We're going to go ahead and get started. All right. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to First Advantage's Inaugural Investor Day. I'm Stephanie Gorman, Vice President of Investor Relations here at First Advantage. We're thrilled to have you all here with us today, whether you're in person or joining us virtually. Your support and engagement are invaluable to us as we continue to advance our mission of providing global software and data to help our customers hire smarter and onboard faster. Today, you're going to hear from our leadership team about our strategic vision, go-to-market approach, product and technology solutions, and our financial outlook. We are committed to transparency and open communication, and we look forward to sharing insights about our growth strategy and how we plan to navigate the evolving landscape of our industry.
I'd like to remind everyone today that our event is being recorded, and following the presentations, a replay of the webcast will be available for a limited time on the company's Investor Relations website. For those of you joining us in person today, I want to cover a few housekeeping items. During our break, we will have snacks and refreshments just outside here where breakfast was located. Restrooms are located just around the corner from the breakfast area. If you do have any logistical questions throughout the day, feel free to seek out one of our First Advantage team members in the green lanyards, and they will be happy to assist you. Additionally, we're pleased to have several members of the First Advantage management team and board of directors here with us today.
We hope you'll take the time to introduce yourself to them during the break or following the presentations. Before we dive into the presentations, I would like to remind everyone that our presentation today will include forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results may differ materially due to a variety of factors. You can find more details about these factors in our SEC filings, which we may update periodically, and we do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements made today. We will also present non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the closest GAAP measures, to the extent available without unreasonable effort, can be found in today's presentation, which is available on our Investor Relations website.
Additionally, to facilitate comparability, we will also discuss pro forma combined company results, consisting of First Advantage and Sterling Check Corp historical results, and certain pro forma adjustments as if the acquisition of Sterling had occurred on January 1st, 2023. The pro forma information does not constitute Article 11 pro forma information. With that, let me provide a quick overview of our agenda for the day. We'll begin with Scott Staples, our CEO, who will provide an overview of our business, industry, and the FA 5.0 strategy. His insights will set the stage for understanding the broader context of our goals and the exciting journey we're on. Next, Joelle Smith, our President, will share her insights on our go-to-market approach. She will discuss the compelling growth opportunities we have to increase share in our target verticals, enhance our global presence, and drive customer engagement.
Following Joelle, Irena Kovach, our Global Chief Product Officer, will discuss the latest advancements in our product offerings and how we are delivering value to our customers. Next, Charlie Euler, our Chief Technology Officer, will lead us in a discussion on how our technology and AI-led innovation is fueling our growth. After these presentations, we will have a Q&A session allowing you to engage directly with the presenters and clarify any points, and then we will take a short break to recharge. Once we reconvene, Stephen Marks, our Chief Financial Officer, will discuss our financial strategy, performance, and long-term outlook. Scott Staples will then return for closing remarks, summarizing the key takeaways for the day. Finally, we'll conclude with an open Q&A session featuring all of our presenters, giving you the opportunity to ask any remaining questions.
After the presentation, we would like to invite all of you here today to join us for a few minutes to chat with our leadership team. We'd love the opportunity to meet all of you and answer any lingering questions you may have. With that, I'd like to thank everyone again for joining us today, both virtually and in person, and I'd like to invite to the stage our CEO, Scott Staples.
Good morning. This is a big day. This is our first-ever Investor Day, and it was kind of timely because we were in this building just about four years ago for our IPO. Welcome. We have a lot of exciting data and information to share today, as well as some strategy. We hope you have some great takeaways. Before I dive into the materials, I just thought, for those that do not know me, I will give you a quick background. I have been the CEO of the company for eight years. I am into my ninth year now. Before that, I have spent almost my entire career in software development, IT services, product development. I co-founded a company called Mindtree in 1999, which is now the sixth-largest IT services company out of India, with $4.5 billion of revenue and 86,000 employees around the world.
It was a very proud achievement to have been the co-founder of such a great company. After 18 years, I felt like I had accomplished everything and was looking for a new challenge. I was introduced to First Advantage through Korn Ferry, and I really loved the space because I felt it was behind the times from a technology standpoint, and it was a place that I could make a difference. We have done a lot of work in the last eight years. First Advantage is really a transformation story. We have gone from being a background check provider to a software data and services company. We literally have transformed every aspect of the business. Today, we will kind of walk you through where each one of those functions is. In the past eight-plus years, what have we achieved?
We have become a category leader, and it has been an exciting journey. We have created modern, agile software development shops. We have actually over 850 product and software engineering teams in 90+ Agile PODs around the world. We are a software development company. We obviously have invested in proprietary data. We think that is a differentiator, and we will talk a little bit about that later. For those that know us well, we always feel that our secret sauce is bringing that technology and data experience to a verticalized, specific go-to-market strategy. Joelle will walk you through that strategy when she gets into the go-to-market. The verticalization is really the secret sauce. Last fall, we did a small acquisition called Sterling.
It's purposely a joke because it was the same-sized company as First Advantage, and we've been working for the last seven months on putting these two great companies together, and I'll give you an update as to where we are. Key messages for today. I've walked you through a little bit of this already, but I think the one thing to remember about our space is that it's a growing space. Just think about the world we live in. It's a very complicated world, and it's getting more and more complex. Risk and safety are becoming more and more prevalent in our discussions with our customers. We feel that, and I'll give you a little bit of an analogy here. Everybody knows how important cybersecurity is. This is a topic that C-suites and boards talk about regularly.
When you talk to C-suites and boards, what are they looking for? They're looking for best-in-class processes, policies, and partners. This is what's happening to background screening. We're now becoming a C-suite board-type discussion. The biggest thing that is accelerating this is digital identity or identity fraud. I'll get into a little bit more about what that acceleration means, but this is on the radar of C-suites and boards, and First Advantage is perfectly positioned for this. We'll talk a little bit about the Sterling acquisition. I think the Sterling acquisition has really accelerated our position in the market. We actually see that acquisition as a 1+ 1 = 3 situation, where we took the two best companies in the space with the best technology, the best people, the best processes, and we're putting them together.
It's really accelerating where we are, and we'll give some more information around that. You'll learn more about our FA 5.0 strategy today. This is a new strategy that we launched as of January 1st, and we'll talk a little bit about that. The last thing to remember is our numbers are really good. When you think about where we are from a revenue, from an EBITDA, from a free cash flow position, we are really great numbers. Stephen will obviously give you a lot more detail into the numbers, and we'll also give you estimated projections for 2028 later in his presentation. I think all the key messages are very favorable for First Advantage. Let's talk a little bit about who we are. I already told you we're a software data and services company.
We have a comprehensive suite of offerings, which is great because this means a couple of things. If you look at all the offerings on the right side, those are all upsell/cross-sell opportunities for customers that do not have all those offerings from us. We are going to double down on digital identity in the middle on the top there. You are going to hear a lot about that today because we are so excited about what that means for the business. At the end of the day, what do we sell? We sell our platforms. We sell our proprietary data. We are known in the industry for our speed. First Advantage, when you go talk to talent acquisition organizations, HR departments, security departments, whoever is buying on the services, First Advantage is known for its speed because we have spent the last eight to nine years investing in automation.
This is all about APIs and robotic process automation and AI. Today, in the U.S., you may not know this, but 70% of our transactions on criminal background checks in the U.S. are 100% machine-to-machine. No human intervention at all. A machine takes the order. A machine goes out and searches the data. A machine interprets the data. A machine produces a report. Sure, there are quality checks and things like that, but that is core to the business. That is driving great margins. That is driving great customer satisfaction. The 70% will grow. It will continue to grow every year. It will never be 100% because in order to be 100%, all the courts in the U.S. need to be digitized, and that is never going to happen because some rural court out in the state of Montana has no business case to digitize their database, but the vast majority do.
If we can get that number to 90% in the next couple of years, that'll make us even faster than we are today, even more profitable. I said we're going to double down on digital identity. You're going to hear a lot about this today. I'm going to give you this information multiple times today because this is what's got us so excited. The digital identity space is a $10 billion TAM that's brand new. This is an additional TAM for us to go get. We'll talk about the specifics of that TAM as we go through the slides. Let's spend a little bit of time on just sort of First Advantage at a glance. I know there's a lot of numbers on here. We're not going to go through all of them, but I think there's some important messages.
Based on everything I just talked to you about, how this is becoming a C-suite board type of discussion, size and scale matter. They matter a lot. When you think about 190 million background screens a year going through our platforms, there's a couple of things that that signifies. One, our platforms can handle high volumes. That's a lot of transaction. Enterprise customers love the fact that they can trust our platforms to handle as many orders as they throw at us on a given day. These platforms are essentially engines, and they're the core of the technology story behind First Advantage. Also, when you look at 200+ countries and territories, that's important because global is becoming more and more important. Just think of it this way.
As I gave you the trend of this is becoming a C-suite and board-level discussion, it's also now because the spend is becoming a bit larger, this is now also on procurement radars. Now, when you say procurement, some people say, "Oh my, now that your price is going to, you're going to have to give discounts and your price will come down." No, that's not what's happening. That's not what's happening. What procurement departments are doing is they're looking at vendor consolidation. A lot of our upsell/cross-sell that we've had over the last year or so have been big global enterprises getting away from using small, local, regional mom-and-pop providers and consolidating with large providers like First Advantage. This is a great trend. We're heavily invested in proprietary databases. It just makes sense.
Why would we pay to go out and get third-party data when we can build some of it ourselves? Now, we'll never get to a point where it's only our own proprietary data because a lot of the information is publicly available data in court systems. Building up your own proprietary databases makes a lot of sense because once you get that data from a publicly available data source, you can legally keep it, just like they can keep it. You can reuse it when you get consent to reuse it again. Why not have your own data? That will, again, drive speed and will drive margins. The last number I'll talk about on this side here is the 96% gross retention is a pleasant surprise.
When we did this acquisition, we were unsure as to how the market would react to it, and we projected that there would be some attrition. There has been hardly any attrition from the Sterling acquisition. I think the main reason for that, and we're going to get into that in a few minutes, is that we have been very purposeful and highly communicative to Sterling install-based customers and new prospects that there's no forced migrations here. I have to give the biggest shout-out in the world to our product and tech teams who have come up with an extremely elegant solution. They've architected a platform strategy that will make it feel like people are staying on their existing technology bases, and all these changes are happening sort of behind the scenes.
The good things that they're getting that are in terms of upgrades that they're visible, they're extremely happy with. The Sterling install-based customers are extremely excited about our product strategy. The FA install base is extremely excited about our product strategy because they, in turn, will get some of the best in breed from Sterling brought over to them. 96% is really important. On the right side, Joelle will go into this in way more detail, but she'll talk a little bit more about the vertical strategy. The only part that I wanted to talk about was the verticals you see on the right are the combination of the two companies coming together. My message for you is resiliency. We're not overly dependent on one single vertical anymore. Not that we were before, but as you know, First Advantage was heavy into transportation and retail.
Now, healthcare is our biggest vertical, and healthcare is extremely resilient and growing very fast. What we love about this slide is the fact that we've got built-in resiliency into the model. Also, there's a ton of white space in all of these verticals for us to go get or market share for us to go get. Joelle will get into exactly how we're going to do it. I've talked a little bit about these trends. I think it becomes easy in a publicly traded company to get caught up in quarterly trends. What's JOLTS data this quarter? What was JOLTS data the quarter before? What's the guess of what it's next quarter? Yeah, those are important because those do affect current stock price. Let's not forget the big picture here. The big picture is incredibly positive for us.
I've talked to you about some of these trends. What I think we have is all these trends on the left are tailwinds. Sure, they may not be hitting next quarter, but these are the next three- to five-year big tailwinds. We feel First Advantage has the biggest sail in the industry. We're going to catch most of these tailwinds. I talked to you a little bit about digital identity. I think it's really important. When I tell you it's a $10 billion TAM, don't think of it as a product line. Think of it as a category in itself. It's a multiple product line. We could probably sell three, four, or five different products to customers just to combat identity fraud. What that will give us, obviously, it gives us bundling, which we love, but it'll also give us tremendous stickiness.
This is a really hot topic. I don't know if anybody saw the Wall Street Journal this morning. There's an article. It was very timely. We have to thank the Wall Street Journal for their releasing of this article. There's an article, and please read it. There's an article that everybody's fear here is North Korea. What is happening in the space is that due to the fact that companies are doing virtual recruiting, meaning over Zoom or over Teams, North Koreans are applying for jobs and getting jobs in the U.S. This article says that 300 American companies have already been infiltrated by North Koreans working at their companies. There's two reasons they're doing it. One, and most are coming in through IT jobs. One, they're qualified for it, so they get the job.
Two, North Korea needs money, so these people are sending money back to the homeland. Three, it opens up the doors to their corporate systems and malware, and you have threat actors and cybersecurity looming. Companies are petrified about this right now. Joelle and Irena will give you some stats. There was a Gartner report that just came out a few weeks ago too about how prevalent this is. I would say that in conversations with customers today, this takes up 50% of, let's say, an hour-long meeting just on digital identity fraud. What does it mean? It means we all hear about AI, right, and the good things that AI is doing. There are some negative things that AI is doing as well. North Korean threat actors are applying for jobs using deepfakes on videos, and they are using AI-enhanced or technically forged documents.
Somebody else is filling out an I-9 for them. They've enlisted some American to fill out an I-9 to get past. This is happening. Our products can help stop this or at least can help deflect it. Again, we feel it's a $10 billion TAM for us to go get. Speaking of that TAM, let's break it down because it's not just the new TAM we want to focus on. Our existing TAM, if you remember from IPO days, for those who have been following us for the last four years, there was a $13 billion market that we're in without digital identity. This $13 billion market continues to grow. It grows because of the risk that companies perceive in the space, meaning they want to protect their brands. They want to protect their shareholder value. They want to protect their workforces.
They want to protect their workplaces. So they're continuously buying stuff from us. For those that are close to the store, we call that package density. They continue to come back and say, "What else do you have that can help us feel comfortable here?" The space continues to grow. There is a lot of space internationally as well. Joelle will walk you through some big first-time screeners that have come to us out of places like APAC who have never done background screening before. It's some interesting stories. If you take the growing existing TAM and then you add in the $10 billion for digital identity, we're now in a $24 billion space. We're the flagship. We're a category leader in a $24 billion space. It's got us extremely excited. Again, this may not mean new wins tomorrow.
We're talking about three to five-year tailwinds here. But we're very excited about our market position. Okay, let's talk a little bit about competitive landscape because I think this is also helping a little bit with upsell/cross-sell. So if you think about how this is sort of how we break down the market, we only have about 25% market share, which again makes us pretty excited when you think about a $24 billion market in which we only have 25% market share. We then break the competitive landscape into two buckets. There's mid-size players who range from a revenue standpoint from $100 million to $700 million. For those who have been following the story, you'll notice that larger players that used to be our peers are now mid-size because we're double the size of them. So we're categorizing them as mid-size players.
You literally have dozens and dozens of mom-and-pops. They're still around, and they're still holding on to clients. It's incredible. What we think with the benefits of size and scale, our technology platforms, our investments in data, how background screening and digital identity fraud, etc., are becoming C-suites and board-level discussions, how procurement is getting involved, we all think that this is bad news for the mom-and-pops, especially. They're not going to have solutions here. They're not going to be able to talk like we talk in front of our customers. Just think of it this way. When we're in front of customers, what are we talking about? We're talking about AI. We're talking about machine learning. We're talking about facial recognition. We're talking about biometrics. We're talking about using liveness scans. We're talking about proprietary data, API frameworks, robotic process automation, proprietary algorithms.
No way mom-and-pops or even some of the mid-size can even back up what that stuff is. That is where we're really seeing what we feel is the acceleration of the competitive moat that we've got. When you bring in the vertical overlay to that and you have those discussions about how that technology is going to affect that specific vertical with the vertical-specific regulatory requirements, we think we're really well positioned. Okay, I love this slide because it basically just walks you through everything I just talked about. We've got lots of competitors in our space, but when you talk about our product breadth and depth, when you talk about our vertical expertise, and you can solve their problems with technology and data, that's what helps solve and simplify these things. This is where we stand out.
What this also means is when we stand in front of a customer, everything I just talked to you about enables us to do consultative selling. We're teaching them, and we're coaching them on how to combat digital identity fraud. We're teaching them how to do best practices. We're teaching them what is best in breed. Due to our size and scale and the fact we do 190 million screens a year, we can sit in front of any company in our desired verticals, and we can do peer benchmarking with them. Peer benchmarking is the greatest upsell/cross-sell tool ever invented in this industry. What it means is you show them on paper what their peers are doing. Obviously, you anonymize the data. They can't see a customer name. You can show them in fact, I spoke last week at a National Retail Federation offsite.
There were 60 retailers there, large retailers. We put a slide up that was data from the top 40 retail customers that we have, and we showed them peer benchmarking. I guarantee you we're going to get phone calls out of that meeting as to, "Hey, I need to add that. I need to add this because I didn't realize we were behind the scenes." Things like that really give us an advantage. Okay. We talked about technology. We talked about data as differentiators. We talked about these mega trends. It is more than that. When you start layering in other things like best-in-class customer and candidate experience, we've now launched our Next Gen Profile Advantage candidate mobile portal, which Irena will walk you through a little later today. It's an amazing piece of technology that applicants are using as their portal to interface with us.
When you layer in that type of great user experiences with also great account management and customer service, you've heard us talk. If you know our story, you've heard us talk about our Click. Chat. Call. customer service. This is a winner. We just rolled this out to Sterling install-based customers March 1st. The reception's been amazing. They never had the ability to chat. Anytime a Sterling customer needed customer service, they had to call an 800 number. Now they can chat, and they're loving it. The feedback is great. When you roll all that together, we feel it gives us a competitive advantage. You've heard me say a number of times this morning about how size and scale matter and how we've become a category leader. What does that mean? This is kind of showing you the world that we sit in.
What we feel like is that we are in the center of the universe of a very highly complex but networked business landscape. We feel we're the integration hub for our customers' talent acquisition organizations, their HR departments, their security teams, and their compliance teams. We bring simplification to a very complicated network. We enable them to use our technology and our data to help them figure out a simplified user experience and workflow that makes doing a background check comprehensive and easy. We do not forget that every day we have a noble purpose. Our noble purpose is to keep customers and their employees safe. We never lose sight of that. It's easy to lose sight of that in a very complicated, highly networked industry. When you've got technology and data and experience and expertise bringing it together, that's what a category leader means.
We feel other companies have done this in other spaces, and we hope that you see us the same way. It is very similar to what is shown there on the right, what a category leader who is at the center of the universe of a network business means. Okay. Today, you are going to meet everybody on the top line, or at least today's presenters or everybody on the top line in that order. There are other folks in the room as well sitting in the back that we hope that you get to meet as well. Please spend time with the First Advantage management team. What I think is there are a couple of things that stand out on this slide. One is we have been together for a long time. When I came in eight years ago, there was great talent here.
We obviously brought in some new folks. What we've got here is a great combination of software and background screening expertise. Like I said, when you've got 850+ product and engineering people around the world and 90 pods, you've got to know software development. You also need to know compliance. You need to know background screening. You need to know customer success. There are lots of other things you know, and these folks are experts. We mentioned FA 5.0, the new strategy. We launched this strategy on January 1st. What we did was since we had acquired Sterling, we felt it was time for a new strategy. The old strategy was a good strategy, but now we're double the size. We've got to integrate Sterling. We need a new strategy.
We worked for many, many months on this and launched this as a three-year strategy, which we launched on January 1st. I'm going to walk you through it. It's got four pillars, as you can see. I'm going to walk you through the first pillar, which is the integration of Sterling. Joelle, Irena, and Charlie will cover the go-to-market, product, and technology pillars. Let's talk a little bit about Sterling. This was a great acquisition. The financials obviously made sense. You never know what you got until you can get under the hood. As we got under the hood, November 1st, we have just been really excited about what we've found. The analogy we've been using in the company is that it's two puzzle pieces coming together nicely. We feel these were the two best companies in the space. They're fitting together very well.
The big connector, the big glue that's making it happen is we're a culture match. We were not sure how that was going to go until we met the Sterling teams, and we felt like we have been working together for years and years and years. Great culture has come together to make this work. I think the other thing that's very exciting, and you have seen this in our Q4 and Q1 results, is the sales engine is humming. This has not slowed us down. This has, in fact, accelerated us. If you look at the wins in Q4 and the record wins in Q1, one, it signifies that we did a good job of harmonizing the go-to-market engine. Two, it signifies that the market likes the story. There was no hesitation because there are still new logos being won. There is upsell/cross-sell being won.
The sales engine is obviously extremely important. Joelle will cover the pipeline and what we're uncovering as we put these two pipelines together. We're super excited about it. Again, what's made this work is culture. What's really made it work at the customer level is the best-of-breed strategy or philosophy. We went into this saying, "Hey, First Advantage is acquiring Sterling, but we're not going to take Sterling and force it into First Advantage. We're going to look objectively at both companies and say, 'Let's create a new company out of these two gems, and we'll take the best of both worlds.'" Whoever's got the best, the best technology will take that. The best product will take that. The best process, the best automation, the best sales team, the best marketing, the best people, and so on.
The game changer and what has got us the most excited is what we have ended up with is a lot of bests. We have got a big pile of bests, and we are super excited about what that means. The other thing to note about this integration is that we are ahead of plan. We are ahead of plan because, one, we had great planning that went into it. Two, the culture match has made this easier to integrate. Three, when you have got a lot of bests, decisions get made quicker, and you get things done faster. This is a very complicated slide, and Charlie is going to spend a lot of time on this. All I wanted to show you today was this is the tech slide that we show our customers about what best-of-breed really means.
If you're on the Sterling platform, you stay on the Sterling platform. If you're on the First Advantage platform, you stay on the First Advantage platform. We will take best-of-breed from both and offer it up to the other platform. What's most important is the global fulfillment engine there on the right. We're doing all of this and hitting our synergy targets and actually exceeding our synergy targets because we're making one back end. This is where the infamous First Advantage automation lies. Sterling customers will get the advantage of our automation. That global fulfillment engine, and Charlie will give you way more detail on this, is really where the synergies can happen, the margin improvements can happen. This is all behind the scenes. You think about the customers. This is the presentation layer of the software products. This doesn't change for them.
If anything, it gets better. The global fulfillment engine, that's behind the scenes. That's something they don't see, but they feel. The turnaround times get faster. The quality's higher, etc. Charlie will get into way more detail on this.
Having said all that, today, we're going to raise our synergy target because we are ahead of plan, because things are going so well. We're now increasing the range to $65 million-$80 million. I think what's important is that we've already got $37 million in the bag. That's way ahead of plan for us. $37 million of run rate synergies already actioned by the end of March. We obviously have more to come. We're feeling really good about this number.
Also, one of the other reasons we're raising it and we're ahead of plan is because of the fact we have had very little customer impact. If we had customer impact, we would slow down and say, "Okay, let's get this right." Customers are actually excited about this. We have a good line of sight into more cost-saving areas, and we'll continue to get the synergies. This is an exciting slide to show you because I'm giving you a sneak peek into our 2028 estimated projections, our goals, and our targets. We feel by 2028, given everything we just talked about, that from a revenue standpoint, we can get to $1.8 billion-$2 billion, 31%-32% Adjusted EBITDA, $1.65-$2 of adjusted diluted EPS. Why are we so confident about this?
One, being the category leader puts us in the pole position to really own our own destiny. Two, and Steven will show you this. We've been crushing it for the last four or five years or maybe six, seven years on the things we control really well: new logo wins, upsell, cross-sell, retention. We're taking market share. We have a growing market with the TAM and digital identity. We're ahead of our integration plans. We generate a lot of cash. This is a very exciting time for us, and we're really excited about the next couple of years driving us to 2028. With that, I will now turn it over to Joelle, who's going to walk you through our go-to-market strategy, and she's also going to shepherd the conversation around product and technology. Our President, Joelle Smith.
Hello, and good morning. Thank you, everybody. Before I get started on the topics, I thought it would be great to introduce myself, help you get to know me a little bit. As Scott mentioned, I've been with First Advantage for seven years. For the last five, I've had the privilege of transforming our technology, data, and product organizations, as well as modernizing our cloud architecture. That's been a lot of fun. Before that, I spent about 15 years selling and building software, SaaS, and technology consulting services for Fortune 500 companies. I had notable experience in verticals such as financial services, banking, transportation, retail, and hospitality.
I'm very excited to tell you more about what we have going on in the go-to-market space and some of the new structure that we've put in place in the organization to allow us to capitalize on all the great stuff that Scott just talked about, but also to drive accelerated growth. All right. Scott talked about 5.0, and this is key to our strategy for the next three years. He covered the Sterling acquisition, which is great. We're going to talk about the next three. I'll talk about the go-to-market. We'll have Irena talk about product, and Charlie will talk about AI and technology. We're very excited about what this means for our customers, for our product innovation, and all of our customer experience.
The one thing hopefully you will take away from this whole presentation is that we have a relentless focus on our customer and candidate experience, and that we believe is what has propelled us through the success that we've seen so far. We will continue to drive our innovation and all the feedback that we need to be able to ensure we're building products that are fit for purpose for the enterprise market. All right. My section is going to talk all about the go-to-market. These are really the three key areas of secret sauce that we have found so much success in. The first one is really about increasing our share in our target verticals.
We have been vertically focused for the last seven years, and we will continue to do this because our customers love it, and our products match the needs of where our customers are today, and it also allows us to grow with them for their needs for the future. As Scott mentioned, there is a lot of change happening in the industry right now, and it is important that we can keep pace with that. Doubling down on the verticals and selling net new business is key. One of the other key areas of focus we have for accelerating growth is global. We are one of the only companies that can deliver global background screening data and services across over 200 countries and territories. There are really very few people, very few organizations out there that can do that.
This has a large opportunity and some pretty significant white space, which I'm going to get into in a little bit. The last piece that is really exciting for us is really all the investments that we've made and the transformation that we've been able to do with our platforms and our products and how we accelerate the cross-sell and upsell. One of the great things about bringing in 80,000 customers is that it gives us a huge selling ground to be able to go and get more because the world isn't getting any nicer, unfortunately. That is actually an okay thing for us because it allows us to really drive that growth and continue to help our customers protect themselves, protect their brand, and bring safety. I'm going to walk through this.
The first piece I'm going to really talk about is our targeted verticals. I want to educate you all on how we're going to do this because it really is about the people that we have at this organization and how we have built this NewOrg structure. We have set ourselves up for global growth. About 87% of our revenue of that $1.5 billion is out of the U.S., the North America region. What we did is we brought on two general managers to handle that whole area, and we actually split out the verticals in a strategic way. The way the verticals are aligned, we have one that's heavily focused on more of the regulated and professional services verticals, and then we have another that's really focused on the hourly workers with high turnover and lots of opportunity for accelerated hiring.
The last general manager that we brought on was really actually promoted, is focused on our international regions. Our international regions that we focus on, we focus all over the world, but the areas we see a ton, a ton of growth is around the U.K., the E.U., Australia, India, and some emerging markets in APAC. I'll walk through a little bit about what each one of these kind of groups are doing and some of the results that we've seen really early on. The one thing I also want to focus with this team is that these are P&L leaders. These are business leaders. They're really good at selling. It allows us to really have a great understanding of what our customers need, what our business needs, and then being able to go get a lot of that white space.
The last thing that we did is we brought on an organization called RevOps or Global Revenue Operations. One of the ways that you can accelerate growth is by taking all the great things that happen in each of the regions and all the great things that are happening in each one of the verticals, and you create a data and analytics arm that helps you look at all of it across the board to be able to pinpoint areas where you can continue to accelerate. This new RevOps organization has really driven a lot of opportunity for our sales team. It's giving them the success that they need to go get, and it helps give us deep insights into our customers and what our customers are looking for. What are those results that those teams have all seen so far?
I want to talk a little bit about the cross-sell and upsell because, again, 80,000 customers, $1.5 billion in revenue, there's a huge amount of go-get just in that customer base. One of the things that we did is let's look at what potential cross-sell opportunities would be there. Cross-sell, that definition for us is what new products can we sell to them. We just took our top 150 just in the U.S., and we said, "All right, let's take a look. Who's buying what?" Scott kind of talked about that package density across. Say somebody has a criminal check, and say somebody else has drug testing, but maybe they don't have digital identity, or maybe they don't have I-9, or they don't have some of the other product features that we have.
What's our go-get, and what can we tell them that they should be thinking about? We did that exercise, and we found $400 million right out of the gate with just the top 150 customers. We were really, really excited about that, put it into action, and our customer success teams went out in just a few months and found 40%-45% of that, and it's already in pipeline. When you think about all the opportunities we have with bringing two great organizations together, bringing customers together, and educating them on all of the things that are out there that they should be thinking about, it really helps us to accelerate this growth. The nice part is these are existing customers. Our win rate is super high, well over 90%.
When you're talking about bringing new business in, this is one of the key differentiators we have, this big, large customer base to be able to go-get. This is just a fraction of the opportunity that's out there. The other opportunity that we have is net new, right? Yes, we have 80,000 customers, but that is just the tip of the iceberg as far as opportunity and companies for us to go-get. One of the areas that we've been focused on is increasing the annual contract value. One of the things that we've been able to find just in the last year is we can do that. We can sell them more right out of the gate.
Our annual contract value has increased by 15%, and we're seeing that continue to increase quarter on quarter, and we're really, really excited about that. For any of you that have looked at or listened to our Q1 earnings, we had a record quarter. Our Q1 had the highest bookings rate that we have had, and that's combined company. Better than First Advantage, better than Sterling combined across the board. We're really, really excited about the market's reaction to the two organizations coming together. We're really, really excited about how our products are resonating directly with our customers and with our prospects, and our win rates are showing for that too. Again, brand new, net new, over 50% win rate.
We are super, super excited about what this means, not just, again, for our business today, but really where we're going to tackle that new additional TAM that Scott was talking about. All right. Let me tell you a little bit about what this means from an international perspective. I talked a lot about the U.S. prior to that, but now moving into expanding our global presence. We've always been a global player. This has been a great opportunity for us, but there's a lot of needs that are coming up within our customer base and with prospects that allow us to really lead the way here. The big change that we've seen, we've always had U.S. companies expanding globally. We've seen that across the board. You've got large organizations headquartered here in the U.S. They're expanding to Canada. They're expanding to Europe.
They're expanding to India, APAC, different regions. The trend we're starting to see now is large enterprises in countries outside of the U.S. calling on us for background screening. This is actually really exciting for us. I'll give you an example of one of these things. We actually had a large international airline. This airline has 25,000 people globally. If anybody has ever flown to APAC, you've probably flown them. They called us three years ago, never done background screening. We very happily took that call, educated them on all the things they need to be thinking about because we have a ton of airlines in the U.S. and what they're doing. Now it's a multi-million dollar customer.
They've been with us for three years, and we have a number of RFPs coming in from other international airlines, really understanding what it means and what some of these, what we were talking about, brand threats and safety threats that are happening, it's not just happening to enterprises in the U.S. It's happening to enterprises across the world. We are really fit to capitalize on this trend that we're seeing, and we're actually really excited about being able to deliver that for our customers. Scott talked about digital services. This is a really, really hot market, and that's an area that we're seeing every customer and every prospect ask us about. We know that there's a lot of opportunity here, and we're definitely driving more opportunity into the pipeline from that. The international workforce, so it's kind of blurring lines, right?
You've got lots of people getting jobs in lots of different areas, and they all didn't live in the same place. The platform that we have and the data that we have allows us to be able to screen anybody in any region for any of the services that we provide, which is great. The last thing I want to kind of highlight here is really about the KYP and what we call Know Your People. This is really about that brand protection, safety, and risk management, and that elevation that Scott talked about as far as what we're seeing and who the buyers are. It was traditionally an HR buyer. We're now speaking to CEOs. They're concerned about insider threats. They're concerned about employees and new people being hired, but also existing employees.
We're seeing a lot of opportunity for us to upsell our business and our products, not just within background screening, but also with knowing kind of your whole employee base. I'll get into that in a little bit. Let me break down the international opportunity for you because this is a big area of white space, and we are perfectly positioned to capitalize on this. These are the areas that we are doubling down on right now. The U.K. has always been a mega market for us. We are three times the size of the next biggest player in the U.K., and that is one of the most mature markets that we see out there for background screening and digital identity. The other two countries that have really doubled down on digital identity are India and Australia.
They've done this with the help of the government. The government has sponsored aggregated data that we have access to that allows us to take our services and our products, connect that to the government data, and do a lot of the identity validation that's necessary. The thing and the most valuable thing about delivering a digital identity product is the fact that you need to have the technology to validate who the person is. You also need to have a data source that's validated at the government level to confirm the technology and the biometrics that you're receiving from that. We have both. That really gets the opportunities moving very quickly in the pipeline because not a lot of organizations, I would say very few, have the opportunity to do that, especially in the global markets.
The last opportunity that we see are some of those emerging trends I was talking about with that APAC airline, but we also see a huge opportunity in Latin America. Those markets are maturing, and a lot of these industries and a lot of these regions are moving off of the trends we see in the U.S. and the EU, right? India is heavily focused on serving the U.S. and the EU market, but a lot of these other APAC regions are serving their own markets. Australia has a really nice symbiotic relationship with a lot of the APAC countries. This helps to further diversify our opportunity and give us resiliency across the markets. We are really excited about the opportunity that we have globally and where we are going with these markets in particular.
The other thing and the last thing, if you take anything away from this, is we have a really small percentage of the market share. So less than 7% today, and our products, services, and platforms right now out of the box can deliver on every single one of the requirements that are necessary for delivering in these regions. Our sales team has wound up. We've got a great pipeline. A lot of this pipeline is focused on net new. Some of it is net new replacing with existing vendors, but a lot of it is net new first-time screeners. That is a great opportunity for us to really educate them, take the data that we have, and Scott was talking about that benchmark data.
When you walk into that international airline and you walk into that international retailer and we say, "Hey, here's what everybody else in your industry is doing. Here's what you're not doing. What would you like to do?" It gives you credibility. It gives you the ability to really quickly close that deal and get that business up and running, which is what we are known for is our speed. I want to also talk a little bit about that TAM, that beautiful TAM that Scott talked about with digital identity. If you look at this slide, this second column there, that candidate screening is the original TAM that we talked about. That's the TAM that's $13 billion and has grown over the last couple of years to $14 billion.
That's where we've traditionally played, and that is the sweet spot, and that is package density, and we are really good at it. And we're really good at that in the U.S. We're also really good at it internationally. What we've seen over the last couple of years, and First Advantage and Sterling were both first to market with digital identity. That gives us a huge edge. We are now moving upstream to where the candidate is now applying for a job or interviewing for a job because what we're seeing is that the person who interviews through a video interview, and then the person who is getting screened for the credentials for the role, and then the person who shows up on day one are three different people in many cases. This is how North Korea is coming in and infiltrating 300 organizations.
Of those 300 organizations, by the way, six of them actually had an insider threat issue where they got their credentials, they got into the laptop, they exfiltrated data, and they created a massive cybersecurity event. This is real, and this is right here and right now. That Gartner report that Scott was talking about, they predict by 2028, one in four candidates will be synthetic, deepfake, synthetic fraud. 25% of the people applying for jobs will be fake by 2028. This is a major issue that a lot of our companies and customers are talking about. That is the upfront piece, the interview stage, again, our sweet spot in that second bucket. You have post-onboarding. This is also really exciting because this takes us from the hiring market, and it moves us into the employee saw base.
These are existing employees, and there's a ton of opportunity there as well from monitoring, also digital identity because, again, that day one, that I-9 is only checking if you are able to work in the country that you're being hired in. It is not checking your identity. Ours does now, but it was not before. That's how a lot of these fraudsters are getting in, getting the job, getting the laptop shipped to them, and then stealing data. We also have monitoring for vehicle records, and this goes really well to our industry and our vertical. We have monitoring for social media. We have random drug screening.
You can kind of see that orchestration layer that Scott was talking about where we have the front of the funnel, the whole candidate lifecycle, and now the employee lifecycle to really handle some of that risk mitigation strategy that our organizations and customers are really trying to drive for their business and their protection and their safety of their employee and customer base. There is a really great opportunity here to expand downstream, upstream, and then continue delivering on our bread and butter of where we've always been strong. With that, I think it would be great for you guys to hear about what we do to get all of this feedback from our customers because we couldn't develop all of the products that we're building, and we couldn't sell them as well as we are if we didn't really know what they wanted to do.
There are a couple of things that we have done. Scott talked about our Click Chat Call, but it is award-winning. It is AI-enabled, and it is a game changer for our customers. He talked about the competitive landscape. There is not another company out there that is putting the commitment, dedication, and investment into really driving the customer success and support that we do. Nobody wants to call somebody anymore. The days of email are over. Everybody just wants to send a quick chat or click somewhere, get the answer, and go. That is what we have enabled. The only way we could have been successful with this is with a massive knowledge repository and a ton of data. Good news, we have both. We put the technology on top of that, and we really are driving a lot of value for our customers.
The other thing that we do every year is collaborate. This is the only user conference in the industry, and we absolutely love it. We've been doing it for nine years. Next year will be our big 10-year anniversary, so I'm sure we'll do something fabulous. This is really where we pull our customers together. That vertical strategy I talked about is our massive differentiator. We put a bunch of global banks in the same room, the big ones. Think of every big one you could possibly do. We put a bunch of the biggest retailers in another room, and they get to talk about all the challenges they're seeing with identity fraud, with I-9 and right to work, and some of the challenges that they're all seeing because it's not any different.
The products and services that we provide are solving similar challenges for all of our customers. The value they get by talking to their peer groups, understanding what they need. Oh, your experience is the same thing. This is so great. I do not feel like I am alone in this world. It is a wonderful thing. They build cohorts together. They continue talking to each other over the next months, and we gather so much data. We get so much feedback. We get so much information about what they love about the products, about the problems they are having, and then we put that into action. We take all of that feedback.
Obviously, it drives pipeline, but really, it's about the relationships with our customers because that's the thing that's most important to us because if our customers are happy, they're buying more, we're selling more, they're solving problems, and it makes everything work really well. I think the best way for you to hear about the real feel of how our customer feedback is going into our products is to hear directly from our Chief Product Officer, and that is Irena Kovach. Please join me in welcoming her to the stage.
Thank you, Joelle. Hello, my name is Irena Kovach, and I have the privilege of running an amazing product team at First Advantage. I've been with the company for a little bit over three years, but I'm not new to product management. I bring over 20 years of product management experience from B2B and B2C industries, ranging from financial services to real estate to real estate analytics, multifamily, the list goes on. I have run and scaled product organizations of literally any size, and I deployed product solutions within budget and on time within any technology framework, from waterfall to agile to extreme agile. You know, I bet you if you mention it, I probably know that. I would tell you that having run multiple product teams, though, I have never run equally talented and innovative product teams as we have at First Advantage.
With a product and technology organization over 800 people, we still continue being very agile in our product deployment, which is not easy for an organization of this size and definitely sets us apart. Today, I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking to you about how we think about product innovation and deploying product solutions. Speaking of product solutions, as both Scott and Joelle have mentioned, our product solution covers the entire employment lifecycle from pre-onboarding to post-onboarding. Today, I'm going to share with you how we make sure that all of our product solutions remain relevant and competitive in the marketplace. First Advantage has been transforming for a long time in the product solutions. We introduced digital identity that you've heard a lot about today to help address rising concerns in the identity fraud in the workplace.
We launched SmartHub, AI-enabled software, and stood up Verified database to combat rising third-party verification costs. We launched Next Gen Profile Advantage to help address different to cater to the diverse needs of various generations. We boosted our criminal and healthcare monitoring solutions to help mitigate risk better in the post-employment place. The list goes on, but what I would love to do today is to walk you through how we actually think about product innovation by citing and walking you through some of the actual examples. Let's start with digital identity. By now, you've heard a lot about it, and we cannot skip it given a very attractive TAM of $10 billion. Given that by 2028, one in every four job candidates could potentially be fraudulent, how will our customers know if their candidates are who they say they are?
We actually saw the trend emerge in the international markets first a few years ago, Europe in particular, but we knew it's just a matter of time before it gets to the States. We saw a tremendous opportunity, and we thought, who else? There's nobody else in the industry who saw more, who is seeing more working population than we do. We need to provide a solution. With that, we set off to provide a very comprehensive identity fraud solution that leverages our proprietary data and AI-enabled technology to detect candidate fraud. The solution is actually very simple on the surface. It includes collecting a few data points from a candidate, including a selfie and a scan of a government-issued ID. It is 100% digital. Results are instantaneous, and they're discreet. Candidates have no idea that they've been screened for fraud.
The magic happens behind the scenes where our multi-layer approach leverages trusted data sources and intelligence and leverages the findings to triangulate those findings against AI and machine learning technology that is constantly going through all of the provided documentation looking for fraudulent patterns, AI deepfakes, or inconsistencies within a particular individual profile. The best part, the solution can be offered either as a standalone or as part of our software. It can be consumed at any particular point of the entire employment lifecycle, which opens up tremendous revenue-generating opportunities for us, and we're extremely excited about it. Another product innovation that we're very proud of is the launch of our next-generation Profile Advantage. We actually launched this new workflow to combat the increased drop-off candidate rate among younger generations.
Who would have thought that Gen Z and Gen Alpha and millennials do not like a conversational question-answer data collection process? They prefer fewer clicks. The fewer clicks, the better. Based on our research, observation, voice of customer, and voice of candidate, we actually moved away. We pivoted from a conversational question-answer model to a hub-and-spoke model where we stood up individual spokes such as identity spoke or address spoke or personal information spoke, and we would only present those spokes to candidates as part of the required workflow. Basically, what we did, we removed the unneeded clicks, and we only gave them what they need to collect the data information that we need.
While we were designing the solution, we said, "Okay, well, let's leverage AI." So we introduced an AI support agent that was embedded in the workflow and was designed to help answer easy queries during the data collection process. You know, the results outpaced all of our expectations. Not only did we see a rapid apply and rapid complete, but we also saw a 20% reduction in call volume to our contact center. A side but very significant benefit is we were able to cut down our workforce by 50% because we did not have the same call volume to handle. I would be remiss if I do not draw your attention to the importance of the proprietary databases in our overall approach to product solutions. We have two noteworthy, over the years, we actually collected and curated massive data sets. Our two noteworthy databases are Verified.
That contains over 120 million records, employment and verification records, and our very own criminal database that contains a very impressive 780 million records of all of the candidates that we saw over the years. Having these databases is crucial to our product management because not only do they give us deeper insight and intelligence, they also allow us to generate and create really high-margin products. Data is king, but databases alone are not enough. That is why we combined our proprietary databases with our proprietary AI-enabled software. Let me kind of walk you through an example again of how we thought about it. A few years ago, probably late 2020, we saw a huge gap in the employment verification, employment/education space. The third-party costs were rising exponentially, and they were becoming unbearable for our customers.
To combat and alleviate the burden, we created an AI SmartHub, our AI-enabled software that determines the best verification source for a particular verification or education, employment or education verification. Since its inception in 2021, SmartHub did just absolutely great and is now helping to deflect roughly 60% of all verifications away from the most expensive verification source. It is only going to get better because now what we are doing, we are introducing more and more sources, and we are enhancing our algorithm. It is getting even better, and it is learning of which education and verification record will be found at each source. What is also important is that our Verified database is deeply embedded and is an integral part of our SmartHub software, which means that we get some very attractive high-margin revenue opportunities, and we have been enjoying it for a few years now.
Let me give you a real-life example of how our combination of proprietary data and proprietary software benefited one of our real-life customers. This is a healthcare customer who has been experiencing a rise in third-party verification costs, and their turnaround times were suffering greatly, which was impacting their applied-to-hire cycle. They came to us, and they said, "We really want a one-stop solution. We want a one-stop vendor." We approached it from a product perspective, and we did it iteratively in phases. Phase one, we said, "We already have SmartHub/Verified technology," so we introduced that. Over time, we realized the customer saw a 50% reduction in costs associated with their verification costs. Yet for us, we enjoyed a rise in our higher-margin revenue because Verified was used as a source in the SmartHub software. We said it is not enough.
They're still having a problem with the longer turnaround times. That's when we introduced near-instant automated verifications for present employment that we're targeting to reduce. They were near-instant, immediate. We verified and we confirmed the employment, and candidates could move on. As a result, we saw a 30% of their entire present employment pool was verified near-instantly. The turnaround times decreased drastically, and as a result, we had a highly satisfied customer. We got our revenue. It's a win-win for both parties. As we look at 2025 and beyond, we are going to continue making advancement in our existing product suite, our core solutions in criminal verifications and drug screening areas by advancing our proprietary algorithms, by optimizing our candidate workflows to increase the whole apply-to-hire cycle, and by enriching our proprietary datasets. We also, at the same time, are going to strengthen our emerging products.
We've talked a lot about identity, digital identity today. I've got to tell you, digital identity genie is out of the bottle, and it got out of the bottle in early 2023. Now, not one single customer meeting goes by where we don't get a question about digital identity. We cannot move the momentum. We're enjoying an early entrant advantage. We're light years ahead of competition because we developed a solution so early before everybody else. Everybody else is still catching up, but we've got to continue keeping the momentum and enhancing the solution so we enjoy even more market share. Form I-9 becoming focus and center given the recent focus on the immigration issues and monitoring. Monitoring becoming very prevalent and very important for our customers.
I hope by now you are just as excited as I am about all of the product innovation and positive disruption in the HR tech space. None of that product innovation is great. The teams are wonderful, but none of that would be possible without the support of our technology. With that, I would like to introduce Charlie Euler, our CTO, and my partner in crime. Thank you.
Thank you, Irena, and good morning, everybody. As Irena mentioned, my name is Charlie Euler, and I'm the CTO at First Advantage, and I am definitely guilty as charged of being her partner in crime. I've been in the HR technology space now for almost 25 years, and over that time, the work that I'm most proud of is the work that's gone into driving this technology transformation that both Scott and Joelle talked to you about earlier.
I'm here today to talk to you about our technology strategy and how we're using our investments in technology to drive innovation, drive even higher levels of automation and efficiency for First Advantage, and deliver better and smarter outcomes to our customers. First, I want to talk to you about our leading technology capabilities when it comes to building and delivering solutions to production. With the acquisition of Sterling, we more than doubled the size of our product and technology organization, and we also doubled the amount that we're spending on R&D. As Scott pointed out, we now have more than 850 product and technology experts globally organized into more than 90 Agile pods, iteratively and continuously delivering change to production. That scale, that agility, and the expertise of our teams means that we can meet the demands of a rapidly changing environment in ways that others can't.
Three years ago, we opened a technology hub in Poland, and that quickly became a focal point for our investments in innovation. We now have eight full-stack innovation pods, including a team of data scientists and AI engineers that are all focused on transforming our business through the application of cutting-edge technology like AI. The really fun thing that my partner in crime and I get to do is figure out how to leverage the outcomes of that innovation to drive change into our products, our solutions, and our platforms. Let's talk a little bit about our platforms. Scott showed you this slide earlier and talked it up quite a bit that I was going to deliver more information to you. It is really important because this is how we're going to bring things together.
This is the architecture that is going to allow us to deliver on our strategy. I'm going to walk you through each of these areas, tell you why they're important to our customers, and why we see that they differentiate us as First Advantage. First, let's start with our partner integrations. Most of our customers don't actually begin their interactions with us from within a platform that First Advantage controls. They're actually starting that journey from within an applicant tracking system or a human capital management solution. These are things like Workday and Salesforce, and it's where the HR recruiters actually spend the majority of their time. It's really important not only to have a breadth of pre-built integrations, but to make sure that those integrations are deep and functional.
That's exactly what we're going to have because we're pulling together the best and most capable integrations out of both legacy First Advantage and legacy Sterling and putting them together into one partner framework that will give us more than 100 pre-built, highly capable integrations to these applicant tracking systems and human capital management solutions. It's going to allow us to onboard customers quickly with little to no friction. Those integrations plug into our customer platforms. As Scott mentioned, we've made a somewhat unique decision after the acquisition to keep both of the core product platforms that existed previously under First Advantage and Sterling separately. We're doing that for the reasons that Scott provided. Our customers love those vertical-specific experiences that they get in those customer platforms, and we don't want to force them or ourselves to go through the pain of a migration.
Now, that doesn't mean that we're going to neglect the ability to deliver synergies in this area. Our strategy is that we're going to integrate both of these separate customer platforms into one product catalog where we'll drive synergies by removing redundant solutions, but still have the ability to offer a full suite of products and services across both of those customer platforms. Now, the next step in the journey is normally one where we're reaching out to the candidate on behalf of the customer to capture the information that we need in order to run the background screen. Similar to our partner integrations, we see this as an area of great opportunity to consolidate.
Specifically here, we want to leverage the investments that we've made in Next Gen Profile Advantage that Irena walked you through, all of the capabilities and how we've embedded AI and what was already the leading candidate experience. Now we're going to expand that so all of our candidates, regardless of which legacy install base they come from, will get that leading candidate experience and feel the value of our investments in AI. Once we've captured the data we need for the background screen, that flows into our global fulfillment engine. As Scott said, this is the area where our best-in-breed technology strategy is going to drive the most fundamental change in how we actually produce and deliver the products to our customers.
This is because we're going to keep the most unique, the most capable, and most importantly, the most automated of those solutions, which is going to allow us to deliver to our customers what they will see and feel as a series of upgrades where they will get quicker results and more capabilities without having to sacrifice the coverage or the quality that they get today. Another area which we're going to use to drive even more efficiencies into our global fulfillment engine is leveraging the full breadth of all of our data source integrations. There are literally thousands of them, as you see on the slide. These are not only integrations to third-party data providers and public records data sources. They're also where we somewhat uniquely leverage our own proprietary data.
It is that leveraging of that unique and greatly increasing proprietary data that gives us an advantage that our competition cannot match. Underneath all of this, you will see a few common capabilities that are supporting things end-to-end. First, our analytics framework, and then our support framework in Click Chat Call. This means regardless of what customer platform our customers are on, they are going to get the same deep insights, the same best-in-class customer support. All of this is built on our foundation of automation, unique proprietary data, and our advantage with AI. Before we get to AI, I want to spend a minute talking about our unique data and how it all comes together in something we like to call our data fabric.
This is where we bring together an unparalleled amount of data along with the technology that allows us to analyze and leverage that data in compliant ways to produce unique insights and products for our customers. With the acquisition of Sterling, the number of screens that are flowing through our systems annually more than doubled. That is that amazing 190 million number that you saw earlier in Scott's slides. It is amazing not only in it's a really big number, but it's 190 million opportunities for us to capture a massive amount of valuable data. It is really important that you not only have the ability to capture that data, but that you know what to do with it and how to use it. This is where our data processing and compliance frameworks come into play.
They ensure that we're able to maximize the way that we're able to reuse this data, but that we always do it in a compliant and responsible way. Now, all this data means that we can provide our customers with broad global information about their verticals and the trends that we see across the entire economic landscape. We do that in the form of our global trends report. We're also able to deliver deep and meaningful targeted insights to them through our intuitive analytics experiences to give them the information they need to make the right informed decisions and drive the right outcomes. All right, now to AI. At First Advantage, we believe that our strategy with AI is something that gives us a unique advantage.
This is because we've not only invested in the ability of our teams to leverage the best of the publicly available AI models and off-the-shelf solutions that have embedded AI, but we've invested in ensuring that those teams have the ability, when needed, to build our own proprietary AI models and machine learning algorithms. That means that we have the flexibility to choose the right tool to solve the right problem and where we have a need that can't be solved by something off-the-shelf that we're able to develop our own proprietary AI models like we did with SmartHub. This experience and expertise gives us an advantage that new entrants can't simply buy their way out of. Any new entrant entering the space can go out and get resources that know AI, work with third parties who bring those technical skills to the table.
What they're not going to have is our experience over years of using the power of AI to solve problems specific to the background screening industry. We want to take this advantage with AI and expand it across our customer-facing capabilities, as well as using it to drive internal operational efficiencies. That means we'll be using AI to drive better experiences and deeper insights for our customers, as well as making ourselves more efficient by removing more and more manual activities and automating more things end-to-end. Finally, we see the opportunity to combine the power of AI with our proprietary data to deliver unique and meaningful solutions to the market. As we look at our future and our ability to continue to build on our advantage with AI, there's just so many opportunities out there.
I want to talk to you about a few of them today that we're particularly excited about. The first, and you've heard about it a lot, is around digital ID. This is where we're going to continue to invest in AI to combat specifically the increased risk of identity fraud that in and of itself is being driven by new advances in AI and publicly available models. This means we're going to be fighting fire with fire, or more specifically, fighting AI with AI. We also see a great opportunity for AI as it relates to using agentic AI to interact with sources where the only way to get data from the sources today is for a person to reach out to them manually. Yes, these still do exist, and they're not going away anytime soon.
We believe agentic AI can perform these same interactions to better quality and at lower cost. We're also looking at leveraging AI as it relates to dealing with unstructured and unclean data that we get from certain sources. Today, we use humans to bridge that gap between the unstructured data and the structured inputs that we need to drive the rest of our automation. Through the application of AI, we believe this will allow us to automate those end-to-end and increase the number that Scott shared with you earlier of the percentage of the time that we're able to deliver a result without a human ever being involved.
Finally, we want to take the value from the investments that First Advantage historically made in AI, specifically SmartHub, Click Chat Call, Next Gen Profile Advantage, and digital identity, and expand those across our entire ecosystem, bringing the power of those solutions to the Sterling install base. We believe that executing on these strategies will deliver increased margin by reducing the amount of manual activities and building upon our already leading levels of automation, as well as delivering top-line growth by allowing us to bring to market new products that would not exist without the combination of our unique proprietary data and AI. It is a bright future here at First Advantage, and it is one that is going to be powered by our people, by our experience, by our technology, and by our dedication to driving innovation. With that, I am going to bring Joelle back out to wrap things up. Thank you, everybody.
All right, so hopefully you have figured out by now we're a software and data company. And we just went through our four pillars of FA 5.0. Scott covered our Sterling acquisition. I covered the vertical go-to-market. Irina talked about our product innovation, and then Charlie gave us all the how with our architecture, our technology, our data, and our AI. With that, I really appreciate everybody listening in. We're going to have our emcee, Stephanie, come back up and get us all situated for some Q&A. All right, everyone. I hope you can see how excited we are for the future of First Advantage and everything we have ahead of us here. Thank you to Scott, Joelle, Irina, and Charlie for getting us started on the right foot today.
We are going to transition into our Q&A session now for the benefit of everyone in the room as well as on the webcast. If you can raise your hand, we'll bring a microphone to you. When you get the microphone, can you please state your name and the firm you're with before asking your question? All right. Yeah.
Hi, I'm Andrew Steinerman. I'm at JPMorgan. Joelle, on digital identity, I did hear your partners mentioned ID.me, Yoti. How much in just, again, just in digital identity, how much of the data is proprietary that's owned by First Advantage versus enabled by partners? Could you just name the partners that are being leveraged?
Yeah, great question, Andrew. Thank you. The partners that we have are primarily on technology. A lot of the work that we do has a portion of multiple data sources. It's not just a one-for-one. You have to be able to pull in our data, government data, and the technology that is coming through. We have multiple partners. You're right. We do have a number of them, but it's not just one particular one in one region. They're across the board. We are the orchestration layer for digital identity. For digital identity.
Andrew, think of it this way. With digital identity, what we're telling our customers is that it's not a single solution like an ID.me. That only solves a piece of it. We've been selling them the concept of the triangulation of data and products. It's multiple data and products coming together to give them a single source of truth on that person's background.
A piece of it, facial recognition technology via digital identity, would be fulfilled by an engine like ID.me or Yoti or Socure or MyTech and so forth. There is a lot of other things that go into it. That is just one piece of the pie. There are multiple other things that go into it, like how we are hitting government MVR databases to make sure the driver's license is real, or how we are hitting passport databases to ensure a passport is real. Think of it as the triangulation of many data points to solve one thing.
Let's go to Stephanie here in front.
Hi, good morning. Thank you, Stephanie Moore with Jefferies. Maybe another one for Joelle here. Is there a metric that you look at when you compare Sterling customer, maybe package density, to a legacy FA customer density? I'm making this up, but maybe like legacy FA customer, you provided seven products or different solutions, and Sterling on average is only at five. I'm just trying to come up with the delta of what's already within your existing customer base now post-deal.
Sure, yeah. That's a great question. The way we think about it, though, we think about it by verticals. Sterling had a really strong presence in healthcare. When we look at the whole healthcare ecosystem, we'll benchmark all of the healthcare companies against each other. It's a little agnostic on kind of where they came from, but that's where we're seeing. We'll see trends and patterns like, say, in acute care or in a payer or a provider or a pharma company. There's definitely trends that go deeper into those subverticals.
That is really how we align the package density. When we see if, again, a transportation company or a pharma company is lacking in some areas, it is still their choice whether they want to add to it. We give them the education they need to say, "Hey, look, we have 1,000 customers in this vertical. You are one of 5% that are not doing this. It is okay if you do not want to, but it is something you may want to consider because the bad actor or the folks are going to find their way to your organization instead of protecting your brand."
Stephanie, I will add a few things there. It is definitely something we are looking at, obviously, because upsell and cross-sell is so important to the growth. Sterling was actually really good at upsell and cross-sell.
What Joelle's comment is correct is that when you start looking at it vertically, that's where you see some differences. The biggest difference is in transportation. Transportation was only 3% of Sterling's revenue. It was 24% of ours. We have over a dozen transportation products. They had about three or four. Of those dozen products, which we call Road Ready, that's the umbrella that sits under, about half of them are products to screen the driver, and the other half are actually more compliance and vehicle. We do vehicle registrations. We help transportation companies submit to the government their gas tax. I mean, there are so many things we do on the vehicle. That's the upsell opportunity to the Sterling install base. We've done that slicing by each vertical. It's hard to give one metric of it because it's so nuanced within the verticals.
Thank you.
Thank you. Manaf with Barclays. I just had a few follow-ups on the databases. First on Verified, the 120 million, how much of that is employment versus education? I do not know if there is a way to think about the average age of those records because I do not know if they are real-time or not. Just on the national criminal, I was just curious. You guys also, I think, use the APRIS database. What is the difference between that and what you have?
Yeah, let us separate them. On the Verified database, I do not have the exact number, but the vast majority is employment. There is some education there, but we have got an API connection to the Student Clearinghouse, which is the de facto standard in the industry for education. It is also a very cheap data source.
It is not a huge imperative for us to build up the education part of Verified. What is more important is the workforce. The vast majority of that is employment data. On the national criminal record file, none of that is third-party data. It is all publicly available data. None of it is from APRIS because, one, we could not use it. When you go to a third party, you are not legally able to reuse that data. Think of it this way. We do a background check on you, and we hit a database in a county or a state or even a federal database. That is the data we are keeping in the national criminal record file. We can reuse that data the next time you go for a background check because you are getting consent to use that data. That is all our data.
It's publicly available data, but we're building it out. In the future, we have a really great indicator of any potential hits that we could be finding on a candidate because we've historically been building that database for 20 years. That's got a lot of great data in it. The Verified database is very recent data. That's data that we've been building for the last five years. Now, obviously, if we go back and do a verification on somebody, we can also keep that data and reuse it again with consent from the candidate the next time they go for a background check.
Hi, I want to ask a little bit more about the digital identity and the opportunity. It seems to be something you're leaning into in this analyst day. How much of it are you selling? How are you selling it? Is there different products? Is it more prone to certain verticals? After that, maybe you could just talk about something you talked about a few years ago in terms of social media monitoring because it sounds like you're doing it, but we haven't talked about it in a while. It was something that was front of mind, but then it kind of came back. Are you making money on that? Is that something that's really growing? Thanks.
Yeah, so on digital identity, Irena mentioned that the early adopters were actually in Europe. Again, having governments that are proactive in this area, the U.K., India, and Australia are the most proactive governments of digitizing and centralizing their databases. It becomes easier to do digital ID when you've got databases like that.
Now, as Irena mentioned, this is the hot topic with customers starting literally January 1st. I mean, it's incredible the interest in it. We have already sold over 3,000 customers on digital identity. And again, it's still early days. It can be sold to customers of all sizes, by the way. It's not just enterprise because everybody's worried about this. Obviously, the enterprises are the most worried about it because of the cybersecurity and other factors that come into play. I tell you, we're almost a little overwhelmed with the amount of customers that want to talk about this because it's popping up everywhere, like we heard today and read today in the Wall Street Journal. We are selling this as, again, not a point solution. Digital identity is a multi-tenanted product, and we're selling the concept of triangulating data.
The consolidation of vendors is important here, Shlomo, because as Joelle talked about, we have many customer instances where customers have told us the person they interviewed over video is not the same person that showed up for the job, and it's not the same person that filled out the I-9. Who can put that together when they're using different vendors for all of that? We can put that together. Part of our pitch is consolidating with us so we can give them the single source. Using us for our I-9 so we can connect the dots that, yes, the person we did the digital identity screen on and the person we did the background check is the same person that filled out the I-9.
That has been a big sales pitch for us, the consolidation of vendors, which is obviously going to lead to great upsell and cross-sell. Did I get all of your question? About the social media. You want to take that?
Sure, yeah. We are actually seeing, I think because of some of these trends, a pretty significant uptick in social media demand right now. We are seeing it on both sides, one for the pre-hire, and then we are also seeing it in monitoring. It is very hot in the financial services industry at the moment, but we are seeing it expand in technology and some of the other verticals. I think it is coming. I think some of the fraud issues that we have seen and some of the risk challenges organizations are experiencing is a catalyst to driving that demand.
Thanks. Andrew Nicholas with William Blair. On the digital identity topic, obviously, a lot of questions on there. Is there any reason why, as the background screening vendor, it makes the most sense for that check to happen there as opposed to maybe earlier in the process? I would imagine the ATS systems are the first to get that inbound. Is that something that you would consider a threat or just thinking about who else could play in that market?
Yeah, you have actually honed in on sort of how we are positioning it. We are positioning digital identity upstream. We are positioning it as part of the recruitment process. Our biggest customer that uses digital identity today is a large retailer in Europe. They literally run hundreds of thousands of recruitment candidates through digital identity before they even start the recruitment process because they have run a business case which shows that here is the dollars they spend on recruiting a candidate. If they can avoid that spend because, one, the candidate is a fake, or two, the candidate does not have the right to work. That is what happens a lot with these companies. They go through the recruitment process, they try to onboard somebody, they run a background check, and then they find they fail the I-9 process or they fail the right to work process in the U.K. or in Europe. Do all of that upfront before you even start a background check. It is a workflow issue. It is not a threat of the ATS doing it because it is downstream from the ATS, but it is upstream from the background check. That's why we love it so much is that it's a new space.
Hi, Ashish Sabadra from RBC. Just wanted to follow up on that 60% deflection rate in 2024. I was just wondering if that was for the combined company or how was it different between the legacy FA versus legacy Sterling. And then as we think about that improving going forward, how much of the benefit comes from the SmartHub versus the proprietary data. And then maybe just a last tack on on that one is one of your competitors acquired an income verification provider. Do you believe that you need to do an acquisition like that to significantly increase that deflection?
Yeah, I'll handle the last part. Irena, could you handle the first part?
Sorry, Scott.
It's okay.
I'm already looking at Scott, so.
I'll take it all. So I can.
Sorry, 60%.
Yeah, the deflection rate right now is 100% on First Advantage because we have not cut over the Sterling clients to SmartHub yet. That is really not a hard technical thing to do. What we are trying to do is balance that between sort of contract discussions with third parties and others. That is really just a TBD, but that is a First Advantage legacy, First Advantage stat. On the last part about your question, yeah, I mean, we do not obviously know what the strategy of that competitor is, but we also see it as a little bit of a head scratcher. There are so many fintechs in the space that do that. What is the need to buy when you can just partner? We partner with that acquired company's competitors. We partner with multiple of them. There are many of similar sources.
It does get that company into the income verification game, which we have no interest in. That is not our space. We do not have an interest of being in that space. We cannot tell you what their strategy is. Do not understand buy versus partner because there are so many partners. Obviously, we do not know the details of the deal. Maybe it was a fire sale. We know that company was small, like $20 million in revenue, not profitable. We like growth and profitability, so it was not of interest to us.
Hi, guys. Alex Captain from Cat Rock Capital. Great presentation today. Since the IPO, you have had some really great things happen. You bought your largest competitor in the space and your best competitor in the space. Digital identity has become much more of a bigger opportunity, and that is accelerating this year. From a cost perspective, AI has become a lot more capable than it was at the time of the IPO. Just amazing mega trends as you guys kind of described here. I'm curious about the way in which all these really positive developments translate into the growth algorithm. Are there any other offsets that are causing you guys to not add to the growth algorithm when you're looking at the digital identity opportunity? Is there anything else that is offsetting that, or are you just being conservative?
Yeah, Alex, I think we're in a situation where it's a little bit of a sprint, not a marathon, because it's hot right now, and it's got all our attention, all our customers' attention. We don't see any big things looming out there which could derail any of the stuff that we walked you through.
Obviously, the one thing we can't control is a macro environment, but the things we can control, we've been crushing it. We don't see there's any change there. We think maybe there's actually improvement into some of the numbers because of size and scale, because of technology chops that we have, and because of digital ID. I mean, it's been hard for us to model what digital ID will do for us from a revenue growth potential. It could be a door opener that leads to more bundling and more package density and other sales. It could be a margin enhancer because it is a high-margin product. But we're such early days on it.
Yeah, we have 3,000 customers up and running on it, but still, that's even not enough sample set for us to say, "Okay, here are some of the trends, and here are some of the things that are happening." What's happening the most is articles like in the Wall Street Journal and what Gartner is coming out. Literally, we all sit in what we have with all our large customers, we have quarterly business reviews or QBRs. All of us up here sit in those, and we have them frequently. They're usually one hour long, sometimes two hours long. I'll tell you, 50% of the conversation is on identity fraud. It's completely changed. I mean, last quarter, it wasn't that. Two quarters, it was like, "Hey, start thinking about this." Now this is like, "Hey, I've got to make a presentation to my board. Help me with it." We are like, "Okay, here is where it is going." We think it is a tremendous tailwind for us, but hard to model right now.
Scott. This will probably be our last question for this session.
Hey, guys. Scott Wurzel from Wolfe Research. On the cross-sell opportunity, Joelle, that you guys have identified, I mean, how much of that, if any, has been from digital ID? When we think about moving that cross-sell from pipeline to bookings, how does that sales cycle compare to an upsell or to a new logo?
Yeah. Great question. Hey, Scott. Yeah, it is in there for sure because it is something that we are seeing obviously high demand from. It is not just that. There are a lot of other things in there.
When you kind of look at the vertical alignment and all of the other visibility we have now with double the customer base, it really opens up the eyes for all of our other customers to say what they have not really been looking at or what they have been looking at. It is in there, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. We really have not kind of put in the full opportunity. Like Scott said, it is a little hard to model right now, but it is super hot and the pipeline is filling.
Scott, the nice thing about digital identity is it is just a turn-on switch for us. If someone says tomorrow, "Hey, we want to start doing a digital identity review," it is not like we have to do a lot of tech work. It is already there. We just flip the switch so we can start revenuing immediately once they give us the green light.
All right. We have a weird clarification question. Is there anything you can't do in digital identity? I know that seems like a basic question, but I'm just trying—it's so new, but are you fulfilling all your customers' needs right now?
Again, this is where the triangulation of products and data play comes in because one product doesn't fulfill it all. I'll give you an example of something that gets you sort of halfway there. When you think about Irena's slide where she had the digital identity, she had six components, right? One of the components, which gets us maybe half the way there to an answer, is IP address detection. This is an important component, right?
If you can find out where that person is coming in from, now where I say it only gets you halfway is if they use a VPN, then you're done, right? If they're doing it from home with a home network, or if they're doing it from somewhere else where you can clearly say, "This IP address is not coming from a VPN and is not coming from Russia or North Korea or the other threat actor states," that actually does help our customer in saying, "Okay, at least I know this isn't a threat actor." Customers are getting really—they're starting to get creative. I heard one of my customers just last week say that they've now changed their process with video interviewing. As part of the process, the person can no longer use a standard background.
They have to take the background off because the one, they just really want to see if it's dark outside. If they're interviewing during U.S. daytime and it's dark outside, they're like, what's going on here? The other thing is they have to take their camera and their laptop and show their outlet because a U.S. outlet is very different than an Asian outlet or a European outlet. Customers are starting to think about these things, but our IP address detection product is a good product, but it'll never be great because it can't give you full—if a VPN's being used, then you're kind of up against a wall.
All right. Thank you so much for your questions. At this time, we're going to take a short 15-minute break, and we'll come back here at around 10:40 A.M. to resume and talk about our financial outlook.
Thank you very much. Thank you very kindly for Elvin Jones on drums, formerly of the great J.J. Johnson Orchestra, now playing with Stan Getz, and tonight, of course, he's appearing with myself, Sonny Rollins, and on bass, the very great Wilbur B. Weir. We'd like to take a brief pause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
This is not on. All right. Let's go ahead and get started here. All right. Thank you all. I think you could see with the first half of our session today just how excited we are about the future of First Advantage and that we have so many opportunities ahead of us to create immense value for not only our customers but for our shareholders. To round out our presentations this morning and before we get into the next Q&A session, we want to spend just a few minutes discussing how everything we've talked about so far will translate into strong financial performance. With that, I will welcome to the stage our CFO, Stephen Marks.
Thank you, Stephanie. Good morning, everyone. I appreciate all of our analysts, investors, those watching at home for joining us today. As you heard, I'm Stephen Marks, Chief Financial Officer of First Advantage. I joined First Advantage about nine years ago. During that time, I've been running our global accounting, finance, and treasury functions and been part of some of our more transformative events, including the sale of our company in 2020, our 2021 IPO in this building about four years ago, and more recently, obviously, our acquisition of Sterling last year.
I'm excited this morning to talk about how we're going to translate all of the strategy that you heard from Scott, Joelle, Irina, and Charlie into our next phase of our company and our financial success. With our trends, we like giving things in threes. Our kind of three key financial messages are: one, we have a proven track record of delivering controllable growth through our go-to-market excellence and our product innovation. As you heard from Joelle, Irina, and Charlie, we have a lot of exciting items coming here that will continue to propel growth into the future. We have a strong focus on margin generation and have ever-expanding margins over time and focus on free cash flow generation, which gives us stability in our business model.
Lastly, something you'll hear from me a lot is we have a clear path to be leveraging our business to well within our target range over the next four years. You'll hear that several times. Let's talk about the future, but we'll first put the last four years since our IPO in a little bit of perspective. Over the last four years, there has been a variety of macro factors. In fact, exiting the pandemic, there was huge broad-based acceleration in the jobs market. A metric I really like to look at is the ratio of job openings, sorry, to those unemployed, which peaked well over two to one after the pandemic. Not really sustainable given the more comfortable BLS metric is that hovering right around one to one.
What's happened since about the second half of 2022 is we've had a long journey of normalizing that revenue back down to more historical norms, which is what you've seen over the last couple of years. During that time, there's a couple of key traits I want to highlight. One, we've been driving incremental growth through new logo and upsell cross-sell throughout that period. Two, we've been focused on profitability, driving increased margins, free cash flow, and ultimately resulting in, you could see, a CAGR and our EBITDA growth that exceeds our revenue growth. Also, in the theme of stability in our business over the last number of years is one of the benefits of the Sterling acquisition that comes from our new enhanced vertical mix.
You can see now that our number one vertical, like you heard from Scott and Joelle, is healthcare, which is a place that we love because that provides both resiliency in our business but also a huge avenue to growth. That, combined with our broad-based verticals, is a key attribute to the business and why some of the metrics I'll provide in a few minutes become so real in life. It also provides the enhanced benefit of having less customer concentration and more diversification. In fact, if you look at First Advantage standalone prior to the acquisition, our top 25 customers represented about 45% of our revenue, including we had one customer regularly at 10% or more of revenue. Fast forward to where we are today after the acquisition, our top 25 customers only represent about 25% of revenues. It is a much better mix.
We have zero customers that are approaching that 10% metric. A much healthier business, a much stable base to grow off of, and a much more resilient overall model. The other benefit of Sterling was not just mix. We obviously get a huge bump from our synergy program. This is something I am particularly proud to talk about today because our team's been doing a phenomenal job executing here. What you heard from Scott earlier is where we originally thought synergies were around $50 million, and we had some upside to that, and most recently at a $50 million-$70 million rate. We now believe that we will be able to generate total synergies from the acquisition between $65 million and $80 million. An important note is we already have realized or actioned $37 million of synergies as of the end of last quarter.
This higher synergy target comes as we have more confidence in our overall model, and we have a long-term outlook on generating incremental synergy savings through the use of automation, AI, and data through the integration process. We are really proud of these results and happy to share these with you today as it helps drive our long-term growth as well. Another benefit of our new status quo is our new cost of sales structure. As you can see, we have a highly variable cost of sales structure, and we have been successful at implementing these traits across the full business now. As the market changed rapidly, and we have seen that happen time and time again over the last three or four years, we have a highly scalable cost of sales structure with highly variable third-party data costs, nearly 100% volume variable.
We're able to leverage our proprietary data to offset that. We have best-in-class workforce management where we're able to scale our workforce to meet the demands of our inbound volumes and scale our business as our revenue demands change. Something else I'm very proud of because of the way our team has managed this so well, not just in recent times, but over our company's history, is our current strength of our balance sheet and our ability to deleverage in this business. As you can see, we wrapped up the last quarter with $172 million of cash and the full $250 million of our revolver available should we ever need it. We have no intention of tapping into it, but it's there if we ever need additional capital.
As you can see on the top left of the screen, this business has been very good about driving or deleveraging after a corporate action. In fact, this management team from 2020, when the Silver Lake acquisition took us up to near 6x, supported a program that rapidly deleveraged our business and got us to numbers that gave us a ton of flexibility to make strategic investments and return capital to shareholders. It is the same team. It is the same program. That is the playbook that we will be executing over the next couple of years as we get our leverage back into our target range. How does this happen? We have A, a low CapEx requirement at less than 4% of revenue annually. B, incredibly strong free cash flow conversion. After the acquisition, we expect that to be around 90%+ of our adjusted net income.
Lastly, we have a finance and accounting team focused on networking capital management, including attacking the Sterling-acquired DSOs and bad debt, and have already made a substantial dent into that, which enabled incremental cash flow. We've already prepaid $20 million of our $2.2 billion term loan just in the last 60 days, including a $15 million voluntary prepayment we made at the beginning of the month. Overall, we feel very good about where we are from a leveraged position today and believe we have a very clear path to our target leverage range in the near future. Let's talk about capital allocation priorities. It's best if you think about this in really two phases.
Phase one is where we are today, and our focus is deleveraging the business, as you've heard, back to our long-term target range of 2x to 3x , which we think will take most of the next two years. During that time, our focus remains unchanged from where it's been the last number of months, driving organic growth, integrating the Sterling business, and realizing that new $65 million-$80 million synergy target. As we approach that 3x top end of our long-term range, we'll begin to explore new uses of capital, which we expect to include enabling strategic growth through potential M&A, as well as maximizing shareholder value by looking at opportunistic ways to return capital to shareholders. We've been very successful on these programs in the past and expect to continue them in the future. That future won't happen overnight. It's going to take a journey.
We have a program in place, and our main focus now is getting leverage to that 2x to 3x number again within the next two years. Before getting into the long-term guidance, it's been good to give you guys a quick update on 2025. As you guys heard in our earnings call just a few months ago, we had a good start to the year with Q1 showing the real stability trends that we had expected as we started the year. We mentioned on the call that April looked a lot like Q1, and I'm here to tell you that May is looking about the same.
That's why we're able to sit here today with confidence and say we don't really have a change point of view on 2025 and expect the numbers on your screen to come true as we continue to see the normalization of the macro cycle continue, driving these numbers and converting to growth as we get to the back half of the year. Setting the stage for long-term revenue growth really requires a look into the past to understand the consistency of the contribution of our revenue model over time. This is something not just true about legacy First Advantage, but also one of the real value traits that we liked Sterling and wanted to execute that acquisition.
As you can see, both businesses had a strong ability to generate incremental revenue from upsell and cross-sell, finding new logos and bringing those into the portfolio, and retaining clients at a 96%+ rate. You see some spikes in these numbers because we've been successful at bringing in some marquee clients or marquee upsell cross-sell, but you have an incredible consistent trend of being able to drive incremental growth. This is in a variety of backdrops within the macro. You had pandemic periods, post-pandemic periods, normalization periods, and you have consistency in upsell and new logo and retention. With that consistency in mind, let's talk about how that continues into our long-term revenue growth algorithm.
I'm not going to spend much time on base on this slide, and we'll come to it in a minute, but we expect base growth to contribute 2%-3% annually to our growth long-term. Short-term, there are some unique items going on in the macro, and we'll address those in a minute. Again, we expect to continue 4%-5% contribution from upsell and cross-sell driven by our new product, the demands on package density, and our clients' desire to have lower risk management. Retention is still expected to remain at or above 96% into the future as we leverage our best-in-class customer success team and look at how deeply integrated we are into our clients' onboarding and risk management processes. Lastly, of course, we continue to expect our go-to-market team to drive 4%-5% annual new logo growth.
Again, we have an incredibly compelling go-to-market story and a best-in-class sales team and sales strategy. What this amounts to is a long-term organic growth target of 7%-9%, which exceeds the data on the vendor market, which is only 6%-7%. We are really excited about the opportunities here. Let's double-click a few minutes and spend a little bit of time talking about the key drivers of each of the revenue algorithm factors. I'm going to spend a little bit of time on base. What base represents primarily is the organic change in demand for our services, and a primary driver of that is sustained hiring demands in the overall labor market.
It's worth noting we do have a number of products that are tied to ongoing compliance, and those products' demands are tied to ongoing employment, not onboarding and hiring, which does provide some resiliency in our model. However, if we think about base and we think about those hiring demands, a few key things to think about about the 2%-3% growth. One, over time, if you look at the BLS data, there's about a 1.5% annual expansion in overall employment in the U.S. hiring market. That was true all the years up to the pandemic. Obviously, the last few years with the macro going up and down is a little bit of a variation.
Through that time, if you look at 2010- 2020, the pace of change in both hiring and quits and openings all exceeded that 1.5% by a healthy margin, which we believe is more indicative of a stable revenue base for our business. Additionally, there are some material generational shifts happening in the world today. Whereas the current working generation of baby boomers, the BLS data shows, held a job for an average over eight years, Gen X just under eight years, millennials, present company included, are only expected to hold on to a job for five years. Even more exciting is the Gen Z coming into the workforce who are expected to change jobs within the first two years of entering the workplace.
These are generational shifts in demand, not tied to an economic cycle, and provide ongoing demand for our services as our clients onboard new employees and get set for the next generation of workers. Additionally, our customers, as they invest in their own businesses and expand, we get to benefit from that expansion. As we return to investment hiring, whether that be opening new distribution centers and warehouses and transportation, new hospital and doctor's offices and healthcare, or new stores and retail, we see that upside as our customers make those investments and expand their hiring bases. Turning to upsell, cross-sell, and retention and new customers, which are three factors that we consider to be within our ability to influence.
Again, we have best-in-class commercial teams focused on driving growth here, combined with new products, best-in-class technology, and an overall fantastic customer experience that gets deeply integrated into our clients' hiring processes. Additionally, when you think about concepts like customer retention, we are deeply integrated. We have low SMB exposure. Our primary customers are enterprise clients who do not make overnight changes to their processes. They are very structured and very strategic. Lastly, new logo, as you heard from Scott and Joelle, with the addition of digital identity into our product portfolio, we now live in a $24 billion TAM and have tons of white space to grow and identify new opportunities. Overall, we are very excited about our new revenue algorithm. We get that that algorithm does not live in a bubble, and there are a variety of macroeconomic factors that can influence.
Now, that primarily comes through our base revenue growth on an annual basis. If you look at the middle of the page, you'll see the baseline for our 2028 model. Again, the continuation of the normalization cycle of our base revenue is expected to continue through next year and take most of 2026. Beyond that, we expect the 2%-3% annual growth in base volumes to continue, and then that will be beginning in around 2027. If you think about what FA can do during a time where it's facing economic headwinds, you would expect a decline in base volumes naturally, but then you think about all the things we can control. We'll continue to excel on new logo and upsell, cross-sell, driving offsetting growth.
We are incredibly focused on the scalability of our P&L and adjusting our cost base to our volumes, and we have an incredibly disciplined approach towards cost management to help preserve profitability in those times. Guess what? When the macro recovers, those traits around cost discipline do not go away. We have got a great management team who is focused on cost management, which allows us to scale that growth, create incremental profitability, deleverage faster, and ultimately make more strategic investments back into our business. Now let's talk about our 2028 financial targets. I will let these sit in for a second because I believe this is the most impressive slide of the day. What you see in front of you is we believe by 2028, we will be operating at a revenue scale of $1.8 billion-$2 billion.
That results in us generating $560 million-$630 million of Adjusted EBITDA, which reflects a margin of 31%-32%. Almost more impressively, that results in an adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.65-$2.00, with an impressive CAGR compared to 2024. All of this while getting our leverage well within our 2x to 3x long-term net leverage target. Let's talk about how we convert all that revenue I just talked about into EBITDA and profitability. Obviously, as we grow our revenue base with our scalable P&L, we're able to convert that incremental revenue into high EBITDA margins through revenue growth alone. We also get the added benefit of $65-$85 million, our new synergy target, coming through the P&L over the next two years.
Add that in with the fact that we have a management team focused on consistent cost savings and efficiency gains, where we also plan to then take some of that and reinvest back into our business to fund the growth and product strategies that we've been talking about all morning. What this results in is a $560 million-$630 million Adjusted EBITDA target for 2028 and an impressive 9%-12% CAGR compared to 2024. Again, what's almost more impressive is the ability to convert that profitability to earnings per share. This is driven by all of the factors I just covered on Adjusted EBITDA, but then also compounded with all of those deleveraging and cash flow generation trends I talked about earlier. As we pay down debt and as we delever the business, we get incremental flow through to our adjusted EPS.
Our $1.65-$2 target EPS for 2028 represents a doubling of our EPS from 2024 at all ends of the range. That is an impressive amount of growth over the next four years. I will close with this. What has us excited about FA's financial model? As I mentioned, we have a proven track record of delivering growth. We have an attractive financial model that generates tons of additional profitability and free cash flow, and we have an incredibly disciplined capital allocation structure that gives us that clear path to our net leverage well within our target range. Think about this and fast forward to 2028. FA is now projected to be operating at nearly a $2 billion scale, generating around $600 million of Adjusted EBITDA, with high quality of earnings that translates to strong free cash flow and leverage comfortably within our target range.
What that leaves us with is something that is truly advancing the advantage. With that, I'll call on Scott to come back to the stage to deliver some closing remarks, and then we'll open it up for Q&A.
Thanks, Stephen. I know you guys want to get to questions, but I just wanted to put this slide back up for the closing statement here. The numbers are just phenomenal. We love where we are right now, and we love what the future could bring us when Stephen showed you the 2028 goals and projections. I think just a couple of things to remember. Obviously, we're super excited about digital ID, and you heard a ton of that today. Just try to remember the one side where we're visually kind of right in the middle, and we're dominating or owning that current section, but we're expanding out. We're expanding downstream. We're expanding upstream. I think that should translate into market share because there's very few companies, if not any companies, that can do that other than us.
That is what gives us confidence in these numbers for this year and for 2028 and beyond. We feel really comfortable with the goals and objectives of the numbers that we gave you. The reason why, again, go back to this category leader concept. I think, one, we have obviously shown and demonstrated what it means to be a category leader. Incredible consistent performance on the things we can control. The slide that shows the last four or five years of just new logo, upsell, cross-sell, retention. We are taking market share, and I think that will accelerate with digital ID and the expansion of our services. We have a growing TAM, which we obviously talked about a lot. I think we are at the very tip of the iceberg on that growing TAM. It is early days.
Revenue coming in from digital ID right now is not a needle mover, but we're obviously super excited about where it's going to go since it's such early days. We're ahead of the integration plan with Sterling. We've increased our synergy targets. We feel the Sterling acquisition is, again, 1+1 = 3 type of situation, which we think will accelerate everything that we talked to you about today. The numbers are great. We generate a lot of cash. It's a very attractive EPS. We are very excited to bring you our story today. We are First Advantage. With that, I'll bring Stephanie back up, and we will do Q&A.
Thank you. All right. So we're going to transition to our final Q&A session. Similar to the last session, please raise your hand, state your name, and your firm. We'll start with Shlomo.
This is a question for Stephen, if he's up there. There he is. Just real quick, you talked about a 90%+ free cash flow conversion. Should we be thinking about that for 2028 on those numbers? Because the implication would be the stock right now, if you could look forward that way, is like a 17%-19% free cash flow yield. I just want to make sure that that's part of your commitment of what you're talking about.
Yeah, Shlomo, great question. Free cash flow conversion, being above 90% of adjusted net income, should really start in around 2027. Obviously, in the current year, we're working through the integration. There's cost to execute the synergies. There's some deferred purchase price items that we'll be paying out over 2025. That'll have a little bit of residual in 2026. As we get into 2027 and 2028, we really hit that normal run rate. A strong trait of First Advantage always has been high quality of earnings. The ability to convert that adjusted net income to free cash flow. We've got, obviously, declining leverage as that's happening, and then just an overall very stable P&L model. Once we hit that kind of post-integration period, which is really in 2027, that free cash flow will normalize out at the very high conversion rates.
Thank you.
Thank you, Manaf. Thank Barclays. Just to follow up on the numbers as well. The 4%-7% CAGR compared to your 7%-9% annual, I think it's the base growth assumptions, but if you could just help us bridge that gap through 2028. And then just a quick follow-up, the bridge to EBITDA, the incremental margins and the revenue growth, what was that assumption you made there?
Yeah. I'll start with the first question. The reason our CAGR and our long-term model don't align is our base year is 2024. As we've been talking about, 2025 is a little bit of a transition year for the macro. The first half of the year, we're still comping over the earlier part of 2022 and the way that compounds through. There's still some normalization that has to work its way through base. As you can see from our guidance this year, our guidance is between 0%-5% growth. Obviously, that pulls back a little bit against the CAGR when you compound that over four years. It's a little bit of mechanics of just 2025.
As I mentioned, that full run rate of 2%-3% base growth, we do not really expect to see until we get into 2027, just as this macro cycle fully flows through and gets its sea legs underneath it. In terms of the components that are driving EBITDA growth, obviously, the synergies is easy math at $65 million-$80 million. We recognized about $4 billion last year. The math of what is going to be providing an uplift to our revenue model is pretty strong. Incremental revenue flows through at a really high rate. We have great top-end margins. As I mentioned, it is a very scalable cost structure within cost of sales, the volume variable nature of third-party costs.
As you heard from this team, our investments in proprietary data and products like digital identity, which come with a different cost structure to it, helps enable that incremental revenue to just have a higher flow-through margin and contribution margin. Ultimately, that's kind of the biggest piece of the puzzle if you look about where we're going from 2024 or even our 2025 guidance to the 2028 vision. Our revenue growth is the key component there. Like I talked about, this management team has been great about finding incremental cost savings. I mentioned we're getting upside in how we're getting to the $65 million-$80 million, our new synergy target from automation, from AI, from data. That's specific to the integration. There's still a lot of opportunity to leverage those technologies within our ordinary course operations, our back office.
We will have efficiencies from that over the next few years, but we will take a portion of that and reinvest it in the business to fund growth.
Hi, everybody. This is Alex Hess with JPMorgan on Andrew Stein's team. This is a two-parter, so brace yourselves. First, if I take your medium-term algo and I sort of backsolve into what you're projecting for not this year, but next year, 2026, it looks like something like a mid-single-digit revenue top-line growth rate, which, taking your company-specific factors, would suggest you're expecting another year of flattish base volume performance next year. That's just sort of how I arrived at the math. That's question one. Is that your assumption, or are you being--I'm just taking mid-points of guides and mid-points of targets? Second would be on the penetration of digital identity. The medium-term algo you guys have laid out here today is broadly consistent with what you guys had as a pre-Sterling company as well.
Now you've got digital identity that you're layering on top of everything, but that algo is sort of broadly consistent despite that. Lastly, Stephen, what are you expecting to do in voluntary debt repayments quarterly for the next two years?
A three-part question. A, on base in 2026, I think the neutral state that we've been talking about in kind of the back half of 2025 is kind of the initial expectation in our long-term model for 2026. There are reasons to be optimistic about that. I think from having a model that we believe is attainable and reasonable, we did not want to overly rely on macro acceleration in the near term. We felt that that was an appropriate place and assumption to put it in the model. In terms of digital identity and the impact on the long-term algorithm, I think, again, given it's a new product, we did not want to over-rotate on aggression on ramping up, upsell, cross-sell a new logo.
You also have to remember, taking a 4%-5% growth rate, but applying it against what will become a $1.5 billion or even a $2 billion company, the actual in-year growth value that you're having to create is a pretty large number. We did not want to over-rotate, again, on kind of having to deliver large numbers that may not be attainable. We thought we were in a very conservative and appropriately sized number that we can deliver with a level of certainty. We feel good about that. I think digital identity, the new other products that we have offering, being able to leverage our data, all support those trends and will help power that. It's both 4%-5% on upsell, cross-sell, and 4%-5% on new logo.
On your last question on deleveraging, I think as you saw from us in Q1, and that will be our plan for the next period of time, as we generate excess free cash flow, we will be using a healthy portion of that to pay down debt. It reduces the debt balance and obviously gross leverage, but also materially impacts our annual debt service and helps not only with compounding to more free cash flow, but also it yields to EPS accretion as we reduce our interest expense.
Thanks so much. It's Jeff Silber with BMO Capital Markets. Stephen, I'm going to give you a break. I'm going back to the technology discussion from earlier. You talked a lot about how much you've invested in that area. I'm just curious, do your clients have to invest in that area to catch up to you and integrate with your systems? If so, do you see any reluctance right now in the current environment?
That's a great question. The short answer is no. We don't need our customers to invest in technology beyond the capabilities that most of them already have in order to integrate to us. That's because the majority of them are coming through those applicant tracking systems and those human capital management solutions where we already have pre-built integrations. It is more or less out of the box as long as they're using one of those 100+ solutions that we have the pre-built integrations to. Almost all of our new sizable customers are. If a customer doesn't choose to integrate, we always have the ability for them to use those customer product platforms to place the orders themselves. In most instances, we're using things like our next-generation Profile Advantage to interact with the candidates to capture most of the information regardless. We don't really see tech barriers or needs for our customers to invest in order to leverage our solutions.
Maybe throw in the rest of the APIs and stuff as well.
Yeah. One of the things we really take pride in is that where our customers or partners want to integrate to us, we've focused on the ability to do that in as many ways as possible. We want to maximize flexibility. If a customer or partner is moving to us from a previous provider where they had a certain type of integration, we can mimic that and basically make that transition painless for them. They just redirect where they're sending the traffic, and we're able to ingest that and process that through our RESTful APIs or any other type of integration that they want to use.
Jeff, I'll add in that customers are actually having the opposite type of discussion with us, where they're saying, "Hey, can you guys extend your automation further into their organization where they can then reduce headcount on their side or at least free up time?" For many customers, we're bringing AI and automation and even process improvement into the customer's world where they can then free up their time. We actually have a pretty large Six Sigma team. We've got black belts, green belts. We've got a very large Six Sigma team that sits within our operations team. This team works with customers on their side of the things to help improve things. That extends our software deeper into the customer. We love that because it's even more stickiness.
Thank you. I have two questions. The first question, I think you've laid out a pretty clear path to your leverage target. What would be your appetite to expand in the digital identity space via M&A?
I mean, I think, first of all, it's a little bit TBD because it's fairly new. But I don't think we have to. I don't think there's anything out there that we would have to own that we couldn't partner with today. If you think about, and it's actually interesting, if you think about, I'll call them the tech engines that kind of live in that space today, it's a little bit of an arms race. It's kind of an area you wouldn't want to own because you would then have to, it would suck up R&D and things like that. It's best for us to just sit back. And we've built our technology, thanks to Charlie and team, to be very, it's a microservices-driven architecture.
Think of it as like Lego blocks, where you can pull out a partner and put in a new partner literally in a week or two. If one of those tech companies falls behind, we pop in a new one. That is what we love, the architecture being agnostic to that. I think we can just be the partner to those companies and not ever have to acquire.
Thank you. Then second question, as you think about your revenue or top-line growth algorithm, one area or contribution we have not touched much on today would be pricing, which I think there is more to it in your business than just straight price increases. It would seem based on doubling your customer base, the products that you offer that you should have a bit more, maybe pricing power with your customers. If you could talk a little bit there, it would be helpful. Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, it's fortunate that pricing has been very stable in this industry. There's some opportunities in certain products. Obviously, with a lot of our smaller customers, we have the ability to leverage things like CPI. We are all about growing our enterprise customers through package density, through upsell and cross-sell. We'd rather not risk those relationships and kind of help latch on to that 96% retention rate, which is very valuable. We can grow those other accounts and grow the profitability of those accounts by adding on incremental services and growing deeper relationships with them. Is there opportunity within price? Yes. I think for us, the core focus is growing through more strategic methods, especially with an enterprise-focused customer base.
Ashish Sabadra from RBC. Thanks for taking my questions. I just wanted to focus on the cost synergies. You've made some really great progress, raised the guidance range. As we think about the rest of the synergies to be achieved, can you just help us understand what are the key buckets and how should we think about the timelines for achieving those? Thank you.
Yeah. So you're right, Ashish. I mean, getting to where we are today has been a pretty Herculean effort across our organization. These leaders here in front of you, the leaders in the back of the room, all contributing to the success. The reason we were confident to raise the number today is we've got some clear outlook into how we're going to leverage our automation, how we're going to leverage some AI, how we're going to leverage our proprietary data. As Scott mentioned in his remarks, it's not a unidirectional thing. It's not from an FA process to a legacy Sterling process. We're finding nice attributes within both processes and growth systems and both frameworks that we can leverage across and usually benefit the entire company. That complex framework that you saw Charlie show on the screen is really what's enabling it.
When you think about what's coming next in our synergy program, a lot of it comes within cost of sales as we're able to optimize those workflows, able to leverage those automations, able to deduplicate some of that. We have also had other benefits. Like you heard from Joelle, we rolled out Click Chat Call, so our chat-first or our self-service customer care experience for the Sterling customers, which was a big storyline, as you know, under FA for the last two years. That rolled out in early May to the Sterling install base and will continue to get more efficient. There are a lot of places that it's coming from, but the primary focus is going to be the "top of the P&L" as we really get deeper into the fulfillment processes and the back-end processes there and leverage that data, automation, and AI.
Thanks, guys. Alex Captain with Cat Rock Capital. If we take 4% churn and 4%-5% new customer and we net them out, you're getting 0%-1% real net new customer growth, which sort of makes sense given this is a pretty sticky product. On the other hand, given the size of the TAM, it seems relatively low. Following up on Stephanie's question on pricing, now that you've bought Sterling and you've come together on the enterprise side and presumably from an enterprise perspective, that it's a more limited set of players there than it is on the overall market.
I'm just curious whether you're seeing any early signs that you'll be able to either reduce the churn rate as a result of this merger or increase your share of gross ads on the new customer side and your win rate on the new customer side and get some benefit, putting aside the pricing, from having bought the biggest enterprise player outside of yourselves?
Maybe I'll take the retention and you take the new logo part of it. On the retention side, Alex, I'll tell you, we're still early days in this integration. I think you could tell from our tone and some of our messaging that we're pleasantly surprised as to where we are. Again, the best of both worlds or the best-in-breed message is hitting home. Yeah, we might be a little bit conservative with our retention projection right now. It certainly could improve. We're so early, we just don't want to go there yet. Let this pan out a little bit. Maybe at some point, we can look at adjusting that. Just the feedback we're getting from talking to Sterling install-based customers, First Advantage customers, there's just general excitement about this.
I think it's going to come down to our ability to deliver on our promises. What we've done is we told Sterling install-based customers that they would start getting these First Advantage upgrades, first being Click Chat Call. We said you'd get them on May 1st. We delivered it on May 1st. We now also have to keep delivering the next couple of months' upgrades, and on the same side for First Advantage. There were some nice things we found on the Sterling side that we will now offer to the First Advantage customers. As long as we continue to deliver on Irena has got a really intricate and detailed product roadmap. It's almost, think of it as a pretty key piece of upgraded functionality almost monthly to these install-based customers. Let us deliver that for a few months. Let these customers see that we're proving what we're saying. We might be able to revisit the retention.
Yeah. And then as far as new logo, yeah, I mean, we feel really good about it. We have a pretty decent win rate with new logo right now. We are seeing opportunity across, again, some of those deeper verticals where we are able to get into the subverticals. It is not about, I think, the new logo percentage. It is maybe increasing that win rate and really kind of driving that growth. We feel really good about where we are right now. The sentiment, which we were not sure what was going to happen post the acquisition, it has not changed. Again, we had the record Q1. We had the most number of new logos in Q4 ever. We are seeing signs from the market that they are really happy with where we are. We think that is going to help with new logo. We're just not at a point where we're going to raise that target up just yet.
Yeah. So just a quick follow-up on the new logo piece. HireRight's now private. Historically, at least based on our research, you guys, Sterling, HireRight, were the three really big enterprise players. And Checkr is out there as well. Has that remained a pretty static enterprise competitive environment since the merger? Are you seeing new players or mid-market players making it into those enterprise bids? What's changed about the competitive environment post-merger that you guys are seeing on the enterprise side specifically?
Yeah. So Alex, that's a great question. We're still seeing the mid-market players. We are. And we even still see some mom-and-pop shops. What we are seeing, though, is a higher appetite to kind of lean toward our solutions just because they're more comprehensive. The message that everybody keeps bringing to us is we just need a one-stop shop. We are one of the only ones that can deliver that. The others are still trying. There is still a highly competitive market out there. I think the message of us being able to deliver at the beginning, at the interview stage, during the background screen, and then post-hire is really resonating with the customers.
I think the big difference is the one-stop shop has changed. It is not one-stop shop just for background screen. That world has expanded to include I-9, include WATSE, include digital identity. Because again, these customers are looking for one, it is easier to do with one vendor. They do not want to be the ones to have to connect the dots in the background between three or four vendors. They want us to do it for them. I think that one-stop shop concept is actually expanding and becoming a little bit of a sales weapon for us.
You're right, in a couple of key verticals, it goes beyond that to the ongoing compliance too. You've got transportation, healthcare as a couple of names where we've got a suite that goes beyond just the onboarding phases of employment and goes to the ongoing compliance of maintaining a network of drivers or vehicles, maintaining a network of doctors or healthcare workers. You can kind of, again, expand those even within the verticals to a broader suite of products and really help kind of manage all of the human capital risk under one umbrella.
I had one follow-up to just that. Do you have that where you can quantify it? So what % of maybe customer wallet is currently post-onboarding versus pre-onboarding?
We don't because it's not always directly known. Why a customer does a certain screen or why they do a certain drug test isn't really known to us always. We know that there's a healthy portion of it that relates to if you're a driver having to do an annual compliance check or if you're a doctor doing some kind of annual compliance check. We don't have the exact number. Obviously, it's a smaller piece of our business today. Certainly in those core verticals where there is an annual compliance burden on the employers, there is either a suite of products, whether it be what Road Ready that Scott talked about earlier in transportation or just natural demands of being in a healthcare space or being in some other kind of regulated environment, there's a consistent demand for those services. Again, tied to ongoing employment and not onboarding.
Just to be real clear, let's say someone sends us an order to do a drug test on somebody at their company. We don't know if that's a new employee or existing employee. It's hard for us to say that's post or pre.
All right. Any more questions in the room? Okay. Once again, thank you all for joining us today. As I hope you can tell, we're very optimistic about the future for First Advantage and our ability to create value for our customers and our shareholders. With that, we're going to conclude the formal presentation. I want to thank everybody who joined us on webcast today. We hope to see you in person very soon. For everyone else in the room, thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to join us for the session this morning. Our team will be here for the next 15 or so minutes if you have any lingering questions or would just like to say hello. Thank you.