Verisk Analytics, Inc.
Q2 2019 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 31 Jul 2019

[Operator:]

Good morning. My name is Charelle, and I would be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Verisk Analytics' Q2 2019 Earnings Conference Call. . Ms. Brodbar, you may begin your conference.

[Stacey Brodbar:]

Thank you, Charelle, and good morning to everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for a discussion of our second quarter 2019 financial results. Today's call will be led by Scott Stephenson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, who will provide a brief overview of our business. Lisa Hannan, President of Verisk Financial Services, will then provide an update on our Financial Services segment. Lastly, Lee Shavel, Chief Financial Officer, will highlight some key points about our financial performance. Mark Anquillare, Chief Operating Officer, will join the team for Q&A.

[Scott Stephenson:]

Thanks, Stacey. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to report that Verisk delivered another strong quarter marked by solid 7.2% organic constant currency revenue growth, which remains the most important measure of the health of our organization. Moreover, our growth was driven by continued broad-based strength in our Insurance segment as well as marked improvement in our Financial Services segment. At Verisk, it is our people that drive innovation, provide a great customer experience and are critical to delivering our consistent and solid financial results. As such, we are keenly focused on maintaining an environment that attracts and retains the best talent through strong recruitment, leading talent development programs and management training efforts, which ultimately results in highly engaged employees. I'm pleased to share that employee engagement at Verisk is on an upward trend, improving 2 percentage points from 2018. At the same time, we have maintained retention of our top performers at over 92% in each of the last three years in what is a very competitive labor market for our kind of talent. From a recruiting perspective, this summer, we are hosting our largest class of interns ever with 119 interns across all our business units who can serve as a pipeline for permanent hires. On a training and development front, we are investing in our future by hiring talent earlier in the talent pipeline and training them ourselves instead of competing for experienced talent. As such, we have expanded our global data science excellence program, which is an internal four plus year rotational training program for data scientists with a Masters in Data Science or Data Analytics. We have also extended training programs for talent in key areas, including cloud architecture and artificial intelligence. We have enhanced our management training programs to include offerings for first-line managers as well as experienced leaders and have expanded our online education offerings in data science and analytics in connection with leading universities such as Johns Hopkins and University of Michigan.

[Lisa Hannan:]

Thank you, Scott. I'm excited to have the opportunity to provide you with an update on Verisk Financial Services, our business unit built through the combination of the legacy Argus platform with acquisitions that added capabilities and expanded our solution sets. Now that I've been in the role of President, Verisk Financial, for just over a year, it's a great time to discuss the progress we've made over the past 12 months, provide an update on our key strategic initiatives and share our vision for the future. To start, I think it's important to take a step back to better understand where Verisk Financial Services is in our evolution and where we're headed. At the start of 2017, the Financial Services segment of Verisk consisted of the Argus business, which is a data contributory consortia business working with the leading banks and payment companies around the globe, including the top 30 credit card issuers in North America, the U.K. and Australia. Argus offers our customers unique solutions such as tracking and measurement of over $2 trillion worth of consumer spending annually as well as industry benchmarking and portfolio profitability analytics. Throughout 2017, we made several business acquisitions that aligned from a strategic and financial perspective and added capabilities to our existing services. In early 2018, we dedicated significant attention to integrating the acquired companies from an operating perspective, and we began creating a unified go-to-market presence under the Verisk Financial brand. In May of 2018, the management team went through a comprehensive strategic analysis of each of our solutions within Verisk Financial. We examined critically and dispassionately what Verisk financial was doing very well and where we could improve. Based on this analysis, we developed an integrated strategic plan for the business. The first change, which many of you may recall from our December Investor Day, was to align our go-to-market strategy around four solution sets.

[Lee Shavel:]

Thanks, Lisa. First, I would like to bring to everyone's attention that we have posted a quarterly earnings presentation that is available on our website. Presentation provides background, data trends and analysis to support our conversation today. Moving to the financial results for the quarter. On a consolidated and a GAAP basis, revenue grew 8.5% to $653 million. Net income decreased 2% to $150 million while diluted GAAP EPS declined 1.1% to $0.90 per share for the second quarter 2019. As we previewed on last quarter's earnings call, both GAAP net income and diluted GAAP EPS were negatively impacted by the acceleration of $6 million in stock-based compensation in the quarter.

[Stacey Brodbar:]

Operator, we're ready for questions.

[Operator:]

. And you do have a question from Toni Kaplan.

[Toni Kaplan:]

Just taking a step back, you've had margin contraction in Insurance for the past 10 quarters, and you've been investing and experiencing an impact from dilutive acquisitions. But at some point, perhaps we could see that reverse. And so just given operating leverage of the business overall, I guess at what point do you think that we could start to see some margin leverage in Insurance specifically?

[Lee Shavel:]

So Toni, thanks for the question. I think we've been focused on those -- on the year-over-year results. And when we look at this quarter's year-over-year performance from a margin standpoint, I think it's important to understand that if you take the timing -- compensation timing impact of about 1%, the margin in the second quarter of 53% would have been 54% versus 54.4% in the prior year period. And so that certainly is I would -- we would describe as flattish. And at the same time, recognizing that we have been making some significant investments in Geomni and telematics that have been accelerated as we've ramped up in particular, Geomni. And so we are making those investments with the expectation that those will be contributing to our margin improvement over time as we reach scale in those businesses. So I think it's the financial dimension, and I'll turn it over to Mark to provide some additional color here.

[Mark Anquillare:]

Sure. I'll echo the investment we're making. I think the thing that I always like to emphasize is that inside the investment, what we have seen is our top line organically growing quicker, which means our bottom line EBITDA cash flow is growing quicker. So I think that's been successful. We have been disciplined in the way we spend and invest. And I think there is scale clearly in the business as we take on pretty big investment in something like aerial imagery and IoT. So I just want to provide a little bit of color that I think we've had quite a bit of success in the growth side of things.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from Manav Patnaik.

[Manav Patnaik:]

I guess since you have Lisa on the call, maybe I can just ask on the Argus comments. I think there was a comment about updating the pricing structure to more subscription-based revenue, and that might have been specific to the EDM business based in India. So I was wondering if you can just elaborate on that with some context on how much of Argus today is subscription. And are there any other areas there that you could see similar pricing structure updates?

[Lisa Hannan:]

Sure. There were two things. The first is that as we've begun integrating the companies that we acquired, the business that we acquired in India, we did go through a rigorous review of all of their solutions and the pricing for those solutions relative to our investment in those solutions. Based on that, we have updated our pricing structure for solutions-based set of India. Those are primarily subscription-based solutions. In addition, across all of the Argus business, we have also been changing and shifting our mix towards more subscription-based and product-driven solutions as opposed to onetime implementations or initial development revenue up-front and more heavily weighted in the current year. As we implement some of our data analytic solutions, the enterprise data management solutions, we're now orienting those to more of a longer-term subscription base as well. So in all the things that we're doing, we're looking for longer-term subscription-based revenue. Today, the percentage of revenue that's subscription-based is over 65%, close to 70%. We continue to move that up.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from Tim McHugh.

[Timothy McHugh:]

Just wondered on LightSpeed, you highlighted that this quarter. So can you talk about how customers are adopting that? Is that displacing prior methods of kind of underwriting and acquiring customers? Or is it used -- being used as an incremental? And then I think recently, you talked about taking Sequel to the U.S., which I believe is a new initiative. So I guess talk about the plans and how aggressively you're pursuing that.

[Mark Anquillare:]

Great. Thanks, and this is Mark. So let me first talk a little bit about LightSpeed. Inside of the insurance process, there has typically been a two-step process. First, you provide a quote, and then people run what is typically all the reports and gather the information. There's a cost there before they bind the policy. So what we have attempted to do inside of our kind of ecosystem is create a very automated approach so they can flow this business, that's a term of ours, they can be completely automated, more accurate, more efficient. And we're bringing all the data needs up-front. We call it our data-forward strategy. So that represents kind of a different way of going to -- go to market. You can actually provide a quote, bind it all in one. Just an example, you talked about digital engagement. On the personal auto front, on a car insurance, about 33% of all quotes you get online change after people do that work. So very poor experience. And what we've done is we've taken things like motor vehicle reports, loss histories, prior losses, prior coverage, all the things about the driver and brought that up-front. And that has been adopted, well accepted, and we have a nice success on the insurance front. That kind of moves across auto, the homeowners and even into small commercial. That is our theme, and that's where we're headed. I'm going to now flip over to the question on Sequel. Just to remind everybody, Sequel solution set which is, for the most part, all of the software to a service policy, starting from the up-front, within underwriting on to claims, all of that very much a industry standard inside the London insurance market, primarily around things that what I'll refer to as ISO. And most of Verisk hasn't been as focused on the non-admitted market, meaning the specialty lines, the really complex risks. What we have attempted to do is use some of that technology in some of our products here. But more importantly, what you saw in the press release is for specialty or complex insurance risk, we are going to bring Sequel to the United States. We seem to have quite a bit of interest. We are leveraging the teams in place, both on the claims side and on the ISO side of the underwriting side. And I think we're very optimistic that inside that niche specialty market, we have a solution that can win today. And we're optimistic.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from Andrew Steinerman.

[Andrew Steinerman:]

It's Andrew. Could you give us a sense how your Energy clients are doing as they're increasing spend with Wood Mac, which areas of interest is increasing with those Energy clients? And also, you mentioned cost intelligence with energy. I assume that's around PowerAdvocate. And could you give us a sense of how PowerAdvocate is do -- again evolving within Verisk?

[Scott Stephenson:]

Yes. So Scott here. And in reverse order, the PowerAdvocate suite is doing well. The traditional customer set for PowerAdvocate has been utilities. A lot of the motion in the business has been taking the same kind of solution into the oil and gas space, which is one of those places where PowerAdvocate is advantaged by being tied to the business with very substantial footprint we've already got in the oil and gas space. And then over on the traditional Wood Mac side in the oil and gas space, basically, there is a lot of interest in what the Lens platform provides, which is essentially more real time and more integrated into the customer workflows. And so it's essentially doing what we thought it would do, which is positioning our content even more deeply in the customer workflows. And that's the direction of travel. Basically, as the United States has sort of been differentially adding to the global supply curve, the U.S. environment is one where you're making operating decisions all the time as opposed to the traditional offshore decadal kind of investment cycle. And so the need for real time, the need for more benchmark kinds of data just goes up, and that's exactly what we've been positioning for. So it's -- one of the leading metrics there is the rate of adoption of Lens among the oil and gas companies, both the integrated globals as well as the more pure-play E&P companies. And we're very happy with what's happening there.

[Operator:]

. Your next question comes from Gary Bisbee.

[Gary Bisbee:]

Thanks for the detailed rundown on Financial Services business. It sounds like you're making a lot of progress there. I guess the key question is, how do those changes impact how we should think about the medium- or longer-term growth potential of the business and maybe also profitability? Historically, before the recent couple years of challenges, I think there was clear discussion of this being the fastest growth or growing above the corporate average. Is that a reasonable and sustainable target at some point in the future based on the progress you're doing?

[Lee Shavel:]

Gary, this is Lee. So for all three of our segments, our expectation that all of them have the ability to meet or exceed our long-term targeted 7% organic constant currency growth rate as well as to realize the operating leverage and achieve EBITDA faster than that. And so I think one of the challenges for investors, which we certainly empathize with, is that given some of the large contracts in contract transitions in the business made it difficult to see the underlying growth within the business. And so we wanted to focus on really developing the bottoms up approach to the business that Lisa described in each of the four solutions areas. And I think in those more traditional -- in the kind of the foundational benchmarking areas, those are probably mid-single digits growth elements. And the fraud, bankruptcy, enterprise data management, marketing spend analytics are newer, higher-growth businesses that we think contribute to achieving that 7% growth. So no change in terms of our expectations of what the Financial Services business can achieve and can contribute to our overall growth rate, but there has been a shift in making sure that we're delivering that on a more sustainable and granular basis and that investors have greater clarity on that growth, which certainly I think within this quarter is a clear step in that direction.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from Joseph Foresi.

[Joseph Foresi:]

I was wondering if you could talk about Geomni and some of the potential contribution to revenues and the CapEx that you've put in there and what stage that's in.

[Mark Anquillare:]

This is Mark. Let me try to address that. So the opportunity with Geomni is very much focused on, first, ensuring that we have coverage, frequent refresh of those images. And with that, that library of information, our first step was really to address the claims-focused solutions in the insurance space. So literally, by using those advanced pictures and some advanced analytics, we can get measurements and do repair cost estimates for the claims departments from the sky. They then use maybe some desktop adjusting but, for the most part, a majority of that is done in a very automated fashion, saving a very significant cost to the insurers as well it's safer and more accurate. We have opportunities to bring that into underwriting as well as to the world of cat modeling. But I want to highlight though that as much as our first use case was insurance, there's probably and there is bigger opportunities outside of the insurance space. So we have partnered up with some folks that are doing construction. We're doing work in the solar space. We're doing work across various verticals where that imagery and those exact measurements are very helpful. And Geomni is contributing nicely to that claims category inside of our growth rates for insurance. So it continues to be investment-oriented. Keystone accelerates that investment for us because it replaces what we have to buy in the form of sensors, meaning big cameras as well as the planes. Keystone has it. They have operations. They have pilots. So this will accelerate our path to strength there.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from Andrew Jeffrey.

[Andrew Jeffrey:]

Yes. I wonder and I'm thinking about LightSpeed. But broadly across your business, can you talk about the extent to which InsurTech maybe is driving some of your growth and how structural that is? And whether as you look out to the market today, that's a potential growth acceleration driver over the next year or two?

[Scott Stephenson:]

Yes. Scott here. It has two effects on our business. So one is, if you think of InsurTech as a category of digitally enabled innovations, this is one of the things that actually our customers and all of our segments are looking for. They themselves are trying to transform their businesses making use of digital methods. And so here we are with our particular solution sets. They are rotating their budgets in the direction of making use of modern methods. So that's just a fundamentally constructive factor across everything we do basically. But in addition to that, when people refer to InsurTech, partly what they're talking about are new companies that are basically using digital methods fundamentally to change the distribution of insurance, the sourcing of insurance, customers presenting the insurance product to the end user. And so these are some of the companies that get celebrated as startups that are -- sort of kind of present a new face to the insurance-consuming world. We've done very well with those companies as customers. So here they are. They're inventing a new insurance company. And we find that they just -- that they have voted with their feet and basically want to use our industry-standard solutions so that they have the benefit of efficiency, fighting fraud in effective way. One of the big issues you have when you emerge as an insurance company is you don't have a lot of experience. And so how are you going to anticipate where your losses are going to be and at what level? That's one of the things that our solutions just give you right out of the box. So it's really gratifying to see how many of them come our way when they form and then all of a sudden -- and I've had a chance to visit with the CEO -- even recently with the CEOs of some of these highly celebrated, emergent insurance companies. And they just -- they really, really like being a partner with Verisk.

[Operator:]

And your next question comes from Jeff Meuler.

[Jeffrey Meuler:]

Scott, I was just hoping you could extend your earlier comments around kind of human capital and the opening of the Kraków office. You relatively, I guess, acquired Wood Mac. And one of the points from the acquisition was expanding your global office footprint, but I know data nationalism always top of mind. So just roughly, what percentage of your data and analytics and tech head count or innovation head count is in the United States or more expensive labor markets today? Like how big is this long-term opportunity as a margin enhancement for you?

[Scott Stephenson:]

Yes. So the first thing that motivates us on this is access to talent. That's the thing that this is really about. So the reason we like Kraków so much is, as we expand our business in Europe, especially Continental Europe, having high-quality, technically deep people who also will get steeped in the verticals that we serve, having them right there to interact more easily with our customers is a really, really nice feature here. And then I'm glad you picked up on the point I was making about talent because that really is the wellspring for our company. And there's no question that everybody -- we have about 9,000 associates at Verisk now. Everybody really counts. There are some of the technical disciplines that are the ones that are particularly in demand. I ticked off a few of those, so being able to make cloud architectures that are secure and really work, sort of data science as in the transformation of the data. There's also a big data engineering dimension always to what it is we do. And so there's no question that over the last couple of years as we have built those communities of people around Verisk differentially, the additions have been overseas between what we do on -- in Continental Europe, both in Spain and in -- now in Poland, we have added quite a few people in India. And so as a percentage of the additions to the team that we've made, they're coming more not in the United States than in the United States of late. Of course, we're building both sides but relatively, it's even more overseas. And I don't see that changing. But it's -- and it is constructive from a cost point of view as well. But to me, that's just a marker actually of supply and demand. And we're just trying to make sure that we are in as many places as a, we intend to serve; and b, can provide great talent. And the last thing I'll just emphasize again is the develop ourselves mentality that we have here. We feel very rewarded for having gone in a direction that I think by degree is at least is a little bit different than what some other companies do. Because several years ago, we recognized if we're just going to count on our ability to go into the market and hire already experienced people, we're essentially saying, "We're going to let somebody else solve our challenge, the talent challenge." And we said, "Well, no. We can do better than that." And so we've just gone very early into the talent pipeline. And we have felt very rewarded doing that.

[Operator:]

. Your next question comes from the Bill Warmington.

[William Warmington:]

So the acquisition of Keystone last week brought to the front the question of how much coverage of the U.S. do you have now? And is that enough? Because you've been -- I know you've been talking about going into Japan and Asia. So in that context, I want to see how much is left to go in the U.S. And then as you look out internationally, is this going to be the beginning of a new investment cycle in geospatial for Asia? And how much you think it'll be? And how long do you think it'll take?

[Scott Stephenson:]

So Mark, you may want to add to this, but I'll just kick off. So in the United States, we are approaching what we would consider full coverage now. You have to understand coverage as both the square miles that you are imaging, but also the frequency with which you are imaging them. And so with respect to will we be able to reach all the important corners of the United States, we're very, very close to being there. With respect to the frequency of the refresh, that may always be something of a moving target. These data sets are not commodities. And one of the ways that you make them to have the quality of not being a commodity is the freshness of the data. So we will always be taking account of customer needs and competition in order to determine how frequently are we refreshing the images. So when you think about coverage, you have to think about both of those. With respect to overseas markets, we actually already do, do some of this work in other places. And basically, the methods that we develop, the ability of the team to automatically interpret the image sets, that works everywhere. So as we build out our franchise generally -- and insurance is one of the killer apps for the -- for remote imagery. As we build out the Insurance franchise globally, I think it's very clear we will want to come in behind with these methods. But it'll -- it's -- we still got plenty of room to run in the United States, and then we will sort of build it I think organically and consistently with the rate that our Insurance franchise grows outside of the United States.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from George Tong.

[George Tong:]

Historically, enterprise data management and fraud solutions were the two underperforming areas within Financial Services. This quarter, all solution sets within Financial Services saw sequential improvement. Can you elaborate on the relative performance here and specific initiatives you'd call out that should drive continued acceleration in revenue growth in this segment?

[Lisa Hannan:]

So it's true. All the segments saw sequential improvement. The enterprise data management sector is the sector that will continue to be lumpy and have variability on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Those contracts are very long-term contract often delivered through RFPs. And so the sales cycle is very long, and they also -- some of them end. Some of the work that we've done on more of a client-by-client bespoke enterprise data management solutions basis end. So it's really about building a book of business there and getting to a level of sustainability that allows us to meet that level of consistent performance as we see contracts end and new contracts begin within a quarter and quarter-to-quarter. Continued improvement in that sector, that is a sector that we're looking to grow over the long term. And we'll continue to see lumpiness on a quarterly basis over the short term, but we do hear and continue to feel that the market is receptive to the solutions we're offering. Most particularly, we are hearing good reception to the global regulatory reporting platform. Regulators around the globe are changing the way they do their oversight. They are creating. They are leveraging deep and rich granular data to do that work, and we believe we're uniquely positioned to serve in the financial sector there.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from Ashish Sabadra.

[Ashish Sabadra:]

Just a quick two-part question on the Energy side. Any color on the softness in the consulting services? Is that mostly difficult comps? And then just where are we in terms of investments for the breakout opportunity within Energy? And when can we start to see margin expansion in the segment?

[Scott Stephenson:]

Yes. So go ahead, Lee.

[Lee Shavel:]

Again, Ashish, I may just want to get clarity around the second part of the question. I had a little difficult time hearing you. So on the -- in the first element in terms of the consulting revenue, some of it was a function of a very strong second quarter in 2018. We also saw among some of the large national oil companies some political transitions that delayed some of the revenue that we had anticipated in the quarter. We do not think that, that was a revenue at risk but simply a delay of some of that revenue. And then with regard to margin, if that was the question and the impact of the breakouts on the margin for Energy and Specialized Markets, Ashish, was that the thrust of your question?

[Ashish Sabadra:]

Yes. Yes. Yes. That's it.

[Lee Shavel:]

Yes. So thanks for raising that. Within Energy and Specialized Markets, I think it's important to note that in this second quarter that a large part of the decline in the revenue, in fact, the largest single element was an FX gain adjustment, which reduced margin by approximately 2%. That's a function of the dollar-pound exchange rate and valuation of our net current assets that influenced that. And so that would -- absent that impact, which fluctuates from quarter-to-quarter, we would have had a higher margin. In addition, that margin also bears approximately the 1% impact of the timing from a compensation standpoint. So absent those two nonoperational elements, it reflects the operating leverage and the margin expansion that we are experiencing in the core business while at the same time investing in new initiatives like Lens and the breakout areas like subsurface, power and renewables and those elements. And so I think we feel very good. This -- the quarter, the numbers are distorted by that compensation timing issue in the FX. But overall, from a pure operating standpoint, we actually saw margin expansion. And if I may, I want to emphasize this dynamic to go back to Toni's question around the Insurance side. In each of our businesses, putting aside the FX impact as well as the timing issue, all of our Insurance businesses saw an expansion in their operating margin. And so that's the underlying operating leverage that drives our margin up. And then we are deliberately making decisions from an investment standpoint with the breakouts in terms of how much of that do we want to spend down with an overall objective of increasing that margin over time. And that's -- we think that's a very healthy dynamic. It's important for continuing investment. But it's also important to understand that absent that investment, we are seeing net operating leverage and that margin expansion improve as we grow. It's just that when you look at the net number, there are various nonoperational impacts and investment impacts that are affecting that. Does that -- hopefully, that addresses your question.

[Operator:]

There are no further questions at this time.

[Scott Stephenson:]

Okay. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us. We've scheduled a number of follow-ups with you. We look forward to that. Thanks for your interest and talk to you soon. Have a great day.

[Operator:]

Thank you all. This does conclude today's conference call. You may all disconnect.