Welcome back to Evercore ISI's Eighth Annual Payments and FinTech Innovators Forum. Delighted to start our next fireside chat with Equifax management. Joining us from Equifax are Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer. And then in the room we also have the IR team from Equifax, Trevor Burns, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, and Sam McKinstry, Senior Director of IR. Thanks so much for being with us here today.
Thanks, Rodolfo.
We really appreciate it.
Yeah.
So tech transformation has been a hallmark of your leadership of Equifax. What inning are we in with Equifax's tech and cloud transformation, and when do you expect to see a significant benefit to revenue and earnings?
Yeah, it's a great question. As you know, it's been a long road. I'm a big believer to be a market-leading data analytics company. You have to be a great technology company. And as you know, almost five years ago, we launched on this path to go fully cloud-native. And so we'll be, we believe, the only data analytics company that's fully in the cloud. We think it's going to deliver benefits across multiple levels. Maybe I'll come back to that. Your question about what inning we're in, we're top of the ninth, so we can see the finish line. And we're leading. So we've got the lead in the game, and we look forward to finishing. We finished last year at 70%+ of our revenue in the new Equifax Cloud. We'll finish this year at 90%.
The reason I talk about we're at the top of the ninth is we're going to have U.S. businesses complete. EWS finished up really almost two years ago, and USIS will finish most of their big operations in 2024, which is a big deal. A lot of that happens in the first half. I think, as you know, from a bandwidth standpoint, these tech transformations are not for the faint at heart. They're quite hard. They're very complex. They're expensive. We put over $1.5 billion incrementally into the tech transformation over the last, call it, five years. But it's going to deliver really substantial benefits. Again, the heart of it is, I believe, to be a great data analytics company. You have to be a great tech company. So two really elements of our tech transformation.
Number 1 is we took all of our legacy applications, and we didn't lift and shift. We rewrote them into using new cloud-native kind of technology into the new Google capabilities. So that's a big deal that we're going to have a fresh tech stack. And we also have eliminated the sprawl. Over decades, you end up having multiple versions of the same application with customers on each one. Everyone's moving to the really best application, the most features that we have. So we think that's a big advantage from us. We'll have pre-cloud, we had something like 40 data centers. Post-cloud, we'll have zero. So we're going to be fully cloud-native. So some of the benefits. Number 1 on security. You know what happened in 2017. It's a long time ago, but we don't forget it. It delivers, we believe, industry-leading security being in the cloud.
It's super important to us to make sure that we're protecting the unique data that we have. We believe security has become, for Equifax, a competitive advantage. We believe we're an industry leader. In a couple of weeks, we'll put out our annual security report with a lot of details around all of the investments and capabilities we have in security. Our customers look at us now as a leader because of our transparency and our focus on security. So that's one big benefit from the cloud. Second is the digital macro. More and more, really predominantly, our customers' volumes are now being done online with their consumers and small businesses. So that digital macro really requires always-on stability. And you can't get nine-nines of stability or always-on in a legacy environment.
If you're in a legacy mainframe data center or in a server farm, you have to have backups. And if there's a power outage, if there's a failure there, when you're down, your customer's down. Because remember, virtually every transaction we do with our customers and our competitors do the same thing. They're hitting our database and then bringing data back for their decisioning engine. So if we're not operating, if we're down, they're down. So we believe nine nines of stability, meaning always-on, is a table stakes. But it's also going to differentiate Equifax because everything we know, our competitors are not making this investment. So we believe, from a stability performance standpoint, we'll be advantaged, which should drive some share advantages for us going forward.
I think on the third-quarter call last year, we talked about a big FI that's moving us from third place to first, meaning more volume because of our innovation, because of our new products, but also because of our stability, always-on. So it's a really important element that changed in the last five years when really everything went online. Speed of data transmission is another benefit of the cloud. Latency. So how quickly is that transaction completed, and how many milliseconds? We believe the cloud advantages us in that process. Innovation and new products. And you know this, David. So part of our $1.5 billion investment was the tech discussion we had of rewriting our applications in the Google Cloud. The other half is moving our data into the cloud, into a single data fabric.
So very uniquely, we made the decision to take our siloed data assets, which we have a lot of them. That's one of our competitive advantages, is we have data at scale that's more than our competitors. We put that all together in a single data fabric. Really big investment, a big part of the focus. But it's going to allow us to do more innovation, to deliver more new products. And we think the cloud advantages us around the ability to roll out new products. I'm sure we'll talk about our Vitality Index because we're very transparent around our focus on innovation. But it's also going to allow us to deploy AI as a tool to deliver higher performing scores, models, and products. So that's another big capability. We can come back to AI. But we've been investing in AI for a decade around explainable AI.
We've got 120 patents, another 100 pending, around explainability of AI. But having your tech in the cloud, having your data in the cloud in a single data fabric, and having scale data assets allows us to put AI on top of that to deliver more sophisticated solutions. So that's a benefit of the cloud. Last one maybe there's actually two more. Second to last one is around margins. Our costs are coming down. So we believed, when we started this, the cost advantage in our tech costs, which is our largest element of our COGS, is going to be down in the neighborhood of 15% legacy to cloud. And you've seen those cost savings last year, $210 million of spend savings, a carryover this year of $75 million, an incremental $25 million this year. And we'll have some incremental savings next year.
That's part of that accelerated margin expansion on the top of our core $50 basis points per year of operating leverage from the cloud cost savings. So that's a real benefit to expand our margins, our free cash flow, as we go forward. Last piece would be around M&A. As you know, part of our strategy is to add a bolt on M&A. We're not looking for big deals. We're looking to strengthen our core, whether it's workforce, differentiated data, identity and fraud, or some of the international platforms that are available, like a Boa Vista that we bought last year. Being in the cloud allows you to integrate those more quickly. In the old legacy environment, it was super hard to integrate them. It was a lot of effort taking their data into our single data fabric and taking them into the cloud. So we're in the ninth inning.
We can see the finish line. It's been a long road. Just one last point around being in the ninth inning. It's not like it's the end of the game for us. It's the beginning. By finishing the cloud, the last five years, the whole team has been working on running the business, growing the business, doing all the things you do in running a business, and doing the cloud transformation. It's all-encompassing. It's not just tech. It's tech, DNA, product, the commercial team. Everyone's involved in it. When we get on the other side of cloud later this year, we pivot from doing both elements to just growing the company. There's a bandwidth element that we can really start leveraging the cloud versus building it, which we're really excited about.
Great. You mentioned NPI. So if we could go there, I think you called out near-record NPI in the fourth quarter. Could you talk about some of the biggest products from NPI that will drive growth in 2024, 2025, and beyond?
Yeah, just to frame for the rest of the group, you know it well. We, for a long time, before I joined, had internally and externally a measure around innovation, which is rolling out new products. The reason new products are important is, number one, you become more important with your customers. If you're innovating with them, what that means is you're giving them solutions that drive their ROI: more approvals, lower losses, better identity pass rates. So real big focus around customer. It makes us stronger with our customers. Also, new products have very high incremental returns. You've already paid for the data. It's a new solution. It drives our top line, as well as our margin expansion. So it's part of that $50 basis points per year of margin expansion. So pre-cloud, we had a Vitality Index that was in the 5%-7% range.
As a reminder, that 5%-7% is the percent of our revenue over the last three years that includes new products. If you think about Equifax last year at $5.3 billion, a 10% vitality, which is our goal, would be $530 million of our revenue was from new products that weren't here three years ago. We think that's a great measure for the team and our investors to see our progress around growth and innovation. Historically, 5%-7%. With the new cloud capabilities, we moved it up to 10%. As you point out, last year and the year before, we were well north of the 10%. In 2022, we were 13% and change. Last year, we were 14%. As you point out, which obviously, the 14% is a record. The fourth quarter was also a record.
So we've had some real acceleration as we've moved into cloud completion around new products. And maybe I'll just frame the different businesses for you, which we've talked about. We're very encouraged by Workforce Solutions that pre-cloud was kind of in the 3% range in that 5%-7%, so below our average. They were growing nicely. Their legacy infrastructure limited some of their innovation capabilities. Post-cloud, they really unleashed a lot of innovation capabilities with products. You asked about some that we like. Like in Workforce Solutions, 18 months ago, we rolled out a Mortgage 36 solution. So in essence, trended historical data on income and employment for the mortgage industry. That's a solution that we sell at a higher price point than our core mortgage solution. And it's one that delivers a lot of value to the mortgage originator.
That's now almost 50% of our mortgage revenue because it delivers so much value to the originator with the richness. And if you think about it quite simply, if you have a snapshot of my income today, you know what I'm making today. But if you have three years' worth, you know if it's been going down or if it's been going up or sideways or if it's been gaps in the income. So that historical information is a great example. So Workforce Solutions, the last couple of years, has been north of 20% vitality. So they've been the big driver of being north of that long-term growth rate of 10%. International is quite innovative, particularly in Latin America. It's been a place where we have some really strong innovation. Even though they haven't completed the cloud, they've been innovating in legacy as they move to the cloud.
So they've been at or above that 10%. And USIS, which is still completing the cloud and will complete it this year in the first half, really, we would expect them to move up towards that 10% in the latter half of 2024 and into 2025 as we get closer to the tail end of 2025. So we're really encouraged by the innovation that's coming through. The 10%, we think, is a good long-term growth rate, even though we've outperformed it. We don't expect EWS to be 20% over the long term. We expect them to move down. But 10%, we think, is quite innovative. And it underpins our 8%-12% long-term growth rate.
That really is a big part of our increase three years ago, from 7%-10%, 8%-12%, was our view that we could innovate more quickly and deliver more solutions to our customers and EWS getting a bigger piece because they outgrow that 8%-12%. So Mortgage 36 is a great solution. We just rolled out a product yesterday for the small business space here in the United States. It's an identity solution that's very unique. We have a solution in the United States called OneScore that takes all of our differentiated data assets and adds them to the credit file. Last year, we rolled out adding our cell phone utility attributes to our mortgage credit file that only we can do. We're the only ones that have that scale data set.
As we complete the cloud in USIS, which obviously, EWS is already in there, we think the next chapter of innovation is going to be powered by AI, more AI. On the call a couple of weeks ago, we talked about last year, 70% of our models were powered by our new AI capabilities. This year, we expect to grow that to 80%. We'll move to 100% as we complete the cloud. We'll also start leveraging all of our data assets, meaning including income and employment data that we think is so valuable, and look for opportunities to expand and enhance our credit file by using some of the income and employment attributes that only Equifax has from workforce solutions. We're super energized around innovation. We've been building out, over the last three years, our product muscle. There's a chief product officer who works for me.
That wasn't in place pre-cloud at Equifax. So really big focus around leveraging our differentiated data assets, leveraging our cloud capabilities, rolling in now our AI capabilities to keep innovating. And if you're an innovator, you're going to be more important to your customers because you're bringing in more new ideas to help them grow.
That's great. Just shifting to the 2024 outlook, that includes a 15% year-over-year decline in U.S. mortgage increase. One of your competitors called out an expectation for a 5% decline. So there are different points of view about mortgage in 2024. So what do you think accounts for such a big delta across different sources, like MBA's?
MBAs up 30%.
Yeah. I mean, I guess, how do investors put all the different forecasts for mortgages this year together? And your forecast seems conservative relative to the others we've seen.
Yeah, I think you've been around us for a while. I think many of the people in the room and on the call have too. We've been very consistent on mortgage. First off, you've got to step back. Obviously, mortgage in kind of a changing economic environment like we had the last couple of years, where the Fed was raising rates at a pace and a level like never happened before, has a big impact on the market. We don't profess to be good forecasters of interest rate increases or interest rate decreases. We have a view on how they impact the mortgage market. We just don't know how to forecast that. We've, for a decade, in the 5+ years I've been here, had a consistent strategy where we're going to forecast mortgage off our current trends.
It just so happens that a few weeks ago, we were starting guidance for 2024. We had to lay it out for the whole year. In April, we'll give you guidance for the last three quarters of the year. That's kind of that rolling quarterly basis. We took November, December, January run rates for our mortgage business. We ran those through 2024, added some seasonality because some of the quarters are higher than kind of December and January, just from seasonality of purchases, and basically flat from that run rate. That's how we always do it, adding seasonality. Because the mortgage market declined last year, you pick up the first couple of quarters of comps year-over-year. That's how you get to the down 15%, down 16%. We think that's the right way to forecast the business.
We're super transparent with you and our core investors. I think each of you can decide, is MBA right? Where is it going to be versus -16% versus flat or up? We'll give you continued updates as we see trends change. I think the really important point for us, which I think our investors certainly focused on, is it certainly feels like the mortgage market has bottomed. Number one, the Fed indicating they're done raising rates and actually indicating they'll likely reduce rates sometime in the future, that felt like a bottom. And as you know, that wasn't the case in the last two years. There was less visibility around that, which was a challenge for us and a challenge for our investors on that portion of our business.
Second is, we shared with you that in the last 90 days, we've seen kind of slight improvements and just keep it at slight, right? Slight improvements versus declines, which we saw through last year. So meaning it feels like we're bumping along that bottom, which we think is important. The other thing we did is we wanted to share at least how we think about where the market is today is unprecedented. And we use, and we've done it for a long time, 2015-2019 is what we would call a normal market pre the COVID rate reductions and refi boom that happened in 2020 and 2021. So 2015-2019 is kind of a normal purchase volume. There's some element in 2015-2019 of cash-out refis that always happen. Today, there's almost $30 trillion of untapped equity in people's homes.
So homeowners will come in and do a cash-out refi to get cash out and pay down higher credit cards, higher auto loans from an interest rate standpoint. And then some element, small amount, but some element of rate refi in 2015-2019. So unprecedented. It's never happened in our history where you've had that kind of rapid interest rate increases that the Fed did over the last two years or the decline in the mortgage market. So it's down 50%, five to zero, from what it was in 2015-2019. So we laid out a chart, which you saw in our investor deck. And we've been talking about it for a while, meaning we've been absorbing that billion-dollar decline in 2022 and 2023, roughly $500 million in each year in our P&L, still growing our top line because of the outperformance from mortgage, which we may touch on.
But also, remember, mortgage is only 20% of Equifax. 80% of Equifax is non-mortgage, which has been growing in that 8%-12% range. So we laid out that there's in the neighborhood of $1.01 billion revenue as the market moves back towards normal. And we framed it as 2024, 2025, 2026. I mean, it's going to be multi-years likely before it comes back. But because of the high incremental margins on the way down, those high incremental margins are on the way back. So we framed that as $700 million of EBITDA and $4 a share of kind of incremental tailwind as it rolls back into our P&L. And we also said that that's revenue, margin, and EPS that'll drop through, right? We're not going to reinvest that. We're reinvesting at the right rate in the rest of Equifax.
So, your question about what's going to happen with rates is probably how you have to think about when rate cuts are coming. I think we all believe they are, probably not in March, which some people thought, but maybe in the second half. But over time, these rates are abnormally high. Once the Fed tames inflation, we believe rates will come down. As rates come down, we expect our mortgage volume or market to come back up. And remember, what we talk about with the mortgage market is inquiries. That's revenue for us. So, originations are. MBA is actually a survey of the top mortgage originators. And they do a survey of what do you think is going to happen with mortgage originations? Originations are a lag of six months before we see them. But there's a very tight correlation between inquiries and originations.
That's the metric we've been using for a decade of market for mortgage. As you know, we try to frame market because we want you to understand how we're performing versus the market. That's our mortgage outperformance that we could touch on if you want.
Great. Yeah, so perfect segue. So fourth quarter USIS mortgage market outperformance of 33 percentage points. And you've guided 2024 total Equifax mortgage outperformance to 24 PPT. So can you walk through some of the key drivers of that expected outperformance?
Yeah. And again, maybe just to make sure everyone understands, when we talk about outperformance, that's versus the market. And again, you've got to think about versus the market, whether it's up, down, or sideways. So in a flat mortgage market, we would expect to grow those 20+ points in 2024 or 2025 from outperformance. And so there's a number of elements. And I'll break it down between USIS and EWS. So there's always been the elements of price that we take up really every year in all our businesses. There's some market share elements in both EWS and USIS. They're different. There's product. We roll out new products that obviously allow us to have higher revenue, higher margin because they're generally higher-priced products. And then last one is record growth in EWS.
As we grow records, we grow our revenue versus the underlying market because we have higher hit rates, because we have more individuals in the data set. So when you look at, I'll break down USIS and EWS. I think USIS last year's overall outperformance was 25 points. This year, we've guided to 35 points of outperformance. And using the -16, that would make the point that that business in a -16 is going to grow 19 points. Their mortgage business will be up 19 points with 35. And if you break down to 35 points for USIS, I think you know there's been a big change last year and again this year with the FICO pass-through. FICO, as you know, we're their customer to the mortgage industry, the three credit bureaus or three data analytics companies. And FICO last year had a meaningful price increase.
They had a larger price increase this year. We pass that through. We mark it up to protect our margins. So that's a meaningful part of the 25% and the 35%. Also, in that 25% and 35%, there's a little bit of share gains because we pick up some market share in our Tri-merge business. There's also some product element. Last year, we rolled out a new pre-qual or shopping product for the mortgage industry that has more value at a higher price point. So that's part of that 25% and is a bigger piece of the 35 points. If you look at USIS, go back to 2021, 2022, back in time, generally, they were more like five points of outperformance. So there's been a change in how FICO is going to market, which obviously, with our margin markup there, protects Equifax and is a positive.
We're not sure what they're going to do going forward. But certainly, that's the guidance we gave for 2024. In EWS, last year was about 20 points. This year is about 15%. And again, what's in there is pure price. We take our price up on our mortgage solutions. Record growth drives hit rates as part of that, 15%. New products is a meaningful piece. And part of the decline from 20%-15% is we rolled out. I mentioned it earlier in our conversation. We rolled out a solution, I guess it was almost 18 months ago, called Mortgage 36 that we talked about. That's been a big success for us. That's starting to lap as far as kind of comps. So that was driving that 20 points last year and is part of that decline to 15%.
So using the 15% in a market that's declining, 15%, 16%, our EWS mortgage revenue is flat. You get to the second half, it's growing. Obviously, USIS in the second half is growing. And then pick your mortgage market growth rate for 2025. Let's say it's flat off 2024. I don't think that's going to happen with mortgage rate declines. But if it's flat and our outperformance is similar in 2025 in each of those businesses to what is in 2024, we're obviously growing our mortgage business positively going forward. So the last two years, that inflection from a declining market at a rate most markets don't decline 50% in 24 months, right? It's been very rapid. As it moves forward, we're going to get leverage off that from our outperformance.
Great. Thank you for that. So in the fourth quarter at USIS, outside of mortgage, consumer solutions grew 15%. And fraud saw double-digit growth. You also highlighted the extension of the NCTUE relationship. So outside of mortgage, where do you see the biggest growth opportunities within USIS?
Yeah. So there's a third business I'll mention I think we talked about too. So there's really 3 businesses that have been outperforming the core USIS. And we've already talked about mortgage, right? So mortgage is a big piece of the FI element. We have an auto business, a credit card business, and a P-loan business. Those we expect to grow kind of low to mid-single digits in 2024. The business is outgrowing their long-term 6%-8% growth rate. That's the growth rate that we have for USIS. Obviously, mortgage outperformance certainly is. You highlighted a couple. Our direct-to-consumer business, which is selling credit files through credit monitoring, is really improved. We put a new leader in place about 18 months ago. She's done a great job of rolling out new products. And that business has moved to kind of a double-digit grower, so above the 6%-8%.
We expect that business to have a good 2024 also. Second is our identity and fraud business, as you highlighted. Big macro, digital transactions are growing. So we're growing our identity and fraud business in USIS and globally, actually. But this conversation is about USIS. We expect that business to well outgrow the 6%-8%. And you remember, we bought Kount a couple of years ago. We bought Midigator. And those capabilities are now getting fully integrated and being rolled into the marketplace. We're rolling out new solutions using AI as well as our full set of data that drives predictability of identity that's driving our revenue growth and market share gains. Last one you didn't mention was our commercial or small business data business. And as you know, we compete in that space really with D&B and with Experian. TU doesn't have a commercial data business.
That business was up double-digit in 2023 and again in 2024. We expect strong growth. That was the product we rolled out, I think, yesterday or this morning, a new identity solution for small businesses. Same issue. Banks are interacting with small businesses online, right? That's how they're originating accounts for a loan, a credit card, or other financial products. So they have the same fraud exposure. So they're looking for more enhanced identity solutions to make sure they're giving a loan to someone that's really a small business, so that product innovation. So those three businesses are positive. A last point I'll make on USIS as you think about cloud completion. I mentioned it earlier in one of your earlier questions. We would expect, as they move into the cloud and move into that kind of nine nines of stability, for some share gains.
And the share gains are going to be principally in auto, cards, and P-loans. But that will be the space. Like mortgage, maybe in Tri-merge, we might get some advantage there. But it's really going to be in auto and cards where we'll have some advantage. So as we get to nine nines of stability, we expect there to be opportunities for us to move where we're in second or third place to first. And as you know, the difference between second and third and first is like 70% of the transactions versus 10% or 20%. So that's where you certainly want to be. And the combination of them driving their Vitality Index up post-cloud as well as completing the cloud, meaning you're innovating more.
We're going to become a more valuable partner to our customers, which we expect should drive some share gains for USIS really in the second half of next year and into 2025. But we talked on the third quarter call. We've already had one FI that's moving us up because of stability and innovation in our differentiated data. We expect more of those to roll forward that'll benefit USIS.
Great. Shifting to your best business, Employer Workforce Solutions.
Finally.
Say the best for last.
Yeah.
Work Number Database finished fourth quarter with 168 million active records, 124 million unique records. That's 75% of private non-farm payroll. You also called out 6 new payroll partnerships. Can Work Number Database ultimately reach 90% or more of U.S. private non-farm payrolls?
Yeah. And I'm going to challenge you on one point. You shouldn't think of the population as being non-farm payroll. We think about it as being all-income-producing Americans. And so just to frame that for the rest of the group, there's roughly 170 million people that are W-2 or non-farm payroll. So they work for companies. There's another 40 million, 40, that are self-employed. And a lot of people mistakenly think about self-employed as being only gig workers, which they are. If you're working for Uber or DoorDash, or you're certainly not a W-2 employee typically. You're a 1099 employee. But that's in that 40 million. But in there, you've got doctors, dentists, lawyers, professionals, financial service professionals, private equity executives that are 1099 individuals. So it's not in W-2. You have to have a different strategy to get to those. That's 40 million.
That's a lot of people and a lot of income. When we think about that 40 million, a lot of them are getting mortgages. Income and employment has to be verified in every mortgage. A lot of those are getting government social services. 70 million people in the United States get government social services. So you think about a gig worker that maybe is also getting some rent support or child care support. Their income has to be verified. So really valuable records. There's another 30 million defined benefit pensioners. And that's income. So someone who's on a pension is taking out a car loan, an auto loan. Their income has to be verified. And there's a lot of pensioners that they retire from government pensions at 55 and get a second job. And they're in W-2 or 1099+ their pension.
So when we think about the 124 million uniques that we have at the end of the quarter, we think about the opportunity as being 220 million, so another 100 million to go. Same answer to the question, though. You have to do a lot of work to get to them. We added 16 million records last year. We're onboarding some pension records now. We're onboarding as part of the 16. We're onboarding some 1099 records. In December, we made an org change in EWS. The individual that was responsible for record additions in all three areas also ran our employer business and our talent business. Now, that individual is just doing records. So we really want to have even a more concerted focus around going from 124 to 220. And then we brought in two new leaders to run talent and government.
Those are big businesses, I'm sorry, talent and employer. They're both $400+ million businesses. So they needed a dedicated business leader. We get records two ways, I think, as you know. Our employer business is how we get records directly from companies. So as we're delivering those regulated services to HR managers like I-9, unemployment claims, Work Opportunity Tax Credit, W-2 management, ACA validation, ERC credits, all those different services, we get records as a part of that relationship because we do income and employment verification for that HR manager or company for free. And if we're not doing it, they're doing it themselves. So it's a really strong value prop along with those outsourced services. So that's half of the 126 million records that we have. Actually, as an aside, remember, we talked about the 124 million individuals. We have 168 million active records.
They're really quite remarkable when you think about those 124 million people that we have. There's at least 40 million of them that have at least two W-2 jobs. They may also have a 1099 job, meaning a third job. Some may also be retirees with a pension. The complexity of income is really important to have that full coverage there. Half our records come direct. The other half, as you point out, come with partnerships. Last year, we signed 17 partnerships, six in the fourth quarter. The ones we signed in the second half will likely come online in 2024. There's a lag with those from a tech standpoint typically on our partner side. As you know, we pay a rev share in our partner records. As I mentioned earlier, we do not in our direct records because of the relationship that we have.
If you think about where we get those, you've got to think about payroll processors, HR software companies, pension administrators, right? If you go into the pension records, tax prep services, other places where 1099 or self-employed records are, that's our focus around the multiple records. So when we think about 124 million, we've got another 100 to go. Last year, we added 16 million. We've been delivering record growth that I would call outsized for the last 5 years primarily on the partner side. As we landed a lot of the big payroll processors, the rest of them are really moving towards Equifax. We have a pipeline now of discussions we're having in the first quarter, second quarter, third quarter with those additional partner records. And remember, we're growing our employer business. Every time we add a new client, we pick up records there.
That's the path that we have going at records. What's really powerful, I think, as you know, is when we add 500,000 records, 1,000,000 records next week or the week after, we're already receiving inquiries for them, right? Because we're getting every transaction from our customers, a mortgage originator, an auto lender will send us every transaction that they're doing. We'll fulfill the records that we have. As we add new records, we already have the orders. They get monetized instantly. As you know, that drives our revenue. It's part of that 13%-15% revenue growth is record editions. It also drives our margins because of the incremental nature of the business.
Very uniquely, there isn't another business, and I'm aware of in the data analytics space, that has all of the growth levers we have in workforce along with records, the ability to add records because of the network effect. We've already got the orders or the inquiries in order to monetize them.
Great. Thank you so much for that. Earlier, you talked about adding employment and income verification data to the credit report, which is a really intriguing idea. How do you maintain very high demand, obviously, for income and employment verification when some of it's on the credit report? How do you price those products differently when some elements are the same?
It would be similar to what we're doing with the NCTUE attributes, the cell phone utility attributes we put in the mortgage credit file. It might be, in the case of income and employment, a flag that says, "Mark's working." That's not on the credit file today. It's valuable. It would make our credit report more valuable. But it would still protect, generally, where that pull is made later in a mortgage or an auto loan or a P-loan when they're verifying income and employment, they need more than just "Mark's working." They need the full set of attributes. And remember, we deliver in a lot of our reports as many as 50 attributes. So we have gross pay. We have all the deductions for 401(k). We have stock compensation. We have incentive compensation. What's the makeup of the income? A lot of data that we deliver in that final report.
That's where the richer idea would be. Earlier would just be an indicator that Mark's working, which you have no visibility. Someone could have a great credit report today, but they lost their job last week, right? Meaning their credit report likely would go down if they're not working. That is the kind of value. So we would do it on kind of depth of data. And we do that across the business. Like Mortgage 36 is a great example. 3 years' worth of data, much more valuable, different price point. What Mark's income today is works for a lot of transactions. But you need more history for others of that trended data.
Got it. Thank you for that. So for TWN's income and employment verification, you now have some new competitors, albeit quite small. How do you think about the evolution of competition over the next couple of years as you kind of plot strategy?
Yeah. So we're well aware. I don't know what your list of competitors are. Sometimes they're broader. But you think about kind of categories. There's a set of Argyle, Plaid, Yodlee kind of companies that do consumer-consented data acquisition either from bank transaction data. So they're trying to get generally your deposit into your bank account. That's net pay. That's generally not enough for most transactions or the idea of trying to get to your payroll system in order to get payroll data. There's a lot of friction with that.
We've seen very little adoption because if you go through a digital origination process and then you're asked to click through on this line item and leave your bank's website, and they ask you to put in your bank user ID and password for your Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo bank account, a lot of people drop out on that friction. So that friction. One is we haven't seen a lot of traction on it. When there's an instant record from Equifax, it just is seamless. And the consumer doesn't feel it in that workflow. So there's no risk of losing the consumer. And there's not a big price difference between those consumer-consented and an Equifax instant transaction. The other place where there's other players' experience trying to build a business, they have some unique records from their employer business that they have.
There's a company called Truework that has a very small number of unique records. I think the important proof point, if you look at last year, over the last three years, our ability to add new partnerships has been quite strong. We haven't seen evidence that they've been able to do that. So I think that's a really strong so why does a partner come with Equifax, our scale, our technology, our track record, our security, our privacy? This is a regulated data asset. If you're a partner with Equifax, you want to make sure that that regulated effort is done really well. I think we're viewed as being quite strong. We also, if you look across the universe, most of the big players are with Equifax. There's a credibility element that comes with that.
I think that's why you saw 17 and 6 in the fourth quarter or 5 in the fourth quarter of partnership additions. We've got a long runway of those additions going forward.
Got it. So for this year, you're guiding Workforce Solutions EBITDA margin of 52%. Once the mortgage market normalizes and your hit rate continues to increase, where do you see Workforce Solutions EBITDA margin going potentially over the next two to three years?
So maybe a couple of points. We haven't given kind of business-level margin long-term growth rates. So for Equifax, we're still very committed. And we believe quite strongly in the long-term Equifax margins growing 50 basis points per year going forward. And we set a medium-term goal of 39 originally for 2025. With the mortgage market decline, we said it likely isn't going to happen next year dependent upon how the mortgage market comes back. But we're still committed to the 39. And remember, the difference between 50 basis points a year and 39 is the leverage you get from the cost savings from the cloud transformation. So longer term, maybe just on the 50%+ EBITDA margins, we think those are quite attractive. And having those stay in that 50 range with the revenue growth higher than Equifax, those margins are accretive to Equifax's growth.
And they're part of that 50 basis points per year of margin expansion along with NPI and the Vitality Index at 10%. So we expect EWS margins to continue to be highly accretive to Equifax at that 50%+. We don't have a point of view on individual business unit margin over the long term.
Great. Let me just pause to see if there are any questions from the audience. We've got a mic here as well.
Thank you so much. I just wanted to check on the FICO pricing dynamics. I mean, I understand that they have raised their prices last year. And again, they plan to do it this year. Are there any pushbacks that you're getting from clients or from banks? Or how's the entire dynamic playing out with you being just like the intermediary?
The intermediary.
Like, yeah, just like passing this on to them.
Yeah. First off, nobody likes price increases, period. It's never a pleasant conversation. But the mortgage industry is a little bit different, in that the bulk of the credit costs in a mortgage application are paid for by the consumer. So it's really a pass-through cost. It's quite unique in that. And I think, as you know, if anyone on the call or in the room has gotten a mortgage before, when you close your mortgage, you get all 3 credit reports because you've paid for them. That's part of that service that you get. And inside of a mortgage, mortgage closing costs might be $5,000. There's $200 of data costs in there. And the view is you should talk to FICO. I don't want to speak for them.
But I think their view directionally is there's a lot of value in the data that's used to originate a mortgage. If you've got a mortgage that's a $500,000, pick a number, loan, having a lot of data to support that underwriting, whether it's credit, the FICO score in this case, the credit file which we deliver, or income and employment is super important. And that's why the cost of data for a higher value loan, if you will, versus an auto loan or a credit card is so much more important. That's why it's also a long process. A mortgage application is generally 90+ days between shopping, application, and closing. And there's multiple pulls along the way to make sure that the consumer's credit is still good so they can keep working on it.
An originator will spend in the neighborhood of $5,000 in COGS to close a loan, right, from marketing all the way through to closing. So that's why there's multiple pulls. And there's also multiple income and employment pulls. They want to make sure that individual's still working. So I think the element of the pass-through nature of it dampens some of it. But nobody likes price increases.
Great. Thanks for that, Mark. Perhaps just as a closing question, when you look at capital allocation priorities, where do you see the best opportunities through acquisitions to add proprietary data sets over the next couple of years?
Yeah. So we've been very consistent on that, David, as you know. In our eight to 12 framework, we would expect to do bolt-on M&A over the long term on an annual basis of one to two points of rev growth. So that's kind of a framework that we think about. There's those kind of opportunities to do tuck-ins or bolt-ons to strengthen the core of Equifax. And to be clear, we're not looking for a fourth business. We're looking to strengthen the core. We really have four priorities around M&A. So I would call it fairly narrow swim lanes about where we want to participate in bolt-on M&A: differentiated data. So we're looking for unique data assets that are proprietary. Kount was an example of that. Appris Insights, the incarceration data, an example of that. PayNet, an example. DataX, Teletrack. So unique data assets that are proprietary.
Second is identity and fraud. Big TAM, big space for growth, and a place where we think we can play around differentiated identity and fraud data. So Kount, Midigator, examples of those acquisitions that we've done in the last couple of years. We're looking to strengthen workforce solutions. Our largest business, fastest-growing business, highest-margin business, most valuable business. We've done, in the last three years, five acquisitions there. So two flavors for workforce. One is data that can strengthen our talent business. Incarceration did that. We look for other data assets that we can provide to background screeners to help them complete the background screen more quickly. So we want to have more data. And then the other area would be government data, data that supports government social services. And then inside of workforce, we've done either four or five acquisitions in the employer business.
So more capabilities around Work Opportunity Tax Credit, I-9. That's a big outsourcing play. But it also brings records. So that's the third play. Number four is international platforms. There aren't many of those. We bought Boa Vista last July, great acquisition that we're integrating now. Number two player in Brazil, fast-growing market. When these platforms become available, if you don't buy them and obviously, they've got to meet your financial returns, they're not going to be available, right? The idea of entering a market on your own without owning an existing business is almost impossible. And then we bought DataCredito. So those are kind of the swim lanes. And then the second half of the capital allocation question is, beyond M&A, our allocation of capital, obviously, we spent a ton of money in CapEx over the last, call it, five years in the cloud transformation. CapEx is coming down.
We're down $100 million this year versus last year. We'll come down again in 2025. We'll get on a run rate that'll be 6%-6.5% of revenue for CapEx going forward. As our margins expand and, of course, dependent upon how mortgage market changes, our free cash flow really accelerates dramatically. We've been very clear that beyond CapEx at that, call it, 6%-6.5%, beyond the bolt-on M&A of one to one points of rev growth, which is $500 million-$600 million, $700 million of bolt-on M&A, we want to return cash to shareholders. It's our expectation that we'll start growing the dividend again as we complete the cloud and move towards those 39% EBITDA margins. We'll also have a meaningful long-term buyback to return cash to shareholders.
Great. Mark, thanks so much for being with us here today. Greatly appreciate it.
Thanks for having us.