Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to the Equifax 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. This meeting is being broadcast live via the Broadridge Virtual Meeting Platform. At this time, I would like to turn the proceedings over to Mark Feidler, Chairman of the Board.
Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to the Equifax Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I'm Mark Feidler, Chairman of the Board. At this time, I call the meeting to order. As described in our proxy materials, this meeting is being conducted using a hybrid and virtual format. For in-person attendees, we have convened at the Ritz- Carlton in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition, shareholders have been able to join virtually using the live meeting webcast. I am joined here today by the Equifax Board of Directors and senior leadership team. The participants in today's meeting include Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer, and Lisa Stockard, Corporate Secretary. A representative of Broadridge is serving as the independent inspector of election for this meeting. Before proceeding, we would like to address a few housekeeping matters that are unique to this hybrid format. Lisa.
Thank you, Mark. If you are a shareholder and logged in today using your 16-digit control number, you will see a meeting agenda on the website, along with rules of conduct and our proxy materials. If you have not yet voted or wish to change your vote, please proceed to submit your vote on the meeting website or raise your hand to request a paper ballot.
Following the business portion of this meeting, our CEO will provide a brief presentation, and then we will conduct a Q&A session. During the Q&A period, a representative of Ernst & Young will be available to respond to appropriate questions regarding the company's financial statements.
If you are a shareholder and attending virtually, you may submit a question using the meeting website to be answered during the Q&A portion of the meeting. Please note that only questions relevant to meeting matters will be answered today, subject to our meeting time constraints.
I will now ask the secretary to report on whether a quorum is present.
The Inspector of Election has certified that a quorum is present.
Thank you. This meeting is now duly convened for the purpose of transacting business properly before it. The next order of business is voting on the matters described in the proxy statement to the extent they are properly presented. The first proposal is the election of 10 directors for a one-year term. The second proposal is an advisory vote to approve named executive officer compensation. The third proposal is the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young as our independent auditor for 2026. The fourth proposal is an advisory vote to lower the ownership threshold to call a special meeting of shareholders to 25%. The fifth proposal is a shareholder proposal to lower the ownership threshold to call a special meeting of shareholders to 10%.
The board recommends a vote for each of the director nominees named in proposal one, for proposals two, three, and four, and against proposal five.
Thank you, Mark. It is our understanding that a representative of John Chevedden, the shareholder proponent, is here in the audience today. If so, could you please identify yourself and come to the center aisle to present the proposal? In the alternative, if Mr. Chevedden, you're on the line and you wish to present the proposal, please identify yourself now.
Hello, this is John Chevedden. I'll defer to the person at the meeting, and we'll present the proposal only if for some reason that person can't present the proposal.
Yes, Mr. Chevedden, there's no representative here on your behalf today in the room.
Okay, well, I'll present the proposal. It's give shareholders a reasonability to call for a special shareholder meeting. The shareholders ask the board of directors to take the steps necessary to amend the governing documents to give the owners of a combined 10% of the outstanding common stock the power to call a special shareholder meeting. Such a special shareholder meeting can be an easy-to-conduct online shareholder meeting. This proposal is on the same special shareholder meeting topic as proposal four. Proposal five was drafted first and should have been given the earlier number. Proposal five is the only proposal for an attainable right for shareholders to call for a special shareholder meeting. Proposal four requires a higher 25% of shares to call for a special shareholder meeting, which is not attainable.
Shareholders of more than 100 companies have voted on a special shareholder meeting proposal. Not one of these 100 companies have ever cited a special meeting ever taking place at a company that required 25% of shares. There has been a big rush by many companies to adopt the 25% figure because company management knows that the 25% figure is not attainable. Equifax was not satisfied with the 25% requirement made in the proposal for shareholder right to call for a special shareholder meeting attainable. Equifax added another factor to make proposal four even more unattainable. Equifax disqualified all Equifax shares not owned for a full continuous year from any right to call for a special shareholder meeting.
Shareholders of more than 100 companies have voted on a special shareholder meeting proposal. Not one of these 100 companies ever cited a special shareholder meeting ever taking place at any company anywhere that disqualified all shares not owned for less than a full continuous year. Proposal four thus has two roadblocks, each of which acting alone makes a shareholder right to call for a special shareholder meeting unattainable. Please vote for the only proposal on the ballot today that is for an attainable shareholder right to call for a special shareholder meeting, proposal five.
Thank you, Mr. Chevedden.
I declare the polls are now closed. The Secretary will now report on the preliminary voting results.
Thank you, Mark. Just one more reminder, if you have not yet voted or wish to change your vote, please do so now. If you already sent in your proxy card or voted in advance, no need to vote today unless you wish to change your vote. The inspector has provided us with a preliminary report on the tabulation of ballots and informed us that the 10 nominees for director have been reelected. The vote to approve named executive officer compensation has received majority support. Ernst's appointment as independent auditor for 2026 has been ratified. The proposal to lower the ownership threshold to call a special meeting of the shareholders to 25% has received majority support, and the shareholder proposal has not received majority support.
Thanks, Lisa. The final voting results will be filed with the SEC. Since there is no further business, I declare the meeting to be officially adjourned. We will now proceed with the informal portion of the meeting. At this time, I'd like to invite our CEO, Mark Begor, to provide a brief presentation regarding the company. A Q&A period will follow his presentation. Mark.
Thank you, Mark. It's exciting to be here in St. Louis for our shareholders meeting with our Equifax Solutions, I'm sorry, Workforce Solutions team. This is one of our largest businesses and exciting to be here for our meeting in 2026. 2025 was an important year for Equifax. It's it was a really record year. I think our investors know well that we're a leading data analytics technology company. We have leading cloud capabilities, unique data sets that sit in a moat that are very unique and proprietary at Equifax that allow us to deliver solutions to our customers. Our revenue last year was a record $6.1 billion, the first year that we've been over $6 billion of revenue.
Really a big milestone for the company. Broad-based growth across the business. And our both our mortgage and diversified businesses performed well, particularly in a challenging mortgage market in 2025. If you look at this next slide, you can see our businesses performed very well. Workforce Solutions, which is based here in St. Louis, our largest business, had revenue of over $2.5 billion and up 6%. Our USIS business had a first year over $2 billion of revenue of $2.078 billion. A very strong year and up 10%. In our international business, where we operate in 23 markets around the world, we're up 6% for $1.4 billion.
Very strong performance by the company, and that momentum continued in the first quarter of 2026. I think our investors know well that we've had a massive investment in the cloud over the last five plus years. We invested an incremental $3 billion in our tech stack. We believe to be a leading data analytics company, you have to be a leading technology company. We're now the only cloud-native data analytics company in our space, which we think is a big competitive advantage to deliver solutions to our customers in a very high speed, as well as having very strong stability and the ability to innovate, bringing new solutions to our customers. That really drives our innovation. Very central to our DNA is our new product focus.
We run the Vitality Index, which as a reminder, is the percent of our revenue from new products in the last three years. We believe that a company that's innovating is a stronger partner to our customers. About five years ago, we set a goal of 10% vitality, which was above our historical rates. We've been surpassing that for the last four years. Last year, we hit a record of 15% vitality, which means that 15% of our $6 billion of revenue is new in the last three years from new innovations. We think that's a very important metric for the company. It's one that's a broad-based role between our product teams, our D&A teams, our technology teams, and our commercial teams, really collaborating with our customers.
Last year, we also delivered a record 188 new products. A few weeks ago, we reported our first quarter results, and we had 17% Vitality Index. Really strong performance by the company around innovation, which is driving closer customer connections, but also driving our top line and our margins. AI is a big opportunity for Equifax. As I said earlier, if you haven't read it, you should read our annual report, which is available on our website. It talks about powering the future with EFX.AI. There's really three vectors around our AI initiatives. First is really using AI to deliver higher performing scores, models, and products to our customers. Super important to really deliver. What's unique about our AI is that we're using for our products is it's responsible or explainable AI.
We reported last year that we added 40 new AI patents to our portfolio of 400 AI, explainable AI patents, and we added another 10 in the first quarter. Equifax is investing to bring higher performing solutions to our customers built off our proprietary data in our Equifax Cloud database. The other two big initiatives are really to drive AI across Equifax across our internal operations. We call AI 4 EFX our initiative, where all of our employees are really using AI to really enhance their jobs and how they deliver all the work that they're doing. We're seeing big productivity lifts and big enhancements with the deployment of AI and a big adoption by the company.
We're really excited about the initiatives we have about really deploying AI across all of our 15,000 employees. The third initiative is we call E3. It's really taking AI and really deploying it against our operations and really seeing big opportunities to drive productivity, to drive speed as well as accuracy. We process a lot of paper from our consumers, and we also take a lot of calls in our call centers from our customers and consumers, and AI is really enabling that. We announced in February in our fourth quarter 2025 earnings call that we've got a three-year $75 million productivity program that's being driven by AI from operations, which is one of the things that's really expanding our margins in 2026.
You're familiar with our long-term growth framework and our strategic priorities. I won't go through the strategic priorities on the right-hand side. They're very familiar to what I shared last year at our shareholders' meeting. The emphasis that we've added in 2026 is really around AI. As I said on the prior slide, really a big focus about using AI across Equifax. On the left-hand side, you see our long-term framework. You know, our intention is to grow the company 7%- 10% organically. We were at the low end of that last year with the challenging mortgage market. We've got a guide for 2026 that moves us into that 7%- 10%. We're very focused on doing bolt-on M&A. Last year, we added the Vault Verify acquisition in the fourth quarter.
Our intention is to add one to two points of revenue growth annually from bolt-on M&A. Our margin expansion goal is 50 basis points per year, so a very strong operating leverage from that strong top-line growth. In 2026, we've got a guide with our investors to be at 75 basis points, so 50% above that 50 basis point margin expansion. I think as our investors know, with that strong top-line growth as well as the strong margin expansion going forward, we generate a lot of excess free cash flow that we can invest in the company. With that margin expansion and top-line growth, we expect to grow our EPS in mid-double digits, which is a very strong performance for our shareholders.
This next slide talks about our free cash generation, very important to Equifax. As a reminder, back in April of 2025, we rolled out our long-term capital allocation plan, which was new for the company, where we laid out a plan to grow our dividend in line with our earnings growth and return cash to shareholders in a $3 billion three year share repurchase program. With our strong cash generation and maintaining our strong balance sheet, we're able to invest really record amounts inside of Equifax. Over the long term, we expect to invest in CapEx, which our investors know is really used to drive new products now that the cloud is substantially complete.
We'll invest upwards of $500 million a year in the future in CapEx to really drive innovation and new products. Bolt-on M&A at that one to two points of revenue growth will be on the average, something like $500 million-$700 million a year of investment in bolt-on M&A, like our Vault Verify deal last year and our Boa Vista deal two years ago. There's gonna be significant excess free cash flow in the neighborhood of $1 billion a year that we'll be able to return to our shareholders through dividend growth and also through the repurchase of shares. Last year in the fourth quarter, we purchased $500 million of our shares.
In the first quarter, 240 million, I'm rounding a little bit, of shares in the first quarter. Equifax is focused on not only growing the company and investing in the company for the future, but also returning cash to shareholders, which we think is a very strong shareholder equation. We know we play a very important role in consumers' lives and small business lives, with everything that we do, whether it's, you know, financing a new home, an auto loan, a new credit card, financing a refrigerator, or getting that first job, renting an apartment, or in the case in the U.S., the delivery of social services to those that are in need.
Equifax plays a very important role, it's really aligned with our purpose of helping people live their financial best. We also have a big impact. This slide just shows some of the statistics and some of the markets that we're in of the, really the massive impact we have on consumer and small business lives every day, with the unique data that we have to help them live their financial lives. We also give back. We have a foundation that we're quite supportive of that last year delivered $2.6 million to charitable organizations. We focus in the in the areas where we live and work in Atlanta and St. Louis in particular.
We invested over $800,000 in community financial-oriented, financial education-oriented type organizations in 2025. We have a gift matching program for our employees for a total of $2.6 million. Really important to Equifax to not only deliver for our shareholders, but also deliver for the markets and neighborhoods and areas that we live. Now I'd like to open it up, the meeting, to our shareholders to ask questions during a brief Q&A session. If you're here in person and would like to ask a question, please raise your hand and wait for me to call on you.
If you're attending virtually, please click the Q&A button on the meeting website and submit your question, and we'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can today, subject to our meeting time constraints. Being no further questions, I now declare the meeting concluded. Thank you to our investors and shareholders for your support of Equifax. We're energized, not only about what we delivered in 2025, but we're even more energized about the future of the new Equifax. Thank you very much.
That concludes the Equifax 2026 annual meeting of shareholders. The meeting webcast has now concluded.