Table of Contents

​

​

​

UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20549

FORM 10-K

(Mark One)

☒          ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020

or

☐          TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

For the transition period from                   to                   

Commission File Number: 001-36788

Registrant's Telephone Number, Including Area Code: (844) 935-2832

Securities Registered Pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. ☐ Yes ☒ No

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. ☐ Yes ☒ No

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant (1) has filed all reports required by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. ☒ Yes ☐ No

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§ 232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to submit such files). ☒ Yes ☐ No

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, or a smaller reporting company. See definitions of “large accelerated filer”, “accelerated filer”, “smaller reporting company” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Act). ☐ Yes ☒ No

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report.  ☐

The aggregate market value of the Registrant’s voting common equity held by non-affiliates of the Registrant, computed by reference to the price at which such voting common equity was last sold as of June 30, 2020, was approximately $42,280,594 (based on a closing price of $1.66).

As of March 18, 2021, the Registrant had 58,968,599 shares of common stock outstanding.

____________________________________ 

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

​

The information required by Part III of this Report, to the extent not set forth herein, is incorporated herein by reference from the registrant’s definitive proxy statement relating to the Annual Meeting of Shareholders to be held in 2021, which definitive proxy statement shall be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission no later than 120 days after the close of the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020.

​

​

​

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

​

​

​

​

2

Table of Contents

SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

Certain statements included in this Annual Report on Form 10-K (“Annual Report”) are not historical facts but are forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements generally are accompanied by words such as “may”, “should”, “would”, “plan”, “intend”, “anticipate”, “believe”, “estimate”, “predict”, “potential”, “seem”, “seek”, “continue”, “future”, “will”, “expect”, “outlook” or other similar words, phrases or expressions. These forward-looking statements include statements regarding our industry, future events, the estimated or anticipated future results and benefits of the Novitex Business Combination, future opportunities for the combined company, and other statements that are not historical facts. These statements are based on the current expectations of Exela management and are not predictions of actual performance. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties regarding Exela’s businesses, and actual results may differ materially. The factors that may affect our results include, among others: the impact of political and economic conditions on the demand for our services; the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; the impact of the Appraisal Action, the impact of a data or security breach; the impact of competition or alternatives to our services on our business pricing and other actions by competitors; our ability to address technological development and change in order to keep pace with our industry and the industries of our customers; the impact of terrorism, natural disasters or similar events on our business; the effect of legislative and regulatory actions in the United States and internationally; the impact of operational failure due to the unavailability or failure of third-party services on which we rely; the effect of intellectual property infringement; and other factors discussed in this report under the headings “Risk Factors”, “Legal Proceedings”, “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and otherwise identified or discussed in this Annual Report. You should consider these factors carefully in evaluating forward-looking statements and are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such statements, which speak only as of the date of this report. It is impossible for us to predict new events or circumstances that may arise in the future or how they may affect us. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this report. We are not including the information provided on the websites referenced herein as part of, or incorporating such information by reference into, this Annual Report. In addition, forward-looking statements provide Exela’s expectations, plans or forecasts of future events and views as of the date of this report. Exela anticipates that subsequent events and developments will cause Exela’s assessments to change. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing Exela’s assessments as of any date subsequent to the date of this report.

DEFINED TERMS

In this Annual Report, we use the terms “Company”, “we”, “us”, or “our” to refer to Exela Technologies, Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries, and where applicable, our predecessors SourceHOV and Novitex prior to the closing of the Novitex Business Combination. “Following is a glossary of other abbreviations and acronyms that are found in this Annual Report.”

“Appraisal Action” means the petition for appraisal pursuant to 8 Del. C. § 262 in the Delaware Court of Chancery, captioned Manichaean Capital, LLC, et al. v. SourceHOV Holdings, Inc., C.A. No. 2017 0673 JRS.

“Common Stock” means the common stock of the Company, par value $0.0001.

“Consent, Waiver and Amendment” means the Consent, Waiver and Amendment dated June 15, 2017, by and among the Company, Quinpario Merger Sub I, Inc., Quinpario Merger Sub II, Inc., SourceHOV, Novitex, Novitex Parent, L.P., Ex Sigma LLC, HOVS LLC and HandsOn Fund 4 I, LLC, amending the Novitex Business Combination Agreement.

“EIM” means enterprise information management.

“ERP” means enterprise resource planning system.

3

Table of Contents

“Exchange Act” means the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.

“Ex-Sigma 2” means Ex-Sigma 2 LLC, our principal stockholder at the Closing of the Novitex Business Combination.

“Ex-Sigma” means Ex-Sigma LLC, the sole equity holder of Ex-Sigma 2.

“GAAP” means generally accepted accounting principles in the United States.

“HGM Group” means, collectively, HOVS LLC and HandsOn Fund 4 I, LLC and certain of their respective affiliates.

“HITECH Act of 2009” means the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, enacted under Title XIII of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

“HIPAA” means the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

“IT” mean information technology.

“JOBS Act” means the Jumpstart our Business Startups Act.

“Margin Loan” means the additional PIPE financing in the form of a $55.8 million loan obtained by Ex-Sigma 2 as borrower (and secured by shares of the Company held by Ex-Sigma 2) that was used by Ex-Sigma 2 to purchase additional common and preferred shares from the Company to help meet the minimum cash requirements needed to close the Novitex Business Combination.

“Nasdaq” means The Nasdaq Stock Market.

“Novitex” means Novitex Holdings, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

“Novitex Business Combination” means the transactions contemplated by the Novitex Business Combination Agreement, which closed on July 12, 2017 and resulted in SourceHOV and Novitex becoming our wholly-owned subsidiaries and the financing transactions entered into in connection therewith.

“Novitex Business Combination Agreement” means the Business Combination Agreement, dated February 21, 2017, among the Company, Quinpario Merger Sub I, Inc., Quinpario Merger Sub II, Inc., SourceHOV, Novitex, HOVS LLC, HandsOn Fund 4 I, LLC and Novitex Parent, L.P., as amended by the Consent, Waiver and Amendment.

“PCIDSS” means the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

“Quinpario” means Quinpario Acquisition Corp. 2, a Delaware corporation, the former name of Exela Technologies, Inc.

“SEC” means the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Securities Act” means the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.

“SourceHOV” means SourceHOV Holdings, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

“TCJA” means the Tax Cut and Jobs Act.

“TPS” means transaction processing solutions.

4

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

We will continue to further expand our solutions and services for the industries we serve, with a focus on connecting the front, middle and the back office. We believe this positions us as one of the few companies that can offer solutions and services that span from multi-industry departmental solutions to industry specific solutions.

Our Solutions and Services

We are a leading, global provider in the Business Process Management (“BPM”) industry. Our digital foundation has been shaped to deliver fully outsourced solutions for current and evolving customer needs. Specifically, our fully operational seven-layer technology stack enables easier integration to build digital bridges over broken processes. We derive all our revenue from BPM, including approximately $104 million (8% of total revenues) in 2020 from the sale of licenses by our digital assets group (“DAG”).

We host our digital foundation across a hybrid environment, both on-premise and/or hosted on the cloud and our customers are able to choose one based on their needs and preferences. Our customers also take advantage of hybrid deployments leveraging either our or their own environment. We sell to our customers recurring licenses and maintenance charges, along with professional service fees for configuration and system integration services. We offer multiple options in relation to licensing. Similar to our BPM model, customers can purchase a license for a number of transactions, however they usually acquire multi-year term licenses with flexible recurring options. As part of our DAG offering, we also offer per user per month subscriptions. We plan for an ever growing portion of our digital foundation to be made available along these pricing and licensing models to our existing and potential customers and to that effect we expanded our plans in late 2020 to include small and medium businesses as well. Our solutions are evolving to contain more self-service features, are easy to deploy, and integrate with existing solutions.

Our BPM solutions have expanded to include a suite of Work from Anywhere (WFA) applications to support a remote workforce with enterprise software for connectivity and productivity. Our current BPM solutions including our digital assets are grouped as follows:

6

Table of Contents

​

Our multi-industry and departmental BPM suite of offerings combines platform modules for finance and accounting services, enterprise information management, robotic process automation, digital mailroom, business process management and workflow automation, visualization and analytics, contract management and legal management solutions, and integrated communication services which contribute to revenues across our organization and accounting segments and also complement our core industry solutions for banking, insurance, healthcare and the public sector.

Finance and Accounting Solutions (F&A)

Exela offers a suite of finance and accounting (“F&A”) solutions across its network of customers, providing digital roads to connect broken processes of global commerce. By structuring and linking digital data across disparate customer systems, processes and standards, our exchange for bills and payments (“XBP”) enables digital transformation savings and modernization to be rapidly implemented utilizing existing customer infrastructure and in-country settlement processes. As an enabler of digital roads carrying enriched biller, payer and transaction data, we provide process automation and enhanced services addressing the payments lifecycle from procure to pay (“P2P”) to order to cash (“O2C”). We use our own technology and our global operations to deliver these solutions.

Our XBP solution provides a platform with a secure messaging service, allowing billers, consumers and businesses to communicate and transact utilizing a modern technology stack that can be rapidly connected to any system without a material investment by the prospective customers. Billers are able to send bills to payers, whether businesses or consumers, electronically, offering transparency and simpler reconciliations. Payers are able to receive their bills in one place, with analytics, alerts and several payment options. With XBP making the bill component of P2P and O2C electronic, downstream processes can be integrated with richer and more actionable data, available for adjacent value-added services.

Our O2C solutions enable consolidation of inbound payment channels and data continuity to drive digital adoption and enhance treasury management, including integrated receivables dashboards, multi-channel bill presentment and payment, reconciliation, exception and dispute management, aging analytics, collections management and targeted engagements. The full process includes fulfillment of a customer order, raising an invoice in accordance with customer contracts, accounts receivable management and collections.

Our P2P services can be integrated with our digital mail room technology, which expands our ability to support existing data types and formats. In effect, both digital and analog items can enter this information stream. The process kicks off by opening a requisition, and once approved it moves to procurement to solicit bids from an approved supplier network. We believe that supporting our customers by making available our supplier network can be a key differentiator in enabling a complete P2P solution. Our P2P platform also records receipt of goods and invoices and performs three way matching digitally. Exceptions are processed by our employees, and once approved, we record the purchase in a customer’s ERP system, so it can be paid. We then use our system to generate and deliver a payment file in the format the bank needs so that a payment can be processed. Some of our customers also authorize us to process the payment on their behalf.

Our Record-to-Report (R2R) services include spend analytics and data mining tools for financial planning and analysis to support reporting and audit functions, interchanges and robotics providing automation of ERP entries and regulatory reporting and fixed asset management.

7

Table of Contents

Our mission is to build roads over broken processes, for example, exchange for bills and payments (“XBP”) is an example of connection bills, payments and many related processes across many industries:

​

​

​

Enterprise Information Management (EIM)

Exela’s enterprise information management solutions ingest and organize large amounts of data across many data types and formats and store the information in cloud enabled proprietary platforms. We also gather transactional data from enterprise systems for similar hosting. The collected, extracted data is used to complete a process, and is then made available to our customers and their end-consumers for an agreed upon period. We derive revenue for such services, hosting and access.

Our EIM systems host billions of often mission critical records for our customers and the total number continues to rise. As an example of a large deployment of our EIM platform, we helped enable online records access to over 48 million end-customers of a group of European savings banks for deposits, statements, and car and personal loans and mortgages. Another example of EIM deployment is in the hosting of images of healthcare records, checks and payroll taxes for many years for retrieval, compliance and internal information purposes.

Our platforms provide a data fabric to simplify integration with customers’ existing EIM systems, and our customers can benefit from being able to conduct federated searches across connected datasets, manage records in accordance with their needs and regulatory requirements, build live customer and employee profiles, and facilitate release of information and routing with control over security and permissions. We also provide business intelligence add-ons, offering summarization of data sets, dashboards and trend monitoring, relationship visualization, macro and micro drill-downs, escalation triggers and notifications.

​

Exela Robotic Process Automation

Exela has been at the forefront of using robotic process automation since 2009. Our deployment model is to use desktop automation first, and if the usage is very high, we usually migrate to server level automation. We have built up a

8

Table of Contents

large library of rules by industry and by customer. While we have been using robotic solutions as part of our internal processes for years, only recently have we made them available to our customers. Our domain experts and analysts can either use an existing bot, modify one or create new ones using our design studio. Our robotic solutions are available as programmable robots with a rules library for a specific industry or feature, or as an enterprise license or on a per user per month basis.

Digital Mailroom Solutions

Exela is one of the leading global providers of digital mailroom solutions. Our digital mailroom solutions rely on proprietary technology, use our own or a client’s facilities and process a significant number of transactions daily. We use proprietary high-speed scanners as well as support most other major scanners. Our end-to-end digital mail room features ingestion from many sources – paper, fax, electronic, emails and other digital data. We also offer recorded voice, image and video ingestion channels. This solution can be complemented with our shipping and receiving services with digital receipt, delivery and routing to our intelligent lockers.

We own several classification engines that we deploy for information processing, including unattended digital repositories, for example unattended email boxes to identify content and route it to the appropriate member of an organization. Exela offers its digital mail room for enterprise wide deployment to captive mailrooms of our customers, mailrooms outsourced to both Exela and others, and for business locations where there is no dedicated mail room, such as a front desk. Our customers can see their information across the enterprise from a single platform. Our digital mail solutions are available as SaaS, BpaaS or enterprise licenses and we often handle the entire mail operation for a customer.

​

Business process management and intelligent workflow automation

Exela has built extensive proprietary workflow automation platforms for business process management across several industries and regions. Our platforms are designed to have intuitive user interfaces with drag & drop configuration enabling analysts a certain amount of customization. Our platforms use our EIM engines by default, are designed to integrate with popular database and enterprise systems and are offered across three user categories:

Exela provides visualization and analytics capabilities within its platforms to provide actionable intelligence tied to collaboration and task management. Configurable dashboards enable users to quickly consolidate and organize disparate data sources through intuitive interfaces. Users can also build their own dashboards with dynamic drilldown options and alerts, link data to managers, and launch action items in pursuit of optimization and issue resolution. By providing analytics tied to actionable tasks, we can help drive optimization to enhance profitability and connectivity. For example, users can create visualization of volume trends and set triggers upon statistical thresholds, sending SMS alerts to managers to adjust their downstream capacity planning, if trends are not in line with set thresholds.

9

Table of Contents

While we offer reporting and analytics on the scope of work processed through operations, we also provide our customers the capability to consolidate various data streams into comprehensive dashboards to enhance the business intelligence functions of an organization, including providing real-time visibility to revenue, cost, profitability and cash flow as well as process monitoring, KPI tracking, and actionable alerts.

We believe providing analytics modules complement our services and solutions, creating a superior user experience, and reducing the need for other third-party tools by centralizing business management within Exela’s platforms. By enabling users to share dashboards across their organization, we believe additional users will adopt Exela platforms and increase our penetration into the front-end applications across an enterprise.

Enterprise Legal Management

Exela provides a contract management system to streamline execution, organization, and data management of large volumes of contracts. We utilize natural language processing and machine learning to extract key terms within unstructured formats and complex content, providing variance analysis, summary tables, and automated organization. Users can easily find important data points in contracts, and quickly analyze large volumes of language variations across format types. The extracted data can then be used to connect to existing systems and ERPs and serve as inputs to business operations, such as accounting and billing processes, financial planning and analysis, and regulatory reporting, enabling real-time audit and automated alerts for deviations from contract parameters. By automating key term extraction, our contract management system enables large volumes of contracts to be analyzed quickly and enables processes such as billing or automatic reminders for significant dates. We believe that Exela’s ability to cost effectively provide high accuracy transactional operations with automated validations creates a competitive advantage against those relying on manual processes and discrete sampling.

Exela can also provide a digital signature system to streamline collaboration, approvals and execution of contracts. We deploy a secure, hosted environment to request and execute signatures and exchange contracts and documents across individuals or groups. Our platforms enable multiple signature execution with routing through approval hierarchies, while providing transparency to the status and tracking of comments and edits. Upon execution, documents are stored electronically for secure archiving and retrieval.

Furthermore, Exela offers a suite of enterprise legal management solutions and services that streamline and automate legal department processes to rationalize costs and drive productivity. Solutions and services range from preventative remediation, identifying risks such as overcharges, discrimination, and data breaches and proactively providing restitution, eDiscovery, word processing and contract management using automated summarization and metadata extraction along with cognitive search enabled by natural language processing; and records management.

Integrated Communications

Exela’s comprehensive multi-channel integrated communications solutions help customers communicate with other businesses or customers. This suite of solutions links through many channels, for example, email, print and mail, SMS, web, voice, and chat. Exela solutions and services can also include design and marketing and selection of optimal engagement and least cost routing for mission critical communications for example, bills, statements, enrollments, customer support, targeted marketing, mass notifications, reprographics, and regulatory notices.

We also work with our customers as a digital migration partner to improve user experience while helping to reduce and even eliminate inefficient, wasteful communications. We use proprietary discovery techniques and analytics in addition to service specific technology to propose optimal channel and content. Our employees can also generate personalized messages, customized promotions, incentives, escalations, and resolutions.

10

Table of Contents

Exela Smart Office

In the second half of 2019, we launched a group of solutions that complement our existing offerings, labeled Exela Smart Officeە℠ (“Smart Office”). Smart Office seeks to improve employee and visitor experiences while optimizing facility management efficiency thereby contributing towards corporate sustainability standards. Smart Office is our enterprise IoT, which helps transform the front-office, energy and facilities management, logistics and fulfillment for our customers, and provides on-demand services with connected devices to facilitate green initiatives, reduce waste, and ultimately enhance the employee and visitor experience. For example, our space management software uses sensors to detect facility utilization, which enables optimized space and energy usage and provides mobile workers directions to available work spaces, while our Contactless Entry and Exit (“CEE”) and lobby kiosk can be deployed to regulate facility access and track employee activities with automated time sheets. Our FYI platform connects our customers’ employees with AI assisted digital help desk channels across departments and a federated search forum to quickly explore related topics and discussions.  Our Intelligent Lockers are available for visitor day storage of luggage and to provide a secure chain of custody for parcels and mail for employees using our hosted shipping and receiving tools.

Human Capital Management (“HCM”)

During 2019, we moved the majority of our employees to our proprietary human capital management platform, HCM. This platform integrates with our existing offerings and is designed to help an enterprise and its employees manage the data and processes relevant to the entire employment lifecycle from recruitment to retirement.  By providing digital management and data tracking for human capital, we enable reduction in administrative overhead and enhanced management of human capital productivity while improving the overall experience. Our human capital management platform is now available for sale.

Industry Specific Services and Solutions

While the above-described solutions and services can be leveraged across industries, over the years we have also developed services and solutions for specific industries which help our customers around the world better manage their liquidity. The most significant are summarized below. 

Banking and Financial Industry Solutions and Services

Our banking and financial solutions consist of payment, mortgage, enrollment, lending and loan management, governance and information management solutions and accounted for approximately 27% of 2020 revenue. Exela’s payment operations and treasury management solutions are designed to improve digital engagement and transaction speed and compliance. We also provide mobile and remote deposit technologies to our banking and financial services customers.

We are one of the largest non-bank processors of payments. We handle many payment channels in addition to checks and credit cards including, automated clearing house (ACH), Faster Payments in UK and Ireland, Single European Payment Area (SEPA), Bank Giro in the Nordics and other payment networks. We perform these services on behalf of banks or their customers. We believe the regulatory environment in many geographies is beginning to allow non-bank payment processors to connect to the payment networks directly such that one can verify funds, confirm payee and settlement of payments and are pursuing a PSP license in the European Union to further expand our payment offerings.

We have extensive experience and technology that we have built over decades and that are in use to serve many banks and companies to process the payments related to both business to business (“B2B”) and business to consumer (“B2C”) transactions. We develop, use, and sell proprietary integrated receivables processing technology, providing our customers with a solution that consolidates B2B and B2C transactions across many payment channels into a single platform, connected to our XBP network of global buyers and suppliers. We plan to offer this as a branded or as a private label solution to our banking customers giving them the ability to offer advanced treasury solutions with insights from accounts receivable, customer credit worthiness, payment habits, soft collections and delinquent collections.

11

Table of Contents

We add value by automating manual, repetitive processes to improve speed and provide cost efficiencies within a compliant mortgage and lending completion process. Our proprietary mortgage and loan management solutions enable lenders to originate loans and service them with greater efficiency. Our platforms also enable invoice discounting, factoring, payables financing and leverage automation and integration such that traditional lenders and alternate lenders, including peer to peer lenders can provide liquidity to underserved borrowers.

Our key focus is connecting broken billing and payment processes through XBP using secure messaging and established settlement infrastructure. By providing a digital transformation path without heavy integration requirements, we believe we can rapidly improve user experience, reduce postage, print and mail costs, enable faster decisions, and facilitate optimal allocation of capital and risk management for our customers. By using our solutions and services, we believe our banking and financial services customers can better manage their lending book and at a lower cost of ownership.

Our banking solutions help organizations transform compliance, know your customer, anti-money laundering and confirmation of payee checks into a competitive advantage, including accelerated digital on-boarding, complex process automation, screening and monitoring and predictive analytics.  Exela can provide these services as an end-to-end solution or as an augmentation of existing banking processes, as a technology license or through our employees to manage a component or an entire process.

Healthcare Industry Solutions and Services for Insurance Companies and Healthcare Providers

Exela’s healthcare industry customers include commercial and government sponsored healthcare plans, hospital networks and university hospital systems and large medical distribution systems and pharmacy networks, and accounted for approximately 23% of total revenues in 2020. We serve our customers using our proprietary technology and for some customers combined with their systems.

We bundle our core solutions and services with a suite of healthcare payer specific services such as end-to-end processing of complex transactions, enrollments and credentialing, claims processing, adjudication and payment operations. We specialize in transactions that require multiple layers of validation, supporting documentation processing, reconciliation, and management of exceptions.

We host a proprietary platform that connects providers and payers for claims submissions, acknowledgements or denials of payments and many other interactions covering the complete lifecycle of a claim, which enables a more satisfactory engagement between payers and providers and contributes to improved access to health care and lower administrative costs. Our payer customers often encourage their contracted providers to adopt our digital platforms for overall reduction of claim processing time and cost. We also provide our healthcare provider customers with many services including computer assisted coding, audit and recovery of underpayments, denial and grievances, release of information, and electronic health records. We plan to offer our mobile and web enrollment solutions, appointment scheduling and locating providers with ratings, also include insurance verification, cost of visit estimates and visit pre-approval. We provide some of these services and features on a stand-alone basis and on a more integrated basis.

Insurance Industry Solutions and Services

Exela offers a suite of insurance industry solutions aimed at providing digital engagements and rapid integration of disparate systems and silos. Our insurance industry solutions accounted for approximately 10% of total revenues in 2020. We provide applications and services to facilitate automation and digital transformation for underwriting and enrollments, premium payments, claims submission, first notification of loss, fraud, waste & abuse monitoring and integrated communications. Our solutions are aimed at improving the customer experience by providing digital pathways and transparency with web portals and integrated communications, while helping to improve quality and risk management.

12

Table of Contents

Public Sector

We provide technology and solutions to public sector customers. Our public sector solutions accounted for approximately 9% of total revenues in 2020. Our mission is to help our public sector customers with their digital journey and meet their objectives of better serving the public. Exela solutions are primarily deployed across pension benefits and administration, tax return processing, payment operations, inter-agency information management and communications with citizens and employees of government institutions.

Our solutions have evolved over time to include digital capabilities and are designed to reduce taxpayer refund waiting time, decrease the potential for tax fraud, and provide reports and data to the relevant stakeholders. Exela also has the infrastructure in place to process payments, perform collection services, handle overflow taxpayer calls, provide e-filing for individual income tax, generate outbound taxpayer notification (traditional and/or electronic notifications), and host other developed solutions.

Commercial, Tech, Manufacturing, and Legal Industries Solutions and Services

For the commercial, technology, manufacturing and legal industries, we primarily provide multi-industry solutions described earlier. For 2020, our commercial industry revenue accounted for approximately 19% of total revenues, our revenues from the technology and manufacturing industry accounted for approximately 6%, while our revenue from the legal industry accounted for approximately 5%.

Historically, the majority of revenue for the above-mentioned industries was generated in the Americas, though we believe there is significant expansion opportunity throughout EMEA and the Asian markets. As we have made investments in our global scale, technology platforms, and business strategy, some of our multi-national customers have expanded our services to other geographies to leverage our international footprint. We believe our value proposition as a single source provider with global platforms and location agnostic operations, positions us as a differentiated partner to our multi-national customers.

With the launch of Smart Office, we have been targeting technology companies in our initial go-to-market approach. We believe technology companies have a heavy focus on employee experience to attract top tier talent, and they often serve as early adopters for new offerings setting trends across other industries, and we believe they will serve as strong references as we expand our Smart Office growth strategy.

Overview of Revenues

Our business consists of three reportable segments:

Additional financial information for our three business segments is included in Note 19 within our consolidated financial statements.

13

Table of Contents

We provide services to our customers on a global basis. In 2020, our revenues by geography were as follows: $1,057.0 million in the United States (81.8% of total revenues), $213.4 million in EMEA (16.5% of total revenues), and $22.1 million from the rest of the world (1.7% of total revenues). We present additional geographical financial information in Note 19 within our consolidated financial statements.

Our revenues can be affected by various factors such as our customers' demand pattern for our services. These factors have historically resulted in lower revenues in the third quarter and higher revenues in the fourth quarter. Backlog is not a metric that we use to measure our business.

History and Development of Our Company

Exela is a Delaware corporation that was formed through the strategic combination of SourceHOV Holdings, Inc. ("SourceHOV") a leading global transaction processing company, and Novitex Holding, Inc. ("Novitex"), a cloud-based document outsourcing company, pursuant to a business combination agreement dated February 21, 2017. Formerly known as Quinpario Acquisition Corp. 2 ("Quinpario"), Exela was originally formed as a special purpose acquisition company on July 15, 2014 and completed its initial public offering on January 22, 2015. In conjunction with the completion of the Novitex Business Combination in July 2017, Quinpario was renamed "Exela Technologies, Inc." Exela began trading under the ticker "XELA" on the Nasdaq Stock Market on July 13, 2017.

The Novitex Business Combination was accounted for as a reverse merger for which SourceHOV was determined to be the accounting acquirer. The acquisition of Novitex was accounted for using the acquisition method. As a result, the financial information for 2017 presented in this Annual Report is not pro forma (unless labeled as such); it includes the financial information and activities for SourceHOV for the entire year ending December 31, 2017, but only reflects the financial information and activities of Novitex for the period following the Novitex Business Combination from July 13, 2017 to December 31, 2017.

On April 10, 2018, Exela completed the acquisition of Asterion International Group, a well-established provider of technology driven business process outsourcing, document management and business process automation across Europe. The acquisition was strategic to expanding Exela’s European business.

On November 12, 2019 we announced that our Board of Directors had adopted a debt reduction and liquidity improvement initiative (“Initiative”). The Initiative is part of the Company’s strategic priority to position the Company for long-term success and increased stockholder value. As part of the Initiative, certain subsidiaries of the Company entered into accounts receivable securitization facilities during 2020 and we consummated the sale of our tax benefits consulting group in March 2020 and our physical records storage and logistics business in July 5, 2020. The Company is continuing to pursue the sale of non-core assets that are not central to the Company’s long-term strategic vision. The Company has retained financial advisors to assist with the sale of select assets and announced in December 2020 that it had retained an Investment Bank as an additional financial advisor to assist the Company and management in pursuing alternatives to strengthen its balance sheet and enhance shareholder value. The Company expects to use the net proceeds from the Initiative for the repayment of debt, with a target reduction of $150.0 to $200.0 million. Exela has set a two-year timetable for completion of the Initiative. There can be no assurance that the Initiative or any particular element of the Initiative will be consummated or will achieve its desired result.

On January 25, 2021, we amended our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation (the “COI”) to effect a one-for-three Reverse Stock Split (as further described under “Reverse Stock Split” below). Except as otherwise indicated, all share and per share information herein gives effect to the Reverse Stock Split.

Key Business Strategies

Exela business strategy is to use its Digital Now^SM model, which aims to accelerate our customers’ digital transformation through deployment of our software automation techniques, hosted within a single, cloud hosted platform. Our overarching goal is to provide highest value and lowest cost of ownership. We accomplish this by building scalable systems that are used by our employees to deliver business process automation services globally. The key elements of our growth strategy are described below:

14

Table of Contents

See diagram of 7 layers of solutions below:

15

Table of Contents

16

Table of Contents

Customers

We serve over 4,000 customers across a variety of industries, including over 60% of the Fortune® 100. Our customers are among the leading companies in their respective industries, and many of them are recurring customers that have maintained long-term relationships with us and our predecessor companies.

We have successfully leveraged our relationships with customers to offer extended value chain services, creating stickier customer relationships and increasing overall margins. Customers are increasingly turning to us due to a demonstrated ability to work on large-scale projects, past performance and record of delivery, and deep domain expertise accumulated from years of experience in key verticals. We believe, our stable base of customers and sticky, long-term relationships lead to predictable revenues.

Industry Highlights

We maintain a strong mix of diversified customers with low customer concentration. No customer accounts for more than 10% of 2020 revenue. The diversity of our customer base has contributed to the stability and predictability of our revenue streams and cash flows. We have been able to effectively balance our customer mix and reduce dependency on any single customer or vertical by penetrating a diverse set of end markets.

Research and Development

Our ability to continue to compete successfully depends heavily upon our ability to ensure a timely flow of competitive products, services and technologies to the marketplace while also leveraging our domain expertise to demonstrate our understanding in implementing solutions across the industries we serve. Through regular and sustained investment, licensing of intellectual property and acquisition of third-party businesses and technology, we continue to develop new knowledge platforms, applications and supporting service bundles that enhance and expand our existing suite of services.

Our seven-layer technology model requires us to continue to harness our capabilities in each layer and the ultimate measure of success will be how many customers are in each layer. We believe that a greater customer concentration in the top layers will reflect the success of our R&D strategy. Additional financial information regarding our R&D expense is included in Note 2 within our consolidated financial statements.

Intellectual Property

We deploy a combination of internally developed proprietary knowledge platforms, applications and generally available third-party licensed software as part of our scalable and flexible solutions and services. We believe our intellectual property is our competitive strength.

17

Table of Contents

Our platforms aim to enhance information management and workflow processes through automation and process optimization to minimize labor requirements or to improve labor performance. Our decisioning engines have been built with years of deep domain expertise, incorporating hundreds of thousands of customer and industry specific rules which enable efficiency and lowers cost preparation and decisioning of transactions. Our business processes and implementation methodologies are confidential and proprietary and include trade secrets that are important to our business. We own a variety of trademarks and patents, which are registered or pending.

We regularly enter into nondisclosure agreements with customers, business partners, employees, and contractors that require confidential treatment of our information to establish, maintain and enforce our intellectual property rights. Our licensed intellectual properties are generally governed by written agreements of varying durations, including some with fixed terms that are subject to renewal based on mutual agreement. Generally, each agreement may be further extended, and we have historically been able to renew most existing agreements before they expire. We expect these and other similar agreements to be extended so long as it is mutually advantageous to both parties at the time of renewal.

Competition

We believe that the principal competitive factors in providing our solutions include proprietary platforms, industry specific knowledge, quality, reliability and security of service, and price. We are differentiated competitively given our scale of operations, reputation as a trusted partner with deep domain expertise, innovative solutions, and highly integrated technology platforms that provide customers with end-to-end services addressing many aspects of their mission-critical operational processes. We continue to integrate best practice delivery processes into our service-delivery capabilities to improve its quality and service levels and to increase operational efficiencies. The markets in which we serve are competitive with both large and small businesses, as well as global companies:

Regulation and Compliance

We handle, directly or indirectly through customer contracts and business associate agreements, a significant amount of information, including personal and health-related information, which results in our being subject to federal, state and local privacy laws, including the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, HIPAA and the HITECH Act of 2009. Further, we are subject to the local rules and regulations, including those relating to the handling of information, in the other countries in which we operate. In addition, services in our LLPS segment, though not directly regulated, must be provided in a manner consistent with the relevant legal framework. For example, our bankruptcy claims administration services must be provided in accordance with the requirements and deadlines of the United States Bankruptcy Code and Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In addition, some of our customers are subject to regulatory oversight, which may result in our being reviewed from time to time by such oversight bodies. Further, as a government contractor, we are subject to associated regulations and requirements.

Changes to existing laws, introduction of new laws, or failure to comply with existing laws that are applicable to us may subject us to, among other things, additional costs or changes to our business practices, liability for monetary

18

Table of Contents

damages, fines and/or criminal prosecution, unfavorable publicity, restrictions on our ability to obtain and process information and allegations by our customers and customers that we have not performed our contractual obligations, any of which may have a material adverse effect on profitability and cash flow.

Privacy and Information Security Regulations

Data privacy laws and regulations in the U.S. and foreign countries apply to the access, collection, transfer, use, storage, and destruction of personal information in connection with our services. In the U.S., our financial institution customers are required to comply with privacy regulations imposed under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, in addition to other regulations. As a processor of personal information in our role as a provider of services to financial institutions, we are bound by similar limitations on disclosure of the information received from our customers as apply to the financial institutions themselves. We also perform services for healthcare companies and are, therefore, subject to compliance with laws and regulations regarding healthcare information, including HIPAA in the U.S. We also perform credit-related services and agree to comply with payment card standards, including the PCIDSS. In addition, federal and state privacy and information security laws, and consumer protection laws, which apply to businesses that collect or process personal information, also apply to our businesses.

Privacy laws and regulations may require notification to affected individuals, federal and state regulators, and consumer reporting agencies in the event of a security breach that results in unauthorized access to, or disclosure of, certain personal information. Privacy laws outside the U.S. may be more restrictive and may require different compliance requirements than U.S. laws and regulations and may impose additional duties on us in the performance of our services.

There has been increased public attention regarding the use of personal information and data transfer, accompanied by legislation and regulations intended to strengthen data protection, information security and consumer and personal privacy. The law in these areas continues to develop and the changing nature of privacy laws in the U.S., the European Union (“E.U”) and elsewhere could impact our processing of personal information of our employees and on behalf of our customers. In the E.U. the comprehensive General Data Privacy Regulation (the "GDPR") went into effect in May 2018. The GDPR has introduced significant privacy-related changes for companies operating both in and outside the EU. In the U.S., California has adopted the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect on January 1, 2020, and several states are considering adopting similar laws imposing obligations regarding the handling of personal information. While we believe that we are compliant with our regulatory responsibilities, information security threats continue to evolve resulting in increased risk and exposure. In addition, legislation, regulation, litigation, court rulings, or other events could expose us to increased costs, liability, and possible damage to our reputation.

Human Capital

The continued success of our business is driven by our people. Our senior leadership team has extensive experience within the larger BPO as well as the BPA industries. As we were formed through a series of acquisitions, we have retained an experienced and cohesive leadership team. The combination of our employees with our technology is the backbone of our ability to provide holistic solutions designed to meet the rapidly evolving needs of our customers.

As of December 31, 2020, we had approximately 19,000 total employees, of which approximately 625 are part-time employees. We have a global workforce with a majority of our employees located in Americas and EMEA, and the remainder located in India, the Philippines and China. Our employee count fluctuates from time to time based upon the timing and duration of our engagements. We consider our employees to be the foundation for our growth and success. As such, our future success as an organization depends in part on our ability to attract, train, retain, and motivate qualified personnel. We are also fully committed to developing and fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion, and understand that our ability to identify and hire talented individuals from all backgrounds and perspectives is key to our continued success.

19

Table of Contents

We locate our operation centers in areas where the value proposition it offers is attractive relative to other local opportunities, resulting in an engaged educated multi-lingual workforce that is able to make a meaningful global contribution from their local marketplace. We offer our employees a focused set of training programs to increase their skills and leadership capabilities with the goal of creating a long-term funnel of talent to support the Company’s continued growth. Additionally, our proprietary platforms enable rapid learning and facilitate knowledge transfer among employees, reducing training time.

Human Capital Management (HCM)

During 2019, we moved the majority of our employees to our proprietary human capital management platform, HCM. This platform integrates with our existing offerings and is designed to help an enterprise and its employees manage the data and processes relevant to the entire employment lifecycle from recruitment to retirement.  By providing digital management and data tracking for human capital, we enable reduction in administrative overhead and enhanced

20

Table of Contents

management of human capital productivity while improving the overall experience. Our human capital management platform is now available for sale.

Ronald Cogburn is our Chief Executive Officer and served as Chief Executive Officer of SourceHOV from 2013 until the closing of the Novitex Business Combination. Mr. Cogburn has been part of companies that were predecessors to SourceHOV since 1993, bringing over 30 years of diversified experience in executive management, construction claims consulting, litigation support, program management project management, cost estimating, damages assessment and general building construction. Mr. Cogburn has also been a principal of HGM since 2003. Prior to his role as Chief Executive Officer of SourceHOV, Mr. Cogburn was SourceHOV’s President, KPO from March 2011 to July 2013. Prior to this role, Mr. Cogburn was the President of HOV Services, LLC from January 2005 to September 2007, providing executive leadership during the company’s growth to its IPO on the India Stock Exchange in September 2006. Mr. Cogburn has a BSCE in Structural Design/Construction Management from Texas A&M University and is a registered Professional Engineer. 

Shrikant Sortur is our Chief Financial Officer and served as Executive Vice President, Global Finance from the Novitex Business Combination in 2017 until May 15, 2020. Mr. Sortur served as Senior Vice President, Global Finance of SourceHOV from 2016 until the closing of the Novitex Business Combination. He was responsible for SourceHOV’s finance and accounting groups and led financial operations, activities, plans and budgets. Mr. Sortur’s career spans more than 19 years of varied experience in financial management, accounting, reporting, and lean operations. Mr. Sortur served in other management roles in predecessor companies to SourceHOV from 2002 until the closing of the Novitex Business Combination. Mr. Sortur also acted as Vice President of Finance of SourceHOV from June 2015 to May 2016. Mr. Sortur acted as Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, TPS from January 2014 to June 2015. Prior to this role, Mr. Sortur was the Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, North America Operations from January 2012 to December 2013. Mr. Sortur acted as Controller for HOV Global from January 2009 to December 2011. Mr. Sortur was a Senior Accounting Manager for HOV Services, LLC / Lason, Inc. from May 2004 to December 2008 and worked for the SourceHOV group as a Manager, Finance & Accounts for Lason India Ltd. from December 2002 to May 2014. From March 1999 to December 2002, Mr. Sortur served as General Manager, Finance at SRM Technologies, a business solutions and technology provider specializing in software design and development, systems integration, web services, enterprise mobilization, and embedded solutions development. From June 1997 to February 1999, Mr. Sortur served as Junior Manager, Finance and Accounting for Steel Authority of India, a large state-owned steel making company based in New Delhi, India. Mr. Sortur graduated from Osmania University with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), Chartered Accountant (CA), and Certified Management Accountant (CMA).

​

Suresh Yannamani is our President and served as President, Americas of SourceHOV from 2011 until the closing of the Novitex Business Combination, and has been a part of companies that were predecessors to SourceHOV from 1997 until the closing of the Novitex Business Combination. Mr. Yannamani oversees the sales and operations and plays a large part in scaling the transaction processing solutions practice and enterprise solution strategy for healthcare, financial services and commercial industries. Mr. Yannamani was also President of HOV Services, LLC from 2007 to 2011, serving customers in the healthcare, financial services, insurance and commercial industries. Mr. Yannamani was the Executive Vice President of BPO services for Lason from 1997 to 2007 prior to its acquisition by HOV Services, LLC. Mr. Yannamani also served in management roles at IBM from 1995 to 1997, managing the design, development,

21

Table of Contents

and implementation of financial management information systems for the public sector and worked for Coopers & Lybrand as a consultant in public audits from 1992 to 1994. Mr. Yannamani has a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of London and holds an MBA from Eastern Michigan University.

​

Mark D. Fairchild is our President, Exela SmartOffice and served as President of Exela Enterprise Solutions from the Novitex Business Combination until January 2019 and prior to that served as President, Europe, of SourceHOV from the merger of BancTec and SourceHOV in 2014, having served in management roles at BancTec since 1985. With more than 30 years of executive experience in the financial services industry, Mr. Fairchild specializes in global account management, transaction processing services, software solutions and hardware technology products. In 2005, Mr. Fairchild was appointed Chief Technology Officer of BancTec and was responsible for the company’s software and hardware products, manufacturing and internal IT services until 2014. Prior to this role, Mr. Fairchild acted as Vice President for International Operations of BancTec from 2001 to 2005 and VP of European Operations from 1998 to 2001. In his role as International Systems Director from 1991 to 1998, Mr. Fairchild led the European software teams, implementing payment platforms throughout the region. As Director of Engineering of BancTec from 1989 to 1991, Mr. Fairchild led the research and development team that introduced a new high-speed digital image processing system that formed the base of BancTec’s ImageFIRST product portfolio. Mr. Fairchild joined BancTec as a Project Manager, a position he held from 1985 to 1986. He began his career as a software developer at British Aerospace, where he worked from 1981 to 1985. Mr. Fairchild graduated with honors from Manchester University with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering and holds an MBA from London Business School.

​

Srini Murali is our President, Americas and APAC and served as Chief Operating Officer Americas and APAC from the Novitex Business Combination until January 2019. He is responsible for all sales, operations and business strategy functions across the Americas and Asia Pacific. Prior to the Novitex Business Combination, Mr. Murali served as Senior Vice President, Operations for the Americas and APAC regions for SourceHOV, creating global operating strategies, developing client relationships, and overseeing compliance. Mr. Murali has been a part of predecessor companies to SourceHOV since 1993. During his tenure, Mr. Murali has held analysis, product development, IT, and operational roles. In 2010, Mr. Murali took on a broader scope of responsibility as SourceHOV’s Senior Vice President of Global Operations and IT. Mr. Murali has served in executive-level leadership roles at companies that preceded SourceHOV since 2007, when he was appointed Vice President of IT and Technology. Prior to these management roles, Mr. Murali served as Director of Information Technology for Lason from 2002 to 2007, and as an Application Development Manager for Lason from 1998 to 2002. Before joining Lason, Mr. Murali worked as a Systems Engineer for Vetri Systems from 1996 to 1998. Mr. Murali graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics from Loyola College, Chennai, and earned an MBA from Davenport University, Michigan.

​

Vitalie Robu is our President, EMEA and served as Chief Operating Officer, EMEA from the Novitex Business Combination until January 2019. Mr. Robu is responsible for all sales, operations and business strategy functions across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Mr. Robu specializes in transaction processing services, technology products, and software solutions, and has over 20 years of international management experience in the private and public sectors. Prior to the Novitex Business Combination, he served as Senior Vice President, Operations for the European region of SourceHOV from 2014. From 2010 to 2014, Mr. Robu held the position of President and Executive Director of DataForce UK, a business process outsourcing and software provider that was part of SourceHOV. Prior to joining the SourceHOV group, Mr. Robu served as Manager of Investment and Insurance Products for Citibank EMEA in London from 2007 to 2010. Mr. Robu has degrees in International Relations from the National School for Political Studies, Bucharest and Physics from the State University of Moloves, and earned an MBA from IMD — International Institute for Management Development, Lausanne.

Reverse Stock Split 

At the 2020 Annual Meeting, our stockholders authorized our Board of Directors, in its discretion, to amend our COI to effect a reverse split of our outstanding Common Stock at a ratio between one-for-three and one-for-ten, with such final ratio to be determined by the Board of Directors following the special meeting (the “Reverse Stock Split”). On January 22, 2021, the Board of Directors determined to set the Reverse Stock Split ratio at one-for-three and approved the final form of the certificate of amendment to our COI to effectuate the Reverse Stock Split, which was filed with the

22

Table of Contents

Secretary of State of the State of Delaware on January 25, 2021. The Reverse Stock Split became effective in accordance with the terms of the certificate of amendment at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on that date, at which time every three (3) shares of Common Stock issued and outstanding automatically combined into one (1) share of issued and outstanding Common Stock, without any change in the par value per share. Fractional shares were not issued as a result of the Reverse Stock Split. Stockholders who would otherwise have been entitled to a fractional share of Common Stock instead received cash in lieu of fractional shares based on the closing sales price of the Company’s Common Stock as quoted on The Nasdaq Capital Market on January 25, 2021.

The Reverse Stock Split resulted in a proportionate adjustment to the per share exercise price and the number of shares of Common Stock issuable upon the exercise of our outstanding stock options and warrants, as well as the number of shares of Common Stock eligible for issuance under the Company’s 2018 Stock Incentive Plan. In addition, the conversion rate of our preferred stock was equitably adjusted following the Reverse Stock Split, such that the conversion rate is now 0.3030 (previously 0.9090) and the Conversion Price is $26.40 (previously $8.80), with the effect that immediately following the Reverse Stock Split, each share of Preferred Stock converts into 1/3rd of the number of shares of Common Stock into which it was convertible immediately prior to Reverse Stock Split. Similarly, as a result of the Reverse Stock Split, the number of shares of Common Stock issuable on exercise of each of our warrants has been decreased in proportion to such decrease in outstanding shares of Common Stock. As a result, each warrant previously exercisable for one-half a share at $5.75 per half share ($11.50 per share), is now exercisable for one-sixth of a share at $5.75 per one-sixth of a share ($34.50 per share).

Except as otherwise indicated, all share and per share information herein gives proforma effect to the Reverse Stock Split.

Available Information

Our website address is www.exelatech.com. We are not including the information provided on our website as a part of, or incorporating it by reference into, this Annual Report. We make available free of charge (other than an investor's own internet access charges) through our website our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish such material to, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). In addition, we make available our code of ethics entitled "Global Code of Ethics and Business Conduct" free of charge through our website. We intend to post on our website all disclosures that are required by law or Nasdaq listing standards concerning any amendments to, or waivers from, any provision of our code of ethics.

The SEC maintains an internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. The information contained on the websites referenced in this Annual Report is not incorporated by reference into this filing.

23

Table of Contents

during 2020 and continues to pursue the sale of other non-core assets. While the Company seeks to repay and/or refinance a material portion of its indebtedness, there can be no assurance that such plan will be successful in whole or in part and, even if the plan is successful, we will still have a substantial amount of indebtedness outstanding. On March 26, 2020, the Delaware Court of Chancery entered a judgment against one of our subsidiaries in the amount of $57,698,426 inclusive of costs and interest arising out of the Appraisal Action, which judgment will continue to accrue interest, until paid, at the legal rate, compounded quarterly. The Company was unsuccessful in its appeal of the judgment, and the petitioners aggressively continue to seek to enforce the judgment, including an action alleging unjust enrichment and seeking restitution and to pierce the corporate veil and seek alter ego liability against Exela and over 50 alleged subsidiaries and/or affiliates in an attempt to collect the award in the Appraisal Action from entities other than SourceHOV, and an action against SourceHOV and certain of its directors and officers alleging creditor derivative claims relating to the Company’s securitization facilities. In early February 2021, petitioners also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in the derivative action in which they seek a court order freezing certain property and prohibiting certain transfers and payments by Exela subsidiaries other than SourceHOV, including preventing them from paying their creditors unless the payments are made equally among Exela’s other creditors and toward the Appraisal Action liability. If the petitioners are successful in their efforts to accelerate payment of the entire judgment, such action could have a material adverse effect on our liquidity and/or cause certain of our secured lenders to take action adverse to us.

Our indebtedness and other obligations could: require a substantial portion of cash flow from operations to be dedicated to servicing our indebtedness, thereby reducing our ability to use cash flow from operations to fund operations, capital expenditures, and future business opportunities; increase the risks of adverse consequences resulting from a breach of any indebtedness agreement, including, for example, a failure to make required payments of principal or interest due to failure of our business to perform as expected; decrease our ability to obtain additional financing for working capital, capital expenditures, general corporate or other purposes; limit our flexibility to make acquisitions; require non-strategic divestitures; increase our cash requirements to support the payment of interest; limit our flexibility in planning for, or reacting to, changes in our business and our industry; and increase our vulnerability to adverse changes in general economic and industry conditions.

Our ability to make payments of principal and interest on our indebtedness and our ability to comply with financial covenants in our various debt agreements depends upon our future performance, which will be subject to general economic conditions and financial, business and other factors affecting our consolidated operations, many of which are beyond our control. If we are unable to generate sufficient cash flow from operations in the future to service our debt and meet our other cash requirements, we may be required, among other things: to seek additional financing in the debt or equity markets; to refinance or restructure all or a portion of our indebtedness; to sell certain of our assets, to the extent permitted under our indebtedness agreements; or to reduce or delay planned capital or operating expenditures. Our ability to restructure or refinance our debt will depend on the capital markets and our financial condition at such time. Any refinancing of our debt could be at higher interest rates and may require us to comply with more onerous covenants, which could further restrict our business operations. In addition, any such financing, refinancing or sale of assets might not be available at all or on economically favorable terms. Our inability to generate sufficient cash flow to satisfy our debt service obligations or to refinance our obligations on commercially reasonable terms could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, cash flows and results of operations and could cause the market value of our Common Stock to decline.

Our future profitability and ability to sustain positive cash flow is uncertain.

Our future profitability depends on, among other things, our ability to generate revenue in excess of our expenses. However, we have significant and continuing fixed costs relating to the maintenance of our assets and business, including debt service requirements, which we may not be able to reduce adequately to sustain such profitability if our revenue decreases. Our future profitability also may be impacted by non-cash charges such as stock-based compensation charges and potential impairment of goodwill, which will negatively affect our reported financial results. Even if we achieve profitability on an annual basis, we may not be able to achieve profitability on a quarterly basis. You should not consider prior revenue growth as indicative of our future performance. In fact, in future quarters, we may not have any revenue growth or our revenue could decline. We may incur significant losses in the future for a number of reasons and risks described elsewhere herein and we may encounter unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications, delays and other unknown events.

24

Table of Contents

Our ability to generate positive cash flow depends on our ability to generate collections from sales in excess of our cash expenditures. Our ability to generate and collect on sales can be negatively affected by many factors, including but not limited to our inability to convince new customers to use our services or existing customers to renew their contracts or use additional services; the lengthening of our sales cycles and implementation periods; changes in our customer mix; a decision by any of our existing customers to cease or reduce using our services; failure of customers to pay our invoices on a timely basis or at all; a failure in the performance of our solutions or internal controls that adversely affects our reputation or results in loss of business; the loss of market share to existing or new competitors; the failure to enter or succeed in new markets; regional or global economic conditions or regulations affecting perceived need for or value of our services; or our inability to develop new offerings, expand our offerings or drive adoption of our new offerings on a timely basis and thus potentially not meeting evolving market needs.

We anticipate that we will incur increased sales and marketing and general and administrative expenses as we continue to diversify our business into new industries and geographic markets. Our business will also require significant amounts of working capital to support our growth. We may not achieve collections from sales to offset these anticipated expenditures sufficient to maintain positive future cash flow. In addition, we may encounter unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications, delays and other unknown events that cause our costs to exceed our expectations. An inability to generate positive cash flow may decrease our long-term viability.

In 2020, we restated certain of our previously issued consolidated financial statements, which resulted in unanticipated costs and may affect investor and customer confidence and raise reputational issues.

In 2020, we restated our consolidated financial statements and related disclosures for the years ended December 31, 2018 and December 31, 2017 and restated each of the quarterly periods for the nine months ended September 30, 2019 and for the year ended December 31, 2018. As a result, we incurred unanticipated costs for accounting and legal fees in connection with or related to the restatement, and have become subject to a number of additional risks, costs and uncertainties, including the risk of related litigation, which may affect investor and customer confidence in the accuracy of our financial disclosures and may raise reputational issues for our business.
​

We have recorded significant goodwill impairment charges and may be required to record additional charges to future earnings if our goodwill or intangible assets become impaired.

As of December 31, 2020, our goodwill balance was $359.8 million which represented 31.1% of total consolidated assets. We are required under GAAP to review our intangible assets for impairment when events or changes in circumstances indicate the carrying value may not be recoverable. Goodwill is required to be tested for impairment at least annually. Factors that may be considered a change in circumstances indicating that the carrying value of our intangible assets and/or goodwill may not be recoverable include a decline in stock price and market capitalization, slower growth rates in our industry or our own operations, and/or other materially adverse events that have implications on the profitability of our business or business segments. We may be required to record additional charges to earnings during the period in which any impairment of our goodwill or other intangible assets is determined which could have a material adverse impact on our results of operations. Even though these charges may be non-cash items and may not have an immediate impact on our liquidity, the fact that we report charges of this nature could contribute to negative market perceptions about us or our securities, including. our Common Stock.

The HGM Group has significant influence over us and our corporate governance.

The HGM Group may be deemed to have voting control of over 40% of our Common Stock. As long as the HGM Group owns or controls a significant percentage of outstanding voting power, it will have the ability to strongly influence all corporate actions requiring stockholder approval, including the election and removal of directors and the size of our board of directors, any amendment of our certificate of incorporation or bylaws, or the approval of any merger or other significant corporate transaction, including a sale of substantially all of our assets. In addition, pursuant to the terms of the Director Nomination Agreement, the HGM Group has certain nomination rights with respect to our board of directors and consent rights over certain of our corporate actions.

25

Table of Contents

Additionally, the HGM Group’s interests may not align with the interests of our other stakeholders. The HGM Group is in the business of making investments in companies and may acquire and hold interests in businesses that compete directly or indirectly with us. The HGM Group may also pursue acquisition opportunities that may be complementary to our business, and, as a result, those acquisition opportunities may not be available to us. In addition, our certificate of incorporation provides that we renounce any interest or expectancy in the business opportunities of the HGM Group and that it shall not have any obligation to offer to us those opportunities unless presented to one of our directors or officers in his or her capacity as a director or officer of Exela.

Certain of our contracts are subject to termination rights, audits and/or investigations, which, if exercised, could negatively impact our reputation and reduce our ability to compete for new contracts and have an adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition.

Many of our customer contracts may be terminated by our customers without cause and without any fee or penalty, with only limited notice. Any failure to meet a customer’s expectations, as well as factors beyond our control, including a customer’s financial condition, strategic priorities, or mergers and acquisitions, could result in a cancellation or non-renewal of such a contract or a decrease in business provided to us and cause our actual results to differ from our forecasts. We may not be able to replace a customer that elects to terminate or not renew its contract with us, which would reduce our revenues.

In addition, a portion of our revenues is derived from contracts with the U.S. federal and state governments and their agencies and from contracts with foreign governments and their agencies. Government entities typically finance projects through appropriated funds. While these projects are often planned and executed as multi-year projects, government entities usually reserve the right to change the scope of, or terminate, these projects for lack of approved funding and/or at their convenience. Changes in government or political developments, including budget deficits, shortfalls or uncertainties, government spending reductions (e.g., during a government shutdown) or other debt or funding constraints could result in lower governmental sales and in our projects being reduced in price or scope or terminated altogether, which also could limit our recovery of incurred costs, reimbursable expenses and profits on work completed prior to the termination. The public procurement environment is unpredictable and this could adversely affect our ability to perform work under new and existing contracts. Also, our government business is subject to the risk that one or more of our potential contracts or contract extensions may be diverted by the contracting agency to a small or disadvantaged or minority-owned business pursuant to set-aside programs may be bundled into large multiple award contracts for very large businesses. These risks can potentially have an adverse effect on our revenue growth and profit margins.

Moreover, government contracts are generally subject to audits and investigations by government agencies. If the government finds that it inappropriately charged any costs to a contract, the costs are not reimbursable or, if already reimbursed, the cost must be refunded to the government. Additionally, if the government discovers improper or illegal activities or contractual non-compliance (including improper billing), we may be subject to various civil and criminal penalties and administrative sanctions, which may include termination of contracts, forfeiture of profits, suspension of payments, fines and suspensions or debarment from doing business with the government. Any resulting penalties or sanctions could be substantial. Further, the negative publicity that could arise from any such penalties, sanctions or findings in such audits or investigations could have an adverse effect on our reputation in the industry and reduce our ability to compete for new contracts and could materially adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition.

Our failure to meet the continued listing requirements of Nasdaq could result in a delisting of our Common Stock.

​

Our Common Stock is currently listed for trading on The Nasdaq Capital Market, and the continued listing of our Common Stock on The Nasdaq Capital Market is subject to our compliance with a number of listing standards, including the $1.00 minimum bid price requirement for continued listing on The Nasdaq Capital Market under Rule 5550(a)(2) of the Nasdaq Listing Rules and Nasdaq Listing Rule 5550(b)(2) requiring the Market Value of Listed Securities (“MVLS”) to be at or above $35 million and Nasdaq Listing Rule 5250(c)(1), which requires timely filing of periodic reports with the SEC. During 2020, we failed to meet each of these requirements, and

26

Table of Contents

while we are currently in compliance with these requirements, there can be no assurance that we will continue to satisfy these or. other continuing listing requirements and remain listed on The Nasdaq Capital Market. If our Common Stock were no longer listed on The Nasdaq Capital Market, investors might only be able to trade on one of the over-the-counter markets. This would impair the liquidity of our Common Stock not only in the number of shares that could be bought and sold at a given price, which might be depressed by the relative illiquidity, but also through delays in the timing of transactions and reduction in media coverage. In addition, we could face significant material adverse consequences, including:

Downgrades in our credit ratings could impact our ability to access capital and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Credit rating agencies continually review their ratings for the companies that they follow, including us. Credit rating agencies also evaluate the industries in which we and our affiliates operate as a whole and may change their credit rating for us based on their overall view of such industries. Both Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s downgraded our ratings during 2019. There can be no assurance that any rating assigned to our currently outstanding public debt securities will remain in effect for any given period of time or that any such ratings will not be further lowered, suspended or withdrawn entirely by a rating agency if, in that rating agency’s judgment, circumstances so warrant.

A further downgrade of our credit ratings could, among other things:

We may not always offset increased costs with increased fees under long-term contracts.

The pricing and other terms of our customer contracts, particularly our long-term contact center agreements, are based on estimates and assumptions we make at the time we enter into these contracts. These estimates reflect our best judgments regarding the nature of the engagement and our expected costs to provide the contracted services and could differ from actual results. Not all our larger long-term contracts allow for escalation of fees as our cost of operations increase and those that allow for such escalations do not always allow increases at rates comparable to increases that we experience. If and where we cannot negotiate long-term contract terms that provide for fee adjustments to reflect increases in our cost of service delivery, our business, financial conditions, and results of operation would be materially impacted.

Our business process automation solutions often require long selling cycles and long implementation periods that may result in significant upfront expenses that may not be recovered.

We often face long selling cycles to secure new contracts for our business process automation solutions. If we are successful in obtaining an engagement, the selling cycle can be followed by a long implementation period during which we plan our services in detail and demonstrate to the customer our ability to successfully integrate our solutions with the customer’s internal operations. Our customers may experience delays in obtaining internal approvals or delays associated with technology or system implementations which can further lengthen the selling cycle or implementation period, and certain engagements may also require a ramping up period after implementation before we can commence providing our services. Even if we succeed in developing a relationship with a potential customer and begin to discuss the services in detail, the potential customer may choose a competitor or decide to retain the work in-house prior to the time a contract is signed. In addition, once a contract is signed, we sometimes do not begin to receive revenue until

27

Table of Contents

completion of the implementation period and our solution is fully operational. The extended lengths of our selling cycles and implementation periods can result in the incurrence of significant upfront expenses that may never result in profits or may result in profits only after a significant period of time has elapsed, which may negatively impact our financial performance. For example, we generally hire new employees to provide services in connection with certain large engagements once a new contract is signed. Accordingly, we may incur significant costs associated with these hires before we collect corresponding revenues. Our inability to obtain contractual commitments after a selling cycle, maintain contractual commitments after the implementation period or limit expenses prior to the receipt of corresponding revenue may have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition.

We face significant competition from U.S.-based and non-U.S.-based companies and from our customers who may elect to perform their business processes in-house.

Our industry is highly competitive, fragmented and subject to rapid change. We compete primarily against large multi-national information technology companies, focused BPO companies based in offshore locations, BPO divisions of information technology companies located in India, other BPO and BPA and consulting providers that focus on the legal sector and the in-house capabilities of our customers and potential customers. These competitors may include entrants from adjacent industries or entrants in geographic locations with lower costs than those in which we operate.

Some of our competitors have greater financial, marketing, technological or other resources, larger customer bases and more established reputations or brand awareness than we do. In addition, some of our competitors who do not have, or have limited, global delivery capabilities may expand their delivery centers to the countries in which we operate or increase their capacity in lower cost geographies, which could result in increased competition. Some of our competitors may also enter into strategic or commercial relationships among themselves or with larger, more established companies in order to benefit from increased scale and enhanced scope capabilities or enter into similar arrangements with potential customers. Further, we expect competition to intensify in the future as more companies enter our markets and customers consolidate the services they require among fewer vendors. Increased competition, our inability to compete successfully against competitors, pricing pressures or loss of market share could result in reduced operating margins, which could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.

Our industry is characterized by rapid technological change and failure to compete successfully within the industry and address rapid technological change could adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition.

The process of developing new services and solutions is inherently complex and uncertain. It requires accurate anticipation of customers’ changing needs and emerging technological trends. We must make long-term investments and commit significant resources before knowing whether these investments will eventually result in services that achieve customer acceptance and generate the revenues required to provide desired returns. If we fail to accurately anticipate and meet our customers’ needs through the development of new technologies and service offerings or if our new services are not widely accepted, we could lose market share and customers to our competitors and that could materially adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition.

More specifically, the business process solutions industry is characterized by rapid technological change, evolving industry standards and changing customer preferences. The success of our business depends, in part, upon our ability to develop technology and solutions that keep pace with changes in our industry and the industries of our customers. Although we have made, and will continue to make, significant investments in the research, design and development of new technology and platforms-driven solutions, we may not be successful in addressing these changes on a timely basis or in marketing the changes we implement. In addition, products or technologies developed by others may render our services uncompetitive or obsolete. Failure to address these developments could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition.

In addition, existing and potential customers are actively shifting their businesses away from paper-based environments to electronic environments with reduced needs for physical document management and processing. This shift may result in decreased demand for the physical document management services we provide such that our business and revenues may become more reliant on technology-based services in electronic environments, which are typically provided at lower prices compared to physical document management services. Though we have solutions for customers

28

Table of Contents

seeking to make these types of transitions, a significant shift by our customers away from physical documents to non-paper based technologies, whether now existing or developed in the future, could adversely affect our business, results of operation and financial condition.

Also, some of the large international companies in the industry have significant financial resources and compete with us to provide document processing services and/or business process services. We compete primarily on the basis of technology, performance, price, quality, reliability, brand, distribution and customer service and support. Our success in future performance is largely dependent upon our ability to compete successfully, to promptly and effectively react to changing technologies and customer expectations and to expand into additional market segments. To remain competitive, we must develop services and applications; periodically enhance our existing offerings; remain cost efficient; and attract and retain key personnel and management. If we are unable to compete successfully, we could lose market share and important customers to our competitors and that could materially adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition.

We rely, in some cases, on third-party hardware and software, which could cause errors or failures of our services and could also result in adverse effects for our business and reputation if these third-party services fail to perform properly or are no longer available.

Although we developed our platform-driven solutions internally, we rely, in some cases, on third-party hardware and software in connection with our service offerings which we either purchase or lease from third-party vendors. We are generally able to select from a number of competing hardware and software applications, but the complexity and unique specifications of the hardware or software makes design defects and software errors difficult to detect. Any errors or defects in third-party hardware or software incorporated into our service offerings, may result in a delay or loss of revenue, diversion of resources, damage to our reputation, the loss of the affected customer, loss of future business, increased service costs or potential litigation claims against us.

Further, this hardware and software may not continue to be available on commercially reasonable terms or at all. Any loss of the right to use any of this hardware or software could result in delays in the provisioning of our services, which could negatively affect our business until equivalent technology is either developed by us or, if available, is identified, obtained and integrated. In addition, it is possible that our hardware vendors or the licensors of third-party software could increase the prices they charge, which could have a material adverse impact on our results of operations. Further, changing hardware vendors or software licensors could detract from management’s ability to focus on the ongoing operations of our business or could cause delays in the operations of our business.

Some of the work we do involves greater risks than other types of claims processing or document management engagements.

We provide certain business process solutions for customers that, for financial, legal or other reasons, may present higher risks compared to other types of claims processing or document management engagements. Examples of higher risk engagements include, but are not limited to:

While we attempt to identify higher risk engagements and customers and mitigate our exposure by taking certain preventive measures and, where necessary, turning down certain engagements, these efforts may be ineffective and an actual or alleged error or omission on our part, the part of our customer or other third parties or possible fraudulent activity in one or more of these higher-risk engagements could result in the diversion of management resources, damage to our reputation, increased service costs or impaired market acceptance of our services, any of which could negatively impact our business and our financial condition.

29

Table of Contents

Our business could be materially and adversely affected if we do not protect our intellectual property or if our services are found to infringe on the intellectual property of others.

Our success depends in part on certain methodologies and practices we utilize in developing and implementing applications and other proprietary intellectual property rights. In order to protect such rights, we rely upon a combination of nondisclosure and other contractual arrangements, as well as trade secret, copyright, trademark and patent laws. We also generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our employees, customers and potential customers and limit access to and distribution of our proprietary information. There can be no assurance that the laws, rules, regulations and treaties in effect in the U.S., India and the other jurisdictions in which we operate and the contractual and other protective measures we take are adequate to protect us from misappropriation or unauthorized use of our intellectual property, or that such laws will not change. There can be no assurance that the resources invested by us to protect our intellectual property will be sufficient or that our intellectual property portfolio will adequately deter misappropriation or improper use of our technology, and our intellectual property rights may not prevent competitors from independently developing or selling products and services similar to or duplicative of ours. We may not be able to detect unauthorized use and take appropriate steps to enforce our rights, and any such steps may be costly and unsuccessful. Infringement by others of our intellectual property, including the costs of enforcing our intellectual property rights, may have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition. We could also face competition in some countries where we have not invested in an intellectual property portfolio. If we are not able to protect our intellectual property, the value of our brand and other intangible assets may be diminished, and our business may be adversely affected. Further, although we believe that we are not infringing on the intellectual property rights of others, claims may nonetheless be successfully asserted against us in the future, and we may be the target of enforcement of patents or other intellectual property by third parties, including aggressive and opportunistic enforcement claims by non-practicing entities. Regardless of the merit of such claims, responding to infringement claims can be expensive and time-consuming. If we are found to infringe any third-party rights, we could be required to pay substantial damages or we could be enjoined from offering some of our products and services. The costs of defending any such claims could be significant, and any successful claim may require us to modify our services. The value of, or our ability to use, our intellectual property may also be negatively impacted by dependencies on third parties, such as our ability to obtain or renew on reasonable terms licenses that we need in the future, or our ability to secure or retain ownership or rights to use data in certain software analytics or services offerings. Any such circumstances may have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition.

We generate a significant portion of our revenues from a small number of customers, and any loss of business from these customers could materially reduce our revenues.

We have derived, and believe that in the foreseeable future we will continue to derive, a significant portion of our revenues from a small number of customers. While we have no one customer that accounts for more than 10% of our revenue, for each of the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, our ten largest customers accounted for approximately 26% of our revenues. Our ability to maintain close relationships with these and other major customers is essential to the growth and profitability of our business. However, the volume of work performed for a specific customer is likely to vary from year to year. A major customer in one year may not provide the same level of revenues for us in any subsequent year and there can be no assurance that any customer will extend or renew its contract with us. The business process solutions we provide to our customers, and the revenues and net income from those services, may decline or vary as the type and quantity of services we provide change over time. Furthermore, our reliance on any individual customer for a significant portion of our revenues may give that customer a certain degree of pricing leverage against us when negotiating contracts and terms of service.

In addition, a number of factors other than our performance could cause the loss of or reduction in business or revenues from a customer, and these factors are not predictable. For example, a customer may decide to reduce spending on business process solutions from us due to a challenging economic environment or other factors, both internal and external, relating to our business. These factors may include corporate restructuring, pricing pressure, changes to our outsourcing strategy, switching to another BPO provider or returning work in-house or other changes in a customer’s prospects or profitability. The risk of customer loss may be heightened as a result of recent economic volatility due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The loss of any of our major customers, or a significant decrease in the volume of work they give

30

Table of Contents

to us or the price at which we are able to provide our services to them, could materially adversely affect our revenues and thus our results of operations.

Our revenues are highly dependent on a limited number of industries, and any decrease in demand for business process solutions in these industries could reduce our revenues and adversely affect the results of operations.

A substantial portion of our revenues are derived from three specific industry based segments: ITPS, HS, and LLPS. Customers in ITPS accounted for 77.8 and 79.0% of our revenues in 2020 and 2019, respectively. Customers in HS accounted for 16.9% and 16.4% of our revenues in 2020 and 2019, respectively. Customers in LLPS accounted for 5.3% and 4.6% of our revenues in 2020 and 2019, respectively. Our success largely depends on continued demand for our services from customers in these segments, and a downturn or reversal of the demand for business process solutions in any of these segments, or the introduction of regulations that restrict or discourage companies from engaging our services, could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. For example, consolidation in any of these industries or combinations or mergers, particularly involving our customers, may decrease the potential number of customers for our services. We have been affected by the worsening of economic conditions and significant consolidation in the financial services industry and continuation of this trend may negatively affect our revenues and profitability. The COVID-19 pandemic, may lead to further increased consolidation in the financial services industry as larger, better capitalized competitors will be in a stronger position to withstand prolonged periods of economic downturn and sustain their business through the financial volatility.

We derive significant revenue and profit from commercial and government contracts awarded through competitive bidding processes, including renewals, which can impose substantial costs on us, and we will not achieve revenue and profit objectives if we fail to accurately and effectively bid on such projects.

Many of these contracts are extremely complex and require the investment of significant resources in order to prepare accurate bids and proposals. Competitive bidding imposes substantial costs and presents a number of risks, including: (i) the substantial cost and managerial time and effort that we spend to prepare bids and proposals for contracts that may or may not be awarded to us; (ii) the need to estimate accurately the resources and costs that will be required to implement and service any contracts we are awarded, sometimes in advance of the final determination of their full scope and design; (iii) the expense and delay that may arise if our competitors protest or challenge awards made to us pursuant to competitive bidding and the risk that such protests or challenges could result in the requirement to resubmit bids and in the termination, reduction or modification of the awarded contracts; and (iv) the opportunity cost of not bidding on and winning other contracts we might otherwise pursue. If our competitors protest or challenge an award made to us on a government contract, the costs to defend such an award may be significant and could involve subsequent litigation that could take years to resolve.

Our profitability is dependent upon our ability to obtain adequate pricing for our services and to improve our cost structure.

Our success depends on our ability to obtain adequate pricing for our services. Depending on competitive market factors, future prices we obtain for our services may decline from previous levels. If we are unable to obtain adequate pricing for our services, it could materially adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition. In addition, our contracts are increasingly requiring tighter timelines for implementation as well as more stringent service level metrics. This makes the bidding process for new contracts much more difficult and requires us to adequately consider these requirements in the pricing of our services.

We regularly review our operations with a view towards reducing our cost structure, including, without limitation, reducing our employee base, exiting certain businesses, improving process and system efficiencies and outsourcing some internal functions. We, from time to time, engage in restructuring actions to reduce our cost structure. If we are unable to continue to maintain our cost base at or below the current level and maintain process and systems changes resulting from prior restructuring actions or to realize the expected cost reductions in the ongoing strategic transformation program, it could materially adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition. In addition, in order to meet the service requirements of our customers, which often includes 24/7 service, and to optimize our employee cost base, including our back-office support, we often locate our delivery service and back-office support

31

Table of Contents

centers in lower-cost locations, including several developing countries. Concentrating our centers in these locations presents a number of operational risks, many of which are beyond our control, including the risks of political instability, natural disasters, safety and security risks, labor disruptions, excessive employee turnover and rising labor rates. Additionally, a change in the political environment in the U.S. or the adoption and enforcement of legislation and regulations curbing the use of such centers outside of the U.S. could materially adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition. These risks could impair our ability to effectively provide services to our customers and keep our costs aligned to our associated revenues and market requirements.

Our ability to sustain and improve profit margins is dependent on a number of factors, including our ability to continue to improve the cost efficiency of our operations through such programs as robotic process automation, to absorb the level of pricing pressures on our services through cost improvements and to successfully complete information technology initiatives. If any of these factors adversely materialize or if we are unable to achieve and maintain productivity improvements through restructuring actions or information technology initiatives, our ability to offset labor cost inflation and competitive price pressures would be impaired, each of which could materially adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition.

We are subject to regular customer and third-party security reviews and failure to pass these may have an adverse impact on our operations.

Many of our customer contracts require that we maintain certain physical and/or information security standards, and, in certain cases, we permit a customer to audit our compliance with these contractual standards. Any failure to meet such standards or pass such audits may have a material adverse impact on our business. Further, customers from time to time may require stricter physical and/or information security than they negotiated in their contracts, and may condition continued volumes and business on the satisfaction of such additional requirements. Some of these requirements may be expensive to implement or maintain, and may not be factored into our contract pricing. Further, on an annual basis we obtain third-party audits of certain of our locations in accordance with Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 16 (SSAE 16) put forth by the Auditing Standards Board (ASB) of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). SSAE 16 is the current standard for reporting on controls at service organizations, and many of our customers expect that we will perform an annual SSAE 16 audit, and report to them the results. Negative findings in such an audit and/or the failure to adequately remediate in a timely fashion such negative findings may cause customers to terminate their contracts or otherwise have a material adverse effect on our reputation, results of operation and financial condition.

Currency fluctuations among the Euro, British Pound, Swedish Krona, Indian rupee, the Philippine Peso, the Mexican Peso, the Canadian Dollar, the Chinese Yuan and the U.S. Dollar could have a material adverse effect on our results of operations.

The functional currencies of our businesses outside of the U.S. are the local currencies. Changes in exchange rates between these foreign currencies and the U.S. Dollar will affect the recorded levels of our assets, liabilities, net sales, cost of goods sold and operating margins and could result in exchange gains or losses. The primary foreign currencies to which we have exposure are the European Union Euro, Swedish Krona, British Pound Sterling, Canadian Dollar and Indian rupees. Exchange rates between these currencies and the U.S. Dollar in recent years have fluctuated significantly and may do so in the future. Our operating results and profitability may be affected by any volatility in currency exchange rates and our ability to manage effectively currency transaction and translation risks. To the extent the U.S. Dollar strengthens against foreign currencies, our foreign revenues and profits will be reduced when translated into U.S. Dollars.

Although the vast majority of our revenues are denominated in U.S. dollars, a significant portion of our expenses are incurred and paid in Euros, British Pound Sterling, Swedish Krona, Indian rupees, and to a lesser extent in other currencies, including the Philippine Peso, the Mexican Peso, the Canadian dollar and the Chinese Yuan. We report our financial results in U.S. Dollars. The exchange rate between the Indian rupee and the U.S. Dollar has changed substantially in recent years and may fluctuate substantially in the future. Our results of operations may be adversely affected if such fluctuations continue, or increase, or other currencies fluctuate significantly against the U.S. Dollar.

32

Table of Contents

Further, although we do not currently take steps to hedge our foreign currency exposures, should we choose in the future to implement a hedging strategy, there can be no assurance that our hedging strategy will be successful.

Fluctuations in the costs of paper, ink, energy, by-products and other raw materials may adversely impact the results of our operations.

Purchases of paper, ink, energy and other raw materials represent a large portion of our costs. Increases in the costs of these inputs may increase our costs and we may not be able to pass these costs on to customers through higher prices. In addition, we may not be able to resell waste paper and other print-related by-products or may be adversely impacted by decreases in the prices for these by-products. Increases in the cost of materials may adversely impact customers’ demand for our printing and printing-related services.

Sales tax laws in the U.S. may change resulting in service providers having to collect sales taxes in states where the current laws do not require us to do so. This could result in substantial tax liabilities.

Our U.S. subsidiaries collect and remit sales tax in states in which the subsidiaries have physical presence or in which we believe sufficient nexus exists which obligates us to collect sales tax. Other states may, from time to time, claim that we have state-related activities constituting physical nexus to require such collection. Additionally, many other states seek to impose sales tax collection or reporting obligations on companies that sell goods to customers in their state, or directly to the state and its political subdivisions, regardless of physical presence. Such efforts by states have increased recently, as states seek to raise revenues without increasing the income tax burden on residents. We cannot predict whether the nature or level of contacts we have with a particular state will be deemed enough to require us to collect sales tax in that state nor can we be assured that Congress or individual states will not approve legislation authorizing states to impose tax collection or reporting obligations on our activities. A successful assertion by one or more states that we should collect sales tax could result in substantial tax liabilities related to past sales and would result in considerable administrative burdens and costs for us.

We are subject to laws of the United States and foreign jurisdictions relating to processing certain financial transactions, including payment card transactions and debit or credit card transactions, and failure to comply with those laws could subject us to legal actions and materially adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition.

​

We process, support and execute financial transactions, and disburse funds, on behalf of both government and commercial customers, often in partnership with financial institutions. This activity includes receiving debit and credit card information, processing payments for and due to our customers and disbursing funds on payment or debit cards to payees of our customers. As a result, the transactions we process may be subject to numerous United States (both federal and state) and foreign jurisdiction laws and regulations, including the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, as amended, the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act of 1970 (commonly known as the Bank Secrecy Act), as amended, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, as amended, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, as amended, and the USA PATRIOT ACT of 2001, as amended. Other United States (both federal and state) and foreign jurisdiction laws apply to our processing of certain financial transactions and related support services. These laws are subject to frequent changes, and new statutes and regulations in this area may be enacted at any time. Changes to existing laws, the introduction of new laws in this area or failure to comply with existing laws that are applicable to us may subject us to, among other things, additional costs or changes to our business practices, liability for monetary damages, fines and/or criminal prosecution, unfavorable publicity, restrictions on our ability to process and support financial transactions and allegations by our customers, partners and clients that we have not performed our contractual obligations. Any of these could materially adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition.

The Reverse Stock Split may decrease the liquidity of the shares of our Common Stock and the resulting market price of our Common Stock may not attract or satisfy the investing requirements of new investors, including institutional investors.

Effective January 25, 2021, we completed the Reverse Stock Split. The effect of the Reverse Stock Split upon the future market price of our Common Stock cannot be predicted with certainty. The liquidity of the shares

33

Table of Contents

of our Common Stock may also be affected adversely by the Reverse Stock Split given the reduced number of shares outstanding following the Reverse Stock Split. Additionally, the Reverse Stock Split may increase the number of shareholders who own odd lots (less than 100 shares) of our Common Stock, creating the potential for such shareholders to experience an increase in the cost of selling their shares and greater difficulty effecting such sales. Moreover, there can be no assurance that the Reverse Stock Split will result in a share price that will attract new investors, including institutional investors, and there can be no assurance that the market price of our Common Stock will satisfy the investing requirements of these investors. Consequently, the trading liquidity of our Common Stock may not necessarily improve as a result of the Reverse Stock Split.

​

General Risk Factors

Our results of operations could in the future be materially adversely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) or similar public health events.

​

Our results of operations could in the future be materially adversely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) or similar public heath events. While we remain hopeful that the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on our world and our business will subside with the continuing roll out of vaccines, we continue to have two priorities: the safety and wellbeing of our employees and their families, and maintaining our ability to provide services to our customers in these unprecedented times. The global spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) has created significant volatility and uncertainty and economic disruption. The extent to which the coronavirus pandemic will continue to impact our business, operations and financial results will depend on numerous evolving factors that we may not be able to accurately predict, including: the duration and scope of the pandemic; governmental, business and individuals’ actions that have been and continue to be taken in response to the pandemic; the impact of the pandemic on economic activity and actions taken in response; the effect on our customers and customer demand for our services and solutions; our ability to sell and provide our services and solutions, including as a result of travel restrictions and people working from home; the ability of our customers to pay for our services and solutions; and any closures of our and our customers' offices and facilities. The spread of the coronavirus has caused us to modify our business practices (including employee travel, employee work locations, and cancellation of physical participation in meetings, events and conferences), and we may take further actions as may be required by government authorities or that we determine are in the best interests of our employees, customers and business partners.

Our results of operations could be adversely affected by economic and political conditions, creating complex risks, many of which are beyond our control.

Our business depends on the continued demand for our services, and if current global economic conditions worsen, our business could be adversely affected by our customers’ financial condition and level of business activity. Along with our customers we are subject to global political, economic and market conditions, including inflation, interest rates, energy costs, the impact of natural disasters, disease, military action and the threat of terrorism. In particular, we currently derive, and are likely to continue to derive, a significant portion of revenues from customers located in North America and EMEA. Any future decreases in the general level of economic activity in these markets, such as decreases in business and consumer spending and increases in unemployment rates as we experienced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, could result in a decrease in demand for our services, thus reducing our revenue. For example, certain customers may decide to reduce or postpone their spending on the services we provide, and we may be forced to lower our prices. Other developments in response to economic events, such as consolidations, restructurings or reorganizations, particularly involving our customers, could also cause the demand for our services to decline, negatively affecting the amount of business that we are able to obtain or retain. We may not be able to predict the impact such conditions will have on the industries we serve and may be unable to plan effectively for or respond to such impact. In response to economic and market conditions, from time to time we have undertaken or may undertake initiatives to reduce our cost structure where appropriate, such as consolidation of resources to provide functional region-wide support to our international subsidiaries in a centralized fashion. These initiatives, as well as any future workforce and facilities reductions we may implement, may not be sufficient to meet current and future changes in economic and market conditions and allow us to continue to achieve the growth rates expected. In addition, costs actually incurred in connection with certain restructuring actions may be higher than our estimates of such costs and/or may not lead to the anticipated cost savings.

34

Table of Contents

In addition, any future disruptions or turbulence in the global credit markets may adversely affect our liquidity and financial condition, and the liquidity and financial condition of our customers. Such disruptions may limit our ability to access financing, increase the cost of financing needed to meet liquidity needs and affect the ability of our customers to use credit to purchase our services or to make timely payments to us, adversely affecting our financial condition and results of operations.

Cybersecurity issues, vulnerabilities, and criminal activity resulting in a data or security breach could result in risks to our systems, networks, products, solutions and services resulting in liability or reputational damage.

We collect and retain large volumes of internal and customer data, including personally identifiable information and other sensitive data both physically and electronically, for business purposes, and our various information technology systems enter, process, summarize and report such data. We also maintain personally identifiable information about our employees. Safeguarding customer, employee and our own data is a key priority for us, and our customers and employees have come to rely on us for the protection of their personal information. Augmented vulnerabilities, threats and more sophisticated and targeted cyber-related attacks pose a risk to our security and the security of our customers, partners, suppliers and third-party service providers, and to the confidentiality, availability and integrity of data owned by us or our customers. Despite our efforts to protect sensitive, confidential or personal data or information, we may be vulnerable to material security breaches, theft, misplaced or lost data, programming errors, employee errors and/or malfeasance that could potentially lead to the compromise of sensitive, confidential or personal data or information, improper use of our systems, software solutions or networks, unauthorized access, use, disclosure, modification or destruction of information, defective products, production downtimes and operational disruptions. Despite protective measures, we may not be successful in preventing security breaches which compromise the confidentiality and integrity of this data. While an attempt is made to mitigate these risks by employing a number of measures, including employee training, monitoring and testing, and maintenance of protective systems and contingency plans, we remain vulnerable to such threats. The risk of such threats may be heightened as a result of the extended period of remote work arrangements occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The sensitive, confidential or personal data or information that we have access to is also subject to privacy and security laws, regulations or customer-imposed controls. The regulatory environment, as well as the requirements imposed on us by the industries we serve governing information, security and privacy laws is increasingly demanding. Maintaining compliance with applicable security and privacy regulations may increase our operating costs and/or adversely impact our ability to provide services to our customers. Furthermore, a compromised data system or the intentional, inadvertent or negligent release or disclosure of data could result in theft, loss, fraudulent or unlawful use of customer, employee or our data which could harm our reputation or result in remedial and other costs, fines or lawsuits. In addition, a cyber-related attack could result in other negative consequences, including damage to our reputation or competitiveness, remediation or increased protection costs, litigation or regulatory action. Fraud, employee negligence, and unauthorized access, including, malfunctions, viruses and other events beyond our control, may lead to the misappropriation or unauthorized disclosure of sensitive or confidential information we process, store and transmit, including personal information, for our customers, failure to prevent or mitigate data loss or other security breaches, including breaches of our vendors’ technology and systems, could expose us or our customers to a risk of loss or misuse of such information, adversely affect our operating results, result in litigation or potential liability for us and otherwise harm our business. As a result, we may be subject to monetary damages, regulatory enforcement actions or fines under federal legislation, such as, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and HIPAA, as well as various states’ laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), which became effective on January 1, 2020 or under the GDPR in Europe. Similarly, regulations such as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 expand the obligations of “covered entities” and their business associates, including certain mandatory breach notification requirements. In addition to any legal liability, data or security breaches may lead to negative publicity, reputational damage and otherwise adversely affect the results of our operations.

35

Table of Contents

Our industry may be adversely impacted by a negative public reaction in the U.S. and elsewhere to providing certain of our services from outside the U.S. and related legislation.

We have based our strategy of future growth on certain assumptions regarding our industry and future demand in the market for the provision of business process solutions in part using offshore resources. However, providing services from offshore locations is a politically sensitive topic in the U.S. and elsewhere, and many organizations and public figures have publicly expressed concern about a perceived association between offshore service providers and the loss of jobs in their home countries. In addition, there has been some publicity about the negative experience of certain companies that provide their services offshore, particularly in India. The trend of providing business process solutions offshore may not continue and could reverse if companies elect to develop and perform their business processes internally or are discouraged from transferring these services to offshore service providers. Any slowdown or reversal of existing industry trends could negatively affect the amount of business that we are able to obtain or retain. and could have a material and adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows.

If we fail to maintain an effective system of disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting, our ability to produce timely and accurate financial statements or comply with applicable regulations could be impaired.

As a public company, we are subject to the reporting requirements of the Exchange Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, as amended (the "Sarbanes-Oxley Act"), and the listing standards of the Nasdaq Stock Market. We expect that the requirements of these rules and regulations will continue to increase our legal, accounting and financial compliance costs, make some activities more difficult, time consuming and costly, and place significant strain on our personnel, systems and resources. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires, among other things, that we maintain effective disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting. We are continuing to develop and refine our disclosure controls and other procedures that are designed to ensure that information required to be disclosed by us in the reports that we will file with the SEC is recorded, processed, summarized and reported within the time periods specified in SEC rules and forms, and that information required to be disclosed in reports under the Exchange Act is accumulated and communicated to our principal executive and financial officers. We are also continuing to improve our internal control over financial reporting. In order to maintain and improve the effectiveness of our disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting, we have expended, and anticipate that we will continue to expend, significant resources, including accounting-related costs and significant management oversight.

Our current controls and any new controls that we develop may become inadequate because of changes in conditions in our business. Further, weaknesses in our disclosure controls or our internal control over financial reporting may be discovered in the future. Any failure to develop or maintain effective controls, or any difficulties encountered in their implementation or improvement, could harm our operating results or cause us to fail to meet our reporting obligations and may result in a restatement of our financial statements for prior periods. Any failure to implement and maintain effective internal control over financial reporting also could adversely affect the results of management evaluations of our internal control over financial reporting that we are required to include in our periodic reports that we file with the SEC. Ineffective disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting could also cause investors to lose confidence in our reported financial and other information, which would likely have a negative effect on the trading price of our Common Stock. In addition, if we are unable to meet these requirements, we may not be able to remain listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Management assessed the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2020 and based on its assessment, our management, including our CEO and CFO, has concluded that our internal control over financial reporting was not effective as of December 31, 2020 due to material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting. Any failure to maintain effective disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting could have a material and adverse effect on our business and operating results and cause a decline in the price of our Common Stock.

Internal control matters are more fully discussed in Part II—Item 9A—Controls and Procedures of this Annual Report.

36

Table of Contents

If we are unable to attract, train and retain skilled professionals, including highly skilled technical personnel to satisfy customer demand and senior management to lead our business globally, our business and results of operations may be materially adversely affected.

Our success is dependent, in large part, on our ability to keep our supply of skilled professionals, including project managers, IT engineers and senior technical personnel, in balance with customer demand around the world and on our ability to attract and retain senior management with the knowledge and skills to lead our business globally. Each year, we must hire several hundred new professionals and retrain, retain, and motivate our workforce across the globe. Competition for skilled labor is intense and, in some jurisdictions in which we operate, there are more jobs for certain professionals than qualified persons to fill these jobs. Costs associated with recruiting and training professionals can be significant. If we are unable to hire or deploy employees with the needed skillsets or if we are unable to adequately equip our employees with the skills needed, this could materially adversely affect our business. Additionally, if we are unable to maintain an employee environment that is competitive and contemporary, it could have an adverse effect on engagement and retention, which may materially adversely affect our business. If more stringent labor laws become applicable to us or if a significant number of our employees unionize, our profitability may be adversely affected.

Increased labor costs due to competition, increased minimum wage or employee benefits costs (including various federal, state and local actions to increase minimum wages), unionization activity or other factors would adversely impact our cost of sales and operating expenses. For example, as minimum wage rates increase, we may need to increase not only the wages of our minimum wage employees but also the wages paid to employees at wage rates that are above minimum wage. As a result, we anticipate that our labor costs will continue to increase.

We are also subject to applicable rules and regulations relating to our relationship with our employees, including minimum wage and break requirements, health benefits, unemployment and sales taxes, overtime, and working conditions and immigration status. Legislated increases in the minimum wage and increases in additional labor cost components, such as employee benefit costs, workers’ compensation insurance rates, compliance costs and fines, as well as the cost of litigation in connection with these regulations, would increase our labor costs. Should our employees become represented by unions, we would be obligated to bargain with those unions with respect to wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment, which could increase our labor costs. Moreover, as part of the process of union organizing and collective bargaining, strikes and other work stoppages may occur, which could cause disruption to our business. In addition, many employers have been subject to actions brought by governmental agencies and private individuals under wage-hour laws on a variety of claims, such as improper classification of workers as exempt from overtime pay requirements and failure to pay overtime wages or record breaks properly, with such actions sometimes brought as class actions or under “private attorney general” statutes. These actions can result in material liabilities and expenses. Should we be subject to employment litigation, such as actions involving wage-hour, overtime, break, and working time, we may distract our management from business matters and result in increased labor costs. If costs of labor increase significantly, our business, results of operations, and financial condition may be adversely affected.

New, more stringent privacy and data security regulations may have a negative impact on our business.

Any inability to adequately address privacy and security concerns could result in expenses and liability, and adverse impact on us. Moreover, international privacy and data security regulations may become more complex and have greater consequences. For instance, as of May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, has replaced the Data Protection Directive with respect to the collection and use of personal data of data subjects in the EU. The GDPR applies extra territorially and imposes several stringent requirements for controllers and processors of personal data, including, for example, higher standards for obtaining consent from individuals to process their personal data, more robust disclosures to individuals and a strengthened individual data rights regime, shortened timelines for data breach notifications, limitations on retention of information, increased requirements pertaining to health data, other special categories of personal data and pseudonymized (i.e., key-coded) data and additional obligations when we contract third-party processors in connection with the processing of the personal data. The GDPR provides that EU member states may make their own further laws and regulations limiting the processing of personal data, including genetic, biometric or health data, which could limit our ability to use and share personal data or could cause our costs could increase, and harm our business and financial condition. Failure to comply with the requirements of GDPR and the applicable national data protection laws of the EU Member States may result in fines of up to €20,000,000 or up to 4%

37

Table of Contents

of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher, and other administrative penalties.

Similar to the GDPR, the CCPA, which became effective January 1, 2020, grants California residents with several new rights relating to their personal information. The CCPA applies to businesses that conduct business in California and satisfies one of three financial conditions, including a business that has a gross revenue greater than $25 million. The CCPA sets forth several data protection obligations for applicable businesses, including, but not limited to the obligations to inform a consumer, at or before collection, of the purpose and intended use of the collection; and to delete a consumer’s personal information upon request. As for penalties and fines, the CCPA establishes a private right of action for serious data breaches, which allows consumers the right to seek damages. The CCPA also allows the California Attorney General to bring actions against non-compliant businesses with fines of $2,500 per violation or, if intentional, up to $7,500 per violation.

Any future failure by us to comply with the GDPR and/or CCPA could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations or financial condition. Further, as the GDPR and CCPA have recently come into effect, enforcement priorities and interpretation of certain provisions are still unclear. Industry groups also impose self-regulatory standards that bind us by their incorporation into the contracts we execute. For example, should we fail to be compliant with the PCIDSS we may be subject to fines and other penalties.

Failure to comply with the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or the FCPA, economic and trade sanctions, regulations, and similar laws could subject us to penalties and other adverse consequences.

We operate internationally, and we are subject to anti-corruption laws and regulations, including the FCPA, the U.K. Bribery Act and other laws that prohibit the making or offering of improper payments to foreign government officials and political figures, including anti-bribery provisions enforced by the Department of Justice and accounting provisions enforced by the SEC. These laws prohibit improper payments or offers of payments to foreign governments and their officials and political parties by the U.S. and other business entities for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business. We have implemented policies to identify and address potentially impermissible transactions under such laws and regulations; however, there can be no assurance that all of our and our subsidiaries’ employees, consultants, and agents, including those that may be based in or from countries where practices that violate U.S. or other laws may be customary, will not take actions in violation of our policies, for which we may be ultimately responsible. We are also subject to certain economic and trade sanctions programs that are administered by the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, which prohibit or restrict transactions to or from or dealings with specified countries, their governments, and in certain circumstances, their nationals, and with individuals and entities that are specially-designated nationals of those countries, narcotics traffickers, and terrorists or terrorist organizations. Our subsidiaries may be subject to additional foreign or local sanctions requirements in other relevant jurisdictions.

Changes in laws or regulations, or a failure to comply with any laws and regulations, may adversely affect our business, investments and results of operations.

We are subject to laws, regulations and rules enacted by national, regional and local governments and Nasdaq. In particular, we are required to comply with certain SEC, Nasdaq and other legal or regulatory requirements. Compliance with, and monitoring of, applicable laws, regulations and rules may be difficult, time consuming and costly. Those laws, regulations and rules and their interpretation and application may also change from time to time and those changes could have a material adverse effect on our business, investments and results of operations. In addition, a failure to comply with applicable laws, regulations and rules, as interpreted and applied, could have a material adverse effect on our business and results of operations.

​

38

Table of Contents

39

Table of Contents

Based on the status of the ancillary proceedings, the Company believes that this matter may not be fully resolved through the courts within the next four fiscal quarters.

Class Action

On March 23, 2020, the Plaintiff, Bo Shen, filed a putative class action against the Company, Ronald Cogburn, the Company’s Chief Executive Officer, and James Reynolds, the Company’s former Chief Financial Officer. Plaintiff claims to be a current holder of 1,333 shares of Company stock, purchased on October 4, 2019 at $4.02/share. Plaintiff asserts two claims covering the purported class period of March 16, 2018 to March 16, 2020: (1) a violation of Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5 of the Exchange Act against all defendants; and (2) a violation of Section 20(a) of the Exchange Act against Mr. Cogburn and Mr. Reynolds. The allegations stem from the Company’s press release, dated March 16, 2020 (announcing the postponement of the earnings call and delay in filing of its annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019), and press release and related SEC filings, dated March 17, 2020 (announcing its intent to restate its financial statements for 2017, 2018 and interim periods through September 30, 2019). At this early stage in the litigation, it is not practicable to render an opinion about whether an unfavorable outcome is probable or remote with respect to this matter; however, the Company has moved to dismiss the case and believes it has meritorious defenses and will vigorously assert them.

Derivative Action

On July 8, 2020 Plaintiff Gregory McKenna filed a shareholder derivative action asserting the following claims against current and former directors and officers of Exela: (1) Violations of Section 14(a) of the Exchange Act; (2) Violations of Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5 of the Exchange Act; (3) Violations of Section 20(a) of the Exchange Act; (4) breach of fiduciary duty; (5) unjust enrichment; and (6) waste of corporate assets. On December 21, 2020, Plaintiffs Richard W. Moser and Jonathan Gonzalez filed a substantially similar shareholder derivative action, which has been consolidated with the McKenna action. The claims stem from substantially the same factual allegations set forth in the Shen securities class action lawsuit, described above. At this time, it is not practicable to render an opinion about whether an unfavorable outcome is probable or remote with respect to this matter; however, the Company believes it has meritorious defenses and will vigorously assert them.

Other

We are, from time to time, involved in other legal proceedings, inquiries, claims and disputes, which arise in the ordinary course of business. Although our management cannot predict the outcomes of these matters, our management believes these actions will not have a material, adverse effect on our financial position, results of operations or cash flows.

40

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Equity Compensation Plan Information

The following table provides information as of December 31, 2020, with respect to the shares of our Common Stock that may be issued under our existing equity compensation plans.

​

Sale of Unregistered Securities

There were no unregistered sales of equity securities in 2020 that have not been previously reported in a Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q or Current Report on Form 8-K.

42

Table of Contents

Reverse Stock Split

On January 25, 2021, we effected a one-for-three reverse split of our issued and outstanding shares of our Common Stock. At the effective time of the reverse split, every three (3) shares of Common Stock issued and outstanding were automatically combined into one (1) share of issued and outstanding Common Stock, without any change in the par value per share. Our Common Stock began trading on The Nasdaq Capital Market on a Reverse Stock Split-adjusted basis on January 26, 2021. There was no change in our ticker symbol as a result of the Reverse Stock Split.

​

43

Table of Contents

​

​

​

44

Table of Contents

Our Segments

Our three reportable segments are Information & Transaction Processing Solutions (“ITPS”), Healthcare Solutions (“HS”), and Legal & Loss Prevention Services (“LLPS”). These segments are comprised of significant strategic business units that align our TPS and EIM products and services with how we manage our business, approach our key markets and interact with our customers based on their respective industries.

ITPS: Our largest segment, ITPS, provides a wide range of solutions and services designed to aid businesses in information capture, processing, decisioning and distribution to customers primarily in the financial services, commercial, public sector and legal industries. Our major customers include many leading banks, insurance companies, and utilities, as well as hundreds of federal, state and government entities. Our ITPS offerings enable companies to increase availability of working capital, reduce turnaround times for application processes, increase regulatory compliance and enhance consumer engagement.

HS: HS operates and maintains a consulting and outsourcing business specializing in both the healthcare provider and payer markets. We serve the top healthcare insurance payers and hundreds of healthcare providers.

LLPS: Our LLPS segment provides a broad and active array of support services in connection with class action, bankruptcy labor, claims adjudication and employment and other legal matters. Our customer base consists of corporate counsel, government attorneys, and law firms.

Sale of Non-core Assets

On March 16, 2020, the Company and its indirect wholly owned subsidiaries, Merco Holdings, LLC and SourceHOV Tax, LLC entered into a Membership Interest Purchase Agreement with Gainline Source Intermediate Holdings LLC at which time Gainline Source Intermediate Holdings LLC acquired all of the outstanding membership interests of SourceHov Tax, LLC for $40.0 million subject to adjustment as set forth in the purchase agreement. On July 22, 2020, the Company completed the sale of its physical records storage and logistics business for a purchase price of $12.3 million.

Acquisitions

In April 2018 Exela completed the acquisition of Asterion International Group (“Asterion,” the “Asterion Business Combination”), a well-established provider of technology driven business process outsourcing, document management and business process automation across Europe. The acquisition was strategic to expanding Exela’s European business.

​

Revenues

ITPS revenues are primarily generated from a transaction-based pricing model for the various types of volumes processed, licensing and maintenance fees for technology sales, and a mix of fixed management fee and transactional revenue for document logistics and location services. HS revenues are primarily generated from a transaction-based pricing model for the various types of volumes processed for healthcare payers and providers. LLPS revenues are primarily based on time and materials pricing as well as through transactional services priced on a per item basis.

People

We draw on the business and technical expertise of our talented and diverse global workforce to provide our customers with high-quality services. Our business leaders bring a strong diversity of experience in our industry and a track record of successful performance and execution.

As of December 31, 2020, we had approximately 19,000 employees globally, with 59% located in Americas and EMEA, and the remainder located primarily in India, the Philippines and China.

45

Table of Contents

Costs associated with our employees represent the most significant expense for our business. We incurred personnel costs of $632.4 million, $721.9 million and $687.3 million for the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. The majority of our personnel costs are variable and are incurred only while we are providing our services.

Facilities

We lease and own numerous facilities worldwide with larger concentrations of space in Texas, Michigan, Connecticut, California, India, Mexico, the Philippines, and China. Our owned and leased facilities house general offices, sales offices, service locations, and production facilities.

The size of our active property portfolio as of December 31, 2020 was approximately 3.9 million square feet and comprised of 143 leased properties and 9 owned properties.

We believe that our current facilities are suitable and adequate for our current businesses. Because of the interrelation of our business segments, each of the segments uses substantially all of these properties at least in part.

Key Performance Indicators

We use a variety of operational and financial measures to assess our performance. Among the measures considered by our management are the following:

Revenue

We analyze our revenue by comparing actual monthly revenue to internal projections and prior periods across our operating segments in order to assess performance, identify potential areas for improvement, and determine whether segments are meeting management’s expectations.

EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA

We view EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA as important indicators of performance of our consolidated operations. We define EBITDA as net income, plus taxes, interest expense, and depreciation and amortization. We define Adjusted EBITDA as EBITDA plus optimization and restructuring charges, including severance and retention expenses; transaction and integration costs; other non-cash charges, including non-cash compensation, (gain) or loss from sale or disposal of assets, and impairment charges; and management fees and expenses. See “—Other Financial Information (Non-GAAP Financial Measures)” for more information and a reconciliation of EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA to net loss, the most directly comparable financial measure calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP.

46

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Cost of Revenue

For the year ended December 31, 2020, our direct costs decreased by $201.2 million, or 16.4%, compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. In our ITPS and HS segments, the decrease was primarily attributable to the corresponding decline in revenues. Costs on ITPS segment decreased by $186.6 million, or 18.6%, and HS segment decreased by $20.1 million, or 11.2%. Costs on LLPS segment increased by $5.6 million, or 13.0%.

​

The decrease in cost of revenues was primarily due to a decrease in employee-related costs of $103.1 million, lower travel costs of $4.4 million, lower infrastructure and maintenance costs of $17.6 million and other operating costs of $29.5 million. The lower costs were attributable to cost and capacity management as a result of COVID-19 and transition revenue impact during the year ended December 31, 2020. Cost of revenue includes accelerated amortization of $3.7 million for an operating lease right-of-use asset as the Company decided to permanently close one of its production facilities.

​

Cost of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2020 was 79.2% compared to 78.4% for the comparable same period in the prior year. The increase in cost of revenues, as a percentage of revenues by 0.8% was primarily due to the impact of costs related to the transition revenue that we expect to be gradually removed to further improve the gross margin profile of the business.

​

Selling, General and Administrative Expenses

SG&A expenses decreased $12.7 million, or 6.4%, to $186.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, compared to $198.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2019. The decrease was primarily attributable to lower employee related costs by $13.0 million, lower travel costs of $4.0 million, lower infrastructure and maintenance costs of $1.8 million and lower other costs of $4.3 million offset by higher professional fees of $10.4 million.

SG&A expenses increased as a percentage of revenues to 14.4% in 2020 as compared to 12.7% in 2019. The increase, as a percentage of revenues by 1.7%, was primarily due to the decline in revenues brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the transition revenue.

Depreciation & Amortization

Total depreciation and amortization expense was $94.0 million and $100.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively. The decrease in total depreciation and amortization expense by $7.0 million was primarily due to a reduction in depreciation expense as a result of the expiration of the lives of assets acquired in prior periods and decrease in intangibles amortization expense due to end of useful lives for certain intangible assets during the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019.

Impairment of Goodwill and Other Intangible Assets

The Company recorded no impairment of goodwill and other intangible assets during the year 2020. Impairment of goodwill and other intangible assets for the year ended December 31, 2019 was $349.6 million.

Related Party Expenses

Related party expense was $5.4 million and $9.5 million for the year ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively. The lower related party expense in 2020 is attributable to the curtailment in reimbursements made to Ex-Sigma and Ex-Sigma 2. In 2019 the Company paid approximately $4.3 million in respect of legal expenses, premium payments on the Margin Loan and other expenses related to secondary offerings that did not recur in 2020.

48

Table of Contents

Interest Expense

Interest expense was $173.9 million and $163.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively. The increase in interest costs was partially attributable to the interest on securitization facilities and other interest accruals that was not incurred during the corresponding period in 2019.

Loss on Extinguishment of Debt

Loss on extinguishment of debt for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019 was $9.6 million and $1.4 million respectively. The Company recognized $1.3 million and $8.3 million in debt extinguishment costs during 2020, for the partial debt extinguishment resulting from amendment to the Term Loan in 2020 and the extinguishment of A/R Facility, respectively. The repricing and issuance of the 2019 incremental Term Loans resulted in the partial debt extinguishment, for which Exela recognized $1.4 million in debt extinguishment costs during 2019.

Sundry Expense (Income)

The decrease of $1.1 million over the prior year period was primarily attributable to foreign currency transaction gain / losses associated with exchange rate fluctuations.

Other Expense (Income)

Other expense (income), net was $(34.8) million and $14.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively. The change was primarily due to the $35.5 million resulting from gain recognized on the sale of SourceHOV Tax, LLC and the $8.7 million gain on the sale of the physical records storage and logistics business. Other expense (income) also includes an interest rate swap entered into in 2017. The interest rate swap was not designated as a hedge. As such, changes in the fair value of this derivative instrument are recorded directly in earnings. For the year ended December 31, 2020, the fair value of the interest swap liability decreased resulting in a gain of $0.4 million.

Income Tax Expense

We had an income tax expense of $13.6 million and $7.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively. The change in the income tax expense was primarily attributable to our change in judgment related to the realizability of certain deferred tax assets. The change in the effective tax rate for the year ended December 31, 2020, resulted from permanent tax adjustments and valuation allowances, including valuation allowances against disallowed interest expense deferred tax assets that are not more-likely-than-not to be realized.

49

Table of Contents

Revenue

Our revenue decreased $23.9 million, or 1.5%, to $1,562.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $1,586.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. This decrease is primarily related to a decrease in our ITPS segment revenues of $39.4 million and LLPS segment revenue of $13.2 million. The decrease was partially offset by an increase in revenues in the HS segment by $28.7 million. Our ITPS, HS, and LLPS segments constituted 79.0%, 16.4%, and 4.6% of our total revenue, respectively, for the year ended December 31, 2019, compared to 80.3%, 14.4%, and 5.3%, respectively, for the year ended December 31, 2018. The revenue changes by reporting segment were as follows:

ITPS—Revenues decreased $39.4 million, or 3.1%, to $1,234.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $1,273.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The decrease was primarily attributable to the low margin contract exit in the third quarter of 2018 and adverse currency impact that was offset partially by the revenue from acquisitions completed in 2018.

HS—Revenues increased $28.7 million, or 12.6%, to $256.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $228.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The increase was primarily attributable to the ramp up of new businesses.

LLPS—Revenues decreased $13.2 million, or 15.6%, to $71.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $84.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The decrease was primarily attributable to lower revenue resulting from legal claims administration services of $11.3 million during the year ended December 31, 2019, compared to the year ended December 31, 2018.

50

Table of Contents

Cost of Revenue

Cost of revenue increased $11.3 million, or 0.9%, to $1,224.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $1,213.4 million for year ended December 31, 2018. The increase was primarily attributable to an increase in the HS segment of $28.2 million that was offset by a decrease in the ITPS and LLPS segments of $8.7 million and $8.2 million respectively. The cost of revenue changes by operating segment was as follows:

ITPS—Cost of revenue decreased $8.7 million, or 0.9%, to $1,001.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $1,010.3 million for year ended December 31, 2018. The decrease was attributable to the corresponding revenue decline and flow through of savings that was offset by cost inflation. Cost of revenue as a percentage of revenue increased by 190 basis points from 79.3% for the year ended December 31, 2018 to 81.2% for the year ended December 31, 2019.

HS—Cost of revenue was $180.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2019, up $28.2 million, or 18.5%, from $151.9 million in for the year ended December 31, 2018. The increase was primarily attributable an increase in volumes and ramp up of the healthcare asset acquisition from 2018, including additions to our operational headcount for the large new deals. Cost of revenue as a percentage of revenue increased by 350 basis points from 66.6% for the year ended December 31, 2018 to 70.1% for the year ended December 31, 2019.

LLPS—Cost of revenue decreased $8.2 million, or 16.0%, to $43.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $51.2 million for year ended December 31, 2018. The decrease was primarily attributable to the lower costs on the legal claims administration of $5.8 million as a result of corresponding revenue decline. Cost of revenue as a percentage of revenue remained relatively flat from 60.6% for the year ended December 31, 2018 compared to 60.4% for the year ended December 31, 2019.

Selling, General and Administrative Expenses (“SG&A”)

Selling, general, and administrative expenses increased $14.0 million, or 7.5%, to $198.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $184.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The increase was primarily attributable to higher professional and legal expenses.

Depreciation & Amortization

Depreciation and amortization expense decreased $37.2 million, or 26.9%, to $100.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $138.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The decrease was primarily attributable to accelerated amortization of trademarks and trade name write off that ended on December 31, 2018.

​

Impairment of Goodwill and Other Intangible Assets

Impairment of goodwill and other intangible assets for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2018 was $349.6 million and $48.1 million respectively. During the three months ended September 30, 2019, the Company made an evaluation based on factors such as changes in the Company’s growth rate and recent trends in the Company’s market capitalization, and concluded that a triggering event for an interim impairment analysis had occurred in the third quarter of 2019. As a result of the interim impairment assessment, the Company recorded an impairment charge to goodwill and trade names of $96.2 million and $1.0 million, respectively. Due to continued depressed market capitalization during the three months ended December 31, 2019, another triggering event resulted in additional impairment charge of $252.4 million to goodwill at LLPS and ITPS reporting unit.

Related Party Expense

Related party expense decreased $2.9 million, or 23.4%, to $9.5 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $12.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The decrease was primarily attributable to an overall reduction in the expenses required to be reimbursed to Ex-Sigma 2 pursuant to the terms of the Consent, Waiver and Amendment.

51

Table of Contents

Interest Expense

Interest expense increased $7.5 million, or 4.8%, to $163.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $156.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The increase was primarily attributable accrued interest for the Appraisal Action.

Loss on Extinguishment of Debt

Loss on extinguishment of debt for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2018 was $1.4 million and $1.1 million. The Repricing and issuance of the 2019 and 2018 Incremental Term Loans resulted in the partial debt extinguishment, for which Exela recognized $1.4 million and $1.1 million in debt extinguishment costs.

Sundry Expense (income)

Sundry expense increased by $4.2 million to $1.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $(3.3) million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The increase was mainly attributable to foreign currency transaction losses associated with exchange rate fluctuations.

Other Income

Other income for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2018 was $(14.4) million and $3.0 million respectively. The decrease of $17.5 million over the prior year period is primarily attributable to the Appraisal Action settlement expenses and an interest rate swap entered into in 2017. The interest rate swap was not designated as a hedge. As such, changes in the fair value of this derivative instrument are recorded directly in earnings.

Income Tax (Expense) Benefit

Income tax expense decreased $0.7 million to $7.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $8.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The December 31, 2019 federal tax expense is primarily due to the impact of the TCJA.

Other Financial Information (Non-GAAP Financial Measures)

We view EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA as important indicators of performance. We define EBITDA as net income, plus taxes, interest expense, and depreciation and amortization. We define Adjusted EBITDA as EBITDA plus optimization and restructuring charges, including severance and retention expenses; transaction and integration costs; other non-cash charges, including non-cash compensation, (gain) or loss from sale or disposal of assets, and impairment charges; and management fees and expenses.

We present EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA because we believe they provide useful information regarding the factors and trends affecting our business in addition to measures calculated under GAAP. Additionally, our credit agreement requires us to comply with certain EBITDA related metrics. Refer to—“Liquidity and Capital Resources—Indebtedness.”

Note Regarding Non-GAAP Financial Measures

EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA are not financial measures presented in accordance with GAAP. We believe that the presentation of these non-GAAP financial measures will provide useful information to investors in assessing our financial performance and results of operations as our board of directors and management use EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA to assess our financial performance, because it allows them to compare our operating performance on a consistent basis across periods by removing the effects of our capital structure (such as varying levels of interest expense), asset base (such as depreciation and amortization) and items outside the control of our management team. Net loss is the GAAP measure most directly comparable to EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA. Our non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered as alternatives to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure. Each of

52

Table of Contents

these non-GAAP financial measures has important limitations as analytical tools because they exclude some but not all items that affect the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are not required to be uniformly applied, are not audited and should not be considered in isolation or as substitutes for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. Because EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA may be defined differently by other companies in our industry, our definitions of these non-GAAP financial measures may not be comparable to similarly titled measures of other companies, thereby diminishing their utility.

The following tables present a reconciliation of EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA to our net loss, the most directly comparable GAAP measure, for the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019, and 2018:

53

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

On January 10, 2020 certain subsidiaries of the Company entered into a $160.0 million accounts receivable securitization facility with a five year term (the “A/R Facility”). The Company used the proceeds of the initial borrowings to repay outstanding revolving borrowings under the Company’s senior credit facility and to provide additional liquidity and funding for the ongoing business needs of the Company and its subsidiaries.

On March 16, 2020, the Company and its indirect wholly owned subsidiaries, Merco Holdings, LLC and SourceHOV Tax, LLC entered into a Membership Interest Purchase Agreement with Gainline Source Intermediate Holdings LLC at which time Gainline Source Intermediate Holdings LLC acquired all of the outstanding membership interests of SourceHov Tax for $40.0 million, subject to adjustment as set forth in the purchase agreement of approximately $2.0 million.

On March 26, 2020, the Delaware Court of Chancery entered a judgment against one of our subsidiaries in the amount of $57.7 million inclusive of costs and interest arising out of the petition for appraisal pursuant to 8 Del. C. § 262 in the Delaware Court of Chancery, captioned Manichaean Capital, LLC, et al. v. SourceHOV Holdings, Inc., C.A. No. 2017 0673 JRS (pursuant to which former stockholders of SourceHOV sought, among other things, a determination of the fair value of their 10,304 SourceHOV shares at the time of the Novitex Business Combination) (the “Appraisal Action”), which judgment will continue to accrue interest, until paid, at the legal rate, compounded quarterly. SourceHOV appealed the judgment to the Supreme Court of the State of Delaware on June 30, 2020. On January 22, 2021, the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the Delaware Court of Chancery in favor of the appraisal petitioners. As of December 31, 2020, the Company has accrued a liability of $60.7 million for the Appraisal Action based on management’s best estimate of SourceHOV’s total payment obligation including accrued interest as of such date. To date, SourceHOV has not paid the judgment in the Appraisal Action, and the petitioners have not been successful in their attempts to collect on the judgment against SourceHOV.

The petitioners have filed additional actions seeking to enforce their award against SourceHOV, including an action alleging unjust enrichment and seeking restitution and to pierce the corporate veil and seek alter ego liability against Exela Technologies, Inc. and over 50 alleged subsidiaries and/or affiliates. The appraisal petitioners have filed additional actions to recognize the judgment against SourceHOV, an action alleging unjust enrichment and seeking restitution and to pierce the corporate veil and seek alter ego liability against Exela Technologies, Inc. and over 50 alleged subsidiaries and/or affiliates in an attempt to collect the award in the Appraisal Action from entities other than SourceHOV, and an action against SourceHOV and certain of its directors and officers alleging creditor derivative claims relating to the Company’s securitization facilities. In early February 2021, petitioners also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in the derivative action in which they seek a court order freezing certain property and prohibiting certain transfers and payments by Exela subsidiaries other that SourceHOV, including preventing them from paying their creditors unless the payments are made equally among Exela’s other creditors and toward the Appraisal Action liability. If the petitioners are successful in their efforts to accelerate payment of the entire judgment, such action could have a material adverse effect on our liquidity and/or cause certain of our secured lenders to take action adverse to us.

On March 27, 2020, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) was enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The CARES Act, among other things, includes provisions relating to refundable payroll tax credits, deferment of employer side social security payments, net operating loss carryback periods, alternative minimum tax credit refunds, modifications to the net interest deduction limitations and technical corrections to tax depreciation methods for qualified improvement property. The Company continues to evaluate the impact of the CARES Act, and at present expects that the refundable payroll tax credits and deferment of employer side social security payments provisions of the CARES Act to materially benefit the Company. The Company will also defer certain payroll, social security and value added taxes in various European jurisdictions, as permitted under the recently enacted COVID-19 relief measures.

On May 18, 2020, the Company amended the Prior Credit Agreement to, among other things, extend the time for delivery of its audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2019 and its financial statements for the quarter ended March 31, 2020. Pursuant to the amendment, the Company also amended the Prior Credit Agreement to, among other things: restrict the borrower and its subsidiaries’ ability to designate or invest in unrestricted subsidiaries; incur certain debt; create certain liens; make certain investments; pay certain dividends or other distributions on account of its equity interests; make certain asset sales or other dispositions (or utilize the proceeds of certain asset sales to

55

Table of Contents

reinvest in the business); or enter into certain affiliate transactions pursuant to the negative covenants under the Credit Agreement. Further, pursuant to the amendment, the borrower under the Credit Agreement is also required to maintain a minimum Liquidity (as defined in the Credit Agreement) of $35.0 million. On May 21, 2020, the Company also amended the A/R Facility to, among other things, extend the time for delivery of its audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2019 and its financial statements for the quarter ended March 31, 2020. Upon delivery of such financial statements, the Company became in compliance with the Credit Agreement, the indenture for its outstanding Notes and the A/R Facility with respect to the financial statement delivery requirements set forth therein.

On July 22, 2020 the Company completed the sale of its physical records storage and logistics business for a purchase price of $12.3 million which can be used to acquire, maintain, develop, construct, improve, upgrade or repair assets useful in our business or to make certain investments and acquisitions as permitted by the Credit Agreement.

On December 17, 2020 certain subsidiaries of the Company entered into a $145.0 million securitization facility with a five year term (the “Securitization Facility”). On December 17, 2020 the Company made the initial borrowing of approximately $92.0 million under the Securitization Facility and used a portion of the proceeds to repay the A/R Facility, which terminated on such date. The Company used the remaining proceeds for general corporate purposes.

Analysis of Cash Flow Changes between the years ended December 31, 2020, December 31, 2019, and December 31, 2018

Operating Activities— Net cash used in operating activities was $29.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, compared to cash used in operating activities of $63.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2019. The increase of $34.0 million in cash flows from operating activities for the year ended December 31, 2020 was due to lower Gross profits in the corresponding period offset by higher cash flow from working capital primarily driven by $46 million improvement in our accounts receivables. “Gross profit” is defined as revenue less cost of revenue (exclusive of depreciation and amortization). This decrease in cash flow was significantly offset by higher cash flows from accounts receivables.

Net cash used in operating activities was $63.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2019, compared to $23.6 million cash provided by operating activities for the year ended December 31, 2018. The decrease of $87.5 million in cash flow from operating activities was primarily driven by increase in operating loss by $49.2 million including $35.2 million lower Gross profit and $14.0 million higher selling, general and administrative expenses in 2019 as compared to 2018. “Gross profit” is defined as revenue less cost of revenue (exclusive of depreciation and amortization). The rest of the decline was driven mainly by working capital items including $13.7 million pay down of accounts payables and $13.6 million pay down of related party payables as compared to 2018.

Investing Activities— Net cash provided by investing activities was $21.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, compared to cash used in investing activities of $25.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2019. The increase of $46.6 million in cash used in investing activities for the year ended December 31, 2020 was primarily due to $50.1 million total cash proceeds received from asset sales, lower additions to Property, plant and equipment and

56

Table of Contents

development of internal software offset by partial settlement of the liabilities related to the healthcare acquisition announced early in the first quarter of 2019.

Net cash used in investing activities was $25.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2019, compared to cash used in investing activities of $58.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The decrease of $33.6 million in cash used in investing activities was primarily due to a decrease in cash spent on acquisitions compared to previous year (in 2018 Company made three acquisitions in Europe and acquired certain healthcare assets) as well as lower capital expenditures to add Property, Plant & Equipment.

Financing Activities— Net cash provided by financing activities was $63.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, compared to cash provided by financing activities of $59.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2019. The increase of $4.3 million in cash provided by financing activities for the year ended December 31, 2020 was primarily due to the proceeds from securitization facilities and revolving credit facility offset by principal payments made on debt.

Net cash provided by financing activities was $59.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2019, compared to cash used by financing activities of $2.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The increase of approximately $61.7 million in cash provided by financing activities was primarily due to $65 million of revolver draw during 2019.

Indebtedness

In connection with the Novitex Business Combination, we acquired debt facilities and issued notes totaling $1.4 billion. Proceeds from the indebtedness were used to pay off credit facilities existing immediately before the Novitex Business Combination.

Senior Credit Facilities

On July 12, 2017, the Company entered into a First Lien Credit Agreement with Royal Bank of Canada, Credit Suisse AG, Cayman Islands Branch, Natixis, New York Branch and KKR Corporate Lending LLC (the “Credit Agreement”) providing Exela Intermediate LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company, upon the terms and subject to the conditions set forth in the Credit Agreement, (i) a $350.0 million senior secured term loan maturing July 12, 2023 with an original issue discount of $7.0 million, and (ii) a $100.0 million senior secured revolving facility maturing July 12, 2022. The Credit Agreement provided for the following interest rates for borrowings under the senior secured term facility and senior secured revolving facility: at the Company’s option, either (1) an adjusted LIBOR, subject to a 1.0% floor in the case of term loans, or (2) a base rate, in each case plus an applicable margin. The initial applicable margin for the senior secured term facility was 7.5% with respect to LIBOR borrowings and 6.5% with respect to base rate borrowings. The initial applicable margin for the senior secured revolving facility was 7.0% with respect to LIBOR borrowings and 6.0% with respect to base rate borrowings. The applicable margin for borrowings under the senior secured revolving facility is subject to step-downs based on leverage ratios. The senior secured term loan is subject to amortization payments, commencing on the last day of the first full fiscal quarter of the Company following the closing date, of 0.6% of the aggregate principal amount for each of the first eight payments and 1.3% of the aggregate principal amount for payments thereafter, with any balance due at maturity.

On July 13, 2018, Exela successfully repriced the $343.4 million of term loans outstanding under its senior secured credit facilities (the “Repricing”). The Repricing was accomplished pursuant to a First Amendment to First Lien Credit Agreement (the “First Amendment”), dated as of July 13, 2018, by and among Exela Intermediate Holdings LLC, the Company, each “Subsidiary Loan Party” listed on the signature pages thereto, Royal Bank of Canada, as administrative agent, and each of the lenders party thereto, whereby the Company borrowed $343.4 million of refinancing term loans (the “Repricing Term Loans”) to refinance the Company’s existing senior secured term loans.

​

The Repricing Term Loans bear interest at a rate per annum of, at the Company’s option, either (a) a LIBOR rate determined by reference to the costs of funds for Eurodollar deposits for the interest period relevant to such borrowing, adjusted for certain additional costs, subject to a 1.0% floor, or (b) a base rate determined by reference to the highest of

57

Table of Contents

(i) the federal funds rate plus 0.5%, (ii) the prime rate and (iii) the one-month adjusted LIBOR plus 1.0%, in each case plus an applicable margin of 6.5% for LIBOR loans and 5.5% for base rate loans.  The interest rates applicable to the Repricing Term Loans are 100 basis points lower than the interest rates applicable to the existing senior secured term loans that were incurred on July 12, 2017 pursuant to the Credit Agreement. The Repricing Term Loans will mature on July 12, 2023, the same maturity date as the existing senior secured term loans. As of December 31, 2020, the interest rate applicable for the first lien senior secured term loan was 8.3%.

​

On July 13, 2018, the Company successfully borrowed an additional $30.0 million pursuant to incremental term loans (the “2018 Incremental Term Loans”) under the First Amendment to the Credit Agreement. The proceeds of the 2018 Incremental Term Loans were used by the Company for general corporate purposes and to pay fees and expenses in connection with the First Amendment.

On April 16, 2019, the Company successfully borrowed a further $30.0 million pursuant to incremental term loans (the “2019 Incremental Term Loans”, and, together with the 2018 Incremental Terms Loans, the “Incremental Term Loans”) under the Second Amendment to the Credit Agreement. The proceeds of the 2019 Incremental Term Loans were used to replace cash spent for acquisitions, pay related fees, expenses and related borrowings for general corporate purposes.

The Incremental Term Loans bear interest at a rate per annum that is the same as the Repricing Term Loans. The Incremental Term Loans will mature on July 12, 2023, the same maturity date as the Repricing Term Loans. The Company may voluntarily repay the Repricing Term Loans and the Incremental Term Loans (collectively, the “ Term Loans”) at any time, without prepayment premium or penalty, subject to customary “ breakage” costs with respect to LIBOR rate loans. Other than as described above, the terms, conditions and covenants applicable to the Incremental Term Loans are consistent with the terms, conditions and covenants that were applicable to the Repricing Term Loans under the Credit Agreement.

On May 18, 2020, the Company amended the Credit Agreement to, among other things, extend the time for delivery of its audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2019 and its financial statements for the quarter ended March 31, 2020. Pursuant to the amendment, the Company also agreed to amend the Credit Agreement to, among other things: restrict the borrower and its subsidiaries’ ability to designate or invest in unrestricted subsidiaries; incur certain debt; create certain liens; make certain investments; pay certain dividends or other distributions on account of its equity interests; make certain asset sales or other dispositions (or utilize the proceeds of certain asset sales to reinvest in the business); or enter into certain affiliate transactions pursuant to the negative covenants under the Credit Agreement. In addition, pursuant to the amendment, the borrower under the Credit Agreement is required to maintain minimum Liquidity (as defined in the amendment) of $35.0 million.

Letters of Credit

As of December 31, 2020 and 2019, we had outstanding irrevocable letters of credit totaling approximately $19.5 million and $20.6 million, respectively, under the senior secured revolving facility.

Senior Secured Notes

Upon the closing of the Novitex Business Combination on July 12, 2017, the Company issued $1.0 billion in aggregate principal amount of 10.0% First Priority Senior Secured Notes due 2023 (the “Notes”). The Notes are guaranteed by certain subsidiaries of the Company. The Notes bear interest at a rate of 10.0% per year. The Company pays interest on the Notes on January 15 and July 15 of each year, commencing on January 15, 2018. The Notes are guaranteed by subsidiary guarantors pursuant to a supplemental indenture. The Notes will mature on July 15, 2023.

Securitization Facilities

On January 10, 2020, certain subsidiaries of the Company entered into the $160.0 million A/R Facility with a five year term. In the A/R Facility, (i) Exela Receivables 1, LLC (the “A/R Borrower”), a wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of the Company, entered into a Loan and Security Agreement (the “A/R Loan Agreement”), dated as of

58

Table of Contents

January 10, 2020, with TPG Specialty Lending, Inc., as administrative agent (the “A/R Administrative Agent”), PNC Bank National Association, as LC Bank (the “A/R LC Bank”), the lenders (each, an “A/R Lender” and collectively the “A/R Lenders”) and the Company, as initial servicer, pursuant to which the A/R Lenders made loans (the “A/R Loan”) to the A/R Borrower used to purchase certain receivables and related assets from its sole member, Exela Receivables Holdco, LLC (the “A/R Parent SPE”), a wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of the Company, (ii) sixteen other indirect, wholly-owned U.S. subsidiaries of the Company (collectively, the “A/R Originators”) sold or contributed to the A/R Parent SPE certain receivables and related assets in consideration for a combination of cash, equity in the A/R Parent SPE and/or letters of credit issued by the A/R LC Bank to the A/R Originators; and (iii) the A/R Parent SPE sold or contributed to the Borrower certain receivables and related assets in consideration for a combination of cash, equity in the A/R Borrower and/or letters of credit issued by the LC Bank to the beneficiaries elected by A/R Parent SPE.

The Company used the proceeds of the initial borrowings under the A/R Facility to repay outstanding revolving borrowings under the Company’s senior credit facility and to provide additional liquidity and funding for the ongoing business needs of the Company and its subsidiaries.

The A/R Borrower and A/R Parent SPE were formed in December 2019, and are consolidated into the Company’s financial statements. The A/R Borrower and A/R Parent SPE are bankruptcy remote entities and as such their assets are not available to creditors of the Company or any of its subsidiaries. Since January 10, 2020, the parties amended and waived the A/R Facility several times to address contractually, the occurrence of certain events, including among other things, the delay in delivery of annual financial statements for the fiscal year ended 2019, financial statements for the quarter ended March 31, 2020, and the Initial Servicer’s Liquidity (as defined in the A/R Facility) falling below $60.0 million. In connection with these amendments a forbearance fee of $4.8 million was due and added to the outstanding principal balance of the loans. The Company concluded that the amendment represented modification of debt under ASC 470-50. Accordingly, the forbearance fee paid was added to unamortized debt issuance cost and amortized ratably over the remaining term of the A/R facility.

Each loan under the A/R Facility originally bore interest on the unpaid principal amount as follows: (1) if a Base Rate Loan, at 3.75% plus a rate equal to the greater of (a) the Prime Rate in effect on such day, (b) the Federal Funds Effective Rate in effect on such day plus 0.50%, (c) the Adjusted LIBOR Rate (calculated based upon an Interest Period of one month and determined on a daily basis) plus 1.00%, and (d) 4.50% per annum and (2) if a LIBOR Rate Loan, 4.75% plus a floating LIBOR Rate with a 1.00% LIBOR floor. In connection with the above described amendments to the A/R Facility, the applicable margin of the Base Rate Loans was increased to 5.75% and the LIBOR Rate Loans was increased to 6.75%. As of December 31, 2020, there were no borrowings outstanding under the A/R Facility.

On December 17, 2020, the Company repaid in full the loans outstanding under the A/R Facility.  The aggregate outstanding principal amount of loans under the A/R Facility as of such date was approximately $83.0 million.  The early termination of the A/R Facility triggered an early termination fee of $0.8 million and required repayment of approximately $0.5 million in respect of principal, accrued interest and fees. All obligations under the A/R Facility (other than contingent indemnification obligations that expressly survive termination) terminated upon repayment. The A/R Facility was replaced by the Securitization Facility as described below.

On December 17, 2020, certain subsidiaries of Company closed on Securitization Facility with a five year term.  Borrowings under the Securitization Facility are subject to an improved borrowing base definition over the A/R Facility that consists of receivables and, subject to contribution, further supported by inventory and intellectual property, in each case, subject to certain eligibility criteria, concentration limits and reserves. 

The Securitization Facility provided for an initial funding of approximately $92.0 million supported by the receivables portion of the borrowing base and, subject to contribution, a further funding of approximately $53.0 million supported by inventory and intellectual property. On December 17, 2020 the Company made the initial borrowing of approximately $92.0 million under the Securitization Facility and used a portion of the proceeds to repay the A/R Facility and used the remaining proceeds for general corporate purposes.

59

Table of Contents

The initial documentation for the Securitization Facility includes (i) a Loan and Security Agreement (the “Securitization Loan Agreement”), dated as of December 10, 2020, by and among Exela Receivables 3, LLC (the “Securitization Borrower”), a wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of the Company, the lenders (each, a “Securitization Lender” and collectively the “Securitization Lenders”), Alter Domus (US), LLC, as administrative agent (the “Securitization Administrative Agent”) and the Company, as initial servicer, pursuant to which the Securitization Lenders will make loans to the Securitization Borrower to be used to purchase receivables and related assets from the Securitization Parent SPE (as defined below), (ii) a First Tier Receivables Purchase and Sale Agreement (the, dated as of December 17, 2020, by and among Exela Receivables 3 Holdco, LLC (the “Securitization Parent SPE”), a wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of the Company, and certain other indirect, wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Company listed therein (collectively, the “Securitization Originators”), and the Company, as initial servicer, pursuant to which each Securitization Originator has sold or contributed and will sell or contribute to the Securitization Parent SPE certain receivables and related assets in consideration for a combination of cash and equity in the Securitization Parent SPE, (iii) a Second Tier Receivables Purchase and Sale Agreement, dated as of December 17, 2020, by and among, the Securitization Borrower, the Securitization Parent SPE and the Company, as initial servicer, pursuant to which Securitization Parent SPE has sold or contributed and will sell or contribute to the Securitization Borrower certain receivables and related assets in consideration for a combination of cash and equity in the Securitization Borrower, (iv) the Sub-Servicing Agreement, dated as of December 17, 2020, by and among the Company and each Securitization Originator, (v) the Pledge and Guaranty, dated as of the December 10, 2020, between the Securitization Parent SPE and the Administrative Agent, and (vi) the Performance Guaranty, dated as of December 17, 2020, between the Company, as performance guarantor, and the Securitization Administrative Agent (and together with all other certificates, instruments, UCC financing statements, reports, notices, agreements and documents executed or delivered in connection with the Securitization Loan Agreement, the “Securitization Agreements”).

The Securitization Borrower, the Company, the Securitization Parent SPE and the Securitization Originators provide customary representations and covenants under the Securitization Agreements. The Securitization Loan Agreement provides for certain events of default upon the occurrence of which the Securitization Administrative Agent may declare the facility’s termination date to have occurred and declare the outstanding Securitization Loan and all other obligations of the Securitization Borrower to be immediately due and payable, however the Securitization Facility does not include an ongoing liquidity covenant like the A/R Facility and aligns reporting obligations with the Company’s other material indebtedness agreements.

The Securitization Borrower and Securitization Parent SPE were formed in December 2020, and are consolidated into the Company’s financial statements. The Securitization Borrower and Securitization Parent SPE are bankruptcy remote entities and as such their assets are not available to creditors of the Company or any of its subsidiaries. Each loan under the Securitization Facility bears interest on the unpaid principal amount as follows: (i) if a Base Rate Loan, at a rate per annum equal to (x) the greatest of (a) the Prime Rate in effect on such day, (b) the Federal Funds Effective Rate in effect on such day plus 0.50% and (c) the Adjusted LIBOR Rate (as defined in the Securitization Loan Agreement) plus 1.00%, plus (y) 8.75%; or (ii) if a LIBOR Rate Loan, at the Adjusted LIBOR Rate plus 9.75%. As of December 31, 2020, there were borrowings of $91.9 million outstanding under the Securitization Facility.

Potential Future Transactions

We may, from time to time explore and evaluate possible strategic transactions, which may include joint ventures, as well as business combinations or the acquisition or disposition of assets. In order to pursue certain of these opportunities, additional funds will likely be required. Subject to applicable contractual restrictions, to obtain such financing, we may seek to use cash on hand, borrowings under our revolving credit facilities, or we may seek to raise additional debt or equity financing through private placements or through underwritten offerings. There can be no assurance that we will enter into additional strategic transactions or alliances, nor do we know if we will be able to obtain the necessary financing for transactions that require additional funds on favorable terms, if at all. In addition, pursuant to the Registration Rights Agreement that we entered into in connection with the closing of the Novitex Business Combination, certain of our stockholders have the right to demand underwritten offerings of our Common Stock. We may from time to time in the future explore, with certain of those stockholders the possibility of an underwritten public offering of our Common Stock held by those stockholders. There can be no assurance as to whether or when an offering may be commenced or completed, or as to the actual size or terms of the offering.

60

Table of Contents

Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates

The preparation of financial statements requires the use of judgments and estimates. Our critical accounting policies are described below to provide a better understanding of how we develop our assumptions and judgments about future events and related estimations and how they can impact our financial statements. A critical accounting estimate is one that requires subjective or complex estimates and assessments, and is fundamental to our results of operations. We base our estimates on historical experience and on various other assumptions we believe to be reasonable according to the current facts and circumstances, the results of which form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets and liabilities that are not readily apparent from other sources. We believe the current assumptions, judgments and estimates used to determine amounts reflected in our consolidated financial statements are appropriate; however, actual results may differ under different conditions. This discussion and analysis should be read in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements and related notes included in this document.

Goodwill and other intangible assets: Goodwill and other intangible assets are initially recorded at their fair values. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price of acquisitions over the fair value of the net assets acquired. Our goodwill at December 31, 2020 and 2019 was $359.8 million. Goodwill and other intangible assets not subject to amortization are tested for impairment annually or more frequently if events or changes in circumstances indicate that the asset might be impaired. Intangible assets with finite useful lives are amortized either on a straight-line basis over the asset’s estimated useful life or on a basis that reflects the pattern in which the economic benefits of the intangible assets are realized.

Impairment of goodwill, long-lived and other intangible assets: Long-lived assets, such as property and equipment and finite-lived intangible assets are evaluated for impairment whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate that their carrying value may not be recoverable. Recoverability is measured by a comparison of their carrying amount to the estimated undiscounted cash flows to be generated by those assets. If the undiscounted cash flows are less than the carrying amount, we record impairment losses for the excess of the carrying value over the estimated fair value. Fair value is determined, in part, by the estimated cash flows to be generated by those assets. Our cash flow estimates are based upon, among other things, historical results adjusted to reflect our best estimate of future market rates, and operating performance. Development of future cash flows also requires us to make assumptions and to apply judgment, including timing of future expected cash flows, using the appropriate discount rates, and determining salvage values. The estimate of fair value represents our best estimates of these factors, and is subject to variability. Assets are generally grouped at the lowest level of identifiable cash flows, which is the reporting unit level for us. Changes to our key assumptions related to future performance and other economic factors could adversely affect our impairment valuation.

We conduct our annual goodwill impairment tests on October 1st of each year, or more frequently if indicators of impairment exist. When performing the annual impairment test, we have the option of performing a qualitative or quantitative assessment to determine if an impairment has occurred. If a qualitative assessment indicates that it is more likely than not that the fair value of a reporting unit is less than its carrying amount, we would be required to perform a quantitative impairment test for goodwill. A quantitative test requires comparison of fair value of the reporting unit to its carrying value, including goodwill. We use a combination of the Guideline Public Company Method of the Market Approach and the Discounted Cash Flow Method of the Income Approach to determine the reporting unit fair value. For the Guideline Public Company Method, our annual impairment test utilizes valuation multiples of publicly traded peer companies. For the Discounted Cash Flow Method, our annual impairment test utilizes discounted cash flow projections using market participant weighted average cost of capital calculation. If the fair value of goodwill at the reporting unit level is less than its carrying value, an impairment loss is recorded for the amount by which a reporting unit’s carrying amount exceeds its fair value, limited to the total amount of goodwill allocated to that reporting unit.

We conducted our annual goodwill impairment test for year 2020 on October1, 2020 and concluded that there was no impairment in our goodwill and other intangible assets during the year. During the third quarter of 2019, the Company concluded that a triggering event for an interim impairment analysis had occurred as discussed above. As part of the interim impairment assessment performed on September 30, 2019, it was determined that the increase in the discount rate applied in the valuation was required to reflect current market dynamics and company-specific risk. This higher discount rate, in conjunction with revised long-term projections, resulted in lower than previously projected discounted long-term future cash flows for the reporting units which reduced the estimated fair value to below carrying

61

Table of Contents

value. As a result of the interim impairment assessment in the third quarter, the Company recorded an impairment charge of $87.9 million and $8.3 million to goodwill at ITPS and LLPS reporting units, respectively. The Company did not perform a separate annual impairment test as of October 1, 2019 as the impairment test performed during the quarter-ended September 30, 2019 was one day from the annual impairment test date. Additionally, later during the fourth quarter of 2019, the Company conducted its annual budgeting process along with an update to its long-range plan. Following the completion of that process, the Company made an evaluation based on factors such as changes in the Company’s growth rate and recent trends in the Company’s market capitalization, concluding that a second triggering event for an impairment analysis had occurred. As a result, we performed another quantitative impairment test as of December 31, 2019, resulting in an additional goodwill impairment charge of $229.7 million and $22.7 million to goodwill at ITPS and LLPS reporting units, respectively. Therefore, as a result of these two impairment assessments in the third and fourth quarters of 2019, a total impairment charge of $348.6 was recorded to goodwill for the year ended December 31, 2019.

Application of the goodwill impairment test requires judgment, including the identification of reporting units, allocation of assets and liabilities to reporting units, and determination of fair value. The determination of reporting unit fair value is sensitive to the amount of Revenue and EBITDA generated by us, as well as the Revenue and EBITDA market multiples used in the calculation. Additionally, the fair value is sensitive to changes in the valuation assumptions such as expected income tax rate, risk-free rate, asset beta, and various risk premiums. Unanticipated changes, including immaterial revisions, to these assumptions could result in a provision for impairment in a future period. Given the nature of these evaluations and their application to specific assets and time frames, it is not possible to reasonably quantify the impact of changes in these assumptions.

In the process of reconciling the fair values of the Company’s reporting units to its overall market capitalization, the Company used a combination of both quantitative and qualitative considerations, arriving at the implied control premium of 41.4%. The implied control premium was computed using the Company’s closing stock price as of October 1, 2020.

Revenue: We account for revenue in accordance with ASC 606. A performance obligation is a promise in a contract to transfer a distinct good or service to the customer, and is the unit of account in ASC 606. Revenue is measured as the amount of consideration we expect to receive in exchange for transferring goods or providing services. The contract transaction price is allocated to each distinct performance obligation and recognized as revenue when, or as, the performance obligation is satisfied. All of our material sources of revenue are derived from contracts with customers, primarily relating to the provision of business and transaction processing services within each of our segments. We do not have any significant extended payment terms, as payment is received shortly after goods are delivered or services are provided. Refer to Note 2—Basis of Presentation and Summary of Significant Accounting Policies for additional information regarding our revenue recognition policy.

​

Income Taxes: We account for income taxes by using the asset and liability method. We account for income taxes regarding uncertain tax positions and recognize interest and penalties related to uncertain tax positions in income tax benefit/(expense) in the consolidated statements of operations.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (“TCJA”) was signed by the President of the United States and enacted into law on December 22, 2017. The TCJA significantly changes U.S. tax law by reducing the U.S. corporate income tax rate to 21% from 35%, adopting a territorial tax regime, creating new taxes on certain foreign sourced earnings and imposing a one-time transition tax on the undistributed earnings of certain non-U.S. subsidiaries.

Accounting Standards Codification Topic 740, Income Taxes (“ASC 740”) requires companies to account for the tax effects of changes in income tax rates and laws in the period in which legislation is enacted (December 22, 2017). ASC 740 does not specifically address accounting and disclosure guidance in connection with the income tax effects of the TCJA. Consequently, on December 22, 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission staff issued Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 118 (“SAB 118”), to address the application of ASC 740 in the reporting period that includes the date the TCJA was enacted. SAB 118 allows companies a reasonable period of time to complete the accounting for the income tax effects of the TCJA.

62

Table of Contents

Deferred income taxes are recognized on the tax consequences of temporary differences by applying enacted statutory tax rates applicable in future years to differences between the financial statement carrying amounts and the tax bases of existing assets and liabilities, as determined under tax laws and rates. A valuation allowance is provided when it is more likely than not that all or some portion of the deferred tax assets will not be realized. Due to numerous ownership changes, we are subject to limitations on existing net operating losses under Section 382 of the Internal Revenue Code (the “Code”). In the event we determine that we would be able to realize deferred tax assets that have valuation allowances established, an adjustment to the net deferred tax assets would be recognized as a component of income tax expense through continuing operations.

We engage in transactions (such as acquisitions) in which the tax consequences may be subject to uncertainty and examination by the varying taxing authorities. Significant judgment is required by us in assessing and estimating the tax consequences of these transactions. While our tax returns are prepared and based on our interpretation of tax laws and regulations, in the normal course of business the tax returns are subject to examination by the various taxing authorities. Such examinations may result in future assessments of additional tax, interest and penalties. For purposes of our income tax provision, a tax benefit is not recognized if the tax position is not more likely than not to be sustained based solely on its technical merits. Considerable judgment is involved in determining which tax positions are more likely than not to be sustained.

Business Combinations: We allocate the total cost of an acquisition to the underlying assets based on their respective estimated fair values. Determination of fair values involves significant estimates and assumptions about highly subjective variables, including future cash flows, discount rates, and asset lives. The estimates of the fair values of assets and liabilities acquired are based upon assumptions believed to be reasonable and, when appropriate, include assistance from independent third-party valuation firms.

Because we are primarily a services business, our acquisitions typically result in significant amounts of goodwill and other intangible assets. Fair value estimates and calculations for these acquisitions will affect the amount of amortization expense, or possible impairment related charges recognized in future periods. We base our fair value estimates on assumptions we believe are reasonable, but recognize that the assumptions are inherently uncertain.

Recently Adopted and Recently Issued Accounting Pronouncements

See Note 2 to the consolidated financial statements.

Internal Controls and Procedures

As a publicly traded company, we are required to comply with the SEC’s rules implementing Section 302 and 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which require management to certify financial and other information in our quarterly and annual reports and provide an annual management report on the effectiveness of controls over financial reporting. For management’s assessment of internal control over financial reporting required by Item 308(a) of Regulation S-K for the year ended December 31, 2020 see Part II—Item 9A – Controls and Procedures for management’s report on the effectiveness of internal controls.

Off Balance Sheet Arrangements

At December 31, 2020 we had no material off balance sheet arrangements, except letters of credit described above under Liquidity and Capital Resources. As such, we are not materially exposed to any financing, liquidity, market or credit risk that could arise if we had engaged in such financing arrangements.

The HGM Group and other former SourceHOV equity holders formed Ex-Sigma and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Ex-Sigma 2, to hold the Exela shares to be issued to SourceHOV as merger consideration upon the closing of the Novitex Business Combination and to invest in Exela immediately prior to the closing. Ex-Sigma 2 secured additional PIPE financing in the form of a $55.8 million loan (the “Margin Loan”) that was used to purchase additional common and preferred shares from the Company to help meet the minimum cash requirements needed to close the Novitex Business Combination. As a result of these transactions, the Company issued 28,304,167 shares of Common

63

Table of Contents

Stock to Ex-Sigma 2 at the closing, which represented approximately 54.9% ownership in the Company at that time and were pledged as collateral for the Margin Loan.

The Company determined that Ex-Sigma was a variable interest entity and that the Company had a variable interest in Ex-Sigma through an expense reimbursement arrangement related to the Margin Loan and contained in the Consent, Waiver and Amendment. The Consent, Waiver and Amendment provided among other things for the Company to reimburse Ex-Sigma for costs and fees related to the maintenance of the Margin Loan, other than payments of principal, interest and original issue discount.

The Company was not the primary beneficiary because the Company did not have the power to direct the activities that most significantly impacted the economic performance of Ex-Sigma. Accordingly, the Company did not consolidate the financial statements of Ex-Sigma and did not have any assets or liabilities related to Ex-Sigma and the Company did not have an investment in Ex-Sigma. The Company reaffirmed its assessment as of December 31, 2020.

Ex-Sigma 2 paid off the balance of the Margin Loan as of December 31, 2019, and as such the maximum exposure to loss as a result of the Company’s involvement with Ex-Sigma is $0. Ex-Sigma 2 distributed the shares held by it during the first quarter of 2020 and is no longer a shareholder of Exela. Ex-Sigma and Ex-Sigma 2 ceased to be variable interest entities upon the distribution that occurred on February 21, 2020.

64

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Critical Audit Matters

The critical audit matters communicated below are matters arising from the current period audit of the consolidated financial statements that were communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that: (1) relate to accounts or disclosures that are material to the consolidated financial statements and (2) involved our especially challenging, subjective, or complex judgments. The communication of critical audit matters does not alter in any way our opinion on the consolidated financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matters below, providing separate opinions on the critical audit matters or on the accounts or disclosures to which they relate.

Evaluation of Goodwill for potential impairment

As discussed in Notes 2 and 9 to the consolidated financial statements, goodwill is tested for impairment at the reporting unit level at least annually, or more frequently if indicators of impairment exist. Goodwill is impaired if the carrying value exceeds the fair value of the reporting unit. Fair value of a reporting unit is estimated by management using the discounted cash flow method and the guideline public company method. To validate the reasonableness of the assumptions used in the two valuation methods, management performs a market capitalization reconciliation by comparing the determined fair value of all reporting units to the Company’s market capitalization as of the date of the analysis. As of December 31, 2020, the Company’s goodwill balance was $360 million.

We identified the evaluation of the goodwill impairment as a critical audit matter. There was significant auditor judgment required to evaluate key assumptions related to the discounted cash flow method including the revenue forecasts, operating margins, and discount rates used in the discounted cash flow method. Additionally, significant auditor judgment was required to evaluate the control premium used in the market capitalization reconciliation.

The following are the primary procedures we performed to address this critical audit matter. We evaluated the design of certain internal controls related to the critical audit matter. This included controls related to the Company’s goodwill impairment review process, including controls over the forecasted revenue growth rates, operating margins, and discount rates, as well as management’s review of the control premium used in the market capitalization reconciliation. We evaluated the revenue forecasts and operating margins by comparing them to the historical performance of the respective reporting units, consistency with third party market and industry data or other third party analyses. We also evaluated the consistency of the forecasted cash flows with evidence obtained in other areas of the audit. We also compared the Company’s historical forecasted revenue, operating margin, and working capital forecasts to their actual results to assess the Company’s ability to accurately forecast. We tested the Company’s reconciliation of the fair value of the reporting units to the market capitalization of the Company. We involved valuation professionals with specialized skills and knowledge, who assisted in:

​

​

​

​

67

Table of Contents

Going Concern

As discuss in Note 2 to the consolidated financial statements, management identified there were conditions that raised substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern for a period of one year from the date the financial statements were issued. The conditions that resulted in the substantial doubt being raised included a history of net losses, net operating cash outflows, a working capital deficit, significant interest payments, the Appraisal Action liability incurred, a requirement through its First Lien Credit Agreement to maintain a minimum liquidity of $35 million, and an accumulated deficit. However, based on management’s operating plan and resulting available liquidity, management believes the Company’s liquidity is sufficient to fund operations and satisfy their financial obligations as they become due for at least one year from the financial statement issuance date. Therefore, the Company concluded these plans alleviate the substantial doubt that was raised about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern for at least twelve months from the date that the financial statements were issued.

We identified the evaluation of going concern as a critical audit matter. There was significant auditor judgment required in evaluating the Company’s forecasted cash flows, and resulting available liquidity, throughout the measurement period. Specifically, this included revenue and operating margin forecasts, and working capital requirements.

The following are the primary procedures we performed to address this critical audit matter. We evaluated the design of certain internal controls related to the critical audit matter. This included controls related to the preparation of forecasted cash flows, including revenue and operating margin forecasts and working capital requirements. We evaluated the forecasted cash flows by comparing them to historical performance, consistency with third party market and industry data or other third-party analyses. We also evaluated the consistency of the cash flow forecasts utilized in evaluating goodwill for impairment. We also compared the Company’s historical forecasted revenue, operating margin, and working capital to their actual results to assess the Company’s ability to accurately forecast. We also assessed the probability and timing of forecasted cash outflows related to the settlement of current liabilities included in management’s assessment.

​

/s/ KPMG LLP

​

We have served as the Company’s auditor since 2013.

Detroit, Michigan
March 22, 2021

​

68

Table of Contents