, our workflow management tool; a Colorado-based alternative investment manager chose as a full suite of SS&C offerings, including GlobeOp fund services, loan servicing with Precision LM, our Eze trading platform and Intralinks. An existing fund services client extended their relationship to include risk, investor services and regulatory solutions, including our new Blue Sky reporting offering. A large SS&C Health client adopted our digital platform portfolio with a mobile app that enhances the member-payer interaction for 10,000-plus members.

I will now turn it over to Patrick to run through the financials.

Thank you. The results for the fourth quarter were GAAP revenues of $1.234 billion, GAAP net income of $197.1 million, and diluted EPS of $0.74. On an adjusted basis, revenues were $1.206.1 billion, including the impact of the adoption of the revenue span 606 and acquired deferred revenue adjustments for acquisitions.

Adjusted revenue was down 0.5%, adjusted operating income decreased 2.4%, and adjusted diluted EPS was $1.13, a 4.6% increase over Q4 2019.

Adjusted revenue decreased $6.1 million, or 0.5% over Q4 '19. Our acquisitions contributed $27.4 million. Foreign exchange had a favorable impact of $6 million or 0.5% in the quarter. Adjusted organic revenue decline on a constant currency basis was 2%, driven by weakness in the Advent, institutional, software products and DST financial services. These were offset by strength in fund administration, Intralinks and the Eze business. And we had strong sequential growth in the DST financial services and health care businesses over the third quarter.

Adjusted operating income for the fourth quarter was $458.8 million, a decline of $12.2 million or 2.4% from the fourth quarter of 2019. Foreign exchange had a negative impact of $3.5 million on expenses in the quarter. Adjusted operating margins were 38.8% compared to 38.0% in 2019. The expenses were driven by higher employee compensation and benefits, higher sales commissions and professional services, and these expenses were partially offset by lower travel and contractor expenses.

Adjusted EBITDA, defined in Note 3 of our earnings release was $475.8 million, with 39.4% of adjusted revenue. Net interest expense for the fourth quarter was $53.3 million and includes $3.4 million of noncash amortized financing costs and OID. The average rate in the quarter for our amended credit facility and our senior notes was 2.99% compared to 4.53% in the fourth quarter of 2019, and resulted in an interest expense decrease of $47.2 million or 47%. We recorded a GAAP tax provision of $37.7 million or 16.1% of pretax income.

Adjusted net income, as defined in Note 4 of our earnings release, was $302.6 million, and adjusted diluted EPS was $1.13. The effective tax rate used for adjusted net income was 26%.

Diluted shares increased to $268.1 million from $266.7 million in Q3. The impact of the increase and the average share price and option exercises was partially offset by share repurchases in the quarter.

On our balance sheet and cash flow, as of December 31, we had approximately $209.3 million in cash and cash equivalents and approximately $6.5 billion of gross debt for a net debt position of approximately $6.3 billion. Operating cash flow for the 12 months ended December 2020 was $1,184.7 million down $143.6 million compared to the same period in 2019. The decrease was impacted by a onetime upfront $250 million license payment that we received in 2019.

For the full year, net debt payments -- made net debt payments of $738.2 million. Treasury stock buyback of $227.8 million for purchases of 3.7 million shares at an average price of $60.99. We declared and paid $136.1 million in common stock dividend as compared to $107.6 million last year, an increase of 26.4%. Paid interest for the period was $236.2 million compared to $353 million last year due to lower debt levels and lower average interest rate.

For the full year, our average interest rate was 3.35% compared to 4.78% in 2019. For the year, we paid income taxes of $277.4 million compared to $222.7 million in 2019. We saw improvements in our accounts receivable DSO as of December 2020 at 48.4 days, and that compares to 50.4 days as of September 2020 and 49.7 days of December 2019.

Capital expenditures and capitalized software were $106.4 million or 2.3% of adjusted revenue. Spending was predominantly for capitalized software and IT infrastructure, and also some facility leasehold improvements.

Our LTM consolidated EBITDA that we use for covenant compliance was $1,856.3 million as of December 2020. Baseline net debt of approximately $6.3 billion, our total leverage ratio was 3.39x, and our secured leverage ratio was 2.31x as of December 31.

On our outlook for 2021 -- first, I'll cover some of the assumptions in our outlook. We currently expect markets to be volatile, large-scale outsourcing deals and license deals to continue to be at moderate levels, but with improvements in the back half of 2021. Our fund services business will continue to perform. As we focus on client service, our retention rates will continue to be in the range of our most recent results.

We've used foreign currency exchange at current levels. We expect the impact on DST Health unit pre-acquisition client terminations to impact revenue by approximately $25 million for the full year 2021.

Adjusted organic growth for the year will be in the range between 0% and 4% positive. Adjusted organic growth for Q1 in the range of negative 2.3% to positive 1.1%. Interest rates on our term facility will be approximately 1 month LIBOR plus the spread, which is currently 175 bps. We will continue to manage expenses during this period by controlling variable expenses and staff hiring.

On capital expenditures, we'll continue to invest in our business and spend approximately 2.8% of revenue on capital expenditures and capitalized software. We expect our adjusted tax rate to continue to be 26%.

For the first quarter of 2021, we expect revenue in the range of $1.158 billion to $1.198 billion, adjusted earnings per share to be in the range of $1.05 to $1.11. For the full year of 2021, we expect revenue to be in the range of $4.685 billion to $4.875 billion, and adjusted earnings per share to be in the range of $4.36 to $4.64.

For the full year, we expect cash from operating activities to be in the range of $1.240 billion to $1.320 billion.

And now I'll turn it over to Bill for final comments.

(technical difficulty)

I think Mr. Bill got disconnected, but he's reconnecting now.

Mr. Bill Stone is reconnected.

Sorry about that. Thanks, Patrick.

We continue to operate in the global pandemic. 99% of our global workforce is still remote, and business travel and in-person sales meetings are essentially nonexistent. Over the past 11 months, we have learned how to operate under these circumstances. Utilizing video conferencing, web-based marketing and promoting the power of our business model and reliability of our people and technology.

As you can tell from this call, we are optimistic and we believe our performance during this pandemic will pay dividends well into the future. We will now open it up for questions.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of David Togut.

Can you comment on fourth quarter 2020 total organic revenue growth? Quantify, please. And then if you could break down organic revenue growth for the fourth quarter by fund administration, Intralinks and DST.

For the fourth quarter, total adjusted organic growth was down 2%. The alternatives fund administration business was up 5.5%. And DST, we can provide you kind of a breakout between the 2 groups. The financial services group was down 1.1%, and the health care group was up 3.1%. And I think that combined to be down 0.3% for the full year. And Intralinks was up 3.8%.

Got it. And just as my follow-up, could you comment on your acquisition pipeline and appetite to acquire in the year ahead based on the quality of the pipeline and valuations that you see?

Well, we constantly look at acquisitions, and we're disciplined about it. Obviously, we deployed $8.3 billion in 2018. And that bought DST, Eze and Intralinks. We spent, I think, about $138 million in 2020, which was less than we would have expected. But we looked at lots of things. And obviously, in the public domain, you know that we looked at link administration down in Australia. So we're disciplined about it.

And we're quite aware that all the questions that we get on the conference calls and from our shareholders are on our organic revenue growth or unit. So we want to make sure that we focus on our organic revenue growth. And as Rahul had detailed in his remarks, we've made lots of changes. All of our businesses are getting better. All of them. Because if they don't get better, we get different executives, and that's how we operate.

So we're very optimistic about where we're going, about generating tons of cash, paying down a bunch of debt, looking at great acquisitions and earning more money for our shareholders, and then deciding how we're going to allocate our capital, whether that's going to be on acquisitions, which is generally our first choice. But we also like to pay down debt, and we also like to evaluate buying back our shares.

So I don't think our business plan, our strategy has changed. I believe that what we're doing is executing, and I think that's what we'll continue.

So there's a lot of stuff for sale, and you see stuff getting purchased all the time. And the question becomes is this -- is that strategic for us? Will it drive our organic revenue growth? And what is it going to do over the long term? So those are the criteria that we have. And I think we will probably buy some things in 2021. But as usual, we'll be disciplined about it, and we are going into 2021 with some optimism.

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Schmidt from Citi.

I wanted to touch on the sales cycle briefly. I know you mentioned in your revenue assumptions. You expect customer appetite and buying behavior to improve throughout the year. But wondering what you're seeing more recently as we head heading into 2021, and are you seeing customer behavior and buying patterns improve? Obviously, you're still in a large growth environment. But just curious what you're seeing from a sales cycle perspective, especially as it pertains to large deals.

Well, I'll give that a quick shot, and then Rahul can comment. But we have a pretty full pipeline. We have large deals. We have what we believe are a number of large deals that we hope to close this quarter. We had a very reasonable January. And I believe that that we will continue to execute. And we're seeing some strength across our different businesses.

I think our indicators that we have in Intralinks are as strong as they've ever been. I think we have a larger pipeline in January than we've ever had. And fund services, the hedge fund industry has proven to be quite resilient. And I think it will continue to be, as more and more private assets become the most attractive place to put money, whether that's private equity or private credit.

Our real estate, I think that SS&C is well positioned to do well there. And I think that the DST business is getting stronger. Our retirements business grew very nicely in Q4, and we expect it to grow very nicely throughout 2021. We have some challenges in our health care business. But Danny DelMastro and his team are doing a good job, and they are very focused. And so with that up, I'll let Rahul take a crack.

So I think the thing that I would add is, as time has passed in this pandemic, we have gotten more comfortable, and our customers as prospects have gotten more comfortable transacting over digital and virtual. And we always had an element of that, but obviously, we've had to rely on it a lot more. So we've seen our yield for virtual events and all the things that we do to gather together pipeline go up pretty substantially. And we've also seen contract signings and things like that, which were certainly slow at the start of this process pick back up.

So we feel pretty good about the current state. It's better than it was 3 months ago, and we think it's going to keep getting better throughout the course of the year.

That's great. Good to hear about the improvement, especially on the DST side. Maybe to tap on to that, when we think about the FY '21 organic growth outlook, the 0 to 4, what are the primary things that drive sort of the bottom and the top end? And then within that, what are the assumptions for DST as the year progresses? Any color there would be helpful.

No, again, right? The -- when you're selling $20 million to $50 million deals for a year, or $10 million to $25 million deals for the year, multiyear deals, if we win them, we will be at that 4%. And if we don't win them, we will be closer to that 0%.

But we're confident that we are going to win a lot more than we lose. We're going to continue to perform. The feedback from our clients has been tremendous based on the work that our entire staff has put in and the attention to detail that we have delivered in places like Advent and others that do Net Promoter Scores, it's as high as it's ever been. Customer satisfaction, as we track, is very high, and our retention rates stick at 96-or-so percent. And so I think that we have lot of optimism that we can perform.

We got to win. You got to throw passes, somebody got to catch them and they've got to go across the goal line, right? I mean that's the nature of the beast. And I don't know if, Rahul, you would have anything else to add to that.

Just, I guess, on the second part of that, on DST, in particular, so to talk about the pieces of DSD separately, the DST Financial Services business, which is really everything except Health, we're expecting to see low-single-digits type growth. That's kind of what's in sort of at the midpoint, maybe something like 3.5% or something like that. And the Health business, as Bill mentioned, we do have some challenges, and we're still dealing with some COVID impacts, and we expect that to be flat to slightly down for the year.

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Kramm from UBS.

Can you talk about the cost structure and the margin a little bit? If I look at the guidance correctly here, it looks like continued margin expansion. So any more details there? But more importantly, is it just operating leverage, or is it still a lot of efficiency gains that you're getting? You've been doing a lot of that. So just wondering where you're still finding opportunities to, I guess, cut if that's what's happening.

Well, I think, Alex, we would say that we manage. We cut where we have to. And -- but we have a large workforce. We have almost 25,000 people. And there's opportunities everywhere, right? And we have to get more efficient. And if you can get 5% efficiency on 25,000 people, that's 1,200 people, I think, right? So we need to drive revenue in order to be able to continue to grow our workforce and continue to increase our margins. And so that's what everyone at SS&C is focused on, and we manage it. We manage it every week.

So we picked places that we want to put our resources in. I think we spent $600 million between R&D and capitalized software in $140 million or so on acquisitions, we did. So we're investing back in our business. And we think that there is tremendous opportunity for us, and we think we have some very large competitors that just aren't going to be able to keep up.

And we think the as long as 2021 goes and 2022, we are going to continue to execute on a much higher level than our competitors.

Okay. Great. And then secondly, quick one. I think the buybacks were pretty soft in the fourth quarter. Is that just because you were looking at deals and maybe also your cash balance is fairly low, I think. So you just had to step back? Or where did that come from? And what's the expectations for 2021? I mean, you accelerated nicely in 2020. So is that still pretty focused on repurchases, all else equal?

Well, again, we try to allocate our capital as best we can. And obviously, we think our stock is certainly not overvalued. So we look at that somewhat fondly, but it's not our first choice. And even as we buy in it, if we buy more than we did in 2020, it would not surprise me. But I don't believe that we will probably spend more than we pay down debt.

So obviously, if we do acquisitions, then interest rates stay where they are. We'll probably use a lot of debt on acquisitions. But we generate a ton of cash. We generate a ton of cash in January. We'll generate a ton of cash throughout the year. And hopefully, we will use it wisely with the best interest of our shareholders.

Our next question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick from Crédit Suisse.

Great. My first is for Bill. Bill, I'm wondering if you have any perspective on the higher trading volumes and volatility related to retail flows in the equity markets, and how, if at all, in any way, they've impacted parts of your business, maybe the health of fund admin clients or anything else worth noting?

And Bill, I know you've been around long enough to see just about everything. Curious if you have any perspective on this force in the market, and if, in any way, it's an opportunity for SS&C?

Well, me and Moses have been around for quite a while, Brad, as you well know. So as I look back on my 400 years in the business, these things happen, right? They get to be bubbles. And when you start taking technology and spreading it around the world and then allow people to collaborate, as always, it's difficult for the regulators to be able to manage all of the various schemes, so to speak, that people can deploy to drive up stocks or drive down stocks. And so I think the regulators will catch up. And I think that this will be another thing that isn't much different than year 2000 and how many eyeballs are looking at your screens.

And so I think the drive up on some of these very well-known stocks, I think, is probably a little bit a ball, maybe more than a little bit. But I don't know about where we would step in and have it as an advantage for us, other than in our regulatory services business that can help our clients see insights into that. And then our Algorithmics business where we have also a lot of quants that are constantly looking at this stuff.

So we can give our clients insights into what's happening, and I think that can be very valuable.

Thank you, Bill. It makes perfect sense to me. I appreciate the thoughtful answer.

Maybe for Rahul. Rahul, in your prepared remarks, you talked about a comprehensive solutions program under Eamonn Greaves, combining products and services. Just curious what prompted this now? What's the opportunity really? And with total respect, it sounds obvious. So why wasn't this something you were already doing?

So about a year ago, I'd say, in the fourth quarter of 2019, we put Eamonn in charge of global sales. And his mandate was really to help us collaborate more effectively. And more than collaborate, integrate, right? So that if you go see a customer, and a customer as a bank or an insurance company or a hedge fund manager, we're bringing together different parts of the organization, and offering that comprehensive solution. And the more we can do with that, the more strategic we become for them, the more likely it is to buy bigger, right?

So just remember that we, as Bill pointed out, we brought DST, Eze, Interlinks in 2018. And we're trying to sell things that work together, right? So it takes some time to integrate them. It takes some time to get the user interfaces and the functionality that they want. And we feel like we're in a good place with that product offering. We're putting the right focus behind the sales and marketing of that was the right move. So I think we're formalizing things we've done all along, but we're off to a good start.

Our next question comes from the line of Ashish Sabadra from Deutsche Bank.

Rahul, I just wanted to go back to a comment that you made on the DST. If I heard you right, the DST financial could potentially grow 3.5% this year in fiscal '21 at the midpoint. Just want to confirm if I heard that right.

And then maybe just a question on that one is, obviously, that's pretty strong compared to the DST financial growth profile historically. What's really driving that strength? Is that the new -- there were a couple of large deals that you won last year. Are those -- is the implementation really driving it?

And then if you can maybe any provide any incremental color within DST Financial, where are you seeing pockets of strength or pockets of strong demand? Any color would be helpful.

Sure. So yes, we have at the midpoint, approximately 3.5% or so organic growth. The retirement business, where we've talked about a number of large deals, and done some press releases on them, is clearly one of the bright spots. We're also seeing good strength in our U.K.-based wealth and insurance services business. And really across all of DST, we've been working hard for since 2018, really focused on the sales efforts there, focused on the product development efforts there, focused on digital and web portals and different ways in which our end customers can interact with their clients, and that's what they deem most valuable. We're starting to see some signs that the work we've done is paying off, and we're pretty bullish on what might happen with that business, not just in 2021, but beyond.

That's great. Very helpful color. And maybe just a quick question on pricing in the alternatives fund Advent side, there was a pricing increase back in end of 2018 -- sorry, end of 2019, early 2020. Are there opportunities for more annual price increases going forward? Any thoughts on '21?

So we're doing -- and I think we said this last year, we really tried to set this up as a price conversation that was going to happen once a year, right? And it's been reasonable increases that I think our customers -- well, nobody welcomes them, they understand where we're coming from. We're working our way through that process right now, and it's going pretty well, and we do expect it to have a positive impact on alternatives, but really across our business.

Our next question comes from the line of Mayank Tandon from Needham.

Bill, just wanted to get a sense from you, or maybe Rahul can chime in, too. How should we think about the growth within the installed base, i.e., land and expand versus contribution from new logos as you get back to some level of normalcy in terms of organic trends across your portfolio of solutions?

Mayank, that's a very good question, and it really is kind of at the core of what we're doing. We bought DST and closed in April of 2018. In 2020, DST clients represented 75 of our top 100 clients. And they're all the largest investment organizations in the world and they're tremendous opportunities, right?

But there's a lot of work to do at DST, and we've done a lot of work. And we doubled EBITDA. I know it's doesn't because our organic revenue growth didn't go up. But our earnings went way up. Our cash went way up, cash flow went way up. And it gave us tremendous opportunities to drill into all those great big clients and start showing them all of our opportunities.

Algorithmics is a treasure trove of expertise with a worldwide business. So we have opportunities to go into these large organizations. And I think we just did a $1 million deal with one of our clients on our new Blue Sky portal. And that makes it so easy for our clients to be able to comply with all the regulations in all 50 states. And it's a pain in the neck.

And the more things that we can take away from our clients that are a pain to them, the larger our land-and-expand process goes. And that's why we put Eamonn in charge. I think several others of our top sales executives are also now drilling into all of our different opportunities that our client base, our 18,000 clients. But you can't go into a place as large as DST and start just swinging a sledgehammer, right? You got to go in there, you've got to understand, and you got to be willing to accept the slings and arrows of Wall Street for a while. But there's no way we'd be at $2.7 billion revenue without those 3 acquisitions. And guys like Mike Sleightholme and Kevin Rafferty and John Geli and Danny DelMastro and Tori Dargati and a whole bunch of other people at DST, they've done a great job.

And I think that those people understand that SS&C likes to be on the gas pedal and this brake stuff is not in our DNA. But they had a lot of brakes; lots of brakes. And so we had to break those brakes and then hit on the gas pedal. But remember, it's $2 billion in revenue, $2 billion. Now that it starts growing, that's going to really put some wind in our sales and allow us, if we execute. And I believe we are executing. It's going to get better and better and better.

And that's why you see the changes we've made, the bundling of our products and the improved outlook that we have because of all the work we've done.

When a stonecutter swings that axe at a piece of granite, it doesn't crack the first time. It might crack the 100th time. But something tells me those 99 swings he made before -- or she made before it cracked had an impact on it cracking. And that's the same thing we've done. We know it's granite. We know we've got to swing. We know we got to stay focused. We know we got to push. That's not easy for everybody, but that's what we do. That's how we manage. That's how we generate cash flow. That's how we generate earnings. And it used to be earnings and cash flow were really important. Now kind of important, but they're not as important as organic revenue growth, that we did the things we think were necessary in order to set the platform to get organic revenue.

Great. That's very helpful perspective. And I can just follow up briefly, has the pandemic and the effect of that flushed out some of the competition in the fragmented portions of your markets? In other words, are you now even stronger in some of the segments where you might have had more competition from some of the start-ups and smaller players that are not as well funded?

Well, I think actually, I mean, I think we're going to do better against the larger ones, the biggest ones. I think the use of third parties in India has not been very effective for an awful lot of very large places, and we use our own people almost 100%. And it's taken us 1 year, 2.5 years, 3.5 years. And Rahul can comment on this, too. But we had, I think, 1,600, 1,800 contractors from Syntel that worked for DST that we've now completely rebatched. They now work for us, right? And we have less and less outsiders inside SS&C, and we operate better when we're in charge of people's raises, people's bonuses, people's promotions, people's careers. And that's been a really big help for our business. And Sunil over in India has done a great job for us, and I think we're going to continue to execute and I think we're going to continue to surprise positively. And Rahul, what do you think?

Well, I would just -- coming back to what you said about customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores, we've seen really high levels of accolades from our customers throughout the -- both large and small customers. And we do think that this has been a disruptive time for many in the marketplace. So relatively placed. We're getting stronger on an absolute basis. But also relative to others, I think we're really well positioned going forward.

Our next question comes from the line of Jackson Ader from JPMorgan.

Great. Bill, the first one for you, on main reasons you win and lose. You're talking about being at the high end or low end of the guidance range just depends on whether you actually win some of these deals or not. And I'm curious, the reasons that you win and the reasons that you lose, have they changed over the last couple of years? Just curious on your thoughts.

Well, I think for a number of the businesses that we inherited with DST, they hadn't had a win in a number of years, right? So changing that entire attitude, you got to believe you can win so you can win, right? Your prospect's going to know immediately if you're not confident. So knocking that insecurity out of people, that's not easy. And it's not comfortable for people, but that's who we are. Let's get at it. Hence, we've built software, and whether that's a fraud waste and abuse app that we did for SS&C Health or whether that's the improvements that we've made to the transfer agency business, that's a large business for us, or what we've done in the retirement business.

So first, you have to have a superior product. Then you have to have a very trained workforce, right, so that they can implement it. And you have to have a knowledgeable marketing team that can market it. And you have to have a great sales force. So as I've said many times, right? We meet our sales team every week. Some of these places we bought didn't meet except every month. So there's a big difference in the culture and in the drive.

And again, you have to recognize that we did $1.184 billion in cash flow in 2020. In 2017, we did about $400 million. So we've tripled our cash flow. And again, that's a very positive thing. It gives us lots of resources to invest in training, in education or technology. We've hired some great people that have done some great work for us. Anthony Caiafa, John Gutgreund, and Nick Wright, all kinds of people who have done just great jobs for us. And I think that, that's going to continue. Because they like winning. They get paid more when they win, right?

So I think that's been the major reasons why we win, is it's more organized. Eamonn's doing a great job getting it more organized than it was, and we're competitive. And we're not going to just sit back and not go after our competitors' clients directly. And they aren't going to like it, but that's fine. That's the nature of competition.

Great. Yes, I appreciate the thoughts. What about the link asset? What did you find really attractive about it? And what are some of the main, main reasons that you kind of withdrew there?

Well I mean, it's -- I think it's a good business. We really like Australia as a market. We have done very well in Canada, and we feel like we can replicate that in Australia. And we've got a nice business in Australia, and we want to have a bigger outsourcing business in Australia, and Link would have fit that bill, but there's a lot of work to do on Link. And I believe they've started their process, but we have done a lot of work on DST. We have lots of positive momentum, as you can hear on this call. And we didn't really want to have another situation where I got to tell you guys, it's another 2- or 3-year change. And so we decided that, that really didn't fit with what we wanted to do. And so -- and so we were through. It's still a good company. I think they'll do fine, but it wasn't something that we wanted to tackle right now.

Our next question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann from D.A. Davidson

Just one maintenance question. I didn't hear you mention the pending Capita acquisition. Is that deal still pending, or has it closed?

It's still pending.

But it's not dead, theoretically. We're still pursuing the close?

Yes. We had one large client at Capita that was not going to fit into that acquisition, and they had to find alternative. But we believe that has been rectified, and we would expect it to close in the next 60, 90 days. And -- but we have expected that a couple of times in the past, so we want to make sure. It's not that big of an acquisition, anyway.

Right. Right. No that's right. Okay. And then just in terms of when we're looking out over the next couple of years, could you identify any pending regulations? Kind of like a CECL, whether it's in the U.S. or globally, that you think can serve as demand drivers for spend or upgrade activity? Anything out there that we should be monitoring?

Well, I mean, obviously, you have a new administration in the United States, and it's going to be much more active in financial services and going to view financial services as a money pot for taxes. And so there's going to be a lot of regulation. And no different than Form PF and other things that came out in the 2012, 2014 time frame. And we would expect that it's going to be -- I'm guessing it will be pretty similar from what it was 2008 to 2016, and there will be opportunities to help our clients meet those new regulations and those new tax requirements in as cost effectively as possible.

Got it. Got it. Okay. And if I could just sneak in one more. There was a joint venture announced by a number of financial services companies: State Street, PIMCO, Man Group, and it looked like they were going to be focusing on business process outsourcing for the fund industry. Is that something that's on your radar? And do you think that will be something that would be potentially competing with any operations of SS&C or perhaps DST?

Well, hey, those are large, sophisticated companies with a lot of great people. And my guess is there's probably a little bit of politics in every one in those places. So when they all get together, it might be like the United Nations. So we'll have to see what happens with -- what happens with that. We're well aware, but we're also executing on our plan. And hopefully, we'll see them in our rear view mirror.

(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from the line of Michael Young from Truist Securities.

Wanted to just kind of ask maybe high level, coming from 2020, which was a heavily impacted pandemic year to some hopes of reopening this year, could you just maybe give some color on the conversations with clients and how they've trended? And could there be sort of a backlog of activity as people kind of refocus on operating core businesses in 2021? Just any color on that would be helpful.

Well, I think as you well know, right, when you have a crisis such as this, the rapidity of change probably goes up tenfold. So companies that would have never believed they could operate from remote now operate from remote. And I think that it's going to change lots of things.

So how we all execute on our strategy using how we deploy our greatest asset, obviously, is our people, and keeping them safe is paramount. There's going to be a lot of things that are going to be important that we focus on. And I think obviously, you guys are a recent merger of 2 large banking organizations. And my guess is, is that there's a lot of change going on at Truist. And you have a major acquisition during a pandemic. So there's added impetus to streamline your operations, make them as efficient as possible, make sure you have redundancy. Cybersecurity is a very big deal. And I think that we need to be cognizant of what is out there, and we need to be prudent.

When we know, we need to act quickly. But being precipitous seems to me to be a poor strategy.

Okay. And my second question, just wanted to follow-up on a few of your comments. I think you've kind of highlighted how the market's more eager in revenue growth versus good, stable cash flow businesses. Is there any desire with either your next M&A deal or just kind of how you're managing internally to try to ramp up the revenue growth piece of the business as opposed to just cash flow?

We're trying. I would tell you that our focus is probably -- we're not going to forget about cash flow, and we're not going to forget about earnings. But our focus is on growing revenue. And anybody that has any conversations with me knows exactly what I'm talking about; or any conversations with Patrick or any conversation with Rahul or any conversation with Eamonn or Justine or anyone else in the company. Everybody knows it's revenue.

Now you can't pigeonhole everything. You got to make sure it's -- everybody admires Jeff Bezos, and he apparently did it on revenue growth, and it's admirable. But not everybody has an Amazon business. So we need to be prudent.

We're not going to go buy up 100,000, 200,000 square feet of office space in New York, in London, in Paris, in Frankfurt and other places because we think that would be a poor use of our cash and our -- not that we don't have strong cash and not that I think we probably couldn't afford it. We probably could. But we're not Google. We don't have more money than most nations. So we're going to be prudent. We're going to think. And we're going to make sure our people are safe, and they're not coming back into the offices until we can make sure that, that environment is safe for them and we're ready. So I think that's how we're trying to operate in a -- we're very focused on revenue growth.

It's a little more difficult getting large-scale licenses when you don't get in-person meetings. So -- but we're working at it. We're winning some deals. And we're winning -- like I said, the funds services business has been strong. Intralinks has got very, very full pipeline. And Ken Bisconti and Bob Petrocchi were doing a great job there, and -- Petrocchi are doing a great job there. And I think that our opportunities are greater than they've ever been. But those are opportunities. We still got to catch the ball. We still got to get over the goal line.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Donat from Piper Sandler.

Bill, I wanted to ask one question about the redemption indicator that we see for GlobeOp. And January was the lowest number on record since 2008. And do you think that's mostly market forces? Or is there anything changing in the competitive landscape that's keeping redemptions from leaving SS&C? .

I mean, I think that we have really a blue-chip roster of funds. But that being said, it's probably a heavy, heavy dose of what's happening in the market. I mean, if you look at the amount of assets going into private equity and real estate and private credit and hedge funds, I think you see that people are starving for returns, starving for income. And they're not finding it in corporate bonds or government bonds, for sure.

So I think that people redeem either when they have a life event like buying a house or retiring or something, or that they have an alternate place to put their money. And if they don't have an alternate place to put their money, they tend to stand packed. And I think the hedge fund industry, in particular, and the other ones, the real estate industry as well as investment industry as well as the private equity industry, has learned to communicate with their investors. And that communication is paramount. And again, that's something that SS&C is very well positioned in and able to help our customers communicate with their customers, with their investors. And I think that's another reason why the redemption indicator remains historically low.

Okay. And then, Patrick, one question about guidance. And well, for the fourth quarter, you commented that there was less travel and less usage of contractors in the fourth quarter. Are those 2 things that you would expect to stay low through the remainder of 2021? Or do you expect travel and contractor usage to increase kind of over the course of the year as things get to some level of new normal?

Yes, the contractor reduction is due to the fact that we moved the India contractors to in-house employees. So that will be permanent for 2021. And on travel, I think, basically, we've assumed that travel expenses won't be a heck of a lot different than Q1 and most of Q2, and then gradually start increasing in the third and fourth quarter, but not be back to pre-pandemic levels. So that's kind of the assumption we've made.

Our next question comes from the line of James Faucette from Morgan Stanley.

Just a couple of quick questions for me to follow-up on previous questions and answers. First, on DST, I think you made a comment around some incremental work or improvements on DST that you're working on. Just wondering if you can touch on that, first of all.

Well, again, I'll take 30 seconds and then give it to Rahul, but we have made a lot of changes. Mike Sleightholme has made a lot of changes. Nick Wright took over at the end of June last year, and he's done a great job for us. He's based in London. And Kevin Rafferty came in, and he's running our retirement solutions business, and he's doing it with John Geli, and they're both doing a great job for us. And we have a focus on that business.

So we've made a number of changes there. We talked about Danny DelMastro and Tori Dargati running our health care business, and they brought in quite an increased level of focus and intensity. And I believe that will pay off. And he took over OIC maybe September or maybe it might have been August last year. And so we made a lot of changes. And the sales force is now reporting up through Eamonn as a global. And Mike has taken Rob Stone and some other top sales executives that we have and slotted them into the DST business. Jeanine Kilgallen, our VP, and a bunch of others that are really top flight people and know how we operate, how we prepare and how we show our wares to our various prospects. Would you have anything else, Rahul?

Well, the only thing I would add is, in addition to the sales focus and just overall more attention to the speed at which we execute and making sure that there's tangible things that we're trying to do, and we're all marching with some -- just some pace to it, we're also really focused on product development and innovation. So a lot of our hires, even below the senior executives that we've mentioned, have been in folks that are bringing in new technologies, whether that's digital, which a lot of our clients are looking for, or things we can do with artificial intelligence and machine learning. We've made an acquisition at Vidado. There's others. So we're giving that sales force more tools to be able to differentiate themselves from our competitors, and that's helping.

Got it. Got it. And then I appreciate that. And then Bill, you started off talking about acquisitions and discipline. And look, clearly, you've built and established an incredibly strong reputation of being able to find the right things at the right time and under the right circumstances. What kind of moves your guardrails, if you will, of discipline around? And I guess I'm thinking about the current environment, and maybe more generally, how you think this ultimate -- how the current environment ultimately plays out? And what do you, at SS&C, have to do to be prepared to take advantage of when things do change and start to adjust?

James, again, you got to do the work, right? I mean, you have to have people find businesses that we can ultimately buy. We have looked at making a number of different investments to get to know businesses better, and then see if we can help them grow and then ultimately acquire them. We have to stay close to the private equity industry. We have to stay close to large-scale financial institutions that want to get rid of divisions or want a joint venture with us, in ways that they can really improve their margin profile. So there's a number of those kinds of things that I think -- or the path to very accretive acquisitions that drive revenue growth?

But it's work, right? I mean, it's looking at a lot of deals. It's having discipline about it. It's not turning this into -- the focus isn't on our business, the focus is on what we could do to buy additional businesses.

We have a lot of businesses. We have 18,000 clients. We have tremendous upsell and cross-sell opportunities, right? We have tremendous development teams, thousands of developers, right? We need to be able to build product, deliver product, market product, sell product, raise prices, right? We need to create this entire environment where we're the best, right?

So when we went into fund administration in 2002, we didn't have $1 in AUA. Now, we have $2 trillion. It's the same thing. You got to execute. And then you can bring in places like Eisnerfast, where we get people like Rahul Kanwar, Renee Mooney, Mike Megaw and Chris Madpak and a bunch of others that add to the quality and capability and breadth and depth and you keep marching through. And now that we're the largest as a fund administrator, both in hedge and private equity, and we're moving up fast in real estate. And Bhagesh Malde has done a great job. And we just got a lot of great people, and there's also a lot of work to do with deploying $8.3 billion in 2018.

Our next question comes from the line of Surinder Thind from Jefferies.

Just following up on the comment about the focus around revenues and growth. Can you talk a little bit about maybe how pricing fits in into that strategy in terms of how you think about it on an annual basis? And then if there's any impact that we should be thinking about, from a COVID perspective this year, in the sense that maybe there's clients that have asked you to hold off from pricing increases? And any color you can provide there would be helpful.

Rahul, you want that one?

Yes. So thus far, in the annual pricing conversations that we've had, it really hasn't been that different than it was last year. Now this was a pretty new process for us. Last year was the first time, but the conversations have gone well. And there are -- as I mentioned earlier, we are going to be reasonable and to the extent that we have a customer that has some constraints. Obviously, we're going to respect that and try to make it work to the satisfaction of both SS&C and that customer, but they've been going pretty well.

Got it. And then just a quick, I guess, modeling question. Just can you remind us of the expected impact on revenues in 2021 for the DST clients that were terminated pre-acquisition?

It's $25 million for the full year.

Full year. Okay.

No further questions at this time. I will now turn back the call over to Mr. Bill Stone.

Thank you. Again, thanks, everybody, for your thoughtful questions. And again, we're going to execute, and I look forward to talking to you in late April or early May. Thanks.

Thank you again for participating. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.