All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 2025 Wolfe FinTech Forum. My name is Scott Wurtzel on the Payments and Info Services team here at Wolfe, and happy to be joined by Stephen and Joelle from First Advantage. Thank you guys for joining us.
Good morning. Thank you.
Good morning.
Yeah. So Stephen, maybe we can start off. There could be some of the room who are maybe unfamiliar with the First Advantage story. So can you maybe begin by giving a quick overview of the company?
Yeah, absolutely. There are a few new faces, but good morning, everyone. First Advantage is the leading global tech solutions leader in the background screening space. We specialize in high-volume verticalized screening solutions, drug testing, digital identity, and pretty much anything else to help manage your human capital risk around hiring, employment. We offer a whole wide suite of services supporting a highly verticalized product and sales market and really specialize in anything our clients need to manage their risk and hire the top talent and focus on delivering that through a product-first, tech-enabled solution. Obviously, recently doubled the size of the company, so now we are well over $1.5 billion of revenue and certainly the market leader in our space, not just here in the U.S., but globally as well, and are looking to obviously grow the story off of that.
Gotcha. That's a great overview. Maybe we can talk about the market for a little bit because I feel like the market for background screening, identity verification, post-hire monitoring is definitely unique in terms of the kind of flow of business and market share. Can you maybe give us a sense of just how you sort of view the overall market right now, your guys' position relative to competitors? Then we'll get into the Sterling acquisition a little bit as well.
Yeah, I kind of had the same reaction almost 10 years ago when I took this job. You would never imagine how complicated this industry is and how much tech can enable to be a big differentiator there. First and foremost, with our Sterling acquisition we completed, we are by far the largest in the world, but it is a huge market. It's a $13 billion TAM with a ton of white space, about $7 billion vendors, so there's $6 billion of white space. Even with our acquisition, which makes us the market leader, we're roughly 25% of the U.S. market. A ton of growth both here domestically, which is the largest market in the world, but we are a global player. Almost 13%-15% of our business is outside the U.S.
Our key markets being the U.K., India, and APAC, and seeing some really good results out of all of those markets, especially the ones that kind of mirror U.K. common law, so U.K., India, Australia, Hong Kong, regions like that. When you look at kind of the U.S. market, back to our Americas, 85%-87% of our business, hugely fragmented. We're by far and away the largest at 25%. There's a couple other players. There used to be three public background screeners. There's now only one. It's kind of a survival of the fittest game, if you will. There's a whole plethora of them. There's a middle market tier of around 10 or so companies in a 300, 400, maybe 500 million. They're all private, so it's kind of hard to get the data.
Beyond that, there is quite literally a countless number of smaller enterprises, maybe single proprietor, single digit millions to tens of millions of dollars. First Advantage has really focused on a few things. One, being verticalized. We love being in very specific verticals that have, A, consistent needs for screening. If you look at our top three verticals, healthcare being now number one, it's over 20% of our business. Huge compliance demand in healthcare, very specialized compliance demand. Our second largest vertical, which was when we were a standalone company before the acquisition, transportation, another great vertical to be in because it's hugely DOT compliance, lots of kind of recurring demand, whether it's annual screening and health services and driver qualification. Retail, another one where we can flex our speed muscle.
High volume hiring being what we're really good at, taking in huge volume of orders. Joelle's team is building really good tech that can then fulfill all of that through high automation and then fulfilling it really quickly. You kind of think about our vertical approach, really tech driven, but our big client focus is on what we would call enterprise-sized clients. Enterprise contract for us is $500,000 a year or more of annual revenue. We have a really good sweet spot there because we've got a great commercial team, so sales and customer success. Again, a vertical approach so we can walk into a door of a large transportation company and everyone they meet at First Advantage understands DOT compliance. Huge differentiator in our market.
We really went to a vertical approach back in probably 2017 when Scott Staples joined as our CEO. We do this all with a huge tech-enabled backend, so high automation, over 70% of our US criminal elements. That's the core of our business, end-to-end touchless. People don't realize how complicated it is. I think when you say kind of the background screening industry and what differentiates you, you look at this country, there's almost like 3,500 unique counties, but then within those, there's upper courts and lower courts. There's over 10,000 court jurisdictions. The key to doing this job really well is building that automation. When Stephen Marks comes in the door and you can identify where you need to go, but you've got automated solutions and really quick data solutions on how to get all that data to validate all those credentials.
I know it's a long answer to a short question, but it really explains for you. You're like, "Man, background screening, how simple could that be?" It really what differentiates you is being able to do it at scale with automation and tech.
Gotcha. Yeah, no, it's very helpful. Yeah, and it's definitely a unique space. I guess if we get into the numbers a little bit, you recently reported four key results a couple of weeks ago, which I think saw a continued theme of you guys executing well on the factors that are in your control. Base growth still remains a headwind as some of the hiring headwinds we see in just the U.S. labor market right now. Can you just maybe talk about what developed in the quarter relative to your expectations and then your assumptions also embedded in 2025 guidance regarding the labor market?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Q4, I mean, a lot happened for us in Q4, right? We closed the Sterling acquisition October 31. When you kind of pro forma for all of that and just kind of look at it in a bubble, yeah, you're right. I mean, I think base growth, which if you're newer to our story, it's kind of your same store sales. How much your same customer ordered the following year fell short a little bit. I think we saw, like we talked about in our call, a little bit of late quarter surprise from our retail and transportation just because. Legacy First Advantage had a little bit of a seasonal peak that's relying on the big retailers and e-commerce players and home delivery guys having a really good holiday season. They did.
I think just what retailers, A, with a really late Thanksgiving and B, trying to eke every penny out of the consumer have widened the aperture of the holiday season. We used to have Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and now it seems like you've got just nonstop sales. If not just November, it's October, November, and December is nonstop sales season. We definitely saw elevated hiring, but we didn't see that peak that we were accustomed to seeing. That was kind of the late quarter revenue surprise. I think we still focused, to your point, on what we could control. Legacy First Advantage, that's really where that impacted because that was the First Advantage focus there, retail and transportation. Still delivered over 32% EBITDA margins. We were able to quickly adjust the cost base, execute on a few other savings.
Obviously, like we've talked about a lot, accelerate synergies out of that acquisition. That was kind of the later quarter. On the Sterling side, a little bit more tied to the white-collar salary employee kind of fell right within our expectations, which weren't rosy. To your point, we've been in this normalization and stabilization cycle with base. We were just talking right before the call about how crazy 2020 was. In the hiring industry, 2021 was the crazy year, right? We saw base volumes go through the roof and good mid-single double-digit growth, I mean, 30%+ in some international geographies, 40%+ . That obviously wasn't sustainable. What we've seen and kind of correlates to almost the glide path of where the jobs data has been taking us. It's kind of been getting back to what is a normal hiring environment.
We see that stabilization and that trend, and we kind of see it within our base trend as well. We just have to comp over in the early part of 2025, some tougher comps. When we get to the middle of 2025, that's kind of the end of a three-year normalization cycle. All of your comp periods in 2024 have three years compounded in them. We do see some stabilization in base there. To your point, our focus has been what we can control. Our revenue is driven really by four things: base growth, like we've been talking about, new logo. Joelle's sales team is able to generate 4%, 5%, 6% constant new logo growth. We think we've got a great team to power that forward. We focus on retention.
Our retention rates for both legacy First Advantage and legacy Sterling were both 96% and 97%. Huge customer attachment. You get that by being integrated and really fundamentally part of your client's hiring environment. The last piece is upsell, cross-sell. Upsell, cross-sell is really three things. A, it's expanding geography. That's very simple to understand. A U.S. client going international. Maybe you've got certain regions or subsidiaries and growing more wallet share. Cross-sell, like I mentioned in the onset, we have a huge portfolio of products, whether it's for certain verticals or we have onboarding products, post-onboarding products, tax products, etc. What is unique about background industry is something called package density. Because we're kind of in the risk management space, we can help our clients adjust the dial and do more screening.
A basic package and then add sex offender or global sanctions, go deeper into the criminal history, etc. That's a 4%, 5%, or 6% contributor as well. Between focusing on new client growth, upsell, cross-sell, high retention numbers, we can generate 6%, 7%, 8% growth even in a flat base environment. We've been executing on that, I mean, incredibly consistently. I know you know the numbers really well, but that's been a trend 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, no matter which of the macro swings you're talking about generating that growth. Certainly now we have the added ability to focus on executing on a $60 million-$70 million synergy plan to help drive even bottom line growth to add to that top line.
Gotcha. I think that leads well into my next question. As you mentioned before in the fall, you closed the acquisition of Sterling, which effectively doubled the size of the company. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the strategic rationale of the transaction, the early days of integration, and what kind of synergies we could expect. Joelle, would love if you can follow up with maybe giving any early examples of sort of the First Advantage and Sterling maybe working together to land a new customer and how it's going on that front.
Yeah. I mean, as you know, we were active in the M&A space in 2021 and 2022, did five acquisitions, and all were really successful internally, but none were very big. The largest purchase price was right around $40 million. They did not move the needle. We certainly paused for a minute to look at our strategy. We looked around the market for kind of the best way to power growth. Candidly, we always saw Sterling as our highest quality competitor. They have a lot of traits that we really liked when we got into that diligence. One, they were verticalized a little differently than we were, but their number one vertical was healthcare. We love that space. It was our third largest vertical pre-acquisition. It is now our largest. There are great macro trends there in terms of the demand for healthcare, aging population in the U.S.
They had some really nice product and data assets and ways to acquire data that we liked. The more and more we got into that diligence, we really just liked a lot about the business model. Look, it was obviously six months ago, a year ago, a little bit of a different regulatory environment. We obviously had a long DOJ path to get that approved. The fact that we were able to acquire the second best asset, if you will, in our industry effectively doubled the size of our company overnight, but do it in a way where we got, A, a good value. We did not overpay. That has really been one of our core tenets around M&A is we are kind of stingy on valuation. It had a great synergy case to it, and we were able to start executing on that very early.
We have some, and Joelle highlighted, some great product wins and go-to-market wins that came out of it because great sales culture, some really nice product assets. Really happy we were able to get that deal done. Obviously, we have a lot of work to do now. Integration's going really well. The cultures fit really well, which is really important in one of those types of deals. Obviously, got a meaty synergy case there, right? We originally thought it was going to be around $50 million. We're now very confident in a $60 million-$70 million range, and we're doing everything we can to draw that savings forward. Obviously, 2025 has a lot of unknown in the environment. I haven't logged into Twitter yet this morning to figure out how busy of a day it's going to be on the flight home.
That's why we're focused on those synergy numbers because those are real tangible dollars that we can achieve very quickly.
Yeah. As far as some of the sales synergies and deals, the teams have been working really, really well together. It is interesting. You have got two fierce competitors that have been for decades going after each other. To pull them together and to see them work like they are over the last couple of months has been pretty remarkable. Some evidence of that is a large deal that we recently won in the retail gig space. As Stephen mentioned, our sweet spot has always been high-volume hires. That is really around retail, transportation, last-mile delivery, that type of stuff that dovetails really nicely into gig.
When you look at our vertical go-to-market, one of the big differentiators is being able to benchmark exactly what our customer is doing as far as risk management and benchmark that against tens of hundreds of other customers to give them a really nice view. When we were going for that deal, and this deal is probably one that could end up being a top 10 customer for us, it was pretty significant. We were able to pull all of the benchmark data in from the Sterling customers as well. You had all of the strength of the retail customers and all of that data. Then you had a lot of the data from the gig space, which Sterling actually had done a really nice job of developing a nice customer base there.
When you put those two together and show all of those benchmarks and show the strength of all of the services and products that we can deliver to help mitigate risk, it gave the customer a lot of comfort that we were the right solution. That is one example. Another example, which we have internationally, is one of our largest international deals in actually a couple of years. It is out of Australia. One of the strengths of Sterling was an acquisition they had done a number of years ago in Australia. They had done a really nice job of building out some criminal products in that space. When we went to market, we did a nice analysis around kind of the First Advantage platform, the Sterling platform, the services that could be delivered from this large customer in Australia.
At first, we maybe thought they would be a little spooked, giving, "Oh, the acquisition just happened," and we were both bidding for the same business. They loved it. They chose the platform that best suited them. It was the industry and also because that was a financial services win and also the region expertise. It was great to see the two teams from Sterling and First Advantage both work together to close that large deal for us. It has been really good. We are seeing a lot of momentum.
Gotcha. That's great to hear. Before we get more into the go-to-market side, Stephen, with the Sterling acquisition, you guys are obviously now more diversified from a vertical exposure perspective. Can you just talk a little bit about that, how that can have a positive impact on the business? I imagine there could be cyclical benefits, seasonal benefits that come into play. I'd love to just kind of hear how you think about the positive impacts of vertical diversification.
Yeah. I'll let Joelle chime in at the end about how it helps the go-to-market too. It certainly helps from kind of a financial modeling, right? We've got, A, it's not just vertical, it's seasonality as well, right? A number of kind of alternative benefits, if you will, from the acquisition, right? We're less reliant now on that seasonal peak I talked about, which was our Q4 kind of surprise, if you will. Much more diversified, like Joelle mentioned, First Advantage never really got into gig because we didn't like it domestically. Sterling had some great gig solutions, specifically internationally, that we kind of looked at and said, "Man, that's actually a unique solution to a unique problem." There are a few other benefits like that. Overall, yeah, much more diversified.
First Advantage was heavily tailored towards the hourly employee, which we liked very much because it's a lot more consistent churn there. Obviously, the screening packages you run over an hourly employee are a little skinny compared to a salaried employee who's looking at sensitive data or doing sensitive company items or much more regulated industries they tend to be in. Sterling's got a little bit more of a salaried employee. White-collar back in the day is what you would have called it. It diversifies us there, less seasonality. Look, now we've got a portfolio of over 80,000 customers, almost 80,000 customers. You just have this much larger mix of marquee brand names, a huge portion of the Fortune 100, 500. We get this great mix. Even more so internationally, just think about a geography, very complementary there.
Now we're pretty much the market leader in our major markets we want to participate in. First Advantage had a great India practice. Australia was a great Sterling market. Those are great growth opportunities for us, but it also makes us the market leader in there and again, helps us diversify more. If you want to, maybe Joelle will give a few minutes on the vertical approach now and our sales teams there and that because I think that's a great story.
Yeah, absolutely. We certainly kind of came out of the gate first with the verticalization, but many of the other competitors caught up quick. As Stephen mentioned, First Advantage traditional was really the high-volume hires. It is a lot of the retail and transportation. Sterling traditionally did what we call more professional services, salaried workers. There is a really nice complement there. When you look at it from a verticalization, you have a lot of the healthcare, transportation, financial services more in the professional services space. You have retail and transportation. The product offerings in how you service customers that have high compliance, high regulatory requirements are pretty different based on what you would do for someone who is going to be a warehouse worker or a clerk or something like that for a retailer.
When you look at the product space and you look at how the verticalization for those products kind of complement each other as the Sterling kind of traditional professional services group was there, you have the product offerings more in healthcare and in transportation that really drive a lot of the compliance. It's actually pre-hire and post-hire, which is great. When you look at going to the First Advantage customers, you can bring some of those services and some of the products that Sterling has over to them, and then vice versa. There are a number of products that First Advantage has that is really strong in some of the verticals that Sterling has. There is a nice complement in the product space as well as the vertical market.
Gotcha. That's helpful. When we kind of think about the go-to-market, over the last 12 months, you've had, I think, 88 enterprise wins and 25 in the fourth quarter, which we think are pretty good numbers. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the sales environment where you're seeing the wins come from and what products and services maybe are resonating most with customers?
Yeah. There are two kind of focus areas we have here. One is, like I said, the vertical piece, but then the other one is the segment. Traditionally, First Advantage has been really good at getting kind of the larger enterprises. That has been kind of the bread and butter for a long time and then continuing to upsell and cross-sell and do that. The Sterling segment is really good at kind of the lower enterprise. I say lower, it is not really that much lower, but as far as the size of deals. When you look at that, there is a lot of cross-training that we are doing with the teams that allows us to bring some of that large deal focus and expansion. That is kind of going back to the package density term that Stephen used earlier.
That really is just a training exercise to be able to go to these larger customers and out of the gate provide the full suite of products. Sterling had a little bit different approach where they kind of went in and then they kind of expanded, but with maybe one or two instead of kind of the broad suite. When you couple those together, it gives us a really great advantage. We're seeing that resonate a lot in the market. Identity is very hot right now. There's a lot of identity fraud out there in the pre-hire space right now, which is a little unnerving for a lot of our customers. That's not vertical agnostic. That's across the board. We had, for instance, a fintech come to us and say they had a person go through.
These folks have interview technology to validate they are the person. They did background screening. They have the I-9 verification, all of the stuff that we do. They still had somebody get through because they had a fragmented product approach and they were not connected. When that person started, they asked to have their laptop with all their credentials shipped to an address that was not theirs. They did it. There was a cybersecurity incident and other things that were there. That is just one example. We are seeing a number where we have other customers where some of the bad actors from areas like North Korea and whatnot are trying to get credentials. They do not necessarily care about the job. They just want the day one, get the credentials, download the data, drop in a malware, and go from there.
It's on the rise. That product offering is very hot right now. It's something that both Sterling and First Advantage did really well. We're excited about what that looks like for us. Like I said, that's vertical agnostic. We have specific solutions in healthcare that Sterling had that were a little bit more advanced than some of the stuff that First Advantage had. First Advantage is probably a little further along in transportation. There's a lot of nice complements vertically, but also from a segment perspective and then product.
Got it. Got it. I'd love to stick on that kind of identity side of things. I mean, I think sometimes when people think of the background screeners, a lot of times they think of really just the pre-hire side of things. But there's obviously identity verification. There's post-hire monitoring. I would love to kind of talk a little bit more about how you view those spaces, the white space there, and what you or with Sterling, what you guys are doing to really attack that identity and post-hire monitoring space.
Yeah, absolutely. Identity is definitely kind of the next frontier for this space. It does run the full cycle of the work hire, right? From the very beginning of interview stage through the cycle of the hire stage and then also post-hire because we are seeing fraud hit every aspect of the life cycle of someone's work. It's really interesting. This market really got very hot internationally to start. The U.K., actually Canada and Australia were some of the first areas to really kind of venture into the identity spaces years ago. Because we're a global organization, we were able to be first to market in a number of those regions with some of these new products. We learned a lot about really what this means for, and we call it kind of a KYP space.
I know your people, it's not really the KYC, which is the traditional identity. When we learned kind of what was happening there, bringing the solutions to the United States obviously just made a lot of sense. As we said, our international business is about 13% of our business. The lion's share is obviously in the U.S. market. When you look at where you can slide these identity products in and how the underpinning of the data, the data that's collected at the identity space, the data that we collect at the background screening space, and then obviously the proprietary data that we capture and then post-hire to make sure that it all stitches together, that's how you handle a lot of this fraud and a lot of the challenges that customers are seeing with this increased risk in the new hire space.
We're really bullish on it. We think it's exciting. Monitoring is something that we see really taking off with our regulatory customers. Drivers, nurses, doctors, obviously they need to have proper licenses. They need to be there from a perspective of eligibility and credentialing. It hasn't really picked up as much in some of the unregulated businesses, but I think that's just a maturity curve that eventually will pick up. For now, that's where we're seeing a lot of that growth. We're really bullish on both. It's really nice to be able to have a product suite that expands the whole length of where the hiring cycle is and then gets us to post-hire as well.
Got it. That's helpful. I got to ask about AI, of course. Just how should we think about artificial intelligence impacts on the business, whether from internal efficiency exercises, product-related, anything there?
Yeah, absolutely. We love AI. We're really bullish on it. We've been using AI inside of First Advantage for the better part of five years. It's not new to us. That's because a lot of our differentiation in the market was really around proprietary data. As you know, anybody that's followed the AI market, it's really about the efficacy of the modeling and making sure that the products that you are building and the services that you're delivering are fit for purpose for your business case. When we think about AI, we think about it kind of in three buckets. The first one is really customer and candidate experience because you're talking about all the folks that are getting hired. Some of our major customers, which is why we do so well in the enterprise space, are folks that are hiring individuals.
They're the talent management, they're the HR people. We really focus on bringing AI to help our candidates, which are in the tens of millions, and then our customers. Anything we can do to improve that experience, whether it's on the UI or whether it's click chat calls. A lot of our claim to fame for helping in customer service has been a lot of the stuff we've been able to do with the calling originally, which was natural language processing and being able to kind of improve that experience. The latest was really chat and all of the AI that we've done with our chatbots, which has really dramatically improved efficiencies, but obviously also experience.
I think one of the points we made last year in our service is we were able to drop about 300 folks out of our customer care organization just because of that modern technology. That's great. The next space is obviously internal efficiencies. We get kind of a twofer with click chat calls. That's great. There are a number of other things that we're doing there. We rolled out FA ChatGPT. Every person inside the organization can be efficient and better at what they're doing. From our operations team, there are a number of internal agentic types of AI that we have rolled out to make them more efficient. That's been really exciting. Last, probably most exciting to me is the AI that we're generating revenue from. That's really around kind of the Smart Hub and then also our candidate experience.
A lot of that has been built proprietary to First Advantage. It's really been something that's been fed by our own data. AI out of the box is great. If you don't have really solid training data to feed it to make it more efficient, you're not going to get the most out of it. That's something that we've been able to do really well with some of our proprietary AI like Smart Hub and our Next Gen Profile Advantage.
Gotcha. Very helpful. Stephen, maybe we can go now to capital allocation. Obviously, post-closing of the Sterling deal, there's probably been a little bit of change in capital allocation priorities. I'd love to kind of just hear how you guys are thinking about deploying free cash flow over the near to medium term here.
It's a pretty simple story for the moment, right? I mean, we just closed the acquisition about four months ago. Our main focuses right now are A, completing the integration. Joelle's highlighted a couple of the early wins from the go-to-market. That team's done a great job integrating. There's still a lot of work. These are a 10,000-person organization now combined that we have to fully integrate and keep working through. Obviously, when you think of an organization that size, getting those synergies, that $60 million-$70 million, it does take a little bit of capital to get some of those. We have to re-engineer process. We have to negotiate with some vendors and exit some contracts and some employees too to get us down to the right size organization for our new size.
When you think about capital allocation, those are kind of the two priorities. Get the integration done, get it done well, get the synergies we've talked about. Obviously get our leverage back into our optimal position. Our long-term target's been two to three times. It's going to take a little bit of a journey to get there just from closing the deal, yielding the synergies, and getting the go-to-market success churning. We think it's roughly at the two-year mark. Call it into 2026, we're right around that 3X mark. From there, it could be a little bit differently. We've obviously got an investor day coming up in May. I'm sure there'll be a little bit more topic about the long-term uses of cash there.
For now, really our focus is get those synergies, leverage our organic investments around AI and automation, and really just start to get back to where we were, which was a really good free cash flow generator.
Gotcha. That's helpful. Maybe last one before we see if there's any questions from the audience. I mean, if we were to be back here 12 months from now and looking back on 2025, what would you point to that would lead you to view this year as a success?
I mean, the way the news is going, we could probably be back here in about 12 hours and have a different story. No, look, I think A, completing the integration, right? Twelve months from now is kind of probably a big milestone for us because we'll kind of have completed the first full fiscal year as a combined company. Like we talked about in our call, we're accelerating our synergies and integration wherever we can. Our original target was, hey, let's get 50% of our synergies realized or actioned within 12 months of the acquisition. We've pushed that timeline to six months. Twelve months from now, we're 16-18 months post-acquisition.
We should be starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel from the integration itself and then can get back to doing the fun FA 5.0, which is going to be kind of our new three-year plan, pushing those initiatives forward, which should be about growth and less about integration. Obviously, I'm sure Joelle would love to be here 12 months from now telling you how great those three bookings that Scott highlighted on our earnings call, the healthcare deal, the retail gig, and the Australia deal that Joelle highlighted a few minutes ago. Really, I think at that point, we should have the synergies action, the one-time costs out of the way, and really have a good track record at that point of the free cash flow.
Really what our original thesis for doing this deal, we should be starting to yield all the benefits from it.
Gotcha. Very helpful. Anything from the audience?
Can you talk about just kind of your sales force and maybe kind of the ROI when you add another person and how you think about the payback?
I guess I want us to repeat the questions, but yeah, the ROI on our sales force. I'll tell you, Konstantin, we look at two areas that if we invest in the business, it's never returned poorly, sales and product. Joelle can talk about the sales team more specifically, but I think when we look at investing in the sales team, we're pretty prudent. We're not extravagant spenders, but when we invest there, we've seen it yield pipeline success, go-to-market success. Even when we invest in customer success, which is a little bit less about growth, that's what powers 96%-97% retention, which we know is incredibly valuable, but.
It's also we have, because we're really good on the cross-sell upsell, we kind of measure it over a course of the 24 months. The original investment is what you would see in any standard organization. Because of the 5%-6% cross-sell upsell growth every year, that really gives us a nice return kind of on that original sale as it comes through. As Stephen mentioned before, we're really sticky. Customers stay with us a really long time, average 10 years, 12 years. The lifetime of that customer value based on that original sale is extremely high.
On the back.
Just a question on the cross-sell upsell. How much is related to pricing? Then secondarily, can you talk about integrating technology stack from Sterling to FA and how much are you doing there versus where you came from?
Yeah. Say the first part of that question again. I'm sorry.
Just pricing.
Pricing.
Cross-sell.
Yeah. Pricing for cross-sell upsell, the pricing has never really been a major issue. We do not sell on price. We sell on quality. Because we are a global player and one of the only ones in the market that can do that, that is something that has been held pretty strongly. Sterling actually had the same approach. I do not know that I have time to answer that.
Yeah, I think we might be out of time. Thank you guys so much, Stephen and Joelle.
Thank you, Scott.
Next up, we have emerging markets panel in here, and then we have Flywire in the home stream. Thank you guys.
Thanks, Scott.