SS&C Technologies Holdings Aktie

Good day, and welcome to the SS&C Technologies Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Justine Stone, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hi, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining us for our Q2 2026 Earnings Call. I'm Justine Stone, Investor Relations for SS&C. With me today is Bill Stone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rahul Kanwar, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Brian Schell, our Chief Financial Officer.

Before we get started, we'll 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 provisions 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 our 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, July 23, 2026. 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 welcome, everyone. Q2 was record-setting for SS&C. Our strong quarter resulted in setting quarterly records for second quarter in revenue, adjusted EBITDA, earnings per share and shares repurchased. We continue to demonstrate success in an uncertain backdrop, underscoring the resilience of our diversified business model and the value clients place on our technology, expertise and innovation.

Our second quarter results were adjusted revenue of $1,696.9 million up 10.3% and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.76, an 18% increase. We delivered adjusted consolidated EBITDA of $670.7 million, up 12% or over $70 million and an adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin 39.5%. The dollar figures are all records. Adjusted organic revenue growth was 7.6% with performance driven by our largest businesses, new business wins, strength in multiyear renewals and market and transaction tailwinds.

For the 6 months ended June 30, 2026, cash from operating activities was $716 million, up 11% year-over-year. This quarter, we returned $499 million to shareholders, which includes 6.4 million shares repurchased for $435.2 million, the highest quarterly buyback in our history. Primarily a result of our repurchase program, diluted shares outstanding are down 4% over the last year. Share repurchases remain our top capital allocation priority as we are projected to earn $7.29 in operating cash per share for the year. We have lots of flexibility.

The acquisitions we completed at the end of 2025 are both tracking ahead of expectations. Curo has given us additional exposure in EMEA and revenues are growing nicely. Calastone continues to perform ahead of expectations as well. We expect 2026 growth to be in the mid-teens, and we have added 431 clients to the network. Although through Calastone, we are investing in solutions to support the future of our clients, including digital investment markets. As interest in tokenized investment products continue to grow, our clients and prospects are looking forward towards the infrastructure needed to support digital transactions. Combining our servicing capabilities with Calastone Technologies already supports the issuance and distribution of tokenized funds, our innovation road map now extends to the next stage of digital investment life cycle.

The new capabilities will enable digital investment transactions to settle using regulated forms of digital cash, including stable coins and tokenized commercial bank deposits. This will help reduce settlement risk, improve operational efficiency and simplify cross-border investment transactions. We look forward to capturing more market share.

The highly anticipated Medicare GLP-1 Bridge Program launched on July 1. Since launch, nearly 3 million claims have been processed using SS&C's DomaniRx platform to support our client, Humana. We believe this demonstrates our technology scale, reliability and flexibility and underscores the critical role DomaniRx plays in enabling innovative health care programs. We're proud to expand access to these important therapies for millions of Americans.

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

Thanks, Bill. Our second quarter results came in ahead of expectations with strong sales and renewal performance and continued margin expansion. We are on track to meet our margin objectives for the year. These results demonstrate the strength of SS&C's customer relationships and the criticality of our products and services. Outsourcing, co-sourcing and lift-outs combined with industry-leading technology continue to enhance our revenue growth. Rapid technological innovation is pushing customers towards SS&C as they look for a partner to help them take advantage of the latest technologies.

Our front, middle and back-office technology business, including Geneva, delivered a strong quarter. We are seeing momentum in multiyear technology license renewals across our client base, reflecting the confidence clients have in our platforms and long-term road map. Several of our largest pipeline opportunities are anchored by tech. Our global footprint remains a competitive advantage with offerings spanning markets and asset classes worldwide, and we are seeing robust demand and healthy pipelines internationally as well as here in North America.

We're deploying AI across our products and operations, and it is one of the drivers of the growth and margin expansion you see in these results. Our approach is governance first and proven internally before it reaches customers. In one example we announced this morning, a global leader in risk, reinsurance and capital chose our WorkHQ platform to scale Agentic automation across its business. This is one example of a trend we are seeing, established enterprises choosing SS&C to move their automation efforts to Agentic AI.

With that, I'll turn it over to Brian to walk through the financials.

Thanks, Rahul, and good day, everyone. Unless noted otherwise, the quarterly comparisons are Q2 2025 -- are to Q2 2025. As disclosed in our press release, our Q2 2026 GAAP results reflect revenues of $1.696 billion, net income of $235 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.97. As Bill noted, at the beginning of our call, our adjusted non-GAAP results set several records for SS&C, including revenues of $1.697 billion, an increase of 10.3% and adjusted diluted EPS of $1.76, an 18.1% increase. The adjusted revenue increase of $159 million was primarily driven by incremental revenue contributions from organic growth of $118 million, acquisitions of $36 million and a favorable impact from foreign exchange of approximately $5 million.

As a result, adjusted organic revenue growth on a constant currency basis was 7.6%, and our core expenses increased 6.1% or $58 million, which also excludes acquisitions and impact of FX. Adjusted consolidated EBITDA, also a record, was $671 million, reflecting an increase of $70 million or 11.7% and a margin of 39.5%, a 50 basis point expansion. Net interest expense for the second quarter was $107 million, an increase of $1 million year-over-year. Record adjusted net income was $426 million, up 13.3% and adjusted diluted EPS of $1.76 was up 18.1%. Our effective non-GAAP tax rate was 22.5% this quarter.

Note for comparison purposes, we have recast the 2025 adjusted net income to reflect the full year effective tax rate of 22%. Also note the diluted share count is down to 242 million from 252.2 million year-over-year, primarily due to the size and continued impact of share repurchases and to a lesser extent, lower diluted shares.

Cash flow from operating activities grew 11.1%, driven by growth in earnings. SS&C ended the second quarter with $435 million in cash and cash equivalents and $7.6 billion in gross debt. SS&C's net debt was $7.2 billion and our last 12 months consolidated EBITDA was $2.6 billion. Resulting net leverage ratio is 2.75x. In addition, we are actively exploring refinancing opportunities for our bonds maturing in 2027 to further optimize our capital structure.

As we look forward to the third quarter and the full year 2026 with respect to guidance, we will continue to focus on client service and expect that retention rates will be in the range of our most recent results. We will continue to manage our business to support our long-term growth and manage our expenses by controlling and aligning variable expenses, increasing productivity and leveraging technology and AI tools to improve our operating margins and strategically investing in the business, especially with respect to R&D, sales and marketing.

Specifically, we have assumed short-term interest rates remain at current levels, an effective tax rate of approximately 22.5% on an adjusted basis, capital expenditures to be 4.4% to 4.8% of revenues and a stronger weighting to share repurchases versus debt reduction.

For the third quarter of '26, we expect revenue to be in the range of $1.657 billion to $1.697 billion and 5% organic revenue growth at the midpoint. Adjusted net income in the range of $413 million to $429 million, interest expense excluding amortization of deferred financing costs and original issue discount in the range of $103 million to $105 million and adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $1.73 to $1.79.

For the full year 2026, we increased our expectations to revenue to be in the range of $6.672 billion to $6.832 billion and 5.5% organic revenue growth at the midpoint. Targeted EBITDA growth of 9.3%, EBITDA margin expansion of 50 basis points with the goal of a 40% margin in Q4. Cash from operating activities in the range of $1.717 billion to $1.817 billion, adjusted net income in the range of $1.67 billion to $1.77 billion, adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $6.93 to $7.25, reflecting approximately 15.5% growth at the midpoint.

And now back to Bill.

Thanks, Brian. We believe our results speak to the strength of our business and consistency of our execution. Our clients continue to invest in SS&C and expand their relationships with us. We remain disciplined in how we operate, invest and allocate capital in ways that create long-term shareholder value.

[ Timber ], we look forward to welcoming our clients at our Deliver Conference in Orlando, Florida. We have a lot of great sessions, demos and speakers lined up. And in partnership with NASDAQ, we will be hosting a remote opening bell ringing during our time there.

With that, I will now open it up to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from the line of Dan Perlin with RBC Capital Markets.

Fantastic quarter. So the organic growth, I mean, it was a couple of hundred basis points above guidance. I would just love to get a little bit more color in terms of the context around that. It sounds like there were some big license renewals in the quarter. I'm wondering, oftentimes, Bill, you talk about like you'll sell whatever you need, right? So it's a license quarter or it's a big recurring. You just want to make the sale.

So I'm wondering how these deals are kind of flowing right now because it feels like there's a pretty big tilt towards maybe some of these license renewals.

Well, Dan, we get those license renewals when the contract runs out, right? So if we have a 7-year contract and it runs out, generally, when they renew, they want to renew for another 7 years. So then obviously, with the accounting pronouncements of 606, that creates somewhat of a rush on revenue. So it depends when these things hit. I think one hit in June this year.

And so I just think that, that's a little bit of the lumpiness of the business. But as we get larger, we have more and more of these big clients with big renewals. And so in some ways, it kind of smooths out. But we did have a couple of big renewals in Q2, and that's why organic revenue was up a couple of hundred extra basis points.

Got it. And then just a quick follow-up. Also, I guess, in the context of organic growth. You mentioned kind of market and maybe some transactional activity. But I'm really thinking more market and maybe it probably falls heavy in the GlobeOp, I think. But can you just remind us like market volatility, directional moves in the market, strength or otherwise and how much that can play into any one given quarter? Obviously, you don't predict that into your guidance, but just trying to understand directionally how that might have impacted your organic growth as well.

Yes. So we produce our capital movements index and our performance index for our hedge fund business every month. And this past month, the redemption index was at 1.35%, which is about the lowest we've had in the history of having this thing, and we've done it since, I think, 2009.

So I think that's indicative of how strong that hedge fund business is and the strength of that kind of asset manager type. They have a lot of flexibility. They're very good risk managers and they have the full range of product capabilities. If you look at our assets under administration in our fund administration business, over the last 2 years, it's up $581 billion. I think that's pretty indicative of the strength that we have in that space.

That will come from the line of Jeff Schmitt with William Blair.

Another question on GlobeOp. Are you seeing demand for outsourcing just kind of pick up in general just as AI raises the need for companies to modernize, so they're turning to third-party vendors just to do that more easily?

I do think that, that's a big part of what's happening. At a baseline, we've got strong demand just because, look, we're tech forward and we're the biggest player in this business, and we have a lot of referenceability. But then the other kind of thing that's happening is customers are looking around and they want to take advantage of AI. They want to take advantage of some of the Agentic capabilities we have. And rather than try to put that all internally and build it from scratch, the fact that we can deploy it in a very scalable way has been positive for us.

Okay. Great. And then a question on GIDS. What's the underlying growth there when you exclude the recent lift-outs like Insignia? And how does your pipeline for additional lift-outs look? I mean those seem to be pretty accretive transactions, I would think.

Well, certainly, ultimately, they are very accretive. At the same time, it's competitive. We have to win and we have to deliver a great service, which we have been doing. But hey, these are large, sophisticated organizations that require a lot of attention, and we give it that attention. So I think we have a great pipeline in our global investor and distribution services business. And I think that will continue.

Once again, I think one of our prospects is you guys have 65% market share. I'm pretty sure you can probably handle us. And I think that, again, that goes to the strength and size of our business and that we win mandates from Australia and we win mandates in Europe and we win mandates in North America. I just think we have a very powerful business model.

What's that underlying growth, I guess, if you just back out Insignia?

It's still in excess of 5%.

One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Kevin McVeigh with UBS.

Congratulations again. Just really, really strong results and it feels like a little bit of a choppy environment. Bill, I think you had mentioned the claims launch. Any way to think about what that contributed in the quarter and how that scales over the course of '26?

Yes. We get in excess of double of the $0.20. But I think this is a trial program of the government, but it so far has been very popular. And we'll see. It's a 6-month program, Kevin. So knock on wood, they -- it's the government. So will they stick with a very successful program? That's probably 50-50. But we do believe that there's a lot of great collaboration between us and Humana and the CMS that manages Medicare and Medicaid. So we're optimistic.

And again, it's a reason why we're in health care. When it comes, it will come in large waves. And if we can deliver a great service and the government likes what we do, it seems to me they spend a lot of money. We just won our fair share.

No doubt. And then you talked a little bit about AI governance and in terms of starting to see it in the organization. Is that still through Blue Prism? Or are you starting to see other avenues? And any way to think about from a margin perspective, philosophically, how much will go to reinvestment versus just margin growth overall, things like that?

Well, again, Kevin, we made the upfront investment, right? We bought Blue Prism that had AI and had ML and had RPA and had natural language processing. So I mean we made the investment, spent $1.6 billion. Same thing as you read about tokenization and about some other fintech companies that are getting into tokenization. Well, we spent $1 billion and we bought Calastone. And we didn't buy Calastone so that we could be an also ran. We bought Calastone so we can be a leader in technologies that our customers want.

And I think that's been our attitude the whole time is that, look, we don't want to dabble. We don't want to have a 3 licenses of Automation Anywhere or UI, whatever it is. So it is something where we got 1,400 people when we got Blue Prism, and we got another 250 and probably added another 25 with Calastone. So we're optimistic about where we're putting our investments, how we're using it, why we focus on governance and protection for our customers because they're in highly regulated businesses and black eyes in highly regulated businesses are not good.

And our next question will come from the line of Alexei Gogolev with JPMorgan.

This is Bella Camaj on for Alexei. Congrats on the quarter. So given the organic growth performing so positively this quarter, especially the call out from those large license renewals, how should we think about 3Q organic growth implying a step down? Is that mainly renewal timing rolling off? And potentially, are there any other similarly sized renewals in the second half that could be potentially offering some upside?

Our pipeline is full of opportunities. There are some renewals coming up as well. So we have opportunities to outperform. We're being at our consistent self of great revenue growth, great earnings and not getting ahead of our skis. So that's the same thing we're going to do for Q3 and Q4, but we're not going to pre-beat the drum. We'll let the drum beat itself.

Got it. That makes sense. And just a quick follow-up. So looking at your capitalized software spend, where would you say that investment is mostly concentrated today? Is that mainly a function of the recent WorkHQ launch, implementation tooling or perhaps other platforms? And should we expect that level to persist into second half of this year into 2027?

We brought out a number of new systems. We brought out Genesis in asset management. We have a new release of Eclipse. We brought out -- we'll bring out a new release of DBC. We're bringing out -- we brought out DomaniRx, and we're bringing out a new release of our medical claims. We brought out like you said, WorkHQ and our guide rails, our AI guardrails product that we have brought out as well. And I think there's a number of other initiatives that we're doing, building out our private cloud and making sure that our cybersecurity is very redundant.

So I think we're going to have similar capitalized software and investment in R&D. But at the same time, I think we're going to have some very material ways to improve our margins through adaptation of AI agents and other technologies that are available today.

And our next question will come from the line of Pete Heckmann with D.A. Davidson.

Most of my questions have been answered. I was just curious on the Intralinks side, virtual data room saw a nice sequential increase in organic growth, but it was on a relatively easy comparison. I guess, how much do you attribute that to an uptick in larger M&A or other success in getting new clients versus just benefiting from what appeared to be the easiest comparison of the year for that business?

We're having some success in terms of -- so the metrics we track, whether that's the opportunities that we have in our pipeline or those opportunities getting converted into bookings and then eventually those bookings getting converted into revenue. All of those things are positive. So the comps only work if you can improve on the comps, right? And so that's -- I think that's what we are doing. We are seeing the business strengthening, and we expect that to continue through the remainder of the year.

That's great. So -- and would you attribute it like in terms of areas that you've been winning a bit? I think you mentioned private assets, private equity. Any other areas that have been seeing some adoption in the virtual data room area?

Yes. It's a little bit of -- so there's 2 components to that, 2 big components to that Intralinks business, right? It's the virtual data rooms, and we've been having success, and that's a little more linked to the M&A markets. And -- but then there's the alternatives LP communication part of that business, and that's been growing steadily throughout.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question will come from the line of James Faucette with Morgan Stanley.

It's Michael Infante on for James. Just one from us. Just on the larger renewals that you guys are having and the sort of second half slate of renewals that are coming, like how is AI factoring into these conversations? Do you view the Agentic monetization and the WorkHQ opportunity as really like a call option in the future from a monetization perspective? Or are you seeing customers sort of use AI as a mechanism to push back on your own price realization? It doesn't sound like that's the case, but just wanted to ask there.

Well, as you know, at Morgan Stanley and other organizations of your size and complexity, you're constantly looking at upgrading your infrastructure, and we are proud to have Morgan Stanley as a client. And the AI is something that's on everyone's tip of their tongue, right? And your Board, right? So all your executives are very attuned into what are we doing with AI. And I think our approach has been very effective in showing people that our technology is better, the way we're rolling it out is better, the more protected you are and the more that we are really a partner in making sure that your transition from traditional software products to then RPA products where you have bots helping you do pretty simple processes, but things that take a lot of time, cost a lot of money. And now you can have a bot to whether it's statement review or other things like that.

And now there's Agentic agents that can do more complex tasks that can make some decisions. And you have to have the guardrails around what those decisions are. But if you can get real processes and build an orchestration layer like we have, then you can get very sophisticated workflows that are not people intensive. And that's our approach, and it's been pretty effective.

I'm showing no further questions in the queue at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Stone for any closing remarks.

Again, we appreciate everybody on this call, and we appreciate you owning our shares or following our shares. At the same time, we work hard for our shareholders, and we will continue to do so. And we look forward to seeing you at the end of next quarter or this quarter, I guess. Thanks.

This concludes today's program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.

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This here at RBC, and I'm delighted to welcome the management team of SS&C, a long-time friend to the conference and RBC. From the company, we have Brian Schell, who's the company's Chief Financial Officer. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Really appreciate it.

Great. Thank you. We love being here, and thank you for everything you've done so far.

Yes, absolutely. So what I thought we would start with is the underlying growth algorithm of SS&C's organic growth, right? It feels to me like it's changed a little bit over the years. It feels a lot more durable, certainly much more consistent in kind of this mid-single-digit range. So what I'm trying to get at here is, One, what has changed in that period of time? And then how durable do you foresee that being into the future?

Yes. So I would say that just to start things off as we think about the business and where we are, and this will be a recurring theme, I think, with -- as we maybe talk about the business a little more is we've seen the strength of the brand and what the brand represents in the technology space and the importance of having that partner who's been there, who's been operating in your domain, who understands all the regulatory environment, understands the data, understand what needs to happen. And so with that as a backdrop, and we've seen that growth, is the business over time has become a little bit less dependent on licensing revenue at the end of the day, right? As we've seen that evolution, as we've seen the technology-enhanced services has spanned beyond licensing. Licensing is still important. It still happens. It still shows up a little bit of lumpiness within the financials.

So if we look at 75% of the business is with the three largest business units, you see that growth being that mid- to high single-digit growth rates of recent. And then the remaining 25% are kind of bouncing back to that kind of flattish to low single digits, which, again, that's a bit a little bit seasonal. So we've seen that broad growth. But at the end of the day, where you're seeing that sustainability is we are seeing the biggest source of growth has continued to come from our existing clients and either one, they're growing, and we're leveraging that and helping them grow more. So that pure organic growth that they have, whether that be AUA or transactions or clients.

And #2 is more services. We're seeing a broader traditional share of wallet that they're coming to us to help support. So that's been a really nice element to it. That's literally the #1 reason. Then we see #2 is essentially is that pipeline growth and what we're doing is, here's what we're going to do, here's what we're seeing. And then the last, obviously, is that, obviously, our retention rate continues to hold strong, if not improve a bit. So that's been the kind of the source of that durable growth over time.

Yes. If you could just paint a picture for us in terms of the macro backdrop that we're operating in today, how are your clients handling their budgets? Are you seeing anything kind of get pulled back, delays, implementations? Anything in that regard, just the health of the overall business?

Yes. I would say we have not seen any impact to the sales cycle. I think the dialogues have been actually quite the opposite. We actually just, as you know, recently increased our organic growth rate guidance for the year. So we're seeing that continued strength of our underlying client base and then the increasing relationship of what they're looking for, for us. So we have not seen any pause or slowdown or lengthening of any sales cycle.

Okay. I want to touch on the M&A playbook first, and then we'll get into the details of the business. But it does feel like the playbook has tilted a little more towards finding businesses that are also very good contributors from an organic perspective, not just kind of the traditional operating leverage opportunities that you might have taken advantage of in the past or been able to grow from in the past. So, One, is that intentional? Two, how does that contribute as you think about, again, the durability of organic growth and these businesses coming in at maybe a little bit higher than corporate average? Anything in that regard?

Yes. So I would say that we haven't lost the operational execution and leverage that we think we can bring to an organization and what we've done. So that's still a key element. But you're right, the last several transactions have been more about the accretion to our growth rates, both on the top line as well as the bottom line. So that has been an important driver. But again, even underlying that is adding I'll call it, assets to the organization that continuing the depth and breadth of what we offer is that incremental domain knowledge and expertise and what that group of people and/or technology brings to SS&C, right?

So whether it's the incremental client, whether it's incremental technology, whether it's incremental geography, that's increasingly important and what they bring to our organization and help expand that growth on its existing network has been very important. And we've seen those growth rates really turned out even better than our expectations. The last two acquisitions, for example, with Calastone and Curo, they're growing in the high teens right now, right? So that's certainly incremental to the overall revenue growth rate, and that's helping to and over time, contribute to a higher -- to your earlier question, organic revenue growth rate in the future.

Yes. It just seems like the weighted average contribution as they anniversary in is just creating like a new normal for this company that we just hadn't seen over the prior several years. So let's get into the kind of the big three parts of the business, right? There's GlobeOp, there's GIDS and then there's the Wealth and Investment Tech. As you point out, 75% of the company, growing very strong. But maybe disaggregate each one of those, starting with GlobeOp.

Sure. So GlobeOp has certainly been the beneficiary of a very strong hedge fund performance environment at the end of the day, right? SS&C services the largest, most complex hedge funds in the world and predominantly here in the U.S. And with their success has certainly helped facilitate the success of our overall revenues and what we've seen. So we've continued to really lean into that with our clients, additional services, particularly as they want to do something more complex, new strategy, new fund, new managers, we're able to support that geography or wherever that might take place and not a lot of folks can do that. So we've continued to work with them, and that's been a real nice source of strength.

The other things I will mention outside the hedge fund, which is the bulk of that business, but another two important growth drivers are we continue to see strength in the private markets, that's private equity and private credit. I know there's been a lot of headlines around private credit, but we've continued to see double-digit growth broadly around that space and supporting that, right? We've seen private equity expanding their look to, call it, a fund administrator, more broadly just in-house. And then we've -- the last one is retail alts, which we continue to see growth, right? Smallest part of our business as far as within that GlobeOp part in those categories, but probably the highest growth rate, right, as there continues to be client demand and supplier interest in providing more of those assets into the market.

Shifting to GIDS. We obviously -- we've seen that organization really grow nicely. And it's -- a lot of that more recent growth has been around some of the lift-out transactions been able to do, particularly Australia, which we've talked about quite a bit. We've seen the pipeline there continue to grow. We're seeing -- that's where we're seeing a lot of share of wallet increase, particularly with some of our largest clients is they're wanting us to do more for them as we've seen that. And then we've seen the retention rate actually increase within our U.S. clients. Before, the U.S. was a bit shrinking, but naturally, we've seen that stabilize and starting to actually be positive. So broadly, that's contributing to a very strong growth rate there. So we see that pipeline looking strong.

And then finally, on WIT, the Wealth Investment Technology, that's a little bit more subject to the rev rec lumpiness with 606 requirements. And sometimes within any one quarter, it's not necessarily the best gauge about the health of the business because you could have had a term license that was a very long time frame that show up in this quarter, but there wasn't one in the prior quarter or vice versa. It was last year in this quarter, but it wasn't in this quarter. So it looks like your business is not doing as well. It's just not a great economic measurement of how well that business is doing. So -- but that is going to continue to do well. We expect that to continue to actually have a much higher growth rate than indicative of the first quarter. It will be lumpy certainly within the year, but even sometimes over a year where you might have more renewal opportunities than the prior year. So all in all, I think all three are just -- are performing very well right now.

Yes. I want to stay on the lift-out concept. I guess, one, can you just mechanically explain what that really means for the business? And then two, we're framing it around a lot of different opportunities, but Australia is clearly a big one with the superannuation market. And so maybe give us the mechanics of actually what is happening, why that's an important facet for the clients and why they want it. And then let's go into the growth opportunities that you've created for yourself in Australia.

So that's a great topic that we love more people to learn about because I think what a lot of the funds have learned is that -- and it's similar almost in a way the way GlobeOp started, right, is a -- we're really good at, meaning the fund managers or the hedge funds or the PE firms, really good at investments and choosing those and knowing what to invest in and grow ROI, but maybe not as much on the operational execution of supporting our LPs, supporting the clients of the clients, those types of things. And so what we have seen is that we're now applying our operational expertise from either the transfer agency business or even the fund admin business to the superannuation funds in the example that you're talking about right now, right? So there's a lot of compliance that needs to happen. There's a lot of reporting and investor support that needs to occur. And if not done well, you can get tripped up in either some of your filings or client satisfaction that may not be reflective of the financial performance on the asset side of the business, right, on the investment side of the business.

So we've taken that discipline and excellence and applied it to a lift-out. So it's not an acquisition in the sense that we're paying money to take on that business. Essentially, what happens initially is lift-out, meaning we will lift out 100 people, 1,000 people, whatever those operations we are there to support with this scope of work, and we will set a price and we'll provide these services with these performance criteria. And gradually, what will happen is that we improve the quality, actually, the quality improves immediately, but we will improve the quality and overall, the efficiency over time and the compliance as we adopt our operational procedures, which we think are best-in-class as well as then migrate to our software, which we also think are best-in-class, which creates a much more efficient framework of revenue certainly for us. So that margin grows over time with the lift-outs. And as well as get better execution for the firm that we're doing that service for.

Yes. So it's interesting as opposed to just signing a contract and having a new client come on board, you've got this migration path that ultimately leads down a similar financial conclusion, but you're able to do it with this kind of bridge.

Exactly.

Yes. That's actually pretty interesting. How do we think about sizing the Australian market? I mean I know it's -- Bill talks about it, I forget what he said, but it's just -- it's pretty big.

It's pretty big. So I think that that's why this first transaction, I think, is very important. There's a lot of eyes on it, both with our client. We want to make sure every client is -- talks about some of the other clients in the most positive way. So we know execution is very important for Insignia itself. But we know a lot of eyes are on it because there have been others who have tried to do this in this market and haven't done as well.

So we think it's an important opportunity for the existing client to say, I think you can do more for us. So there's an opportunity to kind of more share of wallet there as well as other players in the market. So we think that's where they really comes in both of those fronts. And over time, we hope to take advantage of that.

Okay. Other international markets you've talked about is in and around the Middle East and APAC, excluding Australia. So what specifically are you doing in those markets? And where do they fit in the geography of your business?

Yes. So those have grown nicely kind of across all elements of both GlobeOp and GIDS is kind of the two primary ones, although we see Intralinks continuing to expand. They're pretty global as well as far as transactions and expand their presence. But primarily, the first two, we've seen those services really look to both GIDS and GlobeOp as we establish new locations with, for example, the Curo acquisition, we now have a presence in South Africa, which we hadn't had before.

We are seeing nice presence of looking at the sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and the family offices helping them as they continue to move forward. And frankly, I will probably add into that more recently, we're actually seeing a resurgence in growth in Europe itself as well, not just kind of the Middle East and APAC. So we've seen this really nice, I'd say, glide path as far as incremental firms and wanting to us to leverage our capabilities in those geographies.

Interesting. You mentioned private credit earlier. It is still a debate. We get lots of questions on it, in and around GlobeOp. And so I'm just wondering how you would describe potential exposures or lack thereof and maybe just explaining why those would be the case.

So I would say that we have -- we saw a slowdown in growth rate, which was really, really high in '25. '26 has still got a solid growth rate. And I think what's limited the exposure here to SS&C as far as what does that mean for us is that a lot of the private credit clients that we have are closed-end funds. So the redemptions -- that type of activity just it's not showing up. We obviously don't have the credit exposure of -- that may exist with maybe the owners of the fund itself. So yes, there's been some incremental activity. We've seen a lot of headlines, but the bulk of our clients, we haven't seen that. And...

Nor would you in the closed-end funds.

Right. In the closed-end fund, you just wouldn't see it. And those that aren't, like I said, it's been more limited exposure. Short term, there's actually probably a little brief lift of just incremental activity. But at the end of the day, it's very limited, and we just didn't bake a lot into our revenue growth algorithm for private credit in '26, just knowing that there were signs of it. We know there's a lot of headlines. I think the headlines are bigger than the actuals of what we've seen.

Yes, that makes sense. I want to go back to Wealth and Investment Tech for a moment because I feel like there's just some difficult comparisons in optics that are occurring on the platform as one of the clients kind of rotated off. But your commitment to kind of still being in that 3% plus range seems very high. So how do we interpret that interplay?

Yes. So I would say the -- first of all, not that I would ever be critical of our generally accepted accounting principles, but I wish 606 certainly complicates that story as far as to truly understand the economic performance of a business. And -- but I would say we are very optimistic about the next 3 quarters and what we see just because of the pipeline, the renewals we see. And there was a little bit of a drag with some of the State Street contract that we've talked about that went away that essentially that team has done a great job of refilling that pipeline of some of those services. And so we expect to see significantly stronger growth rates for the remaining 3 quarters that will get us back up to that mid-single-digit growth rate.

Got it. Moving on to one of the non-big three, kind of the Intelligent Automation and Analytics business. been a little bit of a slower start there, I think, to the year than maybe you would have thought. Blue Prism, I think, is half of that business. And so the question that comes up oftentimes is, AI kind of creating disruption to RPA? Is that impacting that business? How do you kind of defend against it? And if it's not actually impacting it, like what's actually occurring?

Sure. I think -- for context, I think we started seeing that RPA market start to slow down probably 1.5 years ago. And partly when you saw -- when chat came out, it was like this whole AI thing. like should I be doing that? Or should I be looking at RPA? And I think people were just pausing, trying to understand the difference of what does AI and what do agents really do to me versus what a digital worker does for me when I'm making digital worker synonymous with RPA.

But -- and I think people were paused a little bit on the growth rate. So we saw the growth rate starting to stall. And so where we are today is that people are realizing that RPA is still incredibly efficient, incredibly economical and much less expensive and does probably a better job than AI in a lot of usage, right? So AI doesn't work as well with historical APIs, right? At the end of the day, right? And what that has to happen and RPA does. And I don't have to pay tokens to continue to make it operate, right? So there's the cost structure and what you need to do and you can just set it and go. And that still exists.

We actually had the strongest I'll call it, retention rate in Q1 for the Blue Prism for the RPA, right? Now again, it is about half the business, but we've seen some real strength from that core, right? And I think the migration now is how do I leverage using the agents and AI around both use of RPA as well as a workflow orchestration, which is what we do know really, really well, right? So we know the domain expertise with respect to the accounting, with respect to the regulatory compliance reports. We're already the system of record for the data. We're already housing that data and the knowledge of where that is. And we're actually doing a lot of this internally with the client zero concept that is really resonating with clients and prospective clients to be able to implement more with them.

So it will be a migration, so to speak, and more and more, but I don't think RPA is going anywhere. I think it will be continue to be enhanced. And I think the combination of that package and our knowledge of the workflow and having this data get to over here from a compliance, from a filing, from the LPs, whatever that might be from a reporting standpoint, that knowledge is still very critical to understand how it's done, where it needs to go to and make sure there's the right controls around it.

Yes. So maybe speak to the point even further about the entirety of the business around AI. opportunities, again, threats, why it's not disruptive to the business. We were actually talking about this a little bit last night then was a good discussion.

So there were -- I would say there's -- the way that we've kind of initially thought about it, right, similar to any technology or productivity tool is that first level of -- our first approach might be, I can do more with the same resources. And so my margin on my incremental revenue is higher because I don't have to add more to it. I think the next phase is how do I then -- wow, I can actually do more with not just the same, but not less, right? So we'd expect to see margin enhancement over and above some of those productivity gains.

And then the third element is how is that involved in the overall revenue cycle? Does it increase my sales because of what I'm able to do, what I'm able to innovate or what I'm able to embed in the software that existing today? Or is it a new type of service like Work HQ that we're able to sell to our clients that they can leverage. So that's the cycle. We see it showing up in incremental revenue and incremental margins over time.

Yes. Let's talk about tokenization of assets for a minute. We're going to talk more about that later on with another company that's coming here today. But if you have Calastone, and so you see it kind of firsthand. One, what are you seeing today in the market? Where do you think this is actually going? Is -- how important is it for you? And is there any disruptive properties to that as well?

Yes. So we have several clients who are live, who are utilizing it via Calastone. So it's real. It's being delivered. It's still relatively small part of overall revenue base. We haven't seen a huge client demand for it, but we're ready there and we're serving it. We have one client who's doing a bunch of business on it and a couple of others who are, I'll call it, piloting and offering there. I think what it does is it takes out a lot of friction and a lot of manual processes. That also actually helps us on the manual processes as well on our end. So our costs can go down. So overall, we're there. We're ready to support, ready to roll out.

Right now, I'm not sure there's a lot of disruption quite yet. And even then in the future, it will be a lot of the same reports, filings, investor calls are still going to occur regardless of it's tokenized or not.

Yes. Yes. Let's talk in this last moment we have here about the pathway to get you back to kind of 40% EBITDA margins and clearly, a goal to exit that out of 2026. So what are the building blocks that we need to be mindful of as we think about the rest of the year?

Yes. My favorite building block is incremental revenue is -- and frankly, our opportunity is how do I then go from an incremental 45% margin on that incremental revenue to 50% or more, right, at the end of the day. How do I deliver that? And a lot of times, it depends on where that revenue is coming from and the type of service that's being supported there. So I think scale at the end of the day, right?

#2 will be the technology enhancements that we've talked about is how do I continue to do it even more efficiently within our own operations. And again, that can lead to even then even greater margin expansion than what we've been able to demonstrate in the past. We haven't changed that guidance going forward yet, but we think there's definitely an opportunity with technology enhancements, including AI, to be able to expand that even more over time.

Okay. And then in the last 30 seconds or so, just the capital allocation decisions of the organization. Historically been a little more M&A heavy, but the valuation has been a lot more compelling these days. How do we think about those two attributes?

Yes. The priority hasn't changed, like the compelling M&A that's accretive and we can benefit our shareholder, we absolutely want to do. But absent that, we're going to buy the heck out of the stock given where it's trading.

It's a great way to end it. So Brian, I really appreciate your time today. It's always a pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Why don't we go ahead and get started? My name is Jeff Schmitt. I cover wealth management and capital market stocks here at William Blair. I'd like to introduce SS&C Technology, a leading provider of enterprise software and outsourcing solutions for the financial services industry.

We're very happy to have them here again this year. And with us, we have the CFO, Brian Schell. So thank you. He's here to discuss the business. And as usual, please go to williamblair.com for a full list of disclosures. So I will turn it over to Brian.

That's a good start. Thanks, Jeff. And again, thanks for a terrific conference and the quality of investors we're meeting with so far. And so we love coming back every year. And thank all of you for joining today. A brief highlight of what I'm going to do today. I'm just going to cover SS&C real quick in case some of you are maybe not as familiar with SS&C, provide an overview, really dig right into AI at the end of the day, right? It's not an extra topic. It's really kind of part and parcel of what we do and the story and what investors want to understand with respect to SS&C.

And then I'll just jump to our financial performance and some of the guidance that we put out there. And so with that, we'll just start with the safe harbor, I won't spend much time on this, but it's there, again, big part of the presentations. Jeff, kind of highlighted here is kind of a bit of our kind of high-level description about SS&C as far as kind of where we sit in providing the mission-critical systems, financial services and health care industry.

And you'll hear more and more about this as we go through, but it's important to kind of easy to come back to. But specifically, SS&C, why do we own what we own? What do we do what we do is that we believe there's value in the breadth and depth of the services that we offer across the board, right? The services include the transaction process and the accounting, the operations supporting, everything that I'll call it in broad asset managers primarily do, the reporting, the compliance, the analytics and those asset managers, including the asset, the hedge fund industry, banks, insurance companies, private markets, wealth management.

And then we do have a technology where we are a provider to the health care industry as well for a small sliver of the organization. Again, that technology solution that we provide is primarily around either the on-prem or cloud software-as-a-service, the actual software itself, outsourcing of operations, as I mentioned earlier, as well as AI, agentic AI and kind of the workflow orchestration, including use of RPA and overall operational execution.

As we look at the revenue kind of by business, here's a, like I said, high-level perspective, right? So 3 of our business units cover 75% of the business, right? So you have GlobeOp, you have GIDS and you have the Wealth. And each of those roughly represent about 25% each. And so as these 3 business units go, as well consolidated SS&C goes, a couple of -- the remaining 25% is covered by a couple of horizontals in the form of intelligent automation analytics, which is where we have the RPA and the AI and the agents that we've been deploying as well as Intralinks, which many of you are familiar with, providing a lot of the transaction support services and secure data sites, data rooms.

And then the remaining roughly 5%, now actually close to 4% is our health care kind of medical and claims processing group and providing analytics to those users as well.

Let's just jump right into AI. And we've had these conversations with some of the one-on-ones earlier today about, is it -- is AI is disrupting our industry? Well, 100% it is, right? That's when we bring it upfront, what are we doing? What does it look like? How does it involve SS&C? And how are we thinking about it?

And when we think about disruption, the use in this word is that disruption is definitely meaning change at the end of the day, right? There are some organizations that will not survive as much and will be significantly impacted in the future, others who -- it's either a tailwind or a headwind. And for those that we think it's more of a headwind to it, it's those that we think are convenient Software-as-a-Service. And something that's very vulnerable that could be easily replicated versus we think which is less disruptive, but certainly is impacted and we think as a positive can utilize those changes is we've categorized ourselves in more of that the system of record and how we think about where SS&C sits with its primary services with the proprietary data, the regulatory requirements and everything that we have, we think AI strengthens the offering that we have.

Because if you think about what we do versus what AI can enable, there's 4, I'll call it, assets or qualities that we bring, and we call it to the AI cycle. The first is that domain expertise across financial services and health care services, right? There's that accounting logic, that regulatory interpretation, that exception handling that's just comes with time and knowledge that is just not easily replicated or sitting outside some system about how does this work?

You can just kind of make up. You have to have the same consistent answer every single time you process the transaction. And that's where the domain experience and expertise and real IP in the broadest sense comes into play. The other is, we call it the stewardship of the client operational data. And here's where we have the continuity of all the data, the information, I mean there's $55 trillion of assets, of client assets that sit on an SS&C software solution, service, our SS&C tech. And knowing this, how it works, this is very difficult to replicate this knowledge at the end of the day.

The embedded systems of record, I kind of referenced this right upfront, right? I mean the production systems, the execution, where the work is executed and where does it go from there and what is needed. And that integration with custody systems, integration to the regulators and the reporting is critical overall to operational efficiency and processing overall to meet various compliance standards as well as not just the regulators, but also to the clients of the clients that we serve, most importantly.

And then the last part, which we think is one of the most compelling parts, certainly working with our clients is that we take this perspective of being client zero. A lot of this work and these systems, everything start out inside of SS&C's 4 walls is that we test it, we utilize it, we deploy it on ourselves and within our operations to achieve the efficiencies and achieve the outcomes that we essentially will eventually and that we have sell to our clients, both either embedded within the software or as part of the overall operations.

So real operational practical knowledge of how it works, what to use in the loop, where does it make sense, the controls and what works and what doesn't. So we think these are, I'll call it, the assets that we bring to the cycle and why at the end of the day, we feel positive and feel that the AI elements and what we can do is really more of a tailwind for us, and we're excited about what it can do to us going forward and our growth rates, both top line and bottom line.

Again, a little bit of a backdrop of leading up to this and why do we have these capabilities. A lot of the acquisition work, and this is a summary of some of the larger acquisitions that we've done, really, you see how it expands our network and what we've done of our services, our capability, our distribution, our client base. You can see we've added analytics, trust services. You see the Blue Prism automation, which was really found -- served as a foundation with originally as RPA, moving that to be more AI forward.

It really gave us a really jump start overall to incorporate within our own operations. And then the most recent acquisition with Calastone, which also gives us a foothold into tokenization. They already have clients already utilizing tokenization in its operations. Again, nascent, but actually live and actually working right now.

But if we want to take a closer look at the agentic AI elements and a little bit of the time line and how we've evolved Blue Prism with the RPA because this is pretty fundamental to our AI strategy going forward is you can see the timeline that we have here and what we've done. This is -- we acquired the business 3 years ago, closer to 4, I guess, now. And you can see how -- that we've made a lot of strategic changes starting last year with what we've done around the business and how we've continued to evolve it from just, I'll call it, a pure RPA play to beginning to make those agents smarter, starting to leverage AI and being able to do more with the agents and being able to connect different processes that it couldn't before.

And as we recently launched -- and we've added a lot of talent along the way that was more focused on this AI forward look and utilization of the tools. And when we get to the end of the day and we see the positive, call it, revenue or commercial outcome, the revenue mix within this business unit and within Blue Prism more specifically is we are going to see larger contracts and work that's being done, and it won't necessarily be seat-based type of licensing, to be more outcome-based end usage similar to what you might expect.

And so like I said, we're very hopeful. We're in the early stages of it. And as we have more to report, we certainly will, but we do expect larger dollar contracts to start as the commercial outcome of what we're doing here.

As we look at our overall approach, now these next couple of slides are a bit dense, and I don't expect -- I'm going to hit every point. So I would encourage you to download the slides, and you can kind of see some of the other metrics that we're looking at. But some things we need to continue to want to reinforce with our investors to understand that this isn't just a -- we're just put AI on the PowerPoint slide and said, we are an AI company is that we are used to, and this is what we do is fundamentally is we spend a lot of money on R&D every year, and more and more money is being deployed utilizing AI across the board.

And some of the examples of where we put it in, we put some statistics there in that second chart of the multiplier of looking at how much less time of those developers who started to start using some of these tools reduction in cycle time and reduction of how much time we get a new release to the market and kind of some of the return numbers that we've calculated internally and what this looks like.

We talked about the WorkHQ launch, which again is an overall orchestration layer that can be applicable kind of horizontally, primarily financial services firms with clients using our existing software, connecting the AI agents, connecting RPA, connecting digital workers and the core services and software that they're already utilizing and they don't have to rip out their existing systems.

And again, a lot of these systems, the expression you probably heard it from others, it's not necessarily greenfield for AI, it's brownfield because AI doesn't work as well working with APIs at the end of the day, right? And agents do. And so leveraging that technology, leveraging that understanding and how everything needs to flow to get to a specific outcome from the client data, we think, gives us a really good advantage in understanding and a tool that a lot of people are going to want.

And we're testing it internally, like I said, and we have several clients that we're working with right now in, I'd say, advanced stages. Again, nothing to report yet, but we're very excited about, like I said, the prospects overall. We already have a lot of infrastructure internally to support this with multiple LLMs deployed on-prem globally so that it's -- everything is still within our 4 walls. We call AI gateway to help support that governance structure given that we -- our clients are almost all regulated, some more so than others in different geographies. And so that governance, that auditability, understanding the flow and changes is very important and making sure there's no data leakage or external. So control of that data and use of AI has been very important from day 1.

So I am going to mention, again, this is also, I mentioned a dense slide. You can take a closer look at this. But what we want to do is lay out with our -- the 6 different business units that we do have is these are specific examples and capabilities that we're rolling out right now that we actually are utilizing, right, within our GlobeOp business, trade break reconciliation, which takes out a significant amount of time and resources across the millions and millions of trades that are done on a daily business by our clients, right?

You look at the invoice processing kind of across the board. You have fraud detection in AML. You have AI product-driven capabilities embedded within products within the WIT business that a lot of the clients, particularly the small to medium-sized RIAs are demanding or make it so that you have those tools where they can deploy it on their own for some of the more sophisticated organizations. And Intralinks has been embedded as a native part of the software in their latest deal center release.

So you see a lot of AI-enabled services that are being deployed right now within different businesses, some on the revenue side and some on the expense savings side to create efficiency, increase accuracy and a quicker time to deliver. So we're pretty excited overall about where this goes. With that, I will turn to an overview of our financials. And we'll do this quickly.

The high-level metrics here with the adjusted revenues. Again, just looking at first quarter, up almost 9% on revenues. It was about 5% organic growth rate. The strength of the 8.8% was driven by some acquisitions and a positive FX impact. You can see that more drop to the bottom line with EBITDA growth of 10%, operating -- cash flow from operations up another 10%. And you can see margin expansion of EBITDA of about 40 basis points. And we guided roughly high level for the year to about 50. So this is right in line with where our expectations were. And you can see the EPS increase of 14% -- a little over 14% for the quarter.

More broadly, as we look at the margins over time, I mentioned the 50 basis points -- or excuse me, 40 basis points for the quarter, but 50 more broadly is we have a pretty high-margin business model. It's pretty consistent. We've delivered 180 basis points over the last 2 years, so fluctuating between 40 to 60 bps. Again, that's balancing driving incremental productivity and efficiency and incremental cash flows to our shareholders, but also with the discipline of redeploying some of that earnings or that efficiency into our structure to allow for longer-term revenue growth rate as well.

So we've tried to make sure there's a reinvestment and so that we're reinvesting for the long-term growth of the business and the long-term health of the business as well as delivering incremental efficiency and margin expansion to our shareholders. We think it's important to deliver both over time. I think that's translated to higher earnings over time, right? So you have the higher revenue, you have increasing EBITDA margins. You've got the benefit of a lower expense structure from lower debt as well as rate reductions over this time frame.

We've been working really hard on our tax rate to continue to help deliver incremental earnings. And then, of course, the benefit of share buyback continues to help contribute to that EPS growth rate trend over time, 14.3% on a 3-year CAGR using our midpoint guide for '26.

One of the core elements that we look at from other metrics has been just basically AUA. This has been a real nice driver for our -- primarily our GlobeOp business. I think during the last call, we talked about this metric and the growth that we've seen over the last several years. And a lot of firms that compete with us don't even have this amount in total, let alone the growth that we've seen in these years.

So solid consistent growth continues to help drive this underlying metric for the health of the business and what we do. It also speaks to the -- to our servicing capability to the largest of clients, primarily the hedge funds, private markets and private credit, private equity, and we serve the most sophisticated of these firms across the globe, and we continue to benefit from their success. I mentioned earlier about R&D as an important metric. And on an earlier slide, we talked about the reinvestment and what we do is we've invested $3.2 billion in R&D since '21, right? So that's a very important part of continuing to try and drive that long-term revenue growth rate. So we measure it. We want to be thoughtful. We're looking for an appropriate ROI on it.

And again, we think it leads to better long-term results as far as revenue growth and earnings over time. And we think, again, that leads to ultimately cash flow, which is what we can redeploy back to our shareholders. So you've seen the growth rate over time. We've got a little chart on top of it to kind of look at the cash conversion, which is basically the net income we report and the cash flow from operations, continuing to exceed conversion above 100%, and what this does, we think, can lead us to what we believe is an appropriate and shareholder-friendly capital allocation program.

This is just a snapshot of Q1, but our priority has traditionally been high-quality M&A transactions that we believe can create shareholder value. You can see the company has a history of doing that. And absent that, we've said very clearly, particularly given where the stock is trading right now, we will prioritize share repurchase. I'm not sure how much else I can say that other than what this chart does. And so I would expect to see this chart throughout the year.

Obviously, the dividend has been set. The debt payment that you see here was a mandatory debt payment and everything else is share repurchase activity. And we would expect to continue to see that and have that benefit over time.

Turning to guidance a little bit longer term and what we did, this goes back to a couple of years ago from our investor meeting is that we set the medium-term guidance organic growth as a key metric, and we've given a range of 4% to 8% as our core growth rate. And then we'd expect to try and do more as we are active in opportunistic M&A activities. And I think we've demonstrated that over the last year or 2 with respect to some of the recent acquisitions have really done a nice job of adding, call it, 1 to 3 percentage points on the top line.

You can see that 4% to 8% organic revenue growth rate. You'll see the '24 through the '26 estimate. We've been squarely in the middle of that, 6.1%, 4.8%; 5.3% is the current midpoint of the guidance. And you can see the different levers and methods that we use to achieve that with the products, with cross-sells. Price increases have been a relatively small component of that, but still there across the organization. And then the other one that we're seeing, I think, benefits of is improving the customer retention and certainly measure that very closely at each business unit level.

As far as the M&A and what makes a good M&A or what makes it attractive, obviously, we want that high-level shareholder value accretion. But what are some of the characteristics we look for in a good M&A transaction for us is we want that revenue growth rate of that candidate to be revenue growth rate accretive, ability to leverage the existing client base in either services or geography.

And look, we want to see profitable growth at the end of the day, right? We don't want to buy a start-up or no earnings growth business. So those are important things that as part of the target, which makes it very attractive to us. And of course, we've always tried to deploy price discipline as far as what we're willing to pay for a transaction to make sure there's not too much of a valuation gap in our expectations.

As far as the quarterly guide goes, again, this is out there. For the second quarter, we put out an organic growth rate midpoint of 5.6%, a little bit higher than obviously than what we guided to for at least for the full year. You'll see the EPS growth rate -- excuse me, EPS number at the midpoint of $1.67, which is a 12% growth rate. For the full year, I'll just flash that up as well, is an organic growth rate midpoint of 5.3%, which is up from 5.1% from the beginning of the year and then EPS midpoint of $6.90, which is about a 12% growth rate, which is kind of what we said as far as the growth rate we've seen that 12% to 14%, depending on which metric you're looking at, and that's where we're landing right now as well as the continued healthy cash flow from operations, which, again, is a key metric from us.

So I think that takes me to the end. So we have roughly 5 minutes. Do you want to turn it over to you or...

Yes. feel free to open it up to questions, to see if we have questions. Or else we will go to [Technical Difficulty]

First one on AI. Are you seeing that -- I mean here we've been implementing it more recently. But is it enough at this point where you're seeing an impact on the bottom line? Or is there to talk more [Technical Difficulty]

I would say that we are -- the approach that we're taking is a -- we don't need to be bleeding edge certainly. And I'll say that for the couple of, right, is that we're putting it in the hands of our most savvy, both developers as well as those within, for example, like with the finance organization that are not like how do I turn on the computer type of -- we're not going to be having those people, but basically who may have already been using it on their own, I'll call it, the power users already.

So we've already seen that efficiency built in. But it's been -- we're trying to be very measured in it before we -- everybody has a Claude license, for example, type of thing. So we're monitoring token usage, trying to measure ROI right away as far as it's taking 2 days to do this and used to take 3 months type of those types of being able to put these enhancements in place. So we are I would say, right now, those productivity gains we're rolling back into, I'll call it, the business and being -- getting more efficiency and productivity to where we see right now, right? So there's 3 paths, I think that very high level around AI is that you can see that path of that technology use and you don't have to hire incremental resources to support more client growth or you're delivering things a little bit more quickly.

The second path, which you've seen a lot of announcements in a 5%, 10%, 20% reduction of headcount because I don't need as many people or I'm going to deploy AI. And that third path, which we're starting to see more of is on the revenue delivery of, is it enhancing your revenue sales as a result of utilization of AI. So I would say we're still -- given the $6.7-ish billion of revenues, it's hard to show a huge impact right away on it, but we're starting to see signs of it for sure.

Go ahead.

What are changes that you see in [indiscernible] AI more on, [Technical Difficulty] more often, how do you -- how do you -- you have lots of LLMs, you do have Claude, how do you [Technical Difficulty] make it improve, how does that work from [Technical Difficulty]

So what we do is for the -- so the LLM, no. But for the -- so we don't use the, in a way, I want to answer yes. So we're exploring different ways. So we do bring some on-prem when we're actually putting our data in and exploring that, right? So we put it within our AI framework so that any of the enhancements and the learnings and everything that is does the revisions stays within. So that's not shared back out, okay?

And so we do monitor the token usage. If we aren't going external, if we're using it, say, to build code, say, I'm going to use an Opus model that's the frontier model, a frontier model, and I'm going to have to pay for some of that upfront. That's a -- we found a pretty good investment. So learning to use which of the models are great for the brains and which are good for just the muscle, so to speak, that can still do things that the average person can't.

And so we're looking for that blend and finding the right blend around those costs. So -- but keeping that data and that learning, particularly what we're doing internally is what we're doing for the actual data when we're running that through is on-prem.

Let's say you actually take [Technical Difficulty]

Well, to the extent that we can, yes, as far as the learning. So if it's generating like, for example, a Python code to be able to do this, we take that code, pop it in, and I don't have to keep tapping the Opus mode because I now have what I want to do would it help me create. So I don't have to keep doing it. It becomes an R&D tool in and of itself.

Thank you, Brian.

Yes. Thanks.

Great. Hello, everyone. My name is Alexei Gogolev, Head of Vertical SaaS here at JPMorgan. Welcome to first day of Boston Conference. Today, we're delighted to be hosting CFO of SS&C, Brian Schell. Brian, welcome.

Thank you.

And I guess to begin the conversation, Brian, could we talk about the durability of the organic growth engine for your business? What are the most important internal leading indicators that you track to assess the organic growth durability, things like net new bookings or renewals and which matter most by segment?

Yes. Thank you. I would say that, first of all, let me just say you guys do an amazing job with the investors that you have brought here and all the logistics...

Appreciate it, Brian.

Well done to JPMorgan. I think there are the multiple factors that you kind of highlighted there that are most important, right? And I would say the number one, the way we think about it is where we've seen the most growth and that organic growth has been share of wallet and the continued expansion of services, both within an existing business unit and a service provider as well as then across SS&C that may cross over into another part of the business unit, whether that be providing transfer agency and investor-related services as well as potential Intralink services or intelligent automation business that we've continued to see more and more of that revenue growth come from.

So the share of wallet I would say then the new logo and that pipeline conversion are metrics we look at very closely and see how that is going. I would say pricing is always a consideration that we evaluate, but it's not the primary consideration at the end of the day. And then the last couple of things that we look at and we may touch on later is we always take an eye at looking at those renewals, which I know can be a little bit lumpy in some of our quarterly revenue results, but looking at the duration -- the contract duration length and when that hits and any other considerations, any incremental services that are added into that.

Thank you, Brian. That actually is a good segue. So how is the mix of recurring versus more transactional or license-driven revenue has been evolving? And what operational choices are you making to reduce the lumpiness that you just referred to?

Absent not complying with revenue recognition of 606, which is obviously not a choice or not an option, I would say our primary objective is to meet the client where they are, right, is that while I love the idea of having a higher percentage of recurring revenue, if nothing else for predictability, stability and everything that goes along there.

But if they choose to do something that may be more transactional in nature or incremental service or project-related work, we know that, that leads to longer-term growth over time. And we've seen several clients where we started out with a source contract that's kind of a stated -- here's your statement of work, this is what I want you to do, here's the price. They may engage us on some incremental work that may be project in nature and then that turns into a longer-term statement of work that becomes more permanent.

So we've seen a lot of that evolution over time. So we've seen, like I said, more of that. Now some of the business will remain transactional at the end of the day. Even if we do sign a long-term contract, say, for example, with Intralinks, Intralinks will sign a long-term contract. And let's say, we signed a long-term contract with JPMorgan, and that still may be periodic in transactions that we will support in conjunction with you and your teams with JPMorgan to be able to do that as well as some of our -- as business. So otherwise, I think you're going to continue to see that evolution of recurring revenue across literally every single segment with maybe the exception of Intralinks.

And Brian, the retention has already been very high for a while. Where is the biggest opportunity to drive it further? Is it price realization or maybe some expansion modules or additional services?

I would say I think it's more of the -- honestly, I think it's the additional services at the end of the day is for that, I'll call it, that net revenue retention, right? So I would love to see, obviously, the gross continue to increase. I would -- we might be able to see that increase with lengthening contract renewals. Like I said, pricing is always an element, but it hasn't been a material part of the way we've grown revenues, as you know. And so that's more of where I think we would see that grow is that incremental share of wallet to really kind of look at that gross retention and then the incremental organic growth rate to really help to continue to try and drive that higher.

Okay. And Brian, you've done quite a few lift-outs in the past couple of years. What have you learned about what makes lift-outs successful operationally? And how do you see kind of ensuring that margins improve as the engagement matures?

Yes. So this is I would say this first one isn't maybe that terribly insightful, but let's make sure you're aligned with the client and what they want the outcome to be and how quickly you get there and how you're going to define success along the way. So that's very important. That's probably a very important part of any engagement or any type of service you're providing to your client. But beyond that next step is, I think some of the key has been around the data and systems migration to your platform and what that's going to look like.

A lot of the efficiency, and this feeds in really the third part of your question about where do you see the margins? How does that evolve over time is understanding how you're able to move that data or those processes to the SS&C system at the end of the day, right, because of the efficiency and our scale and the operational know-how at the end of the day, right? So that's what we bring that to the table is the software, it's the people and it's the technology.

And that will take some time. We do put in some contractual provisions to make sure there is some retention and some consistency over the first year of the contract, then you start seeing a step function of margin expansion as that operational efficiency kicks in as some of those extra costs are removed as you start seeing the technology migration as a real benefit and you start seeing those step functions in 1 year 6 months after that and then 2 year and all along the way. It's -- and I think the discipline around looking at that performance, at least from, I'll call it, a finance standpoint, is talking with that business on a monthly basis, how are we doing against our plan.

Any implementation capacity constraints that you're seeing in some of those lift-outs, especially large transactions when they're done at scale. When you're delivering talent, data migration and tooling, like how are you investing to avoid those bottlenecks?

Yes. I think that comes with having a good playbook, being able to plan for that, right? So we know we're going to need some key talent hires to maybe help execute that playbook. We're also not coming in cold. So we do know who is likely going to become part of that lift-out transaction. So we know the resources that are coming in.

And we spot the talent and identify we think that's going to be the person to help us. That will be a strong interface with the people who are leading the lift-out from the, call it, the core or the legacy SS&C side of things as we move that forward.

And what we found also with that talent is some of the talent that we're picking that's becoming part of SS&C is very leverageable to other parts of our business that's usually within the existing business unit because we found that they can actually take on some of our existing work as well. And so we get a lot of -- we're starting to see some productivity gains, which goes back to accruing to a more expansive margin over time.

And Brian, tying it all together, you discussed a path towards 40% margin exit. Where are the biggest levers? Like maybe it's automation or you mentioned pricing, productivity mix? And what are the biggest offsets like those AI costs that everyone is talking about and maybe some integration costs?

Yes. I would say that my favorite place to get margin is scale, is revenue growth, right? And a lot of times when we're adding that revenue growth, it has a much higher margin on that incremental revenue. And so that's my favorite place to get it. But obviously, for the business, what we do is we put in productivity targets with every single one of our business unit leaders in primarily trying to drive that through use of technology, not necessarily staffing reductions or what that looks like.

It's more around how can you get technology gains to improve efficiency and productivity such that maybe headcount does not increase with that next incremental dollar or next client that is signed. And that's the goal in leveraging that and improving your workflow, improving the accuracy, improving the results. And so that's really how we're trying to drive that across the board. So it's really coming through that technology initiatives and leveraging the existing infrastructure scale that we have today.

In terms of CapEx and some capitalization strategy, how do you think about the right level of CapEx to software capitalization in order to sustain this product modernization that you're facing?

I think over the last several years, we've kind of settled into that 4.3% to 4.8% of revenue as far as a percentage of revenue. And that feels like it's been accommodating both our R&D efforts and ongoing support effort as far as enhancements to our clients. And again, our goal is to invest, whether that show up in OpEx or CapEx to try and drive that long-term revenue and earnings growth rate. And that's kind of where we've settled out. We haven't seen things shift too much. That may change in the future, but I think we'd be cautious and be measured at it because we do know it's important to invest in the business, but also continue to deliver enhanced margins to the business longer term to our shareholders.

Okay. Brian, diving deeper into your segments. So starting from Globe Operations, can you talk about the growth algorithm here? What are the key drivers of the business growth? And where is the best runway over the next few years? Is it going to be maybe private markets or retail alternatives or hedge funds?

Yes. So the -- I would say where we've seen the biggest growth, and it's also the growth that's AV -- usually easier to accommodate and usually the most profitable has been existing client growth, right? It's that revenue -- that's that incremental revenue from an existing client. As they grow and as they do well, it's that much easier and better for us.

And we're able to facilitate that growth in a very manageable way because same systems and same, I'll call it, infrastructure within those clients. So that's where we see that growth. It's not necessarily always strict us to just a higher AUA because there are different strategies that a lot of these managers deploy, whether they be long, short, whether it be different factors. there's -- you just can't measure it based on looking at the -- where is the S&P 500 Index trading because it's different asset types and different geographies, as I mentioned.

So we see the benefit also of potentially when some firms decide -- some of the managers decide to start off on their own within those firms. And it's almost like an extension of the existing firm because a lot of times they will pick up the same SS&C solution that they had when they were with some of these other firms. So hedge fund is the biggest part of our business, and it continues to grow at that mid- to high single-digit growth rate, both from fees as well as some basis points on their AUA growth.

We're seeing a combination of both. We're seeing some nice new logo wins at the end of the day. But the highest growth rate, albeit still small but growing quickly is retail alts. That certainly is the fastest growing from a percent, but kind of smallest of all the asset bases between that private markets, which is, again, also still growing rapidly and hedge fund.

If I may ask about private credit. How do you think about exposure and the associated revenue sensitivity? Like what's structurally resilient in your fee model?

Yes. So the -- I'd say the good news here from an SS&C standpoint is that, one, we're not exposed to any credit losses. Obviously, longer term, if a firm managing that private credit is -- has a lot of losses. They won't be around. So you have that potentially longer-term revenue exposure. But most of our funds that we support are closed end. So they're not faced with the redemption activity that you're reading about a lot of times in the headlines.

The other parts of these funds are actually sitting within hedge funds and what they're doing. So they've been able to diversify that risk and hedge that risk as well. So we haven't quite seen as much of some of the negative press might indicate in some of the funds. And actually, shorter term, we've been doing a little bit more work helping firms address some of the higher-than-expected redemptions. So we saw some of the growth rate declining in 2025, and we didn't bake in a massive amount of growth in '26. So we feel good about where that sits right now.

Moving to the other large sector of yours, GIDS. How do you separate some of those structural growth trends versus lift-outs that we spoke about earlier? And what does the steady-state growth look like for this segment?

Yes. We like the lift-out work, and it basically allows us to apply all aspects of our expertise for our clients, the people, process and technology to enable them to do better on their margins, and it helps us with our growth as we continue to leverage scale. And incrementally, each one of those lift-outs, I think, enhances SS&C and our overall value to our shareholders.

So we've had some recent large wins, and that's accounted for a large percentage of the growth, probably close to half of the growth rate. So much of the growth that we've had, though, has been coming from core independent of those lift-outs. But having said that, those lift-outs, we have more in the works from new clients as well as incremental work, we think that can occur from existing clients from some of those lift-outs. So this is going to be -- it's really been a really nice source of growth for -- certainly for GIDS.

Another segment that's not part of the 3 large segments, but still an important one, Intralinks solution. How are you evolving the product to improve conversion and retention, workflow features like AI enhancements? And what customer feedback has most influenced this road map?

So we replatformed -- started a replatforming effort on this a couple of years ago and started integrating AI as part of that platform a couple of years ago. And so that's really showing up. It's more of a seamless. It doesn't look like it's an add-on button type of thing. So we've been working through that. I think one of the key items that we've been bringing to that product feature is really incorporating more of the total deal life cycle into it, not just maybe it's just a diligence element, but how we are managing the teams that who have access, the NDA workflow, the different teams workflow that really kind of steps beyond just what's the core data in the data room.

So bringing that into a secure environment and allowing those incremental tools that can be applied without having to go outside of a secure kind of area from where the data is and the communications channel has been critical, and that's really been a nice point of leverage for success and wins for us.

Moving to another large part of your business, wealth and investment technologies. So what's driving one of your very strong solutions, Black Diamond? What's driving the growth most? Is it new advisers or maybe some wallet share expansion that you're seeing? And what are the biggest risks to sustaining that growth?

Yes. We're seeing a lot of new logo wins there. We've also been -- with some of the RIA roll-up approaches that we've seen, some of the medium to larger-sized firms, they've been primarily Black Diamond clients on the acquiring side, the acquirer. So we continue to see expansion of their RIA base, which means incremental usage of the product. We've brought incremental features such as more AI features into the software, which is particularly attractive to the medium-sized types of clients.

And I would say, finally, what's helping continue to drive that growth has been bringing in Trust Suite services into the software as we know that RIAs and as their asset base and as their client level sophistication grows, a lot of times they're looking for a trust solution and having that capability and being able to provide that to the RIA community within that software as part of that support has been a real competitive differentiator.

Okay. Brian, can we talk about the Healthcare division? Like from a long-term play perspective, what needs to change for health care to become a more predictable grower? Are you looking at maybe product readiness or some go-to-market focus? Maybe you think there could be some regulatory changes? Like what do you think could happen?

Yes. So what we've seen and actually what we've done over time is that it still has some licensing revenues attached to it and what it does. But I think this goes back to one of your earlier questions actually is around kind of that recurring revenue growth and how we've seen that continue to be a bigger part of our overall revenues. And this is contributing to this. So we've also done lift-outs in this part of the business. We've worked very closely with, for example, with Humana.

We're taking on more of their business over time. And it's been more of a kind of recurring revenue model versus a licensing fee. So that revenue growth has been more of that stable month-by-month grower. So you're seeing more of that stability and then it grows over time such that our expectations for that business is that's a low single-digit growth that we've talked about. But we think in the future, absent some of the larger contracts that we think are prospects for, we think its growth rate can accelerate as it continues to add these services with new logos as well as with existing clients.

Brian, maybe taking a quick step back and looking at the overall portfolio, which regions globally are the most attractive incremental opportunities that you see? Is it maybe Australia or Middle East? And what needs to be true for SS&C to scale efficiently in those markets?

Yes. So I think you nailed the first 2 as far as how we're thinking about it and where we see the opportunities across the various businesses. Australia certainly has been a really key market for us, and we've seen a lot of growth there. And so that continues to remain kind of top priority. as far as new markets go. I think number two is closely followed by the Middle East. We've expanded. We've put in new offices in various geographies there in the Middle East. And actually, the new offices that we've recently opened,

We've actually expanded already that coming to part of the facilities team as I see where all those expansions are occurring or being requested, and that's one area where a lot of that work is tied to, I'll call it, desk space or facility space to be able to accommodate that growth. And then I would say probably the third area has been -- as far as geography goes, would be APAC outside of Australia, we're starting to see pockets of some nice growth. Again, those are the kind of the newer geographies. Again, North America still holds, obviously, a predominant share of where the assets are in that continued increasing share of wallet.

And this growth you're talking about in those local markets, is it coming from product localization or maybe some regulatory or staffing requirements?

It's kind of more of the product, I mean, and what we're doing there versus any incremental requirements. We have a mixed feeling on regulatory requirements and incremental compliance. That usually means better business for us as far as incremental services and what we do because there's usually complexity and/or risk. But we also like the idea of a, I'll call it, a more open market that we think can help facilitate asset growth and managing that. And so we certainly benefit from that, and we certainly like that from our clients to be able to maintain that growth...

Brian, I would love to talk a bit more about your AI and automation. First of all, starting with Blue Prism and some intelligent automation solutions. What are the most important drivers to reaccelerate that division? Do you expect to see some more AI agent attach or maybe platform adoption? And what's the biggest friction in customer decision-making?

So if we go back to the core, if we think about where this kind of started with RPA as its core, we've seen a real stabilization and actually renewal of RPA at the end of the day, right? And so I think that's been a very promising element. Actually, the core Blue Prism actually was higher first quarter inside that business unit than the prior year. So that's been a really good solid sign because at the end of the day, RPA is still a very cost-efficient, very effective tool to use in establishing automation.

Number two, is what we've seen as far as the agent elements and the use of AI is, as you know, we recently launched WorkHQ, which is an orchestration layer of agents across existing technology that makes it much easier for people to use their existing platform, the existing technology to help manage their workflow across their platform, across different systems because at the end of the day, what SS&C's expertise is that IP in the broader sense of managing that workflow is that they have data and transactions that are occurring over here on the left-hand side, there's a lot of things that need to happen, different processes and different touch points, different environments, control checks and end up with, call it, 3, 4, 5, 10 different outputs that are required from different constituencies.

And that knowledge and help of that orchestration of that workflow is I think is where we've turned our attention to, and we started with client zero doing that ourselves in our different business units and then selling that solution that's not a proof of concept on a piece of paper, it's actually done in process and working.

Brian, you spoke a lot about governance first AI as an important differentiator and obviously emphasized regulated environments and various inaccuracy risks. So what does your governance framework look like in practice? And how do you productize it to the advantage of your customers?

So this is -- I'm sure every organization can -- either their executive management and/or their audit committee is asking, and this is obviously a big topic is around that framework. So we have an AI framework that we started out with, and this is kind of how we initiated the whole effort. Again, as you mentioned, right, the regulatory requirement of our clients and our own, you can't make up a number if you don't know what it is in between to get there.

It's got to be right given the financial records and they're being filed with a regulatory body, a taxing authority, a government body that differentiated a statutory report. So it's -- the level of accuracy is critical. And so we've designed the AI framework for people, again, almost with us, our ownselves in mind of what do we want, what do we need? We need to make sure it's secure and there's no leakage outside of it. We need to make sure that we can insert human touch points within any loop at any point in time.

We need to make sure there's a reconciliation where we are. We need to make sure there's an audit trail if someone moves it or touches it and it potentially is redirected. And if it's going in a direction where it shouldn't be going, there's an ability to stop that. So those are just some of the, I'll call it, more critical elements that we have around the framework to make sure that all those steps along the way that there's accountability as far as what's happening and who's making what decision and how.

Brian, as you think about that framework you just described, where do you see the clearest monetization opportunities for AI agents? And how do you ensure pricing captures ROI without creating some friction with customers?

So the first opportunity is internally. I know your question was more revenue focused, but that's part of back to a little bit of client zero. And we think that's a really nice productivity enhancement opportunity. We also think that actually helps lend itself to a greater revenue opportunity, which is, I think, the source of your question, broadly, right?

And as far as the folks that are leveraging different systems and how do they make that outcome the way they would like it to be to be a more efficient manner. At the end of the day, people have this, like I said, a workflow that they need to get to, and we're trying to engineer the solution, and that's where we think the revenue opportunity is. And it doesn't just have to be financial services. We've seen it already in the health care, even though it was independent of the health care business unit. And so we've seen it across financial services as well. Again, it's still nascent in its approach and the revenue generation, but we've seen it applicable across a lot of different use cases.

Brian, talking about M&A, you've done so many over the years. How do you set valuation guardrails for some of those potential deals? And more importantly, with this acquisitive history, what have you changed in your integration playbook to reduce complexity?

I would say that when we look at transactions, obviously, valuation is very important. And when we look at the valuation, we look at revenue growth rate and profitability and what are the assumptions and how good do we feel about that historically on a go-forward basis and what does it provide to us. So there's a discipline around that from that standpoint.

From a playbook on the front office, call it the business, the revenue-generating side of it, it feels like there's a good playbook about for whatever reason they're being brought in, are they being brought in for product, geography or clients and knowing where those strengths are and how that's going to interplay. So there's a plan upfront about what we plan to do with the asset.

Why do we want this asset and why do we need it and then basically put that in place. And so that, I think we've actually done a pretty good job at. What we've done better at, I think, over the last several years is making sure that back-office integration is also happening that we're all on the same general ledger. We're on the same human capital management project. We're on the same payroll. All of those things help tighten the process so that the communication and the financial reporting and the analysis basically help us determine whether we're achieving the returns or make the adjustments we need to make.

Okay. Brian, final question on your capital allocation. You've done a great job balancing buybacks and dividends and debt paydown and some acquisitions. So in this cycle, like where are you currently leaning more towards? And should an attractive acquisition opportunity come along, how far would you be willing to lever up to satisfy some of those potential acquisitions?

Yes. I would say that in a consistent theme, I think that our capital allocation priority has always been that attractive M&A opportunity at the end of the day. We think that, that's -- and given our history, that wouldn't be a surprise to anybody who follows SS&C. Again, that's because there's discipline around that valuation and what that looks like and what that can do for us.

But absent that, we are leaning into share repurchase opportunity. Again, there's a lot of challenges around valuations and where people are coming together on bid-ask spreads. But again, we're still -- that would still be a priority for capital allocation. As far as the theoretical, is there a leverage opportunity, whether the markets accept this or not, I think the debt capital markets have been fairly open right now.

I know there's been some windows of open and close. But generally, where we sit, I think the market has been pretty receptive to any debt issuance. Historically, the company has levered up to 4.5 to 5x. Whether that's still the case or not, we would see, but I haven't heard anything that would indicate it would be different given the focus and the history in being able to take the cash flow and redirect it to delevering back to a -- we call it a more normalized level.

Great. Well, thank you very much, Brian. This has been great, and I appreciate you being here with us.

Thank you.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SS&C Technologies First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Justine Stone, Head of Investor Relations.

Welcome, and thank you for joining us for our Q1 2026 Earnings Call. I'm Justine Stone, Investor Relations for SS&C. With me today is Bill Stone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rahul Kanwar, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Brian Schell, our Chief Financial Officer.

Before we get started, we need to review the safe harbor statement. Please note the various remarks we make today about future expectations, plans and prospects, including the financial outlook we provide, constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of safe harbor provisions 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 our 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, April 23, 2026. 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 welcome, everyone. The first quarter of 2026 included a war in Iran, tariff score, spiking oil prices and other macro headwinds. Nevertheless, we delivered strong first quarter results, underscoring SS&C's resilience. Based on our performance and [ viability ] today, we are raising 2026 guidance. We recently rang the NASDAQ closing bell to celebrate SS&C's 4-year anniversary of powering mission-critical systems our financial services and health care clients rely on every day. Our business is built on deep domain expertise, strong trust and client relationships and constant innovation guided by what we -- what we call our customer [indiscernible] strategies. These strengths position us well as our industry enters the next phase of technology transfer information driven by AI.

We are updating the name of our largest revenue line item to better reflect the deeply embedded technology framework powering our services business. technology-enabled services encompasses our proprietary data streams, domain expertise, software, private cloud, data center infrastructure, with ISO and SoC certifications and the redundancy and multilayered cybersecurity measures required by our sophisticated client base.

First quarter results were adjusted revenue of $1.648 billion, up 9% and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.69, a 14% increase. We delivered adjusted consolidated EBITDA of $651 million, up 10% and an adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin of 39.5%. The dollar figures I did said are all Q1 records. Adjusted organic revenue growth was 5%, with performance driven by GIDS which grew 10.4%, GlobeOp was grew 6.7%. And our recent acquisitions are executing kind of expectations, strengthening our global capabilities and expanding our addressable markets. Intralinks grew 3.2% with a positive -- with positive leading indicators and an increasing adoption of its next-generation AI-enabled deal center platform. The resilience of our business is highlighted by the $581 billion assets under administration we have added to our fund administration business since Q1 of 2024.

Across SS&C, we are leveraging AI to enhance software development, increase our speed to market, accelerate implementations, improve customer experience and drive efficiencies. These initiatives support both revenue opportunities and cost leverage over time. All of our teams are partnering closely with [ Blue Prism ] to scale our AI operations in a governed and secure manner. For the 3 months ended March 31, 2026, cash from operating activities was $300 million, up 10% year-over-year.

In Q1, we returned $233 million to shareholders, which included 2.3 million shares, repurchased were $168 million at an average price of [ $72.60 ] and [ $65 ] million in common stock dividends. Through share repurchases and our dividend policy, 98% of our allocated capital in Q1 was returned directly to our shareholders. At current levels, our conviction around share repurchase has strengthened, and we are prioritizing repurchases, absent high-quality, accretive acquisitions. We remain bullish on our opportunities and continue to be AI as a structural tailwind for our business. Our platforms are deeply embedded in our clients' day-to-day operation serving as systems of record and execution. That positioning makes SS&C a natural partner as clients look to advance their [ A1 ] strategies. I mean their artificial intelligence strategies.

I'll now turn it over to Rahul.

Thanks, Bill. We had a strong first quarter, GIDS and GlobeOp built on last year's sales performance with additional new logo wins and continued upsell and cross-sell activity. Across the business, disciplined attention to our clients is generating new opportunities. SS&C's pipelines are robust and as always, execution remains the priority. Our AI capabilities, including agents and workflow orchestration are accelerating how services are delivered. Our [ customer zero strategy ] is working as intended. Internal adoption of Agentic capabilities is driving product maturity, credibility and faster time to market. The product expertise is the prerequisite for harnessing these tools, and we are well positioned. We serve the largest and most sophisticated firms in the world. And as their businesses grow more complex, our platforms grow with them. We sit at the center of their operating models with deeply embedded workflows. These workflows form the national foundation for further innovation.

As Bill mentioned, we've renamed our largest revenue line to technology-enabled services. Our clients are buying services such as NAV computations, tax returns, regulatory filings, investor interactions, risk calculations and hundreds of others. These services are usually tied to contracts for services rather than software license agreements, delivery requires deep domain knowledge expertise operating complex workflows refined over decades, the networks we operate across counterparties and secure resilient infrastructure. We estimate that software, largely in the form of subscriptions, represents 11% of this category.

With that, I'll turn it over to Brian to walk through the financials.

Thanks, Rahul, and good day, everyone. Unless noted otherwise, the quarterly comparisons are Q1 -- are Q1 2025. As disclosed in our press release, our Q1 2026 GAAP results reflect revenues of $1.647 billion, net income of $226 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.91. Our adjusted non-GAAP results include revenues of $1.648 billion, an increase of 8.8% and adjusted diluted EPS of $1.69, a 14.2% increase. The adjusted revenue increase of $133 million was primarily driven by incremental revenue contributions from GIDS of $38 million, GlobeOp of $29 million and a favorable impact from foreign exchange of $22 million. As a result, adjusted organic revenue growth on a constant currency basis was 5% and our core expenses increased 2.9% or $27 million, which also excludes acquisition and impact of FX.

Adjusted consolidated EBITDA was a first quarter record of $651 million, reflecting an increase of $59 million or 10% and a margin of 39.5%, 40 basis point expansion. Net interest expense for the quarter -- for the first quarter of '26 was $105 million, flat year-over-year. Adjusted net income was $418 million, up 11.1%. Our effective non-GAAP tax rate was 22.5% this quarter. Note for comparison purposes, we have [ recasted ] 2025 adjusted net income and EPS to reflect the full year effective tax rate of 22%. Also note, the Q1 diluted share count is down $247.6 million from $254.9 million year-over-year, primarily due to lower dilutive shares and continued impact of treasury share.

Cash flow from operating activity growth of 10% was driven by growth in earnings. SS&C ended the first quarter with $421 million in cash and cash equivalents and $7.5 billion in gross debt. SS&C's net debt was $7.1 billion, and our last 12 months consolidated EBITDA was $2.6 billion, resulting net leverage ratio was 2.76x.

As we look forward to the second quarter and full year of 2026 with respect to guidance, we will continue to focus on client service and assume that retention rates will be in the range of our most recent results. We will continue to manage our business to support our long-term growth and manage our expenses by controlling and aligning variable expenses, increasing productivity and leveraging technology to improve our operating margins and effectively investing in the business, especially with respect to R&D, sales and marketing.

Specifically, we have assumed short-term interest rates remain at current levels and effective tax rate of approximately 22.5% on an adjusted basis. Capital expenditures to be 4.4% to 4.8% of revenues and a stronger weighting to share repurchases versus debt reduction. Second quarter of '26, we expect revenue to be in the range of $1.64 billion to $1.68 billion and 5.6% organic revenue growth at the midpoint. Adjusted net income in the range of $408 million to $424 million. Interest expense, excluding amortization, deferred financing costs and origination discount in the range of $102 million to $104 million and adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $1.64 to $1.70.

For the full year 2026, we increased our expectations to revenue to be in the range of $6.664 billion to $6.824 billion and 5.3% organic revenue growth in the midpoint. Adjusted net income in the range of $1 -- excuse me, adjusted net income in the range of $1.665 billion to $1.765 billion, adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $6.74 to $7.06, reflecting approximately 12% growth at the midpoint and maintaining our targeted annual EBITDA expansion of 50 basis points with a goal of 40% margin in Q4.

And now back to Bill.

Thanks, Brian. Next week, SS&C will launch [ Blue Prism Work HQ ], our Agentic workflow orchestration platform designed to coordinate automation, AI agents and human decision-making across enterprise workflows. Feedback from early adopters has been positive, and we're excited to share more at our launch event, which will be open to virtual attendees and registration right now is over 2,000 people. It's also available at [ blueprism.com ] or by reaching out to Justine.

With that, I will now open it up to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Kevin McVeigh with UBS.

Great. And really just exceptional results given the environment win. Bill, I mean, you beat on everything. I mean would the results have been even stronger, if not for the environment that we're in. I mean -- I know the business is pretty predictable, but is there anything to kind of hold it back just given the environment?

Well, you get hesitancy, Kevin, as you well know, right? When you have tariffs came flying out at billions and billions and billions and then you have a war and then you have spiking oil prices, which generally is going to increase inflation. So there's a lot of macro headwinds. But at the same time, I think people need to have the technology to run their business. And we just had a [ GAIN ] Conference, which is a big hedge fund conference in Cayman Islands, and we had a bunch of our clients there, and it was a spectacular event for us. They were happy. They were investing in us buying more services and products, and we're pretty bullish on 2026.

The results speak to that. And then just -- maybe remind us because the one question we get a lot is on the [ AUA ] growth just in different market environments, it obviously continues to grow. And is that just client balances increasing or just the way they're running their asset allocation. It's just, again, just been another terrific part to the store.

Well, as we said in the investor releases or in our comments is that we grew AUA $581 billion since the first quarter of 2024. I don't know where $581 billion would put you in the league tables, but probably pretty high. And that's just our growth. So that's market appreciation, which, obviously, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 hit new records, I think, this past week. And the equity markets have been pretty robust. We also have almost all of the large global macro funds, and they have been getting increasing allocations from all of the -- all of the different allocators and large-scale pension funds and the insurance companies that are investing in hedge fund solutions, and hedge funds have been stronger over the past couple of quarters. than they have been over the past couple of years.

Your next question comes from Dan Perlin with RBC Capital Markets.

I had a question around private credit. Obviously, it's incredibly topical these days. I think that falls into your GlobeOp operations. So I'm wondering from what you can tell and what you see and hear specifically around potential redemptions. How does that impact your business? Is that a -- you see that as any kind of perceived risk? And to the extent the assets do get redeemed, like what kind of recapture rate do you historically see in other areas of your portfolio?

Like a lot of things in the news, some of these maybe fears might be a little bit overblown, but I think we've got some structural things to -- that do protect us in any event. The primary one being most of our -- by far, the vast majority of our private credit funds are closed-end fund structures, which generally means that our fees are predicated on things that are fairly static, whether that's committed capital or some volume-based metric, like number of investments or investors or something like that. So we're not -- we're pretty immune from day-to-day fluctuations. And that's probably the biggest one. But to be honest, most of our big clients that are private credit managers are still continuing to grow with us.

Yes. No, that's great color. On GIDS, another really strong performance here. The -- I'm just trying to think through the cadence throughout the year. I feel like in the past, you talked about first half, obviously, being kind of in the high single digits or even better, certainly given the 1Q performance. And then you got more difficult comps heading into the back half. Does that still hold true that you're expecting kind of a mid-single-digit in the back half embedded? Or are things changing in and around, let's say, the Australian market that's giving you maybe more conviction that, that might actually prove to be too conservative?

I think that we are making great strides. You mentioned Australia, which were up to over 3,000 people in Australia, and we obviously, everyone knows we signed Insignia, which has about $321 billion in assets, but the superannuation market in Australia is for [indiscernible] so there's a lot of room to grow, and we're the new kid on the block, and we're really working hard to satisfy our clients there and then grow our market share. And so we're very optimistic about that. We also have some tremendous opportunities in North America and in Europe. And I think that if I was a betting man, and sometimes I am, I would guess that it gives us kind of very well in 2026.

Our next question comes from Jeff Schmitt with William Blair.

What segments do you think have the most risk from AI? And what segments do you feel most confident you're protected against disintermediation?

I don't -- we have some very pointed software businesses that are not large, but they're in all total maybe $100 million in revenue. But we are so embedded in the things that we do that we don't really look at AI as a threat. Yes, they can have some disruption. The Internet had disruption and client server had disruption and lots of things have disruption, but people still have to get their work done. They still have to file a tax return. They still have to file their cues in their annual statements. And it's not just in the United States. It's everywhere around the world. And so we do that everywhere, whether it's the Australian stock exchange and they have some rules about short sales that you have to give them notification and the Ministry of Finance in [ Tokyo ] as all kinds of requirements and [indiscernible] up in Ottawa. And we have several of those regulatory bodies here in the United States as well. So we were very steeped in that and it's pretty detailed, it's pretty [ artained ] and the regulators can change it whenever they want.

Okay. And then share buybacks were lower than they've been since, I think, '23 or '24. Is there a potential for you to get more aggressive there with stock down, I guess, so much over the last few months?

How much cash we generate. That tends to be our favorite investment. I think we bought $168 million in Q1. So well, Q1 is -- we have our [indiscernible] paid, we have taxes. So we have other uses for our cash. But yes, we're quite bullish.

Our next question comes from Surinder Thind with Jefferies.

Bill, can you maybe expand upon the Blue Prism offering and the new platform offering? I guess it's something you guys have been working on for a while now. Is the idea here that it's a game changer or maybe we begin to see a material inflection in the growth rate within that segment? Or how should we think about the rollout, the cadence, the initial feedback that you've been getting here?

Well, again, we're very vertical as a company. And so when we go out and talk to people at large-scale places like few guys at Jefferies Tefe and others, everyone is really studying the market and trying to figure out how do we implement this in the best way with governance my talks at these different conferences, I always say, "Look, AI is not just a gas pedal, somebody better have a break. When you better understand what you're doing. And if you don't, you can get hurt." I think it's pretty important that you have a company that's really primarily were a bunch of accountants and systems people. So we understand what controls are. We're kind of a little nerdy when it comes to internal controls, we think they're important. We're doing some silly people want to reconcile their checking accounts. So we reconcile all of our customers checking account.

So I think that's what you're going to be able to use AI for is different things that are primarily mundane. It will get increasingly sophisticated over time, but it's very difficult to replace human judgment to replace human trust and then also years of delivery and the ability to attack problems and solve.

That's helpful. And then maybe turning to the expense side of the equation here. I think you talked about maybe some investments in R&D and sales. Can you maybe provide a bit more color on the scale of those investments that you're thinking at this point. And then maybe how do we think about the potential impact on the range of outcomes on the margin for that? I think the target is the 50 basis points. But is that kind of fully loaded with all of the investments? Is there some flexibility there that maybe there's a bit more bit less? Any color there would be...

Well, I think, Surinder, there's a lot of opportunities for us to drive margin. And what we've done over the last number of years is try to plow money back into our infrastructure and our ability to deliver new services and new products quickly and efficiently. And that's expensive. And so we've been able to maintain our margins at really close to 40% and I think I spoke for a few years that if we want to move it up to 41% or 42%, that's certainly within our grasp. But I don't know if that's enough money to take away from R&D or other initiatives that we have going on.

So we have a lot of flexibility. I think last year, we generated about $7 a share in cash. So we have a lot of flexibility with buying back shares, looking at acquisitions and paying down debt. So we have opportunities to use our cash, and it's nice to have plenty open.

Our next question comes from Peter Heckmann with D.A. Davidson.

I wanted to talk about the emerging developments around tokenization of different asset classes, where do you see the pain points for your customers and how do you view SS&C's preparedness to have some portion of different asset classes being tokenized and process versus some of your competitors?

So like a lot of these things, we're really viewing the technology itself as an enabler right? And so we want to make sure. And look, that's true for the broader AI question, too, right? We want to make sure it helps us get whatever our clients are looking to have happen faster. So we're fully prepared. We have customers that are tokenized today. We have customers that are in the process of becoming tokenize. We're helping them get on the right digital platforms and chains, we're maintaining the IDs. We're doing all the work that's associated with it. And the primary impact that we've seen is in those instances, and we're talking about a pretty -- still a pretty limited subset of examples that we have.

The onboarding process for investors is obviously simpler, but the rest of the world stays exactly the same, right? But we're fully prepared to help to be part of the process and help them any way we can. And Calastone is a big part of that for us.

Which we spent $1 billion a quarter. So as usual, with things that we believe in, we don't dabble. We go get it and then we deliver it to our clients, and we have several very happy clients with our Calastone acquisition already.

That's great. That's great. And acquired -- revenue from acquisitions is a little bit higher than what we were thinking. Did Calastone outperform in the quarter? Or is there a bit of seasonality for them to the first quarter?

Yes, they did. This is Brian. They continue to perform well. And so that was a strong quarter by them, yes.

Our next question comes from Alexei Gogolev with JPMorgan.

This is [ Bala Kumaj ] on for Alexei. So just looking at Intralinks sequential improvement. Would you say that's driven more by the market or by share gains? And are there any metrics such as win rates or room volumes or retention that you feel that has evidence that?

I think it's a little bit of -- one -- there's maybe 3 or 4 things. One, the market has come back a little and is helping us, and you're starting to see that show up in the numbers, but we're seeing it even more in kind of the early indicators that we have of what it might be a quarter or 2 quarters from now. I think we have also invested a fair amount in the product itself. Some of that is building out services capability around the data rooms and things like that. Some of that is putting more AI-enabled modules within the data room itself, and that's helped us gain some market share.

Understood. And looking at health care, that segment posted a nice turnaround this quarter. How sustainable do you view this growth throughout 2026? And what are the largest points of excitement that give you optimism throughout this year?

Well, I think the biggest thing we like about health care is how big the market is. It is really enormous. And as more medicines and therapies come out, the more people are going to use those. And so GLP-1s obviously, are a big deal and the government, I think you're going to use Humana, which is one of our great clients to administer that program for the government. So we're excited about that. We have [ Damani ] making some inroads at places. It's big health care places. So it does not move with extreme rapidity. They are very, very testing oriented and very detailed. At the same time, there's tremendous opportunities similar as financial technology. A lot of it that runs Wall Street is decades old. So if you can get people to take the leap to change, a lot of people in their 40s don't want to change systems because they want to wait until they retire. Keep thinking that's 20 years away, let's go. But that's very difficult for people, and people have had a bigger version to risk. So but we think there's a lot of opportunity in health care and we think that we could be a winner.

Our next question comes from James Faucette with Morgan Stanley.

A lot of our questions have been answered. But I wanted to quickly touch on the Wealth business. And just wondering if you can help us unpack a little bit of what was driving the growth there. And I guess really kind of what we want to be cognizant of it going into Q2. Was there any deal slippage there into Q2? Or any tough license comps we should be aware of from the first quarter?

Our Wealth business primarily is [ Black Diamond ] and some other products that we have embedded around that, whether that's [ Salentica ] or Tier 1 or our [ InnoTrust ]. So we have made great strides with Black Diamond. Trust suite, where a lot of the RIAs, as their customers get older, they're going to move their assets into the GIDS, and they're often going to do it through trust. You're going to have to be able to trust accounting or you're going to lose your best customers. So that's been a nice tailwind for us. Plus we did the [ Marine Star ] transaction, I guess, about a little more than a year ago. And that gave us 600, 700 more RIAs. And so Black Diamond continues to execute and its got a lot of very strong and satisfied clients. We would guess it's going to continue to grow in excess of double digits.

Got it. And then I wanted to ask, just it's a topic that's increasingly been coming up with investors, not just about SS&C, but generally, but wanted to ask about your AI efforts specifically? And how do you think about kind of what you're doing there and how much maybe aim at external revenue generation or AI-driven products versus internal productivity? And are we getting much benefit internally today versus what you may be able to charge or monetize later? Just love to hear from just love to hear from you how you're thinking about that as an enabler.

Well, James, 2022, we bought Blue Prism and Blue Prism got us deep into robotic process automation, machine learning, natural language processing. So with that, we have deployed close to 4,000 digital workers. And now what we're doing is it's proving them by adding -- turning them pretty much in the AI agents. So we're doing this throughout our business, and we feel like the deployment of all these digital workers has maybe saved us about $100 million a year. And you say why didn't that all dropping into margin improvement? Well, I don't know if you're where, but getting compute and larger data infrastructure is not cheap. And so even though we've done all that, we've maintained our margins and we've gone in and we've built them on [indiscernible], and we've built a number of other new systems that we're rolling out now and so we're pretty comfortable with what we're doing.

And Rahul is running a number of projects in the AI space. And maybe you could talk about that Rahul.

Thanks, Bill. So it's a speed of software development. We are seeing a positive impact there. We're also seeing -- we have deep domain expertise, right? So it's 40 years of processing things in very, very complicated, very regulated ways. We're very deeply embedded in our customers and their operating model. So taking that -- taking sort of that knowledge and turning that into skills, right? And having those skills be things that AI agents can run we think it's a massive opportunity. So not to kind of give too much away from our event next week, but I think one of the things we're going to do is preview some of what we've built already in a very short period of time, and we're pretty excited about what else we're going to be able to do.

And it's taken -- it has a lot of enthusiasm by the earliest adopters that we have we have rolled this out to. So there's real opportunity here and it's orchestrating it like delivery pricing and having the right teams, install it and train our clients. We're excited about it.

Our next question comes from Patrick O'Shaughnessy with Raymond James.

How are you thinking about the application of blockchain technology from the perspective of services that your GIDS business provides such as transfer agency. Is there any disintermediation risk that you're thinking about?

I think it's mostly an opportunity. At least one, just in terms of context, right now, the number of examples we're seeing of folks that are interested in sort of blockchain and tokenization, it's still fairly small. Like I said, we've got a few up and running. We've got a few that are doing it. But in the examples we have and the data we have, not only are we a big part of enabling them, which is a revenue stream for us. But it simplifies our work, which is a cost opportunity for us and the rest of our work, which is probably 95% of the work being done, stays exactly the same or grows a little. So net-net, we think it's actually beneficial.

Got it. That's helpful. And then GlobeOp, organic growth, 6.7% in the quarter, down from 9.6% last quarter. Anything to read into that or just kind of the natural ebbs and flows of the business.

Yes. I think it just depends on when you -- when some of these very large global macros, you've got to get those assets blocked. And then we get paid when they're not live, but we're going to pay like maybe an 8. So if we're getting, say, $2 million and when we get it live, we get $16 million. It just depends timing-wise on how that works. And then sometimes, there are some renewals where GlobeOp might pick up in a particular quarter based on a renewal.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the call back over to Bill Stone for any closing remarks.

Well, we really believe we had a strong quarter. We believe we have really a lot of momentum. We believe we're bringing up stuff that's going to give us more momentum, and we look forward to talking to you at the end of the second quarter. So thanks for dialing in, and thanks for your questions, and we'll talk to you in about 90 days, I guess.

Thank you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

All right. We will go ahead and get started. Thanks, everybody, for joining us this afternoon. I think it's rainy outside right now, so you're all stuck inside with us. But I think you'll hear a good story here over the next half an hour. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, the capital markets technology analyst here at Raymond James. And up next, we have SS&C Technologies. And then on their behalf, we have Chairman and CEO, Bill Stone, Founder, Chairman and CEO. Bill is going to go through a handful of slides, and then we'll do a little Q&A after that. So Bill, welcome.

Thanks. Thanks a lot, Patrick. And thanks, everybody. Appreciate you coming out late on whatever the day is. I think it's Tuesday, but I appreciate it. And I think other than software companies now not having any terminal value, which as you guys might imagine, I think it's probably mostly bull*, but we will go through why and then hopefully be able to explain that from a standpoint of SS&C, this -- so there's a safe harbor site. So I'm not sure you guys think 1,000 of these are about the same. So we're a leading provider. And why we say that is, is that we have 23,000 clients in 100 offices in 40 countries, and we have about 200 products and services. And we bought Blue Prism in like March of 2022, so about 4 years ago when we got deep into RPA and machine learning and natural language processing and so forth and so on. And we deployed more digital workers and SS&C than Blue Prism ever deployed in their history and faster than they've ever deployed. So we deployed about 4,000 in about 2 years.

And it's really saved us a lot of money. We think, I believe, over the last a couple of years, 3 years, we've added about $1 billion in revenue and not any headcount. So we think that as we go forward, we think we have a big moat. I mean everyone thinks that AI is going to eat everyone's lunch. And I don't think so. I mean I think this has taken me 40 years to put this together. And we -- like I said, we do a lot of things for a lot of people. So one of our clients is Millennium, and they might do 5 million or 10 million trades in a day, and you better get them all in there and you got to get them processed and you got to get it ready to trade the next day because there's 5 million or 10 million more coming tomorrow. And so we do those kinds of things for big sophisticated places. big clients of ours are like Capital Group or JPMorgan or Fidelity, T. Rowe, Raymond James.

And again, it's being able to handle sophisticated portfolios with high IQ people, high IQ clients and low patients. So we do that. We do lots of things throughout this -- we do derivatives, we do mortgage-backed securities. We do every kind of fixed income and every kind of option. And so that's what we do. We try to do hard stuff because we think it's harder to replicate that. And we have 6 different business units that we're kind of chopped up into -- and each of the ones on the left do about $1.5 billion, $1.6 billion in revenue.

And then we have 3 other on the right, intelligent automation and analytics. We have things such as Blue Prism and algorithmics. We own a company that does structures municipal bonds called DBC. We do one that does timeshare wares for like Marriott and Hilton called timeshareware, very innovative name. And we have Intralinks, which is, I think, the largest M&A, virtual data room. So we have thousands of customers in Intralinks. And SS&C Health, which gets more questions than maybe ought to, we have 5% of our revenues there, but we really like the opportunity in health. We think it's one of the largest industries that really need accounting and systems, and that's what we do. And so now we're a big pharmacy benefits manager claims payer. We're not a PBM, but we're a claims payer, and we built a product called DomaniRx, and we think we have a great opportunity. We run at 31% margins in that business. So we're not like we're hemorrhaging or anything.

And we think that that if we can do to the health care industry, what we did to the fund administration industry, we have an opportunity to build a multibillion-dollar business. So that's what we think. AI, as you've all heard over the last 6 weeks is the death now for all software companies. So now we're a services company. We don't really do software. Everybody can pivot, right? So -- but we really do things that are very difficult. And we do it at scale. And there's things that we have helped like St. James Place in London that they're RIA and the big RIA here in the States might have 100 people or 200 or 300 St. James Place has 5,000. So they're doing lots of trades for a lot of different families in the U.K. in Australia and Scotland and so forth and so on.

We also really think that Agentic AI and the other large language models are going to change a lot of what we do. But I tell people all the time that the only real technology that's changed all of our lives has been this one, right? Everybody hates to lose their cell phone. I'm too old, but we used to hate to lose our wallet, but now we hate to lose our cell phone. And I think that's probably what's going to happen with things like AI. All of us use the Internet, we use it all the time, but to change your life, really change your life. I doubt it. And is AI going to change your life? Maybe, but it's not nearly a done deal. And that's the thing you have to see how it plays out. And most of these things, depending on -- they're all spending tens of billions of dollars to build out infrastructure and build out data centers.

And pretty soon, it will take too much energy or will take too much of this or take too much of that. And all of us will have Broadcom knocking on our door asking another $300 million, right? It's like, well, only paid you $100 million last year, but we went $300 million. And that's when we'll have to go see some antitrust lawyers or something. We do acquisitions. We do acquisitions when our clients want something and we can't build it fast enough for them. So we'll go get it. And we'll integrate it into our workflows and make sure that it's what they want because we're really a customer-centric business. And when you have 23,000 of them and you want to keep them, you better be willing to talk to them. You better be willing to answer their questions, you better be willing to meet their needs.

And that's what we've done pretty well. We bought DST Systems in 2018. They had 14,400 people and 1,600 contractors for about the next 4 years, I was in the desert breaking rocks. So changing that company and changing that culture, we finally are making progress. So our global investor in distribution systems, GIs is $1.6 billion, $1.7 billion. It was negative growth. But last year, it was up 6%, 7%. This year, it's going to be up more. We won a piece of business in Australia called Insignia that pays us about $100 million a year, very demanding, but we're doing a great job for.

And that's what changes the entire kind of outlook. We have something called Black Diamond. As I said, it has about 4,000 clients, has over $4 trillion in assets on it. And we bought the wealth business from Morningstar and added 600 clients into Black Diamond last year, and it continues to grow at double digits. And we have integrated it with our trust system. And so now we're teaching the money managers, the wealth managers that, look, your best customers are going to get old like me. You might get rich, but I'm going to give my money away. I'm probably going to give it to my kids or my grandkids, and I bet they go into trust. And if you can't do trust accounting, then you're going to lose your best customers. And these people that manage wealth, they don't want to lose their best customers, and so they won't.

So they will come and buy our stuff. And that's what we constantly -- we just did Calstone, -- we spent over $1 billion. They have 5,000 funds on their network. They're big in tokenization, and they're also big in ETFs and mutual funds, all areas where we're a big player, and now we're bigger. And I just think that we do things like Batteo, which does class action processing. And we can find people money all the time, and they're always happy because we just send them checks. We take a little vague for ourselves, but it's very minor compared to like Broadcom.

So we really think AI is a way more of a tailwind to us than a headwind. Are there risks? Of course, there's risk. There's risk all the time. But you build up a business over 40 years and you have clients that you've had for 35, 40 years, and they know they can count on you and that we're going to accurately do what we say we're going to do, and we're going to protect them just like with AI, we're not putting AI in our products without guardrails. We put it in a box that cannot get out. and that allows it to secure. You won't secure AI. And if you don't think it can hurt you, I think you're mistaken. I was in Abu Dhabi a few weeks ago, and they had a Formula 1 race and everyone is talking about it.

And I know those Formula 1 cars, they're really fast. And they don't just have a gas pedal in those cars, they got to break. And if you start using AI and you don't have a break, you're going to find out that that flying into one of those walls hurts. And I think that's something that people get all excited and then maybe this thing could hurt us as much as it could help us. And I think that's something that people have to pay attention to. And then they go, you're just an old auditor. Well, mostly, I'm a salesman. I did pass the CPA exam, a long time ago and you had to use a pencil. But I think this is what we do as a company. I think we embrace what we do. We like to win. We're unapologetic. We're capitalists. We -- I hope Mami does great in New York City, but I'm still a catalyst. And I think that the things that we're doing across all of our AI and all of our automation first stuff, I think, is really important for our company, and it gives us an opportunity to really excel more so than our competitors and that we've invested a lot more money.

We spent $500 million in cash on R&D, plus I think we've spent $11 billion or $12 billion in acquisitions over the last few years. And so we're investing in our business constantly. And we recognize that the world changes and changes pretty fast, and you have to be pretty nimble. And if you're not, you get run over. And that's the nature. As I tell people all the time, starting a fintech company is not that difficult. building SS&C might be a little more difficult. But any of you have an idea and you have a programmer, you can build an app and you get somebody to buy it. And if they really like it, there'll be a reference and you can sell another one. And you could sell another one and sell another one. And now we have 2,000 people that are selling all the time. And again, the business that we bought, we bought GlobeOp in 2012, I think, and they were a public company traded on the London Stock Exchange. And they were going to go private with TPG and one other private equity firm, and we thought, wow, this is -- they're stealing one great thing about U.K. takeover rules is that you can put in a superior bid and they have to take it.

And so we did that in one Clowop. We did that one FMC. We did that -- another one down in Australia. When we won Insignia in Australia, we took 1,400 people from them. Now we have 3,000 people in Australia. It's a great market. And we think that we have opportunities throughout that to do more and more. And we think that, that's a real opportunity to really -- like I said, we have $400 billion or $500 billion in superannuation assets that are on our systems, and it's a $4 trillion market. And so we have a really great opportunity there. And I think it's stuff that, again, we're solving people's problems, and they trust us and they ought to. We're not perfect by any stretch. But when we screw something up, we tell you. We don't duck and we fix it. And we don't fix it. We might as well duck. So it's something that we take very serious and we take our customers very serious. We make a lot of money.

That's what we're supposed to do. I think our adjusted revenue, obviously, in Q4 '25 was $1.654 billion. It was up 8%. We generated operating cash flow of $1.744 billion. We have about 250 million shares outstanding. That's about $7 a share. So our earnings turn into cash, and we think that's important. As people at SS&C, Bill, you're like a fanatic on cash. I said, yes, they accountants, they lie. You got to look out for those accruals, and they sometimes don't turn into cash. We have a high-margin business model. We do run at 39%, 40% margins, and we have opportunities to grow those. We think AI will help us. We have thousands of people that do reconciliations, we think we might be able to cut that down by a minimum of 50%, maybe as high as 90%. We have to see if it really works.

Everyone says it does. Of course, I would suggest that proof is in the pudding. So we have run this way for a long time. I think we'll continue to run this way. Why not kind of? So we have added assets under administration in our hedge fund business by $637 billion in the last 2 years. I think $637 billion by itself would be a top 10 fund administrator. So we're the biggest. We're getting bigger and stronger, and we have the best funds and we do the best work, and that's why it keeps growing. We spend money. We spent $729 million, and the guy that runs our CTO is -- he likes to spend money. He finds all kinds of little gadgets with lights that shine up and all that kind of stuff, but it runs pretty good most of the time, too. But we have a fund administration business which uses our Geneva platform.

We also license our Geneva platform and 41 other fund administrators run Geneva, like big ones like State Street and Bank of New York, BNP Paribas and a bunch of others. We are pretty focused on our shareholders. One reason is I'm the largest shareholder. So we really focus on some of our shareholders, particularly. But we think it's important to take care of our shareholders, shareholders, employees, communities, suppliers. Those are the people that really matter, and we have focused on them for a long time. We repurchased over $1 billion of shares in '25. We think that's about what we'll do in '26, maybe a little bit more. And we pay down debt, and we look for acquisitions. We like good acquisitions a lot.

And then we were a General Atlantic Partner company for 8 years and a Carlyle company for 9 years. We know all the tricks. So we can kind of deploy money like private equity guys. Our earnings per share in '25 were $6.14, and we're going to expect to do $6.86 in '26, and we'll make more than that in '27. Guidance, which is always fun. But we think we'll do 4% to 8% organic revenue growth, and we'll add a couple more points in acquisitions and continue to grow and continue to throw off tons of cash. So that's pretty much who we are and what we do. We have our tax rate is about 21%, 22%. We hope to make that lower if we can. but we don't run the business to save taxes. Thank you. Enough already.

Thank you have a seat. I think one of the things you said was really interesting that you guys have grown a lot in the last 3 years, and yet you've not really added any headcount and a lot of that's because of AI-related productivity that you've seen. How has that translated in margins? How does it translate to your ability to invest in technology and other things?

Yes. I think primarily, it's allowed us to maintain our margins at 38%, 39%, 40% margins. At the same time, we put 2 million hours into building DomaniRx. We spent another 500,000 hours building Genesis. We've invested heavily in our Eclipse platform and other platforms that we have. And that's what that kind of cash flow does for you.

As you looked at the different parts of your business, where do you expect growth to be led from in 2026? You mentioned in the presentation, GIDS, you expect that to maybe accelerate a little bit further in 2026. What are some of the other areas of strength that you're seeing right now?

I mentioned Insignia, which is GIDS' biggest platform now, but it also has won a number of other superannuation funds in Australia and won a number of pension mandates in Europe, particularly in the U.K. And then our hedge fund business is really strong. The hedge fund industry is strong. We run a couple of indexes. One is how many redemptions are coming into hedge funds, and they're at the lowest they've been in 5 years. And another one is what are the returns? What is the -- and that's been pretty strong to risk-adjusted returns in the hedge fund industry. And that's given us, I think, last quarter, we grew 8%, 9% in the hedge fund business.

And Intralinks saw its growth slowed down in the last couple of years as M&A activity slowed down. Are you guys seeing any green shoots there that give you more optimism for 2026?

We do. I mean they're optimistic. And so I'm optimistic with them, except not quite as optimistic as them because you have to be able to see what happens in the M&A, right? And wars don't usually help M&A. So we would like us to get out of wars if we could and have people do more M&A. And it was also viewed that this administration that maybe the Hart-Scott and Rodino and the other impediments to really getting deals done quickly would alleviate a little bit, and I haven't really seen much of that. It's still a pretty tough game.

Overall, how would you evaluate the health of your clients as it translates to budgets to buy your services and your content and your software? You talked about, I think, health care -- or sorry, hedge funds are generally pretty healthy, but if you look at the share price of some of the private asset owners and there's maybe some concerns there. So how are you generally evaluating the health of your clients as it translates to their budgets?

I run a worldwide sales call every 2 weeks. It takes me a couple of hours, and we have never had more opportunities. So our pipelines are pretty full. We have lots of opportunity. People are trying to get their tech stack in order. As you know, most of Wall Street runs on 50-year-old technology. And so that needs to get upgraded at some point. And you know they're going to have to upgrade it when all the COBOL programmers die. So they're well on their way, but I don't think they're quite there yet. And so that there's a lot of pent-up demand for improved systems. And my view on this health care stuff is that a lot of these great big health care companies run 5, 6, 7 systems, duplicative expenses all over the place, but it's so much revenue in health care. They kind of just loss on buy, but you won't always be able to loss on buy. You're going to have to get more efficient. You're going to have to do things better, and we'll be a natural person right there.

You had a slide where you kind of showed how AI is being implemented within your own products and services right now in each of the different 6 components. Any examples of areas that you're able to monetize AI as you're selling that to clients right now?

Yes. We've had some successes. We've been able to -- we are now reading radiology in the National Health Service in the U.K. So we're reading all the x-rays and all the MRIs, and we've saved them thousands of hours of their radiologists time. That's been very positive. We also have a couple of banks, one that's using them to proof checks as they come through their thing. And so that's taken out a lot of expense. And another one is doing all the credit checking and the AML and KYC stuff for another bank. And so there's -- and we call ourselves customer 0 because we're such a big services user. We have probably 10,000 people that that do accounting and reporting in hedge funds and private equity funds. So we can test these new agents in our business before we roll it out to the public. And we're getting tremendous feedback. The pipelines are growing. We're getting -- so it's a question of you got to monetize it, I realize, but it's -- you got to let some of this stuff gel, right, before you get in such a big hurry that you want to go get that golden goose and get all the eggs out right now. I've always found when you try to do that, you end up with a dead goose. So you want to kind of take it easy when everyone else is running around like a chicken with their head cut off.

In the slide where you talked about the 4% to 8% revenue growth algorithm, there's multiple components, cross-sells, upsells, AI, I'm sure is part of that. But the pricing is part of that. How are you guys thinking about pricing this year as compared to recent past?

I think we've done a pretty good job of getting some lift in our pricing because of the stickiness of our software and the capabilities and training our relationship managers on how to get more. So I think we will probably get maybe an extra 50 to 100 basis points. And last year, I think we got close to 200 basis points on pricing. So maybe we'll get 250, 300 this year.

As you guys are able to use AI to take out costs internally and clients are...

I'm usually def to that question. I mean you're going to come after us. Why don't you go after Broadcom. Why don't you go after Microsoft, why don't you go after Google, why don't you -- I don't know -- we're charging you 5, 6 basis points, you're charging 1.5 and 20. I don't think it's my 5 or 6 basis points that's really crippling you. So we -- and we need to be strong about that. It doesn't do us any good to -- any of you that run businesses understand that pricing is about the most important thing you do. You do the same amount of work, you pay more. You do the same amount of work, you get paid less. I like the first one of those 2. And -- but you got to deliver a great service and you got to be there and you got to be on top of it. And then people don't -- they don't want them. They don't want to fight about it anyway. But you got to give them a reason why they're with you and why they should continue to be with you, and you got to work at it.

And then maybe last for me. This AI-driven market sell-off and all things software, you said terminal value has questions now in people's mind. Does that create more attractive valuations for you guys as your balance sheet leverage is quite low at this point. You have a lot of cash flow. Is there maybe a greater opportunity for you on the M&A front given some of this market dislocation?

Maybe. And it's finding the right opportunities and then making sure that you don't get giddy and you don't have an investment banker really helping you decide what you should do. You need to have analysis on your own and you need to make sure that whatever that judgment comes down is that it's going to hang, right, that you're not on man, I just spent $3 billion and I got a pig in a poke. So you just -- you have to do your own diligence. You have to do the work. And if you don't do the work, you're just impersonating doing the work. And then you -- all of a sudden, you get all surprised and well no kidding. So we're pretty disciplined. We're not as disciplined as I wish we were. But I think what Kurt Seti, I'm from Indiana on celebrating still. But he said that we're -- we have a lot of discipline. We have a lot of teamwork and $300 million. And I really help this football team, I think.

All right. Well, I think on that note, we will wrap it up. There will be a breakout session downstairs. Thanks, everybody, for coming, and thank you very much, Bill.

So why don't we get started?

Next up, we're thrilled to host Rahul Kanwar, the CEO and President of SS&C in our financial conference. I came down just for this because I think it's a terrific outcome for investors and really just a terrific story and we're thrilled to have you. We've done these in the past. One of the things that we started with is just a little bit of background on SS&C.

And part of that is just give the audience -- sometimes I feel like the market don't fully appreciate the complexity behind SS&C and just the evolution over time. And I think it's more relevant given some of the questions in the market today, but maybe just a little bit of background on SS&C and maybe some of the more meaningful acquisitions that have been done, start maybe a little bit on the beginning, a little bit of the 2018 transactions than some of the more recent ones like Calastone.

Great. And thank you for having us, Kevin. We really appreciate it, and thanks, everybody. So SS&C and what we do is we're mission-critical infrastructure for financial services and health care, right? And with that -- there's a lot of words there, so I'll unpack it a little bit. Mission-critical just means that, by and large, the things we do around the world are things that people have to have.

There are things like net asset value calculations and tax reporting and regulatory reporting and reporting out to investors and managing pharmacy transactions and things like that. We've been doing this since 1986. We approach it through the lens of technology and using technology as a way to create real differentiators in our business. So whether that's Advent Geneva, which is one of the products that's probably the flagship product in the alternative industry or Intralinks, which is one of the leading data room products, so technology.

And then -- and huge service components that have grown over time. So our fund administration business is the world's biggest fund administrator, our transfer agency and wealth business is the biggest transfer agent in those kinds of things. So in terms of kind of what you laid out in progression, I got to SS&C in 2005.

And we're at that point, very much a software, a financial services software company and services company, and we had gotten into fund administration, which is kind of what I did at SS&C for the bulk of my career. So we built a fund administration business through a combination of building technology, taking care of customers and doing some strategic acquisitions along the way into the world's biggest administration business in 2018, we then took a pretty transformational leap in terms of we bought 3 businesses in the same year, DST systems being the biggest one, headquartered and I think headquartered in Kansas City took us from 800,000 people up to mid-20s, 25,000, 26,000 people.

We also bought Intralinks, which is data room business, and we bought Eze, which is a front-end order management system. So we've been, for the last 5 years, 6 years, we've been -- in addition to doing all the things we've been working on getting those businesses integrated into our infrastructure and particularly in the case of the DST, get them to embrace sales and marketing, product development, customer attention the way we would want to do that. And we're pleased to see that over the last several quarters, we're seeing that show up in the financial results.

There's no doubt. And one thing I would like to highlight to since 2018, I think you've taken the leverage from about 7 turns of leverage down to 2.7%, and that centers on about $1.5 billion of free cash flow with the market value today about an 8.5% free cash flow yield that's giving you an opportunity to really reallocate some of that capital to share buyback, opportunistic acquisitions and dividend as well.

So maybe talk about that a little bit, too, because it's -- it's one of these really unique opportunities where you're seeing accelerating organic growth, meaningful return to capital to shareholders and powerful margin expansion as well.

And thank you for that. So what we've tried really hard to do is be very disciplined when it comes to things like profitability and cash flow conversion and things like that. We've just -- we pay a lot of attention to that. So our one of the things we do almost immediately on an acquisition is just try to make sure we've got a path to get them to margin improvement and hopefully, to our corporate margins.

So DST is a pretty good example of a little over $2 billion in revenue margins. And 18 months later, they were in the high 30s, right? So that excess EBITDA is obviously pretty valuable, and that helps with the cash flow generation. And once we have the -- it's also being disciplined about CapEx and being disciplined about where we're spending money, it's not -- we need to spend money. We understand that.

We're just making sure it's being done in a productive way. And then using that to give money back to our shareholders and support the stock the best way we can. So in the last couple of years, it's been a mix of acquisitions, always first priority because the idea being that if you can find an acquisition, you're like enough, the return on that over time is going to be pretty significant.

In general, we're looking at acquisitions that either expand our capability mix. So we've got 23,000 customers. If we can find one or 2 or 3 more things for them to buy that usually becomes pretty valuable. So those kinds of things. And then in the absence of that, we'll pay down debt and we'll buy back stock. And we've skewed a little bit more towards buying back stock over the last couple of years, maybe 60-something percent stock buybacks and 30-something percent debt, and that's about where we are.

M&A is in important segue because what thing I feel like you folks over -- consistently over time has always kind of positioned the company for the next phase of disruption, right? And the one I wanted to start with it maybe into the AI question is Blue Prism, right? Because you went out, you bought Blue Prism and that proved to be somewhat depressing a transaction and automation perspective.

But maybe talk to that a little bit? And then part of our thesis is you folks are more relevant than ever in an AI world, but maybe talk to the go-to-market motion on that and bring fence out into where the retention sits today as well as just really, really just powerful growth in your clients in the assets under administrative. Because it's -- obviously, we get the question on AI a lot, and I don't think the really appreciate sometimes how nuanced critical and how important data security and so on and so forth. So maybe you spend some time there.

Sure. Sure. So I think the -- sort of the broader thing that I would orient you to is we view technology broadly as being opportunities for us to improve the quality of our products and services, create better relationships with our customers, get paid more and obviously, have that show up in our financial statements and be able to take care of our shareholders and our employees, right?

So that's awfully broad. And I know it's a little bit like, okay, so what, right? But in some ways, AI is the same as -- it's the same as the Internet. It's the same as mobile. It's the same as cloud native. It's the same as a lot of other things in the sense that, hey, it's an opportunity, right now.

It may be that it's a bigger opportunity, it's a bigger jump, whatever, all those things. But I think that the way we would approach this is the same, which is, okay, how does it help us, right? So and then how quickly we can employ on things that we've locked in on as being positive. So here are some things to think about, right? The first one being a lot of what we do is built around accounting, right? It's built around a general ledger and closed in, right?

So our entire fund administration business is an accounting business, our transfer agency business is accounting for shareholder transactions. Our front office trading systems are accounting for trades and obviously, the related P&L and so on and so forth.

What accounting systems require is they require ledgers and they require that when you close a period, the period sort of stays closed unless something changes, and usually, those aren't very popular. In our experiments to date, and I would say we're more than dabbling, Gen AI and things like that are really good at a lot of things, and they're going to help us, but they're particularly good at leaving things the same, right?

And you can kind of see that in your own lives where if you go and ask ChatGPT a question that you asked last week, they'll get almost the same answer. But it won't be word forward the same. In accounting, it has to be work towards the same. It can't be that the model got smarter, and so the way we calculated your credit default swap portfolio is now a little bit on that kind of stuff, right? So it's just -- it's a mismatched technology.

What we have found is, and we use them all. We use the big commercial providers. We have our own LLMs that we've deployed internally. We've got Blue Prism that we acquired that we have turned into more and more of an agentic AI story, and that's been a really big and powerful driver for us to kind of have head count efficiencies and productivity internally.

So we know it works because we use it every single day. What we have found is that the parts where Gen AI is going to help us is much more on the stuff that's around the general ledger, around the net asset value. So inputs and outputs, right? So it's things like how do I receive data?

How do I put out data, what kind of interfaces can I make available to customers to be able to interact with my applications? And then can I help them analyze text-heavy primarily things in ways that they couldn't do previously. So Intralinks, for example, which is our virtual data room system, now has an AI module where you can go in and say, okay, what's this company all about? And what are the risks? And here's 15 contracts, what are the legal terms.

And here's all the litigation they've disclosed, which one should I worry about and so on and so forth, things that you would spend hours reading things you can now do instantly, which is what you would expect. The other thing that I would just orient you to briefly is, look, we're a tech company. We're deep in this ecosystem with whether it's fund accounting or regulatory reporting or tax reporting or any of those other things, we have access to all the source code, right?

So every one of these applications, we own the source code. If there's somebody that's going to deploy AI or write code faster or better or whatever, we think we have a pretty good chance of doing that. That's been our experience to date. That's why we think we're really well positioned.

I may open it up to the audience if there's any questions around GenAI or AI or anything else at this point just because it's been such a -- and will continue to be hotly debated. But just any questions in the audience or online?

Let's keep going on that because I think one of the other things, too, is maybe talk about the sensitivity of the data, right? I mean when you think about our sense maybe you can help dimensionalize in terms of the caliber of the clients you're servicing, right?

And the importance of data security as well as just not having a public domain, we think is another huge advantage. But maybe talk to that a little bit, particularly given the growth you've had, again, in assets under administration for a real nice tailwind from a private asset allocation as well, just keeping up with complexity and data security theme.

Sure. Well, that's the -- you kind of get to very quickly, right? And Kevin, I appreciate you kind of raising that because you get very quickly from beyond what's the right technical answer, right? And on a vacuum what's the, hey, this is cool technology. Can you use it to, okay, how would you go about doing that, right? And then the reality is you've got these big financial institutions and in some cases, health care institutions that are heavily regulated.

They got all kinds of considerations, both government imposed and off themselves, they're not going to take their client data. They're not going to take their investment data. They're not going to take their data that's not publicly available and go loaded up into some commercially available generative AI type model to be able to -- it's just -- it's not going to happen, right? Because even now, what that model learns from and how it reuses what it learns, is somewhat opaque, right? Nobody really knows, right? And there's all kinds of confidentiality issues with that.

So instead, I think what we have found, what we're going to do and what we're doing already is we built a product called AI Gateway which allows us to run those large language models within SS&C in a very trusted, controlled, secure way when we can compartmentalize each customer's data to themselves and make available to them the functionality without kind of not knowing where the information went. And that's been pretty popular.

The other part of this in terms of how you go about rolling all this out is, we're talking about organizations that already use dozens of systems. They might have something to manage their clients. They certainly have a finance department, and they've got their own ledgers, they've got reporting systems. They've got all kinds of things. And really, what they're looking for is a way to bring information that's resident in these systems together so that then you can use that to do useful things. That's what we would call orchestration.

So we've got a product called Work HQ similar to our product called AI Gateway, that's all it does. It does orchestration. It builds the integration points for you, brings the data together and then allows you to use some of these technologies in a very, very controlled and secure way. Those are ways for us to take advantage of the opportunity that's out there, but in a way that's comfortable for our clients.

I think you're seeing it. And one of the things maybe we could talk a little bit about is the effect you're seeing across your organization internally because you've obviously been able to deliver some real nice margin expansion. And I think part of that is you've been able to really manage some of the head count growth, right, relative to history? And what's also impressed us a lot is some of the larger superannuation wins you've had, which maybe help us understand a little bit, probably not at SS&C kind of margins coming in and you've still been able to deliver the margin. So it's had a really nice impact across the core business, which I would think in theory for an opportunity to reinvest a little bit more too. Maybe talk about the margin impact.

Yes. So I think that the -- just maybe one final point on the AI thing, which kind of leads into all of this is we really do view technology as sort of being the way for us to drive the right operating metrics over time, whether that's profitability or the right level of service for the customers or something else. And so we have been able to, over the last 3 years or so, have virtually no growth in head count outside of if we do a lift out or an acquisition or something, keep head count pretty stable, even though the company has been growing.

And I've been here, like I said, since 2005. So a little over 20 years. I've never seen that before. I've almost always seen when revenue goes up, head count goes up. I've never seen it just stay the same. And part of the reason we've been able to do it is because of this Blue Prism acquisition and the technology that we're rolling out across the place. So that's a really powerful story for our customers, many of whom are facing the same pressures that we're facing, right? And they would like to have better product, take advantage of the technology and at the same time, manage their expense base.

And so when they see us do it and the way we're building these things, we're building them so that they can be deployed externally. So if we build something that scrubs credit agreements, we can go give it to a credit fund. When we build something that validates investor statements, that we can go give it to anybody that has third-party client statements that they put out. So that's been really powerful. So leading into the lift out part of the conversation, it's very, very relevant because in most cases, those companies are looking for the same thing.

They have these infrastructures. They've got a lot of good people. They've got systems that they rely on, but they know they've got to take whatever that next step is. They've either got to upgrade their systems or they got to keep up with managing the head count or they're starting a new fund, and they've got some new regulatory requirement, they go into some new geography or whatever the case is.

We're a natural home for that operation because they think that over time, they trust us to both modernize it, bring the latest technology, take advantage of AI and some of these other things, make sure the employees have a good home and that they can have a career path that goes beyond that one customer. And so that's why we've been pretty successful with that.

And it's a fascinating shift, right? Because part of what you're seeing in the market perpetually is with these LLM risk of more in-sourcing and you're seeing accelerated outsourcing, right? And part of that, I think, is part of our view is there's more of a skills mismatch from your clients internally. And they'd rather have you take that critical function as well as the ability to source talent and accounting certain areas haven't come out of public account and myself, the technology was driven more by a lack of ability to source, right?

And I think this is just going to be another lever for you to really drive into. I wanted to -- because we didn't talk about it earlier, but one of the things maybe talk about Calastone just a little bit because with the blockchain technology you have through that acquisition, again, historically, you folks have really done a nice job, either building or acquiring technology and redeploying that across the enterprise. So maybe talk about the strategic rationale for Calastone and how you see opportunities to deploy that across existing SS&C?

Sure. And look, Calastone's a great business. We're really excited about it. It's got good numbers, standalone, right? So good growth numbers, good profitability numbers, and obviously, we will preserve those. But we also think that there's a fair amount of synergy. And the synergy on the revenue side is Calastone is the biggest part of their business, it's a network. It's a way to automate many of the flows that come into asset flows into regulated funds. So connecting the intermediaries, the distributors, the folks that manage the customers with the funds themselves.

So we've got a much bigger pool for them to attract to their network, right? And then you get the network. You just get, okay, here's another 1,000 fund companies or whatever it is that you can put on the platform. And so that's one part of it. The other part of it, which has become much more of a topic of late is this tokenization and can you sell funds via tokens, things like that. I would say that it's not a huge part of our business right now, but we have all the capability.

We've got maybe a dozen or so customers that either already have tokenized funds or are in the process of setting up tokenized funds. We're going to handle those funds for them. We have ones that we're doing today. Maybe 2 things that I would just point out, one being a tokenized is still a fund. It's still got regulatory reporting, tax reporting, virtually all of the work with the exception that the investor onboarding process, the process for accepting those transactions.

Maybe a little more automated than it was, which we welcome because we -- that efficiency is kind of accrues to our benefit as well. So -- and so far, that's what we've seen. In a dozen or so funds that we have and we're doing all the same things with the exception that we've actually -- there's actually some new work being created because somebody's got to tokenize the asset itself and then put it on a blockchain somewhere, right? And that's still a part that Calastone does. And so it gives us one more capability.

Switching gears us a little bit to just the income statement role. You've had an incredible amount of momentum on the organic growth. And I think at the '24 Investor Day, build it out on 4% to 8% organic growth overall. And I think there is some initial skepticism to that. And over the last 2 years, you've produced 5% on average and the 26% guidance applies 5% too. Maybe talk about some of the building blocks that afford you the opportunity really -- and we've been pretty consistent with this, drive a structural change in the organic growth in the business.

And we thought about it. I think part of it is price, part of its retention. Part of it is the AUA. But -- and one of the things, I think, that's been really underestimated is the shift in things in particular, in terms of the growth contributor there. Maybe talk about the evolution, it feels a little bit more like a revolution. Just given what we think is a structurally higher level of organic growth within a range?

I think it's -- look, I think it's maybe 3 or 4 things that I would point to. One being that the businesses that have not yet been growing. And I'm talking about a couple of years ago, had not at that point, been growing as much, just how much work we put into making sure we had the right leadership, making sure we had the right innovation process, making sure we were taking advantage of sales and marketing in the best way possible. And then paying attention to our customers, right, and having really satisfied customers that would be references and good partners for us.

And so that's what we've been -- a big part of gives is -- it's a lot of little things, but it's execution. It's taking care of customers. It's focusing on product, focusing on sales and marketing. And then when you start to turn some of those pieces around the pieces that have always grown nicely, like fund administration and wait and some of the other ones, they just have to keep doing what they're doing, maybe do it a little bit better.

And I think when you see that come together, the other thing to point out is, look, it's not all perfection, right? We had a pretty good '25, but we did that without a lot of help from Intralinks because we had a tougher M&A market. We need intelligent automation to grow a little faster than it did in '25. We need health care to grow a little faster than it did in '25. And we think those things will happen, right? So there's -- we are poised, I think, perhaps to kind of improve from here, but we've made a lot of progress.

Maybe talk to health care a little bit because I think you're right, there's been a lot of investment there, and it feels like things are starting to align where there could be potential for that business to maybe start to contribute a little bit more than it has historically.

Yes. Look, I think the -- we're really proud of the fact that we built a large-scale system cloud-native, brand-new, over 1 million hours of code and deployed it successfully and it's used in production and it does millions and millions of those transactions. That's the money Rx, right? And we think that in the pharmacy space, it's the only new system at scale.

There's some fintech start-ups, but they have hardly any customers on there. And most of the people are running on pretty dated technology. So then it's, okay, how do you turn that into stuff that shows up in the financial statements. And I think we would say over time, right. So we're working on RFPs now for 1127 and 1128 and things like that. Some of our clients have trusted us with giving us some portion of the operation, sort of the lift-out scenario, which we very much appreciate, and we think that's positive in both directions. So we do think that our bet on health care has an outsized return. In the meantime, it's a relatively small part of SS&C that's profitable and is moving along okay. But we think that the point in time where it starts to return much more is coming.

If we just moving down the P&L a little bit more, there's obviously been a really nice margin story. And if you look at the margin trajectory of the business, there were some impacts in '22, '23 from Blue Prism as well as just some general inflation out there that you folks were able to absorb. Maybe talk about the margin trajectory of the business and how you're thinking about some of those GenAI efficiencies, philosophically in terms of reinvestment as opposed to maybe sharing that with investors more broadly? And does that afford you again an opportunity to then take on some of these larger wins like you've won in Australia, right, in terms of just bringing in these larger contracts that you're able to fully synergize over time?

Yes. And that's a -- on those lift-out contracts, it is, as you noted, they don't -- they -- obviously, they don't start at our corporate margins. In some cases, they might start and we'll try to get them to 30%, 40% over 18, 24 months, something like that. That is what we would view as a pretty reasonable kind of time frame.

So as we look at that margin opportunity in our guidance for 2026, we committed to 50 basis points of margin improvement. We're going to end the year or try to end the year at 40%. So leave at 40%, whether that's in Q4 or something like that. And that brings us kind of back to where we were before we did all these acquisitions and have been entering in. And look, obviously, what's not included in there is if we do another big acquisition or if we do a number of big lift-outs in which case, they ought to be revenue opportunity that goes with that.

We're finding that the margin part of this equation, while it's not comfortable, and it's hard work and people have to focus on it, is very much within our control, right? So in effect, what we're doing with automation and productivity is very good counter to some of the inflationary pressures that are out there. So our -- like everybody else, our technology providers, third parties as great as they are, would like price increases. Our employees get raises, our health care costs go up, so on and so forth, right? It's inflationary. There's a lot of things that are inflationary.

What head count and productivity do for you, they allow you to offset that and then get some improvement. And I think that, that's a dial you have to decide how much you're going to turn. We have chosen to turn it in a pretty moderate way because we're not trying to be disruptive. We're trying to focus on growth and get a little bit of margin improvement along the way.

That's helpful. And obviously, you've seen that accrete to the cash flow very consistently. So maybe talk about some of the free cash flow growth. And then just philosophy around capital return? Because again, one of the things we focused on is just the meaningful shift away from deleveraging really to return on capital to shareholders and the dividends had a terrific, very consistent growth, but also you've been able to really lean into the buyback even a little bit more. And think part of that is just where the leverage sits and maybe talk about the range and free cash flow more broadly?

Yes. I think in terms of capital allocation priorities, at least in the short term, probably pretty similar to what we've been doing in the last couple of years. We're a little more secured towards buybacks, particularly if -- at these kinds of valuations and share price kind of ranges. We'll still pay down debt, right? So it will still be -- and then we'll look for acquisitions.

A lot of that -- to come back to something you said, Kevin, that I didn't address we don't really think -- we think AI is a huge opportunity for us. We're taking advantage of that opportunity every place we can, and we think that will continue. We don't think that it requires some step change in R&D spend or something like that. We think that this free cash flow will be available for us to use in much the same way.

Most of our philosophy on technological spend is, if you spend it wisely, it's much more about did you have 3 or 4 smart people leading the project? And then -- and that matters a lot more than did you have 50 or 100 or 150 people working on it, because it's technology. It's not supposed to be brute force. It's supposed to be intellect. And so we think there will be lots of opportunity for us to kind of continue to return money to shareholders the way we have been.

Your point on the tech spend, too. I mean you have a certain amount of capacity internal as well as balance with some of the external providers to that forge ability to be a little bit more efficient with that spend too, right?

No, that's exactly right. So we're always just trying to preserve options, right, more than anything else. That's true in our AI strategy. It's true in our data center and cloud strategy, where we're mostly -- we run our own private cloud, and we have a little bit of third-party cloud providers, right? And then you constantly get to say, okay, how much is this costing me? How much is this costing me and nobody has too big of an influence on.

You don't ever really want to not that anybody would ever do it, except they do it pretty frequently, you don't really want to give somebody the power to be able to come in and impose whatever price increase they want and you sort of feel like you have no choice. So we try to leave ourselves with choices.

So maybe switching gears a little bit to the competitive dynamics because I haven't covered the stock for a while, there were some new entrants in the space in '21. A couple of those are in the process and going private again. Maybe talk about how you've seen the competitive dynamics change over the last 5 years, existing players, newer kind of technology that you've had to kind of compete against maybe talk to that.

And I think a lot of it you centers on that doesn't get fully appreciated really in oil in the source code, right? And that's been a huge point of differentiation for you folks, particularly given the scale of your clients, but maybe talk to the competitive environment a little bit and using that more as a proxy for what the future can hold. Obviously, the future is a little bit harder to predict, but you've had a pretty good track record for 30-odd years now.

No, I appreciate that. And look, I think it does come down to the strength of the customer relationship more than anything else. If you have strong relationships, and we think we do, and lots of them. And you're doing mission-critical kind of comes back to, you're doing really important things for them, things that have to be correct, right, whether it's things with their end clients or things with regulators, then chances that you build some trust.

And if you build some trust, they're more likely to do more things with you to take advantage of whether it's taking advantage of AI or it's taking advantage of tokenization or it's taking or partnering with you on some funded development for some project or something like that and that's dynamic we see.

What we see is our customers are actively grappling with these problems. And a lot of times, they'll trust us with a project. And sometimes, they'll trust us, hey, just take it. Just do a lift out, just handle it. We trust you to do it, right? And that's hard to replicate or combat if you're a startup. Right, because look, what start-ups have is some technology, right, some really cool technology. And we like to think we have really cool technology, too, and we can build more technology than most people can -- but hey, they got a great tool.

But then you go into a great big place and you're trying to sell them a great tool, and you solve one problem, right, where we're trying to solve 30 or 40 problems around the world at scale. We like our chances. And that's kind of been -- that's played out pretty well for us.

I think you see it, right? I mean your retention in the most recent quarter, I think it was 96.4%, something like that, right? And it's been increasing over time as has your clients' asset allocation has increased pretty meaningfully as well. Maybe talk to that a little bit as well just because there's been a lot of success there.

Yes. And also worth pointing out that these retention metrics are they're sort of the most punitive possible, right. All it is, is client losses, there's no credit for price increases or upsells or anything. So we're doing gross. We're not doing net, right? So as a measurement of -- if you're talking about like a couple of hundred basis points, whether it's 96 and change or 97 and change.

For the most part, the biggest part of that is always going to be the funds of the clients that shut down over the course of the year, and that's stayed the same, right? So when there's more volatility that we get a little more of that when there's less, we get a little less of that. But in general, some percentage of people either get acquired or decide to close down, and that's the nature of it. And so it does speak to the strength of the business that, in general, these are very, very sticky relationships.

You're in there, you're in there absent some real dissatisfaction, People really don't want to switch. Now sometimes that can work against us when we're trying to go win new customers. But the reality is that for whatever it is, there's plenty of dissatisfaction out in the marketplace. So that hasn't been taking market share and winning new business and taking away from other fund administrators or other providers, there's been plenty of opportunity.

I think, Rahul, you've had success to spin out, right, in terms of -- if you have a lower hedge fund. And again, I kind of -- they see somebody, you typically win that business as well. And I think there's been some recent examples of that.

Exactly right.

Yes. So any questions from the audience? Anything we didn't ask -- I mean you feel really, obviously, operationally, really, really strong, but just anything you want to share with the audience just given there's been so much market uncertainty and you folks continue to power through them and you just reported a terrific quarter, really, really good '26 guidance with accelerating growth and margin expansion, everything you'd expect, but just anything else to as we close this out here.

Yes. I would just say, while past performance, I think investment guys say this all the time, right? Past performance is not necessarily indicative, but it's usually a pretty good leading indicator, right? So we do think that what we've done really over our history and certainly what we've done over the last 6 years or so, is pretty indicative of what you're going to continue to see us do. So I think you'll continue to see us pay a lot of attention to those customer relationships and keep retention at a very high level.

I think you'll continue to see us to opportunistically make acquisitions where they extend our product set or give us some capability, whether that's Calastone or Blue Prism or Curo or any of the other ones. And we have benefited -- and you'd have to -- this is a little bit of a history lesson, you'd have to go back to 2007 to figure this out.

But when mobile first became a big deal, we took more fund administration market share than probably any other time in our history because we built the mobile apps, and we were in the -- we were the first ones in the Apple App Store and all these things. Some of these technological advancements, it's those kinds of opportunities, right?

So obviously, look, there are some concerns and fears and they're, in some cases, warranted. But you always think about who's best positioned to take advantage. And we would say as incumbent with access to the source code in really protected markets, we're really well positioned to take advantage.

Well, I think you see that one other -- maybe just in the closing remarks here, there's been some sizable transactions in the sector, right, whether it was a dense being acquired by NASDAQ, SimCorp being acquired by Deutsche Borse and maybe not the same markets per se, but you can see the value of those assets given some of the multiples and I'm not implying that's where just they've been outsized, the type multiples that these companies have paid up for. And it feels like from a competitive perspective, you folks have only gotten better positioned.

Yes. And so the conversation I was having earlier with somebody was private equity administrators, right? And private equity fund administrators and what kind of multiples they get. We have the biggest private equity fund administration business in the world, right? It's growing faster, it's more profitable. It's got more, you want to try to put a multiple on that. I think you get a great big number, and it's just trying to appreciate all the parts.

Great. Great.

Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Thanks, everybody.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Colby and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the SS&C Technologies Q4 and Full Year 2025 Earnings. [Operator Instructions]. I will now turn the call over to Justine Stone, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Hi, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining us for our Q4 and full year 2025 earnings I'm Justine Stone, Investor Relations for SS&C. With me today is Bill Stone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rahul Kanwar, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Brian Schell, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, we need to review safe harbor statement. Please note the 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 provisions 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 our most recent annual report on Form 10-K which is on file with the SEC and can be accessed on our website. These forward-looking statements represent our expectations only as of today, February 5, 2026. While the company may elect to update these forward-looking statements, it specifically disclaims any obligation to do so.

During today's call, we'll be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures. 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 welcome, everyone. We are all well aware of the set-off of software company shares following the recent release of AI-driven automation tools across legal, sales and marketing and accounting functions. We take all competitors seriously, but we strongly believe we have a wide and deep moat, not easily navigated. For decades, we've built deep expertise across sophisticated assets and strategies, and that capability remains a trademark and a key driver of our long-term success. .

We are functional experts and our software is mission-critical. We believe the AI boom will be a tailwind and are deploying rapidly and with conviction. As we accelerate adoption of these solutions, we see a clear advantage. We are uniquely positioned and structurally protected through the ownership of our software and code enabling us to leverage AI in ways that only we can for our customers.

Fourth quarter results demonstrate SS&C's strength with record adjusted revenue of $1.655 billion, up 8% and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.69. An 18% increase. We delivered record adjusted consolidated EBITDA of $651 million, up 9% and adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin of 39.3%. Fourth quarter adjusted organic revenue growth was 5.3%, with performance driven by continued strength in GIDS with 13.2% revenue growth and loop with 9.6% revenue growth. We continue to focus on international growth opportunities and on execution for our clients. Globo is seeing new opportunities in Australia, leveraging our recent superannuation mandates.

Prospects include local Australian firms and global firms. Intralinks despite signs of improvement with modest growth in Q4, and we are seeing momentum in 2026. For the 12 months ended December 31, 2025, cash from operating activities was [ $1.745 million or $1.745 billion ], up 26% year-over-year on a weighted average diluted per share basis, it was $6.89, up $1.42 from 2024. In Q4, we returned $384 million to shareholders, which included 3.7 million shares repurchased for $319 million at an average price of 85.81% and $66 million in common stock dividends.

We allocated over $1 billion in share repurchases in 2025 purchasing 12.3 million shares at an average price of [ 84.12 ]. Our strong cash flow characteristics allow us to return capital to our shareholders in multiple ways. At current levels, our convictions around share repurchase has strengthened and will prioritize and we will prioritize repurchases, absent high-quality accretive acquisitions.

We are pleased with the early progress of the Cayston acquisition. Since closing, we've partnered with key leadership and operational talent and deepen client relationships. We are seeing strong engagement and collaboration opportunities with our clients and are able to go live with projects strategically meaningful to them.

We expect momentum to continue as we move through the year. I'll now turn the call over to Rahul to discuss the quarter in more detail.

Thanks, Bill. We delivered a strong quarter with solid organic growth and continued margin expansion. We are optimistic about the future as we look at the durability of what's driving that growth. Across the business, we're seeing a consistent trend of clients making long-term decisions to outsource simplify and scaled our accounting models on our platform. These are multiyear partnerships that create recurring revenue, expand over time and provide clear visibility into future growth. Lift-outs are a good example of this dynamic. Mandates such as Insignia and Humana reflect a repeatable process where clients entrust us with complex mission-critical operations at scale.

These engagements ramp in a disciplined way and often lead to broader adoption of additional services across our platform. The fact that we continue to see similar opportunities emerge across regions and business lines, whether in GlobeOp, GDS or health, reinforces our confidence that this is a sustainable growth engine. We see the continued advancement of AI as a positive for our business. We're well positioned given our large data sets, deprocessing technology long-standing client relationships and our ability to deploy solutions at scale in regulated environments.

The work we do is highly expertise driven, requires a deep understanding of complex instruments, global regulation and how information is used by tax authorities, institutional investors and other sophisticated counterparties. AI working alongside with the teams we've built enhances efficiency, accuracy and scalability over time strengthening our competitive position and supporting sustainable organic growth.

With that, I'll turn it over to Brian to walk through the financials.

Thanks, Rahul, and good day, everyone. Unless noted otherwise, the quarterly comparisons are -- Q4 2024. We -- as disclosed in our press release, our Q4 2025 GAAP results reflect revenues of $1.654 billion, net income of $193 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.77. Our adjusted non-GAAP results include revenues of $1.655 billion, an increase of 8% and adjusted diluted EPS of $1.69, an 18% increase.

The adjusted revenue increase of $124 million was primarily driven by incremental revenue contributions from GIDS of $49 million, GlobeOp of $40 million and acquisitions of $27 million, offset by a favorable impact from foreign exchange of $16 million.

As a result, adjusted organic revenue growth on a constant currency basis was 5.3%, and our core expenses increased 4.6% or $44 million, which also excludes acquisitions and is on a constant currency basis. Adjusted consolidated EBITDA was a record $651 million, reflecting an increase of $52 million or 8.7% and a margin of 39.3%, a a 20 basis point expansion. Net interest expense for the fourth quarter of 2025 was $111 million, a decrease of $2 million, primarily reflecting lower short-term rates.

Adjusted net income was a record $425 million, up 16.8%, and adjusted diluted EPS was $1.69, an increase of 18.2%. Our effective non-GAAP tax rate was 19.2% for the fourth quarter of 25%. Our resulting 2025 full year effective non-GAAP tax rate is 22%. Note for comparison purposes, we have recast the 2024 adjusted net income to reflect the full year effective tax rate of 23.1%. The diluted share count is down to $251.5 million from $254.5 million year-over-year, primarily as a result of share repurchases.

Cash flow from operating activities grew 26% and our operating cash flow per share was $6.89, driven by growth in earnings, improved working capital utilization and lower cash taxes paid. Our full year cash flow conversion has been above 100% for the past 3 years. SS&C ended the fourth quarter with $462 million in cash and cash equivalents and $7.5 billion in gross debt. Our net debt was $7 billion, and our last 12 months consolidated EBITDA was $2.5 billion, resulting net leverage ratio is 2.8x. As we look forward to the first quarter and full year of 2026 with respect to guidance, we will continue to focus on client service and assume that retention rates will be in the range of our most recent results.

We will continue to manage our business to support our long-term growth and manage our expenses by controlling and lining variable expenses, increasing productivity and leveraging technology to improve our operating margins and effectively investing in the business through marketing, sales and R&D. Specifically, we have assumed short-term interest rates to remain at current levels and effective tax rate of approximately 22.5% on an adjusted basis. Capital expenditures to be 4.4% to 4.8% of revenues and share buybacks and debt reduction levels remained similar to 2025, but subject to changes based on market conditions, as Bill noted in his earlier comments.

The first quarter of '26, we expect revenue to be in the range of $1.608 billion to $1.648 billion and 5% organic growth at the midpoint. Adjusted net income in the range of $404 million to $420 million; interest expense, excluding amortization of deferred financing costs and original in discount in the range of $102 million to $104 million, diluted shares in the range of $249.2 million to $250.2 million and adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $1.62 to $1.68. For the full year 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $6.654 billion to $6.14 billion and 5.1% organic revenue growth at the midpoint, targeted annual EBITDA expansion of 50 basis points, the goal of 40% margin in Q4. Adjusted net income in the range of $1.662 billion to $1.762 billion, adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $6.70 to $7.2 reflecting approximately 12% growth at the midpoint and cash from operating activities to be in the range of $1.73 billion to $1.83 billion, again, translating to over 100% cash conversion. And now back to Bill.

Brian, I'd like to summarize our key takeaways from today's call, record fourth quarter revenues, earnings, cash flows and over $1 billion worth of share repurchases in 2025. We're excited about the early execution with the Colston acquisition and other lift out wins and the opportunities they present for growth and geographic expansions. Our investments in artificial intelligence and automation are paying off, and we're confident in our ability to drive margin expansion.

As we look to 2026, we believe we are set up for success and will drive long-term growth and profitability for our shareholders. With that, I would now open it up to questions.

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from Jeff Schmitt with William Blair.

Question on the health care business. That had a tough quarter from an organic perspective and what is its seasonally strongest quarter. So could you maybe talk about what drove that weakness? And why do you think that business hasn't seen maybe better momentum yet, just given how much effort you've put into it? .

I think that health care is a long-term play in trying to go quarter-to-quarter or even year-to-year is a tough comp. I think last fourth quarter, we had large license sales. We've had some large license sales in the fourth quarter of this year, but a notable multimillion-dollar license closed in the first 10 days of January of 2026.

So it's lumpy. They're highly regulated even when you've been in a highly regulated businesses like financial services, and so although there are headwinds in health care, it's still an enormous market. We have new technology. We're bringing up Anasys, which has been rewritten to a very large degree, and we're going to have a 1 health with Amisys and DeMane, and we're excited about offering that for both medical as well as pharmacy.

And so we have some optimism but certainly, we would prefer to have more growth than what we're having, but we're still running at pretty healthy EBITDA margins, and we're managing the business in a way where -- it's adding to our cash flow. It's not really detracting from our earnings.

And obviously, it's not accelerating our growth rate. But at the same time, it's a $260 million, $270 million business, and we like its opportunities for the long haul.

Okay. And then could you provide an update on the Element relationship where does that stand? Is there still a chance they could onboard some of their business on to DomineRx?

DomaniRx is certainly ready and waiting -- at the same time, Elavon is a very large health care organization and their relationships with other very large health care organizations are long-standing and they're difficult to break. And the original sponsor at Elavon has moved on several years ago. And so often when you lose the sponsor, it's hard to find another one.

So it's not unexpected. But we think we have a lot of things that entice Elevance, and they've made a big investment. So we think there's still raise of sunshine at the end of the tunnel.

Your next question comes from the line of Kevin McVay with UBS.

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

Good afternoon, everyone. Great to see the encouraging 2026 guidance. I wanted to ask a question on -- within alternative fund administration. It looked like the fourth quarter had an exceptional growth in assets under administration. Can you talk a little bit about that? And does that maybe indicate that the alternative fund administration business can grow maybe faster in 2026 than it did in 2025.

Peter, there's a couple of things going on there. One, it did have a very good organic growth, both quarter and year -- and similarly, we've got high expectations for 2026. Included in the fourth quarter change in particular, is our acquisition of Curo Fund Services. So I think the breakdown is about $92 billion of that change is organic and the rest is the acquisition.

Okay. That's helpful. Okay. That makes sense. And then just in terms of the Intelligent Automation business, which includes the Blue Prism business, just remind us that business is seem to be struggling a little bit from just delays in decision-making. I guess how are you feeling about that business going into 2026. Do you think that can approximate the overall corporate organic growth rate?

We do. We actually feel really good about that business going into 2026. Similar to kind of the comment we just made about health care, that business, in particular, had a really large license in Q4 the year before. So part of when you kind of look at this quarter-over-quarter, those are some of the changes that kind of have an impact. But in general, many of our comments around AI are centered at least in part on that business.

So that's where we're doing the bulk of our innovation relating to whether that's AI agents, use of large language models, use of our orchestration platforms, governance around AI, really, a lot of the things that we're rolling out across the business come out of there, we perfect them in different others of our businesses and then sell them out. So we're really pretty optimistic about the growth prospects for that in '26.

Your next question comes from the line of Alexi Gogolev with JPMorgan.

This is Ellis pit on for Alex. So first, I was hoping to ask about the organic growth guide. Your 1Q and full year '26 guide is basically the same. Do you have anything to call out regarding the cadence of organic growth throughout the rest of the year?

Look, I think what it really reflects is that our business is getting stronger, right? And as our business gets stronger, we have more predictability and the recurring revenue is stronger, right? So we're able to, in effect, forecast and maintain the -- where traditionally, you might have some more in the back end of the back half of the year, we're basically all year going to be pretty strong.

And hopefully, by the time we get to Q3 and Q4, we've got an opportunity to get even better than this.

Got it. Very clear. And as a follow-up, given the breadth of your business, I'm sure you've seen AI fintechs emerging in the landscape, how are you maintaining your competitive advantage?

Well, I think that we see fintechs, it's not very difficult to start a fintech, right? And have an idea, get a program are a little a little lag. Now I'm talking little AI and you got you've got an entree with some spikes in it. But to build an organization that has 29,000 people, 23,000 products or 23,000 customers, several hundred products and services.

I think it's a little more daunting. And what we see with AI and people sometimes forget that -- our clients are SEC regulated organizations are CMS regulated organizations. Large language models sometimes have hallucinations, those regulators, they don't really quite understand us tell the last problem station. It's like a battery, we'll get over it. I don't think that flies. So we're very control conscious. Our clients are conservative by nature right? And they're managing other people's money or the health of other people.

So we think that were positioned and how we conduct ourselves is the right way to do it. And I think that we have the financial wherewithal to invest very, very wisely. We've spent hundreds of million dollars on our development that we've done, and we're still maintaining in excess of 39% margins and we think we'll close out 2026 at 40% margin.

So we're optimistic, and we think we have good reasons for being.

[Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from Dan Perlin with RBC Capital Markets.

It's Matt Roswell on for Dan. I guess 2 questions, if I could. First, also investment management, I mean, it seems like organic growth ticked up a little bit this quarter as we think about kind of that business over the next to medium term, where do you think the organic growth could be and should be.

Again, I think we're very optimistic about our Wealth Management business. Our Black Diamond platform is we think the best in the industry. We have other platforms like our trust accounting that we have integrated with Black Diamond, Black Diamond has approaching $3.5 trillionm it's administrating for its various RIAs. I think we have something close to 4,000 RIAs that are using that platform.

We have integrated a bunch of the Morning store that we had the -- we bought their wealth management platform, and we've already moved over 500, 600 Morningstar clients on to Black Diamond. So we're very optimistic about that business. And I think that we have a lot of expertise and a lot of capability and I think that, that's going to be -- 1 is and will continue to be 1 of our crown jewel.

And can you talk a little bit about the M&A environment? I mean you all have done some smaller pieces this year. I guess, what are you seeing out there in terms of asking prices, availability, et cetera?

When you've been doing this for 4 decades, and they start calling a $1 billion acquisition like Callison, I think small pieces a little bit bigger -- we're constantly looking. We would -- we think we have the leverage down to a point where we could do a large acquisition.

And if we could find the right one, we would and we might find some of our competitors under different pressures than we're under. We run our own data centers, right? We have our own private cloud. We have our clients really secured. Plus, we have a large-scale services business that we get to really test out our software before we send it into our client base.

So we think that we're well positioned. We think as far as all the fintechs out there that we're very well positioned and that our earnings, our cash flow to really give us a lot of flexibility.

Excellent -- congratulations on the nice numbers.

Thank you. And with no further questions in queue, I'd like to turn the conference back over to Bill for closing remarks.

There's always a lot of things that happen in the market. When I first started in this business, we were selling to broker-dealers, 1986 and early '87, then October '87 happened in the market went down 25% in 1 day, and that was the end of that. So you learn to be a little bit nimble, right? And that's what SS&C has been for 40 years. .

And I think we have the talent and capability to continue, and that's what we're going to do. So we appreciate you listening in, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. I am very pleased to have Brian Schell. Thank you for joining us from SS&C. SS&C is always a very interesting company to talk about. You guys have done a lot of things over the years. But as a quick introduction, I'm James Faucette, I lead fintech research here at Morgan Stanley. And like I said, I'm very pleased to have Brian, CFO of SS&C. Maybe we'll just start, Brian, and I'd love to hear how you describe SS&C in 1 or 2 sentences because I have my own way of talking about it, but I'd love to hear how you do.

The elevator pitch to my family who is not as financially oriented, I would say, if you manage assets, you're likely using SS&C to help you manage them in your middle or back office broadly.

Right. That's right. And I think that it's an interesting company because over the years, you guys have Bill in his leadership position, et cetera, have created a lot of value and grown the business tremendously. At the same time, the growth dynamics and what -- the way that you're pursuing growth is changing a little bit. Like historically, Bill focused a lot on finding the right assets to integrate into the business, et cetera. Now you have a broad portfolio of products and looking to continue to expand those, but doing so more from an organic perspective than maybe historically. So maybe with that as a backdrop, let's talk about the organic growth component. You delivered just over 5%, 5.1% organic growth in Q1, 3.5% in the second quarter, 5.2% in 3Q, and you're talking about 4.5% year-over-year, including Battea in 4Q, and that was an acquisition.

Maybe we can talk a little bit about that. But in context of your targeted 4% to 8% medium-term organic growth rate, talk to us about both the drivers of the improvement in organic growth that we've seen thus far in '25 and your confidence in being able to sustainably deliver on that medium-term range?

Yes. I would say it's a combination. First of all, thank you for the invite and being here. This is a terrific opportunity to meet with a group of investors that it wouldn't normally happen in North America per se. So thank you again. The -- I would say it's a combination of, I would say, client success and client growth and what they're doing and what we're seeing pursuit of, I'll call it, risk across various asset classes and us pursuing a broader share of wallet and being able to offer more services to our existing clients at the end of the day, right? So primarily, if you look at the 2 of our largest businesses with GlobeOp, which is primarily the fund administrator for hedge funds, private markets and PE firms and private credit, retail alts, real estate.

And that business has grown very well for us, again, somewhat driven by new logo growth that was generated a couple of years ago and then asset growth from our clients that have really been quite successful. And those funds are some of the largest funds, most complex funds, and we are in a unique position to actually help service them and assist in their growth, particularly as they cross over traditional assets from a hedge fund to starting looking at private credit or into retail alts. And there are very, very few participants who can help them service all of those needs based on the different types of strats they might have or the type of investments we talked about or even geographies at the end of the day. And we've seen that success and our unique positioning there.

The other half of that growth story from at least those 2 businesses with the GIDS business and as the second half of that is we've done a very good job of continuing to expand internationally and offering incremental services outside of transfer agency services. The additional investor support services of helping them with some of the projects that they're growing, their investor communication, their retirement services, the reporting and the support.

So the team has done a terrific job of doing that. And then on the international front, I will mention is that we've had some really nice expansion into Australia, supporting more and more of the superannuation funds and providing those services. So that's been kind of the story more broadly there, and that's really shown up in the organic growth that's kind of permeated through basically all of SS&C.

So that's kind of what's been happening is like -- and as you think about kind of staying in or even hopefully moving to the top end of your targeted range, I think, is kind of would be the aspiration for a lot of investors. Is it a continuation of those as the key drivers? Or are there incremental things that we should be paying attention to?

I think it's a continuation certainly of those 2. And just simply put, right, from a math standpoint, 2 of your largest businesses kind of have to continue that momentum to be able to achieve the, I'll say, midpoint to the higher end of that range that we talked about. And I would say what's going to help push it to that higher end of the range is I think we're going to see a shift in '26 and '27 from Intralinks, right? So a little bit of a stall when we see while the M&A has had a lot of press, that's been more around the value of an increase over prior year versus the number of transactions. And the business model for Intralinks is more geared toward a number of transactions. And it's down. I think the S&P just came out with -- S&P just came out with a report of down 8% through the third quarter on a number of transactions being down.

So to be able to kind of maintain that flattish element has been, I think, a pretty good performance. I think we would -- we've seen our bookings. We see some backlog. We start to see some of that starting to increase. So I think when we look forward, we expect to see the continued progress around the first 2 businesses. Sorry about that. Thank you. And then I think Intralinks starts to expand on an upward trajectory. I think the other 2 businesses that we haven't quite mentioned yet is with intelligent automation and then health care turning that from flattish mid-single -- or low single digits up to mid-single digits, continue to contribute. And then the last one is with the Wealthtech framework. And that, I think, increasing where its growth rate was, again, more around driven by renewals opportunities in '25, much more opportunities kind of on a go-forward basis, just kind of how the pipeline lays out.

Got it. Got it. And I want to touch on at least some of those businesses at a high level. But maybe before I do -- what are you seeing from an overall demand environment perspective amongst your customer base? Any callouts you would make either by end customer type or underlying segment where you're seeing particular strength? I thought your comment just now on Intralinks and the M&A is interesting and something to take note of. But like where would you call out particular strengths or weaknesses?

Yes. I would say we see a continuing blurring of the lines of traditional asset managers, kind of like in my opening comments, when I talked about hedge funds and private credit and private market -- private equity and retail alts there's obviously been an explosion in retail alts, right. And so seeing that -- and I mentioned, obviously, it's a little bit of obviously selling our own book. But at the end of the day, there are only so many people who can actually be a transfer agent and a fund administrator in the same organization. I think we might be it.

So we're in a great position to be able to do that. So seeing that appetite for more risk and distributing more of those, I'll call it, higher risk assets potentially and for a broader appetite of consumers, we see as a really interesting spot at the end of the day. But we've really continued to see, I would say, a positive economic environment for anybody who is, I'll call it, touching or managing those assets from banks to insurance companies, to pension managers, to the funds I talked about earlier. Again, we're seeing a very positive environment right now.

Got it. So let's talk about with a little more detail kind of the key business segments, and we'll start with GlobeOp. Results this year have certainly been impressive and modestly surprising, at least to us and kind of vis-a-vis our forecast when we started the year. What are you seeing from a competitive perspective that's enabling SS&C to win significant mandates in alts against established players? And how are -- what are some more nuance on the secular trends in private equity, hedge funds and retail alternatives that are playing to your favor?

So I think it goes to the -- there's a core level of service offerings. There's plenty of fund administrators out there that aren't named SS&C. And -- but I think where we differentiate ourselves is that ability to handle the complexity of a long-only fund, long/short different macro and then also being able to serve dipping their toes into or probably more than dipping their toes, but being able to enter into the retail alts market and how do they have a service provider that can do something that looks a heck of a lot more like a transfer agent.

And there essentially isn't or just the level of sophistication in supporting just the large hedge funds in general, right, and the capacity and the reliability and the service, the ability to do that at highly accurate service the minutia because the details matter for so many of our clients and getting that right shouldn't be underestimated and the amount of IP that's built into that business intelligence process and the technology that we can influence based on their input and the fact that we own Geneva and be able to continue to service that has really given us a strong advantage at the end of the day.

The other macro trend I'd see is that while hedge funds have typically wanted to outsource that fund administration more, we're seeing the private markets wanting to do that more, partly because as some of the PE firms traditionally have tried to do that in-house, as they launch more vehicles, they're like, this is harder to do -- and they need more scale, and they may not have the resources either from a technology or human capital management standpoint or they're getting into the private credit, which you cannot do that on a spreadsheet or anything else like that. This is -- revolves a sophisticated software like a Geneva to be able to manage that. And as they do that, they realize they're going to have to do that from an administrative standpoint. And so we're seeing that trend say, if I'm not doing it already outsourcing it, I'm going to need to. And I said, primarily with the private markets, we're seeing that TAM expand just because we're seeing their success and they're realizing I might need to step up another level.

And what about from -- so there's been a little bit of consolidation in the -- among competitors and that kind of thing. And it seems like it's always talked about. What's your feeling in terms of your current product portfolio? And as you said, as a lot of these private equity shops, et cetera, they end up with more complicated portfolios, like is there incremental opportunity to add functionality there to address that?

I think there's always opportunity to add to that and provide some of the ancillary services that maybe we don't have or we wish we had to really be able to strengthen the relationship at the end of the day, right? We want to make it -- we want to serve our clients so well, and this is obviously not unique to us, but that they just could ever dream of going into the next fund or the next expansion without us. And -- or they don't have to worry about it, right? We'll be able to do this because SS&C has been able to support our growth in either new vehicle, an expansion, a new pod, whatever that might look like.

Got it. So let's talk about Intralinks a little bit. You talked about like we've seen deceleration there because the number of deals are down year-over-year. And that comes despite the chatter we keep hearing, as you said, if you talk to bankers, they'll tell you there's a flood of them coming, et cetera. How much of the slowdown do you think is just purely cyclical timing in nature for Intralinks? And is there anything that you can do to internally improve the growth rates of that business or at least improve visibility?

Yes. I mean it's -- we've talked a little bit about when we provide some of our regular investor updates on earnings calls and what's behind the scenes that's not showing up in the revenues that we're reporting. So we talked a little bit about bookings. We're seeing that grow. It's bounced off the lows. And so we're seeing that pipeline continue to build. I think one of the things that we continue to do is we're continuing to invest -- today, we continue to invest in R&D in -- I would say, into AI, into agents to be able to enhance the tool set within the data rooms in and of itself, right?

I mean what's going to differentiate us is that we still think we have a superior product -- how do we continue to enhance that? How do we give an incremental tool that's going to benefit the participants from either understanding the materials, do a better scouring of the diligence, the summarization, the redaction techniques, whatever that might be to incremental tools to make that process more efficient and timely for them because ultimately, the less time they spend in kind of prep mode before they get the deal, right, there's risk, either a risk of not getting it done or risk of making a decision too quickly. So getting that data more quickly, more timely to make a decision, we think, is a very valuable part of the process.

Got it. So let's touch on Blue Prism. Maybe you can give a quick summary of the Blue Prism business. But I guess, then, if you can talk about the drivers there, there's clearly, from our perspective, a lot of internal expense savings in the form of lower headcount. But how do you think about the net new opportunity for Blue Prism and how that's evolved of Blade and any initiatives that you may have in place?

Yes. So it is the -- we've almost, in a way, moved to the business of calling it intelligent automation, which I know we kind of called it in the entire business unit, but it's kind of really moved beyond the traditional RPA, right? There's standard RPA. To your earlier point, we generate a lot of productivity internally. And we learned a lot from that process of the automation, what you can do. Sometimes you go through that process like, why do I even have this process? And so you go through that. So this -- if we look at the Agentic AI and the shift that they're making is how do we make our traditional product do even more complex tasks. And that is enabled with the Agentic -- the agents that enables that if there's a break in the process, I have these 5 choices. It can be smart enough to go out and go get the right one, bring it back in and continue the process and different breaks.

So it allows the automation to do increasingly complex more dynamically at the end of the day, again, creating that efficiency, creating the increase in accuracy, the timeliness and everything else. And that's a product that we've got 20 cases that we're working at internally, and we're client 0, and we've been able to frame those up and actually then be able to turn around and start to sell those commercially. Again, small on the revenue side, but we're making progress one step at a time. We're keeping it very practical, real-life uses and here's what can be done.

Got it. Got it. Got it. So let's turn to health care. Another area where the organic growth in the health care business has improved meaningfully over the last few quarters. How much of that is just mitigating or lapping churn versus underlying improvements in the core business, whether it be demand or selling, et cetera?

Yes. I think it's been a combination of both. I mean last year has been a little bit -- was more of a stopping the bleeding, so to speak, is that my retention is kind of getting to that more manageable level where I don't have as much of a -- all that you can't fill that hole, right? And some of that was known, right? There are some really large contracts that just kind of bled off at the end of the day, and they just take time, similar to the large contracts take a long time to get up to scale over consecutive quarters, things of that nature. And then I think that, that team has done a very nice job of basically putting new contracts in place, getting new clients and starting to leverage the DomaniRx platform to get the additional sales. And then hopefully leading to a much stronger sales cycle in '26 and '27 for some of those large contracts.

And let's explore just really quickly on Domani. Is that it sounds like you're expecting acceleration there. Like what's driving that? And what's -- how should we think about the potential medium-term impact of Domani?

It's more likely to be a medium term than a short-term impact because it just takes a while to get a large client onboarded, which is what I call the meaningful kind of revenue growth because it's obviously heavily regulated. It's an industry typically that doesn't move at Lightspeed. And it's -- the regulations exist at the state level. So sometimes it's easier to move in chunks like that versus a wholesale move. They're coming off of a lot of times, they have legacy technology that's already different technology. That's not all just moving from this one ERP to this new one. It's probably 7 from a prior acquisition that they move on and takes different integration steps to be able to build along the way.

Got it. Got it. Got it. And then -- last segment I wanted to focus on here was GIDS. And once again, strong outperformer this year, particularly as you've targeted lift-outs in Australia and elsewhere. How should we think about the composition of your future pipeline? And any probability of incremental lift-outs of similar scale to Insignia?

Yes. So we're excited about Australia at the end of the day, right? So to date, that transaction that -- we don't typically like to talk about individual clients, but that's obviously a big one. It was marquee in the sense of, I'll call it, that superannuation fund and what that represents and what it does for us in Australia as far as an opportunity to earn their trust and do that for the entire industry at the end of the day. So, so far, so good. It's going very well. I think they're pleased with our progress and what we're doing. And we do believe that over the next several years, there will be continued opportunity to provide different services. It may not look exactly the same within those superannuation funds. We actually are touching probably several others, but a much smaller extent and doing some other different services.

So we're building up relationships with many of those funds, building up our presence, building up our capability, building up the scale to be able to continue to -- like I said, once we have that scale, we can support and launch even more services that we couldn't before.

Got it. So that's a run through the different businesses and kind of the drivers I think for a lot of investors, including us in that group, I love talking about like newer technologies and the impact on SS&C. And maybe I'll start with the thematic technology of tokenization. How do you think about asset tokenization as a tailwind or headwind for SS&C? Like what are the puts and takes there over the next 5 to 10 years? And I guess, specifically, does the potential for, example, on-chain type recordkeeping and peer-to-peer settlement threaten or disintermediate parts of your administration and transfer agency stack? Or does it expand your addressable market by creating new workflows and data services, et cetera. So how are you thinking about the puts and takes of tokenization?

Yes. If you have the answer, that would be awesome. So I think it's all of those, right? And we're evaluating that. And here's why I say when people say, "Oh, it's going to destroy you. Here's why I said that's not going to be the case, right? It doesn't happen overnight. And no matter what the service provider, whether it's tokenization or whether it's existing today, there is still going to be investor support. There's still -- somebody is going to want to either e-mail, call, whatever that might be, there's going to have to be support. Now we have introducing AI behind that with the chat and everything else to support it. We obviously have the live behind that as well if they want to go one step further.

And we've all been in the cases where we're good from one end of the service to the other. And they're still going to need that regardless of the vehicle delivery. We do think it's an opportunity. There's probably puts and takes where some of the revenue goes away. But to your earlier point on your question is there's probably a new revenue stream opportunity and to provide that. And the Calastone transaction that we recently closed on, they actually already have a tokenization project client already live and going. So we already have a foothold into real world supporting it. And as we move that forward, they're already in the mix of it.

So maybe I'll just follow up there is that if there are puts and takes, and I think your characterization of like scope and magnitude and speed are probably key uncertainties. When would you expect to start to see some impact? Or have you heard enough about pilots, et cetera, that you can say, well, at least we can start to see the usage cases and develop some idea of what that might look like. And from there, we can start to develop some broader ideas.

Yes. I think that's the fundamental question, right? So the only basis -- and I'm certainly not the expert at SS&C, so I will qualify that, that the team will come back and say, Brian, why did you say that? But if you liken it to rapid adoption of other technologies, you think about either RPA or even where we're going through the AI right now and what's happening, right, there is a lot of dialogue about it. There's probably a lot of things going on behind the scenes. I don't know how many people are really making any money from it or are they saving money from it? But at some point, that's probably going to flip over to having more of a meaningful impact. And this was probably the effort was started. Maybe those were early on were '23, maybe '24 gain some traction in '25. Do we start seeing results in '26? Or is it '27.

So if you think about -- and that's pretty rapid adoption, right? And will this be that rapid. So is it a 3- to 4-year cycle where you start seeing meaningful impact? Will it be similar to that? I don't know. So that's my personal only basis to say here's a potential comparison that might say maybe it's a 3, 4-year process before it really gets traction and then has a meaningful impact where you see adoption in everybody's switching.

Got it. So I want to dig in similarly on AI. You've mentioned a couple of times some of your initiatives or at least alluded to them just now. But at Deliver 2025, you highlighted a governance-first agent-based AI platform and domain-specific agents across financial services and health care workflows. How are you actually packaging and pricing those AI capabilities today? I mean, are they seat-based, usage-based, embedded in broader platform pricing? Just love to get some early feedback there.

So the -- what the client sees is -- will look more like an annual license versus a, I've got 5 people on it, you're going to charge me $5,000 per person. And so it's more of a license basis from that standpoint. As we look at how do we determine what that license or what that fee is going to be is we're basically looking at the value that's being provided and that service and how does it make it compelling. So we're in early stages of pricing and understanding along that elasticity curve, what makes sense for adoption and usage and I would say, the expected benefit from the person on the other end of that.

Got it. Got it. Last couple of questions here. I want to ask about profitability. You're running adjusted EBITDA margins kind of 39%, 40% while still investing behind new products and AI initiatives like we've just talked about. Do you think you're deliberately underearning on margins today and maybe by how much? And like how do you gauge whether the long-term opportunity makes sense? Or at what point do you say, you know what, we've kind of invested enough. Let's kind of move it up? And how much do you think you can move profitability up?

Yes. I think if you spend any time, as you know, working with our CEO, I don't think underearning is in interest given as the largest shareholder. So -- but he does think long-term, right? He does know that to be able to see that revenue growth trajectory longer-term is that there has to be a continuous stream of R&D investment to make sure that we're continuing to supplement those -- the software and software-enabled services capabilities that we're staying ahead of competition. We're being best-in-class. We're working with our clients, and this is what they say they want or need or this is what they'd really be paying extra to be able to do it, which would really save them or allow them to be better to their clients or their own profitability.

So I think paying attention to that and doing that across the board is always going to be important to us. But I think having that goal of increasing profitability annually is important for us, right, through scale growth of incremental revenues through then on top of that, productivity independent of that within each of our business units, which we challenge all of our business units to try and deliver that independently as well. And then what is reinvested either through an OpEx initiative and whether there's more development around AI, whether that's different sales, whether that's a start-up in a different geography that we don't have scale that's going to be "expensive day 1. And -- or it could be, hey, this is a long-term contract. Are we willing to price it a little bit more aggressively that we grow into the traditional margin that will show up, but maybe have a little bit of a compression day 1. So those are all things that go into mix to kind of that 50 basis point EBITDA improvement annually.

Got it. Last question here, capital allocation. Really impressive metrics thus far this year. Year-to-date operating cash flow is up over 20%. You've grown the buyback authorization to $1.5 billion, increased the dividend 8% and still funded sizable deals like Calastone and Curo. On a go-forward basis, how are you rank ordering, do you think right now capital uses, M&A, buybacks, dividend growth and incremental delevering, especially if rates come down?

Yes. So I would say that dividend growth hasn't been our priority. I mean it's been there. It's been anywhere from 2% to 10% and that's kind of the big range, but we're talking pennies, like is it $0.01 or $0.02 has that percentage output. And it hasn't been a -- our investor base hasn't said you've got to raise the dividend. So that hasn't necessarily been a driver. We know it's important, and we want to continue to do it. But I would say #1 priority, especially given that we are levered into a, I'd say, a pretty comfortable spot below 3 is that -- and that we don't have to bring ourselves down is that M&A has been our top priority, but only if it makes sense and it adds value. Otherwise, it's going to be predominantly share buyback, but there's always going to be a supplement of paying down the debt. Now does it become less attractive and accretive with rates if short-term rates do fall, less so. And so maybe even more share buyback.

Got it. We're out of time. Brian, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you. Good seeing you.

Appreciate it.

Great. Why don't we get started? Next up, we're thrilled to have Bill Stone, the CEO of SS&C.

Part of our goal here today is to try to keep this as iterative as possible. So we'll start with a couple of questions. It's always great to get your perspective on a lot of things. But part of this year, well, I just need to read the kind of standard disclaimer, and then we'll get right into it.

But as a research analyst, I'm required to provide certain disclosures relating to the nature of my own relationship and that of UBS with any company which I express a view at this meeting today. These disclosures are available at www.ubs.com/disclosures. Alternatively, please reach out and I can provide you with any after this meeting. So that may be the most value I add as part of this.

I thought that was very good.

See the way it goes.

Bill, this is -- we've been fortunate to have you at this conference a long time. It's the fourth time we've done it. And we start the same way with you in particular. You founded SS&C with $86,000, I think, in revenue the first year. You've been through a lot of cycles, you've seen a lot of different inflections. So what I wanted to do is maybe, for the benefit of the audience, maybe highlight key milestones, particularly given -- and part of the spirit of the question is it feels like we're at an inflection point in terms of generative AI, and you've always been ahead of the curve in terms of shifts.

So maybe talk about some of the dynamics that led to where SS&C is today and the way you position the company, and you're clearly seeing it, I mean we'll get into organic growth a little bit. But think the context on kind of what you've built and how you've positioned it for today is just really important to the thesis overall.

Well, sure. And I appreciate everybody spending a little time with us this morning. I'm kind of the grand old man now, and so -- I used to be one of the youngest, and I'm not. So you kind of get used to that. But you get to see a lot of things when you've been running the same company for about 40 years. And so now it's all AI, right?

But going back to '86, it's been any number of technological changes that changed how we all operate. In 1981, IBM came out with the IBM PC. In 1986, when I started SS&C, we were about up to maybe 386, and then I have 486, then you're going to have a Pentium chip. And pretty soon, you're going to have Novell networks and PC networks and everyone is going to talk about client server. And the first question they'd always get you with, is this true client server? Of course, I'd always tell them, no, it's false client server. What the hell does either 1 of those 2 things mean? I wasn't really quite sure.

But then you move forward and the BlackBerry is really hot, right? And then Apple comes out with the iPhone, and now it's pretty much ubiquitous. And so the whole thing. And even those technologies themselves, as much as we use them, I used to have a car phone that weighed 1.5 pounds, so you always had to be careful that you get one hand on the wheel because the other hand was -- heavily carried your almost portable phone. But those things didn't work as well until all of the infrastructure around the modems going up from 2,400 to 19.2 and stuff like this. And now that's all pretty much point to point.

If you watch Musk, he's going to change what's happening with telecom. He's floating enough satellites to be able to do your home phone and then your cell phone and everything else. It's going to be disruptive. And any of you that are on a plane that ever get to use Starlink, it was instantaneous. And so it's like going up -- or being in your living room and switching between NFL games. It's not much time between Channel 7 and Channel 17 or whatever it's held, right?

So all those things are changing, and AI is going to be another one that changes a lot of things, but all things change and all things remain the same. So I don't think your life is going to change that much. I don't think what you do, I don't think wanting to get your child into college, wanting to get your child out of college, wanting to see if they would be willing to at least be on a 5-year plan instead of a 7 or something like that, right? So all those things, I think, are going to be -- how you run your life, how you live your life, how you go about deciding what's important to you, and I think that will remain central to what's going on.

Agree. And part of what we've been struggling with, and I think what the market is clearly starting to focus on, and your stock as an example, is you're going to have GenAI winners and GenAI losers. And probably not adding much value in that statement, but one of the things we focus on with you is a lot of the IP you've created particularly on the accounting side and the relative complexity of that, and quite frankly how you've always been a big advocate of the services associated with the software and where that differentiation sits.

And there's been some newcomers to this sector the last couple of years that haven't necessarily kind of scaled the way they would have thought. And I think part of the -- where things didn't maybe come as intended was they didn't quite have the service associated with the software. And again, I think where you've got that unique IP, really sits in the accounting, and the accounts that you have.

So maybe talk about -- because again, I think to your point, the method of delivery may change, right? But the regulation gets more onerous, the volatility and your ability to really add more value, right? Because part of our core thesis too is, as your clients' AUA becomes more complex, do private, so on and so forth, you become more embedded just because of the complexity of that. So maybe talk to that a little bit. And you can see that borne out in the financials, whether it's retention and the organic growth, which we'll get into in a little bit. But I think it's a key part to the story that didn't necessarily get fully recognized by the market.

Yes. I look at it that SS&C has kind of proved that it can make money, make more money through all kinds of different cycles. So it's very sticky and very focused on what it does. And what it does changes somewhat locally and then regionally and then nationally and then internationally. So it's all changing.

And so whether you're talking about the Office of Supervision of Financial Institutions in Ottawa or you're talking about the SEC, or you're talking about the Financial Control Board or Financial Conduct Authority in the U.K. or, I mean, 52 other regulators that constantly publish things that we all have to do. And if you don't do them, you can't be in their markets. And they're not the same, right? So that gives us an awful lot of change that allows us to charge our clients if they want us to make it cozier for them to be in those jurisdictions. And then you add AML and KYC and all kinds of other things.

And then you bring in risk. And everybody wants to control their risk. And it used to be risk was, is it interest rate risk, or is it maybe contingency risk about does this place have enough capital that can make it through a downturn? Or is it going to go belly-up? Or what are you going to do? And cyber risks.

And in the businesses that we're in, we have a lot of IP, right? And protecting your IP is extremely difficult, right? So you have to do it constantly. And I was telling Kevin earlier that we've had the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA and all these people, they come in and tell us how to protect ourselves and all those kind of stuff. And all they ever say is, look internally. Like there's not some bandit that's going to come in at the middle of the night and sneak into your data processing room and steal your IP. It's much more likely it's going to be one of your own people: an analyst, a program or a manager or a supervisor or an executive, who knows. But that's what you have to protect against.

But you also still have to move forward. So we want you to move forward, but you can't see any of the stuff we've done already. It seems like you're not going to move forward very fast, right? So it's a balancing act all the time.

And you can never spend enough, right? So people, are you doing this? Yes, we do all that, of course. It's "What don't we do that we should do?" that is the question. And so there's a lot of stuff like that, that happens in 2025. And now the bad guys have AI too, right? It's not just the good guys, as we know, bad guys. And bad guys are going to use it to break your defenses and to break into things that they shouldn't. And so you got to protect yourself for that.

And again, technology changes so rapidly, but as humans, we don't change so rapidly. We inhabit, right? And I try to teach our people, at least in businesses, I'd say, let's get into some good habits. And if we give people a time on a date, let's hit our times on our dates. And as it gets increasingly complex, hitting those times and dates become very, very important.

I was with a bunch of our clients last night, and one of our biggest clients said to another big client, he points to me and says, "He defines customer service." And I smiled at him, I says I pick up the phone. He goes, "Everyone at SS&C picks up the phone because the CEO picks up the phone." So that's a good habit.

Sometimes you don't want to pick up the phone. It's like when your teenager is out late on a Friday or a Saturday, and you get a call. You don't really want to take call if you don't have to. That's one of the burdens of being a parent. So it's, again, it's getting into good habits and trying to teach them good habits and then trying to set that up as the standard.

Makes a lot of sense. So one of the things we've been focused on is, and part of our thesis on the stock, has been there's been a structural shift in the organic growth, right? At the Investor Day, you talked about a range of 4% to 8%. And if you dimensionalize that, you've been very consistently in the 5% to 6% range the last couple -- 4, 6 quarters. And that's a pretty meaningful step-up from kind of what was a 1% to 2% range.

And part of that was clearly cyclical. Part of it is clearly structural, right? And there's no coincidence. One of the things we focused on is you've been very deliberate around R&D, sales and marketing as well as leaning into higher growth areas that's helped boost that structural growth.

So maybe talk to that dynamic a little bit. And to us, one of the real successes has been on the GIDS side where there's structurally higher growth there. And I think most of the folks in the audience know that's 25% of revenue, right? So you've had a structural shift in that business. There's been some real benefit from a pricing perspective, although still relatively modest relative to the value you deliver. And then retention too.

And I know there's a lot here, but I think one of the key things too is your AUA, right? Because one of the debates has been -- in volatility, do your clients' AUA get impacted? And it's been up to the right very consistently over time. So maybe talk to that dynamic a little bit because I think it's a key part to the story.

Yes. I mean one of the things that you've seen is that the global macro vertical in fund administration has been very popular. So places like Point72 and Millennium and Baupost and Citadel and a bunch of other ones have grown exponentially compared to the industry. And all of those are our clients. And almost everyone is that big and that sophisticated, needs to have big and sophisticated matching up, right? Because they're in Luxembourg, and they're in Ireland, and they're in Canada, and they're in Singapore, Hong Kong. And even more so now in Australia and India and then, obviously, all across the United States.

So there's a lot of regulators. There's a lot of money. There's a lot of transactions. There's a lot of sophistication. There's a lot of requirements. And there are always laid-back portfolio managers that you just pick up the phone and try to hold it out here as you try to figure out exactly what -- you know you did something wrong, but you're just not sure.

And like sometimes people call me and they start kind of expressing their displeasure quickly. And I'm going, if you tell me what company you are and you tell me which of our products you use, I might be able to help you, and I'm more than willing. But we have to start off with some like fundamentals, right? Like who are you? And what are we -- I know you're complaining, I caught that, but what are we complaining about?

And so there's a lot of things where, again, it's customer service, it's getting on the phone and letting them have their 60 seconds or 90 seconds, they catch their breath. Okay, now we can maybe make a little progress, right, because you've burned off a little bit of the steam. But that's the nature of people in pretty high-pressure businesses. And I mean, you all understand that if you have great performance, you're a winner; if you have poor performance, you're a loser. I didn't make up the rules, but I think most people would agree that's a pretty accurate statement, I think.

And it's also over time, right? So some people are -- they're just getting started and they're starting to raise capital and they want to get bigger. And then they run into a wall because they don't have enough support mechanism to be able to support them. And that's what we've been trying to do, is the JPMorgan first-class business in a first-class way, and do that all the time, right?

So that -- it doesn't mean we're perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But if we do something wrong, we admit it, right? And then we go fix it. And a lot of people would like to hide. And that's bad practice, particularly with smart people; they figure that out pretty quickly.

No question. Maybe we can disaggregate the income statement a little bit. And I mean just -- if there's any questions in the audience, otherwise, we can keep going. But does anyone have any specific questions? Okay, we'll keep going.

Maybe talk a little bit because, obviously, artificial intelligence has been very topical and will continue to be, maybe talk about some of the internal efficiencies you're seeing. Because one of the things that we've been really impressed with is the continued margin expansion as you scaled your clients and you won a lot of big work where the implementation, my sense, is probably isn't as profitable as some of the work as it goes live. So talk about -- and maybe the spirit of it is from a Blue Prism perspective. some of the efficiencies you've seen from the time of the acquisition, not only from an internal perspective, but also externally across your client base.

Yes. So we sent a press release out close to a year ago about Insignia, which is a very big superannuation firm in Australia. And we lifted out 1,400 people, right? And it looks like it's going to be like $100 million in revenue to us as a client. And those are needle movers, right? And hey, we love million-dollar clients and we love $500,000 clients and we love $2 million clients, but they're not quite the same needle mover as $100 million, right?

So the first $100 million that we do, maybe we earn 20%. But we have a path to get to 40%, right? And we're going to put in Blue Prism and have a lot of AI agents. We have over 3,000 digital workers that we've deployed at SS&C since we've owned Blue Prism. And we think that saves us about $200 million in run rate savings. And people said wow.

So yes. But remember, we're investing a lot of money across our business. And we invest some of it in getting these $100 million a year clients that start off at 20%. That doesn't really help our margin percentage, right? But it's $100 million. And we know we could take that 20% to 40%, maybe take it higher. Just how efficient can we get and how fast?

And then we line up other ones that we're going to bring in. So we brought another one in London called Wesleyan. We brought in -- we took a lift-out from Humana. So we have all of these great big clients. And in our view, the big financial institutions, whether they be banks, asset managers, insurance companies, they get big and then they get multiple layers. So the third assistant vice president has 3 assistants. Oh yes, it's what you really need, right? Best if you didn't have the third assistant vice president didn't have any assistants.

It was very hard for those companies that have big presence in different cities around the world, and now we're going to let all these people go? That's not very popular. And they all want to be popular. I mean we'd like to be popular too, but we're not that interested in being popular though. We're not a retail company. We service institutional almost completely.

And for us, we're behind the scenes. We're not -- we don't need to be front and center. We're not that interested. We like to have higher EBITDA and higher cash flow. I think in the first 9 months of 2025, our cash flow was $1.1 billion and up 22% from '24. And we're a high cash generating company. We have 97% retention rate. We, through pluses and minuses, we're constantly growing. And we've grown from, like you said, $86,000 in 1986 to we should do $6.2 billion, $6.3 billion in 2025. I don't know exactly what that compound annual growth rate is, but I think it's pretty good.

And if you go back when we bought Advent, which we bought in 2015, we were doing $1 billion in revenue. So we had $1 billion in 2015 and now, in 2025, we're going to $6.2 billion, $6.3 billion. So you look at steps that we make -- and we're aggressive and we're ambitious and we like to win. And the grand old man of the place really likes to win because he doesn't have many years to win it, right? You got to make hay while the sun is shining. The sun might not shine that much longer. Not that I'm giving up anytime soon. But to me, that's the essence of my job, is to motivate our team and make sure they understand that winning is more fun than losing.

Like if you think losing is more fun than winning, we don't want you. You could be a great person, but don't work here. So it's trying to get that instilled in all 29,000 people we have now. Do we need 29,000? Well, we'll see how good this AI is or not.

To your point on that, Bill, I think it's an important point, I want to talk about the cash flow. But in terms of number of people, right, you've been able to hold it relatively flat as you're growing. And I think a lot of that is that efficiency you're seeing on the Blue Prism side.

And that's one of the subtle undercurrents we keep focused on is you're not hiring -- you're not having to hire as many to service this growth. And again, you're investing in AI, there's capacity that you're building. There's investment in some of these larger contracts and you're still delivering on margins. So the undercurrent is there's a higher level of efficiency that just you continue to deliver.

That's right. And be able to do it without disruption. That's another key, right? You got to be able to do it without disruption, and be able to -- these are high-demand clients, right? They're the creme de la creme of different parts of the financial services empire.

And same with health care. People say, where do you get your health care? Look, we've got Humana. And it's a big change for these health care companies. And they're more regulated than we are in financial services, whether it's HIPAA or state regulation or Medicaid, Medicare, CMS. I think there's something called F6 coming next year. There's just all this stuff that's different but the same.

And I've always said about we do claims management for pharmacies in medical claims. And I always said, look, prescription and a trade ticket look about the same, right? Number of shares; number of pills. Rx number; CUSIP number. Symbol; symbol. Trader; pharmacist or a doctor. Those are just a few pieces of information, but millions of them. And then you got to process them all, you got to collate them, you got to slice it up and deliver it back. And that's what we do as a business.

Let me scan the audience one more time. Otherwise, we'll keep going, because the next topic I want to talk about is, alluded to this earlier, but the free cash flow probably will be somewhere around $1.4 billion, $1.5 billion for the full year, right? The yield is somewhere around 7%.

But I think, again, one of the real undercurrents is the shift in capital allocation, right? I mean you had the foresight to do DST, Intralinks and Advent back in 2018, and over that period had to delever. But the reallocation of the capital has really shifted much more to equity holders as opposed to debt holders, and it's been a real benefit, I think, to SS&C overall.

So maybe talk to that dynamic a little bit, because I think, more recently, 75% buyback/dividend and 25% deleveraging. And that's inverted from where it was, I think, from '19 to '23, and real important undercurrent to the value proposition you folks are delivering.

Well, like you said, we should probably do $1.5 billion in free cash flow, I think, or operating cash flow. And so that gives us a lot of flexibility as to what to do. And at $1.5 billion, we have about 250 million shares outstanding, so that's about $6 a share. So we can buy our stock back and we save $6 a share, right? And then we also pay $1 dividend, so we're really getting $7.08 for every share we buy back. And our stock is trading at $85, $86 right now, and so that's 8.5% to 9% return on our buybacks.

We can also pay down debt, which our debt is probably $6.5 billion maybe. And the interest on the debt is tax deductible, right, so it's not quite as attractive as buying back our shares. But the debt holders like us to prepay some of the debt, and so we do it. Because we want to keep our debt holders, we want to keep our equity holders in good stead with us. And then we also pay a dividend, because if you don't pay a dividend, there's a lot of pools of money that won't invest in you because you don't pay a dividend. So we want to keep them happy too.

And then the primacy of what we do with our cash flow is generally acquisitions. So we really think Calastone is a very great acquisition with some tremendous technology and a lot of great people. And so we're excited about, that also gives us a lot of a lot more geographic coverage than we already have. Sometimes it's geographic coverage in the same places like Singapore and Hong Kong and Australia. But at the same time, we've got a great business brewing in all of those places. So having more ballast, right? You have size.

Now we bought Blue Prism because I wanted people. And we had, I don't know, 1,440, I think, when we bought Blue Prism. And how long is it going to take me to hire 1,440 people? Forever. Forever. I'd have never got there, right?

So you got to do some of these things to jump start, that you're going to get into robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, ad nauseam, right? But if you don't have enough people that can collaborate and get better and then get better and then get better, right? And then you're pushing. When can we deliver this? And then hitting dates.

So I think that's kind of been the history of SS&C, is take risks -- try to be wise about the risk you take, but take risks. And if you want returns, you got to take risks. Look, if all you ever do is buy treasuries, treasury bills, my guess is, is that your return is going to be like a treasury bill. You could tell I'm a pretty good portfolio manager when it comes to that.

But if you're going to step out a little bit, then you got to do research. You got to understand what you're doing. You got to -- what's your thesis? Why is this going to work? And being able to answer those things. Somebody like us, so we've been doing it for like 20, 30 -- we went public in 1996. That's a long time ago.

So it's understanding, that we understand public markets, we understand the requirements, we understand what shareholders want, and we understand what's the wise risk, at least what we think, and what's going on and doing that. I'm not going 11x leveraged. I'm not doing it. I've been 6, I've been 7. I don't like that particularly either, but we bought really good assets and they threw off enough cash flow that we paid it down fast.

But interest rates went up and fintech became very, very popular, so prices went up. So now we have a collection of assets that are worth way more on an EBITDA basis than what you're paying us as a collective.

But to me, if we're going to throw off $1.5 billion, we're going to do close to $2.5 billion of consolidated EBITDA, we're going to do $6.2 billion, $6.3 billion in revenue, I'm [ non-pulsed ] by people telling, "You ought to grow another 50 basis points." I'd say, yes, I ought to do a lot of things. But I think it's trying to be focused on delivering great returns, giving people great jobs, taking care of your customers. Those are the 3 pillars of kind of what you're trying to do as a public company CEO.

I think, Bill, to your point of Calastone, in addition to the geographical diversification, gained a great technology, right? Because it gave you kind of a foothold, if you would, from a blockchain perspective where there's probably some potential for you, to the extent it's needed, to reallocate that across the enterprise. And that's been another consistent theme you folks have embodied over time.

Yes. I mean we've been delivering these agentic AI agents, like we did one for radiology for the National Health Service. And I think we've saved them 40% of their hours in radiology. And we're doing the same thing for credit agreements. So we're doing all of those electronically, taking on all the important things, putting it into the right buckets and be able to deliver information back.

And now we're doing the same thing, like we're a big provider of municipal bond structuring. And now we can read municipal bond documents, pull out all the relevant information for the structuring process and instantly put it into our models. And that makes a big difference for our clients.

Question. And again, there's been a lot of consolidation, which, in our mind, has really endorsed your strategy, whether it's Adenza being put into NASDAQ, SimCorp being put into Deutsche Boerse. Some of your other publicly traded peers have done some consolidation over the last year or so as well. So the markets have been endorsing kind of what you folks have been doing, which has been reassuring for sure.

Yes. People -- obviously, when people imitate what you've done, right, so a lot of people have followed SS&C and done a lot of acquisitions in fund administration and other fintech things, and some people kind of follow Ferrari too, for instance, but it's okay to be Ferrari.

I think we'll end it there, Bill. We're up on time. Terrific.

Thanks a lot, Kevin.

Yes, of course.

[indiscernible] 14th Annual FinTech Conference. This is my 9th. So super excited to kick off some of my sessions today hosting SS&C Technologies. We have Rahul Kanwar, Chief Operating Officer. Rahul, great to see you; and Justine Stone, Head of IR. Thanks for coming.

I think why don't we start off with this? I think recently, you held your Deliver Conference in Phoenix. It seems like it was a fairly successful event. Why don't you expand a little bit on some of the new announcements that SS&C made, the AI Agent catalog, AI Gateway and SS&C Agent Services were some key announcements there. Great if you could just kind of recap for us how the event went and take us through some of your announcements.

Thanks for having us [indiscernible] the most recent one we just had a couple of weeks ago in Phoenix, we had probably our biggest conference ever. We had over 1,000 attendees, 200 sessions and maybe what's most telling is half those sessions are moderated or the speakers are our customers, right? And it kind of speaks to the high level of engagement that we have with those customers. So we're really using that conference as a couple of different things. One is that feedback loop that's really important to us as we build technology, right?

So lots of customers coming and talking to us about how they use our software where they have requirements. And so that's a big part of it. I think the other big part of it is it does allow us to the point you just made. It does allow us to showcase our innovation.

So we're -- in particular, we have really across all of our businesses a very good focus on product road map, what we're building, how we're taking advantage of whatever new technologies are out there, whether that's AI and generative AI, whether that's tokenization, whether it's -- whatever is the latest in digital, which is really important to our customers, web portals, mobile apps, things like that.

And so in particular, this year, we were able to announce and show a number of different AI agents that we have built within SS&C and I think the thing that's probably most important about that is we're processing at scale millions and millions and millions of transactions. These AI agents are being production tested on real-life scenarios. This isn't some tech company with a bunch of tech kids and you go figure out how you're going to use it. This already does. So when we talk about an AI agent that does, let's say, Credit Agreements. It’s done thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Credit Agreements. So we had a number of those kinds of things that we revealed that were pretty well accepted and that was a very successful conference.

I'd imagine huge time saver for your client base, productivity, so on so forth. What are some of these recent announcements? Obviously, you captured a lot of the new AI technology capabilities that are out there. But how do you think about the strategy in terms of targeting what your clients were asking for. What was kind of like the theme of some of your [indiscernible].

It's a great question because if you're not careful, you try to solve almost everything, right? I mean there's no -- and focus like in those things is pretty important. So we tend to listen more than we talk when it comes to those kinds of things, right? So we tend to just try to understand where the biggest pain points are, where the biggest opportunities are. So that's one part of it.

I think the other part of it is coming back to we have the world's biggest fund administration business. We've got the world's biggest transfer agency business. We've got the world's best portfolio accounting system for alternatives. So we've got lots of examples internally where we see millions and millions and millions of workflows happening every single day, week, month, year, and we get a good sense of, "hey, you know what, it turns out that Credit Agreement probably really is an issue," right? Or when people call into one of our customer service hubs, it's taken them a little too long to get an answer or whatever the case may be, right? And then that becomes what you tend to focus your automation efforts on.

Let’s talk a little bit about recent results, just recap and maybe we could tease out like what were some of the items that you believe drove the quarter? And what were some of the main drivers there?

Yes. So we had a pretty good quarter in Q3. And I think it was really driven by strong revenue growth at some of our biggest businesses, over 9% growth in both our GlobeOp business and our GIDS, Global Investor and Distribution Solutions business. So -- and those 2 together account for over 50% of our revenue. So strong growth there is important. We also had margin expansion in the quarter, and I think that is attributed to just -- we're always paying attention to costs and making sure that we are efficient.

And we have this big kind of AI and automation push throughout our organization that really allows us to both invest in where we see the need, whether that's R&D or sales and marketing but to essentially keep headcount flat and grow our revenues without growing our expense base at the same time.

I want to dig into each one of those areas in particular let's start with GlobeOp. That business [indiscernible] What are Some of the exciting growth opportunities that we will see. Can you help with that Globeop?

Yes. Well, GlobeOp itself, it's the largest alternative fund administrator in the world, and we really have the Crème de la crème of our hedge fund clients, and they performed really well this quarter, which helped to drive some of the higher growth this quarter than what we were saying before, 7% or 8%. I think they grew 9.6% in Q3. We also continue to see strong growth in private markets. So that's where we've got private equity, private assets, real assets, private credit. That's been growing in the double digits pretty consistently for the past couple of years.

And then kind of the newest piece of the business, the smallest piece is also the fastest growing in retail alternatives, growing over 20%. But really, we have a unique offering where we are both the fund accounting and the transfer agency services that are required to account for all of the retail investors that are now getting into the alternatives. We think that this is a -- there's a lot of runway ahead for these types of funds.

Everyone wants to get into alternatives. So high net worth individuals want an avenue to be able to invest in alternatives and get those kind of returns. So we think that that's a great business, and we see kind of continued growth from that.

Yes. It seems like [indiscernible] across our coverage [indiscernible] huge opportunity, multiple quarters of our coverage. So it seems like that's you're positioned well.

Yes. We're the only one that provides both of those services...

Great. I do want to talk a little bit about GIG [indiscernible] growth rate early through the first half of '26. Maybe you could discuss some other factors that you're excited about in the segment to continue that growth rate on mid-single digits, higher than the low single digit expectations that I think perhaps you were realizing. [indiscernible] But are there any specific areas that you're excited about opportunities in the pipeline?

There are. And some of it is -- we've done a lot of work in particular, to try to strengthen our competitive positioning in this business over the last any number of years, 4, 5 years for sure. So we have a lot of confidence in that management team. We've got to look at the sales teams organized the way we want them. We've got product development and innovation where we want it. And we have spent a significant amount of time with our customers understanding where their requirements are, right?

So these things don't happen by accident. You don't go from one set of performance to a different set of performance without having to do something. So we feel like what we've done is laid a foundation that is really in a pretty good spot.

That's being validated in the market with wins like places -- great big institutional places like Insignia that have lots of choices and runs detailed RFPs and do their diligence in a fair amount of detail. It's also being validated every single day and what we see in terms of the opportunities that we have, the pipeline that we have, the RFPs that we're participating in. So we've got a fair amount of confidence that what we have here is a business that will continue to perform well.

And some of the reasons are for most of our customers that are in the money management business, right? And that can take a lot of different forms, the institutional managers, the retirement plans, it sort of doesn't matter. One of the biggest things that they're very focused on is the end client experience, right?

So if somebody logs into a web portal, somebody calls in somewhere, somebody goes on a mobile app, somebody talks to a financial advisor, what's that experience like? How rich is that experience? And is it differentiated, right? And what they're increasingly finding the technology is moving so fast that the best way to get that differentiation is to do it at scale, so which means that we are now being exposed to outsourcing opportunities that we haven't traditionally, folks with lots and lots of internal systems that are saying, "Hey, I know I got to bring all this together.

I know I need a generational upgrade. Rather than try to do it all by myself, why don't I get some help and see if I can retain that configurability that I'm really looking for, but get a lot of scale." And so that's been really good for GIDS. It's a global business. Half the revenue comes from outside the U.S., lots of momentum.

Thinking about some of these challenges. I think there has been -- there is [indiscernible] success rates you're having in the RFP process right there. How are some of your clients doing that [indiscernible]

It's obviously a really important part of the process because large projects, large-scale projects implementation is the sort of both the key risk as well as the key opportunity if you can get really good at it. One of the things that has helped us with some of the bigger ones is this lift out concept, right? So in effect, what we're doing is we're accepting the current operation as is, and we're keeping it going.

So we already have -- on day 1, we have the people, we have the systems, we have the revenue, right? And then what that does is it takes some of the -- it's not that the work doesn't have to get done, it still has to get done, but it gives you a lot more flexibility as to which pieces you incorporate at which points in the cycle and you're getting the economic benefit throughout.

It sounds like having an MVP product to start, right? And then you can iterate from that point on...

Exactly.

That's good to hear that [indiscernible].

Yes, for sure.

I do want to look at -- let's talk a little bit about looking into the future here. I'm just curious if you could talk at real high level about how you feel about organic growth ability for each of your business units. You talked about -- why don't we start with Wealth and Investment Technologies [indiscernible]

Yes. So Wealth and Investment Technologies, the WIT business is really where we kind of house a lot of our financial services software. And we have different kind of verticals within there. But if you think about it, the alternatives business within WIT that's where we have our Geneva product, which is really widely regarded as the best of the best in portfolio accounting for large asset managers, hedge funds and fund administrators. So that continues to kind of hold that space and it continues to grow nicely.

The next big piece of the WIT business would be Wealth, our Black Diamond Wealth platform, again, continues to do really well and is probably the largest kind of provider in the RIA space.

We have a partnership with Morningstar, whereas they are kind of decommissioning one of their offerings, we are making the migration to Black Diamond very seamless. And I think we've won over 400 clients in Morningstar this past year to get on the Black Diamond platform. So that's been going really well, and we think that that's going to continue to drive growth for the Black Diamond platform into '26.

We've got the insurance. Our insurance offering in Singularity that continues to grow really well. We have a couple of competitors in that space that might not be quite as strong in kind of recent quarters and going through some disruption.

So I think that that's something that we can take advantage of. And then lastly, we have kind of our traditional investment management space, which look, is a crowded field competitively, but we think we have a really strong offering in our newest Geneva solution that has all the bells and whistles of new technology that is really based on the functional expertise that we've built over the years. So Wealth and Investment Technologies, to sum it up, we think is a mid-single-digit grower in the whole and a lot of it is dependent on renewal cycles and license deals and things like that, so it can look pretty lumpy, but we have pretty good visibility into the future for driving performance [indiscernible]

[indiscernible] free basis? Or is it a whole ecosystem or platform kind of approach to win deals on a [indiscernible]?

It's a little bit of both. Increasingly -- and some of it is a function of who we are as a company. Increasingly, the most important deals for us are one where we can have a package of a lot of different parts of our business, right? So they may be interested in -- so in particular, they may be interested in Black Diamond and they may also be interested in our trust accounting, which is what we call Trust Suite. They may overlap that and look at our model capabilities at ALPS Advisors.

In some cases, they may also have separately managed accounts or funds that we're doing fund administration for. So there's a lot of different things. And so the most important thing and folks don't understand, sometimes don't often appreciate how deep and complicated some of these businesses can get and how many asset classes they're in and how brand their ambitions are. So the fact that we've got this wealth of products and services that we can offer has been a big advantage for us.

And we tend to think that it's not one size fits all for these types of systems. So we have purpose-built solutions for industry verticals that we think that we know that insurance companies need this certain type of accounting system. And we know that alternatives need something different. They don't need the same thing. So that's kind of how we've approached the market.

And then in the Intralinks business, how are you feeling about growth opportunity there.

Yes. Look, we feel really good about the organic opportunity at Intralinks. If you kind of -- just little historical context, we bought Intralinks in 2018. And for many of those years, it's been one of our best growing businesses, right? So it's somewhat correlated to the M&A markets and what the M&A markets do and we understand that. But at the same time, the underlying product is about as strong as it's ever been.

There's been a lot of work done in terms of new generations of both the virtual data room as well as the alternatives, the investor reporting platforms. There's more AI infusion there. There's a lot more service capabilities around setting up data rooms and privacy processing and redaction and all kinds of things like that. So the fundamentals are really strong. And what we're starting to see as the market comes back is we're starting to see that reflected in the numbers.

The previous -- couple of years ago [indiscernible] competitors in this area, but curious how you're thinking about the M&A cycle [indiscernible] maybe you can give a little bit of color...

I think our early indicators on, so we track what we call opportunity creation and deal count and things like that. So things that are pretty early in the M&A life cycle process. And all of those indicators over the last, let's say, 6 weeks, 8 weeks or so have been trending positive.

[indiscernible] talk a little bit about Intelligent Automation & Analytics and Healthcare. Again, the organic opportunity there is [indiscernible].

Well, I think we talked about a little bit at the beginning with what we're rolling out with our agentic AI capabilities and how we are providing those to our clients. So I think the consultative approach, the SS&C as customer zero is what we're calling it, so we pretty much can build and test everything on ourselves. And then we look at our clients and our prospects and like you guys have a similar problem, this is what we did with Credit Agreements. So how can we apply this to your business specifically. So we've had -- we've already had some successes with these AI agent sales and the pipeline is building. So I think we see some positive momentum going in for that Intelligent Automation & Analytics...

So I'm personally excited to ask this then. The Calastone acquisition [indiscernible] a little bit high level [indiscernible] can you talk a little bit high level on what this business does, what it brings to SS&C and how do you think this enhances [indiscernible]

Yes. Look, I think the Calastone does a few different things, but probably one of the most important ones is it's a network, right? So it's a network with about 4,500 or so participants that facilitates the process of individuals investing in investment organizations, right, very simply. So if you kind of look at kind of that traditional ecosystem where it's custodians and it's financial advisors and it's the end clients and it's the fund manager groups and things like that and then the various flows and the movement of paper and the movement of information, it turns that all into an electronic process, right?

And like most networks, its strength is how many participants it has, right? So our -- part of our thesis is that in addition to the 4,500 or so that Calastone already has, we've got 23,000, 24,000 customers, many of whom are likely going to be interested, and we're seeing that already. So that's one part of it. I think the other part of it is there's a number of things that our clients are interested in, whether it's things like tokenization, taking funds and selling tokens and making that a far more seamless process. Calastone has a fair amount of technology already built around tokenization.

We have seen already in our experience with Calastone in the past that some of their cash management tools and their web portals are really attractive to our customers. So we have customers that are using them now and implementing some of those now. We think we can do more of that. So there's a fair amount of overlap with our GIDS business. And all of it just really comes down to investment accounting, investment processing, investment workflows need to become more and more electronic, right? And we want to be at the forefront of that.

Got it. [indiscernible] industry bringing that level of professionalism for that. And imagine this is, correct me if I'm wrong, cross-sell opportunity [indiscernible]

Exactly.

It's good to hear [indiscernible].

I would say that at least from my seat, like with investors, we've been talking about tokenization for the past 5 years, but really in the past 6 months, the conversations have increased...

Are there opportunities to partner on the tokenization side?

There are mostly with customers. Mostly with -- we have customers that want -- they're wanting pilots and they're setting up funds. And so that's probably our biggest opportunity.

Perfect. And let's pivot to international growth and some of the priorities for SS&C. And maybe if you could talk a little bit about the acquisitions like Curo Fund Services [indiscernible]

I think we've been seeing a lot of international growth over the past couple of years. Australia has been a big market for us with some key client wins. And we have been building up that business in Australia for a number of years, and it's really kind of taken off in the past 12 months or so. I would say we continue to see, especially within our GIDS business, a lot of strengths in Europe and the U.K. in particular.

And then the Middle East, we've opened a few offices in the Middle East that really servicing for both our Wealth and Investment Technologies business, but also fund administration business servicing some of those big sovereign wealth funds, which we still see a lot more opportunity going forward. Curo Fund Services, we acquired a South African based. Again, just kind of gives us a local presence in the South African market, so opens up some opportunities there. And then just talking about Calastone, they really are a global network, and they have touch points across all continents. And I think, in particular, Asia Pac and Latin America and in Brazil gives us more presence in those areas.

[indiscernible] internationally?

Yes.

So you are developing more agentic AI in your own business, and you have designed some of those agents internally. Just curious if you can share some of the examples of agentic AI developments that you've had internally and then you're planning to [indiscernible]

Sure. So we have -- and because it's such a hot area, it changes every day, right, we had this conversation. A week from now, I probably have a couple of different examples or additional examples. But in particular, if you kind of look at the businesses that, obviously, we do a fair amount of processing, health care is one of them. So in health care, we just recently deployed an agent that helps radiologists. So in effect, it does some of the processing -- preprocessing. And we think in the one client organization that we deployed, it's going to save them 15,000 radiologists hours each year, which is really powerful because we're talking about highly skilled people that have -- obviously, there's limitations to how much supply we have.

Similarly, within SS&C and with our customers, we're doing a fair amount of work in credit and the documentation related credit. So that's been a fair amount of it. We're doing a fair amount of work as it relates to managing customers, dialing into customer support kind of organizations and the workflow. So somebody calls and says, "Hey, I have this trust now and I need to transfer my assets and what are the steps?" And that used to be a very human kind of procedural kind of process.

And what you find is if you can train the technology on enough use cases, you actually can give it control, right? You can say, all right, you know what, here's a goal, here's the goal I want to accomplish and here's a set of parameters and go do it. And we're finding that just -- it's mind-boggling how quickly that is coming along.

And I would imagine as you add more and more projects you can scale that those learnings [indiscernible]

That's right. That's the advantage, right? The advantage of when Justine talked about -- we call ourselves customer zero. The advantage is that there's pitfalls to this stuff, too, right? You got to be really careful. Governance is truly important to us. We built our own governance product. We think the first of its kind so that we're trying to do all of this in a really carefully controlled way. But having lots of examples of it working well makes the system smarter.

Sure. Sure. Maybe you could talk about how AI automation [indiscernible]. Is that like your edge right now? Or it actually the new capability [indiscernible]

I think it's the -- I would say it's more of the latter. We're not always -- and this is true, it's true for AI, but it's true for most of these things. We're not really trying to be the one to invent whatever the latest way to deploy AI. What we are trying to do is say, hey, deep in our workflows, deep in the things that our customers care about is a lot of complexity. It's hard to understand. It's hard to process. There's institutional frameworks that have been built up over decades.

And our customers, when they look at AI are not just looking at, gee, that's pretty cool. I can go get ChatGPT to summarize my history paper, right? That's not -- that's a great use case, but that's not the one we have, right? The one we have much more is, hey, I've got 25 applications right now in my back office or my front office, and I need to find some way to integrate the applications, pull the data, get real insights out of them and then use that to do some kind of processing that maybe is hard for me to do today.

So the integrations are really important. The security is really important. The fact that it's tried and tested is really important because a lot of times, we're talking about customer data, right? We're talking about things that they have an obligation to safeguard. So the barriers to entry become that much higher and that's where we play.

I think that's right. We hear that fast followers kind of like the way to go. We actually heard from an unrelated company that I cover like, yes, we're able to sell our AI solution. Clients loved it. We're super impressed and now, that's stuck with legal department because these are customer data, things like that and legal department's writing the rules as we speak. So it's a really interesting development [indiscernible]

Well, we made a big investment with this with Blue Prism when we acquired it in 2022. And I think the use cases for AI, we both can use it internally and have -- it started out with RPA and it has evolved into a more intelligent automation and AI-driven automation. So there's both internally efficiencies and cost savings that we use in our big outsourcing and services department.

Those same automations and efficiencies that we're achieving help us be a better offering to our clients in that sense. So we -- it helps our GIDS business and it helps our GlobeOp business with client wins because what we are providing is a better, more efficient, more accurate service. And then we turn around and we take what we've done internally and built it and we can sell it and generate revenue directly from those AI-powered services.

That sounds very compelling. Just curious how do you see the pipeline conversion playing out and implementing these tools and getting them to work. I'm sure there is bumps in the roads for everybody trying to implement this technology. But from your perspective, how do you see that pipeline conversion kind of efforts -- every client is different...

Every client is different. But the challenge to these kinds of things, right, is who's the sponsor within the customer organization, right? And so a lot of times, when you kind of talk about emerging technologies, sponsor is the IT department. And the IT departments are really important in a lot of places.

What we find what we have is, in addition to the IT department, we have business sponsors, executives, folks that are in operations, folks that are in the financial part of the organization because to them, they can see the functional advantages, right? So then it's not a here's a science project, let's make sense of it someday. This is, okay, you're already doing reconciliations, and I just lost 3 people in my reconciliations department. Can we get this in tomorrow?

So that's one part of it. The second part of it is we've got a -- we're blessed we've got a worldwide sales force that's out there talking to prospects and customers every day. They're not necessarily just talking about AI. They're talking about fund administration and GIGS and a bunch of other things. This is a sort of a very natural thing to include in that process. So it's a lot easier to develop the pipeline.

That sounds super interesting. It's almost like enterprise type of enterprise deal [indiscernible] pretty compelling product. So let's talk about capital allocation a little bit here. Your leverage remains very manageable even after funding the Calastone deal [ with debt ] and balance sheet certainly appears to be strong. Can you talk about how you think about balancing further acquisitions with some of your other capital allocation plans?

Yes. We have strong cash flow characteristics. And look, we're always looking at acquisitions. And with our leverage being pretty reasonable, we're not constrained. We don't have any really financial constraints or any management bandwidth constraints to do any really size acquisition. If it were to come across the desk, we would be interested in it. I would say that we are picky.

We have metrics like growth accretive -- revenue growth accretive. We'd like them to be able -- if they're not currently at our corporate average margins, a path to get to corporate average margins within a reasonable time frame. And then look, how does it fit within our business? Can we cross-sell across the customer bases? Does it provide something that our clients would want to buy are kind of the qualitative things that we look at.

But absent acquisitions, I would say that we are still -- we have a share buyback authorization in place that we are putting to use and we'll continue to use, especially feeling like our stock is undervalued. And then at the margins, we'll pay down debt every quarter.

Solid financial framework in terms of evaluating potential acquisitions. But when we think a little bit more on the strategic side, should investors think about the opportunity there more scale versus capabilities? How are we thinking about those 2 areas [indiscernible]

Well, there's a lot of different businesses. So the answer is probably not the same in everyone. But I'd say maybe a few different categories. One is we are absolutely looking to extend the service offering every chance we get, right? So that may be buying something like Pateo, which complements our fund administration business with class action processing. It may be buying something like Curo, which then gives us an entry into a market where there are likely other customers we can go and get.

So that's a big part of it. Capability set is also important. And we put Calastone maybe in that category where it's a slightly different set of capabilities than what we have today, but there is overlap. Maybe the thing that ties them all together is we do feel like with 23,000 customers in financial services and health care, we've got this unique opportunity where if we can find more things that they're interested in that ought to just drive growth. So that really is, I think, what brings this all together.

Well, I think we're coming up on time here. Rahul, Justine. Thank you so much for coming. Very insightful. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Greg, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to today's SS&C Technologies Q3 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I'd now like to turn the call over to Justine Stone, Head of Investor Relations. Justine?

Hi, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining us for our Q3 2025 earnings call. I'm Justine Stone, Investor Relations for SS&C. With me today is Bill Stone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rahul Kanwar, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Brian Schell, 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 provisions 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 our Risk Factors section of our 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, October 23, 2025. 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 welcome, everyone. Our third quarter results include record adjusted revenue of $1.569 billion, up 7% and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.57, a 17.2% increase. We delivered record adjusted consolidated EBITDA of $619 million, up 9.3%, resulting in quarterly adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin of 39.5%. Our third quarter adjusted organic revenue growth was 5.2%, with performance driven by GlobeOp with a 9.6% revenue growth and our Global Investor and Distribution Services or GIDS business with a 9% revenue growth. We saw strength across all alternative markets, and we are capitalizing on international opportunities.

In our GIDS business, we successfully completed a large lift out in Australia on July 1 and announced an additional lift out for our U.S. life and pensions provider. Q3 Financial Services recurring revenue growth was 6.7%.

For the 9 months, ended September 30, '25, cash from operating activities was $1.101 million, up 22% over the prior year. In Q3, we returned $305 million to shareholders, which included acquiring 2.8 million shares for $240 million at an average price of $86.82 and $65.8 million in common stock dividends. This quarter, we've raised our common stock dividend to $1.08, an 8% increase.

SS&C's strong cash flow characteristics allow us to return capital to our shareholders in multiple ways. We continue to believe our shares are undervalued, and we'll continue to prioritize share repurchase.

High-quality acquisitions that meet our financial criteria are also a key element of SS&C's capital allocation strategy. In September, we announced the acquisition of Curo Fund Services, a South African fund administration business. This acquisition deepens our relationship with 2 meaningful clients and gives SS&C a local presence in the African market.

Our Calastone acquisition closed on October 14, a global team of 250 employees will join our GIDS business, reporting into Nick Wright. We are excited about Calastone's proprietary global funds network and the additional capabilities in money markets, ETFs and digital assets they bring to the SS&C solutions set.

Tokenization is gaining meaningful traction amongst our clients, and we are pleased to offer a solution that supports their evolving digital asset strategies.

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

Thanks, Bill. We had a strong third quarter with solid organic growth of 5.2% and improved margins. Across our business, we remain focused on taking care of our customers and deepening our product set and expertise. And we're pleased to see that focus translate into financial results. We continue to pay close attention to our cost structure and view intelligent automation and AI as both a revenue opportunity and a way to reduce repetitive tasks while enhancing career paths for our employees. We've seen the results of these efforts reflected in improved EBITDA margins to date and expect this positive trend to continue.

GlobeOp had a good quarter with continued strength within our hedge fund client base, international wins in private markets and benefits from the ongoing trend towards retail alternatives. Looking ahead, we view GlobeOp as a key beneficiary of emerging technologies and aim to dramatically enhance user interfaces and client experiences as meaningful competitive differentiators.

Our Global Investor and Distribution Solutions business had an excellent quarter, driven in part by successful lift-outs across the globe. We're encouraged by the potential these mandates unlock.

SS&C continues to help accelerate the global transformation from traditional automation to AI-powered automation, selling purpose-built agents as a managed service. With SS&C as customer zero, we can leverage millions of daily use cases to build deep and comprehensive solution sets, which provide for both internal efficiency and external revenue opportunities. As one example, we sold an AI agent to a U.K.-based health care organization to automate MRI, CT and ultrasound request processing, saving over 15,000 radiologist hours annually. This frees clinical capacity, reduces outsourcing costs and addresses a global hospital challenge as well as points to the utility of these AI agents in a wide range of applications.

With that, I'll turn it over to Brian to walk through the financials.

Thanks, Rahul, and good day, everyone. Unless noted otherwise, the quarterly comparisons are Q3 2024. As disclosed in our press release, our Q3 2025 GAAP results reflect revenues of $1.568 billion, net income of $210 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.83. Our adjusted non-GAAP results include revenues of $1.569 billion, an increase of 7% and adjusted diluted EPS of $1.57, a 17.2% increase.

The adjusted revenue increase of $102 million was primarily driven by incremental revenue contributions from GlobeOp of $37 million, GIDS of $33 million, acquisitions of $17 million and a favorable impact from foreign exchange of $9 million. As a result, adjusted organic revenue growth on a constant currency basis was 5.2% and core expenses increased 4.1% or $37 million.

Adjusted consolidated EBITDA was $619 million, reflecting an increase of $53 million or 9.3% and margin expansion of 90 basis points to 39.5%. Net EBITDA of $619 million is a quarterly record high for SS&C.

Net interest expense for the third quarter of '25 was $104 million. a decrease of $6 million, primarily reflecting lower short-term interest rates. Adjusted net income was $396 million, up 16.5% and adjusted diluted EPS was $1.57, an increase of 17.2%. Our effective non-GAAP tax rate was 21.1%.

Note, for comparison purposes, we have recast the 2024 adjusted net income to reflect the full year effective tax rate of 23.1%. Also note that diluted share count is down year-over-year to 252.6 million from 254.1 million, primarily as a result of share repurchases.

Cash flow from operating activities grew 22%, which was primarily driven by growth in earnings. Our quarterly cash flow conversion was 115%, up from 99% last year. Our year-to-date cash flow conversion is 98% versus 89% last year.

SS&C ended the third quarter with $388 million in cash and cash equivalents and $6.6 billion in gross debt. SS&C's net debt was $6.2 billion and our LTM consolidated EBITDA was $2.4 billion. The resulting net leverage ratio is 2.59x.

As we look forward to the fourth quarter and the remainder of the year with respect to guidance, we will continue to focus on client service and assume that retention rates will be in the range of our most recent results. We'll continue to manage our business to support long-term growth and manage our expenses by controlling and aligning variable expenses, increasing productivity to improve our operating margins and effectively investing in the business through marketing, sales and R&D.

Specifically, we have assumed short-term interest rates to remain at current level, an effective tax rate of approximately 23% on an adjusted basis and capital expenditures to be 4.2% to 4.6% of revenues, and revenues of approximately $20 million for the Calastone acquisition.

For the fourth quarter of 25%, we expect revenue to be in the range of $1.59 billion to $1.63 billion and 4.5% organic revenue growth at the midpoint. Adjusted net income in the range of $394 million to $410 million. Interest expense, excluding amortization of deferred financing costs and original issue discount in the range of $106 million to $108 million. Diluted shares in the range of 251.5 million to 252.5 million. And adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $1.56 to $1.62.

For the full year 2025, we are raising our top line guidance by $37 million at the midpoint and now expect revenue to be in the range of $6.21 billion to $6.25 billion and 4.6% revenue growth at the midpoint. For the full year 2025, we are also raising the midpoint of our earnings guidance. Specifically, we expect adjusted net income in the range of $1.522 billion to $1.538 billion. Adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $6.02 to $6.08, up $0.11 at the midpoint. And cash from operating activities to be in the range of $1.515 billion to $1.575 billion. Our 2025 guidance reflects our record results thus far in 2025, and we look forward to continued execution during Q4.

And now back to Bill.

Thanks, Brian. SS&C's record adjusted revenues and adjusted EBITDA this quarter attest to our strong and long-term financial and operating strength. The 22% increase to $1.1 billion in operating cash flow through 3 quarters gives us the flexibility to pursue growth opportunities as we continue to pay down debt and repurchase shares.

We also look forward to hosting almost 1,000 clients and prospects at our annual Deliver conference beginning this Sunday in Phoenix, Arizona. This year's conference will feature the latest and greatest SS&C's offerings, and we'll have our Chief Technology Officer there, Anthony Caiafa, will talk about all of our AI advancements within SS&C in the market. And our keynote speaker is Victor Haghani, founder and CIO of Elm Wealth and a co-founder of Long-Term Capital Management.

So we appreciate all of you being here on the call, and I'll now open it to questions.

Thanks, Bill. [Operator Instructions] All right. It looks like our first question today comes from the line of Dan Perlin with RBC Capital Markets.

Nice quarter here. I just wanted to try and get a sense around the 4Q organic guide around 4.5%. Kind of keeping in mind that Battea is contributing into that organic growth. So I'm just wondering, can you tell us at least directionally what the contribution of Battea would be in that 4.5% and -- or is that just kind of a conservative kind of jumping off point. It felt like it should be contributing, I think, more meaningfully in the fourth quarter.

Yes. I think that the -- the one thing that I would just highlight is Q4 of the year before was by far our strongest quarter. So we think that's a reasonable jump in all point, not overly conservative, but also something that hopefully we can positively improve on. And Battea's contribution, I think we did about $16 million in Q4 last year. We expect to do about $25 million in Q4 this year.

Got it. Okay. That's great. And then just secondly, I mean, GIDS had a very successful organic quarter. I wanted to make sure I understood maybe the mechanics behind that a little bit. I think the contribution to that organic growth was driven by this lift out, but maybe if you could provide a little more details around that, that would be great.

Yes, that was a big chunk. We had a big lift out in Sydney, Australia, that we completed July 1. So we had a half a year from that. And we also sold other large lift outs as well, and we have a pipeline. So we're pretty confident in Q4 for GIDS and '26.

And our next question comes from the line of Jeff Schmitt with William Blair.

On the Curo Fund Services deal, could you discuss what attracted you to that business? And how much revenue is that generating? I guess why is that going to be held under GIDs if it's a fund administration business?

The African market is still quite a bit behind the European and the U.S. markets in fund administration and a lot of where you find these kinds of companies is in the life and pensions area. So the 2 large clients, we have very large insurers and they jointly owned Curo. So that's why it's going into GIDS.

Okay. And did you mention how much revenue that's generating?

It's negligible. It's $15 million or so, I think.

Okay. And then you had talked in recent quarters just about implementing agentic AI and Blue Prism. I think that had sort of been more bot-based automation in the past. So could you give us an update on kind of where you stand there? And what other businesses are you developing that for?

Well, we call ourselves customer zero. So we're doing it across our entire business. And as we have been leaders in most of the technologies that have come out over the last several years, we're now infusing all of those technologies with AI agents and making them smarter and faster. And again, with 27,000 people we have and literally thousands of experts, we believe that we bring the functional expertise to make really smart agents. You can use the greatest technology, but if you don't know what the hell you're talking about, they are not going to be particularly good agents. We think we have the largest, most sophisticated clients because we deliver. And I think that's what you're going to find with our delivery of AI agents.

And our next question comes from the line of Alexei Gogolev with JPMorgan.

Bill, it's clearly a competitive market out there. Could you elaborate on the potential impact from the lost business at State Street in-sourced SPDR. Will that impact on revenue be felt in 2026 or in 4Q of this year?

I mean we'll have a small impact. We still believe our WIT business will still grow, and that was kind of an ancillary business anyway. And it's not something that we were investing in to see if we could do more distribution of SPDR-like products. So while we don't ever like to lose revenue, but at the same time, this wasn't our focus. It's not really going to hurt us much and we look forward to taking those resources that we had there and apply them to things that we think can grow faster.

Thank you, Bill. And then Brian, with GIDS and GlobeOp's growth performing quite well this quarter, how much does that revenue mix shift change margin outlook? I think you seem to have suggested that 3Q 2024, SS&C had strong performance of Intralinks and significant license sale that boosted WIT business. And both of those have visibly higher margins than GIDS and GlobeOps. Can you elaborate on margin impact this quarter?

Yes. No, I think what you saw is you saw the strength of the margin impact, actually, obviously, with the GlobeOp. It, obviously, already has very strong margins above the consolidated average and you saw an incremental contribution from them. I think that some of the things that GIDS has been doing is continue to try and work on their margin as well. But I'd say more broadly, because of the different growth areas, we're continuing to see positive signs from the rest of the business. So that's why you've been able to continue to see actually a margin uptake, right, from overall, right? So we're projecting that a greater than 50 basis point margin improvement in EBITDA, which has always been our kind of our general target. And so that mix shift hasn't affected our overall plans on a consolidated level.

And at 39.5%, you can compare us to any of our peers, we perform admirably relatively.

And our next question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann with D.A. Davidson.

I wanted to follow up on Calastone a little bit. Two things there. Talk a little bit about how their existing operations complement your existing U.K. operations for advisory firms and then in wealth management firms. And then number two is remind us, is there any significant seasonality of Calastone's revenue? I seem to remember there was some seasonality to the first quarter for year-end statement, but I can't remember if that was correct.

So we're excited about Calastone. Jason Hammerson has built a great business, got 250 people, and I believe, have about 4,600 clients, fund companies and other asset managers and wealth managers around the world, and it really has a powerful tokenization process. It has very powerful ETFs. And many of you know that it looks like dual share class ETFs has been approved, and that's going to be another boon to the ETF market, which is pretty strong in the United States. And the mutual fund industry, where Calastone is also real strong, it's still strong in Asia and in Europe. So we really like the synergies we get with Calastone acquisition, and we look forward to building on our distribution networks together.

Okay. And then on the seasonality of revenue and anything significant there to call out?

I don't think so. I think, Pete, it's a great company, but relative size is not going to impact our growth rates are -- and there's no seasonality in any one quarter that's going to make much of a difference.

Really going to stand out. Okay. Appreciate it.

And our next question comes from the line of Patrick O'Shaughnessy with Raymond James.

So it sounds like, at least anecdotally, the M&A pipeline is starting to pick up. But obviously, that really hasn't translated to improved growth for Intralinks quite yet. What are you seeing out there in terms of the pipeline for Intralinks and the competitive landscape?

Yes. I think it's a little bit like you just pointed out, we are seeing the early indicators of the pipeline. So the opportunities that we're talking to and the data rooms that are getting opened, we're seeing those numbers improve. Generally, revenue lags several weeks to maybe a few months from there, but we are starting to see some positive signs.

Got it. I appreciate that. And then health care business, 2 consecutive quarters of positive year-over-year growth. What's your confidence level that, that business has positively inflected in a sustainable way?

Well, I think, Patrick, that one of the things people should keep in mind is we built DomaniRx while we ran this health care business, and we had 1 million hours in that development. So the Domani runs at -- or our health care business runs at 30%, 35% margins. We -- it's lumpy. You get $10 million, $20 million deals, sometimes way bigger than that. And we have a great client in Humana that we continue to build out further, and we have another great client in Centene. And so we have opportunities. And it's just selling into large banks, large insurance companies, large asset managers. Sometimes I think they're nimble when I sell into large health care organizations.

And our next question comes from the line of Kevin McVeigh with UBS.

Congratulations on terrific results. I think you came in $0.07 above the high end of the range, including kind of some -- it seems like, obviously, implementation work. I guess where was the source of the upside just relative to where expectations were on the EPS?

Well, again, we talked a little bit about the lift out we did in Australia that lifted the GIDS business. And then we also have had very strong performance out of GlobeOp. And even though we had some weaker revenue performance on Intralinks, they're still very profitable. So all of our businesses are doing well with opportunities. And in Q3, we had most of them hitting a pretty good stride. And we think in Q4, we have -- we're pretty good out of the gates, right? It's certainly towards the end of October, which is 1/3 of the quarter, and it's also got Thanksgiving and Christmas in the fourth quarter. So we're reasonably optimistic, as you can tell.

You sound really encouraged. I guess you mentioned tokenization a couple of times with Calastone. Is there an opportunity to kind of implement that technology across the other business lines, similar to what you've done with Blue Prism?

There's opportunity. And one of the great things we always talk about is that you have to get right? So a lot of people dabbled in things like machine learning and natural language processing and robotic process automation and that -- but you buy a few licenses to UiPath or Automation Anywhere and you don't have any substance. SS&C spent $1.6 billion, $1.7 billion to buy Blue Prism so that we had 1,400 people that are steeped in these technologies. And now with what we're doing with AI agents and being customer zero, we get to add all kinds of capabilities in a very controlled manner so that we become your trusted source for AI at a -- in a regulated and highly complex industries.

And our next question comes from the line of James Faucette with Morgan Stanley.

Just wanted to ask a question on the general environment. Bill, you've had great insight previously into private credit flows, and there's been a lot of chatter about that market maybe beginning to show a little squishiness. Are you seeing anything from a flow perspective? Or do you consider that a bit of noise right now?

I think as more people get into it, James, that people need to learn and understand the vagaries of the private markets versus the public markets. But the smartest people in the industry are all over private credit and other new ways in which to develop returns that sometimes are not there in the public markets. And so we've had a bunch of the biggest players in the industry are our clients, and we've had talks by a number of them. And they're talking 100, 200 basis points more in the private markets than what they can get in the public markets. And so as long as that's true, and there's no -- nothing that's showing that it's not, I don't think it's going to slow down.

Appreciate that. And then I wanted to ask on go-to-market. You've been more focused on selling some enterprise solutions that combine multiple products and services. The organic results are still really strong, but anything you can share qualitatively or quantitatively on the impact on that initiative and how it may be impacting things like average deal size or even customer retention?

Well, obviously, you work for a big investment bank and understand that you guys moving real quickly is kind of an oxymoron, right? And so I think what we see is that these larger and larger institutions, the top management wants to move fast. And what they find is that, that really is out of character for these large commercial and investment banks. And what they like about us is that we're still a pretty big place. We've got 27,000 people. We have 120 offices or 130 offices around the world. And so we can bring you scale and we still move pretty quickly. And relative to the gigantic banks, we moved very quickly.

And it looks like there are no further questions. So I will now turn the call back over to Bill Stone for closing remarks. Bill?

Dan, thank you. So I think from a standpoint of our third quarter, we're happy to have performed well. We look forward to talking to you after the new year. And hopefully, we will surprise you positively. So have a good quarter. Thanks.

Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome SS&C to the Jefferies Fintech Conference here. With me today, I have Rahul Kanwar, who's President and COO; and I also have Justine Stone, who's Head of Investor Relations. And I'm Surinder Thind, the lead analyst for Technology and Information Services. Welcome, guys.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

So where I would like to start is, obviously, everybody wants to know what's going on currently. So maybe we can talk about the current demand environment. And more specifically, I think in 2Q, you commented that you continue to have a positive outlook for the remainder of the year. Can you maybe elaborate on that, what that really means, maybe how sentiment has evolved over the year? And how you would describe the current environment in the broader context of historical demand?

Absolutely. And Surinder, thanks for having us, and we really do appreciate it. As we look at kind of the year and the remainder of the year, but also where we are as a company, I think a lot of the work that we have done over the last 3, 4, 5 years is starting to bear fruit. So whether that's investment in sales and marketing, whether that's investment in product plan and technology, R&D, making sure we're paying attention to the customers. And what that really does is it -- there's always a range of outcomes, right? And so you can have a really good outcome and you can have a maybe less attractive outcome. And what it really does is that where we are right now, we feel like for the next several quarters to maybe a year or 2, we have pretty good visibility into what we're trying to achieve. right?

And the visibility comes from having sold clients. It comes from having late-stage deals in our pipeline that we think are likely to happen. It comes from implementations that are about to go live. So lots of things that we can have reasonable certainty. And look, we still need to execute. There's -- those outcomes are still possible. But I think as you continue to get better at execution, where you think you'll land up gets that much more attractive. And I think that's really all we mean.

We mean that the fundamentals are strong. And what that allows us to do is it allows us to withstand a certain amount of uncertainty in the environment, whether that's the macro environment, the political environment, things that are happening globally and still feel like what we're doing is mission-critical. People have to have it, and we ought to be able to do reasonably well.

That's helpful. And then just from a big picture perspective, it sounds like with all of the investments that you have made without -- not talking about guidance, but are we kind of where you want to be in terms of -- is this kind of like a mid-single-digit framework that we should be thinking about? Because we go back to Investor Day, is that the framework that you're kind of alluding to when you say that you're executing where you want to be?

I think so. I think what we talked about at Investor Day was exactly that, right? And we talked about it over a couple of years. As time passes, if we're doing the right things and we're continuing to make progress, we would expect to kind of continue to march along that path. That's really where we feel we are.

And once again, I'll just stress that -- so this is trial and error, right? You try some things that don't work out, you try again. Hopefully, where you end up with is better management, better product plan, better road map, more focus on sales and marketing, never perfection, but lots and lots of progress, and that's where we feel we are.

That's helpful. And then it also appears that with some recent acquisitions and additions to the company, there's maybe a bit more seasonality in the business. Is that a fair characterization? And is there maybe any way to quantify or think about that seasonality?

Yes. So I think the thing that -- at least the way I think about it is I kind of think about quarters and forecasts and ranges and things like that. There's always a degree of variability. I don't know that, that degree of variability has changed dramatically.

Look, we always have some license we need to sell in the course of the quarter. There's always some volume-based metrics, whether that's how many data room deals we can have in Intralinks or how much order flow goes through ads or kind of what that final AUA number is. We like to think that all those things are relatively small. But most of what we're talking about in terms of commentary is, okay, why are you 25 basis points or 50 basis points or 75 basis points less or more? So kind of the narrative focuses on kind of stuff that's really small.

I think the only exception, and it's a relatively small piece of our business is we did acquire Battea last year. Battea is a little lumpier than most of the rest of our business, which just means that we have pretty good visibility into what we think we'll do for a year. We don't always have as much visibility coming into the year as to what quarters that will kind of fall into. But just to give you a sense of magnitude, Battea is less than 2% of our revenues.

That's helpful. And then maybe moving on to international performance. You've talked about some of the strength that you're seeing in Europe, in Australia, in the Middle East with maybe even some increased win rates. So can you help us understand what's driving the success? Maybe talk about the investments that you've made in these regions. And what the plan is for scaling some of that success?

Sure. So international expansion has always been a part of our strategy and has been something that has -- there's a lot of opportunity. There's always been a lot of opportunity in the U.S. It's kind of the biggest financial services market and remains today probably our biggest opportunity, but we've seen in the past probably 3 years or so, a lot more opportunity internationally. And some of that is from the investments that we've made, opening offices in Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi allows us to work more closely with the Capital Markets Authority and the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency. And we've seen continued success.

We have some flagship clients in the region, and that drives more business for us there. And there's obviously a lot of sovereign wealth money in the Middle East region. And we've seen success within the GlobeOp business, within our GIDS business and within our Wealth and Investment Technologies business units in that region.

APAC also is a big area for growth for us and particularly Australia has gotten a lot of airtime. I think a lot of that as our global investor and distribution business has gotten stronger over the past few years, it's opened up more opportunities. So where we did have a small presence in Australia for a long time, we've really been able to gain a more operational presence there. We won a big -- a couple of big clients. We now have probably a couple of thousand employees in Australia that are working to serve that industry. So I think good things to come.

I think the Calastone acquisition also -- that we expect to close in Q4 also presents more international expansion opportunities as well in Australia, in Continental Europe and the U.K. and also they have some presence in Brazil, too, which kind of opens up the Latin America market for us.

And then when we think about the international business and just kind of in the context of everything that you've elaborated on, it sounds like this is going to be an engine for growth for a very long time as we kind of look forward, a big part of the opportunity going ahead.

I think that's right. What we're seeing is that the things that those clients are looking for really around the world are very similar to the things they're looking for here in North America. Obviously, there's some degree of local nuance, whether it's local regulators or language or whatever the case may be. But an investment accounting system still needs to process securities and an Investor Relations function still needs to interact with end clients and those kinds of things.

And in a lot of ways, being as global as we are and having invested as much in our products, the features and functions that we bring to local markets is dramatically different than what they have access to. So that helps with the demand part of the equation.

So it just sounds like being a premium provider here in the U.S. is providing with a competitive advantage as you go into the international market. Is that a fair characterization?

I think so. I think that's a big part of it. And then to the point that Justine just made, we've had in a lot of these markets that we're going into, we've had operations for a long, long, long time. So it's not like we're going in for the first time or we have no local knowledge. It's -- we're already there and -- but we have an opportunity to dramatically expand.

And then maybe switching to the alts business here. GlobeOp obviously continues to generate some really strong growth. It was above 7% organically this past quarter. Maybe can we disaggregate that a little bit? There's a lot more different parts to that business now as you scale different parts. Maybe talk about the private markets part of the business, which I think you said was growing more than 10%. Can you keep that up? How big is that segment now? And then you also talked about your retail alts business growing more than 20%. Just any color that you can provide there would be helpful.

Sure. And any time you're thinking about that business, the challenge with kind of the decomposition is the lines increasingly get blurred, right, because most of the large customers that we're in have hedge funds, private equity funds. They've got some exposure or would like some exposure to retail. And so that's a part of it.

I think a big part of how we think about that business is what we've really done is we put ourselves in a place where if you're a really large alternatives money manager and you're looking for somebody to help you with your operations or your fund administration or something, you're going to consider us. right? And then as you get deeper into what you'd like us to do for you, you'll be interested in our private equity capabilities, you'll be interested in our real estate capabilities, so on and so forth.

So coming back to kind of the numbers, and this is pretty -- this is rough. But I'd say maybe 35%, 40% of our business is what we would call closed-end in some form. So private assets, private capital, real estate, infrastructure funds, things like that, things that look like traditional private equity, even though the asset -- private credit, hedge funds is a big part of the business, more than half. And then retail alts is kind of a small, but importantly, growing fast as just folks are looking for ways to raise capital. So that's maybe 10%, 15%.

In general, over the last several years, private capital has -- the pace of growth in our private markets business has been faster than our hedge fund business, but our hedge fund business has remained strong. And retail alts at least for the last couple of years, has been even stronger than that.

Got it. And then just moving on to, obviously, M&A and capital allocation is always an important part of your strategy. Maybe with the recent announced acquisition of Calastone, you're taking leverage up to maybe -- I think it's about 2.7x by the year-end, maybe when the deal closes. So how does this actually impact your capital allocation strategy in the near term? And what does it mean for things like share repurchases and debt paydown?

I'll take that one. So we're very comfortable operating at a 3x leverage ratio. And our strategy will likely not change if we're kind of operating in the same general environment. We're always opportunistic when it comes to acquisitions, and we'd like to look at everything. And I think Bill said on the earnings call that we have the capacity to take leverage up to 4.5x maybe at the maximum, and that gives us a few billion dollars in potential M&A opportunities or what we can deploy. Not to say that that's something that's in the pipeline or something that's likely to happen, but we're always willing and we're always kind of ready to look at something and to act on something if we're really interested and if it is a good opportunity for us and kind of meets all of our criteria.

So our strategy doesn't likely change. I mean we'll take up the leverage a little bit. We'll -- and then we'll continue to pay down debt and buy back our shares opportunistic. We've been operating more as a probably, I don't know, 60-40 share repurchases to debt paydown in the last 12 months or so, kind of depending on where the stock is trading, depending on the cost of debt or these are all kind of just factors that we look at. But I think we still feel that even at kind of our stock approaching these all-time highs, we still feel like we're undervalued.

Got it. So if I was to just summarize the messaging here, it sounds like at or around 3x leverage below that, the strategy doesn't really change. And it sounds like even with the stock approaching kind of these all-time highs, you're very comfortable about being -- continuing to be relatively systematic on the share repurchases.

Correct. I mean we don't have any plan in place. So it is always opportunistic. We buy in the open market. But we just upped our buyback authorization to $1.5 billion. And I think we intend to use it.

That's helpful. And then just in terms of the pipeline or the opportunity pipeline for acquisitions. Can you talk about that? I think on the call, you mentioned you have the ability to do an acquisition of upwards of about $5 billion. What would you potentially target? Or what are you targeting in that pipeline? And then I assume that even with all of the stuff that's pending, you're still very active in looking through across the spectrum.

Yes. And part of it is that we're, as Justine just said, opportunistic, which sort of means we look at everything. right? And so we're not -- we don't -- we almost never start with a predefined set of criteria as to, look, here's something we would like to buy because we think that maybe tends to narrow the focus unnaturally and you end up overpaying or getting a little too interested in something that might be out there.

So I wouldn't -- I think to the point that was just made, I don't know that we've got a several billion dollar acquisition that is even remotely imminent. But we have the opportunity, and we're going to keep looking because we think that those looks are, one, they're helpful because they eventually help to narrow the pipeline, and we end up with good acquisition candidates. And they're also a really good way for our business unit heads to continue to evaluate what's out there.

And I would just add that in terms of financial criteria, what we look for is we want it to be accretive to growth, and I think you've seen that in the last few acquisitions that we've done accretive to our top line revenue growth, and we want them to be able to get to -- if they're not already there, to be able to work their way to a 40% EBITDA margin.

That's helpful. And then maybe moving on to kind of the concepts around AI automation. Obviously, there's a lot going on. Maybe just start with Blue Prism here. And on the call, you kind of mentioned your first AI agent sale to an insurance client. You gave a number of metrics around that about 80% approval in kind of the manual effort, the accuracy rates went up to 99% plus. Can you maybe talk about a bit more detail about that insurance client and what that means in terms of maybe future opportunities?

Yes. I think that particular sale was for credit agreement. So basically, AI agents being able to read through pretty complex unstructured documents and pulling out the necessary information that who's ever looking at it is looking for. Historically, what we've done with a -- with just RPA and kind of pre-AI automation is, you can teach the machine to do whatever you want, but within a set of parameters. And as soon as a document looks a little bit different, that RPA would break or there would need to be human intervention.

So with the AI, it allows the human to stay hands off and the AI intervenes or the AI can read through and understand the document and bring out the relevant information. So that was kind of this one case. It was our first sale. We have about 20 different kind of instances or AI agents within SS&C that we've deployed and are working on similar things that we could also turn around and sell to our client base. So that's kind of our strategy today. Today, we're calling SS&C customer zero.

So we're kind of building things for ourselves, working it into our own operations. And then we're kind of the proof of concept or we're the case study that we can go along and sell that. So I think that's a huge differentiator for us compared to our kind of RPA and AI competitors in this space. And we have access to the source code for all of these major systems, Geneva, Black Diamond, Genesis that the financial services industry uses, but we can kind of work AI into that. So I think that, that's kind of our big opportunity here.

And then just following up on the Blue Prism offering, where -- when the acquisition was made, the focus was on RPA. Obviously, we moved beyond that at this point with generative AI. Can you maybe talk about some of the investments? It sounds like, Rahul, in your earlier commentary, you talked about all of the investments that you've made. It sounds like there's a lot of near-term investment in Blue Prism as well. How do we think about where we are in the product cycle for that? Is there a lot more coming? Is that perhaps your near-term area of focus? Or how should we think about that?

Yes. No, it's definitely an important area of focus. One, just simply because from a macro standpoint, it's a really hot market. right? And we're in that market in a big way. And so we, of course, want to take advantage of that. The other thing that I would just -- a little bit of -- almost a reality check to some of the hype about generative AI. Generative AI is really, I think, transformational and one of those great technologies that's going to dramatically change everything over some period of time. But what it doesn't do well is reconcile your portfolio, right?

And so it's just a little -- our foundation in RPA, which is numerical workflows that are complicated, that are very systematized, they occur the same way every time. That's still a really, really good business for us. What we've done is we've taken advantage of some of the newer technologies to be able to create things that make it easier for human beings to deploy that functionality, right? So now you can teach the -- in effect, the -- our version of the ChatGPT, what you want to do with your workflow and have it do it for you.

To Justine's point, when it hits a roadblock, the machine is smart enough that it can actually go think about it and figure something out and come back to you and say, do you like this, as opposed to, okay, stop, error, let's fulfill that. And so this whole thing about agents and AI agents is truly that it's goal setting. It's saying, I want to reconcile my portfolio or I want to communicate with my counterparties or I want to interact with my investors or I want to handle my incoming calls or whatever the case may be. And as our algorithms become more sophisticated, you can do more and more and more of that.

The biggest advantage we have is we're a really, really large-scale processor of these kinds of transactions, right? So to the customer zero point, we're a lab, right? So we can produce things that are live tested and already working, we think at a faster rate than some of our competitors, but obviously, the work is ongoing.

And I would just also add to that governance is a huge part of our offering, too. So we're dealing with sensitive information, probably the most sensitive information in financial services and the Healthcare industries with our clients, and we need to make sure that their data is protected. So we're not just putting these things into an open source model or ChatGPT. So we've built SS&C's AI gateway, which kind of protects the data internally. And it's something that, that gateway, we can also sell separately as a license to our customers, too, that want to be able to use AI safely and kind of generative AI safely.

And then switching from external-facing uses for Blue Prism, maybe talking about yourself, customer zero. To date, you've saved approximately 2,500 jobs, I think, through the internal deployment. Can you talk about what that really means? Are you redeploying some of these folks? Is there a lot more that you can do internally as maybe the capabilities expand? How do we think about looking forward in terms of headcount and so forth at SS&C?

I think that the -- we view it as an opportunity for us for the next 5 or 10 years. right? So we kind of -- and maybe beyond, but there's no limit yet that we've hit where we don't think we can keep doing this, which is we're just not replacing attrition at the rates that we previously would. And what that has meant for the last couple of years is headcount has, for the most part, outside acquisitions or lift-outs or something, stayed pretty flat as revenue has grown. And we think that will continue. If anything, we might even gain some momentum in certain areas and go a bit faster than we have in the past.

Most of what's happening is that we're a -- as I said, we're a processor at scale, millions and millions and millions of different kinds of transactions every single day, which almost by definition, occur in much the same way or they couldn't occur at all, right? You can't process millions of transactions at scale if you don't have a repeatable process. That repeatable process does lend itself to AI, whether that's robotic process or machine learning or generative AI. We're in the process of deploying that. We're doing that in a pretty methodical way. We're not trying to be disruptive. We think what it does is it -- for our employees, while it's changed and nobody likes change, it does free them up to do better things, more intellectual things, things that are probably career enhancing. And so that's been all really positive for us.

And then when we think about the impact of all of this automation on the margins, you mentioned the 40% adjusted EBITDA target. You've been there in the past. You're moving towards that now. Can maybe you talk about what the longer-term potential might be with this technology? Is it maybe a little bit higher than you have in the past now that you have it? And is there any way that you can -- for the investors out there, assist with understanding how much is coming from the technology and how much might be -- margin expansion might be from like operating leverage and so forth?

Sure. Look, we're at -- I think what we've said in the past, which we think holds today is we think we can get 50 to 100 basis points of margin improvement every year for the foreseeable future, right? So obviously, at some point, we break through the 40 and we keep going. But as I just said, I don't think we've identified any structural reason why that wouldn't just keep going for a long time. It's also -- it's a mix of a lot of different things. One are sort of the traditional ways of expense control more than anything else, managing vendors, managing -- making sure sales and marketing expense is productive, things like that. And those things will continue, and they'll always be helpful. But by far, our single biggest expense is payroll, right? It's employees. And having a degree of control over that -- the increase in that employee base is something we haven't had traditionally. So our opportunities to manage expenses is probably even better than it has been.

And then generally speaking, when we think about the employee base, you guys have a very global footprint. Does the technology maybe change what the footprint looks like or it starts to shift in certain directions, maybe more people in India, less people in India or more in the U.S., less in the U.S. How do we think about just conceptually what might be -- what changes might be on the horizon?

Yes. Look, I think for many, we would say, traditional employers, what they have done is they have offshored in effect, the lower-level jobs, right? That's -- if you kind of look at our competitors in industry, that has tended to be what they've done. So if you had that kind of a business, what you would think would happen is that degree of offshoring, whether it's India or somewhere else, would probably -- it would reduce a little bit because you just wouldn't -- you'd start to automate at the kind of work your way up. Ours has always been a little bit different.

One of the reasons why we've had really strong retention in far-flung parts of the world, and we have a really motivated and excellent workforce in India as one example, is because we've always just treated that as it's the same there. We do 100% of the work in India, just like we do 100% of the work in New York. We have junior fund accountants sitting in New York, and we have junior fund accountants sitting in Mumbai, and that's how we like it because we want to be able to create career paths and progression and so on and so forth along the way.

So for us, I don't know that the mix really changes. Mix changes for us more with what's going on in the labor market more than anything. What's inflation, what's retention? How easy is it for us to attract talent, those kinds of things. But we don't really think that the technology changes it very much.

And then maybe one more on AI. Just moving beyond Blue Prism, but thinking about the technology a bit more holistically. Does the introduction of this technology maybe start to change your competitive positioning in the sense that maybe is it easier for others to try and cross the moat that you guys have built up? Can maybe we talk about that? And then -- or maybe does this increase the moat given the scale that you operate at and what maybe you can do?

I think a lot of these things are continuations of things that have happened in the past, right? So when we talk about being customer zero with respect to AI, we're also customer zero with respect to our fund accounting technology, right? And that's the world's leading technology, whether it's Advent Geneva or some of the other products.

And so it turns that, I think what happens is the latter. I think these things are hard to build. They require millions and millions of real use cases and lots of IP. And once you build them, in some ways, that the tools themselves make that competitive positioning stronger and stronger because they evolve from there, right? I think there's a reason why some of the generative AI companies have the valuations they do because folks realize just how hard it is to get to that point. We think as it relates to financial services and Healthcare, that's the path we're on.

Okay. And then one more, I guess, I should -- I forget to ask this, but on headcount itself, when you think about talent acquisition itself, does that change the game to some extent in the sense of your ability to attract talent, to retain talent? Does that mean there's more choice out there for you now if you don't actually have to increase headcount at the historical pace?

Yes. No, it does. It completely does. One, because we're not hiring at quite the same rate, but we're still in all the labor markets around the world, we can be a little more discerning, right? So our filter is just a little bit narrower, and we have a little more time, which makes a big difference. I think for the incoming -- for the candidates that are looking at SS&C as a potential employer, we're a lot more attractive. I mean, we've always been a good place to work, but we're a lot more attractive now than we were 3, 4, 5 years ago because what we're saying to you is that, in general, you will be doing higher-level work, right? It will be -- you'll use your creativity, you'll use your problem-solving skills. you'll be on a career path.

We're going to pay you well because by definition, if you have an automated process, it generates a lot of cash and it makes us pretty profitable, and we have the ability. We've always been really good at making sure a large percentages more than half of our employee base has equity in the company. So that ownership mindset, and we'll continue to do that. So what we have seen over the last couple of years is our retention rates are stronger and our ability to attract talent has improved.

That's helpful. And we -- I see we have a few minutes left. So I want to sneak in one on Intralinks and maybe one on Healthcare. Can we just get an update on Intralinks? Maybe there's some commentary before about this idea that maybe activity has been picking up in the second half of the year. We're now 1.5 months plus since you guys did earnings. Can you talk about just an update on that part of the business?

Sure. So Intralinks has had really strong performance over the past couple of years despite some lower M&A volumes in the marketplace. And that's because we've been doing things like rolling out some new products and services for those VDRs. The deal rooms have been staying open longer for complex deals, and we get paid as long -- whether there is a deal that closes or as long as the deal room is open and players are kind of kicking tires, we get paid for that amount of time. So it's time, it's documents that put in and it's people accessing it and doing stuff with that document. So that's kind of the usage fee that we that we charge.

The past couple of quarters, activity has slowed a little bit. Deal rooms have closed. And we're just kind of in that cycle where it's kind of bottomed out for us, and we expect it to pick up again in the second half of the year. So we're starting to see more activity. The deal -- M&A globally has started to pick up a bit, and we've seen announcements, and there will just be a bit of a lag for when Intralinks starts to see that activity as well.

So we're -- it's not going to end the year quite like we did last year. But again, I think we bottomed out, and we'll start to see it reaccelerate based on kind of deal volumes that we're seeing, bookings and kind of other metrics that the team follows.

Yes. And I think to that point, Q4 would likely be better than Q1 and Q2, and we're sort of in the middle of Q3. So we are -- Intralinks has been a strong business for us for a long time. It's nice to see that even in a macro environment that's less than perfect, they can sort of hold their own and grow modestly. And then the second this starts to pick up, we ought to see some pretty sizable acceleration.

Got it. And then last question, just on Healthcare. Can you maybe talk about the opportunity pipeline? And in order to kind of like the visibility you would have into '26 at this point, with the idea that do you have to win some deals in 3Q, and that's what you can convert into '26? Or is '26 effectively set given that a lot of vendors have that January 1 start date that they like for conversions?

I think it's a little bit of both. There are some deals that we're pretty close to now that we think would positively impact us in '26 if they come to fruition. And then there's a fair amount of deals that we're working now that are really 1/1/27 starts.

Got it.

But there's also -- those are kind of the larger deals that we're talking about. There's always smaller deals that we can sell with Healthcare, additional services to our existing clients, et cetera, that will positively impact the current quarter or kind of more in the short term.

Okay, guys. That actually takes us to time. So thank you very much.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you.