Alight, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Good afternoon, welcome to Alight's second quarter 2026 earnings call.

I'm very pleased to have Stephen Lasher, our Chief Financial Officer, joining me today. Steve joined Alight in June, it's been a busy first few weeks for him, we are delighted to have him on board. Included in today's discussion will be our thoughts on our second quarter, our positioning in the marketplace, new initiatives we've put in place to continue strengthening our service, delivery, user experience, our long-term growth strategy. We reported a solid second quarter as we exceeded market expectations, primarily as a result of strengthened project revenue and higher volumes. Our transformation initiatives remain on track as we continue to focus on strengthening our operational execution, deepening our client relationships, and enhancing our commercial capabilities.

To that end, I have now had more than 180 client meetings since I took the role of CEO, we've continued to see improvement in our renewal activity and commercial execution as a result. Second quarter revenue of $511 million was comprised of $471 million in recurring revenue, $40 million in project revenue. As expected, recurring revenue was down 4.3% over the prior year period as a result of commercial activity in 2025 and earlier. As a reminder, our lag from commercial execution to revenue realization for a substantial part of our recurring business is 12 to 18 months. This is reflected in the revenue reduction we are seeing now and expect to see for the next couple of quarters as the impact of that activity runs through our P&L. Project revenue in the second quarter was up approximately 11% over the prior year period.

As we've previously discussed, project revenue can be inherently unpredictable and is often the key driver behind quarter-over-quarter fluctuations in performance. Adjusted EBITDA of $92 million, representing 18% margin in the quarter, and exceeded market expectations, primarily due to the higher-than-expected revenue performance. We've maintained a strong liquidity position, exiting the quarter with $545 million in total liquidity, consisting of $215 million of cash and $330 million of undrawn revolver. Year-to-date, we've generated $101 million in free cash flow, which includes $48 million in free cash flow in the second quarter, and we remain confident in our cash generation for the year and beyond. Our liquidity position and cash generation provides continued flexibility to drive our business forward. We made several key hires during the quarter to strengthen and bolster our leadership team, which is now largely in place.

As I mentioned in June, we welcomed Stephen Lasher to the team as Alight's new Chief Financial Officer. Steve brings more than 30-plus years of financial leadership experience across the services, technology, and B2B sectors, has a proven ability to drive transformation at scale, and has the operating expertise and discipline needed at this stage of Alight's journey. In May, we appointed Dinesh Tulsiani as President, Employer Solutions. Dinesh previously served as Alight's Chief Strategy Officer and has been part of Hewitt for 20-plus years. He leads the Employer Solutions business to help accelerate innovation, strengthen how we deliver value, and advance the outcomes our clients count on. As highlighted on our previous call, in April, we appointed Naveen Baweja as Chief Technology Officer. Naveen is a transformation-focused technology executive and leads Alight's technology organization with a focus on advancing innovation and strengthening execution of our technology roadmap.

Beyond senior leadership, since the start of the year, we've added numerous account management and sales professionals and have expanded our overall sales coverage, with account executive coverage now extending to 500 clients as we build greater expertise across our sales and accounts team. During the quarter, we completed the important phase of insourcing critical client service functions that had previously been outsourced. This has been a major strategic initiative for us as we look to strengthen the client experience and align the priorities of all our staff to one goal, to serve our clients with the highest possible service levels. These changes have garnered very positive feedback from our customers as well as from industry consultants and third-party evaluators that play a critical role in us being renewed by our clients and selected by our prospects.

A fundamental pillar of our long-term growth plan is the continued strategic investment in our technology and people to create consumer-grade customer experience and strengthen service excellence. We made targeted client experience investments during the quarter intended to modernize our user experience, evolve the data layer, and improve user journeys. Our operating data layer will be the industry's first data framework to bring health, wealth, and leave solutions all under one consolidated platform. It will provide employers with a view that makes benefits experiences for their participants more intuitive and easier to understand. Furthermore, we've made ongoing investments in service delivery excellence, deploying automation with the goal of improving service quality. Alight is the only integrated benefits provider operating at true enterprise scale with the capabilities and expertise to manage the full complexity of employer needs across our health, wealth, and leave solutions.

Our health solutions platform is our largest portfolio and spans core health administration, navigation, enrollment services, spending account solutions, engagement services, and point solutions. Our goal is to help employers administer health benefits and manage healthcare spend while helping employees make better and more informed decisions for their health benefits. Wealth Solutions is our second-largest business, with $1.7 trillion in assets under administration. Our wealth platform includes a portfolio of financial and retirement-related benefit solutions, including defined contribution, defined benefits, and pension risk transfer that allow employees to better navigate and plan for their financial future. Our leaves business represents our largest growth opportunity and includes leave of absence administration, medical and disability guideline information, and short-term disability administration.

Keeping up with ever-changing leave of absence regulations can be a difficult and time-consuming effort for employers and their HR teams, which is why our tailored leave solutions assist employers in controlling costs and avoiding compliance risk. We're continuing to see strong client demand across the benefits administration space. Employers are increasingly turning to outsourced providers to handle their benefits compliance, delivery, and technology needs, which allows them to focus on their core capabilities rather than managing the ever-complex world of benefits management. The non-discretionary nature of benefits means that we're seeing a large and active market for our services, regardless of shifting economic conditions. Access to healthcare, financial planning, and retirement services remain essential and creates the foundation of what we believe to be a highly resilient business model.

Our combination of scale, expertise, and our relentless commitment to service excellence allows us to serve this market effectively, whether it be large Fortune 500 clients or more main street organizations. Despite our already expansive breadth of clients and partners, the opportunity in front of us remains vast, and we are energized about the prospects ahead of us. We continue to leverage and deploy AI across our organization to transform the HR employee experience and drive organizational impact with our clients and employees always top of mind. For Alight, AI's potential is grounded in the foundation underneath it. Thousands of participant interactions, deep institutional knowledge built over decades, and a platform already operating at scale with an extensive user base.

It's this foundation that allows the AI tools we're deploying to be predictive, personalized, and provide actual, meaningful assistance to our members while also ensuring these tools follow strict constraints of security, privacy, auditability, and observability. With that said, we believe there are tangible opportunities across our portfolio of health, wealth, and leaves businesses to leverage AI for specific tasks that enhance efficiency, quality, and user experience. We will provide additional updates on how we are deploying AI across dimensions of quality, efficiency, and user experience as our roadmap is quite extensive. While Alight has evolved with the times to strategically implement AI into our offerings, we wholeheartedly believe in a balanced approach that effectively uses AI and people in tandem. We remain intently focused on service quality, and to that end, the most significant part of our CapEx is invested in operational excellence and user experience.

We have five overarching initiatives that are being undertaken under my direct oversight. First, we're building an AI-native employee and employer experience with new navigation guidance and end-to-end user journey for a simpler, more modern, and more intuitive experience that makes it easier to get things done, reducing manual work, and most importantly, friction in the benefits process. The design of this is complete, and we are getting active user feedback with an expectation for rollouts next year. Second, we're building the first framework of unified data and knowledge for health, wealth, and leaves that connect systems to enable AI and orchestrate workflows leading to smarter, more personalized experiences and responses which are more resilient to AI misinformation. We are heavily leveraging AI-based development and expect to begin rolling this out next year.