Donnelley Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:DFIN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Raj Sharma: Hi, thank you for taking my questions. I just wanted to understand on your guidance first quarter, can you give us just a little bit more visibility into what is the guidance building in for transactions and for software? And, from your pipeline that you have currently, how do you see that, do you see certain sectors and transactions doing better than the others, any sort of color on that would be great?

Daniel N. Leib: Yeah, Raj. So I think when we look at from a transactional perspective specifically, we’re expecting kind of the continued downward pressure, both sequentially. And even year-over-year, I think transactional capital markets revenue last year was 51 million or so. And so we’re expecting, down again relative to that number. I think from a software perspective, again, I commented on AD. So, slower growth in the first half and better growth in the second half as things reset. And then I think when you look at the software component within the GIC business, more a continuation of what we’ve been — what we’ve been seeing over the last few quarters here. I’d also counted just from a margin perspective that Q1 is typically our lowest margin quarter. And again, given the pressure on transactional, we think in that 20% range or so is likely where we come up.

Raj Sharma: Great. And then on the software piece, I know that you commented that this year and probably possibly longer term you’re expecting mid-teens growth. How should we see that build up and there are headwinds, so we should expect somewhere South of low to mid-teens in growth rates this year, but something picking up with your investments in 2024, is that the way to look into that?

Dave Gardella: Yeah, and we’ve talked about this in the past that so we do kind of a long range guidance on that. And that mid teen is meant to be exactly that. Certainly not going to be quarter-to-quarter or even year-to-year or product-by-product, right. But in aggregate we would expect that mid teen growth and like you said, there’s certain things that we’re facing this year what I alluded to on earlier on AD will be a headwind earlier in the year. And then kind of resetting to a more normalized trajectory in the back half. Certainly Venue has done better than the broader M&A market. But given the lack of activity in M&A and depending on how the year plays out on the transactional side, Venue will be a function of what the M&A market does, largely.

And then, you referenced some of the tail winds and Dan talked about them earlier, specifically around Tailored Shareholder Reports, but that’s more of a second half 2024. And then there’s some other regulatory rules on the horizon that would be .

Raj Sharma: We didn’t get it, just off.

Daniel N. Leib: Sorry. I guess, yeah. So I would just add and Dave hit it on the two thirds is compliance driven software. One third is Venue. And, if you just go back I think the last few years are instructive as to what the growth rates can look like with a tailwind of regulation. Back in 2021, we grew our software over double what our long term target is. And obviously we had tailwinds and transactions there as well. So, to Dave’s point, there’s a long range guidance here because a third of it is less predictable and two thirds is more predictable and becoming a bigger part of the whole as we operate through cycles.

Raj Sharma: Got it and then just on print of what sort of a decline or flat lining are you expecting in certain revenues this year?