Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Heather Balsky with Bank of America. Your line is now open.
Heather Balsky: Hi, thank you for taking my question. Just another question on the first half versus second half revenue outlook. You talked about the hiring assumptions. When you think about the back half versus the first half on the wealth and buy side, I’m curious what’s kind of baked in your outlook in terms of customer sentiment. And you talked earlier about sort of formation of — on the wealth side, whether or not that potentially picks up. Just what should we take into account? Thanks.
Helen Shan: Sure, I’ll take that. Thank you for your question. So, as it relates to the buy side, I think it’s a similar piece. What — our more complex deals take longer. And right now, with the offerings that we have, they are more complex. So, when I talk about delayed decisions, that’s where you’re seeing a fair number of them as it relates to the analytics business for the buy side. I would see — again, more of the pickup on hiring will help us. We had erosion in both asset management and wealth. So, if we see increased hiring, which we would expect in the second half of the year, that’s where — that’s the driver on that front. On wealth, wealth is an interesting one. Wealth, we have — as I mentioned, some large deals are in the pipe. So, we could see that come through, but a similar situation, if the — as the markets recover, we would expect to see the hiring to pick up again in the second half of the year.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Your line is now open.
Shlomo Rosenbaum: Hi, thank you for taking my question. Main question is, I wanted to ask a little bit if you can go back to the comment about some green shoots that you’re seeing. And if you can give us a little more specificity? Are those green shoots that you’re seeing kind of macro-wise specifically within the clients that you have specifically in your pipeline? Can you just give us a little bit more color on that? And then, maybe just a housekeeping thing. Is there additional interest expense from idaciti acquisition? Is that the way we should think about that?
Helen Shan: Yeah, I’ll talk a bit about the green shoots. The areas that we are seeing some pick-up a little bit, which is always a bit of a harbinger for us, is on the new business. So, in Q4, new business started to make a bit of a recovery in terms of number of transactions. So, we see that as a positive. The one positive also, I would say, overall, even for new business, is that if I look at the average size of the transaction throughout the year, the volume was lower, but the average was pretty much the same. And that, I think, is a testament to the value that clients are seeing. So, we take that as a positive. The other area is around managed services, which we have seen an uptick there. I’ve been mentioning asset servicers as something that’s a positive, but we will continue to see that as one.
And then also, as I can see in the pipeline, what we call data management solutions has also been a driver — we expect to be a driver for us, and that’s been picking up as well. So, when you look at all those pieces, I think that that’s really where the benefits come in. And of course, your second question, it’s probably best to have that with Ali and Kendra afterwards.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Toni Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.
Toni Kaplan: Thanks so much. I was hoping you could talk about your increase in employee count, was about 5% this quarter year-over-year. Is that sort of a normal increase for you now organically, or is it maybe a little bit light? And should we expect sort of around that level for ’24? And maybe you could go into, are you hiring sort of more salespeople or technology or product development? Just trying to understand where the growth areas within the employee base are. Thanks.
Linda Huber: Hey, Toni, it’s Linda. You’re right, headcount growth was actually around 5% for the quarter, you’re correct. For the whole year, FY ’23, it was 9.2%. For FY ’24, we’re expecting that we’re going to continue to add heads at about that 5% rate. But the mix is very, very heavily leaning toward our Centers of Excellence, maybe up to even 80% of those additional folks in our Centers of Excellence. So, in terms of the people costs, we actually took them down by 3% through what we call our Project Blue. We talked about thoughtfully and carefully trimming a bit on the employee base. And we will be looking to do about 5% in terms of hiring for FY ’24, but again, very, very heavily leaning toward the Centers of Excellence. I’ll ask Helen to talk about any potential hiring for the sales organization. So, Helen?
Helen Shan: Thank you. I’m going to ask our CFO if I can do more hiring. No, I think one of the benefits of what we’ve done this year, which is really to become closer to the client, is to have ourselves go to market by firm type and also by workflow solutions. And what that gives us is the ability to actually become more productive. So, our ability now is not covering different types of firm types and talking about things from a product perspective, but rather knowing the workflow and being able to leverage that across clients. And we’ve actually gotten some very good feedback from clients on that piece. And maybe I’ll just add back to a point that Phil and Linda made around GenAI and our client discussions with a larger — the top 25.
What comments we got back, which I thought was very encouraging, is, one, which differentiates us from some of our competitors and some of these smaller upstarts, that the way we talk to them about how GenAI can help them was about their workflow, not about a product, not about something that they are yet to build, and then we were able to show them how we’re already incorporating it into the products we have today. So, I think both of those resonate well, and that’s going to help as we go to market with the current sales force that we have.
Phil Snow: I’m going to pile on just for a second here on the talent front. So, we’re finding this a great environment for talent. So, our retention has improved significantly. Our realignment has allowed a lot of FactSeters to take on new additional responsibilities. But we’ve also found this a great environment to find some exceptional technology and product management talent from the industry, which is going to be accretive, we think, moving forward.
Operator: Thank you. Our last question comes from the line of Craig Huber with Huber Research Partners. Your line is now open.
Craig Huber: Great. Thank you. Linda, question for you. Given you guys’ outlook for revenue second half of the year being better than the first half on a year-over-year basis, I’m curious, on the cost side of things, how are you thinking about cost growth on a year-over-year basis? Is it pretty even you’re thinking over the course of fiscal ’24, or more back-half weighted? Thank you.
Linda Huber: Craig, I think we’ll look to our usual pattern of seasonality. Generally, the spend builds throughout the year. And as Helen said, we’re looking for the back half to be stronger than the first half, so we’d like to sort of match that with our expense growth. So, I think what we want to do is be very careful on expense growth in the first half of the year. I think that’s really important that we try to match up revenue growth with our expense growth. So, we’re going to be very thoughtful in the first half of the year. The second half of the year, I think as we build into our technology budget and some things with GenAI start to catch, I think you should look for our normal trend, that expense growth would be heavier toward the back half of the year and, particularly, in Q4. So, hope that is helpful in terms of your phasing.
Operator: Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Phil Snow for closing remarks.
