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Earnings Call: Q1 2017

Jan 31, 2017

Steve Weber
VP of Investor Relations and Treasurer, Fair Isaac Corporation

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining FICO's first quarter earnings call. I'm Steve Weber, Vice President of Investor Relations, and I'm joined today by our CEO, Will Lansing, and our CFO, Mike Pung. Today, we issued a press release that describes financial results compared to the prior year. On this call, management will also discuss results in comparison to the prior quarter in order to facilitate an understanding of the run rate of our business. Certain statements made in this presentation may be characterized as forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements involve many uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Information concerning these uncertainties is contained in the company's filings with the SEC, in particular in the risk factors and forward-looking statements portion of such filings.

Copies are available from the SEC, from the FICO website, or from our investor relations team. This call also includes statements regarding certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the company's earnings release and Regulation G schedule issued today for a reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure. The earnings release and the Regulation G schedule are available on the investor relations page of the company's website at fico.com or on the SEC's website at sec.gov. A replay of this webcast will be available through January 31st, 2018. With that, I'll turn the call over to Will Lansing.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thank you, Steve, and thank you everyone for joining us for our first quarter earnings call. I'm pleased to say we're off to a good start, delivering solid growth across our portfolio. In our first quarter, we reported revenues of $220 million, an increase of 10% over the same period last year. We delivered $38 million of GAAP net income and GAAP earnings of $1.16 per share. Our GAAP earnings and EPS were positively affected by the adoption of a new accounting standard, which Mike will detail. Adjusting for that impact, GAAP net income and EPS were both up 7% from last year. We delivered $33 million of non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS of $1.03 per share, both up 4% from the same period last year. I'm pleased that we're delivering growth throughout our business.

Both our scores and decision management software segments were up 6% over the same period last year. Our application segment was up 12% over the same period last year. We're continuing to see positive signs in our cloud business, where revenues were up 14% and bookings were up 48% versus last year. In fact, it was the second-largest quarter ever for our cloud business. The pipeline for our solutions remains strong. As we sign more deals and grow our customer base, we are building a strong transactional revenue stream with recurring predictable revenues. We are seeing more evidence every quarter for increased market acceptance of our decision management software. Bookings this quarter were up 31% over last year and represented the largest quarter ever in that segment.

The investments we've made in distribution over the last year are beginning to pay off, and we expect solid growth in this space moving forward. In the scores business, we continue to make great strides towards maximizing the value of this cornerstone franchise. It's been 2 years since we announced the deal with Experian to add FICO scores to their premium consumer offerings. The first year of that partnership was dedicated to rolling out scores across the Experian platform. We continued last year to fine-tune the program and pursue other opportunities with Experian. That led to an agreement we signed this month to further expand our relationship. This new agreement broadens the content we provide to Experian's premium consumer offerings. It also includes licensing the FICO Score as a key component in Experian's direct lead generation business.

We believe in the value that this lead gen business can create for consumers and lenders by taking the friction out of the process. By including FICO scores, the scores that are used by lenders to originate new loans, this lead gen business can instantly match consumers with the best pre-qualified offers. Furthermore, offering FICO scores can produce higher response rates, better conversion rates, and increased consumer satisfaction. We're excited about the possibilities of this expanded partnership. We are also pursuing several other meaningful opportunities in the scores space. In partnership with Experian, we are offering consumers world-class financial products in both the lead gen channel and the premium channel. On the B2B side, we're continuing to see positive results. Originations continue to be strong. We are seeing account growth in account management scores as well.

In a rising rate environment, it's important to remember that our biggest point of leverage on the B2B side is in credit cards, which drives nearly two-thirds of our B2B scores revenue. Unlike other market participants, we price mortgage scores at the same rate as other credit card scores. Because of this, our exposure to mortgage is roughly only 10% of B2B scores revenue. We're less affected by mortgage market headwinds. With the current momentum as well as visibility into new revenue sources, we expect scores growth to accelerate in the second half of the year. I'll share some summary thoughts later. Now I'd like to turn the call back over to Mike for further financial details.

Steve Weber
VP of Investor Relations and Treasurer, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Will. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll emphasize 3 points in my comments. First, we delivered $220 million of revenue, an increase of $20 million, or 10% year-over-year. Cloud revenue was $50 million, up 14% from last year. Second, we delivered $38 million of GAAP net income, which included the impact of adopting ASU 2016-09, the new accounting standard related to share-based compensation. Finally, we had $28 million of free cash flow this quarter. We used $30 million to repurchase shares. I'll begin by breaking the revenue down into our 3 reporting segments. Starting with applications, revenues were $135 million, up 12% versus the same period last year.

Mike Pung
CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

We also had a strong quarter in fraud solutions, originations, and our customer communication services product lines. Our application bookings of $62 million represented an increase of 11% from the prior year. In the decision management software segment, revenues were $26 million, up 6% versus the prior year. The increase this quarter was driven by services revenues in Xpress Optimization. Bookings were again strong in this segment at $26 million, representing a 31% increase over the same period last year. As Will said, it was the largest bookings quarter ever in this segment. Finally, in our score segment, revenues were $59 million, up 6% from the same period last year. On the B2B side, we're up 8% versus the same period a year ago and are continuing to see some positive trends.

The B2C revenues were up a modest 3% from the same quarter last year, but we expect that to accelerate in the back half of the year as the new opportunities Will discussed go online. Looking at revenue by region, this quarter, 77% of total revenues were derived from the Americas. Our EMEA region generated 16%, and the remaining 7% was from Asia-Pacific. Recurring revenues derived from transactional and maintenance sources for the quarter represented 70% of total revenue. Consulting and implementation revenues were 20% of total, and license revenues were 10% of total revenue. Bookings this quarter were $96 million, up 12% from the prior year quarter. We generated $21 million of current period revenues on those bookings for a yield of about 21%. The weighted average term for our bookings was 27 months this quarter. We continue to book more large deals.

This quarter, we had 13 deals over $1 million versus 10 in the same period last year, and we booked seven deals over $3 million compared to a total of 10 all of last year. We continue to drive strong bookings growth in our cloud-based products and built more backlog this quarter as our transactional bookings were up 21% over last year. Operating expenses totaled $185 million this quarter, compared to $191 million in the fourth quarter. The investments we are making in delivery, support, and infrastructure are proceeding as we discussed on our last call. As you can see in our Reg G schedule, our non-GAAP operating margin was 24% for the first quarter. We expect that operating margin to be between 26%-28% for the full year.

GAAP net income this quarter was $38 million and included a reduction to income tax expense of $17 million, or $0.53 per share, associated with the adoption of the Accounting Standard Update 2016-09. Non-GAAP net income was $33 million for the quarter, up 4% from the same quarter last year. Under the new accounting standard, excess tax benefits or deficiencies generated upon the settlement or exercise of stock awards are no longer recognized as additional paid-in capital, but instead recognized as a reduction or increase to income tax expense. Estimating this item is difficult because it's dependent upon our future stock price in relation to the fair value of our awards. However, the largest impact typically happens in our first fiscal quarter because our annual grant vests in December. We expect the quarterly impact going forward to be much smaller over the remainder of the year.

As a result of this change, the effective tax rate was -32% this quarter. We expect the unaffected or normalized tax rate to be about 29%-30% for the full year before any impact of the accounting standard. The free cash flow for the quarter was $28 million, which included the impact of the new accounting standard. On a comparable basis, free cash flow was $46 million in the prior year. For the trailing 12 months, reflecting this impact, free cash flow was $168 million. Turning to the balance sheet, we had $88 million of cash on the balance sheet at the end of the quarter. Our total debt is $621 million, with a weighted average interest rate of 4.1%, and our ratio of total net debt to adjusted EBITDA this quarter is 2.3 times, well below the covenant level of three times.

During the quarter, we returned $30 million in excess cash to our investors, repurchasing 258,000 shares at an average price of $117.91. We repurchased another 158,000 shares in January at an average price of $122.90. We have about $180 million remaining on the latest board authorization and continue to view share repurchases as an attractive use of our cash. We also continue to actively evaluate opportunities to acquire technologies and products that advance our strategy and strengthen our portfolio and competitive position. Finally, we are updating our previously provided guidance to adjust for the first quarter impact of this new accounting standard. We are not including any impact in the future quarters until they are known. We are now guiding for the full fiscal year as follows. Revenues remain unchanged at approximately $925 million.

GAAP net income, previously guided at $109 million, is now adjusted by this quarter's excess tax benefit of $17 million to a new total of approximately $126 million. GAAP earnings per share is now approximately $3.92. Non-GAAP net income remains unchanged at $158 million, and non-GAAP EPS is also unchanged at $4.92 per share. With that, I'll turn it back over to Will for a final comment.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Mike Pung. As I said in my opening remarks, I believe we are well-positioned for success as we move into 2017 and beyond. Our FICO scores business has never been stronger and is now beginning to build market share on the consumer side to match the dominance we have had for decades among financial institutions. Now we're beginning to see the tangible impact of the investments we've made in our software business. We've developed products, and we've invested in sales resources. Now we're producing higher bookings and building a backlog of recurring transactional revenue. We're still working on getting our distribution up to speed as we train and deploy newly hired sales resources. We're gaining momentum, and we're confident we're on the right track. I'll turn the call back now to Steve for Q&A.

Steve Weber
VP of Investor Relations and Treasurer, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Will. This concludes our prepared remarks. We're ready now to take your questions. Sarah, please open the line.

Operator

At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik from Barclays. Your line is open.

Manav Patnaik
Analyst, Barclays

Thank you. Good evening, gentlemen. The first question I had was, in terms of your expanded agreements with Experian and your commentary on B2C growth should accelerate because of that, could you help us maybe just understand the change in the scope of that agreement? I know you said it was mainly lead gen. Does that include the Discover work that you're doing with those guys?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

There's really two pieces to the expansion. One piece has to do with broader use of FICO scores with Experian's paid products. As you know, there's more than one FICO Score, and most of the Experian premium products were wrapped around using a single FICO Score as opposed to a broader set of scores. The new agreement contemplates the broader use of FICO scores so that consumers can get effectively a dashboard of multiple FICO scores and have a more comprehensive view of their credit position. That's one part of it. We've given Experian a great deal of flexibility to construct the products in the way that they see is most valuable to consumers.

It's an expanded flexibility that we've tried to drive here so that the consumer winds up with a better offering, Experian gets a better offering, and we obviously benefit from that. The second part of it has to do with the lead gen piece, and that's a business that we have contemplated for several years now as we've watched other players in the space build lead gen programs. We have always believed that FICO participation in a lead gen program would be more valuable to the lenders than the offerings by these other players, because there's a lot less breakage and friction in going from a FICO score for a prospect to an offer of credit. Working together with Experian, we're now prepared to offer a lead gen offering to the market that uses a FICO score as opposed to so-called education scores.

That's really the second part of it.

Manav Patnaik
Analyst, Barclays

Does that include the Experian Discover partnership, or is that separate?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

That's separate.

Manav Patnaik
Analyst, Barclays

Okay, it's an expanded Experian and then the Discover work you're doing. Okay. I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much, but your commentary on evaluating M&A options to technology and so forth, is that just standard commentary, or is there something in the pipeline that we should be looking out for?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

That is our standard commentary. We continue to love buying back our own stock, and we set a very high bar for M&A activity. At the same time, we're always on the prowl, always looking for opportunities. As you know, and as we've said many times, the alternatives to investing in our own business are obviously being held to a pretty high standard because we're so happy with our own prospects.

Manav Patnaik
Analyst, Barclays

Got it. Just last question for me. Any initial read-throughs or comments that are coming from your customers on the impacts from the new administration that you would want to point out?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

No, I think it's a little early to say, the obvious elements have to do with if there's a reform in regulation that eases the burden on our bank customers, they're likely to benefit from that. If they do, we will.

Manav Patnaik
Analyst, Barclays

Okay. All right. Thanks a lot, guys.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Bill Warmington from Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Good evening, everyone.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Hi, Bill.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Congratulations on the strong quarter and especially on the strong bookings. I wanted to start out by asking about what's new on the affinity side. That's an opportunity that you guys have talked about in the past, and see if we can get an update there.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Yeah, Bill, we are obviously in discussions with others about doing additional affinity programs and work. Those discussions are underway. We're not in a position to announce anything yet, but I think that announcements are coming soon. We feel pretty good about our progress in the affinity space. I guess, connected with that, a little bit different from affinity, but related, is our activity in the paid education space, where we have been exploring paid programs that go well beyond the free Open Access program. Some of those are imminent as well.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

I've heard this referred to as Open Access Plus, sort of a hybrid between the traditional credit monitoring and the Open Access program. Is that the way to think of that?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

I think that's a way to think about it. I think we're careful to distinguish between the two only because Open Access is a completely free program designed to let the consumer benefit from a score that the bank is already purchasing. This program, it does go above and beyond Open Access, but we don't call it an Open Access program because it's not a free program. It's a paid program. It's paid by the bank, not by the consumer, but it's still a paid program.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Discover had made some interesting comments on their call last week. It sounded like they're planning to increase their marketing investment to support an acceleration in the credit card loan growth from, looks like they did about 4.7% growth in 2016, and they're talking about taking it up 5.5%-7.5% in 2017. The other comment they made was that about 75% of that loan growth is coming from newer card members. I wanted to ask how that was going in so far as you could talk about it, and then also ask whether you're in active dialogue with other issuers to replicate that type of an offering.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

We can't really comment on Discover except to say that we have a program with them today that we're very happy with, and we continue to work on expanding it. Don't have anything to announce today, but we're obviously always looking to expand and broaden our partnership with them. Do we have similar kinds of things in discussion with other players? Yes, we do.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Separately with Experian's Right Offer, you'd mentioned that goal of better matching consumers with a pre-qualified credit offer with the thought that that'll produce a better response rate and better conversion rate for the lenders. I guess my question is, how is that going? Is the goal of the program actually being met? Is it actually resulting in better conversion? How many lenders are working with it, and what kind of a revenue model is it using? Because it sounds like it's a different model than the traditional per subscriber per month basis.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

It's early days to provide data. Our views about the lower breakage for lenders and the higher utility for consumers that comes out of using a FICO Score versus a non-FICO Score, we don't have data to present. It's more a kind of a logic thing where we just believe that if you give a consumer a real FICO Score and that's the basis for making the decision on which the credit offer's made, there's going to be less breakage. That seems like kind of a basic. We don't have data to share there yet. With respect to the revenue model, it is a rev share kind of an arrangement. I can't go into a lot of detail on it, but basically we have completely aligned interests with Experian on this, and it's a rev share model.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Got it. A question on the DMS telco deal that you guys had announced this past May. I think that had planned to go live in November, and I wanted to ask how that had performed during the peak holiday season, and also ask about the next piece of that implementation on the marketing piece, how that was looking. Ultimately how we should think about modeling the revenue for that.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Just to take those questions in order, we have gone live. We've gone live without a hitch. We ran smoothly right through the holidays without any kind of outages or failures, although I will say that we were tested. That's natural and this represents a pretty big volume and a big infrastructure play for us. We had a lot of work to do to make sure that we were up to snuff. We sailed through it, and we're happy with the results. Too early to talk about the marketing. We're feeling pretty good about the way that entire operation has gone.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Got it. One housekeeping question, just on the B2C growth, how was the growth within the myFICO piece of that?

Mike Pung
CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

This quarter, Bill, year-over-year, we had 3% growth across all of B2C, and myFICO was about mid-single digits, and all the rest collectively was a little bit shy of that.

Bill Warmington
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Got it. Thank you very much.

Operator

Again, if you would like to ask a question, press star and the number 1 on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from line of Matthew Golenko from Susquehanna. Your line is open.

Matthew Golenko
Analyst, Susquehanna

Hey, good afternoon, guys. You called out strength in customer communications. Curious, was there just a single large deal that was pushing on that, or did you have a number of deals? Just generally, what's your outlook for that product?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

It's across the board. It's not a single deal. That's ratable revenue, it kind of marches upwards smoothly. At least we hope it does, it is now. That's been a multi-year journey for us, getting all of the offering onto a single code base, getting the infrastructure in place globally so that we can support customers around the globe, leveraging AWS to get to places that we don't have operations. It's been a journey. Right now, we feel like we're just hitting our stride. We think we have the best offering in the market by a fairly wide margin. Customers seem to believe that too. It's gone very smoothly, but it's not one single thing. It's kind of everything working together, good execution across the board.

Matthew Golenko
Analyst, Susquehanna

Got it. If I'm not mistaken, did you acquire that asset?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

We did.

Matthew Golenko
Analyst, Susquehanna

If I'm right about that. I think you had.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

It was a company. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Matthew Golenko
Analyst, Susquehanna

I was going to say, I think you had, when you made the acquisition, it was somewhere around a low double-digit growth rate, maybe around 15%-20%. You talked a little bit about the size of the market for you there, but can you talk a little bit about, I know you said you're hitting your stride. Is there a substantial addressable market ahead of you on that? Do you see that as being a product that can drive your software business over the next couple of years?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Yeah, good question. Okay, just a bit of history. The company was called Adeptra. We bought it a bit over four years ago. It was a good growing company when we bought it. It had reached some scale limits on the infrastructure on which it was operated. I would say that we spent several years in a retrenchment mode. I don't think it's just kind of post-merger integration blues. I think we really had a lot of rework to do on the code base and on the infrastructure. We really didn't have tremendous growth for several years in the middle. I feel like we're back onto a double-digit growing kind of trajectory. Where's the growth coming from? It's multiple areas. There's the growth that comes out of appending customer communication services to our existing franchises. That takes primarily two forms.

One is fraud, where we have a very strong franchise. Now we have an opportunity to talk directly to our customer's customers about fraud alerts and, "Is that really you?" "Did you make this transaction?" Those kinds of things. Then, a second franchise where we have natural extension and have a lot of volume is in collections and recovery, where our Debt Manager 9 products offering is naturally complemented by an ability to talk directly to our customer's customers. Of course, there's a feedback loop there that improves the efficacy of the outcomes. Those are the kind of the more natural things for us where we just build and extend from businesses we're already in.

It does have the potential to open up doors in new areas like marketing and particularly since we now have this DMS platform that allows our customers to use the same data that, from multiple data feeds, but the same data to inform different kinds of activities, whether it's originations or line management or marketing solutions or customer communications. We now can append this customer communications service to many other things. We anticipate the demand will just grow beyond even the two franchises where it's strong right now.

Matthew Golenko
Analyst, Susquehanna

Got it. Thanks. Maybe a left field kind of question here, but insofar as you have a lot of products that you're, I think to some degree, experimenting with or testing that aren't necessarily core at this point. If you find kind of a non-core product that you think you could better monetize through divesting the product line, do you think about that at all? Or do you still feel that everything you have today is better taken to market under the FICO umbrella?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Boy, that's a great question, Matthew. We have a fairly disciplined process here. We've adopted GE's S1, S2 strategy process where we review all of our businesses twice a year, kind of mid-year with a look to what the three-year outlook looks like. We look at the competitive environment and the market and the total addressable market, and what the headwinds are, and how strong our product is and what its prospects look like. Then we come back towards the end of the year, where we tighten down and lock up the budget for the subsequent year. That's the S2 part of the S1, S2 process. In that, we kind of have the buttoned-up tactical next year plan.

In the course of that strategy work, we always evaluate whether it makes sense for us to continue to be in the business, whether the business would be more valuable in someone else's hands, and whether we're adequately resourcing some of our young, not yet big and wildly profitable businesses. Of course, that's a challenge for a company like ours because we have prospects that are really tremendous, far more than we can effectively resource. I think we recognize that we have this kind of feast of riches in analytics, and we can't participate in all the great opportunities we have around us. I would say that the businesses that we're in, we have a half dozen or so core franchises where we're typically number 1 or number 2 in the business. If we're not number 1 or number 2, we believe we have the industry-leading product.

There's only a couple of exceptions to that in our portfolio. Where there's an exception, we're usually in it for a different reason or because we believe that there's an opportunity for us to improve it. So I would say that's a long way of saying that we're pretty happy with the portfolio. There's nothing in the portfolio today that we're prepared to divest or that we're seriously contemplating divesting. There are some growth opportunities that have to be managed carefully because we can't do everything we'd like to do, and so we have to pick our winners. For example, we're putting a lot of investment into cyber right now. That's a money-losing business for FICO because we're pouring in resources and the revenue's not there yet.

We have every expectation that that's going to be a great business in several years, so we are resourcing it appropriately. Of course, that's going to crowd out some other opportunities, and that's what it is doing. Those are the hard decisions we have to make.

Matthew Golenko
Analyst, Susquehanna

Got it. I appreciate that color and congrats on the quarter.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Brett Huff from Stephens. Your line is open.

Blake Anderson
Analyst, Stephens

Hey, guys. Congrats on a nice quarter. This is Blake Anderson on for Brett. In applications, I know you briefly touched on your customer communications. Can you size the license sales and fraud management solutions? Was there any outsized deals in fraud for you to call out?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Just one. We had a scheduled license renewal in fraud that hit this quarter. The scheduled renewal was quarter 2, and it got signed by end of December at the request of the customer. Beyond that, it was kind of routine business in the numbers.

Blake Anderson
Analyst, Stephens

Okay, thanks. Your gross margins were down just a little bit year-over-year. Anything to call out there that was driving that?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Not really. The mix of the margin is often dependent upon the mix of how much ratable and services business we have in comparison to license revenue and scores revenue, the latter being higher margin, the former being lower margin. We had a higher mix of services revenue because of some of the deals we booked last year. Beyond that, nothing.

Blake Anderson
Analyst, Stephens

Okay. For the margin guidance for the year, are you still attributing that range primarily to your investments in delivery and cloud infrastructure? Or is there anything that's kind of popped up in the 1Q that might be driving that we should pay attention to more throughout the rest of the year?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

No, nothing's changed from what we said in November when we set the guidance. It really is tied to two things. It's tied to the additional investments we built into our budget that we're making with respect to our infrastructure and our cloud. That's number one. Number two, it's tied to the ultimate mix of business we have between the lower margin ratable and services business compared to the higher margin license and scores. Thus the 300 basis point range. Nothing has changed from November.

Blake Anderson
Analyst, Stephens

All right. Lastly, how does paying down debt kind of stack up in your uses of cash priorities? I know you said share repos, you're number one, you mentioned comments on M&A, how do you guys think about paying down debt?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

The current debt we have, the blend is at about 4.1%, it's pretty cheap debt. More than half of it is in a revolver, which is under 200 basis points. I guess we could pay that down, we think we have a better use of cash than paying down 2% debt. On the other hand, the rest of it is in term notes that have scheduled maturities, if we pay those off early, we have a penalty, a make-whole penalty. As a result, we have just simply let the maturities happen, and we've rolled them into the revolver.

At least under the current kind of regulatory environment and tax environment, what we have been doing is what we will continue to do until we reach a point where we think it's sensible to refinance the entire debt structure, and we're a little ways away from that, probably a year away from that. We don't really think about it as paying off debt. We like our leverage where it is in this 2 to 2.5 times area. To the extent that we have maturities, we replace it with lower cost revolving debt. At some point, we could reevaluate that equation. I wouldn't expect a very big difference in our leverage position going forward.

Blake Anderson
Analyst, Stephens

Thanks a lot.

Operator

Again, if you would like to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Adam Klauber from William Blair. Your line is open.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Hi, good afternoon, thanks. When we look at the bookings, could you give us a rough idea on the decision management? How many of those came from sort of the existing core of financials versus newer verticals?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Yeah, I don't have the exact numbers, Adam. Give me a second. It's probably this quarter more slightly weighed towards financial services than it is outside of financial services. Of our total bookings, I can tell you 60, 68, 69% were with our kind of core financial services business. The remainder was outside. As it relates to DMS, I just don't know that level of detail offhand.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Sure.

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

It's probably similar.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Okay, that's helpful. Just following up on the margin, just on an absolute basis, as you mentioned, you've been investing in sales and delivery, and expenses are up compared to a year ago, but it looks like they're flattening out. Is that a way for us to think about it? Are they at a better run rate today compared to a year ago, but you won't see big jumps up over the rest of the year?

Mike Pung
CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Yeah. Our current run rate's around $185 million, plus or minus.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Yep.

Mike Pung
CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

You usually see a little bit of uptick in our second quarter, the one we're in right now, simply because our annual salary increase happens in December. You see the first full impact of a 2%-3% salary increase in our fiscal second quarter. Oddly enough, you see a payroll tax reset. Most people have hit their payroll tax maximum by the end of the year, and it gets reset January 1. We see actually $2 million-$3 million of an increase in that. That will put the number up a little bit higher than $185. We're locked in in this range and are managing our business at that level as we pursue more top-line growth.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Great. That sounds like more normalized growth going forward then. Sort of jumps we've seen over the last couple of quarters then.

Mike Pung
CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Yeah.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Okay. As far as the Experian, obviously great sign. Is that a couple quarters till we'll see some of the impact from those new agreements, or can we see that more near term?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

I think a couple quarters is pretty near term, but I think you'll see it grow throughout the year. It's going to start smaller and ramp up.

Mike Pung
CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Remember, it's tied to Experian's marketing budgets and marketing plans, which are outside of our area of control. It can vary, the speed and pace at which, basically tied to their new fiscal year coming up here in April.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Right. Okay. As far as cyber, you mentioned, and obviously, that's a long-term effort and it's still very early. Any chance we'll see even a little revenue this year, or is that probably more of a 2018 type occurrence?

Will Lansing
President and CEO, Fair Isaac Corporation

It's really more of a 2018 occurrence, although little bits of revenue are trickling in. There's a lot of interest. We have a lot of conversations going on. We've got a little bit of business going. We've got business going with our iboss partnership. Things are coming along, but it's way premature to expect any kind of revenue in 2017. Could it be meaningful in 2018? It'll be visible. It'll be visible in 2018, meaningful in 2019.

Adam Klauber
Analyst, William Blair

Okay, great. That's great to hear. Thanks, guys.

Mike Pung
CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thanks, Adam.

Operator

There are no further questions in the queue at this time. I will now turn the call back over to the presenters.

Mike Pung
CFO, Fair Isaac Corporation

Thank you. This concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.