All right. Good morning, everybody. Or at least good morning to our U.S. clients. Good afternoon to our U.K. clients. Thank you for joining us at day two of 11th Annual Global Credit Data and Analytics Forum. We are glad to have First Advantage join us this year. Joining us is Joelle Smith, who is the President, Steven Marks, CFO, and Stephanie Gorman, IR, is here with us as well. Firstly, thank you. Thanks to the three of you for your time. Really appreciate it. I am going to hand it over to my colleague, Ronan Kennedy, to run through some of the questions we have received from you guys, as well as the ones that we have had.
If you have anything in particular during the conversation or something you want us to address towards the end, you should see a Q&A box on your screen. Please d o use that so we can touch on them. If you need another venue, we have our Bloomberg terminals open if you want to ping us there as well. That should work. Without wasting any more time, Ronan, I am going to hand it over to you.
Thank you very much, Manav, and thank you, Steven and Joelle, for joining us and everybody for participating in what has been a successful 11th edition of our Annual Credit Data and Analytics Forum. First Advantage, obviously, coming off a strong 2Q, I think 15% revenue growth, 6.7% base growth, 12.5 combined combination from new logos, upsell, and cross-sell. Before we dive into that recent strong performance, the trends and drivers there, and also the updated guide, I think appropriate being at this Credit Data and Analytics forum is to first start with the transformation.
Steven, I will leave it to you as to how you want to describe it, evolution, revolution of First Advantage, from a technology-enabled screening provider to today, a global software and data company, and how First Advantage helps organizations manage the human capital risk, their proprietary databases of more than 1 billion records, AI-driven fulfillment and fraud detection capabilities, and also the historical and key integrations across ATS and HCM platforms. Could you help us understand that transformation, evolution, revolution about where FA sits in the value chain today and how that will continue to progress?
Yeah, no, Ronan and Manav, thanks for having us and good morning, good afternoon to everyone. Lots to unpack in that question. I will certainly start off, but I am sure I will miss a few pieces, and I will have Joelle fill in for you. Ronan, I think when you really think about that question, it is almost the 10+-year history of First Advantage is kind of the answer of that. Joelle and I have both been here for the better part of that decade and have seen that evolution really happen from, to your point, really a transformation from what was really kind of a BPO-looking company, which was really reflective of where the, "archaic" kind of fulfillment methodologies that this industry had.
Really over the last, call it 10 years, have been really putting in a lot of those core tenets of a company that to really transform into a data-enabled and a tech-based company. That started in the earlier days with automating things on the back end. So that would have been reflective of our RPA initiative a decade ago. That has evolved to machine learning and now AI, to your point, and embedding that in the product, in our internal process, in the fulfillment. As we marked through that evolution, and certainly this was a strong tenet on the First Advantage side of our history, really trying to be data first, right? That is really reflective in the over 1 billion proprietary records that you mentioned.
That is both on our criminal fulfillment side, that is also really seen in our employment and education data, in our verified and SmartHub technologies that we use to fulfill there. While all that is going on, so you are automating the back end, you are putting data on the platforms to enable that function. We really have spent a ton of time and obviously annual investment, doubled down with that with our acquisition of Sterling, in terms of putting that into our tech platforms.
That is our user experiences through our core fulfillment platform, how they integrate with our customers and their HCM systems. We have well over 100 of those integrations with all the leading platforms in the world to really transform this, from back to my earliest point, from being a true just outsourced business process to a true tech-enabled solution that our customers are able to really value.
When you do that, and you do that well, you are able to then add incremental value through the process through additional products and services. We have seen that evolve over the years, most recently with our digital identity solution, but we have our continuous monitoring, our compliance solutions, I-9, you name it. As you have this one cohesive modern-day tech platform, you are able to add those incremental value adds to your customers, improve your value proposition to them, and all while at the same time, thinking about our shareholders, making a much more valuable, robust, and durable company. That is why if you look at our customer base, wide set of verticals, right? Healthcare, retail, transportation, gig, financial services, industrials, all over the place. Wide geographic mix. We are able to do these services all over the globe at high quality, high turnaround time.
And then look, we have an enterprise customer focus. If you looked at the names of our customer database, it is the who is who of the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, Global 1000. You have really kind of seen over the last decade, I have been here for a little over 10 years. Joelle, roughly, her and I started not too far apart. We have seen that evolution firsthand, and I think it is probably really admirable for our shareholders to be able to see the value come through our P&L and overall, just the quality of the company over that same period of time.
Yeah, Ronan, I would say, to simplify a lot of everything that Steven just said, which was great, we have really evolved from a point-in-time, one-time check, if you will, at a certain point throughout the hiring life cycle, and you zoom out, and we are really now a broad-based kind of product and platform that delivers managing risk across the entire life cycle of someone in the workforce. So whether it be from the initial start of an interview all the way through to, yes, of course, the background check, which is where we have known, to an identity check. Then, as Steven mentioned, even the post-hire, where right-to-work, I-9, and then continuous monitoring. So it is really taking it from just a one-time transaction, truly, to an end-to-end solution across the workforce to manage risk. And so it has been a really great ride for us.
As Steven mentioned, we took those platforms and the data investments, and we really tried to elevate the organization to allow us to deliver, again, those risk mitigation services from a compliance perspective across for all our verticals. As Steven mentioned, the verticals is a key focus of ours, not something we were doing 10 years ago, something we have absolutely doubled down over the last probably seven, eight years, and it has been really good for the business.
Very good. Appreciate all the insights there. It is an excellent way to start the discussion, especially at this conference and the nature of it. So with that technology and that AI proprietary data and moat, obviously you guys have been investing in that for quite some time and applying AI across now customer care, fulfillment, software development, verification flows, fraud mitigation. Can you talk about, and Joelle, if you want to touch on some of the key product innovations, even from a digital ID standpoint, where you are seeing the most meaningful benefits today, and where we expect to see the most meaningful benefits going forward?
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. What is really interesting and a dynamic change in this industry in particular, but kind of across enterprises, and as Steven mentioned, that is our main focus. The buying pattern has kind of changed. Companies, for really the first time over the last year and a half, two years, are prioritizing risk as the number one requirement for them. When they buy, they are like, "How are you going to help me manage risk? How are you going to do this?" If you kind of reverse the conversation maybe five, 10 years ago, it was all about speed. "I need to get people hired right away. I need to get people in the door." This dynamic change has been a complement to what you talked about with regards to our product suite. As we mentioned, we have a number of verticals.
We are vertically focused. We have a wide range of sub-verticals inside of there, and we are seeing broad-based growth across all of those verticals. That is being driven by the innovation that we have done for those specific verticals inside of our platforms. When you think about the kind of revolution of AI, which you kind of talked about, we would like to consider ourselves using good AI to fight bad AI. The reason risk is so prevalent right now in the top buying pattern, it is because a lot of these organizations are struggling with identity fraud. Identity fraud is coming in all shapes and sizes. It is the only product we have really ever had that is being demand-driven across every vertical, every customer segment, and every region.
The bad actors who are creating synthetic IDs, who are creating deep fakes, who are creating resumes with fake companies on them, who are creating just different facets of fraud, are everywhere. Our customers are really looking for an end-to-end holistic solve for how they address that. That is coming in a lot of shapes and sizes. We are using AI to obviously help with identity fraud, to be able to take a biometric ID across a face and a liveness detection, using all of our proprietary data, as you just talked about, to validate just the physical biometric with the biographic data and pair that up to help people get a good view.
Obviously, the background screen itself to make sure that they are not a criminal, to make sure that they have proper drug testing, that they have all the compliance services, their licenses are active from a nursing perspective, a driving perspective, all of those pieces. Being able to stitch that all together, using AI is a great way to do that. A great way to synthesize a lot of data to get to a positive outcome is a great way to do that. We take our good AI products, and we fight some of that bad AI, and that is allowing us to evolve as we kind of move through the life cycle with these customers and their focus on managing risk.
Excellent. Thank you. Before diving deeper on digital ID, can we just, a quick question come in on just for your articulation of how that proprietary data is valuable and how that lends itself to the competitive differentiation that you guys have, whether it's the improvement in speed, reduction in third-party costs, increased accuracy. You can touch on those aspects of the proprietary data and the benefits. Please.
Sure. Ronan, I feel like you just answered it. It's awesome. Yeah. It's all of those things. But the real thing, there's two big categories of searches that people do to get people hired. Obviously, criminal check is the largest by far, and the other one is a work employment verification. Education verification as well. That's where we focused our time. We have proprietary criminal records that we have built over decades. This is where history and size and scale, we do over 200 million screens a year.
Being able to build up that data asset really allows us to get the historical information that's necessary, as well as direct access, as Steven talked about, the automation to be able to pull real-time activities that are happening as people are living and working, and keeping pace with the arrests and crimes and things like that that are happening. The second side of that is around workforce and employment verification. This is a critical aspect for people to be able to hire, especially in regulated industries. It is a requirement in the transportation industry, the healthcare industry, and in some cases, financial services. We're seeing that. Being able to have a proprietary database of verification data, again, that we've been doing for years, allows us to deliver very quickly for our customers. It allows us to have high accuracy rates.
The verification records that we have is built specifically for the purposes of validating employment verification. That allows us to deliver faster, higher accuracy. Obviously, we don't really have to touch it. No humans are doing that. It really allows us to deliver the speed that our customers are looking for, because just as much as they're focused on risk, they very much also want things done very quickly. That investment has done very well for ourselves. That's on the front end with customers. On the back end with our fulfillment teams, that allows them to work through these processes much faster. As I mentioned, 200 million screens, it's a huge volume. We actually just recently had a volume surge, as we talked about in Q2. We did great with that. We didn't have any service degradation.
We didn't have any speed slowdown, and our accuracy rates stayed exactly where we had hoped. Being able to leverage AI to be able to handle the scale and growth that you mentioned that we've seen this year, is a real differentiator for us as well.
Joelle, I'll just add, Ronan, if you think about the proprietary data and the value to First Advantage, although everything Joelle said is 100% accurate, from a P&L standpoint, anytime you can leverage your own data versus having to go to third-party data, there's obviously big margin benefits. Look, we also acknowledge some of the trends in our industry. We're also at the same time of making our P&L look better.
We're able to help our customers save money. From a competitive standpoint, that's a differentiator because to Joelle's point, in these verticals, you have to go do these things. Reality is that the cost of the data acquisition has gotten a little bit out of hand in some of those areas. If we're able to provide alternative data sources to our customers that are also margin beneficial to First Advantage, it's a win-win of being able to create a better First Advantage and a differentiating customer experience at the same time.
Excellent. Thank you for that further color. Can you remind us of the stat? I think you guys have previously mentioned the percentage of screens that are done automated versus with human intervention, and obviously, there's a margin benefit there. Just a reminder on that, please.
Yeah. Look, it breaks down a little bit, right? The main thing we do, to Joelle's point, is almost the universal element in a background check in the U.S. is the criminal element. That one, I think when we last updated the market, we were highly touchless, over 70%-75%. That number's only going to climb up over time, and it probably has since we last updated it. That's something that we update every year in our annual stats.
The acquisition of more proprietary data, and then I think as you mentioned, I think Ronan, even in your onset, one of the areas that we traditionally used RPA and then machine learning and now we're evolving to AI is on some of the criminal fulfillment to just fill some of those tasks that we tried to automate, but the legacy automation tech wasn't quite good enough, that we can use AI to get to. There's obviously we still need to stay compliant with all of the FCRA and related regulations in our industry, which is both an AI moat in terms of making sure that we're protecting First Advantage in the industry from some of that disruption, also from some of the risks in the hiring process, but at the same time leveraging it to the extent we can to automate more.
We anticipate the next time we disclose that number, it'll be north of the last time we did it. But it's obviously a majority of our cases continue to be highly automated, incredibly touchless. Then to Joelle's point, and we talked about this, and I'm sure we'll get to it in some of your questions around the base growth that we saw in Q2. We didn't know that that growth was coming. It was a pleasant surprise to us, but we weren't able to workforce manage to it either. But at the same, to Joelle's point, our network, the technology, the level of automation made fulfilling all that excess volume possible. So we feel really good about where we're at and the trajectory we're on in terms of making sure things are either end-to-end touchless or as automated as they can be.
Very good. Thank you. Then on back to digital identity. I think management had called it the tip of the spear. Can we just remind us again how to think about how that is increasingly appearing like a standalone product? I mean, sorry, less like a standalone product and more an extension of the broader screening and workforce risk workflow. Then can you remind us how to think about the TAM, and the opportunity there, please? Then also the economics and impact potentially to margins.
Yeah, I'll let Joelle talk about the evolution of the product, and then I'll take some of the unit economic stuff.
Sounds perfect, Steven. Yeah. You're exactly right, Ronan. Digital identity, it's not a feature or a standalone product. Think of it more as a foundational element of how a background screen continues to evolve as this risk profile changes. It works, and it helps improve accuracy, compliance, and it's active and standard in almost every deal we quote right now. We're really looking at as a foundational element to any of the background screens that we do. It's really manifesting itself into a tip of the spear, as you mentioned, but it's really changing the conversation, and it's changing the dynamic we have with existing customers and bringing new opportunities that we haven't actually had the opportunity to talk about before. It's changing how enterprises are thinking about their profile and thinking about how they manage their employee risk.
It's something that we're really excited about. The evolution of this has been really being able to connect the dots. There's technology out there that allows you to check the biometric facial features, the liveness, things like that. But where we bring that value is adding that plus all of our proprietary data about that individual to ensure that the primary source and the verification, and all of that matches up directly with the identity. The other thing that's really interesting is connecting it across all of the aspects of the hiring, and post-hire cycle. If you're interviewing a person, you want to make sure the person that you interviewed and answered all those questions really well and that you want to hire is also the same person that you're running that background screen on to make sure that there isn't a risk there.
You also want to make sure that same person is the same person that either shows up on day one to do the I-9 or shows up day one virtually with their laptop, and has the right to work in this country. Identity is really spreading itself across, and our platform is the only platform that can connect all of those dots at every aspect of the cycle. There's even post-hire monitoring that some of our more advanced customers are talking about. The evolution of the product has been really interesting, and it's rapidly changing. It's changing pretty much as quickly as AI is because we really need to create products that keep pace with all of the fraud activity. I'll tell you, the fraud problem in the U.S. is significantly increasing.
It is something, again, we hadn't seen as so prevalent across every single vertical. It started with financial services. It started with probably a lot of the people that are on this call and the technology vendors, and it started with the North Korean bad actors. It really has evolved to a number of things where a nurse, for instance, is impersonating multiple people, and working at four or five different hospitals. These things are real. This is happening. A retailer, somebody who works in the warehouse, is pulling up with a truck. They are not the person that was hired. They are not the person that they did the screen on, and they pull up with a truck with a fake ID, and they load the truck with all the merchandise, and they drive away.
These are real-world scenarios that are happening, so having a product that can handle all of those types of situations. Then the immigration piece, this administration is very focused on immigration. So if you do not have the right to work in the United States, you need to prove that you are in fact the person that was hired and that you are the person eligible to work in the United States Otherwise, there are major fines. It really is prevalent in many verticals, and it is something that is really driving pipeline. It's driving stickiness with our customers, and it truly is the first thing we really are talking about with all of our customers and prospects.
Well, it's a universal geographic, right? North Koreans, Australian and U.K., and it's global, which I think is why the TAM is so large, right? The prevalence of the risk, how deep they go, how widespread they are. When we looked at our data surveys as part of the prep work for Investor Day last year, we sized up the digital identity market roughly at $10 billion. Now, that's inclusive of some areas that are maybe tangential, so employment, some other areas. But it's a huge growing market opportunity because, to Joelle's point, the risks are so prevalent. They're so real, and it's very much in kin with cybersecurity. You have one issue in a company, and that is all you need to have a really, really bad day. You can hire an employee who might have had a questionable background.
You can handle that via an HR action, remove them before something bad happens. Once you let a threat actor in, the exfiltration of data or the infiltration of something bad, things like that are so real. So that's why it's such a growing market. We believe it's roughly a $10 billion TAM. Obviously, it's very early days, so we're trying to figure out how much of that market we can really attach ourselves to and then really create our independent First Advantage white space. But there's tons of market opportunity, and we're really bullish about the outlook there. We're also bullish because it's a profitable product. You have far less third-party data acquisition. You don't have to go to a state or a county or a driving records or a drug testing lab or someone like that. It's truly a tech service.
It is margin accretive as well. We also think it is differentiating and creates a much stickier customer engagement once you have them. To Joelle's point, you have the entire envelope fueled and with the First Advantage stamp, that creates something that is a really sticky, high retention driver. We are really bullish on the product from a revenue growth, from a margin growth, from a retention aspect.
Very good. Thank you. What we have touched on thus far is actually two key pillars of the FA 5.0 strategy, I think technology and AI innovation. With that technology, leadership across the AI automation, so SmartHub, fulfillment, customer care, et cetera. There is also the element as a product strategy and the candidate experience, and you touched on that to a certain extent. Anything else to be particularly mindful of or perhaps worth highlighting for the successes and the execution on those aspects of the pillar there before we move to others?
Yeah, absolutely. The candidate experience is key. We talked about 200 million screens a year. Obviously, millions and millions of candidates that we are talking to and getting through the system, which is great. Having a super frictionless experience is critical to all of the enterprises. This is the first touch point, really, that these people that they are hiring have with their new company. That experience sets the tone for really how they are going to feel as they continue their work relationship with their new employer. It is also something we are seeing a lot of organizations use for rescreens. That is something that we are seeing very popular as well. Having that frictionless experience, and AI is also perfect for this. We have deployed AI across our candidate experience to be able to pinpoint exactly where the workflow is seamless and completely frictionless.
We also have AI that tells us where you would happen to have a rage click or a challenge or something with the candidate. We have great technology that allows us to respond in real-time to these candidates to enable them. Then we have, as you mentioned, the Click. Chat. Call. All of our chat features are across the candidate experience, and it is something we have invested heavily in, and it has really added to the stickiness and retention of our customers. Because when they have happy candidates, happy employees, an easy way to get through some of the stuff that can be a little tedious as you are trying to get a job.
It really brings a huge value to them and just creates higher retention, which you have seen in our numbers. Our retention held at the 96%, even ticked up to 97% all throughout the integration. Most organizations don't have that level of success through a large M&A transaction. We're really proud of that, and we definitely know that the positive high-quality candidate experience really helped with that.
Excellent. Thank you. Now on to another aspect that you guys have touched on, but key, I think, to FA's strategy, certainly since coming public and before then, and has also been very successfully executed upon, is that targeted vertical go-to-market strategy. Can you talk about the approach there and the key to successful execution and also perhaps some context on international as well?
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Our vertical go-to-market strategy has been the bread and butter of this business since I've been here, and Steve mentioned it's been almost a full decade now. I think I'm at nine years. We have verticalized across the industry, and we have wage workers, blue-collar workers, and we have kind of professional services and white-collar workers. But the key to this is that diversification across the verticals. When we had First Advantage, traditionally retail, transportation, they were kind of the large focus verticals and plenty of others. Then we had the Sterling acquisition. Healthcare and industrials were kind of the bread and butter for the Sterling side. When we brought those two organizations together, it allowed us to have a really nice diversification of verticals across the board.
When you do that and you have a platform that is elastic like ours is and very configurable, you can build products that are specific to driving the needs of a transportation, for instance, and a DOT compliance. You can build products that are heavily focused on healthcare and healthcare workers and the nuances that have changed, right? Healthcare is exploding. It's a vertical that is growing. It's continuing to drive. It is our largest vertical at the moment. And it's something that is kind of keeping pace with a lot of these changes. We have an aging population across the world, so we do anticipate that that is going to be something that continues to grow for us. And then industrials. We've seen a huge surge in industrial activity.
It was kind of a quiet one for us for a period of time, but over the last year or so, it's really taken off. We're seeing big surges in aerospace and defense. We're seeing lots of other activities around that industrial area. Being able to speak to our customers from a sales, a customer support, and a product perspective specific to their vertical, that matters. You have the power of a big company and all these millions of screens, but then you have dedicated teams that can talk to somebody who really only cares about DOT compliance. You can talk to somebody who really only cares about financial services and FINRA and all the things that are necessary for them to run their business. That really matters, and that kind of one-to-one specialty connection with our go-to-market strategy is what allows us to continue to win.
We've seen increased win rates. We've got a very large pipeline, one of the largest we've seen in a long time. It really is helping our go-to-market strategy because we can talk to them. We have product-specific solutions for their needs and their vertical. We have the size and scale with the data that allows to deliver the speed and risk. We feel really good about this vertical strategy. It's worked for us, and it's going to continue, and it's part of our plan going forward as well. It's something that has just been a real winner for us.
Very helpful. Thank you. Before getting into, because obviously we are going to get to new logos, pipeline conversion, growth visibility, package density, and then obviously base growth. On the verticals, can you confirm, because there was that diversification benefit from the Sterling acquisition from an end market, but also, if I'm not mistaken, the nature of the employee type from a white collar to blue collar, the high churn that FA had a particular exposure to, and then also, if I'm not mistaken, an international diversification benefit. Can you talk about that a little bit, please?
Yes, absolutely. You're right. We had a heavy, high volume hire. I would say that is continuing to grow and expand. It definitely was something that the traditional First Advantage had focused on heavily. Actually one of the pleasant surprises with the Sterling acquisitions, they also had a lot of high volume hire as well. That is an area that continues to grow. It's great for our business. Any churn in the market, in the employment, job stacking is a big thing we're seeing now as well, where people are working multiple jobs on purpose, especially the younger workforce, is taking one or two jobs. All of that works really well, but we still have our professional services, and that is the white collar, more traditional, but that's heavy compliance. That actually works well for us because those packages are large.
There may not be a ton of turnover, but it does create a good amount of volume and revenue for us because if you are looking at hiring a DOT driver, for instance, that is something that costs a lot more expensive than somebody who is going to be a retail worker or something like that. That has been a really good mix for us. Internationally, we have seen a lot of strength as well. We have got complementing areas. We do searches in 200 countries and territories across the globe. There is really no place on the planet that we cannot touch. We actually did searches last year for three in Antarctica.
There are things that happen across the globe, but the areas that we are seeing a big surge of volume and interest is the U.K. for sure, and EMEA, the European markets, Australia, India, and then some other areas in APAC. That diversification, that product mix, being able to deliver those verticals, but then also the specifics for those countries really matter. When you can apply compliance, that is for instance, GDPR related on top of a product specific for the European region, they love that.
They need that obviously for compliance purposes, but then to have that sophistication in one-stop shop where your platform can serve all the European parts of your business, all the U.S. parts of your business, and many of the APAC regions, that is a big differentiator for us. The vertical markets matter, but then being able to apply that geographic compliance is also a big win for us, and that is creating a lot of growth opportunity as well.
Excellent. Thank you. Is there any way to, are you helping with how to think about where the potential greatest opportunity to win multinational customers is? What the drivers of that are, whether it is further consolidation, customers seeking to standardize screening or identity and compliance processes holistically, and just some further commentary, please.
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. It is very much a consolidation play right now. We have seen a lot of organizations where they have had different vendors in different regions across the globe, and that creates a level of inconsistency, and that also creates some gaps in the program. That is where some of these risks are starting to bubble up, where they are realizing they really do need one global provider on one platform that allows them to manage their risk consistently across all of the regions. There is also a dynamic with the folks that they are hiring, because not one person comes from one region and has worked in one country.
There is a big shift of people that move all around the world, and so you need a company that can hire somebody in the U.K. who went to school in Australia and who worked in France for a period of time. These are things that are more and more prevalent as the kind of workforce has been and continues to be more mobile. So being able to deliver on that for our customers is necessary, especially as risk continues to grow. One of the other products that is helping to drive that international growth as well, so you have the consolidation, the one-stop shop phenomenon, you also have the identity fraud.
So identity fraud is very active and popular and newsworthy in the U.S. right now, but it actually started first, a number of years ago, in the U.K. and Canada and Australia. This was something that governments kind of centralized. So it has been an evolution, and now India is popping up, and then there is a number of other countries that are doing this.
So in addition to having that one-stop shop, which we offer, we also have products that are helping to address some of the really pressing needs that they have across the globe. So having a company that can deliver identity services across 90 countries that they operate in is really key. Because again, it brings that consistency, the visibility, and then manages risks. Then as Steven mentioned, you now have a conversation where you can have the CHRO having a conversation with the chief information security officer, and they are talking about kind of consistency across the employee base of how they are managing that risk, how they bring them on, and then how they continue then with employees.
Excellent. Thank you. Moving along to, I guess we will talk about base growth after first touching on new logos package density, and I think you already covered the retention consistent at record levels, but very strong momentum from a new logo standpoint. I think enterprise bookings were up to 20 in 2Q 2026 from 17. I think you have described the late-stage pipeline as the largest in company history. So what is primarily driving that, whether it is sales, productivity, demand, the broader product suite, competitive win rates? If you can just touch on the key drivers there and outlook, please.
Sure, yeah. It is definitely the go-to-market verticalization. That has been great because our pipeline is really strong, and yes, it is the largest we have seen, but it is strong across the verticals. We do not have one or two verticals that are kind of carrying. We are really able because we have that diversification, and we have the platform that can handle multiple verticals solutions. That is really helping us drive that swelled pipeline. Also, our ACV is getting larger because of the consolidation that we just talked about. People are looking for one company to handle multiple things at the same time. That is helping the size of our deals, which is obviously helping the pipeline growth. Then, of course, we talked about digital identity. That really is the tip of the spear, and that is driving a big portion of that pipeline growth as well.
It is kind of a few things where we have got the consolidation happening, the verticalization, the kind of all verticals firing on all cylinders, and then you have this great product fit with our digital identity product suite and such a high demand coming off of that. We are also seeing a lot of our post-hire products driving a lot of this pipeline growth as well. Monitoring and some of the post-hire aspects of our business are really starting to grow as well as a continuation of this overall risk management posture that a lot of our customers are trying to help build across their organization. Making sure they have full visibility from hire to current employment to even a fire situation. That is also helping with the pipeline growth.
Excellent, thank you. If I am not mistaken, I think post-consolidation with Sterling, does FA have it? Is it approximately 25% of the core, or what was the legacy historical core screening market? What are the largest remaining potential share opportunities, whether that is, I would imagine it would be primarily global enterprise, but are there specific regions, international markets, or adjacent products to be mindful of?
Steve is going to take it.
Yeah. We certainly feel that was right when we closed. Obviously, we've had really strong growth rates since, so maybe a little bit north of that 25%, but that's roughly the range that we think we represent. I think to your question, there's still a ton of opportunity. A, just inherently, if you've got 25% - 30% market share, let's say that that leaves 70% - 75% of the market to go via white space. When we think about how do we win, the investments that we talked about at the onset, becoming this tech-enabled data company, that technological differentiation, the product differentiation, the user experience differentiation.
When you can change that whole value profile, you start to benchmark really, really well, and even more so against the smaller end of our. As you know from following this industry for a while, there is a long tail of really small background screening providers, certainly in the U.S. or globally. When you're doing $10 million, $20 million, $30 million, $40 million revenue, you just can't make the investment. Think of all the tech areas that we've talked about just in the last 40, 45 minutes. AI, digital identity, user experiences, cloud, data, all this stuff. These aren't cheap investments, and we've been making annual investments in our product and tech and R&D platforms for years. So that technological differentiation versus the lower end of the market and even versus that mid-market side.
We think that that differentiation just over time just widens that gap in terms of the value proposition we can bring to the market, the quality of our product, the speed, the data capabilities. So there's a huge white space, and I think just inherently our continued focus on our products and customers will allow us to continue to execute at a high level versus that white space in terms of camping.
Very good. Thank you. With having described that large, the largest late-stage pipeline in company history, is there a way to think about how much of that, say, is sufficiently advanced to provide visibility into 2027 or even the end of 2H? I know, and we'll cover upsell cross-sell, and I think there's something to be particularly mindful of from a comp standpoint for up and cross for the fourth Q, but just on that visibility on that new for closing out 2026 into 2027, please.
Well, Ronan, I would answer that two different ways. One, obviously, with the pipeline success and the momentum we have, we feel good about it. Candidly, we like to talk about upsell, cross-sell, new logo almost together. There are very many times where you have won incremental territory on an existing account, and it is all the same sales motions as new logo to go. You are displacing a competitor, you are adding new products, et cetera. If we zoom out for just a second and look at them together, there is incredibly healthy last three or four quarters of results. Q4 is going to be just a little bit of a modeling anomaly just because of when we grew 17% new logo upsell across the last Q4, and there is some normalization of that.
We had customers last year, as you recall, holding back screening volume from their incumbents, which obviously is a vote of confidence in the First Advantage platform holding that volume back for online with us. That creates a little bit of, I would call it a modeling void, if you will, just for a quarter. A lot of the wins that Joelle has been talking about, the 20 wins we had in Q2, we will see some of that revenue by the time we get to Q4. By the time you implement these enterprise-size deals, get the integration done, and look, these are denser deals. Joelle mentioned it in one of her answers, your ACVs are up, and that is because they are buying a few more products at that initiation point than they would have in the past. Those more complicated deals take a little bit longer to implement.
We do feel good about the trajectory of new logo and upsell, cross-sell heading into next year. Look, I feel we have got a really good runway. The other thing is I always remind investors, every time we win a new logo, no one comes into First Advantage ever buying the entire portfolio, entire suite of services, a fully dense package. So every time we add something on the front end via new logo, we are also increasing our white space immediately with our customers on our upsell, cross-sell. So they really do go hand in hand. We probably like to talk about them together. Look, the growth out of both the last three or four quarters has been phenomenal. We have a harder comp in Q4, but we still feel good about the long-term trajectory of the combined revenue growth there.
Excellent, thank you. I think you guys had recently referenced your Global Workforce Trends Report.
Yeah.
And that 89% of respondents plan to add screening and identity verification solutions, which I think obviously speaks to the value prop of that product, as we've discussed at length here. But how do those findings align with current customer conversations, your pipelining activity, actual buying behavior, and how to think about sustainability of growth in that package density and that upsell, cross-sell component of the algo?
Yeah, absolutely. Package density is still by far the largest growth driver of our upsell and cross-sell. We are definitely seeing add-ons on the product side, but this is coming off of, in that Global Trends Report, we had 5,000 respondents, and it was really telling. The 89% actually was a bit surprising for us. We knew a lot were going to add, but that was, I think, just reflective of everybody's focus on risk mitigation these days. And that comes in all sorts of, and sizes, right?
So there may be somebody who is looking at a five-year work history, and they want to change that to be 10 years now. Or they are looking at a criminal check that goes back seven years, and now they want to go back 10 years, or they want to add a federal criminal search instead of just a county criminal search. And so these things are what drives our upsell, and then the cross-sell is really product-driven. So there's a lot of discussions that we have with customers on a regular basis on where they are. Because we have such great visibility into an overall customer base, and so we've got a vertical strategy, as we talked about.
So if you're able to walk up to a hospital system and say, "Hey, this is what your package looks like. This is what you're screening for all of your employees. And this is what the top 10 other hospital systems," anonymized, but "this is what they're searching for." And you see that you have gaps in that. It really helps people understand where their risk profile sits.
Or if they're fully compliant, they're very full, and they have the full stack of certain searches, then they feel really good about themselves, and they're like, "Okay, good, I'm managing risk the best way I know how." We're getting tons of questions like that with our customers, and we're also very proactive with it to say, "Hey, these are the things." Like, "Oh, by the way, digital identity, I know you want it. You're working on the procurement aspect of buying it. Here's the other peer group of yours that is already using it." So being able to have those conversations is really great with our customers. That very much drives the pipeline for upsell and cross-sell. And we don't see that, as Steven said, he's spot on. There is no one customer that buys 100% of everything we offer.
As we continue to add products to the platform, that just allows us to continue that upsell, cross-sell growth, which is why we've had such success with the consistency of that over the last several years. Our upsell, cross-sell number and new logo combined have been like clockwork for us because of that fact, because of the product investments, because of the go-to-market motion, and because of the verticalization.
Excellent, thank you. Now shifting to the base growth, which has understandably been referred as the potential wild card of the organic growth component or algo. Perhaps the most susceptible to macroeconomic activity or the general hiring environment or dynamics. But it accelerated to, I think, 6.7% in 2Q, with approximately half of that coming from customer-specific labor reshaping and screening initiatives. But I think underlying base still performed at the high end and above the long-term framework. Is there anything to be particularly mindful of in those dynamics, with those customer initiatives and what the underlying demand signals are? Then also lastly, the normalization, I think, in second half to 4Q. A few elements there obviously, but I'll leave it to you as to what to discuss.
Yeah, no. Look, as we mentioned earlier, it was a good, pleasant surprise to us, certainly on that half of base growth, roughly, that we'd allocate to those customer initiatives. You start to learn about those almost after the fact when you start talking to customers, like, "Why is your volume so high?" Joelle can provide more color too, but it's a variety of things, like you mentioned. We have customers who are doing internal reorganization or restructuring or repurposing of roles. Sometimes in certain customers, that's creating more than normal churn levels, right? Just having to replace the type of workers they have or move workers around or change workers out. When that happens, even if they're not necessarily adding to their total employee count and therefore net total economic employment, that churn over that short duration is a base catalyst for us.
Likewise, some of our customers were doing, to your point, Joelle, reshaping where they're changing the roles altogether, maybe to adapt to a tech core. Some of it's with geographic reasons, et cetera. But some of that resulted in rescreening because you're changing the roles of your workers, and when you brought someone in, their role was something, and you've changed it to something else, and you have that. Or some were harmonizing screening criteria across multiple segments of their business. So we just happened to see a few of those, some larger ones, some smaller ones, but all hit in Q2. Some of those will have a little bit of a longer tail to them. It could be beneficiaries in Q3.
Because individually, they're not long-term and customers aren't saying, "Hey, we're going to be doing this over and over again," we're not going to change our long-term model guidance and long-term guidance to, "Hey, this is now a part of it." What we also saw in the quarter, though, to your point is, look, you take half of 7% and say it's related to those customer issues, that still leaves 3% - 3.5% as just organic run rate, base improvement, base growth. That's a few things, right? We've talked about it a number of times, the value of representing a diversified set of verticals. We still have a core focus on the hourly worker, that blue-collar labor. There's a The Wall Street Journal article over the weekend that just talked about how strong the labor market is for that low-end labor right now.
There's still a good amount of churn in those workers. There's still a lot of demand for it. Our retail and transportation verticals, which have been doing well in this type of market for years. To Joelle's point, industrials, which has got some aerospace and defense in it, doing really well. We've even seen the parts of healthcare around nursing and staffing doing incredibly well, and even staffing in general. As those general staffers kind of evolve to that hourly worker approach too, and that blue-collar labor, those are all doing really well. I think the other storyline in Q2 is we didn't have many laggards, right? We've had some big detractors on base or bigger detractors on base that kind of offset any forward momentum with some backwards momentum. We've had healthcare having some sluggishness now for 12 months at least.
Medicare and Medicaid funding's been uncertain. We've now comped over that, and you've got relative stability in that sluggishness, and you're seeing those numbers improve. When we had modeled the year, rewind the clock six months, we had thought base was going to be on the negative side of neutral. We're now thinking it'll be slightly on the positive side of neutral, just given those tone changes in that hourly worker base. I don't know if 3%, still 3.5%, that's still above our long-term algo. I think there's a little bit of kind of pent-up demand, if you will, in that number .
That's one of the reasons we've always felt good about base long-term, not being the primary catalyst growth. Getting back to that stable point where it's no longer this large headwind that we have to face and then overcome with go-to-market success. It's at that positive neutral state where it's kind of a slight tailwind, and then it allows kind of the true power of our upsell, cross-sell, new logo, and retention pieces of the algorithm to really have those results shine through.
Very good. Thank you. Any final thoughts on what you are seeing from an employee movement turnover versus net employment creation? I know you are often asked about what you are seeing versus the key federal jobs or JOLTS data. No need to go into that because I understand that then quarters in there.
Well, I would say one of the reasons that we are seeing such positive base results versus maybe what you see in some of those other data studies, whether it is BLS or ADP or otherwise, A is how diversified our verticals are. But the fact that we are also focused on these enterprise-sized customers, these large Fortune 500, Fortune 1000. We define enterprise as $500,000 or more of annual contract value. You start to think about that is hiring thousands, tens of thousands, some of our customers, hundreds of thousands or more workers every year. These are the biggest companies, so they are less susceptible to these short-term storylines. We saw some of this unfold, whether it be tariffs or fuel prices now or et cetera. Much more strategic and long-term.
To have a diversified base of enterprise-sized customers is really allowing us to feel good about where the hiring market is. Again, I think the hourly, that base level worker, the transportation driver, delivery guy, your retail clerks, your manufacturing, industrials, construction, et cetera. There is still a lot of demand in hospitality for those labor forces and a lot of churn because these inflationary pressures that you see have caused workers to either change jobs for more money, seek multiple employment, job stacking that we have talked about, where a worker may have a 9:00 to 5:00 and then either pick up a second shift or pick up a weekend shift somewhere else or pick up gig opportunities.
We are seeing more and more of those low-end workers having to do multiple jobs, which every time they seek one of those alternate or supplemental employments, that is good for our screening volume. Even if it is not changing the calculus of total number of net employed and total unemployment in the country, that churn and those forces are certainly helpful to a stable and then growing base.
Very good. Thank you. Mindful of the time, just one on margins and then one on capital allocation, and then two very quick follow-ups that have come in from the audience. So at the adjusted EBITDA margin, I think 28.6% in 2Q, framework target's 31%-32%. Help us just think, Steven, if we may ask, please, for a bridge and a contribution, say, from Sterling synergies, revenue scale, package, digital monitoring, AI, a return of hiring volumes, et cetera. Just a bridge to that margins and how to think about that, please.
Yeah. Look, even the 28.6% was ahead of our model for Q2, to be honest, just because we've seen that broad-based growth, which is what we're expecting over the long term, to get back to a more diversified vertical set. We added some major customer and upsell, cross-sell new logo wins last year that were in the healthcare and transportation space. Higher mix of out-of-pocket that did, I don't want to say artificially, but certainly drove down the net margins from a percentage standpoint. Great wins, great revenue, great pricing on them, just the mix of out-of-pocket fees changed a little bit. But we're seeing that normalize out. To your point, from where we are today to get to that long-term model range of 31%-32%, we still have a lot of flow through from synergies we see in the P&L.
We've actioned a lot, but haven't realized all of them yet. We're starting to action them, and then the remainder of the synergies to get to our final place by end of year will be coming in Q3, but more likely Q4. So you'll see that final synergy benefit flow through in 2027. Also, as we continue to grow, we've got growth expectations for the next 10 quarters to get to the endpoint of those targets. As we grow, we've got an incredibly scalable P&L. We talked about how scalable our fulfillment functions were in terms of the excess volumes we saw in Q2. But our product and tech, our sales and marketing, our G&A, those stay very flat even as revenue grows.
We have to maybe add a little bit on customer success and sales to make sure we can achieve the growth rate, but those are very modest in the scheme of the growth of the revenue. We've just got a DNA of ordinary course cost savings. So we've got a playbook of areas that we need to leverage. As I mentioned at the onset, moving away from RPA and machine learning to AI and getting more workflows automated. That's core FA DNA, like we talked about on your first question. Those will come through and further support. But the main two areas you're going to see is that synergy leverage finally fully realized in P&L, and then leveraging our growth, and then add on some savings from some other opportunities we have. We feel good about hitting those marks.
Very good. Thank you. I think there is, what was it, $166 million of post-Sterling debt repayment, leverage 3.7 times, nearly $40 million of repurchases under $100 million authorization. Just remind us on how to think about prioritization and balance of deleveraging, buybacks, organic investment, and even strategic flexibility.
Yeah, certainly. Look, we are certainly focused on getting the leverage down. We know 3.5 is kind of a bright line for some investors. Ultimately, our long-term target is below 3 to get to that 2 - 3 times range. We have a really good glide path to get there. At the same time, we have the fortunes of being a high cash flow generator, generated almost $75 million of operating cash flow last quarter. Really have a very efficient balance sheet. So we have the ability to be a little opportunistic when it comes to capital allocation, right? We did not have First Advantage stock at $9 in our bingo cards at the beginning of the year, but when that opportunity presented itself, we were able to easily put some of that capital allocation towards share repurchases.
Create good shareholder value by buying back, to your point, almost $40 million a share at a below $12 price on average. So create a lot of good shareholder value as we were able to execute that plan. Look, we were able to stay balanced and through that process, repay debt and we were paying down $25 million before last quarter. We were able to buy back some shares in Q2 and then upsize that to $45 million last quarter.
So looking forward, we will continue to be opportunistic and make sure that we drive capital in the way that shareholders are accretive. Obviously want to get leverage into what is a market-accepted range, and we have great line of sight to doing that. As that journey progresses there, if there are opportunities to be opportunistic, to be honest, we will pass those up and make sure that we are able to ultimately drive a healthier First Advantage in the process.
Got it. Thank you. Anything to be-- We have your assessment of competitive dynamics within the industry. I know you have spoken to, and this is obviously something we could spend an entire call on, but not having seen any disruption or reduction in activity from AI. Not having seen and there being a very well-established moat to potential AI disintermediation. Could we just have your assessment of competitive dynamics with some thoughts from an AI standpoint?
Yeah, I think the first thing that everyone should keep in mind is how regulated this industry ultimately is. I think when we rewind the clock six, nine months ago, there was the question of what's to prevent someone from bias coding their own background screening bot and doing it on their own. But people aren't mindful of the fact that, A, in the U.S. we have FCRA. Globally, there's all sorts of other regimes. In the U.S., you have supplemental laws in a number of states. I think it's over 30 now that either have laws or are working on laws that limit or prohibit the use of AI in the hiring process. You can't just bulk replace what we do with pure AI.
Even when we implement automation technologies, there's proper protocol to make sure that there's a human decision maker, that you're not running afoul of those regulatory items. People have to remember the data landscape. It's so fractured, and also not free. You can't just say because it's courthouse data, it's publicly available. It is available to the public, but at a cost. In the state of New York, they charge $95 for every name you search. You can't just go build a massive database overnight, without expending billions and billions of billions of dollars, maybe for naught, because then you still have to verify things at the primary source for your FCRA compliance and other matters.
We like to see ourselves as a leader in terms of implementing the automation technology and have in a thoughtful manner and a compliant manner in the screening business. It's not one that you can just wholesale outsource to your AI agent and let them go do. Otherwise, you're going to run afoul of a whole host of legal and compliance issues as you operate that.
And then, any changes in competitive dynamics within the industry?
No, look, I think the biggest change in our industry in the last few years is First Advantage in acquiring Sterling and kind of building a clear market leader. We feel really good about how we're positioned, about where we're putting our technology investments, making sure that we're staying at the front of the curve versus kind of being surprised by technological advances in the industry. First Advantage and Sterling were the only two background screeners talking about digital identity a couple of years ago before we acquired them, and obviously we feel really good about where we're taking that product and how the market's moving there.
I think the short answer is no. I think, like I alluded to earlier, our view is it'll be harder and harder for those smaller players to keep up with the technology advancements and all of the things that we're talking about. Over time, that just creates a more effective, more powerful go-to-market message from the market leader.
Very good. Thank you both for all of this. It's been incredibly insightful, and very well done. We, and obviously the market, I think, have been impressed by the recent execution and momentum. But I'll just leave it to you guys if there's anything you would potentially like to close with.
No, look, thanks for having us, of course. We're looking forward to seeing you guys in New York again next week and meeting with some of the investors I'm sure are on the call. Look, I think as you heard from us, we're incredibly proud of the First Advantage story. Well, frankly, all of our results, but certainly notably over the last 12 months or so.
You look at our LTM results, the growth we've been able to drive and the consistency of those results, despite what you might be reading in the news or seeing in some of those data sources, to consistently deliver controllable growth, reps off cross-sell, new logo, strong retention, and now seeing obviously, as we talked about, strong base results and then continuing to yield that through to bottom-line profitability, EBITDA, and per-share earnings and EPS. We feel like we're well-positioned and looking forward to keeping the discussion with you guys going next week.
Excellent. Thank you both so much. Very well done.
Thanks, Ronan. Appreciate it.
Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.
Thank you.