Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:BR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Tim Gokey: Yes. Thank you. So yes, in our retirement business, one of the businesses in there is trading mutual funds on behalf typically of smaller plans and working on behalf of the record keeper to do the fund trading on their behalf. And that does generate float. It’s fairly significant. And so as interest rates go up, we get the benefit of that. Our team has been extremely effective. I think the flow-through from interest rates to us has been something in the order of 95%. And so that is something that has really been a counterbalance so that as we have seen interest rates go up on the debt that we have, we’ve gotten the counterbalancing here. Now I’ll say, certainly, as we pay down the debt as we’re talking to, that balance will shift positively for us.

Operator: The next question is from Darrin Peller of Wolfe Research.

Darrin Peller : So I mean it’s great to see the progress on the wealth side and the build-out, when we look at the free cash conversion, I know you talked — I think it was 100% you said you expected to get to in fiscal ’24 last quarter. You may be more reticent to say about guidance now. But any just directional where we see that going in the next couple of years in terms of free cash conversion? And then really as a follow-up on the same business. Again, I mean, you scaled it out. Can you just help us understand it should be a much better operating leverage as you bring on new business now that you’ve done the heavy lifting, right? And maybe just give us a sense of what it takes to bring on new customers now beyond UBS once we get that going.

Tim Gokey: Yes. Absolutely. Darrin, let me just start with the second part first. Obviously, this, as we have built, the platform has been a significant investment for us. And as we look going forward in terms of bringing on additional clients, we would — I wouldn’t say that the investment to bring on additional clients is 0, but we expect to be much, much lower. It’s not the platform build. There’s just really the data conversion and things like that. It’s also — since it’s a componentized approach, the testing is dramatically simpler. And so the investment to bring on new clients will look a lot more like our regular GTO business, which does have pretty attractive incremental margins. So we do expect good incremental margins on those.

Let me come to your free cash flow topic. And let me just wrap in something to that. So — and just to be clear, I didn’t — none of us said it will be 100% in ’24. What we just said is historically, it has been around that number, and we will be going to more historic. So it’s a little bit like the transitive property of a equals to b, but we’re not committing to that now, and it’s a little too early in the cycle for that. I do want to call your attention, though, I think that as we return to high free cash flow conversion, what it really does for us on the capital allocation side. And our capital allocation is really unchanged from what it has been, but the result of that can be different. So we’re committed to investment-grade credit rating.