Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. Business
ExlService Holdings, Inc. (“EXL”, “we”, “us", "our" or the "Company"), incorporated in Delaware in 2002, is a leading operations management and analytics company that helps its clients build and grow sustainable businesses. By orchestrating our domain expertise, data, analytics and digital technology, we look deeper to design and manage agile, customer-centric operating models to improve global operations, drive profitability, enhance customer satisfaction, increase data-driven insights, and manage risk and compliance. We serve customers in multiple industries, including insurance, healthcare, banking and financial services, utilities, travel, transportation and logistics, media and retail, among others. Headquartered in New York, we have more than 31,900 professionals in locations throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, India, the Philippines, Colombia, Canada, Australia and South Africa.
We operate in the business process management (“BPM”) industry, and we provide operations management and analytics services. Effective January 1, 2020, we made certain operational and structural changes to more closely integrate our businesses and to simplify our organizational structure. Since then, we have managed and reported financial information through our four strategic business units: Insurance, Healthcare, Analytics and Emerging Business, which reflects how management reviews financial information and makes operating decisions. In line with our strategy of vertical integration and focus on domain expertise, we integrated our Finance & Accounting and Consulting operating segments within each of the Insurance and Healthcare operating segments based on the respective industry-specific clients. Finance & Accounting and Consulting Services to clients outside of those industries are part of our “Emerging Business” segment. In addition, we integrated our former Travel, Transportation and Logistics, Banking and Financial Services, and Utilities operating segments under “Emerging Business” to further leverage and optimize the operating scale in providing operations management services.
Our strategic business units align our products and services with how we manage our business, approach our key markets and interact with our clients. These business units develop client-specific solutions, build capabilities, maintain a unified go-to-market approach and are integrally responsible for service delivery, customer satisfaction, growth and profitability. Through our data-led framework, we are able to deliver better outcomes for our clients through the use of data and analytics and by applying data we create intelligence operations to create superior customer outcomes, optimize costs and design resilient and agile business models, using our operations management and analytics.
COVID–19 Global Pandemic
The global Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic (“COVID-19”) has caused and continues to cause global economic disruption and uncertainty, including in our business. The adverse global economic impact of this pandemic has had an adverse impact on parts of our business, customers, and suppliers and caused many challenges for our business operations during fiscal 2020.
The extent to which COVID-19 impacts our future business, strategic initiatives, results of operations and financial condition will depend on future developments, which are highly uncertain and cannot be predicted, including, but not limited to, the duration, spread, severity and resurgence, of COVID-19, the effects of COVID-19 on our customers, vendors and employees and the remedial actions and stimulus measures adopted by local and federal governments, and to what extent normal economic and operating conditions can resume.
We will continue to evaluate the nature and scope of the impact to our business and may take further actions strategizing our business operations and managing our costs and liquidity that we deem necessary or appropriate to respond to this fast moving and uncertain global health crisis and the resulting global economic consequences.
For a further discussion of the risks, uncertainties and actions taken in response to COVID-19, refer to Part I, Item 1A, "Risk Factors" and Part II, Item 7, "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations".
Operations Management Services
Our operations management services, which we provide from our Insurance, Healthcare and Emerging Business operating segments, typically involve the transfer to EXL business operations of a client such as claims processing, clinical operations, or financial transaction processing, after which we administer and manage those operations for our client on an ongoing basis, or in case of consulting, consulting services related to transformation services, including digital transformation services. We use a focused industry vertical approach to manage our business and to provide a suite of integrated BPM services to organizations in the insurance, healthcare, travel transportation and logistics, banking and financial services and utilities industries in addition to providing finance and accounting and consulting services across these industries as well as to clients in other industries like manufacturing and media among others. By using advanced analytics to create predictive insights and enable intelligent
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operations, we help organizations deliver superior customer experience, build sustainable growth, and optimize efficiency and resiliency.
The key differentiators and salient features of our operations management services include our agile operating and delivery model utilizing domain and data expertise and process excellence, EXLerator.AI, our ability to deploy a Business Process-as-a-Service (“BPaaS”) delivery model, business process automation (including robotics), consulting-driven digital transformation and our industry vertical focused approach. Our approach to digital leverages “EXLerator.AI,” which is our transformation stack, and constitutes top talent along with methodologies, frameworks, solution accelerators and digital products to drive simplicity, speed and efficiency for end customers. This approach positions us to digitally transform data flows leveraging advanced technologies along with domain expertise to deliver meaningful impacts (customer experience, business outcomes, and efficiency) to our clients.
While the majority of our operations management services are provided to clients using client-owned or licensed technology platforms, we also deliver our services across clients and industries using a BPaaS delivery model. The BPaaS delivery model includes the provision of a technology platform along with process management services. The service offering typically requires lower capital outlay, is faster to implement and is priced based on the number of transactions or usage by the client. These services may use standardized and shared technology and operational delivery infrastructure enabling us to leverage technology and infrastructure investments across multiple clients.
The operating segments providing operations management services are described below:
Our Insurance operating segment serves property and casualty insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, annuity and retirement services companies. We provide BPM services related to business processes in the insurance industry such as claims processing, premium and benefit administration, agency management, account reconciliation, policy research, underwriting support, new business processing, policy servicing, premium audit, surveys, billing and collection, commercial and residential survey, and customer service using Digital Intelligence, robotics and advanced automation. We provide insurance policy administration and digital customer acquisition services using a BPaaS delivery model through our LifePRO ® and Liss platforms in order to help clients administer life insurance, health insurance, annuities and credit life and disability insurance policies. We also provide subrogation services to property and casualty insurers using a BPaaS delivery model and our proprietary Subrosource ® software platform, the largest commercial end-to-end subrogation platform. Subrosource ® integrates with client systems, manages recovery workflow, increases recoveries and reduces costs. We provide end to end finance and accounting services that include high-end analytics-driven services including financial planning and analysis, decision support, GAAP and statutory reporting and compliance services in addition to core finance operations. We bring a data-driven and practical digital approach to finance and accounting, enabling our clients to simplify and scale their finance and accounting processes, drive stakeholder centricity, improve controls and compliance, reduce operating costs and deliver rich data-driven insights to their businesses.
Our Insurance consulting services are designed to deliver business models that help our clients realize their business and innovation goals and improve their strategic competitive position. Our digital consulting offerings include leveraging design thinking to help improve customer experience, using lean models to drive process excellence and using agile delivery models to implement digital technologies and interventions like customer experience transformation, advanced automation and robotics and enterprise architecture. Our approach to consulting is focused on delivering goals across growth and scalability, customer experience improvement, cost and efficiency as well as scale.
Our Healthcare operating segment primarily serves U.S.-based healthcare payers, providers, pharmacy benefit managers and life sciences organizations. We provide BPM services related to Care Management, Utilization Management, disease management, payment integrity, revenue optimization and customer engagement directly addressing the market need for improved healthcare outcomes, reduced claims, medical and administrative costs, and improved access to the healthcare system in the healthcare market.
We offer BPaaS, software-as-a-service ("SaaS") and platform BPM services designed to serve the healthcare industry as well as proprietary technology platforms, robotics and advanced analytics. EXL’s integrated care management offering, including CareRadius ® and our proprietary clinical data & analytics, connects payers, providers and members to increase efficiencies and effectiveness across all aspects of care management, including medical, pharmacy and behavioral health. Our digital solutions infuse cloud, data, machine learning ("ML")/artificial intelligence ("AI"), analytics, blockchain, augmented reality ("AR")/virtual reality ("VR") and robotics capabilities to improve efficiency, business outcomes, and the consumer experience in healthcare across patient/member management, contracting and network management, health and care management, claims administration, and business operations.
Similar to our Insurance operating segment, we also provide finance and accounting BPM, digital transformation and consulting services for our clients in the healthcare industry.
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Our Emerging Business operating segment provides data-driven and digital enterprise solutions in the areas of revenue management, finance & accounting and customer experience management to clients in the banking and capital markets, utilities, travel, transportation and logistics, media and communication, manufacturing and retail and business services industries. These enterprise solutions complement our domain specific industry solutions enabling our clients to maximize performance.
Our revenue management solutions, enabled by our analytics based Revlift TM platform include lead generation, inside sales, marketing, customer and pricing analytics, billing and revenue leakage prevention solutions, helping deliver direct topline and margin impact to our clients business.
Our finance and accounting services include high-end analytics driven services including financial planning and analysis, strategic finance, decision support, regulatory reporting and compliance services in addition to core finance operations. We bring a data-driven and practical digital approach to finance and accounting, enabling our clients to simplify and scale their finance and accounting processes, drive customer centricity, improve controls and compliance, reduce operating costs and deliver rich data-driven insights to their businesses.
Our customer experience management solutions help clients improve their end-customer experience by unifying customer journeys across the front, middle and back-office, integrating data flows, redesigning customer service processes and leveraging digital omni-channel platforms. In delivering these solutions we combine our deep domain expertise, operations management practices, advanced analytics and digital capabilities including robotics, proprietary and partner driven AI and ML solutions.
We also provide industry specific BPM solutions. For our clients in the travel sector, we provide corporate and leisure travel services including reservations, customer service and fulfilment services. In the transportation and logistics sectors, we provide billing, collections, claims management, freight audit, logistics, supply chain management and payment services. For our clients in the banking and financial services sector, we provide comprehensive range of BPM services, including residential mortgage lending, retail banking and credit cards, commercial banking and investment management. In addition to banks and financial services firms, we work with financial technology (Fintech) companies to supplement their marketing and sales operations, support their processing and underwriting as well as enhance their servicing and collections efforts. For our clients in the utilities sector, we offers BPM services related to enhancing operating models, improving customer experience, reducing costs, shortening turnaround time and simplifying compliance.
Analytics
We are a “Strategic Digital Transformation Partner” for our clients in analytics. We help our clients unlock deep insights from data and create data-driven solutions. By leveraging our full suite of analytics capabilities, our Analytics services focus on driving improved business outcomes for our customers by unlocking deep insights from data and create data-driven solutions across all parts of our customers’ businesses. Our teams deliver predictive and prescriptive analytics in the areas of customer acquisition and life cycle management, risk underwriting and pricing, operational effectiveness, credit and operational risk monitoring and governance, regulatory reporting, and data management. We enhance, modernize and enrich structured and unstructured data and use a spectrum of advanced analytical tools and techniques, including our in-house ML and AI capabilities to create insights and improve decision making for our clients. We leverage and deploy our proprietary ML and AI solutions to help deliver improved business outcomes throughout our clients’ value chain and to address a range of complex industry-wide problems including:
• Advanced natural language understanding and deep learning models to address unstructured text and data,
• Computer-assisted vision and deep learning-based image analytics to analyze photos and videos, and
• Advanced pattern recognition techniques to identify consumer behavior triggers embedded in multiple formats of data.
Our Analytics team comprises over 4,500 professionals, including data scientists, data architects, business analysts, statisticians, modelers, industry domain specialists and data experts.
We help our customers leverage internal and external data sources, enhance their data assets, identify and visualize data patterns, and utilize data-driven insights to improve their effectiveness. Our Analytics services for our customers include:
• Identification, cleansing, matching and use of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data available both internally to our customer’s organization and externally;
• Deployment of analytics professionals and data scientists who utilize analytics tools, cutting edge statistical techniques and methodologies in ways designed to help customers better understand their data to generate actionable business insights;
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• Design and implementation of services enabling data visualization and management reporting enabling business users to segment, drill-down, and filter data; and
• Integration of data insights and predictive models in the real-time decision making processes to drive measurable business impact.
Our Analytics engagements span both project work and longer-term arrangements where EXL provides ongoing analytics modeling and services for a year or more. We utilize domain and industry knowledge related to the business problem being considered to support these Analytics engagements across our various competencies including Data management, Advanced Analytics/AI, Functional, Data-enabled Marketing Solutions and Strategic Data Assets.
Our Analytics services support: (1) retail banking, commercial banking and investment banking and management for the banking and financial services industry; (2) actuarial, claims, informatics, customer relationship management and marketing analysis; (3) marketing and agency management, actuarial, servicing and operations, customer management, and claims and money movement in the insurance industry; and (4) marketing analytics in the retail and media industries.
In Healthcare, our EXLClarity TM platform supports payers and providers Risk Adjustment & Quality Management programs resulting in clinical gap closure and revenue optimization, while our EXLVantage TM platform offers robust population health analytics leveraged by our payers, providers and life science customers to drive insights and associated actions for improved outcomes. Our proprietary EXLVantage TM population health analytics can be applied to a customer’s data or our own benchmark database consisting of Commercial, Medicare and Medicaid to drive insights. In addition, our population health analytic models can be leveraged with our campaign management and marketing analytics to support member acquisition and clinical program intervention management. Lastly, we offer end to end data management services to support data strategy, ingestion, normalization, quality, security, governance, visualization and data architecture development and deployment via agnostic tools and flexible delivery models.
As COVID-19 has created a new normal, we expect a significant acceleration in the shift by our clients to using more digital and cloud-based solutions across all of our target markets. We expect this shift to digital to benefit the demand for our solutions as our clients will require more data-driven decisions across their value chains. Capturing data and enriching data will become key differentiators for clients and their speed of decision-making will be faster, increasing the adoption of AI and ML. The accelerated adoption of cloud-based solutions will increase our clients’ needs for a suite of cloud migration and enablement capabilities which we can fulfill. These trends will help grow our target addressable market and support higher growth over the next few years. We expect the long-term trend in demand to be positive and to capture these new opportunities, we are customizing solutions across our target verticals and markets and deepening our advanced analytics and cloud capabilities and our domain expertise.
Business Strategy
EXL is a business process management company providing operations management and analytics services and is a “Strategic Digital Transformation Partner” for our clients by deploying our data-led value created framework. We help our clients embed intelligence in operations and make better decisions through the use of data, advanced analytics, AI, digital operations and domain expertise to deliver business outcomes and enhance customer experience and efficiency.
Expanding our services in large addressable markets
We continue to focus on the insurance, healthcare and banking industries, which are large markets with high demand. We will also continue to build our client portfolio in Finance and Accounting and Consulting services in all of our business segments in an opportunistic manner. As we can continue to refine our focus, we are pursuing opportunities in other industries. We are strategically equipped to help clients apply relevant digital technologies to enterprise processes and business problems at every step of the digital transformation value chain in operations management with capabilities across Data and Data management, Business intelligence and Analytics, AI, Digital Transformation Consulting, Digital Integration and Operations. Demand for these services is expected to exhibit strong growth in the next several years.
Integrating our capabilities
Our deep domain expertise has been central to our market differentiation. We are also well-positioned as one of the few players in the market with a full suite of data and analytics, strong operational excellence and digital toolkit to create integrated services and solutions under one brand.
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Cultivating Long-term Relationships and Expanding our Client Base
We continue to maintain our focus on cultivating long-term client relationships as well as attracting new clients. We believe there are significant opportunities for additional growth within our existing clients, and we seek to expand these relationships by:
• Increasing the depth and breadth of the services we provide across our clients’ value chains and geographies;
• Offering the full suite of EXL services that includes operations management (including consulting; digital transformation) and data and analytics; and
• Supporting our clients’ geographic expansion leveraging our global footprint.
We intend to continue building a portfolio of Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies in our focus industries that have the most complex and diverse data-led processes and, accordingly, stand to benefit significantly from our services. We also intend to cultivate long-term relationships with medium-sized companies in our focus industries leveraging our BPaaS and digital offerings.
Expanding our Global Delivery Footprint and Operational Infrastructure
We intend to further expand and invest in our network of delivery centers to service our clients. In 2020, we expanded our operations centers in India, the Philippines and Colombia.
Pursuing Strategic Acquisitions and Relationships
We intend to continue making selective acquisitions in our focus industry verticals that enhance our competitive differentiation and facilitate our growth strategy. We consider selective strategic relationships with industry leaders that add new long-term client relationships, enhance the depth and breadth of our services and solutions and complement our business strategy. Through our Connected Intelligence Partnership programs we expand our technology and innovation ecosystem with select partnerships, alliances or investments that we expect will enhance go-to-market opportunities and expand the scope and effectiveness of our services and solutions by adding digital assets and intellectual property, which will help us to win new clients or allowing us to enter new industry verticals and geographic markets.
Our Industry
Operations Management
BPM service providers work with clients to transfer their key business processes to reduce costs, improve process quality, handle increased transaction volumes and reduce redundancy. BPM providers can enable organizations to enhance profitability and increase efficiency and reliability, permitting them to concentrate on their core areas of competence. BPM is a long-term strategic commitment for a company that, once implemented, is generally not subject to cyclical spending or information technology budget fluctuations. Increased global demand, cost improvements in international communications and the automation of many business services have created a significant opportunity for BPM providers with offshore delivery capabilities, and many companies are moving select office processes to providers with the capacity to perform these functions from overseas locations. We believe the demand for BPM services will be primarily led by industries that are transaction-driven and that require significant customer interactions.
Analytics
Companies are increasingly looking for a suite of third party analytics services, including statistical tools, models and techniques to clean, organize and examine structured and unstructured corporate data. This data is then used by companies to generate specific business-related analysis and insights into their business and prospects. The enhanced generation of business data across multiple formats, substantial reduction in data storage costs, growing enterprise demand for data-driven and real-time decision making and availability of sophisticated analytics tools have enabled companies to overcome a local shortage of specialized analytics talent and benefit from global labor markets. Our service offerings develop industry-specific analytics solutions and deep data insights that are especially well poised to benefit from this global trend.
Sales, Marketing and Client Management
We market our services to our existing and prospective clients through our sales and client management teams, which are aligned by industry verticals and cross-industry domains such as finance and accounting and consulting. Our sales and client
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management teams operate from the U.S., Europe, Australia and South Africa are supported by our business development teams.
Our sales, marketing and business development teams are responsible for new client acquisitions, public relations, relations with outsourcing advisory companies, analyst relations and rankings, lead generation, knowledge management, content development, campaign management, digital or web presence, brand awareness and participation in industry forums and conferences. As of December 31, 2020, we employed approximately 171 sales, marketing, business development and client management professionals with the majority of them based in either the U.S. or Europe. Our professionals generally have significant experience in business process services, technology, operations, analytics and consulting.
Clients
EXL generated revenues from approximately 460 clients and 470 clients in 2020 and 2019, respectively (with annual revenue exceeding $50,000 per client). We have won 44 and 28 new clients during 2020 and 2019, respectively.
Our top three, five and ten clients generated 19.2%, 25.4% and 37.4 % of our revenues, respectively, in 2020. Our top three, five and ten clients generated 15.2%, 22.0% and 36.1% of our revenues, respectively, in 2019. No client accounted for more than 10% of our total revenues in 2020 or 2019. Our revenue concentration with our top clients remains consistent year-over-year and we continue to develop relationships with new clients to diversify our client base. We believe that the loss of any of our ten largest clients could have a material adverse effect on our financial performance. See Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” under “Risks Related to Our Business-We earn a substantial portion of our revenues from a limited number of clients.”
Our long-term relationships with our clients typically evolve from providing a single, discrete service or process into providing a series of complex, integrated processes across multiple business lines. For operations management services other than consulting, we enter into long-term agreements with our clients with typical initial terms of between three to five years. Consulting engagements have typical terms of six to twelve months. Agreements for Analytics services are either project based or have shorter initial terms, which are typically between one to three years. However, each agreement is individually negotiated with the client.
Competition
Competition in the BPM services industry is intense and growing. See Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” under “Risks Related to Our Business-We face competition from U.S.-based and non-U.S.-based BPM and IT companies and from our clients, who may build shared services centers to perform BPM and Analytics services themselves, either in-house, in the United States or through offshore groups or other arrangements.” Many companies, including certain of our clients, choose to perform some or all of their customer-facing and back-office processes internally, utilizing their own employees to provide these services as part of their regular business operations. Some companies have moved portions of their in-house customer management functions offshore, including to offshore affiliates. We believe our key advantage over in-house business processes management is that we provide companies the opportunity to focus on their core products and markets while we focus on service delivery and operational excellence. We compete primarily against:
• large global companies with BPM solutions and delivery capabilities in offshore locations, such as Genpact Limited, WNS (Holdings) Limited, Accenture, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services;
• niche providers that provide services in a specific geographic market, industry or service area, such as analytics or healthcare; and
• leading accounting and management consulting firms.
We compete against these entities by working to establish ourselves as a service provider with deep industry expertise, strong client relationships, leading industry talent, superior operational and process capabilities, differentiated technology and BPaaS solutions, and sophisticated analytic and consulting capabilities, which enable us to respond rapidly to market trends and the evolving needs of our clients.
Intellectual Property
Our intellectual property consists of proprietary and licensed platforms, software and databases, trade secrets, methodologies and know-how, trademarks, copyrighted software, operating procedures and other materials and patents and pending patent applications. We have numerous registered trademarks and logos registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and certain foreign jurisdictions and several pending trademark applications, as well as, three issued patents. We consider many of our business processes and implementation methodologies to be trade secrets or proprietary know-how and confidential information. To provide our services, in addition to our own proprietary tools, we use software and data licensed by
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us or our clients from third parties. We also use SaaS services from third parties pursuant to contracts with us or our clients. In particular, we have developed several strategic partnerships with robotics and process automation software companies to facilitate our offering of automation to our clients.
Clients and business partners sign nondisclosure agreements requiring confidential treatment of our information. Our employees are required to sign work-for-hire and confidentiality covenants as a condition to their employment.
Our technology group and various business lines develop proprietary tools that we deploy to support services for our clients. We typically retain ownership of any pre-existing tools including modifications or enhancements to such pre-existing tools developed while providing client services. While working on client engagements, we also often develop new tools or methodologies, including robotics and process automation software or “bots,” and we endeavor to negotiate contracts that give us ownership or licenses to use or demonstrate such tools for other clients.
A lthough our proprietary intellectual property rights are important to our business, we believe our company as a whole is not materially dependent on any particular intellectual property right, other than our EXL brand.
Information Security and Data Privacy
Overseen by management and our board of directors, we maintain a comprehensive program that focuses on information security, cyber security, data privacy and the protection of our clients’ and their customers’ confidential personal and sensitive information. We have invested in our information security and cyber security posture and protocols to support compliance with our contractual obligations and the laws and regulations governing our activities. These investments include people, processes and technology intended to protect information throughout its life cycle.
EXL focuses on implementing and maintaining cyber security capabilities to identify, protect, detect, respond and recover from cyber threats, incidents and attacks; reduce vulnerabilities and minimize the impact of cyber incidents. We emphasize compliance and institutional governance built upon and supported by policies and processes, tools and technologies, and knowledge and awareness training. EXL takes into account guidance from relevant regulatory and governance bodies, including but not limited to the Cyber Security Framework of the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the U.S. Department of Commerce, in designing controls and policies regarding security for sensitive and confidential information of EXL's clients, employee, partners, third parties and EXL’s owned products and services. EXL has undertaken measures designed to comply with new privacy regulations, including the European General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (“GDPR”) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), as well as other national and state laws or regulations.
According to the needs of our clients as well as the regulatory requirements of the geographies in which we operate, many of our delivery centers are certified related to information security and health and environmental safety, such as the ISO 27001:2013 standard for information security management systems, the ISO 22301:2012 for Business continuity management systems, the ISO 9001:2008 standard for quality management system, the ISO 14001 for environmental management standards and the OHSAS 18001:2007 standard for occupational health and safety management systems. Certain delivery centers and processes are also compliant with HITRUST CSF™ and certified for other similar requirements. Some of our centers in the Philippines and South Africa and certain client processes in other operation centers in India are compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) version 3.2 or higher requirements. We engage independent firms to conduct General Controls and business process (SOC1and SOC2 - Type II) assessments on managed hosting environments that we offer in our Insurance and Healthcare verticals. EXL also engages third parties to conduct vulnerability assessment and penetration testing of its technology environment. For disaster recovery purposes, many of our key technology applications are hosted in ISO 27001 certified, SSAE18 SOC1 compliant Tier 4 data centers that are proactively monitored and managed 24 hours a day.
In March 2020, as a result of COVID-19 and the implementation of our business continuity plans, many of our employees began to provide services from their homes, or other authorized remote locations. We augmented our endpoint security posture with next generation security controls including strong encryption and a secure virtual private network to access EXL or client application from these authorized locations. As we were unable to replicate physical controls in place at our delivery centers, we agreed with our clients to implement certain additional logical information security and data privacy controls on the hardware issued by EXL and used by our employees while working from home, including browsers, peripherals and operating systems restrictions, as well additional monitoring from our Cyber Defense Center. All employees providing services from home are required to agree to an undertaking of their compliance with our Telecommuter Policy. However, we continue to face certain risks related to cybersecurity threats in general and our modified delivery models due to COVID-19. See Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” under “Risks Related to Our Business-Our business, results of operations and financial condition have been adversely affected, and could in the future be materially adversely affected, by the coronavirus pandemic” and under “Risks Related to Our Industry-Unauthorized disclosure of sensitive or confidential client and customer data, whether through breach of our computer systems or otherwise, could expose us to protracted and costly litigation and cause us to lose clients.”
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We have procured from leading technology providers and other third parties a robust, wide area network and international telecommunications capacity to support our global business operations. Our business continuity management plans include redundant locations, network infrastructure, power sources and other utilities to mitigate and manage operational risks as well as redundant, trained talent across our service delivery locations. These plans are documented, as well as tested on a periodic basis.
Human Capital Management
At EXL, our culture is defined by our five core values: innovation, collaboration, excellence, integrity and mutual respect. In line with those values, we consider our employees to be critical to the success of our business and view employee development and growth as key to our performance and sustainability.
As of December 31, 2020, we had a headcount of approximately 31,900 employees. We have approximately 20,800 employees based in India, 7,600 employees in the Philippines, 2,000 employees in the United States, 200 employees in the United Kingdom, 400 employees in Colombia, 300 employees in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, and 600 employees in South Africa and other geographies. None of our employees are unionized. We have never experienced any work stoppages and believe that we enjoy good employee relations.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Our diversity, equity and inclusion philosophy is to create an inclusive work environment and leverage diversity to enable the organization to effectively capitalize on the differing views and contributions that each employee brings to the workplace.
We consider diversity, equity and inclusion to be a key factor in our recruiting goals and overall business growth strategy. As of December 31, 2020, of the United States reporting workforce, approximately 39.1% were racially/ethnically diverse individuals. As of December 31, 2020, our global workforce was approximately 39.5% female, with over 12,500 women employees globally.
EXL is committed to providing a supportive working environment and career opportunities for our employees. Our Diversity and Inclusion Council consists of a global, diverse mix of leaders and oversees our diversity, equity and inclusion program. We provide trainings to our employees on topics aimed at improving diversity, equity and inclusion, such as managing unconscious bias, and have formed employee resource groups for select employee communities that are aimed at supporting diverse groups and interests. For our female employees, EXL has several programs to promote career advancement, including leadership development for women at the mid- to senior- levels, a separate program to improve the retention and engagement of new mothers through employee friendly parental leave and similar policies, and our WE (Women at EXL) platform, which is designed to enable women at EXL advance their career and achieve professional growth through discussion, collaboration, networking, training, development and mentorship opportunities.
In addition, we maintain a supplier diversity program in the United States designed to provide opportunities for qualified diverse businesses.
Recruiting our Employees
We have an integrated talent management framework that employs active collaboration between our recruitment, capability development and business human resource functions. We deploy innovative methods to recruit, train and retain our skilled employees. We focus on recruiting the right talent and developing them further on relevant competencies through our learning academies, rigorous promotion standards, client and industry specific training and competitive compensation packages that include incentive-based compensation. We are able to leverage shared resources across our services through personnel who have skill sets applicable to a wide variety of BPM services. We also have specialized experts in various domains, who develop specialization in our chosen industries and subject matters through our training academies. Our employee relations function ensures that we understand the pulse of our employees, and are able to swiftly respond to specific needs and concerns as they arise, through a central team of experts.
We focus on recruiting, training and retaining our professionals. We have developed effective strategies that enable an efficient recruitment process. The recruitment and training process evolved to an online model in 2020. We have over 100 employees dedicated to recruitment. Some of the strategies we have adopted to increase efficiency in our hiring practices include AI-based intelligent screening mechanisms. Our hiring policies focus on identifying high quality employees who demonstrate a propensity for learning, contribution to client services and growth. Candidates must undergo numerous tests and video interviews, in 2020, before we extend offers for employment. We also conduct background checks on candidates, including criminal background checks, where permitted and as required by clients. In 2020, as a result of COVID-19, much of our recruiting and training of new hires was conducted virtually.
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Employee Benefits and Experience
We offer our employees competitive compensation packages that include incentive-based compensation and offer a variety of benefits that vary by facility, including free transport to and from home in certain circumstances, subsidized meals and free access to recreational facilities that are located within some of our operations centers. In 2020, given COVID-19, we implemented a number of new measures to support our employees while working from home, including regular Company-wide town hall meetings, as well as promoting smaller virtual video-based team building activities, and a renewed employee wellness program led by a new global employee wellness team, made up of specialists such as counsellors, physicians and fitness instructors. We also took a number of COVID-19 safety measures, such as chartering a senior management-led Pandemic Management Task Force that is charged with ensuring the safety of our employees and adherence to government guidelines in each of the geographies in which we operate, and publishing guidelines for our employees on quarantine protocols, enhanced testing and tracking measures for those of our employees who are unable to work from home due to the nature of their jobs, and providing an additional four weeks of leave for those of our employees who become ill, and additional two weeks of leave for those of our employees who have to care for family members who become ill.
Capability Development
We maintain a strong focus on capability development, with an emphasis on digital transformation and domain expertise. Our talent development strategy is comprehensive, aligned to overall business strategy and founded on three pillars: Digital Leadership, Digital Technologies & Methodologies, and Digital Culture & Mindset. Digital Leadership is the ability to partner with clients on digital solutions end-to-end, from strategy to execution. Digital Technologies & Methodologies develops expertise around the specific technologies, tools, and frameworks required to successfully execute projects for our clients. Digital Culture and Mindset is all about creating the right DNA for high performance in a digital economy. This includes developing traits of agility and speed, creating a culture of innovation and collaboration, and fostering a mindset to reimagine and think beyond. Digital culture also builds the foundation of self-learning and spurs the desire for change amongst all of our employees. We create thought leaders with high industry acumen who are better able to address our clients’ requirements. We also provide a career-linked learning path to our employees from new hires to tenured employees to senior levels of leadership.
Our domain academies focus on building domain expertise through certifications and specialization. These include our Insurance Academy, Travel Academy, Finance and Accounting Academy, Healthcare Academy, Analytics Academy, Utilities Academy, Consulting Academy and Digital Academy. These domain academies focus on achieving excellence and developing skill sets that can be used across the different domains. Our training includes behavioral and functional components to enhance and ensure job readiness as well as also boosting ongoing productivity and effectiveness. We also focus on promoting better diversity, equity and inclusion through our training programs. We have a global presence catering to the specific learning requirements of each geography. We provide learning through our blended learning methodology comprising of virtual, classroom, on the job coaching and technology led learning.
Our new capability development digital ecosystem, EXL Infinity, drives learning from anywhere, anytime, any device. Objective is to harness the collective knowledge base of the Company, drive a culture continuous self-learning, and promote knowledge sharing and learning collaboration. EXL Infinity has led to curation of over 22,500 hours of learning content deploying more than 3,000 learning assets. We also designed and deployed Leading in Virtual Environment (L.I.V.E) certification program covering 300 managers globally to address current need to effectively connect, engage, manage and collaborate with teams, clients and other stakeholders who are increasingly working remotely. This certification aims to maximize their team’s synergy, productivity and client management capabilities, managers need unique set of skills to succeed.
Employee Retention
Our attrition rate for employees who had been with EXL for more than 180 days was 23.4% and 33.2% for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively. The attrition rate in 2020 was lower than our historical average due to the global pandemic. It is difficult to estimate the attrition rate in 2021 at this time. As competition in our industry increases, our turnover rate could increase. See Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” under “Risks Related to Our Business-We may fail to attract and retain enough sufficiently trained employees to support our operations, as competition for highly skilled personnel is intense and we experience significant employee turnover rates, which may result in loss of revenue and an inability to expand our business; Employee wage increases may prevent us from sustaining our competitive advantage and may reduce our profit margin.”
Environmental, Social and Governance Strategy
The world we work and live in is powered by innovation. We believe success in such a world will come through passing along social goods to the communities in which we operate, and ensuring that we conduct our operations in a sustainable and
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safe manner. These initiatives reflect our core values and will make us a stronger, more impactful organization to work for and to deliver exceptional results for our clients, employees, communities and stockholders.
Our most recent Sustainability Report is available on the Company’s website. The information contained on the Company’s website is not included in, or incorporated by reference into, this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Community Activities
EXL finds meaningful ways to help the communities in which we operate. Our community activities focus on passing along the skills that our employees use in our operations to members of the communities in which we operate to help transform lives. On our own, with outside partners, and in partnership with our clients, we support market-relevant skill development and education initiatives, disaster relief efforts, and global health initiatives. These programs align with the expectations clients have of service providers, and benefit our other stakeholders. In 2020, we were able to continue many of these activities virtually. Examples include:
• Skills to Win Initiative: This skill development initiative provides participants in communities in the United States, the Philippines, India and South Africa with foundational employability skills required for back-office roles, as well as courses on topics including finance and accounting, data and analytics, and digital skills. This initiative also offers placement assistance to successfully trained participants.
• Education Initiative: This classroom-based initiative provides school-aged students in India, the Philippines and the United States with data and analytics skills and career guidance.
Environmental, Health and Safety
We strive to continuously improve in the area of environmental, health and safety initiatives (“EHS”), with a focus on reducing our carbon footprint, energy conservation, waste minimization, green infrastructure and operations. Our EHS team tracks and assesses our progress with respect to key performance indicators for energy, greenhouse gas emissions, water and waste generation targets. We have also established Company-wide and worksite-specific workplace safety objectives that are integrated into our EHS Management System. We believe that these measures will also help us in sustainable development efforts. Where practical, we seek to integrate EHS with our business activities, focusing on conducting our activities in an environmentally responsible manner and ensuring the health and safety of the Company’s employees, contractors, customers, visitors and the communities where the Company operates. In addition, we seek to maintain a responsible supply chain by confirming that our vendors’ values are aligned with ours through background verifications for new suppliers with respect to policies and performance on economic, environmental, human rights, data privacy, product safety and working conditions.
All of our delivery centers in India and the Philippines are ISO 14001:2015 certified, meeting international standards for effective environmental management systems. All our delivery centers have been upgraded from OHSAS 18001:2007 to ISO 45001:2018 certification for health and safety management system. We also have additional ISO 50001:2011 certifications, systemic approaches for energy management and performance.
Regulation
Our operations are subject to rules, regulations and statutes in the countries where we have operations and where we deliver services as a result of the diverse and complex nature of our service offerings. More often, however, our clients contractually require that we comply with certain rules and regulations applicable to their specific industries.\
We are one of the few service providers that can provide third-party administrator insurance services from India and the Philippines and are currently able to provide such services in the U.S. for 49 states and 48 states (including the District of Columbia), respectively. Additionally, our subsidiary in the Philippines is able to provide utilization review services in the U.S. for 44 states (including the District of Columbia). Further, through domestic subsidiaries, we are licensed or otherwise eligible to provide third-party administrator services in all states within the United States, as well as utilization review , insurance adjuster, and insurance producer services in select states. We are required to maintain licenses in various jurisdictions or require certain categories of our professionals to be individually licensed in service areas such as debt collection, utilization review, workers’ compensation utilization review, insurance adjuster, and telemarketing services. Our facilities in the Philippines, as well as one domestic subsidiary, are accredited by the Utilization Review Accreditation Commission (URAC) and National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), the leading healthcare and education accreditation organizations. We continue to obtain licenses and accreditations required from time to time by our business operations.
Our operations are also subject to compliance with a variety of other laws, including U.S. federal and state regulations that apply to certain portions of our business such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Federal
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Trade Commission Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Health Information Technology for Economics and Clinical Health Act of 2009, GDPR and the UK Bribery Act,- as well as state and local laws, such as the CCPA. We also must comply with applicable regulations relating to health, financial and other personal information that we handle as part of our services.
We benefit from tax relief provided by laws and regulations in India and the Philippines from time to time. Regulation of our business by the Indian government affects us in several ways. During the last several years, we either established or acquired new centers that are eligible for tax benefits under the Special Economic Zones Act, 2005 (the “SEZ Act”). The SEZ Act introduced a 15-year tax holiday scheme for operations established in designated special economic zones (“SEZs”). Under the SEZ Act, qualifying operations are eligible for a deduction from taxable income equal to (i) 100% of their export profits derived for the first five years from the commencement of operations; (ii) 50% of such export profits for the next five years; and (iii) 50% of the export profits for a further five years, subject to satisfying certain capital investment requirements. The SEZ Act provides, among other restrictions, that this holiday is not available to operations formed by splitting up or reconstructing existing operations or transferring existing plant and equipment (beyond a prescribed limit) to new SEZ locations. Income tax exemption for new SEZ units was applicable only for units that started commercial operations on or before June 30, 2020. In 2019, the Government of India introduced a new tax regime for certain Indian companies by enacting the Taxation Laws (Amendment) Act, 2019. The new tax regime is optional and provides for a lower tax rate for Indian companies, subject to agreeing to certain conditions, which, among other things, include not taking advantage of benefits from any tax holidays associated with SEZs and certain other tax incentives. Once a company has opted in to the new tax regime, it may not in the future opt out. During 2019 and 2020, our Indian subsidiaries opted into this new tax regime and accordingly gave up the tax exemption associated with SEZs that were used prior to opting in.
See Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” under “Risks Related to the International Nature of Our Business-Our financial condition could be negatively affected if foreign governments introduces new legislation, reduce or withdraw tax benefits and other incentives currently provided to companies within our industry or if we are not eligible for these benefits.”
We also benefitted from a corporate tax holiday in the Philippines for some of our operations centers established there over the last several years. The Company registered with the Philippines Economic Zone Authority (“PEZA”) and is therefore eligible for income tax exemption for four years. We anticipate establishing additional operations centers in PEZA or other tax advantaged locations in the future. This exemption incentive may be extended in certain instances upon fulfillment of certain conditions. Following the expiry of the tax exemption, income generated from centers in the Philippines will be taxed at the prevailing annual tax rate.
Available Information
We file annual, quarterly and current reports, proxy statements and other information with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”). The SEC maintains a website (http://www.sec.gov) that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically through the EDGAR System. You may access the information filed by us with the SEC by visiting its website.
We also maintain a website at http://www.exlservice.com. Information on our website does not constitute a part of, nor is it incorporated in any way, into this Form 10-K or any other report we file with or furnish to the SEC. We make available, free of charge, on our website our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, proxy statements, current reports on Form 8-K and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act, as soon as reasonably practicable after such reports are electronically filed with, or furnished to, the SEC. Our website also includes announcements of investor conferences and events, information on our business strategies and results, corporate governance information, and other news and announcements that investors might find useful or interesting.
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