FactSet Research Systems Inc. (NYSE:FDS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Kevin McVeigh: Thank you.

Operator: And thank you. And one moment for our next question. And our next question comes from Shlomo Rosenbaum from Stifel. Your line is now open.

Shlomo Rosenbaum: Hi. Thank you very much for taking my questions. Phil, can you elaborate a little bit on the cancellations you touched on? Is there something in particular? Is it people getting laid off? Is it some firm closures? Maybe you can just expand on that a little bit?

Philip Snow: Can you help clarify the question? I’m not sure what cancellations I referred to.

Shlomo Rosenbaum: I thought you were when you’re discussing Americas, that you had some area that you said you were some of the positives or one of the negatives. I thought there was — there were some cancellations that you had highlighted. Could be that I misunderstood it?

Philip Snow: Yeah. I think you might have misunderstood that?

Shlomo Rosenbaum: Okay. Go ahead.

Helen Shan: Hi, Shlomo. It’s Helen. Yeah, no, we’ve actually had very good retention. There is erosion that’s happening in cases on a bit on the banking side, which is why we are taking our more deliberate approach on thinking about that. But there wasn’t anything material this quarter.

Shlomo Rosenbaum: Okay. Thank you. And then, Linda, you talked a little bit about real estate potential, additional real estate that you’re planning to do some more actions on the rest of the year. If you look at your downturn playbook, is there a lot more levers that you can kind of push in that downturn playbook beyond what you’ve kind of laid out for us in the last several quarters? In other words, if you — if we do see that this kind of spirals more after, as you noted, was a very eventful weekend last weekend?

Linda Huber: Yeah, Shlomo. Great question. We do have some additional thoughts on things we could do. For example, we’ve added back a bit to travel and entertainment, particularly for Helen’s team, for critical client usage and for critical pipeline activity. So we could pull back on that again a little bit. But frankly, I’d rather not because we’re trying to get the — the make sure the top line is as healthy as absolutely possible. Real estate is one that we’re going to do. Technology costs may come in, may come in a bit lighter. We’ll have to see how that goes. And please keep an eye on the capitalization rate. And then with people, it’s largely about keeping to this essential hiring and making sure that we’re communicating clearly with you on where the bonus pool is going.

So those are — those are the major things. And at this point, we feel pretty good about the way we’re managing the company. I wanted to anticipate a question you always ask Shlomo. You’re always ahead of everyone on days sales outstanding. It has popped up a bit as we brought CUSIP in-house. Job number one was to get the technology changeover completed successfully, not break anything. And we did that. So now our focus will turn to days sales outstanding, Shlomo, and we hope that we have some nice lower results on DSO to speak to you about in the third quarter, but glad you’re paying attention to that detail.

Shlomo Rosenbaum: Thanks for pre-empting that.

Linda Huber: Happy to do so.

Operator: And thank you. And one moment for our next question. And our next question comes from Toni Kaplan from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Toni Kaplan: Thanks very much. You talked about the elongation of the sales cycle already and wanted to understand the impact on not just new customers, but also cross-selling like does cross-selling or up-selling start to get more complicated in this kind of environment? I guess what — what product sets would you anticipate being the most impacted?

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