Alight (NYSE:ALIT) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

0:00 Good afternoon and welcome to Alight's First Quarter twenty twenty six Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Following the prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Instructions will be provided at that time. There is a presentation accompanying today's presentation available on the Alight Investor Relations website. I will now read the Safe Harbor statement. Today's discussion includes forward looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements reflect management's current views and expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Factors that may cause such differences are described in today's earnings release and in ALIT's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in the Risk Factors section of its most recent annual report on Form 10 ks.

0:54 The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward looking statements except as required by law. In addition, during today's call, the company may reference certain non GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the earnings release available on the company's website. I will now turn the call over to Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer of Alight. Please go ahead. Thank you, Sachi. Good afternoon and welcome to Alight's first quarter twenty twenty six earnings call. Joining me today is Greg Giametti, our interim chief financial officer, and Susan Davies, our chief accounting officer. It has been a busy and productive first few months for me, and I'm pleased to have this opportunity to share my thoughts with you. Today, we will cover my perspective on our results, some further transparency into the business, a view of the opportunity ahead, some reflections of what I've heard from clients, including its role in shaping our strategy, and a view of the team we are building, and finally, a perspective on AI.

1:58 Our first quarter financial performance was solid as we exceeded the guidance shared during the last earnings call, which you as you will recall took place just over thirty days into my time as CEO. Our outperformance was driven by higher than expected project revenue, as well as better than expected performance of partner revenue in the quarter. While our Q1 performance was better than expected, we will continue to see a difficult revenue comparison to prior year due to the commercial execution over the last couple of years. It will take the next several quarters for that revenue pressure to completely work through our P and L. For these reasons, the team and I are intently focused on improving commercial execution by retaining clients and winning new clients. I'm pleased to share that we are already seeing improvement in our new sales activity as well as our renewal execution.

2:47 First quarter revenue of $534,000,000 was comprised of $498,000,000 in recurring revenue and $36,000,000 in project revenue. As you all have observed before, our project revenue has been the major driver of volatility in our results. Project revenue was up 29% compared to Q1 twenty five, and this comes in succession to Q4 where project revenue was down 27% to Q4 twenty four, showing the volatility we have discussed before. Our recurring revenue was 4% below last year, resulting in a consolidated revenue decrease of 3%, which was better than expected. Adjusted EBITDA of $104,000,000 benefited from the revenue flow through and lower than expected employee health care expenses in the quarter, which kept the margin decline to only 200 basis points.

3:40 All in all, we are happy with where we landed compared to expectations and glad to see the progress we are making. We are maintaining strong liquidity and generating significant cash. We exited the first quarter with more than $500,000,000 in total liquidity. This is after our Q1 twenty six TRA payment. At the end of Q1, we had $178,000,000 in cash on our balance sheet and $330,000,000 available on our revolver. Additionally, we generated free cash flow of $53,000,000 in the quarter, a 20% increase compared to the same period last year, and we believe we'll continue to see solid cash generation through the end of the year. This provides us the foundation to execute our core strategies. Additionally, it gives us the flexibility to invest in our business, to accelerate the service and customer excellence initiatives that are critical to enabling industry leading outcomes for our clients.

4:36 I, along with our team, have operated with considerable intensity and urgency in the first quarter. I have met 90 plus clients to date in '26, made critical senior hires, and launched initiatives all focused on strengthening our market position and demonstrating our commitment to relentless execution. As I have met with clients over the last quarter, I have been increasingly energized about the strength of our solutions and quality of our customer base. Their feedback has been instructive and insightful. What is evident is that our clients want to work with Alight, and we believe we are really the only company that can truly service the needs of a diverse client base. On many occasions, the exact quote of our clients was that we want to see Alight successful. These interactions have reinforced my confidence in our client retention and ultimately cash generation capabilities.

5:29 During the quarter, we made key hires across the organization, including the head of delivery transformation, head of specialty sales, head of account management, and head of marketing, along with making some critical additions deeper in the organization. Following the close of the quarter, we announced our new chief technology officer, Naveen Bhawaja, who previously led technology at the consumer products division of Disney. I cannot think of anyone better to help reimagine customer experience and translate technology leadership into meaningful business and customer outcomes. Additionally, last week, we announced the appointment of Dinesh Tolsiani as president of employer solutions. Dinesh previously served as Alight's chief strategy officer and played an integral role in company's strategic evolution. In his new position, he'll collaborate with other key leaders across the business to continue to advance Alight's strategies to deliver outcomes for clients at scale.

6:22 We also launched multiple initiatives across the organization to maximize operational excellence and drive consumer level client experience. Notably, we have expanded from our previous strategic coverage of the top 100 accounts to now include our top 400 accounts that represent just over 90% of our ARR in aggregate. Our increased coverage gives us a greater handle on serving those clients even better, building stronger partnerships, improving retention, and building a deeper pipeline. We provide marketing solutions derived from our full service integrated approach to managing health, wealth, and leaves on behalf of our clients. Within our health solution, we provide comprehensive health benefits, including spending accounts, as well as point solutions like healthcare navigation services.

7:10 Our primary focus is on ensuring a seamless consumer level experience, whether the consumer is simply checking their benefits eligibility, or scheduling a physical, or contending with a life changing diagnosis. We also integrate 50 plus partners across the ecosystem, which positions Alight at the critical nerve center of the benefits ecosystem. Wealth comprises a portfolio of solutions for financial planning, including defined contribution plans, retirement savings, and pension plans to enable employees access to a pathway for financial preparation. We administer pension both for corporations as well as various carriers who take on pension risk from corporations. Leaves business handles absences due to short or long term disability, military leave, or family and medical leaves, which are not always straightforward or easy to navigate.

8:02 Our Leap Pro and Absence Connect platform help our clients and their employees develop appropriate solutions to meet the needs of both the individual and the organization when an extended absence is necessary. As we move through 2026, we are focused on leveraging our scale, market recognition, and financial strength to capitalize on attractive industry dynamics and grow our leadership role. Benefits programs are a fundamental nondiscretionary offering for most organizations, creating a large addressable market for our capabilities. Our ability to provide effective outsource benefits administration is an attractive alternative to employers who often lack the in house expertise to manage the demands of compliance, delivery, and technology.

8:47 Additionally, because benefits programs are fundamental and non discretionary, our business tends to be more resilient through economic cycles. We believe our expertise across the benefits administration landscape, coupled with our scale, experience from a diverse client base, and disciplined execution creates a competitive advantage for us to win customers and establish long term relationships with predictable revenue. We remain energized and committed to expanding our market leading position and believe that the market opportunity in front of us is substantial. Alight's opportunity in the marketplace is unique. We have established a leadership position as the only company to effectively service our customer base ranging from large Fortune 500 companies to smaller, more main street operations, as well as organizations in the public sector.

9:37 These companies and organizations are all unique in their own way and require benefits offerings that match their structures, legacy, and priorities. We have more than 30,000,000 participants on our platform, including corporate executives, field operators, young new employees to retirees, and our products and solutions are designed to deliver the reliability and personalization these employees deserve. We understand the challenges inherent in navigating the benefits ecosystem, and we are well positioned not only to provide solutions, but to manage complexity and drive adoption. In addition to human expertise, we are leveraging enterprise AI adoption to capture efficiencies and further improve service excellence and user experience. To that point, we have all heard a lot about AI and its potential impact on a variety of industries.

10:27 At Alight, we are uniquely positioned to deploy AI that is personalized, predictive, assistive, and grounded in real world data while drawing on information from our large user base, participant interactions, and decades of domain expertise. We view AI not as a standalone solution, but as a force multiplier across our scale platform. By strategically implementing AI, we can turn data into guidance, turn guidance into action, and action into better outcomes in the moments that define health, wealth, and lead decisions. It is important to understand that we deal with situations of varying complexity that include unions, grandfathered plans, or multiple enrollment dates. We are also embedded in our clients' workflow as the core system of record for their benefits, and accountability is essential since regulatory compliance and outcomes both matter in our space.

11:18 Health, wealth, and lease all have a significant regulatory component. That accountability needs clear definition and ownership that cannot be made by an AI agent alone. AI isn't a replacement for what we do, rather it's a mechanism to unite the data, insights, human expertise our clients depend on. A meaningful portion of our participants are navigating decisions related to managing a life changing development, and those decisions cannot be made with the support of AI alone. Some of these are happy life events and some require the empathy and guidance of the human touch. I expect to share more with you about our AI journey and its impact in coming quarters. As I mentioned on our last call, we are driving the business forward with our commitment to three clear operating principles.

12:05 Deliver service and operational excellence, innovate products that create value and actionable insights, build relationships that result in enduring trusted partnerships. These operating principles are the compass as we continue to pioneer this space. We're the only company of our size and scale with a singular focus on benefits administration, providing a full range of health, wealth, and leave solutions, And we believe we have a substantial advantage in the industry where most of our competitors take a more singular approach. Providing health or wealth or leave solution of benefits administration is a small non core part of their business. Our focus on benefits as a whole allows us to provide deeper engagement, effective solutioning, and targeted investments. I'm confident that our team's commitment to these guiding principles and our leading position in the marketplace will drive favorable results for our clients and for Alight, and we're already seeing notable progress through enhanced execution.

13:00 With that, I'll turn the call over to Greg to go over the details of our first quarter twenty twenty six financial performance. Thanks Rohit, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll now walk you through our first quarter twenty twenty six results. Echoing Rohit's comments a moment ago, we delivered stronger than expected first quarter revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow. Revenue for the first quarter was $534,000,000 a decrease of approximately 3%. We had anticipated a revenue decline in the high single digits for the quarter, and we were pleased to achieve a more favorable result. As you know, we think about our revenue mix in two distinct categories: revenue from recurring renewable business and nonrecurring project based business. In the first quarter, we recorded recurring revenue of $498,000,000 which was a decrease of 4% compared to the with the first quarter of last year, reflecting higher partner network revenue in the quarter that was originally expected later in the year.

14:01 Project revenue for the quarter was $36,000,000 up 29% compared with the first quarter last year, exceeding expectations. Adjusted gross profit in the first quarter was $189,000,000 down $11,000,000 from the prior year period, reflecting an adjusted gross profit margin decline of 110 basis points. First quarter twenty twenty six adjusted EBITDA was $104,000,000 or adjusted EBITDA margin of nearly 20%, as compared to $118,000,000 or adjusted EBITDA margin of nearly 22% in the prior year period. The first quarter adjusted EBITDA decrease was less than anticipated, due to flow through from the better than expected revenue performance and timing of expenses.

14:52 Adjusted net income in the first quarter was $35,000,000 with adjusted EPS of $06 compared to $52,000,000 of adjusted net income and adjusted EPS of $0.10 in the first quarter of twenty twenty five. Looking forward, with our visibility today, we expect second quarter twenty twenty six revenue in the range of $490,000,000 to $5.00 5,000,000 adjusted EBITDA between $80,000,000 and $90,000,000 and free cash flow ranging from $35,000,000 to $45,000,000 guidance reflects the continued impact of prior commercial execution, which is expected to work its way through our P and L over the coming quarters. Turning to capital and liquidity. We closed the quarter with strong liquidity of more than $500,000,000 following our 1Q 'twenty six TRA payment.

15:48 At the end of 1Q twenty twenty six, we maintained significant financial flexibility, including $178,000,000 in cash and equivalents, dollars $330,000,000 of availability on a revolving credit facility, and free cash flow of $53,000,000 With cash flow growth in Q1, we have continued to strengthen our liquidity, providing us flexibility to pursue our capital allocation priorities, which include investing in the long term growth of the business, deleveraging and opportunistic share repurchases. With that, I'll turn the call back to Rohit. Thanks, Greg. My first few months at Alight have been educational and productive, allowing me to synthesize the valuable customer feedback we've received with what I've learned about the scope of our solutions and the scale of our capabilities.

16:40 Since January, our team has made excellent progress executing our core operating principles and building on our solid foundation to strengthen our organization. Our success depends on our focus as a client centric organization, and that starts from the top with me. As I mentioned, I've met with 90 plus clients since joining Alight, and regular engagement with our client base will remain a top priority for me. We are assembling a leadership team that brings significant industry experience and who embrace a commitment to client engagement and service excellence. We are moving quickly and are building a team that can accelerate the pace of play. Key initiatives to decidedly strengthen our market leadership are underway. These are focused on reimagining the user experience and drive AI based service excellence that will help define the new standards for the industry.

17:27 Our ability to deliver reliability and personalization in a scaled benefit management solution that provides value to our clients and better outcomes to their employers is a competitive advantage in the marketplace. I'm confident that we have the right people and strategies in place to continue building momentum across the business, and I'm optimistic about what the future holds for Alight. Finally, our CFO search is progressing well, and we expect to have some news to share shortly. Susan Davies, Alight's Chief Accounting Officer and Global Controller, will step in as Interim Chief Financial Officer as Greg Giamatti leaves Alight to pursue a new opportunity. We thank Greg for serving as Interim CFO for the past several months and wish him all the best. Sachi, we can now open the call for questions. Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad.

18:21 A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. The first question is from Kyle Peterson from Needham and Company. Please go ahead. Hi. This is Ross on for Kyle Peterson. Thank you for taking my question. I was wondering if you could provide any commentary on how the RFP season looked in the past quarter. In other words, you know, have you won any business here? Thank you. Thank you so much. As I mentioned in my remarks, our execution, both from a renewal perspective and new business is getting better and better. We had a very good new business as well as renewal activity season in in q one, and it was better than the q one last year.

19:19 Thank you. And if I can ask another question, could you talk a little more on the working capital dynamic and if it should start becoming a source of cash? And also, what percent of the book is up for renewal this year? Thank you. I can take the first part, Rohit, and then I'll let you comment on renewals. But, I would say we definitely did see some working capital benefits in the first quarter, you know, across a variety of areas including cash taxes and just general working capital that helped drive the free cash flow result. Yeah. And then the second part of the question was? Full size. The size of renewals for the year. That's, I would say, it's definitely less than last year. I would put it somewhere between that 25% to 30% range of the total book, which is in the normal range that we would expect.

20:12 Great. Thank you. That's really helpful. Thank you. The next question is from Curtis Nagle from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks very much. Yeah, just maybe any help you might be able to give in terms of expectations for cadence of recurring revenue year over year growth. And then just would you be able to size how much that influx of partner revenue, I guess earlier, partner revenue helped in the 1Q recurring revs in the quarter. Sure. I think as we've mentioned, we've been giving revenue under contract at the start of the quarter. If you recall, when we started Q1, the recurring revenue under contract was about $1,970,000,000 Our recurring revenue for starting of Q1 is just over $2,000,000,000 So that effectively sets the floor for where we are in terms of the revenue under contract.

21:13 Does that help? And just to clarify, that's total revenue under contract, 94% of which is recurring. Recurring, yeah. Then in terms of the partner revenue, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Curtis. Go ahead. Go ahead. I'm good. Yeah. On the partner revenue side, it was about 4 to $5,000,000. That was essentially we had expected that to come over the entire over the full year, and that came in pretty much all of it in the first quarter. It is recurring, but it doesn't recur every quarter. Okay, great. And then just any guidance you might be able to give for free cash for the year expectations? Yeah, look, we believe that we will continue to see solid free cash flow generation for the year. We saw 53,000,000 this quarter, which was about 20% higher.

22:00 Greg shared with you that we're expecting 35 to 45,000,000 in the second quarter. That's sort of as much guidance that we are prepared to give right now. Okay, thank you. The next question is from Peter Heckmann from D. A. Davidson. Please go ahead. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions and good to see the stronger than expected first quarter results. In terms of your EBITDA range for the second quarter, down significantly more than the first quarter, should we infer that number one, you don't expect quite a strong professional services quarter? Number two, some of the timing of expenses, some of those expenses that you plan to make will kick in. Any other factors playing into the year over year decline in EBITDA in the second quarter that weren't present in the first quarter.

23:01 Yeah, think that's right. If you think about the guidance that we gave in terms of expectations around first quarter profitability, the second quarter guide is relatively in line with that. And so the exceeded expectations in the first quarter in terms of, you know, what we've talked in the past about heavy drop through, you know, high profit margin on project revenue certainly, you know, drove higher margin in the first quarter. And so, you know, we are kind of expecting a more muted project revenue at this point in the second quarter. So, you know, that's driving, you know, kind of more consistency with what we had expected for the first quarter from a profitability perspective. And then to your point, yes, you know, we do see some of those expenses just shifting between quarters. Okay. And then just as a follow-up, for giving the free cash flow guidance.

23:55 Still looks like something like 44 to 50% free cash flow conversion. And, you know, and that's relatively decent. Do you think that's something that, again, will be reflected by some working capital timing or favor working capital? Or is that the right range to be thinking about for the full year? Yeah. I think generally speaking, you know, it's a reasonable range, you know, that we expect to continue. As you know, there can be some variability quarter to quarter, especially with the seasonality of, you know, some of the commissions business and things we have in the back half of the year. But as we think about, you know, kind of averages, I think that's a reasonable measure. Okay. I'll get back in the queue. Thank you.

24:44 Thank you, Peter. The next question is from Sharon House from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Hi. This is Summer on for Scott. I was just wondering if you guys could talk more about the momentum you're seeing building out the new team and the impacts you've seen so far. Thank you. Thank you so much, Samar, for the question. We're excited about the team that we're building. It's not just the senior hires that we've made, but also deeper in the organization. I think the most important piece for us is increasing the coverage of accounts. As you heard me say that we were covering about 100 strategic accounts for us with a true dedicated or designated account executive, that number is up to 400 and covers 90 plus percent of our ARR.

25:37 We believe that that kind of coverage really gives us a good view of our clients, a good view of the health of our clients, as well as helps increase our ability to retain clients and build a pipeline along with them. As I mentioned earlier in response to the question, we've had a good renewal season in Q1, we've had good commercial execution in Q1, and we are expecting to continue to build on that momentum. We still have a lot of work to do as the team is new, we're building a newer muscle in the organization, but we feel good about the progress that we've made. There are no further questions at this time.

26:25 I would like to turn the floor back over to Rohit Verma for closing comments. Thank you, Sachi, and thank you all for joining. I would like to thank our clients for their trust and confidence in us and importantly our employees that have been relentless in their efforts. I appreciate your continued interest in Alight, and I look forward to updating you on our progress in the quarters ahead. Thank you so much, and God bless. This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.