And I cover Information Services Company. We are at RBC. Excited to host John and Trevor from Equifax. John, Trevor, thanks for giving us this opportunity.
Thanks very much for having us. We appreciate it.
Thanks.
Maybe we'll just kick it off talking about the state of consumer lending. If you can talk about what do you see from a credit card, autos, consumer lending, personal loans, but also on the mortgage front, and how do you think about it as we get into more of a procyclical environment? Obviously, there are a lot of macro factors, sorry, just macro factors in terms of rates, the Fed rate cut, but also longer-term yields going up. You also have a new administration, which are going to be more pro-business. How does all of that fit together? Thanks.
That was a lot. Okay, but so just taking a look at kind of what we're seeing currently.
Yeah.
We talked about this a little bit in October, right? I mean, basically what we're continuing to see the lending environment around card, around auto, just banking and lending in general, be relatively constructive, right? USIS, which is really where you'd see that in our business, performed relatively well in the quarter, had fairly good growth. We saw decent performance in banking and lending. You know, auto was a little weaker, but actually performed okay. So we continue to see the consumer is relatively strong. We're not really seeing our customers pull back, right? So, and as we said frequently, right, even though we have seen delinquencies, certainly in subprime go up relatively significantly over the past, say, 18 months, it plateaued a little bit.
But really, as long as people are working, we tend to think the lending environment will stay relatively good, and we're continuing to see very good employment. So we think that's leading to a relatively healthy lending environment. Some things we are seeing, right, that we talked a little bit about recently is we are seeing hiring be a little bit weaker, right? We talked about that in October. We had talked about that seeing some weakening in late September and then early October before the earnings call in our Talent Solutions business, which, as a reminder, is about $100 million a quarter, right? So, and we saw weakness in hiring across our background screeners. That's our customers, our background screeners. And we've actually seen that continue as we weaken and continue as we went through the rest of October and a little bit into November.
The hiring environment does appear to be a little weaker from our perspective. Mortgage also, you mentioned rates, but we have seen rates move up. We talked about in October the fact that we've seen weakness in the mortgage market in early October, that if you took the run rate that we were seeing at the time in early October and applied them to 2025, that you would have seen mortgage credit inquiries growing something north of 5% at the time, which was certainly weaker than we were seeing back in July. We've actually seen that weaken a little further now as we've moved through October into November. This is not a surprise as rates have gone up. We saw a pop, an improvement in credit activity around mortgage in September when rates fell to near 6%.
Now that rates have gone back up, we've seen it weaken. Probably now, if you applied the current run rate to the mortgage market, the current run rates of credit on mortgage market to 2025, you'd see a growth rate of say something on the order of 5% or maybe a little less, so, and as everyone knows, we tend to use the current run rates when we do our forecasts and we do our longer-term plan, right, so we also just made a few comments around our margins as we look into 2025, and I think really consistent what we've talked about for years, right? When we drive growth rates over a longer-term basis, kind of within our normal growth rates and our long-term model 7%-10% organic, we expect to see margin expansion of say 50 basis points a year.
We also have made very good progress in 2024 of completing very substantial cloud migrations in our U.S. consumer business, our U.S. telco business, as well as in our Canadian consumer business. And those things allowed us to drive cost reductions. And we took a charge related to that in the third quarter, that some of which we'll start to see in the fourth quarter, more of which we'll see next year. We talked about that reducing spending by $70 million. I think, you know, think on the order of three quarters of that is probably expense. Some of that will get in the fourth quarter. So the wraparound benefits a little less than that 75%, but taking that benefit and adding it to the 50 basis points, that's why we made the comment that you should see our margins expand something under 100 basis points in 2025.
So we think, again, very good performance. We do like to remind people, even in a flat mortgage market or a slightly up mortgage market, our mortgage business performs very well. Workforce Solutions outperforms the mortgage market by somewhere between 8% and 11% or 12%, depending on market conditions, but substantially outperforms the mortgage market. And USIS obviously should significantly outperform the mortgage market in 2025, part of it driven by the price increases that were executed by one of our partners. So we still feel very good about our mortgage business growing very nicely, even in a market that isn't as constructive as maybe people thought it was going to be a few months ago. But even in that case, we think we'll have a very, very strong mortgage business next year.
That's great color. If I can drill down further on that under 100 basis points of margin expansion. So you provided a lot of good color there, but I'm just wondering if you could articulate what are you assuming in terms of mortgage. Are you assuming like 5% when you are talking about 100 or even flatish mortgage? And the same thing on the other lending side, any thoughts on those funds?
I'm going to be very careful about giving.
No, not guidance. Yeah.
Five, okay, but I think as I commented, generally in our planning, we assume run rates that we're currently seeing in our planning. So we talked about a market being around 5% or maybe a little weaker. Probably a reasonable assumption that that's the type of planning we would be doing, right? As we get toward the end of this year, we'll look again, right? And if we see the mortgage market start to recover, then we'll reflect that in our guidance. If it's weaker, we'll reflect that, but we think right now it feels like we've seen mortgage bouncing along the bottom, got a little better, maybe got a little worse, but continues to bounce along the bottom. We still have strong conviction that over the next, you put in the number of years, we're going to see mortgage recover, right?
We think the level of mortgage market we saw between 2015 and 2019, kind of prior to the pandemic, is a very reasonable level for the mortgage market to recover to. We don't know how fast that will occur, but we don't know. We strongly believe it should occur and as that happens, you know, I think we've been very clear that the revenue we generate, which should be nicely over $1 billion, will flow through at our variable margins, which we talked about as being on the order of 65%-70% or in that general ballpark on mortgage and we should be able to allow that to flow through and generate nice growth on our margins and our EPS. Some investment has to go in, but a very limited amount. We already sell to those customers. We already have integrations built to those customers.
It's just the traditional mortgage players driving volume. We feel good about how that will help us accelerate the performance of the business. It's kind of an upside that's available. We just don't know when it's going to happen, right? We do believe it will.
That's very helpful color, and then something that you mentioned, your partner of FICO in particular has already communicated that FICO price increases for next year. Historically, you've tried to maintain your margins on those price increases. Is there a fair assumption that you would continue to do that as we look going forward?
Yeah, it's a fair assumption that we would look to maintain. And it's generally our EBITDA margins, right? Not gross margins, but try to maintain our EBITDA margins related to the pricing that was passed to us by our vendor. Absolutely, yeah.
That's helpful color. And then maybe one final question on mortgage, just on this tri-merge to bi-merge. FHFA had communicated that data on 4Q25. Any thoughts on the timeline there, potential for that to get pushed out?
Yeah, I think we've been consistent for quite some time, right? That they were going through an extended comment period that we think tri-merge to buy-merge was directly linked to going to two scores, FICO and VantageScore. We don't think there was a lot of industry support for the activity. It felt to us like something that probably wouldn't happen anyway. We'll find out if it actually does. But given recent events, we would think that the likelihood is even lower than it might have been before. So again, we like to remind people that we own VantageScore, right? So with our peers. So to the extent that this does happen together, there's a significant benefit to us related to selling two scores, which obviously have a significant price point on them.
We do believe, generally speaking, that there are differences in the credit file between the three of us on trended data. So we do think many lenders will continue to buy all three files relative to the closing cost on a loan. It's a relatively small amount of expense to buy an additional file. I mean, last year, a trended file was $19-$20, right? $5,000 plus to close a loan. And you can see differences in scores that are material. I think 20 plus points between different files from the different companies. So we do believe that you'll continue to see people buy three files, even if it went three to two. But again, we think at this point, it's probably very less likely that it will.
Yeah, that's very helpful color. Switching gears, let's talk about verification business. You've had some great success adding new payroll providers, even signing up big HR service providers, including Workday. Can you just talk about what's driving that strong momentum and how do you think about the pipeline as we get through this year, but also going into next year? Just high-level pipeline.
Yeah, it's been a great year, obviously, for adding records. And we think all the investments that we've made over a really extended period of time have put us in a very strong position, right? To be very attractive to not only payroll companies to be a partner, but also certainly to direct contributors to companies to be a partner through the investments we made in our workforce solutions, in our, sorry, Employer Services business, but also to HR software companies like Workday, right? To become a partner. And it starts with the investments we've made in migrating to GCP into a fully cloud-native platform. We think the security standards and compliance standards we deploy are outstanding relative to our peers. The level of investment we've made in those platforms we think is substantially higher than any of our peers. So we think we offer the best technical solution.
We think we also offer by far the best exchange because of its size and completeness. And as it continues to grow larger, we think it continues to be more and more attractive to contributors. And we also think it becomes more and more attractive to people wanting to do verifications. And we think the government business is an obvious example of how that's occurring as we continue to grow the exchange. We're up to over 130 million Social Security numbers sitting in the Work Number exchange. And so that our ability to provide a response on a request continues to grow, which is very beneficial not only to a mortgage underwriter or someone executing in card or personal loans, but also very much in government and then very much also in talent solutions.
We think the continued investment in the exchange and growth of the exchange just makes us continue to be more and more attractive to contributors.
That's great color, and I do want to go and drill down into government, but before we do that, in terms of contributors, as you mentioned, you've signed up Workday, but are there other opportunities to sign up other HR software providers, but also retirement service providers or gig economy? How do you think about that opportunity?
We've added in the last three years, I think on the order of 45 new partners. They include pension providers. Obviously, they include some HR software companies. We think there are opportunities to sign other HR software companies as well as opportunities to continue to add more and more payroll partners, as well as partners that can provide more gig records. Now, we can get gig records through our current partners. That's certainly the case, but we're continuing to try to expand the net for us to be able to find more partners to get more information, not just on W-2 employees, but 1099 employees and people that receive payments in other ways. Yeah, we think that the opportunity continues to broaden. Also within the partners we signed, we don't have all their records yet, right?
Certainly, that's true for Workday because we're just starting to deploy them. But even for partners we've had for an extended period of time, some of our partners were built through acquisition. Not all their systems are consolidated. As they consolidate systems, we have access to those records or we can build direct access to those records. And we continue to drive growth there. In some cases, that gives us access not necessarily to W-2 records, but to 1099 records. And we're seeing that grow as well. So we feel like we have opportunities to add new partners, but also opportunities to grow more within our existing partners.
The growth within existing partners we think is substantially enhanced because in employer services, we continue to add more capabilities for our partners to white label our services around unemployment insurance claims or on I-9 validations around work opportunity tax credits and the other services and even ACA, the other services that we provide that can be a benefit to their customers if they want to sell them directly. We're happy to do that. Because again, what we're trying to do is drive the growth of employer services, but more importantly, drive the records they attract.
That's great. Maybe drilling down further on the government side, one of the questions that we get is how is this new Department of Government Efficiency that may potentially come up? How does that affect your business? Is that a positive or could that be a headwind for the business?
What I can tell you is the way we sell what we sell into government, which obviously has been a tremendous success over the past four or five years, right? You've seen growth rates that have been as high as 50% in several years over the past several years. And this year, year to date, it's been 30%, right? So really, really good performance. But what we sell is efficiency and program integrity, right? So when we go in, and again, as a reminder, generally speaking, The Work Number is used to support the provisioning of benefits around healthcare. Think Medicaid, think the Affordable Care Act, the provisioning of benefits around SNAP and other types of food support, the provisioning of benefits around rental support, right? And then some other supports, but those are probably the biggest area.
What we're able to do when the bulk of our revenue is generated through contracts with states directly, because most of those benefits are delivered through the state, a lot of it's funded by the federal government, but the actual delivery comes through states or local governments. What we sell is efficiency, right? We're able to help them process more claims or more applications much, much more rapidly. We can do it with a much higher certainty that fraud is lower, right? Because The Work Number data is third-party contributed and therefore validated. When someone's on The Work Number, it helps also validate identity. We believe it is substantially more efficient than trying to have a person that works in a state office do it manually, which is much slower when they're dealing with paper documents or other information.
So we feel very, very strongly that we provide significant efficiency to the states in processing claims and getting benefits to people faster. And at the same time, we help with fraud, right? Yeah, because we can help eliminate the risk related to the application process, specifically related to income and employment documentation that's necessary in all these applications. So we feel like what we've been selling for 10 plus years and we've done so well in growing, we think is very consistent with anyone trying to drive efficiency, mitigate fraud, and drive program integrity.
That's great color. And then in terms of penetration, as you said, it's adopted at the state level and there's still room there for penetration. So just even taking an example of Medicaid, how many states have already adopted and how much runway do you have for penetration?
So we have a significant amount of runway left. We haven't given a specific number of states because it's not only the individual states, but it's the programs deployed within the states. But we've got a long runway to go. We're nowhere near done. We're certainly over, let's say we're over halfway home, but nowhere near there. But again, if you think about it, we're looking at a run rate, $800-$900 million dollar business as we go forward, right? And the opportunity is probably $5 billion, right? So we've got a long way to go in terms of penetration of adding new states, adding opportunities within states, and then broadening the data we sell into the customers that we have in the states, right? So we acquired incarceration data with the Appriss acquisition in many cases.
When people are applying for government benefits, understanding incarceration status is an important part of the application. We can continue to grow that, and we also have enhanced, we believe, identity opportunities to provide upfront identity verifications through our account acquisition that we haven't really sold into these benefit programs yet either, so we think we have nice opportunities to continue to grow, not just in income verification, still obviously the largest in employment verification, obviously the largest opportunity, but also to grow in other data assets that are beneficial to managing these programs.
That's great, and then maybe just thinking about other verticals like talent in particular, you talked about some of the weakness there, which was very apparent even when First Advantage reported. You continue to see business decline. How do you think about those trends, and where are you seeing those weaknesses? Are there certain verticals, certain areas that you've seen weakness?
Yeah, so generally in our talent business, we're selling into, let's say, higher paying roles, right? Because that's where the background screen would be more extensive and where the background screener or company through the background screener would want to purchase an instant more detailed employment history. And what we saw is weakness in those areas across, I can't give you specific industry color, okay? But we saw weakness across that segment of our business. And as we said, it was relatively broad-based, right? We don't think it was relative to a specific partner or customer. So it was relatively broad-based. If you look at hiring pace in 2024 and extended into 2025, it's somewhat lower, right? Than the averages. And we'll see whether we see some recovery as we move into 2025.
Our goal, though, is what we can do is we can continue to drive more penetration within our customers. As we continue to build out The Work Number database, we think it makes more attractive to use us. We're up to now over on the order of 700 million total records, including historical. So the depth of the instant electronic resume we can provide or employment history we can provide is getting better and better every day. As we add new current records, it makes it deeper as well. So we think that makes it more and more likely that customers and substantial and smaller want to put us at top of waterfall, which increases our share of their transactions. We're also continuing to expand our education partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse.
We think that's an opportunity for us to continue to provide more data into the background screening industry. I already mentioned Appriss Insights as it relates to government. It also obviously directly relates into the background screening business. And then we also, it's relatively small at this point, but we also have some information on medical sanctions, some information on medical qualifications that we can and licensure that we can also add into the solutions that we're selling. That's a much smaller and earlier part of the journey for us. But we think we have real opportunity to increase the depth of data we're selling into our customers and continue to try to grow penetration there. So that's the way we're going to try to drive performance.
In the third quarter, we outperformed by something north of probably 15 points based on what you saw, the growth in the underlying industry, and we showed relatively decent growth, so we think we can continue to perform well relative to the market, even if the market's a little bit weak as we go forward.
Talking about outperformance, we continue to see really good outperformance and that improved in the mortgage market as well, the verification mortgage market. What's driving that outperformance? How do you think about that sustainability of the outperformance going forward?
So the big driver of outperformance for us in 2024, really across the business, is records, right? We had a very good year in records. And as I think Mark's talked about consistently, right, we put a real focus on putting dedicated teams with dedicated, very senior leadership on how do we build more and more partnerships, not just for record editions, but partnerships across the business, even for data acquisition, right? For Workforce Solutions to give us more opportunity to provide more services to our customers to grow not just our income employment verification business, but to broaden access. So that's been the biggest driver, right? As we go forward, though, when we think about the mortgage business and the level of outperformance we talked about, think on the order of plus or minus 10%, right?
It's really going to be driven by the same things that drive the long-term growth rate of workforce solutions. We expect to see on the order of four points in price. We expect to see on the order of four to five points in record growth, right? And those are two very substantial drivers. We expect to continue to drive penetration, which should be a substantial benefit to us as we go forward. And so we feel good about our, and I'm sorry, and product, right? And we will also drive product. When we look across Equifax, since we hit product, right? The One Equifax or Only Equifax initiative that we have going on, we think is something that's going to absolutely be beneficial to us as we go forward.
We're increasingly starting to find products that we can provide, for example, an employment flag on a credit report or other information regarding employment on a credit report that lets someone understand that we have the record or that the person may be working, right? And that's just more value that should make it more interesting to acquire the Equifax file versus other parties' files. And increasingly finding ways to link the tremendous asset we have in Workforce Solutions with the great assets we have in USIS, we think is something that is going to allow growth in both areas as we go forward. So we're excited about where that's headed. You'll start to see more products probably as we get into 2025 because the technology deployment's occurring.
Now that we've completed consumer transformation and the telco utility exchange transformation in USIS, that makes the ability to create these new products much more seamless when we're talking about using TWN as well, so we're excited about how those things are going to come together and how we can try to sell both sides of Equifax US at the same time.
That's great, and I think that takes us into this conversation around moving on to the full cloud and the Vitality Index. You've seen some significant acceleration in vitality in the business and what's really driving it. You mentioned a couple of these cross-selling opportunities, but I was wondering if you could also talk about the new product initiatives.
Sure. So again, what you saw historically, right, is as we completed cloud transformation, those units that completed it first tended to perform better. So we had very, very strong NPI. We've been running north of 10% for several years. In the earlier part, a lot of it was driven by Workforce Solutions because they finished first, right? I think what you're seeing now is Workforce Solutions are still performing very well, but you're starting to see larger and larger contributions from USIS. They're not quite to where we want them to be yet. They just finished, but there's more opportunity there. And you're starting to see Latin America has always been a strong contributor, but some growing contribution from the parts of international that have started to finish their transformation. Think Canada. And then following that, you're going to see more of it in Europe.
So we think what you're going to see over time is kind of a more even NPI distribution across the organization, which should allow us to obviously continue to execute to deliver that 10%. People have asked, is the number going to go up? I think what we've committed to is 10%. And we're excited to try to keep delivering that. Increasingly, though, part of what we did with transformation is drive global consistent deployment of Ignite, which is our analytics platform, of Interconnect, which is our decisioning platform.
We're starting to make that more available to customers so that we can now start driving more decisioning and more custom score generation for our customers to allow us to try to drive more credit file penetration with those customers directly, make it easier for customers to use our decisioning platforms to make us their preferred provider of credit and other information. We're starting to see that traction take hold because we have very modern cloud-based platforms that integrate very seamlessly into very modern cloud-based data fabric. Again, it's relatively recent, but we believe it's going to happen. We've seen meaningful interest and some movement already, and we're excited that we're going to see more of that over time. We also know in our industry, these transitions are very hard and they take time, right?
But we think we're very well positioned between data fabric, Ignite, and Interconnect to perform very, very well relative to our peers. And the good news is those platforms are deployed globally, right? So they're pretty much everywhere in the world. I can't tell you they're in absolutely every country, but pretty much everywhere in the world, and we're making available to all of our dev teams, all of our analytics teams, and increasingly our customers.
That's great. If there are any questions, please raise your hands and we can have the mic being brought around. Maybe one more question on employer services. The revenue decline that was much worse in the third quarter, obviously some of it is ERC headwinds. Can you just talk about some of the headwinds that you've seen and how do we think about those headwinds moderating as we go forward?
The biggest headwinds you covered, one was ERC, and it moderates going into the fourth quarter because the federal government stopped processing in the fourth quarter of last year, just a wraparound thing, right? Our revenue is quite low in ERC, and we're just now hitting periods where it was low again. So it was very nice when it occurred, but we all knew it was going to happen. WOTC is also weaker work opportunity tax credits, right? It's a matter of the pace at which states are processing claims. There were changes in the way forms needed to be submitted to the federal government for approval. Some of the states have taken longer to adopt than we had expected. I'm not saying it's a trivial exercise, but they're going through that now. What it means for us is we submit to the state. It sits basically in inventory.
And once they process it and the claim comes back, we get paid, right? So we're going to get paid eventually, but it did affect us in the quarter. And then we also talked about hiring being a little weaker. Part of our business is I-9 and onboarding. We saw a little bit of weakness there as well. So that's what kind of impacted employer services as we go forward. We've talked about this business. This is a single-digit type grower, right? It's not a fast-growing business, but what it is is a business that drives a lot of penetration inside large employers and now increasingly small employers because we can distribute digitally so that we can have them let us process UC claims, use our I-9 platforms, etc. And that helps us get more Work Number records. And it's a way to grow the Work Number database.
That's a really substantial benefit from that activity.
If we have two minutes left, why don't we just cover real quickly return to capital?
Sure. Absolutely. That's very important.
We're very excited about the fact that as we get into 2025, we've made lots of significant improvement in the cost structure of the company. We're seeing margins improve as we go into 2025. Capital's coming down, right? So we talked about, we gave a cash conversion metric that our long-term model is to deliver 95% plus of adjusted net income in terms of cash flow. And we expect to make very nice progress toward that as we move into 2025 and then beyond. With lower capital spending, we think we're going to be in a very strong position to not only be able to continue to execute our acquisition program and restart that because our leverage has now come down in the fourth quarter of this year to be at the levels we'd like it to be long-term to maintain our current credit ratings.
Think 2.5-2.75 times EBITDA. We feel very, very good about our ability to not only execute the acquisition program, but also start returning capital to shareholders, start growing the dividend, and start executing a meaningful buyback. We haven't indicated exactly how much that will be yet, but I think we're finally getting to the point where we wanted to be over a long period of time. It's taken a while to get here with the cloud transformation, but we think we're arriving and we're excited to be getting to the point where we can start giving capital back the way we committed some time ago.
That's very helpful, caller. And if I can ask just one quick follow-up, just given the dislocation in the stock that we've seen recently, does that create opportunity for you? And when you think about buyback, are you thinking about more opportunistic or more a scheduled buyback?
So I think we're going to answer all those questions when we announce the buyback. I'm not going to try to do it ahead of time, but as we get into next year, I think we'll provide a lot more color on how we intend to execute as we go forward.
Absolutely. That's great. Thank you very much. Thanks, John. Thanks for.