All right. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Manav Patnaik, and I cover information services with Barclays. We're very pleased to have with us here today, Chris Cartwright, who's the CEO of TransUnion. So Chris, thank you for being here.
Welcome.
Chris, just, you know, maybe just the first question, is, you know, just tied to the macros. Obviously, there's a lot of debate out there on the rate environment and what needs to happen, but you guys have a very, you know, unique view on the consumer, at least. And so from your perspective, you know, where are we, I guess? You know, I don't want to use the word cycle, but I guess, where are we in the cycle, if that's how you look at it?
Sure. So, you know, commenting first, you know, the macro things that we, you know, we're informed of by the market, and they're the things that we see uniquely in our data set around origination volumes and delinquencies and the like. I would say that the consumer and household finances are still in pretty good shape, although they have been under pressure since the Fed started aggressively increasing rates in the second quarter of 2022. Employment is still high, although job growth, less robust, if you will, and employment has ticked up a bit. And while the consumers had to endure price inflation over this period, there have been a lot of offsetting wage increases.
And I don't know that every segment is entirely whole, but at the lower end, in the middle parts of the job spectrum, there have been some pretty considerable wage increases that offset. But of course, higher interest rates means higher debt servicing costs on any debt that's existing and is floating, and consumers have certainly felt that pressure. And what we've seen over this period is, I would say, an overall downward trend in origination volumes. Exacerbated, of course, by mortgage, which has fallen off a cliff, and we think is, like, 60% below its trend line at this point. But really, the only category that held up well is card and card originations, until in recent quarters, that started to decline.
Where I think we are is after the, after the very difficult third quarter that the industry and we faced in 2023, that was the result of both these macro pressures on households, but also disruption in the deposit base amongst lenders around Silicon Valley and safety and soundness concerns, if you like. It feels like we've hit a floor, and for the last three quarters, we've kind of been bouncing in and around this level of muted but stable origination activity within this context of a consumer that's under pressure from macro trends. Where I think we're at now is, you know, the Fed has super strongly indicated that they're going to make a rate reduction. We may be entering an environment where we can get some rate cuts, and I think those cuts mean consumers, the pressure on the household starts to alleviate.
And also, refinancing opportunities are going to arise in multiple categories, not just mortgage, but auto loans. And those consumers that are revolving a significant amount of credit debt, and many of them are, should have an opportunity to refinance that through debt consolidation, perhaps through the fintech segment that is going to get revitalized with lower rates.
Got it. And, you know, you pointed out last year in the third quarter, that kind of came as a surprise, I guess, towards the end there. And I think you already pointed out a couple of differences, but just to reiterate, like this time around versus last year, you know, is it just that the consumer is expecting lower rates or... And there's less of that deposit outflow pressure, or is there something else you would call out?
Um, yeah-
The macro environment today versus-
Oh, why do I feel it's more favorable?
Yeah.
in this third quarter than last third quarter?
Yeah.
Well, first, you know, you're right. Lending volumes fell off a cliff in September of last year, right? And so far, we're, you know, comfortable with what we're seeing in the third quarter of this year versus the guide. I think deposit stability amongst the mid-tier and the community banks is the big difference, right? And last year, what happened is, you had this disruption caused by Silicon Valley and some other stresses within the banking segment in the second quarter, but you still had an inventory of loans in process, but new originations really slowed as banks began to both husband their deposit base against, you know, potential instability, and it's the deposit base that was already under pressure because it was starting to migrate to fixed income. Since then, those pressures have alleviated.
Most of the banks have rebuilt their deposit bases to the prior levels, and they're going to have to put that capital to work increasingly. So I think that's why we feel so much better in this third quarter, and also the fact that we've had three quarters of relative stability up until now.
Got it. If I can just hone in on a couple of the categories. So starting with auto, you know, you've already got a couple of questions, I think you said about, you know, how I reported this morning, talking about delinquencies, rising credit, worst thing. Is there anything that you're seeing on your end that would suggest this is an increasing worry on the auto side?
Honestly, not sure. That's hot off the press news.
Yeah.
I've been in meetings this morning, although I have heard about it. I mean, look, we have seen delinquencies normalizing over this rate adjustment period. They went from being unrealistically low because of all the benefits of low interest rates and fiscal stimulus and forbearance and all of that, to more normalized levels across the multiple lending categories, right? Mortgage, consumer, auto, and bank cards. It felt like they were stabilizing. Even though the delinquency was increasing, it was still within tolerance. Then overall, you know, if you step back, household leverage is still very manageable against historic standards. I can't really comment about anything new in auto. We haven't seen it up until now.
Got it. And then let's just put mortgage to the side for a second, but you alluded earlier that once rates get cut, many categories will benefit. Can you just talk a little bit about, you know, how the categories benefit and perhaps even how quickly they might benefit?
Sure. So, if you assume a scenario of quarterly rate cuts of a quarter of a point between now over the course of next year, right? And I'm not speculating or prognosticating, I'm saying if one assumed that, what you're gonna see is that, loans will reprice, and there will be multiple opportunities to refinance a mortgage, an automobile, a revolving card balance that's at a particularly high rate into a debt consolidation loan, and you may see it multiple times, right? And, I think that is gonna be good for households and help households lower their overall debt service costs, and certainly good for the bureaus, who need transaction volume to drive their revenues.
Got it. Okay, fair enough. And then just on the mortgage side, you know, I think we all know the market's close to a trough, hopefully, and it rebounds, et cetera. Just the two questions: One is the pricing dynamics in the mortgage market. You know, can you just talk about... Obviously, there's been the third-party scoring benefit, but within your mortgage vertical exposure, like, do you take your own pricing with new products, or is that a focus for you guys?
Yeah. So there are two components of our pricing. The first would be what we charge to calculate a score on during a mortgage transaction on the underlying credit data, and that has been a constant throughout this period of price increases. Of course, given that the price of that mortgage score has been increasing, our fixed percentage means more dollars for us in an absolute sense, and that's why we've had this benefit. We also price our credit scores independent. I'm sorry, we price our underlying credit data independent of the score and the processing. You know, we have more or less continued to take price increases where we can, consistent with historic practices.
Okay, fair enough. And then the other component is just, you know, the whole, FHFA and the potential tri-merge to bi-merge and Vantage Scores. So maybe break those apart. Does the Vantage Score implementation, should be a positive to the bureaus? Just how would you frame it, you know, the benefit there?
Yeah, well, look, there's a lot that's going on in the pricing space. Both Vantage and FICO have launched next generation scores. The Vantage Score has been analyzed by a lot of different parties, GSEs, Federal Reserve Banks, et cetera, and they know it's performing, you know, better than the heritage scores that are in market across industry competitors. That's good. Fannie and Freddie have said, or rather, the FHFA has said that, toward the end of next year, they'll start requiring both scores. That would be a net positive for the bureaus, right? We would be selling one additional score. Now, whether that happens, it's still a matter of some discussion and question, I think. For how long that persists, again, is an unknown at this point.
Got it. And so, just a quick add. So is it the debate that it might not happen, or just the timing of when it happens, when you have to pull the VantageScore as well?
Look, it's all- I would say that all scenarios are possible-
Okay
... at this point with the FHFA. They have stated what their intent is. I know they're working with industry players on implementation issues that have to be worked through, but their intent is to require both scores, and selling two instead of one is certainly additive for the bureaus.
Got it. And so that probably somewhat answers my next question, which is the whole bi-merge to tri-merge, which is not a mandate, but more just a recommendation or, I guess you can if you want to do it. How do you think that, you know, is feasible?
Yeah, good question. There are two flavors of three to two, if you will. One is on qualification, and the other, which is the beginning of a mortgage origination, and the other is on the underwriting, and if you look back a year or so, the FHFA was advocating a move to the bi-merge at underwriting, and what the data showed is that, you know, unsurprisingly, when you take a data set away, scoring and pricing deteriorate, and the impact was material enough on U.S. consumers that the FHFA decided to pause to study it further, and I think it's uncertain at origination whether we will ever go from three to two, right, but again, the landscape is still a little bit cloudy, but clearly, they paused, and they listened to the feedback from the industry.
Now, in terms of qualifying a consumer to enter the mortgage process, you know, there have always been a variety of practices. Some pulled three credit reports, some did not, right? But what the FHFA has said is they will purchase the loan off your books if you have one credit score. And so there was a concern that the industry would rapidly and exclusively migrate to one credit score, and that there could be pricing pressure there. What we have seen is less of a migration than we thought, and probably less pricing pressure than we budgeted, which is why we really outperformed our guide on this part of our revenue in the first quarter and then raised it for the full year.
And what you have to understand is the tension between if you're a lender, you know, and you have a chance to underwrite a consumer, you know, you want the business, right? And of course, you wanna minimize your data acquisition cost, and that may take more than one score to optimize processing the business that comes your way. So I think you're gonna see multiple pulls, maybe not three per, probably not, but maybe more toward two per, to make sure that you're not turning away business that you could otherwise underwrite if you pulled a second bureau and got a higher-than-threshold score.
Got it. Okay. Thank you for that update. Just to wrap up the macro piece of the question, you know, obviously, rates coming down should help lending categories, but if it comes down too much, that means something's wrong with the economy. And so the question is more around recession resiliency and your perspective on how you would characterize TransUnion's portfolio. 'Cause it was interesting, last week, Steve Chaouki spoke, and he said, "You know, you're more resilient to a recession than to a rising rate environment." So I was just hoping to get your perspective on how you would allocate the portfolio in terms of recession resiliency.
I can second Mr. Czajkie's opinion on that. I mean, look, in my view, our industry has been through a pretty serious recession since the Fed moved aggressively to increase rates by 500 points. You know, we hit almost like an air pocket of demand, if you will, given the increase in price of loans, and then also concerns about deterioration of household finances and rising delinquencies, and then exacerbated by the deposits. So I think the 18-month period that we've just been through is about as tumultuous as I would expect, right? Now, if the economy slows down further, if unemployment ticks up, you know, that will have an impact.
But if rates are dropping in order to provide relief to the consumer, that relief manifests itself in lower borrowing costs and presumably better availability on the deposit side. That's good for my business. So my business is far more sensitive to rates than it is the general economic and employment GDP trends, although rates and GDP are highly interrelated.
Got it. And are there any particular countercyclical, countercyclical parts of your portfolio that would help you, you know, in the eventual recession?
Yeah, certainly. If you look at our business today versus 15 years ago, we're far more diversified geographically and across market segments. We were very financial services previously. Now we've got 14 different segments that we compete in, in the U.S. And there's also been a ton of product diversification. And so despite the difficulties of the past couple of years, we've still managed to grow 3% and 3% organic. Now, that's not, you know, consistent with a long-term guide, but it does show a certain floor of growth and profitability, despite the fact that it was a very challenging volume environment, and also that our mix was shifting toward less profitable products during this period. So I think the fact that we are geographically, vertically, and product diversified makes us a lot more resilient to macro variations.
Got it. If you can take us to Neustar for a minute. You know, we're approaching, I think, three years now with Neustar. I think considering you know the perfect storm you described on rising rates, et cetera, the shock of the economy, you, I think you delivered a mid-single-digit growth for the last three years.
Right.
Which is short of your expectations really, right?
That's right.
Maybe just help level set, you know, your learnings over the last three years, you know, the reasons for falling short, and then a follow-up would just be, you know, or the outlook going forward for that piece of the business.
Yeah, for sure. You know, so you're right. When we acquired Neustar, and it closed at the beginning of December of 2021, so through 2024, that's three years of operating it. It had come off a couple of years of high single-digit growth, and the marketing business was low double-digit, right? And there's a lot of strength around their planning and measurement of marketing spend. That was very, that really positioned them well, as well as their identity resolution capabilities. Unfortunately, our timing wasn't great, right? You had this macro sea change that started to pressure the various product lines within Neustar, and instead of high single-digit growth that we'd hoped for, we got mid-single-digit growth.
Now, that, of course, is a shame, but it was still a higher level of growth than the core credit business was performing, so it did help lift up overall enterprise growth. The other thing that happened during that, this period is we sold less marketing, and we sold some less risk solutions, but portions of our communications portfolio really took off, the Trusted Call Solutions, and so those have been compounding at around 40% a year. Now, that's fantastic, and it's helped keep us in the mid-single plus range of growth in total, but there's lower margin on those products, so it profit-pressured Neustar as well. That said, you know, we've been able to increase the EBITDA of Neustar from $115 million a year when we acquired it, to $225 million as a floor for this year's profitability. And that was a result of-...
Certainly revenue fall through, but also, you know, really executing well on the $80 million plus cost takeout, which we're completing this year. I think the other real upside for investors on Neustar is that it has given us a state-of-the-art technology destination platform to migrate our credit, along with their marketing and our fraud solutions around this integrated core of physical and digital identity. That's gonna, well, one, produce a lot of cost savings, which we've talked about in our near-term restructuring transformation. We may chat about that in a bit, but really accelerate the pace of innovation. You know, from the first time we announced the Neustar deal, we said we really like the OneID platform.
We think it's a next generation beyond just migrating existing applications to the cloud, which much of our industry has been focused on doing. That's a good thing to do, but it's much better if you can start consolidating within the cloud from multiple points of light, multiple fragmented systems into consolidated next generation platforms, and that's the work that we're delivering on now.
Got it. And I want to get to the tech side in a bit, but going back to just the Neustar and the growth dynamics. So assuming TCS can keep up its 40% growth rate, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the other pieces of business, it sounds like the environment has already been challenging and you're growing at that particular level. So if the macro holds up or gets better, that's where you see the upside?
For sure. And thank you for bringing me back to that point. So despite the difficulties in mid-single digits, as we move from integrating Neustar to really innovating on this OneTru platform and bringing all those products together, and we've reached a floor in the marketplace with potential improvements, my belief is that we can grow it at high single digits and even get to low double digits, particularly on the marketing side. I think fraud is positioned to accelerate, and we're doing a lot to ride this communications momentum, where we've proven there's a great product market fit.
Okay, maybe shifting gears a bit to the technology initiative, the OneTru, maybe just for the benefit of the audience, a quick kind of... And it's not a quick answer, but just to the extent you can help simplify, what is OneTru? You know, I think in the last call, you spent a bunch of time on it, put some slides out there, but just to help us-
Sure.
Reframe that a little bit.
I think, the place to start is what is a cloud migration for an information services company? Because many of us have been pursuing it. If you look at any of these scale global players who've built a portfolio of products over time, you're gonna see fragmentation and redundancy across the myriad of software products and a lot of potential overlap. If you migrate it all to the cloud, that's probably a good thing to do because the cloud providers run very sophisticated and secure and variable data operations. But what you have to do is take an individual application, migrate it onto a foundation of enabling tech that is compatible with a given cloud provider.
Now, we had over 600 applications at the beginning of our Project Rise migration, and if we'd continued on that path, we would have ended up with 600 applications running in Amazon or split between Amazon and Google or something like that, right? The problem there is that you haven't benefited from consolidation on a single platform that can support multiple different applications, and so again, periodically in business, you have a chance to take that white sheet of paper out and redesign things in an ideal way. The OneTru platform presented that opportunity because Neustar had invested in the OneID platform, which had a series of common technology services and microservices, as they're called, that support the standard information and analytic product, and we took those services. We made sure that they could handle the workload of credit, the computational intensity and the like.
And we said, "This is gonna be the core piece of enabling technology in our product ecosystem that will handle all data ingestion, organization around the consumer or identity resolution, all enrichment and analytics, and then deployment of whatever data it is, credit, marketing, or fraud, upstream to the specific product families." And in the last earnings call, that's what we kind of... That's what we outlined so the market would understand that built on a common foundation of enabling tech, was this intelligence layer of OneTru, that does all the common data processing across credit, marketing, and fraud and analytics, and then pumps it upstream into the specific product suites.
Got it.
So that's what OneTru is. And so at the end of the journey, we don't have 30 plus different credit bureau applications and God knows how many marketing and fraud applications proliferated in the universe. We've got it all consolidated, all of the data, all of the analytics and intelligence into a single platform. And any country bureau that runs on that platform avails themselves to the entirety of our IP across the product lines.
Got it. And so, I guess a few follow-ups. So one, I think you said next year, U.S. and India will move on to OneTru.
Right.
I'm sure you've done some testing in other areas before. So can you just give us an example and what the results of that have been, which gives you confidence in this OneTru strategy?
A lot of dimensions of the testing. But in terms of performance-
Yes.
Almost any workload that we have moved from the heritage foundational platforms to OneTru is performing orders of magnitude faster. So big credit batch analytics jobs, which used to be, you know, let's turn off the lights and go home and come back in the morning to look at, they're running in an hour or thirty minutes. And when we interact with clients, we can actually build models real time, you know, hit the button, grab a cup of coffee, whereas before it would've taken a day or two to get the results of that. So the processing speed and efficiency is just dramatically better. But, you know, we've really moved past this integration into an innovation period with our products on Neustar.
So some examples of that are: we have replatformed our payday lending credit business in the U.S., FactorTrust, from its independent legacy technology onto OneTru, proving out that we can run credit at scale there. Marketing already runs on OneTru. That was the origin of the application. And we recently released our first version of our global integrated fraud solution on OneTru. So the proof of concepts that we've achieved and the work that we've done to migrate to OneTru this year would include replatforming FactorTrust in credit, launching the next generation integrated fraud, launching the next generation of marketing audiences, we just did that two weeks ago, and launching a series of analytic and data enrichment products that's kind of greatly improved our ability to compete in that segment.
On top of that, we've been testing extensively the U.S. credit data on the OneTru platform and starting to plan our client migrations, which will happen over the course of next year, and by the end of this year, we will have moved all of our data and all of our analysts and all their analytic models onto OneTru. About half of them are already operating on the platform, and we're just going country by country and doing the migration, so there's lots of heavy lifting and lots of delivery and lots of innovation that's already taking place.
Got it. So this might oversimplify it, but the end game is on the cost side, it's faster, it's better, it's more cost efficient, I guess. And then the revenue side is really dependent on the innovation cadence that you have as a company.
Exactly. And we will greatly accelerate the innovation cadence because we're not dealing with legacy and fragmentation. It'll also allow us to repurpose a lot of our engineering resources. Imagine, we have thirty different teams of people maintaining credit applications around the world. As we move a given country onto OneTru, we free up most of those engineers. Now, we can either take that to profit, which in part we, we will, or we'll use it to fund other innovation in other areas of the business that have got potential. So by getting to OneTru in the U.S. and in India, we're going to really unleash this ability for continually improving our cost and the speed of our delivery.
Got it. And this is a slightly tough question, but, you know, your peers and a lot of other companies talk about the same kind of ambition, at least. Is there anything to point out that, you know, kind of distinguishes OneTru or makes it stand out versus-
For sure. So let me reiterate a point I tried to make earlier. Lots of the industry, not just the credit bureau industry, but across information services, talks about the cloud migration. And again, we had over six hundred applications running, our own proprietary applications around the world. If we'd simply settled for replatforming or putting the data in a common foundation, we'd still have six hundred. Instead, we have one global configurable, state-of-the-art credit, marketing, and fraud platform. All that functionality, one platform, integrated around ID, that's configurable for the needs of each different country. That's gonna greatly defragment what we're doing and take costs out, you know, beyond what I think, certainly take a considerable amount of cost out, but also allow a lot more rapid innovation because all of our engineers can be pointed to one code base.
That's how you scale innovation.
Got it. And this might be the answer to my next question, but you know, I think the Neustar strategy was about, you know, you had the credit risk analytics, they had the customer acquisition capabilities, loosely speaking, and, you know, combine them, right? And the way you explain the strategy, it makes some sense. But so was the main barrier to this not being done before, just basically the technology that you're referring to today, or, you know, why wasn't the bureaus already doing this, like, you know, before Neustar?
The bureaus have long participated in marketing client acquisition. Look, the bureaus basically do three things: We help for credit-informed marketing, which is across lenders, but also insurers, if you will. We help them acquire customers, manage those outstanding relationships, and collect if the loans become delinquent. Within the acquire the customer bucket, there were two highly interrelated processes run by different competitors. The bureaus did the, "Hey, we'll help you understand the market, identify attractive segments, and drill down to specific consumers that you would be willing to make a loan to, that meet your lending criteria." The next part of the process was to understand more about those consumers. Who are they from a demographic, psychographic, behavioral standpoint? And then to create specific audiences to help you go find the consumers, whether you're sending them an email, a direct mail-...
or presenting ads somewhere in the internet, right? We didn't do that part, but our data enabled that part. So when you went across to the marketing side, those marketing prospect databases are organized on a foundation of credit header information. Lots of the matching and identity resolution had been provided by TransUnion and the other bureaus. And in recent years, we built out a top-quality marketing enrichment file. So all we lacked at that point to be full service in marketing was the audience and then the planning and the measurement. We got that with Neustar, and we added it to the series of small deals that we'd done, kind of toe-in-the-water experimentation previously, and now we're bringing those two parts. But again, you know the competitive space well.
You know some of our competitors also have significant marketing businesses and they aspire to consolidate and have articulated that in the way that we're doing.
Got it. If you can move on a little bit to the insurance business at TransUnion, it's a sizable vertical, I guess, for you guys.
For sure.
Can you just talk about some of the dynamics going on in there with your different products and, you know, the whole auto shopping and marketing and-
Mm-hmm.
You know, there's been a lot of noise out there. So just how you look at the setup today.
Yeah, look, it's our largest vertical in our diversified market segment in the US. It's about 25% of revenue, and we've, you know, become accustomed to it growing high single digits and sometimes low double digits. It was impacted by inflation, kind of idiosyncratically, where the replacement cost of a damaged asset became much higher than the premiums charged. And so the insurance industry had to go through the process, state by state, of getting regulatory approval for higher prices. That's taken two-plus years, and we're now reaching a point where they've kind of healed their policy unit economics. They can charge enough for the risk that they're undertaking, and so they're moving back into marketing to acquire customers more aggressively. Now, there have been significant rate increases during this period.
That causes sticker shock, and the consumers are like, "Holy cow, I need to go find alternatives." That drives more shopping, which drives more credit pulls. I think the environment we're in now is, you know, the insurance industry is substantially healed, although perhaps not ideally just yet. Many players are willing to market more aggressively, but consumers will still shop because the rates are just very high, and not everybody has had the opportunity to mark their rates to market, if you will. So in sum, I think that is a more robust insurance environment than we've had these past couple of years.
Got it. And so just, you know, the insurance business is always a pretty nice, high single-
Yeah
Double-digit growth business. You know, I guess, does rates matter in that business as well? Like, when do we return to that kind of, you know, trajectory?
Well, look, as I've said before, I think this will be a healing year, meaning we're going to go from low single-digit growth to something mid and maybe even better. And we'll see how the year develops. But I do feel like, you know, we are on the path to recovering those former growth rates. Whether we achieve it this year or in the next year, not quite sure. But the underlying, you know, components, variables that drive the growth are returning to normal, and so that's. We're encouraged by that.
Got it. Well, let's talk about a business that's already going pretty nicely, which is India. We had Todd Skinner at our credit bureau last week, and, you know, he ran through a lot of the dynamics why. But just from your perspective, you know, it's been an amazing business, strong growth.
Yeah.
You know, there's been some slight deceleration, but, like, can we expect that growth to just continue?
Look, we've been growing in the low thirties for a while, which is awesome.
Yeah.
But we have been cautious in our guides and saying, you know, over the intermediate period, let's put a floor around 20% plus growth, if you will. So we're still highly confident about that, and of course, we're going to aspire to perform as well as we possibly can in that space. The recent slowdown you speak of is the RBI in India became a bit concerned that there was fraud in the unsecured lending market, particularly from non-bank players. And they started to, you know, apply the brakes, if you will. And even in the banking side, they required a higher loan-to-deposit ratio, which took some of the growth momentum out of it. The good news, though, is those loans remain very healthy. The delinquency levels on those loans are at all-time lows.
So it would suggest that perhaps enough has been done in the name of caution and prudence. But look, we've got a great position in consumer lending. The big factors around population growth, economic growth, financial penetration, and innovation all look very good. Plus, we are bringing more and more analytics to the Indian market. We're bringing or enabling new categories of consumer lending, like agricultural lending, which is very big in India. The state banks are required to put 20% of their capital toward ag loans. Currently, we don't get much business there, but we've got new products that will allow that to become in scope, if you will, and then microlending.
And then one of the reasons we chose to replatform India onto OneTru is we want to bring the range of our marketing and fraud capabilities to India, as well as credit and all of the U.S. analytic approaches to managing credit. So again, because all of our services are on this single platform and with a unified identity layer underpinning it, any country that moves their business to that platform benefits from all of the services that are available within TransUnion on the platform. So it's a way that we can really launch a lot of new ships, if you will, on a growth journey within the Indian market.
Got it. Are there any other geographies out there that, you know, have similar characteristics to India? I understand they're probably not going to become, you know, as big perhaps, but just in your portfolio.
Yeah, we're excited about what's going on in the Philippines, right? We had a presence in the Philippines. Now we're really starting to grow rapidly. That's also going to move to OneTru. I think that could, I mean, I don't think we're guiding today about how big it can become, but it can become a very substantial international geography. There are also different opportunities across the Latin America-
Okay.
Latin countries that have great growth characteristics, but no, India is a growth unicorn.
Got it.
But there are other attractive geographies that we will pursue.
Fair enough. And then just to end with capital allocation, you know, I guess about three years ago, you did three deals. Just going forward, like your priorities in terms of, you know, M&A versus, you know, deleveraging, buybacks, et cetera.
Yeah, look, again, I think the consternation around that was again a timing issue, right? We sold one division and then we acquired three other businesses. We levered up into the low fours, four three, four four, I think, at the peak. And it was the second time that we had done that in our public history, which started, I guess, in the summer of two thousand and fifteen, if you will. The good news is that, you know, we have shown that we could rapidly delever both times, and now we're down to the three and a half times. We're charting a course toward three times-ish by the end of this year. And, you know, depending if the rate environment persists, you know, we'll want to go even lower.
Although I think at that point, we'll also look and see if buybacks make sense, if we continue to have a discounted multiple, you know, versus where we think it is, we'll have some flexibility there. But, we have been very focused on delevering. As I've said before, the acquisitions that we made give us the fodder for a generation of growth. The challenge is to do the integration and the innovation to really start generating the top line growth that we believe is there, and then to be very selective on any other deals that we would do. I mean, clearly, if in a-- if a bureau in an attractive geography presents itself-
Yeah, yeah.
We would pursue that. Other than that, the bar remains high.
Got it. All right, well, I think we just... We have very little time left, so let's just end it there. Thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate your thoughts.
Always a pleasure, Mano.
Thank you, guys.