Great. Can everybody hear me?
Oh, loud and clear. Hello and welcome to JPMorgan's US All-Stars Conference. We are coming at you live from London. We're very pleased to be joined today by Mark Begor, Equifax's CEO, and John Gamble, Equifax's CFO. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Alex Hess, a member of the US Business and Information Services Equity Research Team, which is led by Andrew Steinerman. Welcome, gentlemen.
Thank you. Great to be here.
Thanks.
We miss Andrew.
Oh, we miss him indeed.
Yeah.
All right. We'll kick this off with a high-level question. Equifax just hosted an Investor Day, and the core thrust was, after spending a number of years, and I believe around $3 billion building the Equifax Cloud™, the company now sees the opportunity to play offense with, I think, what you called a durable competitive advantage. Can you unpack for investors why now is a great time to get excited about the trajectory of Equifax?
Yeah, I think there's a bunch of reasons. I think everyone knows we've got an underlying data set that's differentiated from our competitors. We have businesses like Workforce Solutions. We have data sets in USIS that are very differentiated. Over the last five years, we've been growing and running the company while doing the massive transformation of the Cloud. It was a huge project for the company. It's one that was, you could argue, a big distraction to run the company and do a tech transformation of that scale. Now that it's substantially complete, with over 90% of our revenue and the bulk of our U.S. revenue in the new Cloud environment and our data now in the new single Equifax fabric, we really can pivot to offense and really have the team fully focused on innovation, around customers, and around winning in the marketplace.
One of the measures that we look at is our Vitality Index. It's one that we've had for a long time at Equifax, way longer than I've been there. It's a measure of the % of our revenue from new products introduced in the last three years. Historically, that was 5%, 6%, 7% kind of pre-Cloud. Back in 2021, we set a goal knowing the Cloud was going to advantage us around innovation and new products of 10%. We've been outperforming that since then. We've had 12%, 13%. We raised our guidance on innovation again at the end of the second quarter with our second quarter earnings. I think that's an example of our ability to innovate. Another big area is around using AI, using AI to deliver higher performing scores, models, and products. The power of the AI allows us to ingest more data.
When we have more data than our competitors, we believe we can deliver products that are differentiated versus our competitors. I think everyone in the room knows when you use more data in the decision, you generally get a higher predictive solution. Higher predictability means ROI from our customers. It means either market share or price for Equifax. That's been another big focus from ours. Fundamentally, the Cloud transformation we felt was table stakes to be a player in the data analytics space. With all of our customers operating digitally, with their customers, whether it's a small business or principally consumers, you have to have always on stability. When you operate in a legacy environment, there's outages. In a Cloud environment, we believe we can deliver that nine nines of stability, which is critically important.
We think those platform capabilities, the capabilities we deliver to our customers, the fact that we're more innovative, and now after almost five years of building the Cloud and running the company, and now in 2025, only running the company, focused on growth, we think we're in a great position to really grow the company coming forward. One of the messages we attempted to deliver in our June Investor Day in New York was that we have a lot of confidence in our long-term framework. Our long-term framework, I'm sure we'll want to touch on. We laid out a long-term framework four years ago to grow the company 7% to 10% organic or 8% to 12% with bolt-on M&A. That was historically 6% to 8%. We raised it 100% on the low end, 200% on the high end.
Historically, we had a long-term framework of 25 bps of margin expansion per year. We increased that four years ago and confirmed that in June, that our expectation is to grow our margins 50 basis points per year going forward. Our intention was to really reinforce to investors our confidence about the future of Equifax to deliver on that long-term framework.
Importantly, we can deliver that long framework with a mortgage market that doesn't need to recover, right? With a mortgage market that only grows with GDP, say, 2% to 3% a year, we can deliver that long-term framework. To the extent the mortgage market does recover over time, which I know we believe it will, but you'll all make your own judgments, that's just upside for us. That incremental revenue and obviously variable margin will flow right through to the bottom line. Let's maybe pause on the variable margin piece. I think some investors saw the margin trajectory that you laid out, both ex-mortgage and with the mortgage recovery. There was sort of a, you know, couldn't that have been lifted a little bit?
Is that just the level you want to commit to in a market where there are lots of moving pieces, with a business model where different aspects of the business are variable? Is there a reason you guys picked that number? Is that a ceiling on what your business can deliver, year in, year out? Any thoughts around why that's the number you chose to?
At the Investor Day, we laid out kind of two metrics. First was, you know, we laid out a five-year plan. You know, what are our goals over the next five years, both with and without a mortgage market recovery? Without mortgage market recovery, we really laid in our 50 basis points of margin expansion per year. We think that's an attractive company, a company that can get the operating leverage to grow margins that are already quite high, meaning kind of mid-30s or high EBITDA margins, and then expand that at 50 bps per year. We don't think about 2030 as a ceiling. You used the word ceiling. When we think about the long term, which would be on the next five years, we see our ability to deliver that operating leverage to the bottom line and deliver that 50 basis points per year.
We also laid out a case for 2030 if there's a full mortgage market recovery. We've been talking about that with you for quite some time to our investors, that it's had a significant impact on us and our competitors over the last almost four years. In 2025, the mortgage market in the U.S. is down in the neighborhood of 10%. That's about $100 million of negative revenue pressure for us in 2025. Over the last four years, that's over $1 billion of revenue pressure that we've had to work through. We've never seen that in our lifetimes. The mortgage market over 20, 30, 40 years moves around a few points. It's never gone down 50%.
As you know, we've laid out for our investors, and John talked about it, that in our Investor Day, we said we can deliver that kind of 50 basis points in 7% to 10% without a mortgage market recovery, with really just GDP growth, which we think is quite strong. We also laid out that there's significant leverage if rates come down and the mortgage market improves. We sized that based on 2025 of being $1.2 billion of incremental revenue, $700 million of incremental EBITDA, and $4 a share of incremental EPS. That was laid into that 2030 case.
What we didn't do, which is, I think we got some feedback from investors, we didn't grow that mortgage market upside in 2026, 2027, 2028, 2029, and 2030 based on likely price increases, likely product rollouts that increase our revenue from where it is today by record additions we have in EWS. We didn't put that in our model. I think some investors did that themselves and saw that that 2030 number could likely be higher with a full mortgage market recovery if you assume there's a compounding of what we do around pricing, product, and record additions, and some share gains that we have in the business. That was our intention of laying it out. No, there's no ceiling on how we think about our margins. We think there's a lot of operating leverage in Equifax with the 50 basis points.
As you know, back in April, we also rolled out a new capital allocation plan. You probably maybe will touch that in the questions. Important for us was to translate that EBITDA expansion opportunity going forward into free cash generation. We shared that we expect to have 95%+ cash conversion, which is extremely high. We rolled out a new dividend buyback program where we're going to grow our dividend in line with earnings. We announced a $3 billion share repurchase program where our excess free cash flow is going to go after CapEx, dividends, and bolt-on M&A.
Excellent. You briefly mentioned that we're prospectively about to enter a potential rate cut cycle. Certainly.
See what happens tomorrow.
I mean, yeah, we'll see what happens tomorrow. You know, the market is certainly looking for a rate cut.
Yeah.
Maybe walk through, look, we're three quarters of the way through 2025 now. Maybe, you know, walk us through if we get 25% or 50%, whatever many basis points you might think of, you know, what that would mean for your business going into next year, especially.
Yeah, it's certainly going to be good news, you know, a rate cut. I think that obviously the variable on the rate cut is going to be what happens with inflation and what happens with employment. Those, I think, is well understood in this room for sure. That's how the Fed in the U.S. looks at how they've set rates. Inflation is higher than they'd like it to be. There has been some nervousness in the last 30 days around what's happening with job creation. You know, is that some pressure? I think those are the two balancing elements. You know, on the inflation side, the Trump tariffs, you know, clarity on where's the closure on that, I think, is a tough one to handicap. You know, when is that going to get resolved, you know, which would likely bring some more clarity to where inflation is going.
I think that's going to be a variable going forward. Maybe, John, you want to touch on if you look at kind of third quarter run rates on, you know, where mortgages today. Just as a reminder, mortgage activity in 2025 in the U.S. is down 10% versus last year.
Right.
That's kind of how we're running in 2025. Your question is '26, maybe I'll let John try to touch on.
Sure. If you take a look at, obviously, rates have come down a little bit here recently, right? If you take a look at kind of the volume that we're seeing and spread it across the third quarter, you might see that going into next year, we could be seeing rates, we could be seeing mortgage activity that was, say, flattish, maybe up slightly, given current third quarter type of volume levels we're seeing in 2026 versus 2025. That would get us back toward that flat to up slightly type of mortgage market, which, again, is what we indicated we need, what we'd like to see, so we can deliver our long-term framework, right? As long as we're not seeing declines in the mortgage market, we feel very good about delivering that long-term framework.
Current third quarter type of volume levels might give us some comfort that that might occur next year.
Maybe two other points, Alex, on this, just to kind of wrap up the mortgage market comment. Number one is that there's been, you follow it, maybe we follow it very closely, but there's been some movements in mortgage rates throughout 2025.
Right.
When we say we see mortgage rates come down something like 25 basis points that happened at the end of the first quarter, we see an uptick in activity, marginal. There's a sensitivity there.
Right.
Same thing that happened this summer. There was a movement in rates. We know that there's a consumer that's watching that. The other thing that's happened is, I think everyone in the room knows that the U.S. mortgage market is a combination of purchase activity, people buying new homes, and then people refiing existing mortgages. It's a very active refi market. In the refi market, because of where rates have been over the last really four years at over 5%, 6%, 7%, we're building a large backlog or portfolio of what you could characterize as high interest rate, as if there's a rate reduction of 25%, 60%, 75%, 100%. It's a meaningful refi activity. I think that's an element to think about going forward. What does it take to get that full mortgage market recovery? In our opinion, it's a combination of rates coming down likely meaningfully.
We don't think rates are going to go back to where they were at 0.5%. Rates in the highs versus in the high 6s. The combination of bringing those consumers on high, large, or smaller homes back into the marketplace, and then also generate some of that refi activity.
Yeah.
Importantly, as John said, and I've said twice, that's not one mistake. Running that, you know, based on it's not going to come if you think about it that way. In this state, we recommend people in product, CapEx, in bolt-on M&A, in technology to continue to grow the company with or without a mortgage market recovery. We've got a lot of confidence in that 7% to 10% organic without a mortgage market recovery. Along with that 50 bps of margin expansion, we think that's a pretty good Equifax, you know, a very attractive company.
As a reminder, when we talk about the mortgage market, we're talking about USIS mortgage hard credit inquiries, right?
Yeah.
That's what we tend to be talking about.
Just to discuss how you are running the company, maybe we'll pivot to Workforce Solutions, Verifier, your biggest and.
Great business.
One thing you laid out in your Investor Day was a $15 billion addressable market.
Yep.
You're looking at sort of, call it $2.5 billion, somewhere in that ballpark this year.
This year, correct.
For revenue, most of the market is unvended. Uniquely, some portion of that market, in fact, possibly a very large portion, is manual.
Correct.
It’s not like you’re competing against somebody. You’re competing against an entirely different process.
Correct.
Help investors understand, because you have a 13% to 15% organic revenue growth target, which implies a meaningful, I would say, step up in penetration of that TAM. Help investors understand what the next legs are for penetrating your TAM.
I'm just going to broaden the question a little bit because you linked it to 13% to 15%. You said meaningful step up in penetration. We don't think about it that way.
Oh, fair enough.
We think that we've got really four legs on the stool of the growth engine at Workforce Solutions. That business has really two legs our other businesses don't have. Every business we have, we increase price every year. We have more pricing power in Workforce Solutions because of the uniqueness of the data asset. That's one where we take price up every year. That's something that's a growth lever for us. We also have the ability to roll out new products. New products are a big part of our engine. We've already talked about our Vitality Index, how we've invested in new product capabilities in Workforce to use the example. We rolled out a trended mortgage solution three years ago. It's now half our revenue. We sell that for twice what we sell just marks income today. We sell at a higher cost because we're delivering more value.
That's a way to grow revenue by rolling out new products. I'm sure we'll get to that in the conversation a little bit later. The two legs on the stool we don't have in any other business, number one is records, the ability to add more payroll records. We're already getting the inquiries from our customers because we're fully integrated with them in mortgage, in auto, in cards, in P loans, in background screening, doing background screening, employment history checks, or in government doing social service income verifications. We're getting every inquiry from our customer. We fulfill the records that we have. When we grow our records, our revenue goes up. Very unique. We don't have that in other businesses. We'll perhaps come back to records. Penetration. I've never been around a business that has the kind of penetration opportunities that Workforce Solutions has.
As you pointed out, roughly, we're a little north of $2.5 billion, but $15 billion TAM. We just have really big TAMs. We're principally competing in those TAMs against manual income verifications or manual employment verifications that take place. We can get into some of the verticals, like government, where we have an $800 million business. That's where our data is used by federal and state government in the U.S. to deliver social services. As you know, there's about 100 million people in the U.S. that get some form of social services, whether it's medical support, rent support, food support, child care support, income support, unemployment support, various services. They're all needs-based and income verified. That TAM is about $5 billion, and we're $800 million. The difference between the $800 million and the $5 billion is principally states and federal agencies that are still fully manual.
That's a very unique lever for us. We don't think about having to step up the penetration to deliver the 13% to 15%. If you look at over the last, actually, almost decade, Workforce Solutions has been growing at that rate. This year has been challenged principally because of government, where there was an air pocket from some budget reimbursement changes made by the prior administration to some of the states. Going forward, we expect Workforce Solutions to be our fastest growing business over the long term because of the strength of those four levers we have around growth.
That's super helpful. Just to maybe dive into the government business real quick.
Yeah.
You know, I think you recently disclosed that it's about 65% state revenue and then 35% federal.
Yep.
The programs funded at the federal level are administered by the states.
That's right.
It's sort of the standard go-to-market. I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, you know, on rank ordering, the biggest business for you guys is with CMS.
Yep.
It is Social Security and then.
It would be Social Security, it would be USDA food stamps, and then all the other programs at large.
OK. That makes a lot of sense. I think sometimes when people look at, you know, hey, what could come next? You look at Treasury. You look at, you know.
Earned Income Tax Credit, unemployment insurance. There's a lot of other programs.
Yeah.
I think to frame it, and this is public knowledge, you can go on the web to look at it. You can look at our data. The U.S. federal government has identified there's in the neighborhood of $160 billion a year, $160 billion of improper social service payments. These are generally someone who qualified for social services because their income was low, and then they solved their life event, maybe went back to work, but are still getting the social services and shouldn't. That's generally what the $160 billion is. That's really what our solution offers. Our solution in social services delivers speed. If someone needs social services, we can deliver it instantly by that income verification versus in a manual process, they generally have to go back and get more paper pay stubs.
If you think about a family that's trying to get food stamps and food support, if they have to go back and get it, they can't get food that they need.
Right.
With our instant verification, we deliver speed. We also deliver productivity. It's a very manual effort by each of the states and each of the agencies. They have thousands of people that are adjudicating on a one-person basis the eligibility by looking at those paper documents. We can deliver an instant verification. For $5, which is in the neighborhood of what we charge for our instant verification in the government vertical versus a $30 an hour caseworker, we deliver productivity. Really importantly, we deliver integrity because it's verified.
Right.
I think the room probably knows at the end of the second quarter, we have 100 million people in our data set that we're getting payroll records every two weeks. It's very current. From 4.6 million U.S. companies are contributing that data to us. A lot of scale. The integrity one is really what's changed in Washington in the current administration. If you go back to kind of Musk and DOGE and the focus by President Trump around smaller government, looking at waste and abuse, the view of the $160 billion of improper payments is something they wanted to address. I think the room may know there was a large bill passed on July 4 called OB-3, one big, better, one big, beautiful bill. Many call it OB-3. That has a lot of new requirements in it for the states that are more stringent about their delivery of social services.
We think that's a good thing for Equifax. What we've seen in the last 90 days since that was signed on July 4 is an increase in activity of commercial conversations with the roughly 500 agencies that would be what you'd call customers around using our solution. It gives us confidence, going forward, about the growth trajectory of growing from $800 million into that $5 billion TAM. We believe our government vertical in EWS will be our fastest growing Workforce Solutions business over the long term, meaning outgrowing that 13% plus kind of growth rate. Clearly, it will be our largest vertical very quickly, meaning larger than mortgage in a fairly quick time frame, short of a rapid mortgage market recovery. We have a lot of resources around product and commercial. We have people at the state capitals in the U.S., which is where the agencies are.
If you think about it, each state basically does it all independently based on the guidelines from the federal government. What changed, which is increasing the activity, is this OB-3 bill put a lot more teeth into what the states have to do to comply. There are some penalties if they don't. Today, the vast majority of social services are paid for by the federal government, as you said, Alex, but delivered at the states. If they have high error rates going forward, which many of the states currently do because they don't use a verified source of income, the federal government is going to force them to pay for a portion of the benefits. If you think about tens of billions of dollars in each state, it is going to come their way unless they really strengthen their income verification requirements.
It is one that we are adding product resources, commercial resources. As I said, I am going to be in Washington tomorrow. I spent a lot of time there working not only on current programs, but there are many significant new opportunities for Equifax. I will maybe just hit on one if I could, Alex. In the United States, there is a program called the Earned Income Tax Credit that the IRS, which is our revenue agency like HMRC here in the UK, administers. If you make less than roughly $25,000 a year, you get a payment every year when you file your tax return of $2,000. It is not a tax credit. It is a payment. The IRS has characterized that as being $16 billion a year of fraud just on that program. The issue is they do not check the income before they pay the refund.
Our proposal is, and we have been working on it for five years, we want to continue collaborating, to really do an income check to our database before you pay the refund of does Mark make $25,000? If Mark makes $30,000 based on our data, it goes to audit. If Mark makes $25,000 or $20,000, pay that Earned Income Tax Credit. Those are some of the new opportunities that this current administration has a really big focus on giving social services to those that qualify. If they do not, they should not get them. That is the $160 billion that they are focused on. We are pretty bullish on it, and we are plowing a lot of resources into it.
That's super helpful, Mark. I think you have a total, we'll peel back for a second and say you have a $50 billion addressable market across the whole firm of it.
Yep.
Yep. We just gave a lot of detail on a very important, very of the moment, timely, $5 billion of that.
Yeah.
Maybe we could flesh out the biggest piece of that, which is an area where I think a lot of people don't think of Equifax, which is in the credit bureau business in the identity and fraud space.
Yep.
Obviously, one of your large competitors in 2022 made a very, or 2021, excuse me, made a very sizable acquisition. Another one has sort of made identity and fraud part of their software play.
We've made two acquisitions, Kount and Mitigator.
Mitigator, yep. How do you sort of think about what's next for the identity and fraud piece of the business at USIS?
Yeah. Why is identity and fraud a priority for us and for our competitors, as you point out? We're investing in it through product, through capital. We have a lot of unique data assets. The acquisitions we've made really bring unique identity signals to us. The Kount acquisition was one where they were a market leader in retail e-commerce identity validation. Someone who's shopping online, there's a lot of fraud there. They had a large business there. What was powerful for us to get those data signals is that they're kind of daily and hourly and weekly, meaning people shop more frequently than they pay their credit card bill, which we have a lot of identity signals on. We're putting all those data together. We would like to do more acquisitions in the identity and fraud space.
We think we have a competitive advantage around the scale of our data, particularly with the Kount acquisition. We have something like 700 million verified email addresses. We have verified cell phone numbers. We have verified IP addresses. Those are all the signals that are important to identity and fraud. Now, why is identity and fraud important? It's because our customers are going fully digital. As you know, that's been a phenomena that's been happening. It accelerated during COVID. No one, virtually no one, goes into a bank to apply for a financial product. It's all done online. That identity validation is a huge issue. Every time I meet with a CEO here in London or anywhere around the world or in the U.S., their number one issue is identity and fraud. That's why we're investing so heavily.
What you are going to see from Equifax is more combinations of the data to really integrate, like with credit data and identity check. In government, for example, government's a great example where there's a lot of identity fraud. People apply for social service benefits, but they're not a person applying. They get the social service benefits using your name or someone else's.
Right.
We want to integrate with our income validation that identity check kind of upfront in one transaction. We think that'll be a real opportunity. You mentioned USIS and kind of another place, I don't know if it's on your list of questions, but another place where we're using multiple data sources like identity is in our credit file. The credit file is more commoditized between TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. Our credit file looks a lot like theirs. We think ours is better, but they would argue the same. We're working for how do we differentiate our credit file. We're rolling out as we speak, we started early this year in mortgage, auto, card, and personal loans. We're adding an income flag or indicator on our credit file.
Today, when you think about what is a credit file and a credit score, it's really a reflection of your propensity to repay your bills in the future based on your past behavior. That's what a credit score is. Likely will you pay it back? It's a risk score if you want to use it that way. Income and employment is your capacity to repay. In a mortgage, in an auto loan, and a personal loan, you verify credit. You verify income and employment capacity to repay. What we want to do is bring up in that shopping process for those products more visibility for our customers in a digital environment to say, OK, Mark's credit score is 800 and he's working. Today, you're blind. You don't know if that individual was laid off or if their income went up, down, or sideways. We're rolling that out.
We think that's going to be a share gain opportunity for Equifax in credit files if our credit file has more information on it than our competitors and really important information that's used in a lot of verticals about verifying income and employment. If we're giving an indicator that really helps the customer in their marketing process and the mortgage shopping process, the auto shopping process of better positioning the company with that consumer around the right product, the right price, the right credit line to close that loan, we think it makes our credit file more important. That's another really powerful, we believe, product that we expect to get some benefits from as we roll into 2026 and beyond.
Let me suggest a proposition for you. You tell me why this is or is not correct. If I look at your product plans in identity and fraud, as well as through the twin flag and the other data that you're adding into your credit file, and I say, how can I benchmark Equifax's success on both those items, noting that it's conflated with other things?
Sure.
I'm going to say, oh, organic revenue growth.
Totally.
Non-mortgage that you disclose each quarter.
Totally.
You think?
Totally.
And so.
Should be mortgage, too.
Of course.
We have a mortgage transaction.
I'm trying to isolate for the fact that.
Where the rubber hits the road in new products is revenue growth.
Right.
As you know, we have the 7% to 10%, 8% to 12%. I'll use 8% to 12% because that includes a bolt-on M&A long-term framework. In USIS, we expect 6% to 8%. In international, we expect 7% to 9%. As you pointed out, in EWS, we expect 13% to 15%. As those products use USIS as an example, that's at the lower end of the 6% to 8%, primarily because of mortgage market.
Right.
If they're able to move into the 6% to 8% and move into the middle of the 6% to 8% over time because the twin indicator is driving credit file market share, that should be proof to you. That's where we would expect it to show up in how we deliver on our revenue.
I'd also look at Vitality Index. We disclose Vitality Index every quarter, right? We're operating above the 10% target that we have. Vitality Index, again, is the amount of revenue we generate, new revenue from new products over the products that were launched over the last three years.
Right.
If we deliver at over 10%, I think we're delivering well against our long-term plan.
Maybe we can unpack the share gain concept a little bit that you guys have talked to, you know, and not say, OK, like what the number is that indicates share gain, but like more conceptually, what does share gain look like? You know, our understanding is that most major financial institutions sort of have a primary bureau.
Yeah.
I don't know what % of volume goes to the primary, but let's say a plurality to a majority.
Over 50%.
Over 50. The other two bureaus in the U.S. sort of compete on use cases.
Yeah.
Is the share gain winning more primaries? Is it winning more, you know, a bigger pie of the secondary use cases? Is it both?
All of the above.
All of the above.
Leave mortgage aside because it's a $3 billion.
Right, right, right.
Principally outside of shopping. We can talk shopping if you want, but it's principally a $3 billion. Yeah, it's moving into primary. We think what are the levers Equifax has to be driving share gains? Number one, we think is cloud. The fact we're cloud native, we're delivering faster data transmission for digital, we're always on because of our $3 billion investment. We think that positions us to move up from third to second, second to first. Like we're first with a lot of people. Our competitors are first with a lot of people too.
Right.
Right? It's obvious there's opportunities there. Second is innovation in new products. We believe we have the tools and now the DNA and capabilities to be more innovative than our peers. We believe that our customers look for an innovative partner, bringing new ideas to grow. How do you help them reduce their fraud losses? How do you help them grow their originations? We believe we're better built for that today. We have more data. Twin Indicator is a great example. Also, a DNA of how we run the company. Those really combine together in the share gains, and some of the product execution, like the Twin Indicator, is just in a test mode now.
Yeah.
Right? The feedback from customers is super positive. I didn't mention it. I should have. We're offering it for free.
Right.
If our credit file is X, we're adding in the twin indicator at no additional charge because we want to differentiate our file versus TransUnion and Experian. If you go outside of mortgage, I think this room knows that. I know you do, Alex, in the other verticals, they're principally a one credit file pull.
Right.
The most sophisticated originators in the US still pull three on non-mortgage products. Most of the industry will pull a TransUnion, Equifax, Experian file. We want to be the file they pull and drive some market share. That is why we're investing in stuff like the twin indicator.
Got it. That's super helpful. We'd like to actually talk on the international for a quick second.
Yeah.
We are in the UK.
Yep.
Obviously, any comment what you're presently seeing here in the UK, what the business sort of, any unique dynamics that investors here might be aware of and what you're seeing presently in the UK?
Yeah. From an economy standpoint, this has been kind of on the weaker, slower growth sides that we have versus many other international markets. Our performance has been very good here. I think everyone knows this is Experian's backyard. They have the predominant market share. They're headquartered here. I think it's very well known. We've been very pleased over the last two years about our performance versus Experian and TransUnion, meaning we're outperforming both of them. Innovation, new products, data combinations, cloud complete. We have the cloud technology complete here. We think it's been paying off here in the UK. We like the UK market. We also have a debt management business here in the UK that's unique to Equifax. Our competitors don't have that. Our competitors have big D2C businesses. Here in the UK, Experian has a very large one. TransUnion is smaller.
Ours is smaller than the other two. We like the market. I get over here a couple of times a year to meet with customers. We've been pleased with our performance the last couple of years.
That's helpful. Maybe one country over, Ireland.
Yeah.
Was recently announced that you guys are opening an AI innovation lab in Dublin.
Yeah.
Would like to maybe drill in on that. Like what will that lab in Dublin be doing?
Yeah.
You know what's exciting.
Just another example of our investment in AI. We think Dublin is a good market for technology in AI, and we wanted to have a center there. We got some incentives from the government, which we're pleased about. It really is just a building block of the many investments we're making around AI. When we talk AI at Equifax, I think one thing to be clear about, and it's the same with our competitors, is what's unique about our data is it's proprietary, meaning we can't be disintermediated. We're the only ones that can use our data. For over a decade, we've been investing in AI capabilities around explainability. Like ChatGPT is really hard. Obviously, there's billions of dollars being invested in it, principally around using in public market data. The explainability of AI is even more complex.
Here in the UK, in the US, and most developed markets, there's regulations that require you to explain a decision that's made in financial services. That explainability is super complex, like which data element is the reason you didn't approve someone. When you're using a ton of different data elements, which the AI powers, that explainability is a big deal. That's where we've been investing. We have over 300 patents, which is double our competitors, kind of individually, including FICO, around explainable AI. We added 12 more in the first half of the year around explainable AI. We're investing around the explainability tools around AI, and now we're deploying that in our products. Because we have more data than our competitors in each market, we're able to deliver higher performing products that have higher predictability using AI.
Yeah.
What that translates into is share gains. Using your prior comment, it translates into revenue. It translates into higher prices for our products because we deliver higher ROI with the AI. That's a big, big focus of ours, around using our DNA teams and our technology and product and commercial teams to use AI and more data to deliver more predictive solutions. The other area for AI for us is what we call AI inside of Equifax or AI for Equifax. We're really just starting to ramp AI tools in our operation centers. We have thousands of call center people that are fielding calls from consumers in each market around questions on their credit file. We get tons of paper when someone wants a copy of their credit report or wants to put a freeze on their credit report.
We're adding AI there, and we think we're going to deliver a bunch of productivity in our operation centers.
Right.
The principal focus is higher performing products powered by our data in order to drive our growth with our customers.
I'm going to ask one high-level question on this, then we'll get back to the more timely matters. It seems to me that one of the great things about the way that regulation and the way the market is structured in the U.S. is that it's deterministic. You have to be able to repeat and arrive at the same outcome.
On a consistent basis.
Yeah, exactly.
Explain it.
Explain it.
Yeah.
I think that a lot of people, when they're looking at who are AI losers, they don't necessarily think you guys. To think about why you guys aren't is because, look, you can't run this in ChatGPT and have it come up with differences in models and scores.
It's that.
Yeah.
You can't get access to the data that is proprietary.
Right. Yeah.
That's the principal element is that no one else can get our data. No third party can get access to it. We're the only ones that will use it. As you know, we aggregate the data. In the United States, somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 financial institutions contribute credit data to us every month.
Mm-hmm.
That's proprietary. It's proprietary on their site. It's not available on the web. In our case, it's not available. I already mentioned in income and employment, 4.6 million companies deliver payroll data to us. There's no way to get to that through the worldwide web. We're the only ones that aggregate it. That moat, if you will, or aggregation of the data means only we can apply AI to it.
Right. What we can do, though, with AI agents, and we are doing now, is JPMorgan obviously has a huge DNA team that can run their own analytics. We can make, using AI agents, our analytics available to small and mid-sized financial institutions much more seamlessly. They can end up with much better outcomes using our technology while a large financial institution like yourself can obviously do it yourself. Yeah.
I want to end with a question on capital allocation.
Sure.
Obviously, Equifax has sort of, with the Equifax Cloud™ now being live and rolled out, the free cash flow profile of the firm. CapEx coming down.
Yep.
Yep. Free cash flow of the firm, profile of the firm is very attractive. A lot of ways you can deploy that. You've touched briefly on there's some appetite for M&A, you know, dividend increases.
Yep.
You said in line with your.
And buyback.
Yep. As you sort of look ahead, how should investors think about your relative appetite for each of the three?
Sure.
How flexible should they be and hold you to being on each of them?
Sure. I'll jump, John, I'll jump in too. When we think about our capital allocation strategy, I think you want us to do, because of our growth profile and our margin profile and expansion profile, invest in Equifax because you want to keep that machine going. We've overinvested over the last five years because we did the cloud transformation. CapEx is coming down. Going forward, we expect to spend somewhere between 6% and 7% of revenue in CapEx. For the last five years, that spend was higher than that, in some cases almost double. That was principally in building the cloud. Our CapEx going forward, while we have some cloud to finish, is going to be predominantly on new products. It's really powerful for us that we can feed the engine around investing sizable amounts. We're talking about a half a billion dollars, roughly, of CapEx that grows with revenue.
That's our first priority. Every product investment we make, we cost justify. We do a cost return analysis on each one. John's team has a very rigorous process, meaning we're generating very high ROI on our CapEx investments that has very high returns on capital. That's kind of priority one for us is to invest in Equifax in a disciplined way. You can kind of model in that $500 million growing forward. Second is around bolt-on M&A. We think about in our framework, we have a 7% to 10% organic, 8% to 12% total. The difference between 1% to 200 basis points of revenue growth annually from bolt-on M&A. If you look at the last five years, we're in that zip code of what we've done, that range, I use the U.S. term, that range of 1% to 2% points of revenue growth. That's not a limit.
We've had years when we've been higher. Last year, we didn't do any. We'll go up or down based on the opportunities, super disciplined financially and strategically around bolt-on M&A. To be crystal clear, we're not doing anything big. No transformational M&A, no big M&A. We're going to do tuck-ins. I very deliberately, John and I use the term bolt-on M&A. These are acquisitions to make Equifax stronger at the core. They principally are around unique data assets, strengthening Workforce Solutions, our fastest growing, highest margin business, identity and fraud, which we've done a couple because of that big TAM and that big growth rate. The last would be international platforms. We've done, those have been where our acquisitions would be. We've done 20 acquisitions in the last five years. We spent $4.5 billion TEV of our cash flow and leverage.
Obviously, paying that down to keep our investment grade leverage on those acquisitions. You would expect that to go forward. I have a Corp Dev leader that works for me. John and I meet with him every month. We go through the pipeline. Strategically, very disciplined. Financially, we have a very high bar on what we're going to do. We want to buy businesses that are accretive to our revenue growth rate and accretive to our margins, and that's going to create shareholder value. If we can't meet the strategic criteria or the financial criteria, we don't do M&A. If we're not doing M&A, we're going to do more buyback. In between, obviously, is a dividend. We rolled out, as I mentioned earlier, the new capital allocation plan. We plan to grow our dividend in line with earnings going forward. We think that's a very attractive dividend growth rate.
The balance of our free cash flow is going to buyback. On our Investor Day, we laid out for you with that margin expansion and growth of the company, the buyback really grows as you get out in the out years because that's really where we're going to spend our excess free cash flow. If we're not doing M&A, we're going to do more buyback or vice versa.
Right.
When you get out to 2030, with or without a mortgage market recovery, there's a lot of free cash flow beyond CapEx, beyond bolt-on M&A, beyond the dividend that we're paying that's going to end up in buyback. Just to make one more point on it, because it's in that Investor Deck from Investor Day, the incremental cash flow from mortgage market recovery when it comes, we could say if it comes, but when it comes, will show up in buyback. We're not going to spend more on people. We're spending the right amount today. We're not going to spend more on CapEx. We're spending the right amount today. We're not going to spend more on M&A. We're spending the right amount. Our EPS will grow up. The dividend will be larger. It'll be principally in the buyback.
Well, great.
I think that's a great balance of investing in Equifax and then returning cash to our shareholders.
Great. Mark, John, and the Equifax team is here as well. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Thanks, John.