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Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Sep 15, 2026

Summary

Guidance for Q3 and the full year remains solid despite mortgage headwinds, with steady growth in auto, card, and fintech lending. International markets, especially India and Mexico, are key growth drivers, while the OneTru platform and AI adoption are expected to enhance efficiency and margins.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay. All right. Good morning again. Thank you for being here. I am happy to have Chris Cartwright from TransUnion, who is the CEO of TransUnion. Chris, thank you for your time.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Always a pleasure.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

A lot to talk through. Maybe I will start a little bit high level, just from a macro perspective. You guys have some unique insights into what is going on in the lending environment, the consumer. We have got oil above $100, filling up the car gas tank is not cheap. Rates above seven. Just your read of the consumer and how that impacts kind of your current guidance and assessment of your financials.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah, for sure. It is a good place to start. It is a bumpier world than I think we all wish that it was. Look, over the course of the third quarter, we expect that we are well-positioned to achieve the guidance that we issued in Q2, even with the upgraded targets that we outlined for the market. As you will recall, all we really did in the upgrade was to flow through the goodness from over-performance in the second quarter. We are also very cautious about not changing our mortgage estimates for the full year because we just felt like the balance of risks was more toward rate increases and some diminished mortgage volume. Overall, mortgage is our most rate-sensitive product and higher rates are not helpful. But as you know, we are at historic volume lows in the mortgage industry currently.

We're kind of at a floor level of transaction with perhaps occasionally a little bump above that for some refi activity. That's likely to diminish in the third quarter. I don't really expect that volumes will be materially impacted in card, auto, consumer lending, fintechs. They are far more insensitive to rates. There's just more spread and more opportunity to either recalibrate the rates or shorter durations, right? Net-net, I feel like the guidance that we provided, which is to achieve at or above the high in the third quarter and for the full year, we still feel pretty good about that.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay. How about when you think about your medium-term, your longer-term guidance, how important is mortgage to those numbers? If things just stay flat for the next year, two years, does that pose a risk to those numbers?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. Well, as you know from our investor day earlier this year, any improvement in mortgage volumes beyond the current level of activity we've been experiencing like Q2 and previous, that was upside to the medium-term guidance that we provided. Now look, if we do get some increased stability and some rate improvements and the like, and refi volumes pick up or purchase volumes pick up, that is very additive to the top line and the flow-through is very good.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yeah.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Let's hope that happens at some point during this kind of three year period. But we don't need rates to drop, and we don't need a big influx of volume to compound the top line high single digits.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay. Some of the other categories where you said you do not expect to see much impact today, at least maybe let us talk to the trends, starting with auto.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Sure.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

What have been the trends? You have been outperforming the market growth. What are some of the reasons for that as well?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Well, running through the other ones, auto will probably continue to be about a mid-single digit grower. In the 2023- 2024 timeframe, there was some demand pull forward, fear of tariffs and the like. The volume shot up there. Since then, it has kind of been a mid-single digit grower. I would expect that to continue. On the card side, again, it is also kind of a low to mid-single digit grower during this period. I think it is steady there. In 2024 and 2025, there has been a resurgence in consumer lending activity . In particular, the fintechs started to revitalize or reinvigorated. I expect that growth rate to continue, although perhaps to abate a little bit quarter by quarter, given the higher comps that they are growing over. Things look good in consumer lending. I think the appetite for consumer loans, unsecured consumer loans is steady to growing.

It is a mainstream product now. There is a lot of capital available to the space, and the fintech players have kind of diversified their product lines and diversified across the risk spectrum as well. I feel like they are much better positioned to weather changes in rates.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay. Before I touch on fintech real quickly, last week, Todd had talked about how the financial services ex-mortgage had been growing high single digits for many, many quarters now. I guess the volumes-

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Seven-plus

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yeah, have been more low single digits-ish call it. So what are the key factors driving that outperformance for you guys?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Sure. Well, I feel like we've been competing really effectively. So we do have some share benefits there, which is nice. Also we have more products that we can sell into the financial services segments and really all parts of our portfolio. That would be our expansion into marketing and the fraud into Trusted Call Solutions and the like. Then also our analytics platform, TrueIQ, has really gained a lot of momentum in recent quarters. Now that it's complete, now that it's on the OneTru platform, it's really solidified and capturing a lot of interest in the market.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. Then just on fintech, I guess the question is more just help us how big is fintech today? I know you had-

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Sure

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

peaked kind of a few years ago, but just curious where you are now.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah, we peaked at about 175, and that was back toward the end of the low-rate environment. 2022, 2023 certainly changed that, and the fintechs kind of went into a hibernation mode, if you will, limited to no originations. Now it's about 145 million, I would think. Yeah, that's it. Look, it's really come back in the 2024, 2025 timeframe. As I just mentioned, the space is healthy. Our performance there and our share is strong. You're actually having good success in cross-selling into the FinTechs. Our credit and credit analytics have always been our strength there. Now we're selling marketing and customer acquisition solutions in combination. So it's kind of an exciting time for us.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay, got it. I know we haven't asked this question for the last two years, but I think people are starting to get nervous again, but recession risks and your ability to even grow during a recession, you've highlighted that in prior investor days. Maybe you could just help us, how you think about how you can counter if we do get into one of those situations.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. Well, look, the last three years, not recessionary, of course-

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yeah

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

but kind of okay, stable to sideways market volumes, if you will. We've been compounding at a 7%, 8% top line. If there's a recession, there could be a step down, but I think the portfolio is just so much broader and diversified and resilient than it's ever been. Part of that is the geographic expansion. In the last kind of lending recession in the 2022, 2023 timeframe, you really saw the benefit of that geographic diversification. The U.S. went down a lot, but the international portfolio grew mid-teens for a while and carried us. There's also been good product line diversification. Even within core credit, while we've had great growth in core financial services and our credit offerings, it's now a full life cycle solution. It's not origination volume dependent.

We're doing a lot of portfolio analytics, we're doing a lot of delinquency and collection tactics and just general analytics across that. The short answer is we have a lot of ways in which we can grow, even in more difficult market conditions.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. One of the other areas people like kind of the macro update on is in India. It's obviously one of the gems of your business. It was growing north of 25%, even higher than that at one point.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

It was compounding in the low 30s for a period.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

And now it's kind of slowed down, picking back up a bit, but just maybe rehash why it slowed down and what you think the trajectory from here on is.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. The first cause of the slowdown from a couple of years of low 30% organic growth was the Reserve Bank of India became concerned that there might be a bit of froth in the online unsecured lending market. They wanted to ensure that appropriate diligence was being done on those loans, and that those loans weren't being granted and consumers then speculating in the equity markets. There was some concern about that. So, they cracked down on the reserves, and they increased the level of deposit reserves you had to have against those types of loans, which slowed the market down tremendously. We also had some banks that looked at the profitability of recent origination vintages and card and decided to cut back a bit. And those two product lines, unsecured lending and card, demand a lot of credit.

That reset things lower, but our volume's been growing back up over that. In addition, recently, on the commercial side, the Indian government has had some support for small to mid-size businesses that have led to increased lending volumes in commercial as well as the consumer rebound. I expect that we will grow high single digits and maybe double digits exiting the year in India, and medium term expectation for India's growth is kind of mid-teens.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay. And that mid-teens growth, is there any way to break that out by pricing, volume, innovation, the kind of breakout that we usually do?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. I think it's going to be driven a lot through volume and a number of innovations. One, we've been improving the core value of our consumer credit file. We've expanded the number of banks and the volumes of trade lines furnished. We've enhanced the amount of data we're collecting from each of the banks, which has improved the predictiveness of the file. We recently rebuilt our primary consumer scores in India. We've been investing heavily on the commercial side of things to become a leading player there, and we've gotten outsized growth in commercial credit. On top of that, now that the tech transformation that we've done and a lot of the new products that we've built on our OneTru platform are available, we're moving them into the Indian market. We moved our analytic sandbox, TrueIQ, into India in the early part of the year.

It's selling extremely well. There's a ton of interest and opportunity in that market. We've expanded our Trusted Call Solutions into India. Now it's pre-revenue right now, but we have struck deals with all the major telcos, and we're going to become the branded and trusted call authentication provider in that market, and that's been a huge grower here in the U.S., as you know. Our fraud mitigation platform, which we call TruValidate, that's also being brought into India. An introductory version of the marketing suite. We're taking all of these global products that we've built on the OneTru platform and we're migrating them into India and also to other few key markets around the world right now.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. Maybe just one last one in India. In terms of the competitive environment, I know TransUnion CIBIL, which is your brand in India, has 70% plus-

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Low 70s, yeah.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

market share. Sounds like that's sustainable and all these new features you talked about is probably a differentiator or are you seeing competition do similar things?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah, look, it's all competition forces innovation. Yes, we've got an advantage, but we can't rest on our laurels. So those improvements to the core quality of the credit data as well as the scores, that's all about maintaining and expanding our competitiveness in the core consumer part of credit. The rest of it is just leveraging the innovation that we've created centrally and pushing it out into all the markets where it's applicable.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. Talking about competition, maybe we'll switch countries to Mexico. Equifax is about to close a deal to get into Mexico.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Right.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

You guys just bought the majority-

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

of Buró de Crédito.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yeah, in Mexico. Maybe the first question is just, is it a two-bureau market? What is the competitive dynamic? I know also you bought consumer, they bought commercial as well. Just curious how you think about the competitive positioning there.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

The business that we acquired, that we have owned 26% of since the mid-1990s, was the consortium of the major banks and other lenders contributing their trade lines to the Buró de Crédito. What Equifax acquired is called the Círculo de Crédito, and it was stood up by one of the prominent Mexican families. It concentrated more on fintech and less on positive data from the central banks. We are the market leader with over 600 million trade lines contributed by all the key mainstream consumer lenders in the Mexican market, and that is proprietary to us. We have had a fairly limited focus on the fintech sector in Mexico. As you would imagine, when the mainstream banks own you, it is a little bit dicey or sensitive to service and enable the fintechs. That was more what Círculo did.

Now, the fintechs have been growing very rapidly in Mexico, and you can see that in their growth rate. Our business has grown extremely well, and for the past several years, we have been low double-digit growth. That is beyond what we have forecasted for 2027, and I would rather be a little bit cautious because in the first year of ownership, there are a lot of changes that are taking place, cultural, organizational.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yeah

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

technological. I want us to weather that. But we are now in a position where we can service all parts of the Mexican lending ecosystem, including the fintechs. We understand fintechs. We are very good at that. We will be bringing a lot of our knowhow from the U.S. into the Mexican market. We are already hosting some of those clients in Chicago, doing innovation labs and the like to show them how powerful our data is and how it can improve their lending operations.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. But just on the trade line, the 600 million trade lines, I guess that does not include fintech. Was that your point? Because the banks own-

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

There is a very limited amount of fintech.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Right.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

All right. Just in terms of timing, like you said, you have owned 20 something percent of this for a long, long time. Why-

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah, I think we invested in 1996. I'm sorry, 1998.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

The question was why-

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Why now

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

acquire today? What is it about the Mexican market that made you think now is a good time?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Well, you got to make hay when the sun is shining, right? We've been trying to acquire Mexico since 1996 because we think it's a great and growthful market with a large and growing population and also under-penetrated along the financial products. So it's got all the characteristics that you want when you enter into a new marketplace. It also has just a very basic bureau. This is like the bureau 1.0, and I think more developed countries are onto the 3.0 version of a credit reporting agency. We think we can infuse all of that innovation and goodness into Mexico in short order. That'll be very good for the Mexican market and for Mexican consumers.

The banks were ready to exit, and we had a right of first refusal. We also had a lot of experience in that marketplace, and we're excited to be there.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. Then maybe just a broader question on international geographies generally. You are in a bunch of others, but is it just whenever kind of the dominant bank-owned bureau is up for sale, you'd be interested in that, or how should we think about where you want to be globally?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah, absolutely. Then you get down to just what are the growth characteristics of a given market? How well is it being serviced? Can we buy our way in at an appropriate price? Do we believe that our platform, our knowhow, our innovation can give us an upside to the growth and profit that's currently being produced?

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. Maybe we can switch to the OneTru migration and the platform and everything. Maybe first question, where are we in terms of that migration? I think in your last call, you said by year-end you will have all the U.S. batch completed. Just a quick update there in the timeline.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Right. We are currently in the process of migrating all of our credit customers in the U.S., our batch API credit customers onto the OneTru platform. It is going well. We are more than halfway there now. We will complete the migration in full by the end of this year. U.S. credit alone is almost 40% of global revenues. So high confidence that that is going to be done by the end of the year and a lot of benefits to running on the OneTru platform versus the Heritage platform. It will probably take another couple of quarters into 2027 until all of the U.S. marketing customers and fraud have been converted fully onto OneTru.

Even if we do not get perfect 100% conversion, we are able to compress and consolidate the legacy tech stack substantially to minimize the spend and allow all of our engineers to focus on OneTru and the go forward.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. I am guessing international will be after that or in conjunction.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. The next four countries that we're rolling out is Canada, Mexico, the U.K., and India, and then we're also going to do the Philippines, so it's five countries. But putting the Philippines aside, once we do those next four countries, that's 95% of the revenue of TransUnion. We've already stood up instances of OneTru in each of the next four countries, and we're working with the local tech teams to understand the fit gap and to plan the migration. I would say within 2027 and 2028 timeframe, we'll have the five countries that constitute 95% of our global volume running on OneTru.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

True. Okay.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Look, the benefit of doing that is once you're running on OneTru, not only do you get a substantially better credit platform,

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

you get a whole series of products that you can launch in the market, relevant products that they don't have today. So we can really lean into the analytic suite to fraud, which we call TruValidate Marketing, which is TruAudience, and push all of that into, build it once and then push it into the major markets around the world.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. Then from a customer standpoint, once the OneTru migration is done, what is the largest improvement that they will notice?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. A couple things to say about the customer experience. First of all, when I talk about the migration, some folks ask, "Is that going to be difficult like an ERP software migration?" It's not like that. We don't have licensed installed software for the most part. We're a service bureau that runs on a sophisticated tech stack. To convert a client requires the client simply to code to a different API. Then, of course, monitor traffic and make sure everything is calibrated and appropriate. So that conversion is not that difficult. But in terms of what the client gets, they get five nines availability, they get a dramatic increase in response time, and they get a whole bunch of integrated analytic, identity, and product functionality that all rest on top of the OneTru platform.

So it's much easier for them to consume products beyond the traditional scope of credit, and it's much easier for us to show them the value and to cross-sell all of those products into their marketplace, or rather into their demand.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yeah.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay. From a revenue perspective, it sounds like it's NPI, it's cross-sell, it's cut, copy, paste into other countries.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. Stability, all of it.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yeah. From a margin perspective for yourselves, how should we think about once OneTru is done, how much of an incremental margin benefit is it?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Look, OneTru is an important enabler of increasing scale within the organization. The starting point, before OneTru, 30 countries, 30 independent tech stacks, 30 fully vertically integrated management teams. As we have created this data as a service platform, if you will, as OneTru, we can build things once and then rapidly deploy them around the world. We will save a ton on infrastructure. We will be able to free engineering capacity up from maintaining all these 30 legacy systems to concentrating on innovation on the OneTru platform and all the products that rest on the platform. There will be efficiencies that we can push to margin. As you know, we have committed over the next three years to enhancing margin 50- 75 basis points per year.

This is an important way in which we can do that, in addition to just steady high single digit or beyond revenue compounding and the natural fall through to profit.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. And maybe this can be a broader answer, but how important is AI, GenAI, all the new technologies to OneTru and to these margin targets that you have set out?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. Look, applying AI is, for us, additive to our financial targets, both on the revenue and on the cost side. I would expect. We are already kind of a rapid adopter of AI. You have seen the analytics orchestrator framework, the agentic framework that we have created to take our data and to rapidly develop all of the predictive models that are built over the lending cycle on that data. I think that is going to give us a productivity boost, but it is also going to help us drive more analytic revenues across our customer base. The software development organization, the data science organization, they are between a quarter to a third more productive right now. Then we are working across the entire landscape of corporate services, particularly where we have got a lot of employee concentration, whether it is customer operations or consumer dispute management operations, to apply AI to drive productivity.

I think there will be material net savings as we roll AI out across the entirety of our organization. Some we will take to margin, some we will reinvest to further accelerate revenue.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. Okay. Let us shift gears to some of the regulatory noise out there. By one count, Director Pulte over the last few weeks has tweeted almost 40+ times now. Just your understanding of what is going on at the FHFA, what Director Pulte is trying to achieve. I know you talk to his teams a lot, but just curious how you would kind of assess broadly what is going on here.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. A lot of communication from the director on a lot of topics. Some directly related to bureaus and bureau data, some related to scoring and really the full landscape of mortgage services and mortgage data. I would say, look, broadly, the director is intent on modernizing the FHFA and in the GSEs, and has been an advocate for change, including price competition and scoring, if you will. Our engagement with the FHFA and the GSEs is frequent, and it is productive, and it is expanding. Look, it is a different world, where regulators and politicians are frequently tweeting these things. Sometimes it is helpful, sometimes it can confuse. What I will say is just first principles, you have to tip your hat to the director for having the courage to take on score competition. The VantageScore has existed for 20 years.

He is the first regulator that said, "We are going to shake things up in the market, and we are going to push the market to accommodate different scores." Recently, in one of those tweets, he signaled that the GSEs may begin publishing their own credit scores, which I think is a great idea. Let us have a lot of competition in the credit scoring market, and the GSE scores are certainly authoritative, and we would be happy to partner with that. So I think all of this is, look, it is net good because the scores first needed to be modernized using trended data and alternative data. VantageScore does that. FICO 10T will do that, and that is a net benefit to the market. If the GSEs start publishing and commercializing their own scoring logic, that is very positive.

Now, on some of the other issues, Tri-Merge versus Bi-Merge versus single pull, I think there are a couple of ways to think about this. From a policy perspective and then from a TransUnion impact perspective. My sense of Washington is that the Tri-Merge is still appreciated by many parts of the political establishment and the industry, and is viewed as the gold standard. We know analytically from work that we have done and that our competitors have done, that S&P Global did, in fact, during the Biden administration, that there are material differences in the coverage of the three bureau credit files. If you exclude one, a proportion of the population would not qualify for a mortgage or would be materially impacted in terms of their pricing. S&P Global sizes that at a couple of million of mortgage applicants each year.

Even a small variation in the interest rate over time can mean thousands of dollars of increased interest against the savings of $11.50 on a bureau report. So you have to be very careful about that. Again, the context is, it is tough out there for mortgage lenders. Volumes are at 20 year lows. The supply of housing is far short of what the nation needs, and borrowing costs are growing up. So it is hard to meaningfully impact affordability unless you do something about those two foundational elements of affordability. From a policy perspective, though, more data works better than less data, and they can see that empirically. As we look at our own economics, look, I expect to finish the year at about $5.25 billion in revenue. Our headline mortgage revenue is about $750.

Three and a quarter of that is the FICO score, upon which there's no margin. Another good chunk of that is non-Tri Merge-related credit data consumption. You're left with maybe $260 million of revenue. That's the Tri Merge universe that's going into resellers. Of that 260, about 37% goes to Fannie and Freddie. The rest is going to the FHFA, the VA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, other government entities providing mortgage partnerships, jumbo loans, portfolio activities, et cetera. Maybe we have $100 million, maybe a bit north of $100 million in revenue that's tied to GSE Tri Merge. If a third of that goes away or maybe half of it goes away, I don't know that you'll notice it in the context of an overall business that's growing at 7% or 8% organically.

Maybe it costs us net a point in a year, then it's gone and it's in the normal baseline. It'll be very much like the Early Assessment Program, which changed pre-qualification requirements. Before Early Assessment, the GSEs required you to pull three credit reports. Three years ago, when this went into effect, they said you could only pull one credit report, and they would give you the indication on whether the GSEs would buy the mortgage. After three years, the market's kind of settled down on two-plus credit pulls per mortgage transaction. I think you probably see something similar like that happen if we went to a Bi-Merge. Net-net, the best policy for the U.S. mortgage market and U.S. consumers is preserve the Tri Merge. From a profit impact to TransUnion, we could easily absorb that in a given year and continue to grow.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. The prior FHFA administration had considered Bi-Merge as well, and it was optional. To your point, if the industry believes in Tri Merge, they'll do that. The question is, Director Mulvaney's also been tweeting a lot about a single file pull.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Sure.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

That sounds a lot more draconian type scenario. Is that even something the industry would, do you think, support there?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Well, I don't think so. Again, there's a lot of economic pressure because volumes are low. There are certain advocates for Bi-Merge or single pull. But even the MBA did a recent analysis, their own analysis, and they are a principal advocate for the single pull, and it showed that one third of the time, if you only pull a single credit report, you're going to misclassify consumers, and that's going to impact their interest rates, but also what the lender would realize via the LLPAs in selling. In the analytic universe, only getting it right 2 out of 3 times is not very good. When I saw that, I kind of didn't know whether they were advocating our position or their position. I think a single pull is not responsible policy.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. Fair enough. The 40- 60 point difference you talked about between whichever combination of 2 reports you pull creates the gaming opportunity. I think your point is the industry will still keep pulling 3 reports. It's kind of a similar question on the score side. There's some big differences in some of the scores you get from FICO and VantageScore. It sounds like there will be some gaming in some corners, but do you think that that will also be a 2-score market, like people will pull both scores?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Well, it could, particularly during this transition period. Look, as you know, in 2026, this transition, there's a lot of 2 scores being pulled. I think that's good and that's kind of expected given the magnitude of the change and the number of different mortgage ecosystem participants that are on this learning curve. Once we're through the transition period and the market is enjoying the benefits of scores built with modern techniques on trended data and incorporating alternative data sets when they're available, I wouldn't worry too much about the gaming because the status quo is a score that really hasn't evolved in 30 years. Now we're moving to competing scores, FICO and VantageScore, that are modern and much more performant.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

I wouldn't worry too much about the gaming risk there.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Right.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Not from an inclusion perspective or a safety and soundness perspective.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. You narrowed down the exposure of TransUnion to a Bi-Merge pretty nicely. The one thing you didn't factor in, of course, was let's just say we do move to a Bi-Merge or a single pull, your ability to take share so that it's not like you lose one third simply. What are some of those things you can do to differentiate in that scenario to not lose a third, I guess?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah. I think what you're saying is, what's unique and special about our credit-

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yes

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

relative to our competitors?

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yes.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Look, each of the three bureaus puts forth a high-quality predictive product. Our advantage has been we have been the first mover in terms of time series credit reports, trended data, and we go back the furthest in time. We go back 2 and a half years. Because we were first to the market by 3 years, we have had more time to develop the analytic attributes that sit on top of the core credit data that make our data very predictive and perform very well. We also acquired and expanded our coverage in the payday lending market, in the unsecured lending market, and so we have got a great complement of trade lines there that provides us with an advantage. Our fintech market share and coverage is considerable. It is best in class. It is well above 50%, 70% by some estimates. That is a differentiator as well.

We have got good rental coverage, improving utility coverage. There is a lot, right? Again, each of the bureaus I know can tell their own story about the uniqueness of their proprietary bundle. We have got a good story, and we have competed very well in the mortgage market for a long time.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Got it. Okay, in the last few minutes we have left, maybe let us touch on capital allocation. The capital allocation has transformed a lot over the years, and now it has become a much more balanced policy. What has changed and how do you think about capital allocation today?

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Well, over this period of transformation, over the past 4 years, first we allocated a lot of capital to acquisition, to acquiring and broadening our value proposition, and then some capital to technology modernization and modernizing our org and our workforce. That spend is largely behind us. Our leverage ratio was 2.6 times, even with the acquisition of Mexico at the end of the second quarter. We are very confident we will be at our 2.5 times target or better by the end of this year, right? So that gets the balance sheet in very good shape. Our free cash flow is growing, and our conversion is well above 90% again. If you look forward to the next 3 years, we are going to generate a lot of cash.

In my opinion, and the opinion of many people in the room, our shares are materially undervalued for a number of reasons: AI, regulatory tweeting and uncertainty, and certainly the macro environment. So buying back shares is a really good use of the free cash flow that we've got. We'll continue to acquire relevant innovation when we think it's smart and we can get it at a reasonable shareholder-friendly valuation. We'll do that. We don't see any need to do anything really big or transformative. We did that. We're still digesting and realizing the benefits from a lot of that. OneTru is a real manifestation of that. I don't think shareholders should worry or think about any of that type of activity.

The prudent balance between acquiring shares, managing the debt load, and the occasional strategic acquisition for innovation's sake, or maybe entering an attractive country, that's the capital allocation landscape we see.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay. And just maybe one follow-up on the, you talked about potential AI risks hitting your stock. In terms of the software components of your business,

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Sure

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

your U.K. peer has been suffering because they have a huge software business, and they talk about it, and people think that could be at risk. Just help us appreciate how much of your software business is tied to that contributory data sets that you have that's hard to replicate versus sitting alone and could be at risk of vibe coding.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Yeah, sure. Look, vibe coding is not a risk for us. We are a data and analytics business, and we have low single-digit revenue coming from annuity-based analytics solutions today. That said, when you think of our overall value proposition, the stack, it is very concentrated in data and attributes and scores and basic analytics today. We call that the intelligence layer. We have taken that intelligence and brought it to market in some point solution software and some integrated suite software, but it is really all about delivering the data functionality. But in this era of agentic commerce and AI, we have got the opportunity to start doing a lot more work for our clients in displacing spend and work that they are doing with their own people, with third-party software, with outside consultants.

That is why we created the analytics orchestrator framework, and that is why I think we can really accelerate the growth through forward consulting of our analytics revenue despite vibe coding and other threats. I mean, it is still, you have a lot of domain knowledge.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Yeah.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

You have got to bring a lot of proprietary data and know-how, and we think we can scale up that aspect, and that is additive to our business.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

Okay. All right. Well, that is a good place to leave it. We are out of time. So thank you, Chris, for being here, and thanks everybody as well.

Chris Cartwright
President and CEO, TransUnion

Thank you.

Manav Patnaik
Director of Equity Research, Barclays

All right. Thank you.