All right. Good morning, let's get the show going here again. For those of you who just walked in, my name is Manav Patnaik, I cover business and information services for Barclays. We're very pleased to have back again with us Team Equifax. To my immediate left is Mark Begor, the CEO, and then John Gamble, the CFO, and Trevor, who runs IR, is in the room there, so if anybody needs to trouble him after this, he loves it. So guys, thank you for being here. Mark, maybe just to set the stage, you know, I think broadly speaking, you know, when you talk about Equifax, I think the first word that comes to mind is just credit bureau, right? And, and you kinda get bucketed into the category, and we've had this discussion-
We think we're much more than that, yeah.
Yeah, we've had this discussion before and, you know, while you agreed to it, you also disagreed to it. So maybe just from your perspective, how do you describe Equifax to a new investor?
Yeah, you know, clearly, we're much more than a credit bureau. You kinda start with that. We're a global data analytics technology company. You know, we've got large businesses that don't fit the credit bureau, you know, TAM. Obviously, we have a large business in the United States and in other markets outside the U.S. that are traditional credit bureaus. But whether it's identity and fraud, which is a large, fast-growing business for us, that's much broader than certainly a credit bureau. A lot of the Workforce solutions businesses are well beyond what would be traditional credit bureau. You know, for example, we have a you know $700 million run rate business with the government in the U.S. federal and state governments in the U.S., using our income and employment data, that's obviously not a credit bureau.
We have a $400 million business in EWS that delivers employer services to companies and HR managers, so clearly well beyond a credit bureau with different dynamics. And then we have a large business that you know is kind of a $500 million run rate to background screeners selling data. So much more than a credit bureau. As far as a TAM, if you think about Equifax as $5.3 billion of rev last year, you know, so it's much larger than a traditional credit bureau, and that's how we think about ourselves.
Got it. Maybe we can just start off with the topic of mortgage, actually, first.
Yep.
You know, it's obviously been a big topic, and a couple of quarters ago, you put out, you know, a slide that had a big opportunity there that caught everyone's attention.
Yep.
So maybe if you want to set the stage, and John, if you want to give us some of the numbers behind how you see where mortgages today, you know, the mix of your revenues and that opportunity-
Sure.
I'm referring to.
Yeah, 80% of Equifax is non-mortgage, which actually isn't a great term, but it's the one we use to talk about 80% of your business, you know, which is growing very well. And as everyone knows in the room, over the last couple of years, as the Fed took rates up, mortgage rates went up, and mortgage volume and activity went down dramatically. Mortgage volume, and we measure that by inquiries, and remember, we see every transaction, you know, because in the U.S., all three files are pulled for every mortgage. In the fourth quarter and first quarter is down 50% from what we would call traditional levels. And we think about a normal market of being 2015- 2019 as being a normal mortgage market.
If you look at the current run rates, we're down 50% from that. It's never been that low. There's always some variability in mortgage. It could be up five, down five, up 10, down 10 points. And of course, during COVID, when the Fed cut rates, mortgage activity went up dramatically. But when we talk about normal, we look at excluding that, you know, sharp increase in mortgage, particularly refis, that happened during that timeframe. In 2022 and 2023, you know, the mortgage market declined over that timeframe as the Fed took up rates at a pace that's never happened before in our lifetime. And as you know, mortgage rates got over 7%, and activity went down dramatically. That took out about $1 billion of revenue, the market impact in 2022 and 2023 out of Equifax P&L.
As we now bottom in the mortgage market, that really started in the fourth quarter, and it continued through the first, you know, we believe we're at a bottom in the mortgage market. If you believe the Fed's gonna cut rates in the future at some level, certainly my view, not back to where they were during COVID, but back to more traditional levels, we would expect to see an increase in mortgage market activity. We're not forecasting that in 2024. You know, our guidance doesn't include any mortgage market recovery, although we've seen a little bit of uptick in the first quarter versus fourth quarter, a few hundred basis points.
But, as you point out, we laid out, if you look at the 50% decline and say that that's gonna go back to normal sometime in the future, whether it's 2025, 2026, or 2027, you know, that's a tailwind versus a headwind over the last couple of years with the mortgage market bottoming for Equifax. That could be, and we've sized it at $1 billion of incremental revenue just from the market. And that's at today's pricing for our mortgage solutions. It's for today's records, our hit rates in EWS. It's for today's product mix. As you know, we roll out new products that drive, you know, our revenue up from a per transaction basis every year. That should come back into our P&L in the future.
We also sized in February, and again a couple of weeks ago, that $1 billion will be in the neighborhood of $700 million of EBITDA, so very high incremental margins. We're a fixed-cost business, so that incremental revenue will be very high, and $4 a share, you know, which is very significant on our $7.35 guide, you know, for the year. We also said that we would expect that to drop through, meaning we don't anticipate, we're not going to reinvest those EBITDA dollars to grow the business. We're investing the right amount in growing the business in 2024. We'd expect to in 2025 and 2026, in our core growth rate, you know, from the business, and we would expect that to be incremental EBITDA, EPS, and free cash flow.
And then, as we move towards next year, returning cash to shareholders through dividend growth and buyback, you know, that would be an increment on top as it, as it comes through. Our view, it's a matter of time. Now, we could argue whether you think the whole $1 billion one's gonna come back or what portion is, but there's no question mortgage market has moved from a headwind over the last three years to a bottoming, our view, in 2024, and to a tailwind in 2025, 2026, 2027. And again, we'll talk about this, I'm sure, in our comments, but, you know, we really talk about mortgage market as the market activity in both EWS and USIS, and then we talk about our outperformance of the underlying mortgage market. And I'll wait to see if you wanna get to that.
Yeah.
but both USIS and EWS, we would expect to continue to outperform-
Outperform.
the underlying market, which will make that $1 billion larger.
Yeah. So, okay, so-
Since we're-
Yeah, go ahead.
completing the cloud transformation, just so you're aware, so there is no additional capital that needs to get invested to drive the additional transaction volumes, right? So it's become more variable, so we can deliver that incremental revenue and variable profit without having to put more capital in the business.
Got it. And John, maybe just to follow up, the $700 million EBITDA that Mark referred to, and that's obviously high margins, but-
Very high.
I think one would have thought it would be higher or could be higher, but I think there's, like, some mix impact, you know, within the different pieces of mortgage, if you wanna just, you know-
There's also some variable costs-
Sure.
of rev share on records.
Yeah.
And FICO, please.
Yeah, that's okay. You got it. rev s hare on records, obviously FICO cost. We're also in the mortgage solutions business, right? So we buy files from Experian and TransUnion, and we resell them as part of a Tri-merge report.
Yeah.
There is more variable cost probably in mortgage than people might anticipate, right, and more than we would generally have on our online businesses, where those online businesses would have higher variable margins than our online mortgage business.
Got it.
Yeah.
When you say $1 billion is the market activity you're trending, that's just basically an origination at current price.
It current price.
Does not include your new records, new prices.
Correct. Current price, current mix-
Correct.
current records-
Okay.
current everything.
Got it.
So to your point, you know, we would expect EWS to deliver outperformance going forward this year, 11%, 8% in the first quarter. USIS, 57% in the first quarter, 35%+ for the year. That outperformance makes that bigger number in 2025, 2026, 2027 as we go forward, and that's a combination, as you point out, of price. We take price up every year, both in EWS and USIS. FICO pass-through, you know, the element of FICO price that goes through in USIS. New products, both in USIS and EWS, and this year, as you know, we're getting a benefit from our new pre-qual solution that's also driving some outperformance in USIS. We had some big, impact in 2022 and 2023 from Mortgage 36 in EWS, and we're gonna be rolling out more new products in both businesses.
And then, as you point out, as we add records, we get higher hit rates in our EWS mortgage business, which drives revenue.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we'll get back to those as well.
Yeah.
So, and maybe, John, just to wrap up the mortgage piece, can you just talk, remind us of what you saw in terms of volumes in the first quarter and what you've guided to for the year as well?
Yeah. So effectively, we saw better, and I'll do mortgage credit volumes-
Yeah.
than we expected, so down, you know, 19%-20% year-on-year, as opposed to the down 25%-26% we talked about when we started the year.
Right.
And what we're indicated is, we expect at the current run rates, we're expecting to see mortgage market down, I think we said 11%, but in the neighborhood of 10%-11% for the full year, right? And that is consistent with current run rates. So better than we talked about, when we gave guidance in February, but still down year-on-year, but that should yield some growth as we get into the fourth quarter, right? Now, again, that's just market. As Mark talked about, that's not mortgage outperformance. We'll perform much better than that-
Yeah.
but that's the market itself.
And maybe just to sharpen that point, John, in the first quarter, second quarter, lesser degree third, we're comping against a mortgage market decline sequentially in 2023, right? So but sequentially, the mortgage market from, like, fourth quarter to first quarter to, you know, what we expect to see in second quarter is fairly flat, meaning it's bottoming.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
As John pointed out, as we get to the second half of the year, particularly the fourth quarter.
Mm-hmm.
we're basically comping against a flat market, fourth quarter 2023 to fourth quarter 2024, in our current guide, but our outperformance is gonna really drop all the way through, and you're gonna see very strong revenue growth-
Yeah.
you know, in our mortgage vertical that'll benefit Equifax as we kinda get to this bottoming mortgage market, which I think will help all of us think about the power of our underlying mortgage performance. Said differently, in a flat mortgage market, let's say you think it's flat forever, right? Which disregard-
Sure, yeah.
that $1 billion recovery that we would expect. If it's flat in 2025 versus 2026, there's no recovery, our mortgage market grows double digit, right? Our mortgage business grows double digit, because of price, product, records, and penetration. So I think that's a, you know, a real positive that shows the underlying power-
Yeah.
of what we execute on it.
Got it.
EWS in the first quarter, and what we talked about, is the level of shopping, or the inability of people to close loans that they'd started, was similar to what we'd seen in the fourth quarter, so it continued, right? So what we ended up seeing is EWS performance be a little weaker than USIS performance, which was somewhat consistent with what we saw last year. A little different than we anticipated, right? We had anticipated that that might switch-
Yeah.
and people would start being able to close loans more consistently or shop less, and we didn't see it in the market, and we think that was probably the big difference between what we saw in terms of market performance in USIS versus EWS.
Got it. And then maybe just to touch on the first quarter results real quickly. You know, to your point, mortgage, finally, after two years of just being a massive headwind-
Yep.
is now becoming a tailwind for you guys. You did perform in mortgage better-
Yep.
than you expected, than we expected in the first quarter.
Yep.
But then, you know, I guess tables turned in your non-mortgage business. There were little areas all-
Yep.
Across the place where you missed. So can you just talk about what's going on? Was that just, were there big changes in the market?
No.
Maybe you guys just got the expectations a little off?
You know, look, businesses are complex, and as you point out, there was a number of small issues in USIS and EWS that we think are, you know, kinda temporary in nature. You know, if you step back, you know, there was a very strong performance for sure at EWS. Their non-mortgage verifier growth was 15%, you know, so very strong performance, you know, by EWS, and we would expect that to continue going forward. You know, we talked about, and we'll come to it, I'm sure, record additions are stronger than we thought as we're landing new partners, which will really benefit the business going forward. With regards to the guidance, you know, we're kind of at the midpoint of rev in the first quarter. We beat EPS.
Given enough uncertainty early in the year, we thought it was prudent to hold the year, and when we put out our second quarter guide, you know, we think we put out the right number at this point in time. We'll re-look at it as we go through the year. I think, you know, when you beat the first and you hold the year, the Street thought-
Yeah.
you would increase the year. We just thought, being early in the year with enough uncertainty about what's the Fed doing or not doing. You know, spool back, if we had this meeting back in February, we probably would've been talking here about lots of rate cuts. As inflation got, you know, more rooted in the U.S. economy, you know, now, you know, a few weeks ago, it was maybe rate cuts are in the second half, and then last week, unemployment goes up a little bit. Now they're thinking maybe a rate cut in June. There's enough volatility in all that, we thought it was prudent to be balanced about our guide for the year-
Got it..
given where we are.
Yeah, and, you know, you've characterized the consumer as still relatively-
Yep.
resilient, strong, but maybe just to talk about the two other categories of lending, card and auto-
Yep.
whichever way you wanna take that. Like, what are the card volumes, maybe if you start there, look like from your vantage point?
Yeah, and I think, if we could, separate subprime from the rest.
Sure.
As you know, subprime is, you know, like 20% of volume in lots of verticals, like auto, cards, and P loans. P loans is predominantly subprime. Subprime, as you remember, went down in 2022 and 2023 as inflation went up. Now, while the subprime consumer's working, inflation has pressured them. You know, so there's no question, and delinquencies went up, so there was some pullback in originations in 2022 and 2023. Those are, for the most part, bottoming out, and we're starting to see some elements of subprime origination growth but at a lower level. But the comps are behind us on that, you know, on subprime. In auto, we've seen some impact of higher rates, really driving payment levels up and a reduction in some activity in auto. We talked about that in the quarter. In card, fairly balanced.
We haven't really seen. You know, card originations still are fairly normal and actually fairly strong, you know, going forward. Would you add anything there?
No, EFX for us in the quarter was fine, right?
Yep.
We saw some nice growth in EFX, so we think we performed relatively well against the market dynamics Mark just described.
Yeah.
Got it. Then within USIS, I think you've called it out, but, like, it's fraud and identity and some of those other areas-
Strong growers.
that are really growing. So can you just talk about that?
Our consumer business is growing strong. Our commercial business had a tougher first quarter but has had very strong growth over the last couple of years that were double-digit. Our marketing business was impacted by fintech, but we expect that to come back in 2024. And then core USIS is, you know, we expect to continue to have a good year in 2024.
Yeah.
Got it. John, you mentioned earlier, you know, when you would refer a new mortgage, you have your tech transformations, you have the scale to handle the volume. But can you just, I think USIS is still running on duplicate systems, right?
It is, right?
You sunset. So can you just remind us of that timeline, and then what kind of, you know, numbers impact should we see when that sunsets?
Sure. So U.S. and Canada consumer credit bureaus, they're, we're gonna complete the transformation, and they'll start the decommissioning of their mainframes third quarter.
Third quarter.
Okay?
Yeah.
Spain, similar timing.
Same. Yep.
They'll start their decommissioning third quarter. We actually completed Chile and Argentina, so they're pretty much done. UK had their commercial bureau; they completed this quarter, and you'll see the UK's consumer bureau go full cloud early in 2024. So let's say first quarter of 2024-ish.
2025.
2025. I'm sorry-
Yeah, 2025.
Got the year wrong here. And so as you look at the second half of this year, what you're gonna see is we're gonna start getting margin benefits from lower redundant costs and that decommissioning of mainframes, and in some cases, data centers, in the third quarter and then fully in the fourth. So one of the reasons why you see our margins grow nicely as you go into third quarter and fourth quarter are these benefits we're getting from decommissioning those big consumer redundant costs that we're incurring right now. And in the US and Canada particularly, those are relatively substantial, right? 'Cause there's a substantial amount of existing infrastructure that goes away, and it's not just the physical assets themselves-
Yeah.
but it's all the support for those assets that goes along with it, as well as ancillary software that's different than what you require in the cloud. So all those pieces start to roll off in the third but heavily in the fourth... and we think that's a benefit, obviously, to this year's results, to the, to later in the year, but also substantially-
To next year.
to next year's results. Yeah.
You know, I think at your Investor Day several years ago, you had quantified that. I, I, if I remember correctly, it was 190 basis points or something, maybe I might be off, but can you help quantify what that fourth quarter run rate benefit might look like?
Yeah, so we did talk about the total reduction we were gonna see over time period. Some of it we've already seen, right? Because EWS has already come almost fully migrated to the cloud, right? But basically, if you take a look at the guide, what you're seeing is a significant margin enhancement, and-
Through the year.
through the year. A nd the incremental margin enhancement in the third and fourth quarter above what you just expect from variable profit growth, which I'm sure you guys have modeled, is really all driven by these cost reductions.
Okay.
Those are the big drivers. It's a material benefit in margin in the second half. We haven't given a dollar amount, but it's a significant amount.
Got it.
Maybe just back on cloud transformation that you heard us talk about a couple of weeks ago. We expect to exit the year with 90% of our revenue in the new cloud environment-
Yeah.
up from 70% at the end of last year. Big milestone for us to, this is a pivotal year to complete a lot of work-
Yeah.
particularly in USIS, to get, you know, that environment in place. And, you know, beyond the cost savings, beyond the competitive benefits that we believe we get, you know, in just, driving some share gains in USIS and international against our competitors, that whole bandwidth element of, you know, focusing on cloud and running the business to be just focused on growth in the second half in 2025 is really a big pivot for the organization. These tech transformations are hard.
Yeah.
It's a lot of work. We've been talking about it for-
For a long time.
five years, almost at Equifax, and to be near that finish line is a big deal. The other thing that gives us a lot of encouragement around the benefits of the cloud is EWS. EWS completed the cloud about 18 months ago. We saw their vitality really go up north of the 10, very substantially. And then, using the example we talked about, we signed two more exclusive partnerships in the first quarter, you know, for record additions in EWS, one of those large, and we spiked it out, you know, being six million records, which is a, you know, a bigger partner. Typically, in the old environment, that would've taken us six to nine months to onboard those records. We're gonna do it in three and a half. Cloud allows us to do that. You know, just the-
Yeah.
the ability to ingest data, to roll out new products, to be always on from a stability standpoint, you know, we think is game changing, which is the reasons why we invested-
Yeah.
in the cloud.
Yeah, it was your big initiative-
And we're-
and you started, so you're-
Getting close.
getting to the finish line.
Yeah.
Just a small nitpick, you know, the 3Q timeline seems to have been pushed out a little bit more. Is that just 'cause there's a couple of customers that aren't ready, or what's the-
No, no.
you know?
For USIS?
Yeah.
No, no, we always said we would be done in mid-year, and we're still gonna be done at mid-year. There's no, no change in that.
Okay.
from what we've talked about for the last six to nine months.
The decommissionings trail the completion of the migrations.
Okay.
That's all.
Yeah.
It takes a little bit of time after the migration's complete to actually turn the assets down-
Got it.
and then take the resources out-
We don't unplug the mainframe the next day.
That support those assets.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fine.
It takes time to clean everything off of them and, you know, like, a month or two-
Okay.
is really the timeframe.
Okay, so maybe just shifting a little bit to capital allocation. So you got this bump coming from decommissioning, phasing out, margins go up, cash flow goes up. If you're fortunate, mortgage comes back next year, that helps you as well. You said all, a lot of that flows through the bottom line.
Yeah.
So, you know, in the last three, four years, you've been very focused on M&A.
Sure.
Now with this, all this extra incremental cash flow, are you gonna be more aggressive on M&A? Should we expect bigger deals? Do you go back to buybacks, raise the dividend? Just help us think through that.
I think we're gonna do all three. You know, we believe bolt-on M&A, and we use that term, you know, very deliberately. Doing bolt-on M&A is a part of our long-term strategy. As you know, we have a long-term growth rate of eight to 12. That includes one to two points of M&A growth annually. You shouldn't look for us to be more aggressive on M&A. We're gonna be very balanced. We've got a corp dev team that looks at opportunities. As you know, in the last 12 months, we added Boa Vista, you know, which added, you know, in the high end of that one to two points of revenue growth. And, you know, we continue to look for what's next in our pipeline.
We have three kind of swim lanes that we're focused on around M&A. One is to strengthen Workforce Solutions, our fastest-growing business-
Yeah.
and most profitable business. We wanna make that stronger. In the last three years, we've done 14 acquisitions. Over a third of those are in EWS, you know, as they should be, given strengthening that business. Second is identity and fraud. Fast, big TAM, fast-growing space. We want to be bigger in it. We've done twp acquisitions in the last couple of years, Kount and Midigator. And third is differentiated data. We wanna find data sets that are unique and proprietary. So that's our M&A focus, and that will continue. And you shouldn't think about as our free cash flow accelerates, we're gonna be more aggressive. We're gonna be balanced on that. ere may be a year where we see something unique, and we'll go above that one to two.
If we don't see opportunities that meet our cost of capital hurdles and strategic hurdles, we'll be south of one to two , but over the long term, one to two. And as you point out, as our CapEx comes down, completing the cloud, as our margins expand from cloud cost savings and the 50 basis points a year of operating leverage that we expect to get, our free cash flow goes up substantially. And we think there's gonna be substantial excess free cash flow in 2025, 2026, 2027 to do that bolt-on M&A and return cash to shareholders. It's our intent to return cash by starting dividend growth again. We froze the dividend in 2017. We're still paying it. We would grow dividend likely in line with earnings on an annual basis and use the excess free cash flow for a substantial buyback.
That was always been part of our plan, you know, as we complete the cloud, and we get that operating lift, and CapEx comes down, to continue to invest in Equifax, but still have margin expansion that allows us to return substantial amounts to shareholders.
Got it. Okay, that's good to hear. Maybe that's a good transition into Workforce Solutions, and maybe just starting with one of the assets you did acquire, Appriss Insights.
Yep.
Can you just talk to us, you know, several years later, like, how integrated it is?
Yeah.
It also sounds like you had kind of left it as it is, and now you're gonna start kind of, you know, maybe looking at pricing and cross-selling. So just how-
Products.
far we are, yeah.
Combinations, yeah. So the business Manav's referring to is called Appriss Insights. We bought it three years ago for $1.008 billion. It's a unique data set on incarceration records in the United States. It's the only data set that's out there, and that data is used by background screeners. Every background screen in the U.S., every, like, 95% of background screens will include a check of, "Have you been incarcerated previously?" That's used by the hiring manager to have a conversation, not to deny employment, but that's done, you know, in order to understand that relationship, you know, with that prospective employee. It's also used in government social services, to find out if the individual applying for services is incarcerated-
Yeah.
they're not allowed to get that service. So large data set, very unique, and we're in the mode of you described, of really doing data combinations. Today, we still sell it as a separate transaction in both verticals. And we're working to integrate it with our work history or income and employment for government social services to do, you know, one transaction with multiple polls. And there's other data in both verticals, actually, that we see that we can put together to simplify our customers, whether it's a government social service agency or a background screener to complete their transaction. So that's a great example of where we're focused on bolt-on M&A. Differentiated data, no one else has it, and strengthening workforce solutions in this case, and those two verticals of government and talent, you know, is why we acquired that business.
Got it. You know, I think in one of your decks, you had a chart talking about the different, like, coverage of the data you might wanna have. Can you just remind us of what other kinds of data would make sense within Workforce for you to acquire?
Yeah. So we're very focused on data elements that we don't have, that are, number one, proprietary, number two, that are used by our customers. Predominantly, that's in background screening and government. Background screeners, you know, use all kinds of data. They use incarceration data, they use work history data, which we have. We have over 640 million jobs in our data set, so we have a digital resume on Manav and Mark of where we've worked in our past. We deliver that to a background screener. Education data is another big one. We have exclusive relationships with some of the providers on that to deliver that kind of data. Medical credentialing data. If you're a doctor, dentist, nurse, medical practitioner, there's more data required for that background screen. We got some of that with Appriss.
We're either gonna acquire or partner around the rest of that data. If you think about all the different job categories, if you're a long-haul truck driver in the United States, you have a special driver's license that has to be validated when you're hired, so there's a data set for that. There's data sets for financial services employees around different accreditations that they have. So really, either building up a data hub for the background screeners. We wanna be the data provider for all the elements used in a background screen, so we can help them do the background screen more quickly and more efficiently, you know, versus calling around to get it. Same for government social services. There's a lot of data elements that are used in all the different government social services. As you know, that's a big TAM for us.
There's about a $5 billion manual effort going on, predominantly in order to verify eligibility for government social services in the United States. There's about a dozen different services that are provided to individuals, and there's, I think it's 99 million Americans get some level of social services every month or every pay period, and that includes rent support, childcare support, education support, income support, healthcare support, all kinds of social services delivered at the state level, and there's different data elements there. You have to verify identity to make sure, because some of it's happening digitally. They've gotta make sure it's not a fraudster. It's all needs-based, so you have to verify income. They pull incarceration on that data, and there's some other data elements.
So we wanna build a data hub to be the data provider to the government social service agencies, so they can speed up delivery, going forward. And of course, that business, as you know, had a very strong first quarter, up 35%. This is our government vertical inside of Workforce Solutions. And just again, to frame for the group, Workforce Solutions last year was $5.3 billion. Government's now on a $700 million run rate-
Yeah.
and is our largest vertical now inside of Workforce Solutions.
2.3. I'm sorry, $2.3 billion.
Yeah.
Yeah, great, great, great catch. And $700 million run rate for government. That business was up 35% in the first quarter, and it's up 50% CAGR the last three years, so really penetrating around the unique data we have on government social services, and that's against a $5 billion TAM, against that $700 million.
Yeah.
The delta, the $4.3 billion, is just manual. It's being done manually by, in the 50 states, by the 10 or 12 agencies in each of the states that are delivering those services.
Got it.
Big growth opportunity.
Yeah. So I mean, in Workforce, it sounds like there's, you've done really well, and there's still a huge growth opportunity. And so maybe it's coincidental, but let's just talk about, you had a press release out last night on-
Yeah.
Rudy, who-
Retiring.
Rudy Ploder, who was the head of the business-
Yep.
retiring, and you just hired someone new. So just talk through that transition and what-
Sure.
the new person perhaps brings to the table.
Yeah, we announced yesterday that one of our long-serving business leaders is retiring. Everyone approaches retirement. This is a planned transition. We've been working on it for five or six months. We looked internally and externally, you know, around the right candidate to lead the business going forward and identified a really, w e're really excited about the leader we're bringing in, named Chad Borton. He's joining us from SoFi. He was running their lending business in SoFi, as well as the bank they have inside of SoFi. Prior to that, he was at USAA, which is a big financial institution, and prior to that, at JPMorgan Chase, and, you know, he's military background, so we're excited to have him go forward. No change in strategy, you know. It's these transitions happen.
You know, people have to retire at some point, you know, and Rudy was ready to do that, and we're excited about the leader we have coming in. No change in the leadership team at Workforce, and no change in the strategy going forward, so we're excited about having him on board.
Got it. You know, in the first quarter, historically, I guess, in the last several years at least, Workforce has outperformed at least the mortgage market by 20 points or so. John, you explained in the first quarter, it came in at seven, maybe a little bit light than what you thought, and for the year 11.
Mm-hmm.
But longer term, what should we think? Is it in that 11-12, and also, why that eight-point gap, I guess? Just help us bridge the-
Sure.
those numbers.
So, we start with long term, right?
Sure.
So our long-term model for Workforce Solutions is 13%-15% growth, two to three points of market. You know, so an expectation that you'd see 10-11 points of outperformance across all the segments on average, and mortgages is a large piece of it, and that's the type of outperformance you should expect, which is very consistent with the model we talked about at the analyst day we had four years ago. And I think what we're doing is we're just now operating at about those levels, which is what we expect. The outperformance is driven by price, product, and records, right? And, I think-
And penetration.
And penetra-
Yep.
And what we saw in 2023, right, is very, very strong performance from product, right? We launched Mortgage 36. Its adoption was extremely fast. It was a much more expensive product, right? It was from $50 to, in some cases, up as much as $100-
Mm.
for a Mortgage 36 full delivery. So we saw very, very good growth related to Mortgage 36 adoption.
And very strong adoption.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's now fully adopted, right? So what we're seeing now is we're seeing growth rates that are more consistent with the longer-term model that we've been talking about. It was a little below the expectation we set when we gave first quarter guidance. It was principally around mix, right? We're talking about some of the customers that we have that have somewhat lower price points. Generally, they're larger, right? We saw more volume move in those directions, so we had a little bit of a negative mix effect. You gotta remember, we're talking about for one to two points of movement in outperformance, it's $2 million-$3 million. It's not a really big number, so we can see that occur in a period.
We're expecting to get better as we go through the year, and I'm sure we'll talk about this in a minute, because of record additions. We had an extremely strong year in 2023 in winning new partnerships, really strong first quarter with one very large new partnership that we're adding. As those board in late in the second and into the third quarter, it substantially increases the record benefit, and therefore, the level of outperformance we'll see in mortgage. It also benefits government, but also benefits talent, right? So it benefits us across the board, but in mortgage, it'll be visible directly. So that's really what's going on. Again, we feel really good about the business, and I think what we're talking about now is we're operating kind of more consistently with the long-term model.
Got it. And, you know, I wanted to address the topic of competition and Workforce Solutions, and the records is a good, you know, segue in there. You know, can you, like, the six million records exclusive, I think all your records, except for one big one, which is ADP, I guess, is exclusive. Do you think when these things come up for renewal, are you able to keep them exclusive? Why are the new guys signing up exclusive, and if that's the case, then why do we still get the question on competition?
Well, you have to answer the last one. I'm not sure on the competition, but you know, to me, you know, I think we've proven over the last 3+ years that you know, Equifax is the preferred partner, and I think records is one good place to think about competition. If you think about our customers, we think about competition as being pay-for-pay stubs. Just to be clear, you know, we think about there being a $15 billion TAM for EWS versus the $2.3 billion last year. The delta is manual. You know, that's where we're focused around competition. As you know, there are a couple of players, Experian and Truework are probably the two.
Yeah.
I don't know if you'd add any others, you know, that are so-called in the space. In the last 3.5 years, we've added 35 partnerships. We added two in the first quarter, we added five in the fourth quarter, 35 over that timeframe. To our knowledge, our so-called competitors have added zero partners.
Yeah.
You know, so if you're not adding records, it's hard to be a competitor, right? As we're growing records going forward. Our relationships are two, three, four years are kind of the contracts on records with our partners. They have auto renewals on them, and they auto-renew. There's a lot of integration that takes place that's very complex on both sides. They have to normalize their records. We have to get into their technology and pull the data out, which is very complex. That can take, you know, it takes months. Actually, the cloud is helping us shorten that timeframe, which is very, very positive. But you get very sticky once you get integrated.
And remember, the relationship, once we're in place, when we add, use that example, the six million records from the one we signed in the first quarter, which we'll bring on board mid-year, the day we add those records, and they're not added all at once, you know, we'll add one million and then one million the following week. You know, there's some kind of cadence that happens dependent upon their technology. But when we add a record, it's monetized instantly. So that's the power. We pay a rev share instantly because of the scale of our distribution. We have so many different integrations between government, background screening, personal loans, cards, auto, and mortgage, of course. You know, when we add a new record, it turns into revenue, and then we pay a rev share .
Yeah.
We pay a rev share as a percentage of the revenue we receive in any vertical, to our partners. So your question about, you know, why do they renew, why do they auto-renewal? Because we're very sticky. It's a very complex integration. Our partners are super sensitive to making sure that their relationship, and in this case, Equifax, is gonna do it really well. Security, cybersecurity, data privacy, technology, we just have so much more scale.
Yeah.
You know, we have that credibility, and second, on a rev share , you know, as they grow their business and add new partners and more payroll records, we monetize those instantly, so they get leverage on their growth beyond just the payroll service they're delivering. And then as we grow our business, if you think about Equifax growing 13-15 in workforce, the rev share of our partners is growing 13-15. It becomes a very important P&L item for them, and 13-15 is generally faster than their core growth, you know, and a very high margin line item, you know, called rev share from Equifax. So it's a relationship that we see them auto-renewal on the same terms.
Yeah.
You know, there's just no change there. If they wanted to go somewhere else, it would be very challenging to replicate our distribution. Said differently, challenging to replicate our rev share -
Yeah.
that we're paying.
That makes sense.
To work with the partners, we have many partners where we haven't onboarded all their records.
Totally.
Right? So there's a substantial effort with them where they're working with us to try to board more records faster, so they can drive more revenue share by boarding with us more records more rapidly. And that's really a big focus of the way they work with us in increasing the records that our customers can consume.
Yeah, you know, a payroll processor might be a collection of acquisitions, and we've picked up maybe 2/3 of theirs. We're still working on the last third, you know, because of a technology challenge on both sides. So as John pointed out, every one of our partners, we have incremental records we're still working together to bring on board. The two we signed in the first quarter will come online later this year, including the six million. The five we signed in the fourth quarter mostly are coming on in the second half of the year, and first quarter records were up 10% year-over-year because of the addition of records-
Yeah.
we did last year. Maybe just to frame one more, one last point on records, you know, we ended the quarter at 126 million active individuals in our data set. That's against 220 million working Americans, so still 100 million records to go get. So there's a lot of runway for us to add records, and very uniquely, you know, most businesses have the ability to raise price every year, you know, do share gains, in our case, penetration, roll out new products to drive their business. This is the only business I know of in the data space that you can grow records or data and grow your business.
Yeah.
Very powerful.
Fair enough. So in the two minutes we have left, maybe I'll just ask that competition question a different way. So the argument is in Experian, Truework, they have, you know, tens of millions of dollars, so it's nothing compared to what you have.
Yeah.
And then there's a whole long list of, like, you know, Argyle and all those guys that have, you know-
Yep.
received approval from-
Screen scraping.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Et cetera. The question is, is all that revenue that they've collectively built up, is that coming at your expense? Or, you know, is that just a market where you're gonna have more than one vendor? I don't know how you would answer that.
Yeah, so, we don't, we don't think so. We don't think it's coming to our expense. You know, for the screen scrapers that are doing, you know, consumer credentialed activity, either to banks to get net pay or to a payroll processor, we see them generally when we don't have the records, 'cause remember, at our 126 million, every one of our customers still has a manual operation for the records we don't have-
Correct.
the clients that we don't have. And think about that being roughly around 50% of their transactions, we don't have the records. Now, we're growing into that 50 every quarter as we add new records, but they still have to have a manual operation. Generally, they do it manually. They will use some of the Argyle and Plaid of the world to do some of that. There's a lot of friction with it. Many consumers don't want to give out their bank user ID and password, or they don't know their payroll processor user ID and password, or they're generally not allowed to give out their HR software, their HR password and user ID for security reasons with the company they work for. And then, you know, Experian has some level of unique records we don't have from their UC claims business.
We think Truework has a very small number of unique records. Those are records we don't have, you know, which they're able to monetize. So a bit long-winded, we don't see it in our P&L, and, you know, I think there's two places you should look. Number one is partnerships. Are we landing them? And we are. And then second, is our growth rate still very strong? And it is, and, you know, look at theirs. I think as you point out, tens of millions of dollars, I think is the right way to think about it, you know, versus our $2.3.
Yeah, fair enough. All right, we're just about out of time, so we're gonna end it there. But thank you, Mark and John, for being in, thanks everybody as well.
Thanks, Manav.
Cool.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks.