Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. Business
ExlService Holdings, Inc. (“EXL,” “we,” “us,” “our” or the “Company”), incorporated in Delaware in 2002, is a global data and artificial intelligence (“AI”) company that offers services and solutions to reinvent client business models, drive better outcomes and unlock growth with speed. EXL harnesses the power of data, AI, and deep industry knowledge to transform businesses, including the world’s leading corporations in industries including insurance, healthcare, banking and capital markets, retail, communications and media, and energy and infrastructure, among others. EXL was founded in 1999 with the core values of innovation, collaboration, excellence, integrity and respect. We are headquartered in New York and have approximately 59,500 employees spanning six continents.
We deliver advanced analytics and AI-powered digital operations and solutions to our clients, driving enterprise-scale business transformation initiatives that leverage our deep domain expertise in generative AI and cloud technology. Data, AI, 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 and AI-led transformation reflects the long-term priorities of our clients' businesses across industry sectors, and we continue to evolve our offerings to drive business outcomes. Our data and AI-led value creation framework enables better and faster decision making, leveraging our end-to-end data, analytics, AI capabilities and deep industry knowledge to drive improved business outcomes, and re-designing of operating models to integrate advanced technology into operational workflows. We embed AI, digital operations and solutions into clients’ businesses and introduce our data and AI-led approach to transform operations with every new engagement, which helps our clients achieve better customer experience, higher productivity, cost efficiency and improved business outcomes.
Through the end of 2024, we managed and reported financial information through our four reportable segments or strategic business units: Insurance, Healthcare, Analytics and Emerging Business, which reflected how management reviewed financial information and made operating decisions throughout that period. 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 AI, data and analytics directly into our client workflows, we drive intelligence into our clients’ digital operations that drive superior sales outcomes, optimize costs and power resilient and agile business models.
Digital Operations and Solutions
Our digital operations and solutions, which we deploy for our clients from our Insurance, Healthcare and Emerging Business strategic business units, are focused on solving complex industry challenges. We use a focused industry vertical approach, and our solutions are designed to help our clients realize their business and innovation goals and improve their strategic competitive position.
Some of our data and AI-driven digital operations and solutions include: a) multi-modal data ingestion using AI, and converting unstructured content into curated and usable data, b) real-time and comprehensive data insights with end-to-end data management and 360-degree customer views for our clients, c) omni-channel and frictionless customer experience including self-service, conversational AI and smart agent assist, d) AI-powered automation of transaction processing and e) automated quality, compliance and audits. Using these solutions, we have transformed client operations such as underwriting operations, claims processing, accounts payables processing, utilization management, member and provider contact center services and collections and accounts receivables. We manage and digitally transform these operations for our clients by deploying our solutions through a software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) model via our partners’ cloud network or a client’s on-cloud deployment model, to digitally transform their retained operations.
Our key digital and AI capabilities that drive data and technology-led transformation for our clients include generative AI, reinforcement learning, hyper-automation, cloud data management, conversational AI, robotics, enterprise architecture development, integration platform as a service and AI for Operations. Some of our key solutions are:
• Insurance Large Language Model (“LLM”) is an industry-specific LLM that supports critical claims and underwriting-related tasks, such as claims reconciliation, data extraction and interpretation, question-answering, anomaly detection and chronology summarization.
• Generative AI platform for the development and deployment of our proprietary solutions, including, among others, Smart Agent Assist, Claims Assist, Conversational Business Intelligence and Code Harbor.
• Xtrakto.AI is a patented and AI-powered solution designed to alleviate the challenges of managing unstructured data.
1
Table of Contents
• PayMentor is an AI-powered collections and receivables management solution designed to optimize the debt collection process.
• Digital Finance Suite automates and streamlines financial processes and key finance and accounting tasks, which helps customers gain real-time visibility into financial operations leading to faster decision making and reduced risks, among others.
• Data and AI-led Customer Experience: Delivers AI-infused customer experiences across multiple customer journeys and touchpoints.
• Digital Lending and Embedded Financing: AI-powered financing solution that reimagines and delivers a seamless and end-to-end origination, service and payments journeys for multiple credit and loan products across industries.
• Data and AI-led Automation Solution eliminates friction and fragmentation in transaction processing using some of our proprietary workflow solutions.
We use AI, data, and cloud technology, including our suite of solutions and accelerators, within a standardized, reusable and shared engineering and delivery infrastructure, which allows us to leverage our investments across multiple clients.
Our strategic business units, which 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 and insurtech companies. We provide end-to-end digital transformation solutions and data and AI-led operations services across the insurance industry encompassing 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, including generative AI, machine learning (“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 SaaS delivery model through our LifePRO® and Life Digital Suite 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 a business process-as-a-service 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 data and AI-led finance and accounting services that include financial planning and analysis, decision support, GAAP and statutory reporting and compliance services in addition to core finance operations. We bring a data and AI-led 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 and AI-led insights to our clients’ businesses.
Our Healthcare strategic business unit primarily serves U.S.-based healthcare payers, providers and pharmacy benefit managers organizations. We combine deep healthcare domain expertise with data and AI-led 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 digital operations, SaaS and platform services designed to serve the healthcare industry. Our integrated care management offering, including our proprietary clinical data, connects payers, providers and members to increase efficiencies and effectiveness across all aspects of care management, including medical, pharmacy and behavioral health. Our data and AI-led digital operations and solutions infuse advanced analytics, AI, generative AI, cloud, ML 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 strategic business unit, we also provide finance and accounting services, digital transformation and advisory/consulting services to our clients in the healthcare industry.
Our Emerging Business strategic business unit provides AI and data led enterprise solutions in the areas of finance and accounting, customer experience management and revenue enhancement to clients primarily in the banking and capital markets, utilities, retail and consumer packaged goods, technology, media, and telecom, travel and leisure, manufacturing, transportation and logistics and business services industries. These enterprise solutions complement our domain-specific industry solutions enabling our clients to deliver superior performance.
2
Table of Contents
Our AI and data driven finance and accounting services include high-end analytical services, including financial planning and analysis, management reporting, advanced forecasting and decision support, data management, regulatory reporting and risk and compliance services in addition to core transactional finance operations. Our Digital Finance Suite, which is now an AI powered integrated cloud-based hyper-automation insights, and processing platform, helps chief financial officers transform finance into an AI and data-led, digitally enabled, scalable function that drives economic performance for the enterprise, delivers improved business outcomes with lower cost to serve, and better stakeholder experience.
Our client experience management solutions that run on a combination of client, partner and proprietary platforms, help our clients improve their end-customer experience across the front, middle and back-office, integrating data flows, redesigning customer service processes and delivering a digital omni-channel customer experience. To deliver these solutions, we combine our deep industry knowledge with advanced analytics and digital capabilities, including robotics, proprietary and partner-driven AI and ML solutions.
Our revenue enhancement solutions include lead generation, inside sales and digital marketing, pricing, customer and marketing analytics, billing and proprietary revenue assurance solutions, which helps deliver direct topline and margin impact to our clients’ business.
We also provide industry-specific digital operations and solutions. For our clients in the banking and financial services sector, we provide a range of AI enabled digital solutions, including residential mortgage lending, title verification and validation, retail banking and credit cards, trust verification, commercial banking and investment management. In the retail and consumer packaged goods sector, we provide supply chain management services and AI-led advanced analytical services including merchandising, pricing and demand forecasting. For our clients in the utilities sector, we offer AI enabled digital operations and solutions related to end-to-end customer life cycle management including onboarding and terminations, engineering field services, customer service, billing and debt management and collections. In the technology, media, and telecom sector, we manage media and advertising reconciliations, order entry, fulfillment and licensing management operations. For our clients in the travel and leisure sector, we provide corporate and leisure travel services, including, AI enabled digital reservations, customer service and fulfilment services. In the transportation and logistics sector, we provide our clients with AI enabled digital freight billing, collections, claims management, freight audit, freight scheduling, supply chain management and revenue assurance services.
Analytics
Our Analytics strategic business unit helps clients build data-led businesses using AI, generative AI, advanced analytics solutions and services, and cloud technology. By leveraging our suite of end-to-end analytics capabilities, we aim to drive better business outcomes for our clients by unlocking deep insights from data and creating data and AI-led solutions across all aspects of our clients’ businesses.
Our Analytics 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 and third-party AI, generative AI, and ML capabilities and proprietary solutions, to create insights, improve decision making for our clients and address a range of complex industry-wide priorities, 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;
• Enhanced decision-making in underwriting, claims processing and policy renewal through cognitive image analytics; and
• Payment integrity services in the U.S. healthcare industry ensuring accurate reimbursement and help prevent fraud, denials, and revenue leakage.
3
Table of Contents
Our Analytics team is comprised of approximately 9,900 professionals, including data scientists, data architects, business analysts, statisticians, modelers and industry domain specialists.
We help our clients leverage internal and external data sources, enhance their data assets, identify and visualize data patterns, and utilize data and AI-led insights to boost their effectiveness. Our Analytics services include:
• Identifying, cleansing, matching and using of internal and external structured, semi-structured and unstructured data;
• Integrating data insights and predictive models into real-time, decision-making processes to drive measurable business impact;
• Designing and implementing services that enable data visualization and management reporting enabling business users to segment, drill down, and filter data;
• Deploying 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; and
• Harnessing the power of AI, including generative AI to elevate decision-making paradigms, enabling our clients to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage amid rapid technological innovation.
Our Analytics engagements include both project work and longer-term arrangements where we provide ongoing analytics modeling and services for a year or longer. We utilize our deep industry knowledge to drive these engagements across our various competencies, including, data management and cloud enablement, AI, generative AI, ML, advanced analytics and insights, data-enabled marketing solutions and strategic data assets.
Our Analytics services support: (1) retail banking, commercial banking, wealth management and investment banking and management for the banking and financial services industries; (2) marketing analytics, clinical analytics, patient engagement, pharmaco-economics outcomes and cost optimization solution within the healthcare industry; (3) marketing and agency analytics, actuarial, servicing and operations, customer management and claims and money movement within the insurance industry; and (4) marketing analytics, supply chain, logistics and digital operations and solutions within the retail and consumer packaged goods, media and telecom and utilities and manufacturing industries.
As technology evolves and AI adoption increases, capturing and enriching data has become a key differentiator for clients and their speed of decision making necessitating the adoption of AI, including generative 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 have built a scalable and customizable multi-cloud cross-sector generative AI platform with pre-built accelerators and packaged solutions. Our AI and analytics solutions include Bank Transaction Insights, which provides insights from bank data and Customer 360 Insights, which provides agent and customer relationship insights. Conversational business intelligence generates insights from data using natural language and other Generative AI-led assistants for various functions.
Our EXLClarity TM platform supports risk adjustment and quality management for payers and providers and helps to optimize their revenue. Our payment services support payment integrity and maximize performance and financial-related results by leveraging our multi-payer dataset and applying digital solutions, such as AI, natural language processing and robotics. These services involve verifying the correct party pays the claim, membership eligibility, contractual adherence, and detecting and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse. Our EXLVantage TM platform offers population health analytics for enhanced care and network optimization. These analytics models integrate with campaign management and marketing analytics to support member acquisition and clinical program interventions.
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. We continue to strengthen our expertise in data and product engineering, ML operations, cloud enablement and managed services. We have expanded our footprint within our existing clients in the insurance, healthcare, banking and financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods, media and telecom, utilities and manufacturing industries by cross-selling our enhanced data management and cloud enablement offerings.
4
Table of Contents
2025 Operating Model
In the first quarter of 2025, we began to implement operational and structural changes to accelerate the execution of our data and AI strategy, capture a greater share of the growing AI market and drive our long-term growth. The new operating model is comprised of Industry Market Units (“IMUs”) to focus on delivering higher value to clients leveraging our full suite of capabilities; and Strategic Growth Units to focus on rapidly advancing our capabilities specific to various industries and client needs. This will enable us to further embed analytics throughout each of our IMUs, enhance our client relationships, deepen investments in data and AI capabilities, develop industry-specific AI solutions, form partnerships, access new client buying centers, enable expansion of our addressable markets across industries and geographies, and provide more professional development opportunities for our employees.
Our IMUs, Insurance, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Banking, Capital Markets and Diversified Industries, and International Growth Markets, reflect how management will review financial information and make operating decisions beginning in the first quarter of 2025. These IMUs will focus on managing customer relationships and delivering the “One EXL” value proposition to clients, maintain a unified go-to-market approach and be integrally responsible for growth, profitability and client satisfaction.
Our new reportable segments, aligned to our IMUs, effective from the first quarter of 2025 will be as follows:
• Insurance,
• Healthcare and Life Sciences,
• Banking, Capital Markets and Diversified Industries,
• International Growth Markets
The primary changes in our new reportable segments reflect 1) the integration of our former Analytics reportable segment as a core capability within each of our IMUs, ensuring alignment with the specialized needs of our clients across IMUs, 2) the reorganization of our former Emerging Business reportable segment into a Banking, Capital Markets and Diversified Industries reportable segment, excluding Life Sciences, which is now a part of former Healthcare reportable segment, and including data and analytics services, and 3) the formation of International Growth Markets as a separate business unit to represent all our service and solutions offerings to clients in the United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific geographies across all industry verticals. The International Growth Markets business unit will help strategically expand our footprint in markets outside of Americas and drive focus on offerings and expansion in those markets in new and existing clients.
The reporting segment changes align with how our Chief Executive Officer (our chief operating decision maker) will review financial information in order to assess performance and allocate resources between segments. This change in segment presentation will not have any effect on our consolidated statements of income, balance sheets or statements of cash flows. The revised presentation will be reflected in our periodic and annual reports beginning in the first quarter of 2025.
Business Strategy
EXL is a global data and AI company and is a strategic services and solutions partner for data and AI-led businesses. We reinvent business models, drive better business outcomes and unlock growth with speed for our clients through advanced analytics and AI -powered digital solutions on the cloud. We do this through our data and AI-led value creation framework to enable better and faster decision making, leveraging our end-to-end data and analytics capabilities to drive improved business outcomes, and we re-design operating models to integrate advanced technology into operational workflows. Below are some of our strategic focus areas.
Expanding our Services in Large Addressable Markets
We continue to focus on the insurance, healthcare, banking and capital markets, retail, communications and media, and energy and infrastructure industries, among others, which are large markets with high demand, as well as pursuing opportunities in emerging industries. We also continue to build our client portfolio and increase client penetration across all of our services offerings. We are strategically equipped to help clients apply relevant digital technologies to enterprise processes and business priorities at every step of the digital transformation journey, by bringing together domain expertise with data, advanced analytics, cloud, AI and ML. Demand for our services is expected to continue to exhibit growth in the next several years.
Integrating our Data and AI-Led and Domain Capabilities
5
Table of Contents
The combination of our data and AI-led capabilities and domain expertise has been central to our market differentiation. We are also well-positioned with our suite of advanced analytics, data and AI-powered digital solutions on the cloud 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, which includes AI-powered digital operations and solutions, consulting and data analytics services; and
• Supporting our clients’ geographic expansions by leveraging our global footprint.
We intend to continue building a portfolio of Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies in our focus industries that have complex and diverse data and AI-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 data analytics, and digital operations and solutions offerings.
Optimizing our Global Delivery Footprint and Operational Infrastructure in the Countries and Regions where we Operate
Our network of delivery centers and operational footprint is designed to serve the needs of our business, including delivering for our clients, driving efficiencies and adapting to hybrid working model. We continually optimize our network based on facility usage and business requirements.
Pursuing Strategic Acquisitions and Partnerships
We intend to continue making selective acquisitions within our target industry verticals that enhance our competitive differentiation and meet our strategic and financial criteria. We consider selective strategic partnerships with industry leaders that can establish new long-term client relationships, enhance the depth and breadth of our services and solutions and complement our business strategy. We expect that the digital assets, intellectual property and client access this ecosystem provides will enhance our go-to-market opportunities, expand the scope and effectiveness of our services and solutions, help us to win new clients, and allow us to enter new industry verticals and geographic markets.
Our Industry
Digital operations and solutions
As a provider of digital operations and solutions, we work with clients to execute enterprise-scale business transformation initiatives that enable improved customer experience, revenue growth, operational efficiency and reduced risk. Our asset-based operations services combine the industry-specific knowledge of our global workforce with an ecosystem of partner and proprietary digital solutions. These digital solutions help clients achieve their desired outcomes in three key ways: 1) leveraging advanced analytics that combine publicly available data, proprietary data sets and clients’ own data to help power faster, more strategic decision making, 2) integrating AI/ML-driven natural language processing to help streamline manual, labor-intensive workflows and improve end-customer engagement and experience, and 3) implementing AI/ML-powered operating models that help our clients transition from legacy business operations and get to value faster.
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 our clients’ customer touch points, interactions and experiences have increasingly shifted to digital channels.
Digital transformation is a long-term strategic commitment for a company that, once begun, 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 opportunities for digital operations
6
Table of Contents
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.
Data Analytics
As a provider of advanced analytics, AI and data services, 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, advanced analytics enables clients to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale, settle consumer issues efficiently and rapidly adapt 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 and AI-led decision making and availability of sophisticated analytics tools, have enabled companies to make better decisions. By leveraging our end-to-end offerings, we develop industry-specific AI and advanced analytics solutions and generate data insights, which makes us well-positioned to benefit from this global trend.
Sales, Marketing and Client Management
We market and sell our services to existing and prospective clients through our sales and client management teams, partner relationships, industry forums, and marketing programs.
Our sales and client management teams are aligned by industry verticals, and have expertise in data and AI, analytics services, and digital operations and solutions. As of December 31, 2024, we employed approximately 320 sales, marketing, business development, and client management professionals based in various geographies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and India.
Our sales, marketing and business development teams are responsible for new client acquisition, nurturing and growing current client relationships, public relations, analyst relations, lead generation, content development, campaign management, digital and/or web presence, brand awareness and participation in industry forums and conferences.
Clients
We generated revenues from approximately 570 clients and 560 clients in 2024 and 2023, respectively (with annual revenue exceeding $50,000 per client). We won 69 and 63 new clients during 2024 and 2023, respectively.
Our top three, five and ten clients generated 17.2%, 23.0% and 33.2% of our revenues, respectively, in 2024. Our top three, five and ten clients generated 16.4%, 22.9% and 34.0% of our revenues, respectively, in 2023. No client accounted for more than 10% of our total revenues in 2024 or 2023. 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. For details refer 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 that are mainly located in the United States.”
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 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. For further details, refer to Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” under “Risks Related to Our Business––We face competition globally from other providers and from our clients, who may build global capability centers to perform digital operations and solutions and analytics services themselves, either in-house or other arrangements.” Many companies, including some of our clients, opt 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 lies in our ability to orchestrate relevant domain, data, digital,
7
Table of Contents
advanced analytics and human design expertise to enable delivery of sustainable outcomes allowing 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, IBM, 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 platforms, software, data, databases, models, methodologies, know-how, names, designs, domains, user interfaces, applications and operating procedures among other materials. We have obtained or are in the process of obtaining patents on a number of our proprietary solutions. 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, as well as through confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions. Clients and business partners typically agree in writing to confidential treatment of our intellectual property. Our employees and independent contractors are required to sign work-for-hire agreements containing confidentiality covenants as a condition to their employment and engagement, respectively. We also have policies requiring our employees, independent contractors, and associates to respect the intellectual property rights of others, including obtaining appropriate licenses when using, selling or distributing third-party materials.
The solutions we offer our clients often include our software, data and other intellectual property assets developed by our data scientists and engineers, combined with software and data licensed by us or by clients from third parties. We also leverage strategic partnerships with third parties to facilitate our solution offerings to clients, including, among others, robotics and process automation software providers, platform providers, and AI solutions providers. 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, and also seek to retain the right to use anonymized data derived from client engagements. Independently or while working on client engagements, we also often develop new tools, methodologies and models, including AI and ML models that can be leveraged for various use cases. We endeavor to negotiate contracts that give us ownership or broad licenses to use, develop, demonstrate and offer such newly developed intellectual property assets to or 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 industry knowledge, ability to advise clients on how to transform their processes and deliver transformation that drives business value, and ability to provide innovative services and solutions, including digital offerings that incorporate AI and ML capabilities. 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 EXL as a whole is not materially dependent on any particular intellectual property, other than our EXL brand. Our intellectual property portfolio is comprised of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and domain names to protect our brands, including our EXL brand, which is one of our most valuable assets.
Human Capital Management
At EXL, our identity is deeply rooted in five core values: innovation, collaboration, excellence, integrity, and respect. Guided by these principles, we acknowledge the essential role our workforce plays in our success. We are committed to fostering the growth and development of our employees, recognizing that their advancement is vital to our continued performance and long-term success.
8
Table of Contents
Our global workforce spans six continents, operating from more than 50 offices worldwide. As of December 31, 2024, we have a team of over 59,500 employees, including approximately 39,100 in India, 12,000 in the Philippines, 4,200 in South Africa, 2,800 in the United States, and 1,500 across other countries.
As a data and AI-driven digital organization, our talent strategy is focused on building a team with deep expertise in these fields. We strive to enhance our capabilities and ensure alignment with the evolving demands of digital technologies, methodologies, and advancements through talent development centered around democratized self-learning. Our learning management system, reNew, provides learning opportunities for our employees to develop their capabilities across AI/GenAI, data and readiness, cloud platforms, domain, and leadership skills and enables us to expand the qualified digital talent we need.
Building on the momentum of 2023, which saw our strategic expansion into Ireland and our partnership with University College Dublin, 2024 was a year dedicated to advancing our recruitment strategy through automation and innovation.
We aim to maintain a work environment that harnesses the power of diversity of thought and experience to drive business performance. We recognize that the world we live and work in is diverse and fueled by innovation. To thrive in this environment, we foster a culture that values varied experiences and perspectives. All employees have access to our employee resource groups that are organized around certain shared experiences and interests, and serve as a platform for networking, support and creating a sense of belonging. In addition, our employees receive training on topics such as compliance with our code of conduct and ethics.
Our operations have consistently remained unaffected by industry or labor disruptions, underscoring our favorable employee relations.
Recruiting, Developing and Engaging our Employees
We have developed a comprehensive and integrated talent management framework that fosters collaboration among our recruitment, capability development, and business human resources teams. Our approach prioritizes attracting top talent and enhancing their expertise, including in the areas of AI technologies, through targeted learning academies, stringent promotion criteria, and specialized client and industry-focused training programs. We offer competitive, performance-driven compensation packages, including incentive-based rewards.
Our talent strategy aims to facilitate EXL’s current needs and support the long-term business objective of transforming data into a competitive edge for our clients. To achieve these objectives, we identify critical skills and roles that are our core business requirements and then build a talent pipeline through market mapping exercises followed by initiatives to attract and retain talent.
We optimize shared resources across our services by leveraging personnel with versatile skill sets applicable to a broad range of data, digital, cloud, and AI/ML services. Additionally, we have dedicated domain experts in key industries and subject matters, supported by our specialized training academies.
We have implemented a framework of practices, processes, and programs designed to make learning accessible, collaborative, and integrated into daily workflows. Through virtual training and upskilling opportunities, our employees engage in continuous development. Our dedicated employee relations function helps to foster a supportive and responsive work environment that seeks to understand and address employees’ needs, concerns, and aspirations and provide timely and tailored responses. Our approach is centered on attracting, developing, and retaining top-tier professionals, for a skilled and engaged workforce that drives organizational excellence.
The talent acquisition strategy is underpinned by a comprehensive "Build, Acquire, and Partner" framework. Since 2020, our transition to an online model for recruitment and training has provided enhanced flexibility and an improved experience for both candidates and recruitment teams. The process has continuously evolved, incorporating AI-based smart screening and real-time proctored online assessments, and in 2024, we introduced a recruitment solution across seven of our geographies, which automates key recruitment processes, streamlines workflows for hiring managers and recruiters, and establishes a standardized approach to talent acquisition. The recruitment process involves comprehensive assessments, including multiple rounds of video interviews, before extending offers, as well as a background check process is conducted in alignment with client mandates.
Our hybrid working model offers employees enhanced flexibility. Leveraging digital-first and multi-channel communication strategies, we continuously refine our approaches to keep our global workforce informed and engaged.
9
Table of Contents
Employee Benefits and Experience
We offer a competitive compensation and benefits program that we refer to as our “Total Rewards” program, which is designed to attract, motivate, and retain top talent and support the diverse needs of our workforce. This includes competitive cash compensation, equity opportunities, and a comprehensive range of benefits tailored to the markets where we operate.
Key components of our Total Rewards program include:
• Compensation: Competitive base salaries, performance-driven bonuses, and equity incentives that recognize employee contributions and align them with our overall success.
• Health and Wellness: A suite of programs designed to support physical, mental, and emotional well-being of our employees, including enhanced health insurance options, and wellness resources tailored to specific geographies.
• Work-Life Balance: Subsidized meals, free or subsidized transport to and from work, and recreational facilities available at select locations to foster a positive work environment.
• Career Growth and Recognition: Rewards and benefits that evolve as employees progress in their careers, reflecting their growing contributions and skills.
Capability Development
We continue to promote opportunities for large-scale upskilling and reskilling of our employees, while also fostering a learning environment conducive to individual skill-building and career advancement. In 2022, we implemented a fundamental shift in our capability development approach, transitioning from a corporate-driven model to an ecosystem of democratized self-learning, where our employees have access to our digital learning ecosystem. This enables our employees self-driven learning and growth experiences based on their personal goals and skills by using AI to anticipate and build market-relevant skills and capabilities, curated libraries and intelligent web-sourced content. Our employees are supplied with specialized learning pathways to build digital capabilities, skill mapping to direct them to courses as needed, chat groups where they can collaborate and discuss the latest trends, practice questions, practice labs for real-world and hands-on experience, supervisor dashboards and leaderboards, and learning on the go.
Our talent development strategy is comprehensive and aligned to EXL’s overall business strategy. We aim for our employees to develop expertise around the specific technologies, tools and frameworks required to successfully execute projects for our clients, as well as a mindset focused on agility, speed, creativity, innovation and collaboration. We create thought leaders with high industry acumen who are better able to address our clients’ business priorities. 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, Sales Academy and Digital Academy. These 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 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.
In addition to our existing academies, we also introduced specialized academies such as the GenAI Academy, and CX Academy to further deepen our employees' understanding and capabilities in these critical areas. Our Operations Excellence trainings engagement emphasize best practices and process improvement techniques to enhance operational efficiency. We also invested in innovation capability development to reflect the rapidly evolving technology landscape.
Our Integrated Leadership Development Framework brings together industry expertise, knowledge of EXL’s products and solutions, technical acumen, and partner ecosystems to equip leaders with the necessary skills.
Employee Retention
Our attrition rate for employees who had been with EXL for more than 180 days was 26.1% and 25.8% for the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively. 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 or professionals with sufficient leadership capabilities” and “Employee wage increases may prevent us from sustaining our competitive advantage and may reduce our profit margin.”
10
Table of Contents
Sustainability Strategy
The world we work and live in is powered by innovation. We believe success in such a world will come through supporting the communities in which we operate, and ensuring that we conduct our operations in a sustainable and safe manner that is aligned with, and contributes toward, our business objectives. These initiatives reflect our core values and will make us a stronger, more impactful organization to work for that can deliver exceptional results for our clients, employees, communities and stockholders.
Our most recent Sustainability Report is available on our website. The information contained on our website (including the Sustainability Report) is not included in, or incorporated by reference into, this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Community Activities
Our community engagement strategy focuses on four key pillars: education, digital skills development, employee engagement, and community impact. Our employees leverage their expertise to help build market-relevant technical and life skills programs that we deploy in communities we operate. We seek out community-based, regional, and global partners and emphasize employee volunteering. We actively engage with our stakeholders to ensure that our community engagement activities are responsive to the needs of our communities and to foster long term relationships.
In addition to our focus on education and skills development, we also work to advance positive environmental and health outcomes for our communities. Through partnerships with local non-governmental organizations in India, the United States, the Philippines, and South Africa, we have contributed to tree planting, beach and sea-bed cleaning exercises and supported organizations focused on community members’ mental and emotional well-being, among others.
Environmental, Health and Safety
Our environmental, health and safety (“EHS”) program is focused on reducing our carbon footprint, conserving energy, minimizing waste, and achieving workplace safety objectives in order to drive business performance. Our delivery centers are ISO 45001:2018 and ISO 14001:2015 certified, meeting international standards for health and safety and effective environmental management systems, respectively. We have also established Company-wide and worksite-specific workplace safety objectives that are integrated into our EHS Management System. Where aligned with our strategic objectives, we seek to integrate EHS with our business activities and to maintain a responsible supply chain by stating our expectations for our vendors in our Supplier Standards of Conduct.
Regulation
Our operations are subject to rules, regulations and statutes in the jurisdictions in which we have operations and where we deliver services as a result of the diverse and complex nature of our offerings. Consequently, we comply with certain rules and regulations applicable to us in delivering our services.
We provide third-party administrator insurance services from India and the Philippines in a majority of states in the United States. Further we are licensed or otherwise eligible to provide third-party administrator services in all states within the United States, as well as utilization review, claims adjuster and insurance producer services in select states. We require certain categories of our professionals to be individually licensed, as applicable. Our utilization management and case management services that we provide from the Philippines, are accredited by the Utilization Review Accreditation Commission (URAC) and National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), both independent U.S. organizations that work to improve health care quality through the administration of evidence-based standards, measures, programs, and accreditation. We continue to obtain licenses and accreditations required from time to time by our business operations. Our healthcare platform and infrastructure have also been assessed and certified by HITRUST®, an information protection standards organization and certifying body.
Our operations are also subject to compliance with a variety of other laws, including tax laws in the jurisdictions where we conduct our business. See Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” under “Risks Related to the International Nature of Our Business––Our global operations expose us to numerous and sometimes conflicting legal and regulatory requirements, including, accreditation or licensing standards that govern our business, and violations of these requirements could harm our business.”
We benefit from certain corporate tax holidays for our operations located in qualified Philippines Economic Zone Authority units. We are managing our business in accordance with the applicable guidelines issued by the Philippines Fiscal Incentives Review Board to continue availing the tax holidays.
11
Table of Contents
In 2023, we established an international business headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, and qualify for a reduced tax rate. We monitor our operations to ensure we continue to qualify for the reduced rate.
In the Philippines and Ireland, we are subject to a minimum tax rate under the Pillar Two Framework prescribed by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (“OECD”). The OECD continues to release additional guidance on the Pillar Two Framework and we will continue to evaluate any potential impact on our operations.
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 governments in the countries we operate in introduce new unfavorable tax legislation, including legal restrictions for repatriation of our earnings.”
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://ir.exlservice.com. Information on our website does not constitute a part of, nor is it incorporated in any way, into this Annual Report on 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, sustainability efforts, corporate governance information, and other news and announcements that investors might find useful or interesting.
In this Annual Report on Form 10-K, we use the terms “EXL,” “we,” “us,” “our” or the “Company” to refer to ExlService Holdings, Inc. and its subsidiaries.
12
Table of Contents