All right, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Manav Patnaik. I'm Barclays's Information Services analyst, and we're pleased to have with us today, Elizabeth Mann, who's the CFO of Verisk Analytics. So Elizabeth, thank you for being here.
Thanks so much for joining us. Great to be here.
So, my first question, Elizabeth, is this is around your first-year anniversary at the company. And so, I figured I'd just give you the opportunity just to, you know, reflect on, you know, you're one year in and, you know, what you've learned, observed, surprises, etc.
Yeah, it's, I can't believe that. Yes, Friday exactly is my one-year anniversary. It has, it has felt both, much longer and much shorter than that, because so much has, has happened at Verisk in that time. But it's been, it's been a great experience, and I think we're, we're all really excited about where we're going. If you look back, a year ago, we were still, a multi-segment company. We divested the energy business and really focused, so we have a single segment here. You know, we're now a pure play, insurance-focused data and analytics company. That's been great. You know, I'd say another big milestone, we did our Investor Day in March, which was a chance to really tell that story to the street.
Then we've been, you know, executing on that story and working through it this year. It's been great. I think some of the most exciting things for me have been to come together with the new leadership team. You know, Lee predated me as CEO by a few months. So we've really been kind of focusing in on that strategy of becoming a more customer-centric organization as opposed to product-centric. And it's been a strong environment in the insurance industry.
Got it. And, you know, when you first started, as you pointed out, you were busy wrapping up the divestitures. And so, you know, now that that's behind you, you know, what are the main focuses that you have as CFO?
Yeah. So I think, and actually, there was one piece – the piece that I have learned over the past year that I sort of knew at the beginning, but have come to appreciate more, is that while we are a one-segment company and focused entirely on the insurance industry, there's still the diversification of the business within that has been something that I've come to learn. You know, there are, you know, 9- 10, you know, low double-digit numbers of different businesses that face customers in different ways, contract on different revenue models, and have different drivers. And so understanding the depth of those businesses and products has been a learning process for me.
I've got the hang of it now, and I think that is the foundation of the opportunity for Verisk going forward, which is to bring together those businesses, their data sets, and the opportunity for customers in different ways. And so that gets me to your second question, to the question you just asked, which is, what's the opportunity for us now? And thematically, if you go back to Verisk's foundation, going back into the 1970s, so just over 50 years ago now, we were founded to help make the insurance industry more efficient. They needed to share information with each other to better price and underwrite losses, and process claims more effectively and combat fraud. That's what we did for them in the 1970s.
Our business has evolved, you know, initially as a consortium model with a contributory database. Our business has evolved a tremendous amount in 50 years. The technology capabilities for all of us have, you know, are light-years away from where they were 50 years ago. But the opportunity for us today is the same value proposition, which is to better use today's technology, today's data and analytics, to help them better price and underwrite risks, better process claims, and just generally operate more efficiently. So the opportunity we see before us today, you know, we've quoted that our revenues represent only 40 basis points of the industry's total OpEx in 2022. We think that we can help them significantly cut down on their OpEx and operate more efficiently, and kind of increase that capture.
Got it. You know, you talked about how it's still a very diversified, you know, business within insurance, and we'll get to some of the segments later, too. But can you just talk about the visibility that you have within those businesses? And, you know, I'm sure it's a lot better than what you had at S&P Ratings. So just, you know, talk about that.
Yeah, yeah, so we are very fortunate in our business. You know, 80% of our revenues come from subscriptions. Some of those are annual evergreen, many of them are multiyear. So we have a tremendous amount of visibility into our revenues going forward and a very, very stable base of revenues in a stable industry. So yeah, the 80% subscription gives us a lot of visibility and the variability of our revenue growth. You know, we've grown organically every year since we went public in 2009, in that 6%-8% range, you know, other than 2020 or 2009 when we have a 5% growth rate.
Got it. One more just big picture question. You know, you talked about the commercialization strategy. You talked about, you know, technology change, evolution. So it feels like there's a little bit of almost a culture change going on. You know, you were brought in new as well as part of that. So just for the audience, just a flavor of, you know, what is the process of that culture change and just some sense of, you know, how long? I mean, you never know how long, but you know.
Yeah. So two sides on the culture change. I think I'll come back to the customer-centric approach and how we're facing and interfacing with our customers. That is a change that I think Lee and the new leadership team have brought in. On the technology side, you know, there's always more technology to take advantage of, and today it's GenAI, and, you know, five years ago it was the cloud. That one, I actually think Verisk, within the insurance space, we have a history of having a large number of data scientists, so a large number of, you know, tech and software engineers.
And so that one, I think maybe we were a little bit underappreciated in the level of data science and other insights that we brought to the table, that I think give us a good foundation for current evolution from here. But going back to the first point, that was a change in terms of how we engage our customers. You know, I think it's been said, you know, Verisk was a we were a fairly product-centric organization. We did have these different businesses that served the insurance verticals, and while they would share information and contacts and things like that, we really did go to market almost entirely separately, and sometimes even under different brands. They didn't always even have the Verisk brands. And so our customers weren't...
Didn't necessarily appreciate the breadth of products that we brought to the table. We would talk to one person on the underwriting side, we'd talk to a different person on the claims side, and the CFO of our customer may only have heard the Verisk name when it came time to sign the annual contract, which is never a good position that you want to be in with the decision makers at your key clients. I think we've changed that approach in terms of bringing together the businesses and bringing together how we think about our customers. As Lee joined, as he became CEO, he kind of led an outreach and some engagement with CEOs of the top customers, and many of them we hadn't really previously engaged with.
They really welcomed the outreach, and they said, "You know, you guys have such a base of information and such insights to be able to talk to the industry, to be able to help us solve common problems on behalf of the industry." And so I got to see that firsthand. Last week, we had the Verisk Insurance Conference in London. We had done this in Q2, in the spring here in the U.S., there's a Verisk Insurance Conference. Those were bringing together what had been kind of previously separate conferences, believe it or not, an underwriting conference, a claims conference, a conference for our extreme events customers. And we did the same thing in London.
Because of the London base, it was-- it had a heavy presence from the Lloyd's market and the specialty insurance market that is centered in London. I think the takeaway, first of all, we don't have the data yet from the London conference, but in the U.S. conference, a tremendous number, you know, almost 50% of the participants, they registered for a particular track for their point of focus, but they went to events and education sessions across the different tracks. So we're seeing our customers having that interest across products. We saw that again in London. I just... Anecdotally, I walked through the product gallery and the demos, and overheard customers saying, "Wow, I didn't know, you know, there's- you have so much stuff. I didn't know that you had this.
I was only familiar with the Specialty Business Solutions product or other things." And so, and we had this, this CEO dinner, probably 8-10 customers and, you know, five of us from Verisk, really talking about what are common themes that they're seeing, what are areas where they need or want more technology, more products, more investment. So it was an exciting engagement.
Yeah, that sounds like a good conference then for you guys. Just one more to wrap up the culture change thing and more from the people aspect of things. You know, Lee obviously took over. I think internally, you've had some new divisional heads. But can you just talk about, you know, the shuffling or the change going on from a people perspective?
Yeah. I think on our leadership team, about half of us are either new to Verisk—so I think there's 10 of us on the senior leadership team. We were all over in London last week and did a little bit of an off-site together after the conference. I think three of us are new to Verisk since 2021. Two or three others are new to their seat on the leadership team. You know, there's a lot of strength. They had previously been at Verisk and in the bench, but with the transitions, they've been able to elevate. And we are thinking about...
I think previously as a multi-segment company, there was more of a sense of there's corporate that kind of sits in their tower, and then there's the businesses. We're now really much more actively engaged with the business. How do we grow? What's our strategy? What are our customer-facing areas? What are our investment opportunities? What are still our opportunities for efficiency and margin improvement? And we're really coming at those together from a business standpoint and kind of functionally. I think you've, you know, you've probably seen them. We're, we've been trying to involve some of our business leaders more directly in the investor dialogue. That's, I think, good for you guys to hear from them and their perspectives, but also good for them to hear what the street is focused on.
Got it.
That's been beneficial in both ways.
Thank you for that. From the technology perspective, two questions. First, the cloud. I believe that move to the cloud is done, and if you could just let us know, you know, what the economics of that might look like, you know, the cost so far that you've borne, and, you know, what we should expect in terms of efficiencies and, and if you'll see that in the numbers.
Yeah. Yes, I think that's part of what you've, what you've started to see in the numbers. You know, we've, we've increased our margin by about 150 basis points for the past two years running. You know, in terms of the cloud transition, we, yeah, we announced last quarter that we, that we have turned off our mainframe. Our, our eastern data center is, is off, so our main contributory database now lives entirely on the cloud. That involved, you know, that transition. First of all, there was a fair amount of CapEx just on the hardware and mainframes that has, that has come out. Some of that spend has been replaced by OpEx. We are, we are primarily an AWS user, so we, we do have expense with AWS.
But, and that's, you know, that was, for a time, ramping significantly, as we kind of moved things in and turned it on and had that usage. What we're seeing now is that step up in expense has kind of anniversaried, and we're now in a just ordinary kind of growing with the business type growth rate in terms of our cloud expenses. There's parts of the business where we've shifted to the cloud, but there is further optimization to do to be more cloud native, to be rearchitected, to either take advantage of bringing datasets together or just to actually operate in the cloud more efficiently. So you may still see some levels of investment to get us there, but ultimately, more efficiency in how we grow as our business grows.
Got it. And, the impact to CapEx, I think you addressed this at Investor Day briefly, but just as a reminder.
Yeah. So that shift to CapEx, I mean, there had previously been a sort of hardware element in the CapEx, which is now the CapEx that remains is almost entirely internally developed software. Our CapEx has been, you know, it was $200 million on an insurance-only basis last year, and that is almost entirely on internally developed software. I think the guidance for 2023 is $220 million-$240 million. We continue to evaluate that based on return on invested capital and making sure that we're creating and delivering value for shareholders.
Got it. And then just on the technology topic, I guess, you get the... I'm sure there's a lot of things going on, but I think one of the big things that you're overseeing, I guess, is the ERP implementation.
Yes.
Can you just, you know, talk about that and the rough timeframe we should expect there?
Yeah. So the ERP, this is our finance and HR internal infrastructure systems. You know, I think Verisk has always done a tremendous job of investing behind and keeping very modern our business-facing technology and architecture. I think for some of our back office systems, there was a little bit of a perspective of, Well, that's just, you know, that's just back office. We don't need, we don't need fancy stuff there. I think we've now grown ourselves into enterprise size, and we need, you know, we need enterprise-level systems. So we're upgrading from PeopleSoft to Oracle Fusion. We kicked that off in Q2 of this year. It, you know, it will be sort of a two-three-year process. You know, nothing that will sort of be seen or impacted, I think, externally.
I think it will help us operate internally much more efficiently and enable our own business people to bring better insights, better forward-looking, and sort of early signs to help navigate business changes, as many other departments have done. In terms of cost, it's, you know, it's baked into the margin targets that we've given and quoted.
Got it. That's a good segue into margins before we get to some of the top-line questions I have here. But, you know, can you just talk about the... maybe remind the audience of your margin targets? And then, in a way, is that other than just the le- the operating leverage that you have, where are the other pieces that margin upside is coming from?
Yeah. So our margins, our target, let's see, 2022 was 52% on an insurance-only basis. Our 2023 targets is 53%-54%, and our 2024, the medium-term guidance, this is not kind of annual guidance for 2024, so it's a wider range of 54%-56%. That all came from the margin targets that we announced in early 2021 of growing 300- 500 basis points from where we were. We upped the ante on ourselves so that the 54%-56% is elevated from that. So that's kind of the trajectory we've been on. We're in that range for 2023.
I will remind people there is some quarterly, whether you call it seasonality or sometimes just noise in the margins. In any one quarter, its margin is affected by all kinds of things, including revenue mix. So we'd encourage people to look on a trailing twelve-month basis, where we continue to expand it.
Got it.
And then the levers for expansion, the ones that we have used so far to get us, to get us that 300 or 400-500 basis point expansion, you know, it's been a combination. It's been efficiencies, it's been some efficiencies that we've been able to gain in going from a three-segment to a one-segment company, from layers within the organization and some places where, by being entirely growth focused, we hadn't been as efficiency-minded as we could have been. So we've looked at that.
And then, you know, so roughly speaking, it's come half from headcount or actions, about half from IT and technology savings, including the cloud transitions that we talked about, and about a quarter from third party procurement consulting, including real estate.
Got it.
And so that's how we've played it out from where we are today. We continue always to look for efficiency in the places that, you know, the opportunities that we see going forward. The ERP program that we talked about after some near-term investment will eventually yield savings and efficiencies going forward, and then continued use of talent optimization and global locations and kind of where we place our workforce is another major trend, as well as, you know, future technology savings.
Got it. All right, super helpful. If you can shift to the revenue side of the equation now. I'm sure you get this in every meeting you're at, but let's start with pricing. Can you just remind us of you know, the historical pricing? I mean, I'd invest at least up to 3%-4%, but you know, how that moves up and down depending on the environments.
Yeah. So, yeah, historically, so historically, our organic constant currency revenue growth has been about 6%-8%. That's our medium-term range. And of that, you know, we say about 300-400 basis points comes from pricing, so, you know, roughly about half of our, half of our revenue growth. You know, in an environment like today, it's, it's a little bit above that, of course. And then in terms of what moves the needle and what drives pricing for us, so in some of our historical businesses that really go back to our birth with the insurance industry, and those that, that contributory and data model, that was set up with a a subscription model that was an annual evergreen contract. And the, the foundation with the industry was that we would grow as they grew.
We would grow with our customers, and so our—their annual pricing or their annual increase was based on their Net Written Premium growth increase. Now, because the price was set, you know, call it late in Q4 of a given year, the numbers—and, and because insurance, the insurance industry is very actuarial-minded and, and precise and wants the numbers to match exactly, their premium for that year wasn't, wasn't yet final, and so they would look to the prior year. So there's, there's... in some sense, there's a two-year lag impact on some of our contract pricing increases. It is a, it is a correlation, it is not a, a one-to-one impact, and it's a fairly loose correlation. But in general, we benefit from a stronger pricing environment, with a little bit of a, of a timing lag.
Got it. Two follow-ups. One, the stronger pricing environment for the insurance market, a hard market, as they call it sometimes, does that mean... and it could vary, I guess, maybe not so this year, but does that mean they buy or willing to buy more products as well, or is this purely just a pricing dynamic?
Great question. It depends what is driving the hard market. I think it's fair to say in today's environment, the hard market has unfortunately been driven by challenges on profitability and high degrees of losses, you know, particularly in 2022. Some of it coming from the auto side, you know, more expensive cars, partially because there's more technology and more equipment in cars, partially because of the post-COVID impacts on supply chains and pricing. Even on the property side, inflation in property values, inflation in labor, inflation in repair costs, all of these are driving, you know, higher claims costs than what was underwritten at the time of the policy. So insurers have been raising rates because of that.
They are willing to pay us, you know, higher pricing to go along with that. But it's not an environment where they are feeling flush with cash or eager to spend on kind of wildly speculative or not wildly, you know, but discretionary new products. We actually think that environment can be beneficial for us as opposed to competitors, because our customers are being very selective in how in what they buy, in how they buy it, and in who they buy it from. Being a trusted partner is important in an environment like that. We are also seeing good traction. Many of our products, remember, are designed to help the carriers be more efficient, to save money, whether it's on OpEx or whether it's on fraud and claims.
And so products like that, that have a really demonstrable ROI from the minute you turn it on, it's actually a great environment to be selling into because they're looking for ways to cut costs.
Got it. Thank you. I'm gonna... The next questions, I'm gonna tie in a little bit more of the near-term questions that we get a lot.
Yeah.
You know, you delivered close to 9.5, more than that, organic growth in the first half of the year. Your second half guidance calls for more like 7.5%. And I think you had, you know, listed a few, or given us a few items why for us to keep an eye on, and I'll touch on those. But broadly, you know, just talk about, this is your first year, you know, just the philosophy around guidance. Like, you know, most people want to believe we're gonna get another 9.5 in the second half of the year, but just help us, you know, moderate expectations.
Yeah. So first of all, I would, I would love to get another 9.5 in the-
Yeah
... in the second half of the year. So don't get me wrong. I mean, our philosophy on revenue is we will drive it as much as much opportunity as we see, and we're, we're aggressive about going after it. My philosophy about guidance, you know, we do want to give you things that you can count on and that we can be reasonably confident in in delivering. But I, I don't... You shouldn't overthink it. I'm trying not to overthink it. You know, it's a new practice for Verisk. We, we had been asked in talking to investors, and maybe some of you were inputs in that survey. We've been asked for more transparency. We are trying to give more transparency and visibility into the business.
We're not trying to game it in any one way or another. We're trying to give you kind of transparency into what we see, and then we'll call out what, you know, some of the puts and takes as they evolve. So I would love to take full credit for 9.8% in my, you know, first year. And there's a lot that we're doing right and that we're excited about attacking, but there's also an environment and a backdrop behind us that is helping us. And as you, I think you jokingly referred to my background in the ratings business. Before coming to Verisk, I was the divisional CFO of the ratings business at S&P. Believe me, no one knows more than I experienced of how environmental factors could impact things like issuance in 2021 or 2022.
Yeah, fair enough. So maybe the you know the first item on the call you had called out was the I guess we'll call it customer liquidation, consolidation impact you know which historically I think in your long-term guidance was 0.5-1.5 points I believe. So for this year can you just help frame you know what that impact has been and kind of you know the outlook for the second half?
... Yeah. So, so for us, you know, attrition and, and customer loss, certainly for our largest businesses, have come primarily when there's been either a, a liquidation, a customer goes out of business. It could also mean a, a customer may stay in business, but if they stop writing business in a certain line of business or a certain state, that, that gets removed from their, from their premium growth, and therefore their, their, their formulaic piece. Industry consolidation, mergers, often, often leads to a bit of a tailwind, sorry, a bit of a headwind for us. You know, it's not, if, if it should be 1 + 1 = 2, it's not 1 + 1 = 1, but maybe, I don't know, 1.7, 1.8.
We saw that, you know, the biggest example was the ACE Chubb merger now six, seven years ago. So that has been for our largest businesses, that has been historically at a low, could come back at some time. It would be, you know, not an unreasonable outcome of a challenged profitability environment. It's something we were watching for in the balance of the year, given the... You know, given kind of where we are at this point in the year, it may be something that may not be a 2023 calendar impact, but could continue in following years.
Got it. And, you know, most of the chatter around kind of the insurers exiting states has been around Florida.
Yeah.
I don't think you've given kind of state exposure, but you're starting to hear similar things in California. So just any thoughts on if that is something to look out for just in the second half of the year?
Yeah, I think it's something to monitor. I don't think, you know, any one state, even a large one like Florida or California, I don't think that would have a, you know, very large impact on us, but it's something we continue to watch. We are focused on the health of the industry in general. I think even when one carrier or a couple of carriers may pull out of a state, you know, those underlying items, typically property, still need insurance, and so that business will eventually, in our experience, has typically gone to another carrier. So that the total amount of premium kind of does have some stability, yeah.
Fair enough. The second point I think that was on the call was around the auto shopping activity. And maybe before we get there, if you can just take a step back, if you talk about what your auto exposure is at various relative to the other categories.
Yeah. So while we don't, we don't separate out our revenue by end market, we don't report it that way, we don't even really run it that way. You know, we have our different businesses and products that may face against different types of market. But I think in the past, we've said that in general, about 10% of our revenues come from facing the auto industry. The underwriting products are some of the ones where we've called out some of the impacts this year, particularly from higher shopping activity. Maybe just to make it concrete for you, what we're talking about, you know, we have a product called LightSpeed, which is a product for carriers. When a customer is shopping for insurance these days, typically online, LightSpeed enables them...
It used to be that you would kind of ask for a quote, they'd give you a generic number, and then you'd have to fill out a form with, you know, 50 different pieces of information. You'd get bored and frustrated. It would they would take that information, and, like, a week later, they would send you the actual price. The LightSpeed product brings together some of our datasets, so that if you, if the customer gives their name, their date of birth, and their address, LightSpeed can give them a quote, a bindable quote, in other words, a, a quote that the insurer is willing to transact on, in real time. So that is tremendously helpful for the carriers to, from a customer, acquisition and, and eventually underwriting value perspective.
That product is monetized in some ways, when the initial quote is given, that's driven by shopping activity, and then if the customer actually buys. You know, if the contract is actually written, that's a different kind of monetization point. There's been high shopping activity with auto insurance. Probably, most of you in this room may have experienced if you have a auto policy, you've gotten a price increase. I think the national average is around 17% for this year. So pretty high prices, and so that has driven customer shopping activity. That's benefited our auto business in the underwriting product.
Got it. And, just to be clear, I think you had a strong, you saw a lot of shopping in the first half.
Yeah.
Your second half guidance assumes some level of moderation?
Yes. Yeah, that's right.
Fair enough. We can leave it there-
Yeah
... because TransUnion, who was before you, expects an increase, so we'll see who wins that.
We'll see.
Yeah. The third point, which I think should be an easy one, is just the whole weather impact.
Yeah.
So maybe just for reference, you know, last year there were a bunch of cat activities that-
Yeah
You quantified the benefit, and maybe that compared to what we've seen so far this year.
Yeah. So it's been an interesting year. So last year, there was very little weather activity in 2022, up until Hurricane Ian, which happened on October 1, I think, of last year, and so that had an impact on us in Q4. Just as a reminder, when there is a major weather event, we have a Property Estimating Solutions business, which helps carriers and the contractors assess and price the value to rebuild property damage. So that's why we benefit from when there's weather-related activity. Because it was such a large event in Q4, so Hurricane Ian was approximately $50 billion of insured losses, and we called out it was... We try to call out these events when they have a more than 1% impact to our revenue growth rate in a given quarter.
So in Q4, we called out a little over $6 million or a 1% impact to growth from Hurricane Ian. This year has been entirely different. So, you know, in the first half, which is the financials that we're talking about, there, you know, there wasn't a single major weather event, but there was a lot of what we call secondary weather events, meaning violent thunderstorms. I don't know if anyone got caught in the 6:00 P.M. thunderstorm last night, but I -
I did.
I certainly did, and I was thinking, "Well, this is what they mean by violent thunderstorms." You know, hurricanes, hail, things like that. We have a PCS service that classifies events like that, and they had an event, I think, in almost every single day in the second quarter of last year, somewhere around the world. So those secondary weather events have been impacting things for this year. Maybe just a point on, you know, it is now hurricane season. We've looked at Hurricane Idalia. It's worth referencing, you know, the insured losses from Hurricane Idalia are estimated at around $2.5 billion-$4 billion. So, you know, significantly less from an insured loss perspective than Hurricane Ian last year.
Got it. Maybe just tie to this, another point that you called out was the cat bond activity.
Yeah.
First half was record, and I guess this is more akin to forecasting ratings business, essentially.
Yes, yes.
But, you know, what is the volatility to the business generally, like with the... Like, how do you participate in the cat bond market?
Yeah. So we help. Our cat bonds model give a way to estimate impact that's used both by reinsurers and insurers when they transact in the cat bond market. We actually have. Our business, our Extreme Events Solutions business competes with RMS from Moody's, but we have probably the predominant share in the cat bond market, and we typically that with new issuance of cat bonds. The cat bond market is very seasonal, based on the reinsurance marketing, which is typically the biggest quarter in the year is the second quarter, which is indeed to place those risks ahead of the North Atlantic hurricane season in, you know, August, September. So that was a very strong second quarter.
There's a little bit of activity in Q4 as well. But so that, you know, strong activity in Q2 would not necessarily-
Got it.
Repeat for the balance of the year.
Okay. Just maybe one more item on, on the success was the, the anti-fraud business you talked about, moved from transact to subscription. Can you just help size that? And, you know, 80% subscription is already a good number overall. Like, is there more of these things you're gonna try and move to subscription?
Yeah. Love that question. So the anti-fraud business, you know, this is a database of claims, and when a claims professional at a carrier, you know, receives a claim, almost the first thing they do is they literally call it run an ISO. So we're like Kleenex for them. That's our name, right? So they, they run it through the database to see what are the previous claims from this individual or company.
Apparently, that is the single biggest predictor of fraud, is what's the prior loss experience of this claimant. So they run it through the database. For carriers, that is and has always been a subscription product. It's typically a tiered subscription, so they pay for a certain number of runs, and then if they have overages, they pay for that. But the product we came a few years ago to think it was maybe under-monetized, so it also sells to self-insured companies or third-party adjusters. Think a large auto fleet owner, like a rental fleet or a rideshare.
They, they kind of self-insure the vehicles that they have, and they typically would use ClaimSearch as well because it's so vital to the industry, but it, it was, for them, a transactional product. We developed a subscription bundle for that audience, and have been migrating them slowly from the, from the transactional to the subscription. That's been a tailwind for our subscription growth. It's, it's, you know, at, at the expense of the transaction growth, that's been playing out, I would say, over the past year. So it's, you know, one product for us within the anti-fraud space, and then one customer subset within that. That, that tailwind of shift from transaction to subscription is probably largely played out at this point. But, but your next question, which is: is there more of that to come?
I mean, many of our new businesses and sort of more innovative or new products typically start on a transactional basis. Customers, you know, initially want to try, want to have something that's usage-based, want to make sure they want to experiment with the product and how it fits. Internationally, it's much easier to have a transaction-based business model than subscription. And then over time, as those products gain traction, we often are able to transition them into a subscription model. So I think kind of the funnel of new revenue coming to us from new products may sort of continue. It may start on the transactional side, and then we may kind of shift over time into the subscription. Which goes to say that, that 80/20 mix that we have may fluctuate around that, but, but that feels like a good place for us to be over time.
Got it. And maybe we can end with capital allocation and just maybe a subsegment of that, which is M&A. You know, so far, it seems like you've been doing internationally, you bought Life, you bought Marketing. How should we think about where the M&A dollars will be spent going forward?
Yeah. We're really excited, and in an environment like today, where liquidity is prized, a healthy and cash flow positive business like ours with a strong balance sheet, you know, has plenty of acquisition opportunities, so we're excited about that. Yes, we look internationally for businesses that can grow our markets, but not just- we're not just kind of planting flags out there randomly to have more presence.
We are looking for businesses that have strong penetration in their markets and ideally strong adjacencies with the businesses that we have today. So the U.K. is a good example of a market where we've built that, you know, with a number of products, the specialty business product that I talked about with our time in London, has been kind of a platform off of which presence and customer dialogue we've built further things. But we'll continue to look at new data sets that we think we can integrate, and new capabilities, strong products and other things with synergies with our existing business.
And maybe just a quick follow-up. In international, you know, obviously there is no Verisk abroad, otherwise that would have been an obvious target. But how do you, Like, is it, is it to replicate Verisk out there, or is it just pieces of Verisk that you can replicate internationally?
Yeah. For a number of reasons, the historical Verisk, the proprietary, the contributory database model abroad, would be very hard to do. So that is not what we are trying to do or to replicate. For different market-specific reasons, that's unlikely to take place. We are looking for strong players, data-enabled players, in their markets. Some of them benefit from our U.S. data. For example, our commercial database in the U.S. has a tremendous amount of data on property-commercial properties in the U.S. Underwriters, say, on the Lloyd's market, are typically underwriting risks which may be associated with those properties, or the characteristics and data and insights can be applied to other local markets. So that's one example of some synergies we could get from our existing data.
Got it. Well, we're just about out of time, so let's end it there. Thank you, Elizabeth, for being in. Thank you, everybody, as well.
Thank you so much!