Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. Business
ExlService Holdings, Inc. (“EXL,” “we,” “us,” “our” or the “Company”), incorporated in Delaware in 2002, is a leading data analytics and digital operations and solutions company that partners with clients to improve business outcomes and unlock growth. By bringing together deep domain expertise with robust data, powerful analytics, cloud, artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning (“ML”), we create agile, scalable solutions and execute complex operations for the world’s leading corporations in industries including insurance, healthcare, banking and financial services, media, and retail, among others. Focused on driving faster decision-making and transforming operating models, EXL was founded on the core values of innovation, collaboration, excellence, integrity and respect. Headquartered in New York, our team is over 37,400 strong, with more than 50 offices spanning six continents.
We deliver data analytics and digital operations and solutions to our clients, driving enterprise-scale business transformation initiatives that leverage our deep expertise in advanced analytics, AI, ML and cloud. Data, analytics, and digital have become core to virtually every significant move a business makes to serve customers, optimize business processes, stay competitive and grow. Our vision of being an indispensable partner for data-led businesses is a reflection of where the data and technology-led transformation of our clients’ businesses is trending across industry sectors, and we are evolving our offerings to drive business outcomes through advanced analytics and AI-powered solutions on the cloud. Our data-led value creation framework enables better and faster decision making, leveraging our end-to-end data and analytics capabilities to drive improved business outcomes, and re-designing of operating models to integrate advanced technology into operational workflows. We embed digital operations and solutions into clients’ businesses and introduce our data led approach to transform operations with every new engagement. Accordingly, as our operations management services are now a part of our digital operations and solutions, they are referred to as “digital operations and solutions” herein; however, we have not changed the way in which we manage our business or our operating segments or segment reporting structure.
We manage and report financial information through our four reportable segments or strategic business units: Insurance, Healthcare, Analytics and Emerging Business, which reflects how management reviews financial information and makes operating decisions. 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. By integrating data and analytics directly into our client workflows, we drive more intelligence into our clients’ increasingly digital operations that drive superior customer outcomes, optimize costs and power resilient and agile business models for our clients.
Our December 2021 acquisition of Clairvoyant AI Inc. (“Clairvoyant”) is included in the Analytics reportable segment.
COVID–19 Global Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause global economic disruption and uncertainty, which affects our business. The global economic disruption of this pandemic has had an adverse impact on our business operations, customers, and suppliers.
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 clients, 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, see Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” and Part II, Item 7, “Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.”
Digital Operations and Solutions
Our digital operations and solutions, which we provide from our Insurance, Healthcare and Emerging Business strategic business units are focused on solving complex industry problems such as the insurance claims lifecycle and financial transactions processing, and typically involve the use of agile delivery models to implement digital technologies and interventions like hyper-automation, customer experience transformation, advanced automation, robotics, enterprise architecture, end-to-end business function management and transformations. We either administer and manage these functions
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for our clients on an ongoing basis via longer-term arrangements or project work. We use a focused industry vertical approach, and our solutions are designed to deliver business models that help our clients realize their business and innovation goals and improve their strategic competitive position.
The key differentiators and salient features of our digital operations and solutions include our agile operating and delivery model, which leverages AI/ML-based content extraction, natural language processing and cloud-based operations to automate business processes and improve speed-to-market. Our approach to digital integrates AI/ML and data on to the cloud to digitally transform legacy models and support real-time insights, faster decision-making and streamlined operations. This approach positions us to digitally transform our clients’ enterprise-wide data flows to deliver meaningful customer experience, business outcomes and efficiency improvements to our clients.
Some of our key digital operations and solutions we provide in connection with our analytics capabilities include:
• AI:OS: Integrated cloud-native AI solutions with deep domain expertise and process transition experience to deliver a cloud receiving center for business processes.
• Xtrakto.AI: AI-driven automation of manual processing of text, image and financial data;
• Exelia.AI: AI-infused experiences across multiple customer journeys and touchpoints;
• Paymentor: AI-powered customer centricity and digitization in payment and collection processes; and
• POS Financing: AI-powered Buy Now Pay Later solution, reimagining an integrated and coherent sales and credit journey.
We deliver digital operations and solutions to clients through multiple technology approaches, including, using client environments, EXL platforms and leveraging third-party solutions from our partner ecosystem. Where possible, our aim is to use standardized and shared technology and operational delivery infrastructure, enabling us to leverage technology and infrastructure investments across multiple clients.
Our strategic business units through which we provide digital operations and solutions are described below:
Our Insurance strategic business unit serves property and casualty insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, insurance brokers, reinsurers, annuity and retirement services companies. We provide digital operations and solutions and analytics-driven services across the insurance industry in areas such as claims processing, premium and benefit administration, agency management, account reconciliation, policy research, underwriting support, new business acquisition, policy servicing, premium audit, surveys, billing and collection, commercial and residential survey, and customer service using digital technology, AI, ML and advanced automation. We provide end-to-end third party administration for life and annuity insurance policies which includes digital customer acquisition services using a software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) delivery model through our LifePRO ® and LISS platforms that help clients administer life insurance, annuities and credit life and disability insurance policies. We also provide subrogation services to property and casualty insurers using 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 a suite of 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 Healthcare strategic business unit primarily serves U.S.-based healthcare payers, providers, pharmacy benefit managers and life sciences organizations. We combine deep healthcare domain expertise with data-driven insights and technology-enabled services to transform how care is delivered, managed and paid. We provide 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, patient and provider experience and access to the healthcare system in the healthcare market, and optimized healthcare spend.
We offer SaaS and platform 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 and 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 operations and solutions infuse cloud, data, AI, ML, analytics 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.
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Similar to our Insurance strategic business unit, we also provide finance and accounting services, digital transformation and advisory/consulting services for our clients in the healthcare industry.
Our Emerging Business strategic business unit provides data-driven and digital enterprise solutions in the areas of revenue enhancement, finance & accounting and customer experience management to clients primarily in the banking and capital markets, utilities, travel, transportation and logistics, media and communications, manufacturing and retail and business services industries. These enterprise solutions complement our domain specific industry solutions enabling our clients to maximize performance.
Our revenue enhancement solutions, enabled by our analytics based EXL Revenue Leakage Preventer (formerly Revlift TM ) platform include lead generation, inside sales and digital marketing, pricing, customer and marketing analytics, billing and revenue assurance solutions, helping deliver direct topline and margin impact to our clients’ business.
Our data-driven finance and accounting services include high-end analytics driven services, including financial planning and analysis, strategic finance, advanced forecasting and decision support, data management, regulatory reporting and risk and compliance services in addition to core finance operations. Powered by our integrated cloud-based hyper-automation and insights platform EXL Digital Finance Suite, we help CFOs transform finance into a digitally enabled, scalable data-driven function with lower cost to serve, superior business outcomes, and improved stakeholder experience and business partnering.
Our client experience management solutions which run on our CONNECx platform help our clients improve their end-customer experience 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, digital operations and solutions, advanced analytics and digital capabilities, including robotics, proprietary and partner driven AI and ML solutions.
We also provide industry-specific digital operations and 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 our clients with billing, collections, claims management, freight audit, logistics, supply chain management, revenue assurance and payment services. For our clients in the banking and financial services sector, we provide comprehensive range of digital operations and solutions, including residential mortgage lending, title verification and validation, retail banking and credit cards, trust verification, 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 offer digital operations and solutions related to end-to-end customer lifecycle management including onboarding and terminations, engineering field services, customer service, billing and debt management and collections.
Analytics
Through our Analytics strategic business unit, we help our clients build data-led businesses. By leveraging our suite of end-to-end analytics capabilities, our analytics services focus on driving improved business outcomes for our clients by unlocking deep insights from data and creating data-driven solutions across all parts of our clients’ 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 AI and ML capabilities, to create insights and improve decision making for our clients. We leverage and deploy our proprietary AI and ML solutions to help deliver improved business outcomes and address a range of complex industry-wide problems, including:
• Superior customer experience, driving engagement, loyalty and increasing cross-sell through a deeper understanding of consumer behavior;
• Solutions for risk models , stress testing, Basel risk-weighted assets, reserves, and economic capital calculation;
• ML models for fraud monitoring, loss mitigation, and implementation and execution of fraud strategies; and
• Enhanced decision-making in underwriting, claims processing and policy renewal through cognitive image analytics.
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Our Analytics team is comprised of approximately 6,600 professionals, including data scientists, data architects, business analysts, statisticians, modelers, industry domain specialists and data experts.
We help our clients 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 clients include:
• Identification, cleansing, matching and use of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data available both internally to our client’s organization and externally;
• Integration of data insights and predictive models into real-time decision making processes to drive measurable business impact;
• Design and implementation of services that enable data visualization and management reporting enabling business users to segment, drill-down, and filter data; and
• 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.
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 our domain and industry knowledge to drive these engagements across our various competencies including data management and cloud enablement, AI, ML and advanced analytics and insights, 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 industries; (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, supply chain, logistics and digital operations and solutions in the retail, media and entertainment industries.
As a result of the ongoing impact of COVID-19, we have seen a significant acceleration in the shift to digital and cloud-based solutions across all of our target markets. Capturing data and enriching data has become a key differentiator for clients and their speed of decision-making necessitating the adoption of advanced AI and ML techniques. The accelerated adoption of cloud-based solutions has increased our clients’ needs for a suite of cloud migration and enablement capabilities. We expect that this will continue to 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 building a scalable and customizable multi-cloud cross-sector analytics platform with pre-built accelerators and packaged solutions. This will enable us to continue to enhance our solutions to scalable industry solutions and as-a-service models.
To position EXL as a market leader in analytics services, we are customizing solutions across our target verticals and markets and deepening our advanced analytics and cloud capabilities and our domain expertise.
Our EXLClarity TM platform supports payers’ and providers’ risk adjustment and quality management programs in order to close clinical gaps and optimize revenue, and our EXLVantage TM platform offers robust population health analytics that can be leveraged by our payer, provider and life science customers to drive insights and associated actions for improved outcomes in quality and efficiency performance for care and network optimization. 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. 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.
On December 16, 2021, we completed the acquisition of Clairvoyant, a global data, AI, ML, and cloud services firm that helps organizations in their business transformation by maximizing the value of data through actionable insights. It provides data engineering, analytics, AI, ML, product engineering, and cloud-based solutions. The acquisition strengthens our Analytics capabilities with additional expertise in data engineering and cloud enablement, further supporting our clients in the insurance, healthcare, banking and financial services, and retail industries.
Business Strategy
EXL is a leading data analytics and digital operations and solutions company and is a key strategic partner for data-led businesses. We drive business outcomes for our clients through advanced analytics and AI/ML-powered digital solutions on the
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cloud. We do this through our data-led value creation framework to enable better and faster decision making and orchestrate re-designing of operating models to integrate advanced technology into operational workflows. Below are some of our strategically focused considerations:
Expanding our services in large addressable markets
We continue to focus on the insurance, healthcare, banking, retail, media and high tech, among other 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. 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, by bringing together deep domain expertise with robust data, powerful analytics, cloud, AI and ML. Demand for our 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 with our suite of data and analytics, strong operational excellence and digital toolkit to create integrated services and solutions under one brand.
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 digital operations and solutions, consulting and data analytics services; 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 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 by leveraging our BPaaS and digital offerings.
Optimizing our Global Delivery Footprint and Operational Infrastructure in the Countries and Regions in which we Operate
We intend to further optimize our existing network of delivery centers to service our clients, drive efficiencies and adapting to remote working operating model. As part of our ongoing evaluation of facilities usage, we closed certain facilities in India, the Philippines and in the United States.
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
Digital operations and solutions
As a digital operations and solutions company, we work with clients to execute enterprise-scale business transformation initiatives that leverage deep expertise in advanced analytics, AI, ML and the cloud. Specifically, digital operations and solutions companies help clients achieve digital transformation in three key ways: 1) advanced analytics that combine publicly available data, proprietary data sets and clients’ own data help power faster, more strategic decision making, 2) AI/ML-driven natural language processing solutions help streamline manual, labor-intensive workflows and improve end-customer engagement and experience, and 3) AI/ML-powered operating models that integrates AI and ML capabilities and data on to the cloud to help transition from legacy models and get to market faster.
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This comprehensive approach acknowledges the critical role that digital capabilities play in both the operational business process and consumer-facing customer engagement and user experience, as touch points, interactions and experiences with companies’ customers have increasingly shifted to digital channels.
Digital transformation 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 digital operations 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 digital operations and solutions will be primarily led by industries that are transaction-driven and that require significant customer interactions.
Analytics
As an analytics business, we help companies access and deliver real-time data and insights at multiple points in their overall workflows so that all parts of the organization are working from the same data pool. Leveraging a large number of high-frequency, granular, non-traditional data elements aggregated across proprietary data sets, client data and publicly available sources, Analytics helps companies settle consumer issues efficiently, deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences at scale, and rapidly shift their business strategies in response to market changes. 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 benefit from global labor markets. Our service offerings develop industry-specific analytics solutions and deep data insights that are 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 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, 2021, we employed approximately 214 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 459 clients and 460 clients in 2021 and 2020, respectively (with annual revenue exceeding $50,000 per client). We have won 58 and 44 new clients during 2021 and 2020, respectively.
Our top three, five and ten clients generated 18.7%, 25.2% and 38.1% of our revenues, respectively, in 2021. Our top three, five and ten clients generated 19.2%, 25.4% and 37.4% of our revenues, respectively, in 2020. No client accounted for more than 10% of our total revenues in 2021 or 2020. 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 digital operations and solutions other than consulting, we generally 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 our 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 data analytics and digital operations and solutions 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 digital operations and solutions and analytics services themselves, either in-house, in the United States or through offshore groups or other arrangements.” Many companies,
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including certain of our clients, choose to perform some or all of their front-, middle- and back-office analytics and processes internally, utilizing their own employees and digital applications to provide these services as part of their regular business operations. We believe our key advantage over in-house business processes and analytics management is our ability to orchestrate relevant domain, data, digital, advanced analytics and human design expertise to enable delivery of sustainable outcomes that allow companies to focus on their customers, core products and markets. We compete primarily against:
• large global companies with digital operations and solutions and operations capabilities, such as Accenture, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Genpact Limited, Infosys, NTT DATA, Tata Consultancy Services, and WNS (Holdings);
• niche industry-specific digital operations and solutions providers such as Cotiviti and Optum Health;
• niche analytics services and digital platform providers; and
• leading accounting and management consulting firms.
We compete against these entities by working to differentiate ourselves as a strategic partner for businesses with deep industry expertise, sophisticated data and analytics capabilities, innovative digital operations and solutions and technology strong client relationships, leading industry talent, superior process capabilities, and differentiated technology, 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, service marks, copyrighted software, operating procedures and other materials, and patents and pending patent applications. We consider many of our business processes and implementation methodologies to be trade secrets or proprietary know-how and confidential information. We seek to protect our intellectual property through a combination of patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret laws, confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions. Clients and business partners typically agree in writing to confidential treatment of our information. Our employees and independent contractors are required to sign work-for-hire and agreements containing confidentiality covenants as a condition to their employment and engagement, respectively. We also have policies requiring our associates to respect the intellectual property rights of others.
The solutions we offer our clients often include our intellectual property assets developed by our technology group combined with SaaS, software and data licensed by us or clients from third parties. We also leverage several strategic partnerships with third parties to facilitate our solution offerings to clients, including, among others, robotics and process automation software companies and a financing platform provider. We typically retain ownership of any pre-existing proprietary intellectual property assets, including modifications or enhancements to such pre-existing proprietary assets developed while providing client services. While working on client engagements, we also often develop new tools, methodologies, and models, including robotics and process automation software, or “bots,” AI and ML capabilities. We endeavor to negotiate contracts that give us ownership or licenses to use, develop, demonstrate and offer such tools for other clients.
We operate in a highly competitive and rapidly evolving global market. We seek to continue providing value to our clients with our deep domain expertise, ability to advise clients on how to transform their processes and deliver transformation that drives business value, ability to provide innovative services and products, including digital offerings that incorporate AI and ML capabilities, and our ability to continuously improve processes and consistently add value through digital transformation. We also rely on our reputation, client references, ability to sustain long-term client relationships, as well as our global reach and scale, and competitive pricing to maintain our competitiveness in our industry. While our proprietary intellectual property assets 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. We have a registered, and applied for the registration of, numerous U.S. and international trademarks, service marks, and domain names to protect our brands, including our EXL brand, which is one of our most valuable assets.
Information Security and Data Privacy
Overseen by our senior management and our board of directors, we have a comprehensive program that focuses on information security and cyber security, data privacy and the protection of our clients’ confidential personal and sensitive information. We have invested in strengthening our cyber security posture and protocols to enable compliance with our contractual obligations and the regulations governing our activities. These investments include people, processes and technology intended to protect information throughout the business life cycle.
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EXL’s cyber security strategy aims to build a cyber-resilient organization and focuses on implementing and operating cyber security capabilities to identify, protect, detect, respond and recover from cyber threats, events and incidents; mitigate vulnerabilities and minimize the impact of cyber incidents. We emphasize on institutional governance built upon and supported by policies and processes, tools and technologies, and knowledge and awareness training. EXL takes into account guidelines 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 policies and controls regarding security of 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 where 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. The required 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 systems are hosted in ISO 27001 certified, SSAE18 SOC1 compliant Tier 4 data centers that are proactively monitored and managed 24 hours a day. In 2021, we also conducted an external security readiness review of our approach to remote work and strengthened the environment further.
In March 2020, as a result of COVID-19 and the implementation of our business continuity plans, a significant portion of our employees began to provide services from their homes, or other remote locations. We augmented our endpoint security capabilities with next generation security controls including strong encryption and a secure virtual private network to access EXL or client application from these global 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 controls on the technology and computers 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 Operations 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 COVID-19” and under “Risks Related to Our Industry-Unauthorized disclosure of sensitive or confidential client and employee data, whether through breach of our computer systems or otherwise, could cause us significant reputational damage, expose us to protracted and costly litigation, and cause us to lose clients.”
We have procured from leading global 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 locations, redundancy network infrastructure, power sources and other utilities to mitigate and manage operational risks as well as trained talent across our service delivery locations. These plans are documented, as well as tested on a periodic basis.
EXL has adopted a cloud-first strategy for delivering business and enterprise technology services and has developed a Unified Cloud Infrastructure that addresses requirements across our diverse businesses leveraging public cloud services. This infrastructure spans across a multi-cloud environment for data and digital led business solutions and are covered with globally established service level agreements and best practices.
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, 2021, we had a headcount of approximately 37,400 employees. We had approximately 24,800 employees based in India, 8,100 employees in the Philippines, 2,300 employees in the United States, 200 employees in the United Kingdom, 400 employees in Colombia, 400 employees in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, and 1,200 employees
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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 and retention goals and overall business growth strategy. As of December 31, 2021, of the United States reporting workforce, approximately 45.4% were racially/ethnically diverse individuals. As of December 31, 2021, our global workforce was approximately 41.0% female, with over 15,180 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, Developing and Engaging 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 data, digital, cloud and AI/ML services. We also have specialized experts in various domains, who develop specialization in our chosen industries and subject matters through our training academies. We have established a comprehensive set of practices, processes and programs, which have made learning easily accessible, collaborative and embedded in workflows. Our employees can now participate in trainings and upskilling virtually. Our employee relations function helps us to understand our employees’ needs, concerns and interests, so that we can respond to specific needs and concerns as they arise.
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 and continued in 2021. We have over 100 employees dedicated to recruitment. Some of the strategies we have adopted to increase efficiency in our hiring practices include AI/ML-based intelligent screening mechanisms, remotely proctored online techniques and automated trainings. 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 2021, 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 and continued in 2021, as a result of COVID-19, much of our recruiting and training of new hires was conducted virtually.
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 and 2021, given COVID-19, we implemented several 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, made up of specialists such as counselors, 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 where we operate, and publishing guidelines for our employees on quarantine protocols, enhanced testing and tracking measures for
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those of our employees who are unable to work remotely 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, and approved salary advances for those employees. We also took actions in response to the pandemic that focused on helping our employees. In the geographies most affected by the recent COVID-19 variants, these actions included healthcare support including securing and administering vaccines for our employees, facilitating our employees’ access to medical equipment, providing ambulance services and online medical consultations, extending medical insurance to our employees’ family members and enhancing the dollar value of such coverage. We also instituted a one-time employee compensation payment to beneficiaries of employees, facilitated voluntary contributions from our clients and employees to support the family members of deceased employees and provide financial support for their children's education.
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 operations and 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 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 over 565,000 learning engagement activities. We have added several new capability development interventions this year on an array of topics, including leadership and team building, diversity and inclusion, and the cloud.
Employee Retention
Our attrition rate for employees who had been with EXL for more than 180 days was 28.3% and 23.4% for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. The attrition rate in 2020 was lower than our historical average due to the global pandemic, and the attrition rate in 2021 increased from 2020 but remained lower than historical average. It is difficult to estimate the attrition rate in 2022 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.” and “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 safe manner. These initiatives reflect our core values and will make us a stronger, more impactful organization to work for and allow us 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
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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 2021, we continued many of these activities virtually. Examples of our programs include:
• Skills to Win Initiative: This skill development initiative provides participants from communities in which we operate with market-relevant skills, including 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 as a Foundation Initiative: This classroom-based initiative currently delivered through online and offline learning platforms provides school-aged students from communities in which we operate 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, and water and waste generation targets annually. 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 stating our expectations for all of our vendors in our Supplier Standards of Conduct, and through background verifications for new suppliers with respect to policies and performance on human rights, labor rights and environmental issues.
All of our delivery centers worldwide are currently ISO 45001:2018 certified, meeting international standards for occupational health and safety, and all of our delivery centers in India and the Philippines are ISO 14001:2015 certified, meeting international standards for effective environmental management systems. We have begun the ISO 14001:2015 certification process for our delivery centers in Colombia, Europe, South Africa and the U.K. In 2021, we received the COVID-19 assurance statement from the British Safety Council for all of our delivery centers worldwide having appropriate health and safety protocols in place for the return to work of our employees. While we expect to maintain these certifications and standards, there may be changes to our delivery centers or applicable rules or standards that could affect such certifications and standards.
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 provide third-party administrator insurance services from India and the Philippines and are currently able to provide such services in the United States for 49 states and 48 states (and the District of Columbia), respectively by location. Additionally, our subsidiary in the Philippines is able to provide utilization review services in the United States for 44 states (and 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 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, mortgage loan processing and underwriting, 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. See Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” under “Risks Related to Our Business-Failure to adhere to the regulations or accreditation or licensing standards that govern our business could have an adverse impact on our
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operations,” and under “General Risk Factors-Our global operations expose us to numerous and sometimes conflicting legal and regulatory requirements, and violations of these regulations could harm our business.”
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 were eligible for tax benefits under the Special Economic Zones Act, 2005 (the “SEZ Act”). 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. Philippines Fiscal Incentives Review Board recently issued guideline that allows PEZA registered units to work-from-home (WFH) with certain maximum thresholds. We are managing our business in accordance with the guidelines, however, if the prescribed thresholds are not met, it may adversely affect our income 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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