Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Cognizant Technology Solutions second quarter earnings conference call. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the conference over to Katie Royce, Global Head of Investor Relations at Cognizant. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jeremy, and good afternoon, everyone. By now, you should have received a copy of the earnings release for the company's second quarter 2019 results. If you have not, a copy is available on our website, cognizant.com. The speakers we have on today's call are Brian Humphries, Chief Executive Officer; and Karen McLoughlin, Chief Financial Officer.Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the comments made on today's call and some of the responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties as described in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC.Additionally, during our call today, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe provide useful information for our investors. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures, where appropriate, to the corresponding GAAP measures can be found in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC.With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Brian Humphries. Please go ahead, Brian.

Thank you, Katie, and good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for joining. Earlier today, we announced results for our second quarter. Q2 revenue grew 4.7% year-over-year in constant currency to $4.14 billion and non-GAAP EPS was $0.94. While we are pleased that we met our revenue and margin guidance, we are not satisfied with this level of performance. Our second quarter results do not reflect what Cognizant is capable of achieving in this market environment, neither on revenue growth nor margin rate. So as we said about correcting these trends, I'm convinced that a large part of what we need to do is in our own control.Softness in Banking and Financial Services, which was up 1.7% year-over-year in constant currency, and Healthcare, which was down 1.5% in constant currency, impacted second quarter revenue growth. While certain market dynamics have impacted our results, I believe that much of our weakness in Banking and in the non-Life Sciences portion of Healthcare is attributable to Cognizant-specific issues.My interaction with clients in both industries underline that they are committed to investing in innovation to help increase their competitiveness and growth. Specific to our banking practice, we've recently implemented a new operating model, which includes a team solely focused on new logos, a team dedicated to the platinum accounts which are a subset of our largest global clients and a banking practice and solutions team to ensure we develop more compelling thought leadership and better align the key partners.In Healthcare, factors such as the in-sourcing of a large health care payer client and the spending pullback by clients that are in the midst of merger integration impacted our performance in the quarter. Fundamental market changes are reshaping health care requiring our clients to do more with less and get ahead of regulatory compliance and complexity while…

Thank you, Brian, and good afternoon, everyone. Second quarter revenue of $4.14 billion was at the high end of our guided range and represented growth of 3.4% year-over-year or 4.7% in constant currency. Digital revenue growth accelerated from previous quarters to the mid-20% range and now contributes approximately 35% of our total revenue.Moving to the industry verticals where overall company performance continues to be impacted by both Financial Services and Healthcare. Financial Services growth was up 1.7% in constant currency, driven by modest improvement in Banking primarily from the contribution of the previously announced partnership with three Finnish financial institutions to transform and operate a shared core banking platform. In insurance, growth continued to be sluggish as delays in decision-making impacted the start of new work from projects in the pipeline. We anticipate some improvement in insurance in Q3 with the ramp-up of several of these projects.In Banking, we continue to see softness at a few of our largest banking clients and a cautious approach to spend with several of our regional banking clients in North America that were impacted by M&A activity. Consistent with recent trends, two of our Top 5 banking clients continue to show good growth while spend at the other three clients remains under pressure.We anticipate some cautiousness in overall levels of spend in the banking sector in the second half of the year due to weakness in capital markets across banking, M&A activity with the U.S. regional banks and weak macro factors. Moving on to Healthcare, which declined 1.5% year-over-year in constant currency. Within our Healthcare vertical, the decline with our payer clients was largely the result of several large clients involved in mergers as well as the accelerated movement of some work to a captive at a large client. We continue the ramp-down of…

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Keith Bachman from Bank of Montreal.

And welcome again, Brian, your first quarter under ownership, so to speak. And my question is going to be directed towards you. If -- there's a lot of moving parts, it sounds like, both on how I think about the offense of trying to chase revenues while at the same time trying to balance costs. And so we have your margin targets for the year, but just philosophically, how should we be thinking about these two goals of trying to really nurture the revenue line while at the same time trying to optimize the cost structure? How should investors be thinking about this over the course of this longer journey?

Keith, well, I mean, the first thing I'll say is I do not believe they're mutually exclusive, but let me start first with revenue and then I'll spend some time on costs. We grew, as you know, 4.7% this quarter in constant currency. Within that construct, I would say we had very muted performance in two of our larger segments, Banking and Financial Services and indeed Healthcare, which represents 63% of the business. So one of the first things we have to do to get back to a stronger growth performance is to actually help turn those businesses around, just the law of numbers becomes meaningful.On top of that, I think we are at the stage now of investing more in growth, changing the dialogue internally, prioritizing growth. As you've seen, we have approved, at this moment in time, and I believe over time we will add to this number, over 500 revenue-generating resources or revenue support resources. So the inclination is to get back to what we've always done, which has been to focus on client centricity and revenue growth.Now cost is, of course, and strategy is important to revenue growth. First of all, what are our strategic postures, how are we exposed to faster-growing categories of the market, which are both technology categories such as digital engineering, our way of working, IoT, cloud, as well as geographic categories. And that's why I'm pleased to see the continued momentum we have in the global growth markets, which is our non-North America region.Costs, however, are important to growth because you need to have a very efficient and disciplined cost base to be able to take pricing in the deals, to be able to absorb the renewals, pricing pressure that we are seeing in our traditional business as well as being able to invest in the future. I talked in my prepared remarks around the importance of pivoting to digital and the associated parameters of that, smaller TCV contracts, more contracts, a different delivery model, et cetera.We also need to invest in people, in M&A and indeed in the brand to make sure that we are more associated not just with the area of the business where we are loved by customers but also with the pivot to digital. Many of these areas are, as you know, key to our constrained assets, both M&A targets as well as even just getting digital resources into the company.But I will say, I'm four months in at this stage. Having interrogated the data for four months and having spent a great deal of time in the transformation office, I see huge opportunity here on revenue growth and indeed on costs. I'm not going to get into a guidance discussion today around next fiscal year or indeed a multi-year view. But at this moment in time, this, from my perspective, is something that I only see opportunity in, to improve our performance from today's performance.

Our next question comes from the line of Tien-Tsin Huang from JPMorgan.

Glad to see a lot of heavy buybacks, well done there. Just wanted to ask actually on gross margins. Looks like it's the lowest level we've seen in some time. What's driving this? I heard the Healthcare renegotiations. I'm not sure if that was related there. Maybe any comments on pricing, contract execution, that kind of thing and maybe any outlook on gross margin.

Sure. So Tien-Tsin, it's Karen. It's really two factors, one of which is the Healthcare renegotiations that you talked about, about a 40 basis point impact in the fall in gross margin and then also the fact that headcount continued to grow faster than revenue in the quarter. Part of that is our digital operations business, which is growing considerably faster than headcount -- than, sorry, company revenue at this point.Headcount grew in line with the revenue growth digital operations, but you know that does come at a typically lower gross margin than the IT business. But overall, headcount for the rest of the business did grow faster in revenue, and the vast majority of that cost is sitting in gross margin. And that is obviously one of the things that as we continue to focus on tackling the cost of delivery to the organization, we will be looking to optimize in the coming months and quarters.

Our next question comes from the line of Lisa Ellis from MoffettNathanson.

Brian, as you're thinking about your overall strategic plan, can you provide a little bit more color on how your -- you believed you guys should be tackling the deterioration in Cognizant's traditional services, meaning shifting away from or reaccelerating, or whatever the right answer is, those more traditional legacy pieces of the business, which just at an industry level, maybe flat or even in structural decline. That strikes me as one of the trickier aspects things to navigate through here.

Yes. It's a good question because we have strength in our existing customer base, and if you look at the Pareto, we have very strong positions and are highly concentrated in a set of customers but we need to pivot more to digital. As we are pivoting to digital, as I said, there are different characteristics of the deals, of the skill sets we need, of the delivery models, of the buying decision makers, if you will, on behalf of the customers. And this is an area that we definitely want to invest into the next S curve and make sure we are, from a capital allocation point of view, really prioritizing that.Now in the more traditional businesses, some of them actually give us a foothold into the new application modernization, we'll go hand-in-glove as I said, with the digital engineering space as we start thinking about cloud-native applications. But in a broader sense of the word, Lisa, I'm a big believer in drawing hard decisions across your portfolio and trying to understand where you need to be extremely disciplined from an investment and from a cost structure point of view in terms of optimizing legacy whilst investing in the new. And those are disciplines we need to obviously continue to drive here in Cognizant as we're investing in some of these newer growth categories that should accelerate our CAGR growth.You have seen in the last quarter, we have aggregated all of delivery under one leader. Previously, delivery was fragmented through a number of leaders in the company. And part of the task of that delivery leader is ultimately to drive a much more aggressive stance in terms of how we think about automation and tooling and putting ourselves in a position that we can be what I would term fit for growth in the legacy as well as the broader company. So optimizing the cost structure, in particular, for the legacy and freeing up capital to invest in the new categories, which should be a growth driver for Cognizant going forward.

Our next question comes from the line of Ed Caso from Wells Fargo.

Can you talk a little bit about your capital deployment strategies from this space? Obviously, you deployed a lot of capital for repurchase. Where does M&A fit into the equation sort of order of magnitude? And is there more share repurchase to be done in the near term?

I'll touch on this and Karen can jump in as well. Look, we saw the opportunity to accelerate share repurchases in the last quarter as an opportunistic situation for us and we took advantage of that. And I have no issues continuing to do so if needed.From an M&A point of view, I have rejected some M&A and I have approved some M&A in the last four months. So we would look at that as a means to execute our strategy. We're pleased to have acquired Zenith Technologies, which closed most recently. And obviously, we're using M&A as a means to an end. It is not a strategy, it's a means to execute a strategy. Our priority right now is continuing to refine our strategic posture and making sure, to the prior question, we get our capital allocation correct. But we will look upon M&A as something that we will use to execute our strategy going forward. My emphasis at this moment in time continues to be tuck-in acquisitions that strategically align us to even better our competitive positioning in the market that we deem most relevant to us going forward.

And I think, Ed, it's Karen. Obviously, the guidance for the share count does not assume any more buybacks for the rest of the year. As Brian said, we will continue to look at that opportunistically. But as you know, we have far exceeded our initial expectations for this year in line with this framework we outlined last year at Investor Day where we said we expect to spend on average 25% of our global free cash flow towards buybacks, 25% towards dividends and 25% for acquisitions with the rest going to India. At this point, there are no changes to that framework. If and when there are, we will obviously update accordingly.

Our next question comes from the line of Bryan Bergin from Cowen and Company.

Brian, can you give us a sense on just your view of the time frame of what you think it's going to take for Cognizant to address the company-specific issues that you noted in the your -- in the core verticals there? And in the transformation office work streams, has this already been set up and that's in progress? Or is this now to come in 3Q and 4Q?

No. The transformation office was set up probably almost three months ago at this stage, to be honest. It consists of six work streams, as I said, each is led by one of our executive committee members. Each one has a steering committee and indeed a working committee below that. We've been very clear in outlining suppositions that I want us to backsolve to and expected outcomes, and as part of that, some short-term wins along the way.So we've been also very deliberate, Bryan, in terms of the composition of the teams, making sure we have people that are cross-functional in nature, people who understand the markets both in North America and internationally, people that understand delivery as well as the market-facing commercial teams. I really feel very, very enthused from the output of the work. We've been working extremely hard on that, but it gives me nothing but optimism that there's a huge opportunity for us to free up capital to invest in growth to simplify the organizational structure, clarify roles and responsibilities and ultimately to make us much more successful in the market by accelerating revenue growth and having better solutions to bring to our clients.So I feel great about that. It is not a new initiative. It's been well underway and frankly, I'm probably more advance in my thinking in the output of that than where I potentially consider I would be three months ago. With regards to Banking and Healthcare, we changed out the leaders of both. This will be some heavy lifting, if I'm very honest. Some of it is because of Cognizant-specific issues that are reflective of the market reality of some M&A in health care where we are heavily exposed to four firms that have merged. And some of it candidly relates to…

Our next question comes from the line of Bryan Keane from Deutsche Bank.

I wanted to ask about attrition. I thought it was up a little bit, although year-over-year, it's pretty similar. Where do you expect attrition to go? Do you expect it to stay elevated? Or do you expect it to come back down? And maybe you can just talk about if you guys have lost any key managers or personnel and just thinking about the morale of the company through all these changes.

So let me start with the broader question around leadership and then Karen can jump in on the attrition question. Listen, I mean, to be very clear, in a company of 300,000 employees, we will always have leadership changes and it's pretty standard when you have a new CEO who comes onboard. We have been fortunate that at the time of my appointment and indeed before that, the Board secured certain executives to see through a CEO transition, and I'm grateful for their ability to actually get us through that first four to six months of my tenure because it's certainly allowed me the time to get deeper into the business and to make sure that I was ready to run forward.My perspective is we need a greater emphasis on our customers, greater energy, fresh perspective and candidly in dealing with clients, typically the questions I was asking were how often you've seen our teams, the thought leadership we brought to bear and how we stack up versus the competition and also who were some of the best people in the industry that they recognize and value as people when they are dealing with them. So we have made some very deliberate changes.Now, of course, we've also had some other departures and I think that's normal particularly in a company that has had a relatively stable leadership team over the best part of two decades. This is not something I will say that I am overly concerned about. The emphasis on growth is permeating through the organization. The people who are touching customers day in, day out is typically not the executive team but the client partners. And those client partners are really, in my mind, enthused with the renewed focus on growth after a few years of more focus on margin rate, if you will.And of course, don't get this wrong. I'm not taking this for granted by any means. We are paranoid that the first line of the P&L is the customer. But from my perspective, this is a very manageable transition we're going through. And we've made some strong internal promotions. The new Head of North America, DK, has been with Cognizant for over 20 years and is ultimately focused and has always been focused across multiple verticals on growth. I'm also pleased to have promoted Pradeep in Delivery, somebody who's been with Cognizant for 23 years, to enable us to get much more focused in terms of optimizing our delivery structures.And we've complemented them with some external hires, some executives who used to work with Wipro and indeed more recently Ganesh Ayyar, who was the ex-CEO of Mphasis. So my sense is we want to have the best team we can get our hands on, a team highly motivated, energized, moving with the same speed and urgency that I have and absolutely focused on their teams and on their customers.

And Bryan, as it relates to the 23%, as you said, it is flat year-over-year. And as you know, there is some seasonality to attrition. So typically, after bonuses are paid in March, we do tend to see attrition pick up. Really no changes in terms of the attrition, in terms of where it's coming from up and down the pyramid, the only exception being the director plus attrition ticked up a little bit based on the actions that we took in June as far as the realignment program. But that was the only real, I would say, significant change in attrition both in terms of geography as well as up and down the pyramid. Now I would expect it's going to continue to be lumpy. As we have said for some time now, the job market is strong and as well as we look to optimize cost structure for the organization, that will in itself likely to create some churn.

Our next question comes from the line of Jim Schneider from Goldman Sachs.

As you look forward to the next few quarters, sounds like you expect continued muted trends in financials and maybe some improvement in Healthcare as you get to the end of the year. I guess my question is your Q4 guidance sort of implies that things remain muted kind of across-the-board for some time. Is that just the level of conservatism relative to the outlook? Or do you actually see some headwinds in other segments that could be potentially offsetting that recovery?

Sure. So Jim, this is Karen. Let me tackle that. So Q3 to Q4, there is actually a decline in bill days of about two days and that will cost about $47 million on a constant currency basis. So from a modeling perspective, if you were to take the middle of the range for Q3 and then the middle of the range for the full year guidance, that would actually say on a volume basis that Q4 will be flat with Q3.There will be some puts and takes. As we've talked about in our comments, we do expect to see some stabilization of Healthcare off of the Q2 numbers, not on a year-over-year basis. It will continue to show challenges but we do expect it to stabilize on a sequential basis going forward. We do expect, as I said, a little bit of slowdown in the technology practice, just given the tough year-on-year comps as we get back into the back part of the year but that was in our guidance both this quarter as well as last quarter so no real change there from that perspective.

Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Foresi from Cantor Fitzgerald.

I wonder if you could talk about your positioning in digital. Do you think you're competitive in that business? Or is there catch-up to be done? And I think most importantly, how does one company catch up in digital and close the gap if there is one?

So this is Brian. I'll start with our position in digital. There are areas that I've been really blown away with and that have really -- I've left reviews feeling very proud about what we have and feeling that we definitely have a strong foundation to build from. I talked today about the digital engineering team. I have spent a lot of time with Cognizant's Softvision team. But more broadly within Cognizant, we had legacy digital engineering as well as the application monetization efforts that collectively, it really puts us in a position -- if you think about it, 11,000-plus resources with over $800 million of revenue. It puts us in an incredible position to increase our brand recognition and really dramatically change our position in the market vis-à-vis some of the, let's say, currently known leaders out there.IoT is a few hundred million dollars for us and we have broad offerings that are aligned by industry vertical, and I'd expect us to go accelerate that as part of our strategy. More broadly, there are organic investments we need to make. There will be some inorganic plays we need to make there, too. But as I said, I'm not working on something huge at this moment in time and it will be more tuck-ins aligned to our strategy. Of course, behind any organic and indeed inorganic acquisitions, how do you scale digital? Well, you need to have a brand, you need to have capabilities and you need to have systems and tools and the sales and marketing engine to facilitate it. That's why I explicitly called out the fact that we are going through a pivot, which requires us to do some work. It's more project-oriented work, that's good and bad. You need to sell more projects, they have lower…

Our final question comes from the line of Rod Bourgeois from DeepDive Equity Research.

Brian, so I appreciate your candor in admitting that Cognizant's weak growth in Banking and Healthcare is mostly due to company-specific issues. And my question is do you have a point of view at this point on what Cognizant's growth rate would be today if it weren't for these company-specific issues that you're needing to fix? And I guess on a related note, you're making a lot of internal changes now. I'd like your perspective on whether you think these internal changes will cause additional growth disruption in the upcoming months.

So Rod, it's, of course, hard to extrapolate the implication but you can do a sliding scale analysis to understand that for every 100 basis points of improvement in Healthcare or Banking, what is the implied implication on the broader Cognizant story. But given they are 63% of the business, you can clearly understand that these are meaningful shifts to our overall numbers. And every 160 basis points -- $160-or-so million of growth is 1 point of growth for us, and every $6 million of bottom line is $0.01 EPS for us. So these are important levers for us to get right.We do have a lot of balls in the air at the moment and that's why we are very, very deliberate around the transformation office. We have staffed it with people who know the company well. They have been surrounded by management consultants both internal and indeed external, and we have a huge operation cadence behind that and a broad framework of change management communication and indeed an execution layer that needs to happen.And Rod, by definition, you will always go home at night and wondering if you're going too far, too fast. But I've got to be honest, I have a great sense of urgency. I'm really proud to have this role. I really am proud to have inherited an organization that is, in my mind, full of talent and I want to lead them forward, and I believe that we are going at the right pace to catch up where we need to catch up and to extend our leadership where we think we're in front.But we're spending a lot of time around operational excellence and rigor and making sure we contextualize these changes. It's clear, certain employees will be concerned around the amount of work and the hours and the pace in the decision-making. But my belief is that my executive level, I've had a number of executive committee meetings now, we have a cadence of two days every month. We've had some really, really constructive meetings where the teams are on board and we are making the decisions, in my opinion, needed at this moment in time to put Cognizant in a position where we can unlock our true potential.

Right. And with that, this concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining and for your questions.

This concludes today's call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.