Hi. Good afternoon. This is Heather Balsky, BofA's Business and Information Services Analyst. I want to welcome you to our fireside chat with Equifax's CFO, John Gamble, and Head of IR, Trevor Burns. John and Trevor, it's great to have you at our conference, and thank you for speaking during our lunch spot.
Oh, thanks for having us. We appreciate it.
Yeah. Before we start, just in case, if anyone out there has a question, we'll pause at the 15-minute mark. As I say every time, I made sure to have a lot of questions. We'll be good either way.
Mm-hmm.
With that, I'd like to start off, John, with your perspective on the operating environment for your credit bureau business. There's a lot of uncertainty right now.
Mm-hmm.
Can you share, you know, your view on what the current operating environment is? You know, I asked this question for True and then kind of outside of mortgages because I think mortgages is its own dynamic. How is the consumer, and are lenders still willing to lend?
Sure. We'll start with the consumer, right? What we're seeing from the consumer, I think is fairly consistent what we talked about both at our last earnings call and what we talked about back in October. Generally speaking, what we're seeing is credit scores are up really substantially since the during the pandemic period, and they've really been fairly stable. We haven't seen a decline in credit scores over the last several months, again, very strong. The percentage of consumers that are prime versus subprime has actually gone up and stayed stable.
What we are seeing is we are seeing some delinquency increases in subprime, probably in subprime-- 60-day delinquencies, in auto and in card are up slightly over where they were or up versus where they were in probably 2019 and have increased slightly over the past several months. There is certainly seeing some level of stress in that part of the environment. Generally what we tend to see a very high correlation between credit quality, the strength of the consumer, and employment, right? Employment is very high. Unemployment is staying low. We can obviously see through the Work Number. Our Work Number continues to grow very nicely, part of that through our existing employer base, so we can see people hiring.
Generally speaking, our expectation is so long as people keep working, that we're gonna continue to see a relatively constructive credit environment. Honestly, I think, you know, if we talked about this two quarters ago and last quarter, we would have said something very similar. It doesn't feel like it's changed that substantially. I know a lot changed over the weekend. Obviously, we wouldn't have any perspective on how that might change things as we go forward. In terms of Equifax, we had really very, very little exposure to either of those financial institutions, no treasury exposure, and very limited revenue.
You started to answer my next question, which is, what are your exposure to Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank and your general exposure to regional banks?
Sure. If you think about USIS in general, but we'll talk about USIS and Workforce Solutions in their non-mortgage credit businesses, you know, probably the three bureaus between regional and larger money center banks or larger banks, we probably have similar type of mix of revenue. I don't think we're probably that different. Where there is a difference, obviously, is in Fintech. Our share in Fintech, not by a plan, right, but doesn't happen to be as strong as some of our competitors. We probably have less exposure there. We're trying to grow that exposure, but we have less exposure there today. Generally speaking, when we take a look at the revenue generation, we tend to see more activity kind of toward prime lenders or, sorry, prime borrowers versus subprime.
I guess, the difference there would probably be in auto, right? Auto, we tend to have a much bigger subprime book. Across Workforce Solutions, it's the same. In auto, we probably have a strong penetration in subprime and near prime, not nearly the same level of penetration in prime. Card in Workforce Solutions is really lender specific and probably tends to be toward larger lenders rather than smaller lenders.
That's very helpful. Thank you. Digging into the business a little bit, your outlook for USIS in 2023 factors in a, you know, a tough U.S. environment, not necessarily a recession. In what areas of your business do you expect pressure, and where do you see opportunity for resiliency or even improvements?
Again, the assumption we made, and you covered it, right, is that we're gonna when we take a look at our long-term model, we've been talking about 6%-8% growth for USIS over the long term. Embedded in that is about 2 points, right, specifically related to just economic growth, 2-3 points from product, you know, 1 point plus probably related to pricing. Also we expect some increased penetration. You mix all that together and you can get to a nice consistent 6%-8% growth. On market growth as opposed to about 2% growth, we've assumed that we're gonna see some growth in the economy, right, but probably between 0 and 1 point. Maybe 100 basis points-200 basis points of pressure. We haven't seen that pressure occur yet.
We've just been assuming some general economic weakness would start to occur as we move through this, through this quarter, but really more into the late second quarter and second half. Our presumption was it would occur across the business. It would affect card, it would affect auto, and really let's call it our banking business generally. Probably not really impacting our identity and fraud business, which is a couple of $200 million business because that's more driven by e-commerce transaction, and we think as a general growth trend. I wouldn't say it was specific to any individual business within USIS, but just more generally. Our opportunities are really around what they always are, which is new product generation. As we complete our cloud transformation, driving share across our customer base. That's really what we're focused on.
A lot of activity this, in the first half and as we finish this year around completing transformation, completing customer migrations, and as that occurs, getting the new products launched that can drive higher growth. We're gonna see more of that going into 2024, right? We should really plant a lot of the seeds that drive that as we move through the second half of 2023.
Got it. Got it. I wanna talk about that a little bit more as we move through the time. You know, for now, if there is a recession, you know, when you think about your business, what are the levers you can pull to kind of offset that pressure?
Well, we probably ought to start with the fact that we announced a fairly substantial cost reduction activity and spending reduction activity in our earnings call. We're already working and driving a $200 million reduction in spending in 2023. That $200 million in spending reduction is $80 million in capital, $120 million in expense. Our focus right now is really on execution of that. We think we have very good line of sight to driving the reductions we need to deliver that level of improvement in our overall spending and cost structure. It's over 10% of our total workforce, more heavily skewed toward contractors than our direct employees. We think we have that well-timed and well-planned.
A lot of it's driven by completion of our transformation, right? We've been talking for several years about the fact that as transformation completes, we'll be able to reduce the incremental expense we put in place to drive delivering those new applications, moving to GCP Cloud Native and Cloud Native on Amazon as well. Also, that we'll start getting COGS benefits, and we'll start seeing benefits in infrastructure as well as, benefits in taking out specifically, some more data centers, and we've talked about closing another 10 data centers this year. We think what we're doing now is delivering on the promise that we've made over the past several years. We feel good about doing that. Right now, the focus is there.
To the extent we see a weaker economy, look, there's always things you can do to try to manage expense, and we'll certainly do that. We think we've already put a very good path in place to bring our expenses down and drive us to EBITDA margins as we exit this year, again, assuming a weaker economy.
Yeah.
at around 36%.
Got it. Got it. I wanna dive into Workforce a little bit, which we haven't touched on yet. You know, that, you know, even with the tough mortgage market, that business continues to outperform versus the market. That's in your guidance for 2023 as well. You know, two pieces. What were the key drivers of outperformance in 2022? As you look to 2023, you know, what are the drivers there, and are they different? Is there a, you know, different mix in terms of those drivers?
Sure. Again, as we think about Workforce Solutions, right, the real growth driver, as you know, is Verification Services and the growth in The Work Number database itself. The major drivers that have allowed us to significantly outperform the underlying markets with the Verification Services database are pretty consistent, right? The first and what the linchpin of really all the transactions is record growth. We had an outstanding year last year growing records another 12%. Again, we try to remind people that that 12% is on a much bigger base than it was two years ago when we grew 20%.
In 2022, 50% of the records, again, were contributed directly, and that's by employers contributing the records to us through the services we provide in our Employer Services business, where again, Employer Services for us is one of the largest providers in the United States of unemployment insurance claims processing, Employee Retention Credit processing, W-2 management, ACA management, Work Opportunity Tax Credit management, I-9 validations, and all of these services, when we provide them to a company, they need to contribute their payroll file in order for us to provide them. Then we offer a free service to that customer, where we'll do income and employment verifications again for free.
Through it's through that Employer Services business, which we think is the largest and strongest in the industry, that we're able to get 50% of the records that we get on The Work Number. That growth of 12% last year really helped drive quite a bit of revenue growth. We also had an outstanding year in new product innovation in Workforce Solutions. Our goal across the company is to deliver 10% NPI Vitality Index. Again, Vitality Index is the percentage of revenue delivered in any given year from the products launched in the past three years. In Workforce Solutions, our goal is 10%, as I said. Workforce Solutions, we delivered at over twice that rate last year. They had a tremendous year in driving new products.
We also delivered good price improvements last year. We tend to drive higher price realization in Workforce than in our other businesses because of the value of the database itself. Also because as the database grows, the products that we're selling, the same product we sell in 2023 that you bought in 2022 is actually better because it's more complete, right? When you buy a trended file from us, the file you get this year is more complete than the one you got last year. It's actually a more valuable product. We also have been driving penetration. We've been increasing our penetration in Talent, increasing our penetration in government, and continuing to work to drive our penetration across mortgage and the non-mortgage financing channels.
It's those three or four, depending on how you wanna bucket them, drove the growth in 2022. We expect them to drive the outsized growth in 2023 as well. We had a really strong year last year in signing up new payroll contributor partners on exclusive basis. We signed four in the fourth quarter, I think over 10 for the year, very, very strong. That will help us drive records in 2023. We continue to launch new products at a very fast pace in Workforce Solutions. Just this quarter, we launched Talent Report Hourly, which is a way for us to try to get into the background screening business for lower paying jobs. We think we'll have an opportunity to grow some share there.
We continue to add new state and local services that provide services to individuals in terms of helping them with their rental assistance, with food assistance, et cetera. We're adding more and more municipalities to those services. We're growing share really nicely across our business. We think that will continue to help us in 2023, NPI, as well as price. We feel good about how we've set up 2023 in Verifier, and we'll be able to continue to substantially outperform the underlying markets.
You know, you actually started to touch on this. You did have a really strong year for record growth in 2022. Kinda how does that set you up for 2023? You know, where do you see it going from here in terms of your sort of record growth? You know, was 2022 sort of the peak in terms of year-over-year growth? You know, could we see continued really robust growth?
Well, we expect to continue to see robust growth. Again, just taking a quick step back, right?
Mm-hmm.
We've got about at the end of the year, we had about 154 million payroll records contributed current. Current pay records contributed to us each pay period. That was about 114 million individuals, right? We had 114 million Social Security numbers effectively out of that 154 million records. That compares to about 165 million U.S. non-farm payroll. We've still got 50 million W-2 people working to continue to gather income information, and we think we have a real opportunity to continue to grow W-2 submissions. We'll do it through the process that we delivered last year, which is adding new exclusive payroll partners, and that continues to go very, very well.
We still have a fair number of records within the partners that we've already signed to grow within, to get more records from them, right? Many times payroll companies were built through acquisition, we don't have all of the records that they have onboarded in The Work Number. We can continue to work to drive that higher. We continue to build out our Employer Services, both in terms of our direct sales channel, but also offering our Employer Services through channels like payroll processors and software companies so that they can use our white labeled services, which we think continue to strengthen. We're also now offering some of those Employer Services through e-commerce channels so that small employers can board themselves directly.
All of those things give us an opportunity to continue to grow the direct record contribution as well as partnership record contribution for W-2s. This quarter, we started transacting on retirement records for the first time on pension records. We've now boarded our first pension contributor from a pension administrator. We think that's an area we'll see nice growth as we go through this year. The ecosystem of pension administration looks a lot like payroll processors to us. It's relatively concentrated, and the benefit to the pensioner is the same, right? Instant, the ability to access credit products through instant verification of their income, of their payments directly. We think it's a relatively good sales method.
Just like we do with a payroll processor, we can offer a rev share. We are working to try to add part-time employees or 1099 based employees, right? Some people call them gig workers or... But it's really people that aren't in the traditional W-2 based economy. We have some progress there. Some of those records come in through partners, and that's an area that probably is a longer tail. But we think between getting W-2 records, driving the pension records, and then also starting to make more progress on non-pension, non-W-2 records, we think we have a real opportunity to continue to grow the data-database faster. Growing at double digits is something that's very difficult, right? But we've obviously had great success over the past three or four years.
Just remind people, long term model at 13%-15% for EWS, we're assuming about 400 basis points of growth per year in records. Another 400 basis points or 500 basis points about growth in price and penetration, and another about 400 basis points, 300 basis points-400 basis points of growth in product. It's those three drivers that let us get the 13%-15% growth along with some market growth. We feel very good about being able to consistently outperform those metrics.
That's very helpful.
Yeah.
As somebody who always loved the numbers behind that stuff, thank you. Thank you for that. You know, Well, actually, yeah, before I move into another topic or another part of EWS, you mentioned the Talent Report Hourly. Can you talk a little bit on what that is and.
Sure.
What that's doing for you guys?
Yeah. The amount of information required in a background screen for a lower paying job is just sometimes different requirement by the employer than it would be for a higher paying job. What we have done is offered a product that has kind of a thinner amount of information on employment that we can offer at a lower price point so that we can access share in that segment of the market.
We're just now launching it and just putting it into the market, but we think it'll give us an opportunity to grow some share in a part of the market where we weren't as well penetrated, because generally speaking, our products are higher priced, without cannibalizing those higher priced products that are sold into different segments of the background screening market. You'll see more products like this launched by us over time, where we try to target specific segments of the background screening market with the data that they're looking for specifically. You'll increasingly see us bundle attributes data with employment data, as well as education data and other third-party purchase data around these type of specific targeted products.
All right. Great. Thank you. My next question was actually on the Talent Solutions side. You know, and it is tied to labor market. You know, there's labor market uncertainty right now as well.
Mm-hmm.
Economic uncertainty, labor market uncertainty. you know, the background check industry, you know, has growth has moderated.
Yeah.
You know, can you help us just understand how that kind of impacts your business and Talent Solutions and the kind of leverage you have there to help kind of offset that pressure as well?
Sure. Fourth quarter, we said we saw about a 10% moderation we estimated in the hiring market in general, and that we assumed that that would continue through the entire year. If you take a look at the portion of the background screening or talent market that we probably service, as I mentioned, it's probably a segment of the market that would purchase a more expensive and more, let's put it, more fulsome background screen, right? That part of the market may have been more impacted recently in terms of job cuts than potentially other parts of the market. What we're doing is we're trying to do exactly what we just talked about, right? Which is offer products that can participate in other parts of the background screening market where we currently don't participate.
Also increasingly, add targeted products that add APRS data as well as education data with our employment data, so that we can increase our position with background screeners in order to help them be able to respond instantly to their customers and hopefully get greater value 'cause they can re-respond immediately with more certainty, right? There's a lot of effort with our background screening customers to try to help to create products that allow them to offer higher value products to their customers so that the value we think we deliver from the depth of the information we provide instantly, they can actually realize higher pricing for.
Got it. Great. Thank you. Moving away from EWS, you reaffirmed your 2025 targets on your last earnings call. You know, given all the uncertainty and the recent mortgage weakness, you know, what gave you confidence to reiterate that outlook? You know, I'm gonna just ask the follow-up here, which is: Do you need a full mortgage recovery to achieve your 2025 target?
What we tried to talk about on the call, right, was that we continue to be focused on delivering $7 billion of revenue. As we deliver $7 billion of revenue, we believe we should be able to deliver 39% EBITDA margins. When we gave that original goal for 2025 back in November of 2021, as you'll remember, the mortgage market was much stronger, right? It was well above average, let's call it that, back in 2021. When we gave that original goal, what we indicated is that assumed that the mortgage market would get back to the levels that it was at pre-pandemic, so kind of the average market between 2015 and 2019.
For 2023, we gave guidance, right, that we expect the mortgage market to be down 30% from 2022. Just to give perspective, that's about 40% below the average level that we would have seen between 2015 and 2019, so very substantially below that. If you compare our non-mortgage revenue growth over the past two years versus what we were talking about back in November of 2021, we performed a lot better, right? Our NPI or Vitality Index at 13% is much higher than we were talking about two years ago. That much stronger non-mortgage growth puts us in a position where we don't need to see a full recovery of the mortgage market. What we indicated is that we would expect we...
Sorry, not expect, we would need to see the mortgage market recover about two-thirds, right, of that 40 points that were off of what that average was, 2015 to 2019. Say 25 of the 40 points. Should that occur, we feel that we can deliver that $7 billion of revenue given the much stronger level of non-mortgage revenue growth we've seen. Again, we're assuming by 2025 that we're not in a recessionary environment, but that it's a more normal environment. I think we're still targeted in trying to deliver that revenue level, absolutely. We're not trying to forecast that the mortgage market is going to move up those 25 points in 2024 and 2025. We don't know that, right?
Yeah.
We wanted to do is provide perspective so people can understand that for us to get to $7 billion of revenue, that's what we'd need to see in the mortgage market. We feel really good about the fact that the really outsized growth in non-mortgage has put us in a position where we don't need to see a full recovery in mortgage to get to that $7 billion of revenue. With our very high variable margins and the execution we're doing on transformation, you know, getting to 39% margin as we achieve that level of total revenue performance, we think is something that's doable.
Mortgages aside, you know, as we talked about earlier, the targets for 23 assume a tougher economic environment. Does that change the dynamic at all or, you know, in terms of those 25 numbers?
No, it doesn't. I mean, 'Cause we made those statements in the context of the guidance we gave, right?
Yeah.
We feel good about being able to deliver outperformance relative to the non-mortgage markets. As we execute that and execute over the next two years, again, given that there is some recovery in the mortgage market, as we discussed, we think we have an opportunity to deliver.
I'm just gonna check just in case to see if anyone has a question. If we will go to the next one. You touched on this. You're almost at the finish line for your cloud migration. One key area of opportunity is leveraging the cloud to fuel new product introductions across your business. You already, your NPI is very high. How's that going on first on the Workforce side?
Really well, right? Workforce Solutions has principally completed the tech transformation in terms of, let's call it, the initial phase of migration. Verification Services is running cloud native at GCP. We certainly have some services also running at AWS. We've made very good progress in migrating the Employer Services onto cloud infrastructure, and that's moving as we expected. EWS has kind of been the first mover for us in showing the benefits we can get out of being cloud native in terms of new product generation. Admittedly, it's also our most unique and valuable data asset. Some of the value, some of the outsized performance and vitality in new products is because of the fact that it's such a wonderful data asset. But we have seen extremely good performance and accelerated launching of products.
In Workforce Solutions, it's principally been around trended information, so multi-period data. An example is Mortgage 360. We launched it last fall, something that would have been much more difficult for us to do two or three years ago on legacy infrastructure. We're able to deliver 36 months of trended information for mortgage underwriters. The take-up on that has been extremely fast. We're seeing very nice performance, and it's at a higher price point, right? We feel very good about delivering that greater value to customers at a better price point. We've seen really good performance across the Talent Solutions business. Again, similarly, we're able to provide trended information in different structures so that our background screening customers can buy as they would like, right? We can provide trended information that's of value to them.
Another huge benefit we've had around tech transformation that's really not product related is around the growth in the database itself, right? We've gone from, you know, sub 100,000 contributors to approaching well over 2.5 million contributors in a three-year period. We would never would have been able to do that without being on the cloud infrastructure, because the level of rigor in data ingestion and normalization that was necessary in order to add that many different contributors is something we just couldn't have done under legacy infrastructure. It's those growth in records that also enables our ability to drive new products. Because again, that growth in records has got us to over 600 million total records. We have lots of information on people's not just current employment income, but also historic.
It makes us feel really good about the benefits we're gonna see as this transitions to USIS and Canada. Those will be the next two to go.
Yeah.
As we said, both ACRO, which is the U.S. credit file, is in production in the U.S., it's in production in Canada. A lot of the customers have already migrated to interface with us through cloud infrastructure. What we're now doing is moving the back-end systems, the fulfillment systems, as well for those new customers, and we're moving through migrations there. It's going well. As we said, we expect to have it completed this year, so you can see decommissioning of those major exchanges occur in 2023.
I mean, I guess you're starting on this, but on the credit bureau side, you know, I want to see how far along you are on the migrations. Also just, you know, the pipeline ramp, you know, how to think about how that starts, how, you know, how quickly, you know, you can move that, and kind of when that starts to potentially benefit sales.
In terms of products?
In terms of new products
New products.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. As we migrate customers, right? One of the real benefits of completing transformation in USIS, but really any business unit is, you know, the migrating significant customers requires a lot of mind share from our significant subject matter experts, around the products that a large customer uses in their Decisioning. As those customers migrate, then it's not only a technology move, but it also allows us to kind of repoint that expertise against new product growth, right? I think what we've seen is we've seen a nice acceleration in new product launches across the company. We've talked about that over the past several years, and we're expecting to see an acceleration of new product launches across USIS and Canada as we get through this year.
Part of it's because they're gonna be on new infrastructure, which makes it far more easy to combine data and run analytics against that data in those cloud-native infrastructures. Also it's around the fact that our subject matter experts that understand how our customers use our data, can move from being focused on getting them.
Yeah.
-to generating those new products. I think we're to the point now where well over 70% of the new products we launch are launched on the new infrastructure already, which is exciting. We would expect to see that accelerate as we go through 2023 back half and those, and those migrations complete, if you think about the big North American credit businesses. We should start seeing the benefit of those products maybe late this year, but really mostly as you get into 2024.
Yeah, that's helpful. I'm gonna totally shift gears to your plans to acquire Boa Vista-
Mm-hmm.
Enter the Brazil market. Well, I mean, you've had that investment, but sort of fully invest. You know, what attracted you to the market and what can Equifax bring to that business?
We're always interested in trying to acquire significant credit bureaus in large growing markets internationally. We've been an investor in Boa Vista for, I think at least 10 years, we think we know the business well, we know the market well. We think there's real opportunity for the Brazilian market to continue to grow. You've seen, obviously, Experian perform incredibly well there. They've done a wonderful job and grown that business extremely well. We think there's a really good position for a strong number two player, and we think we can certainly be that player. As they increasingly migrate more toward positive data, we think it allows for improved growth in that market.
we think what we bring is really our global capabilities and infrastructure that we think Experian did incredibly well over the past 10 + years. Not quite 10 years, I guess. We think we can do the same thing. We'll have to be a fast follower, but we think putting the Brazilian business on Data Fabric will help them in terms of their ability to ingest and manage data more effectively. We think we have outstanding decisioning tools. Our InterConnect-Decisioning platform has thousands of customers around the world, which we think will help us deliver better scoring and decisions to customers there. Ignite, we think is an outstanding analytical platform. They really have nothing like it.
We think we'll be able to deploy Ignite in Brazil and also allow our customers there, assuming it closes, right, to generate more scores and deliver them through InterConnect more aggressively. We're also excited about deploying Kount there, right? We think identity and fraud in the e-commerce space is something that we have an opportunity to really take advantage of as we get more fully embedded in Brazil. Brazil has a very substantial fintech community, right? They're actually very strong, and we think the capabilities we'll have around InterConnect, around Ignite, and also around Kount should help us be very well-positioned with those types of customers.
BVS is principally in the São Paulo state, and we think as we bring our capabilities there, our ability to potentially help it grow into the rest of Brazil. São Paulo is a significant percentage of the transactional activity in Brazil. That's the case, but we should be able to drive them to grow more fully across the country. We feel good about our ability to help it grow. We also know Brazil is a tough operating environment. We also know that a significant migration of assets in a country as large as Brazil will take some time. We know that it will take a little time, but this is an investment we're doing for the long term. We feel good about the ability to drive it over the long term.
You know, you mentioned you'd had a 10-year investment in the market. Why was now the right time for you guys to make this move?
We've been working on trying to find the right way to execute a transaction with our partners where the valuation made sense to us, right. We try to be careful that we are a really disciplined buyer, and we think we've reached a position now where Our valuation allowed us to play a very significant premium relative to the market, and our partners are ready to transact with us. We're hopeful that this will go forward. Obviously, there's a bunch of steps left to do. There's U.S. and Brazilian filings that have to occur and then obviously a shareholder vote.
We'll see whether the shareholders all agree with us, but we think we've offered a very substantial premium and we're hopeful it'll go forward effectively.
Just a follow-up, one last question and focus on M&A. You know, you've done a lot of transactions especially in the past year or so, and a lot of them have been to augment workforce, including Averis, which you talked about how you're leveraging that. You know, when you think about future acquisitions, you know, is EWS the priority? Kinda where are you focused? You know, I guess, what criteria are you looking for?
Sure. In terms of strategically, I don't think the focus will really change. I think you've covered it, right? We're gonna continue to try to focus on growing our Workforce Solutions business, continuing to strengthen our Employer Services business 'cause that helps us generate record growth, and that's very important. Also to continue to look for other data assets that can help us build out the data hub that we've been building in EWS that helps us not only in talent but also in government, right? So that'll continue to be a focus, and I don't think that's gonna change anytime soon. We're also interested in other alternative data assets to support credit and fraud, right? That's really why we executed Teletrack. It's why we executed the Kount and Midigator acquisitions.
I think you'll continue to see us focus there. And again, I think we'll try to be very consistent with those acquisitions as well. They tend to be smaller, right? We'll tend to continue to focus there, although Kount was relatively large. We will, as you just saw with BVS, but also with the Dominican Republic, to the extent there is a substantial credit bureau available in a, in another country that, you know, we'll continue to look closely at those. Those tend to be very episodic, right? They're hard to find. Large bureaus, there's not a lot of them left that aren't owned by one of the major players. There's some in Europe, they tend to be owned by bank consortiums, and they don't really transact very often.
To the extent they become available, we're interested, but those are hard to predict. In terms of financial criteria, again, we generally are looking for businesses that can help us drive outsized revenue growth either directly or through the synergies they drive by adding records to The Work Number, which is also substantial to us. That also we can help drive to margins that are consistent with the margins that we wanna deliver as a company.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Oftentimes, especially in Workforce, but other areas, it's the differentiated data that helps pull through either twin data or other credit data at very high margins that lets us deliver those margins. We're always looking for those synergies to exist. If we can't find a way that an acquisition helps us drive incremental data sales of our core data assets, it's generally not something we're that interested in.
Well, thank you. I appreciate the time. I appreciate you both being here. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.
Awesome. Thanks a lot.
Mm-hmm.