Mark V. Anquillare
Analyst · Wells Fargo
Thanks, Scott. You've heard some of the exciting things that are going on in our business, and I'll share some of the numbers as the results of these efforts. In the third quarter, we delivered 17.3% total revenue growth and 8.5% organic revenue growth. Excluding our historical mortgage business, organic growth in the quarter was 10.8%. For the third quarter, our Decision Analytics segment revenue continued to lead with 27.4% growth, of which 11% was organic, excluding the acquisitions of MediConnect, Aspect Loss Prevention and Argus, as well as the transferred revenue for the mortgage appraisal tools. As a reminder, in 2012, we transferred revenue related to the mortgage appraisal tools from Risk Assessments, property-specific revenue categories into Decision Analytics mortgage and financial services revenue category. We will continue to provide you visibility into the apples-to-apples comparisons throughout 2012. Within Decision Analytics, our insurance category grew 8.6% in the third quarter and 8.3% organically, excluding June, July acquisition of Aspect Loss Prevention. We continued strong double-digit growth in our catastrophe modeling solutions. We also saw improved growth in our loss quantification solutions despite continued to lower levels of storm activity in 2012 versus the same period in 2011. I knew you have a question on the impact of Sandy on our volumes through exact analysis. As you may remember, our multi-year customer contracts include an annual days number of claims to be processed that varies by client. To give you a sense, we are tracking below the contracted amounts of claims year-to-date. So we don't expect to see the transactional bump we saw last year, when clients went into overages. For 2012, we have approximately 20% more claims volumes under contract than in 2011. So we're not currently forecasting overages. Also in the quarter, Claims Solutions delivered good growth. In mortgage and financial services, we grew 10.8%, reflecting the addition of Argus as of August 31. Argus is an excellent business, and we're pleased with the performance today and continue to see opportunity, at least as large than we initially anticipated. After adjusting for the acquisition of Argus and it's transfer to the mortgage appraisal tools from Risk Assessment into this revenue category in the third quarter revenues declined 11.9%. We continue to see the same themes that we've been discussing in previous quarters. Underwriting tools grew nicely in the quarter and reflected the growth in the mortgage application to the market. Our revenue from forensic solutions declined in the quarter, more than offsetting that growth. To provide additional clarity on these trends, a quick reminder about the shape of our business. Broadly speaking, there are 2 types and 2 parts of the mortgage business, what we call the front end, the part that are related to originations and refinancings. It's about half of the mortgage business and is performing well. The other part is what we call the forensic piece. That's about half the business and about 4% of consolidated revenue in the quarter. The forensic business benefited from the surge in demand in the wake of the financial crisis. That demand is now subsiding. To frame the potential downside for you, before the crisis, the forensic business is about $10 million on an annual basis, with business primarily from 1 of our 2 large current customers. We are now in the process of reverting to historic levels. However, because our customers remain somewhat uncertain about where their needs will stabilize, it is harder for us to get kind of forward visibility into our mortgage revenue that characterizes most of our businesses. Based upon our latest review of the mortgage business, our current expectation is that there is more revenue likely to roll off as a part of this normalization process, including in the fourth quarter of 2012. We have projected in early 2012 that our mortgage revenue in aggregate for the year will decline similar to the fourth quarter 2010 or about 7%. Our current revenue expectation for the fourth quarter now leads us to believe the decline for the full year 2012 will be in the 12% to 15% range. The EBITDA margins in this business are below the segment average, so there is less of an impact on the bottom line than top line. Now, of course, when we aren't standing still, we continue to develop new solutions that bring value to our customers, and those opportunities will create new revenue streams in our forensic space. Healthcare continues strong revenue growth, 129% for the third quarter and 47.4% organic. Healthcare organic growth year-to-date is 41%. Our total growth benefited from the second quarter addition of MediConnect. Organically, we continue to add, implement new customers and expand our relationships with existing customers. Both the acquisitions of Bloodhound and Health Risk Partners became part of the organic growth calculation this quarter and have added to organic growth, although all of the businesses are growing nicely. As a reminder, we do have seasonality in our Revenue Integrity and MediConnect businesses related to the CMS review cycle. And the revenue between third quarter and fourth quarter can be a bit fluid depending on customer schedules. While I expect to see strong, continued growth year-over-year next quarter, we may see a modest sequential dip in dollar revenue. Our Specialized Markets grew 11% in the third quarter, with growth both from the supply chain solutions as well as weather analytics. Turning to Risk Assessment. We reported revenue growth of 2.8% in the quarter and 4.9% after adjusting for the impact of the transfer we discussed earlier. Our industry-standard programs grew 5.8% in the quarter, reflecting our 2012 invoices and strong growth from our premium leakage solutions. Our property-specific revenue declined 5.1% as reported, but excluding the transfer grew 4% based upon new sales and higher volumes, as well as growth in appraisal solutions. EBITDA for the third quarter was $182.9 million as outlined in Table 3 of our press release. EBITDA increased 21.1% for the quarter, and our EBITDA margin was 45.9%, reflecting good expense management, as well as seasonal benefit of some of our healthcare businesses. We continue to see opportunities from investing in future growth, and as you remember, those can have a near-term impact on margins, but grow our future opportunity. In the quarter, the Risk Assessment margins were 54.6% versus 50.5% in third quarter 2011. We benefited by about 2% on the margin due to this lower pension costs related to the freeze of the plan in February. Our business continues to show scalable profitability, while we also continue to invest in developing new solutions. Margins in Decisions Analytics was 40.9% in third quarter 2012 versus 40.1% in third quarter 2011. Our acquisitions of MediConnect and Argus added slightly to our margins. Our interest expense was up $3.5 million versus third quarter 2011, based upon higher debt balances related to our acquisitions. We ended third quarter with total debt of $1.6 billion, including the $380 million to fund the Argus acquisition on August 31. Our reported effective tax rate was 39.3% for the quarter, which we expect to continue for the rest of 2012. Coming down to net income. We focus on adjusted net income, a non-GAAP measure, which we defined in the current period as net income plus acquisition-related amortization expense, less income tax, except on that acquisition -- on that amortization. Our adjusted net income increased 20.9% to $92.2 million for the quarter. Adjusted EPS, on a fully diluted basis, was $0.54, an increase of 20%, a great growth rate. The average diluted share count was 171.7 million shares in the quarter. As of September 30, 2012, our diluted share count was 171.5 million shares. In the quarter, we purchased 425,000 shares or about $21 million. At quarter end, we had about 179 million left under our authorization. As we discussed last quarter, we have moderated our buyback program after acquiring Argus to ensure that we meet our deleveraging commitments. Our share repurchase program has been successful to date, generating annualized IRRs of over 25%. Turning to the balance sheet. As of September 30, our cash and cash equivalents were $98 million. Total debt, both short term and long term, totaled about $1.6 billion, reflecting the borrowed funds to acquire Argus, which closed on August 31. Post-Argus, our debt capacity is over $850 million and will grow with our EBITDA and free cash flow. Our pro forma debt-to-EBITDA ratio at September 30, including a full year of historical results for both MediConnect and Argus, was 2.2x, down from the pro forma ratio of 2.35x we cited at the time of the acquisition. As we've stated before, we are willing to temporarily go above our long-term target of 2x debt-to-EBITDA to take advantage of unique opportunity, because our free cash flow is strong and allows us to delever quickly. Free cash flow in the first 9 months of 2012, which we define as cash from operations, less capital expenditures, was $264.2 million, a decrease of about $11.3 million or negative 4.1% versus the 9 months of 2011. This decline was principally due to the funding of our pension, which we have mentioned previously. Excluding the impact of our pension, net of the tax benefit and certain year-over-year timing issues, our free cash flow was up about 16%. Our capital expenditures was about 5.1% of revenue for the 9 months ended September 30, 2012. Free cash flow represented 52.2% of EBITDA in the first 9 months of 2012, reflecting a reduced conversion rate due to the $72 million pension funding, partially offset by the associated tax benefit. As we have indicated previously, we moderate our share buyback program as we delever following the solid acquisitions we made this year. We would anticipate that the share count in 4Q may be up about 1%. Overall, our business is performing very well, and we have a nice mix of growth from multiple verticals and continue to invest in the future. We see that both our subscription and transaction revenue is growing well. Even with our transaction revenue, while we see some variations around that revenue, the purchase of our solutions is largely nondiscretionary, and therefore, we have good visibility into the future. With that, I'll ask the operator to open up the line for questions.