Equifax Inc. (EFX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Andrew Steinerman. Thanks for joining this JPMorgan presentation at a TMC Conference. This is the Equifax presentation. I'm the business and information services equity research analyst at JPMorgan. I've been doing this job for over 20 years. Thanks for joining us. This is the Equifax session. It's going to be a fireside chat. We have CEO, Mark Begor; and CFO, John Gamble. So we're just going to get going here. I'm going to be asking the questions.

Mark, what are the key signatures of the pandemic? Is that pretty much every consumer, including myself, got more digital savvy, and that's surely drive more robust digital commerce across many industries. Could you just tell us what the impact on Equifax is? Is this purely a positive for Equifax? Or are there any challenges or drawbacks that come from a more digital economy, which is obviously just here to stay more?

Sure. Andrew, first, let me say thanks for having us. I wish we were in New York together, hopefully next year, but we always look forward to being a part of your conference and had some great sessions this morning and this afternoon. So really 2 macros, I would add to the digital macro, the one of data and the value of data was -- those were 2 macros over the last 3, 4 years in our space. Meaning more data, more alternative data and the power of digital meeting around identity and fraud. And those were accelerated with COVID, both macros from our perspective. And both, I think, are positive macros for our industry and for Equifax. On that data, just the explosion of more data is something that just is very powerful for our customers to enhance their decisioning. And in the COVID environment, the complexity of the consumer, in the heat of COVID and then post-COVID, is really requiring more data solutions to help navigate that. As you point out, the digital macro was strong coming into COVID, and it's even stronger through COVID. And the really play there for us is around identity and fraud solutions. And verifying that Mark is Mark, when he's interacting on a financial transaction, an insurance transaction, a telco transaction or so many other e-commerce transactions that take place. It's a real fine line because it has to be done really with little friction, but with a lot of resiliency, meaning you have -- it has to be done well. And if you have too much friction in the process, you lose the consumer. They're going to go somewhere else in that transaction. If you don't have enough strength in there, you're not going to verify the identity and you could have fraud. And I think as you know, we've been doubling down in that space around our new products like Luminate, which is our new fraud identity platform we rolled out last year that just brings lots more attributes together, more data sources. And then our Kount acquisition in the first quarter really was focused on this identity and fraud macro that's being driven by digital. The identity space is an $18 billion TAM, growing at 20%. Kount had that kind of a growth rate when we acquired it. We see some really big synergies from the uniqueness of their data set. They have a very large-scale data set from e-commerce and have upwards of 32 billion interactions with consumers every year, large-scale verified e-mail addresses at over 400 million e-mail addresses; cell phone numbers; IP addresses; ship to, bill to addresses. So more signals on Mark and Andrew that can be used in concert with Equifax's data on identity. The combination of the 2 drive predictability and will allow us to launch new products at higher price points because of the higher predictable nature of that identity. So we're very focused on both of those, and I think they are positive for the industry.

Right. All right. Anything about digital commerce, move to digital consumer that's a headwind to Equifax?

The same positive. You need the same data and more when you're interacting digitally. You have to do more around identity, and you still need the same elements as far as originations and those unique data elements in that process. And as you point out, it's a big macro on e-commerce and digital interactions that was strong coming into COVID. There's some stats out there that it was accelerated by 2 years. And it's not going to go back. If you're used to interacting on your tablet with your financial institution or applying for a credit card or mortgage during COVID, you're going to do that after COVID. And that's actually a net positive because there's more identity data required in that digital interaction than there was in a traditional brick-and-mortar interaction.

What was that? And I agree. Let me ask you about innovation around the payments space, particularly buy now, pay later. And the thing that stands out to me is often those models are funded by the merchant and -- funded by the merchant, which, in my mind, means that they are payments, not credit. And so as much as BNPL enablers are clients of Equifax, are there any sort of negative ramifications for the bureaus in the sense of credit applications, need for credit, if small payments are getting enabled over short periods of time that are not credit?

We think that innovation is good for the industry. It's bringing the traditional financial institutions to think more innovatively around products like BNPL. You've got some traditional card issuers bringing that as a feature on the credit card where you compartmentalize a specific purchase and make those minimal payments. The BNPL players are all customer of ours. We [indiscernible] identity data. You still have to verify Mark is Mark, even if they're going to be financing a pair of blue jeans over 4 payments, you want to make sure it's not a fraudster. Increasingly, they're moving up into bigger ticket transactions. And when you move from a $100 pair of jeans up to a $500 refrigerator or a $2,000 couch, you have to bring the credit file and data into it and income and employment data and things like that. So we think it's good for the industry and good for innovation, and we see really nothing but positives for Equifax and for the industry around that. And we're partnering with them around the globe. We have strong relationships in Australia, Canada, U.K. and other markets. And here in the States, we're doubling down our resources in fintech, as you know, which is where we service the BNPL players out of. And we've got very meaningful relationships with a lot of them. Andrew.

Right. If you let me, one more BNPL question. Are they contributors to the credit file because they really are payments, not credit?

And that varies by market. We expect them to, over time, particularly as they move into larger ticket transactions. We think that's valuable data around a consumer. Similar to like the cell phone payment date, if you think about it. If you pay your cell phone bill every month and you know we have that unique NC Plus database and then you also pay off your jean purchase that was 4 payments of $25 each for that BNPL transaction, that's valuable payment data and alternative data that we would like to collect. So it's something we're focused on.

Right. So I want to talk about your era as CEO, which was started shortly after the September 2017 breach. And I want to look at long periods of time. I'm not talking about the 2017 breach. I'm talking about -- look, 2017 and before, Equifax was a strong innovator, strong organic grower, known for extending addressable market, just really kind of a great infoservices company. Then the breach obviously revealed issues. And then over the last several years, you came in with your broader team and spent all this money on technology to solve for that and innovate on top of that, both offense and defense together. And so my question is, when you look at the organic revenue growth profile now of the company, is it the same as or better than what it was for 10 years leading into 2017?

I want to be careful and not get into our long-term framework, which, as you know, we've talked to you about as well as other investors. We intend to have an Investor Day in the second half and rollout our long-term framework, which, as you know, we pulled before I arrived right after the cyber event. I was laughing to myself when you started the question about my era. I would like to say I'm still in the early innings of my era. I'm only 3 years into my time at Equifax. And as you know, I see a lot of opportunity and runway going forward. I will give a couple of comments, though, about how I think about how Equifax is different. There's a lot of Equifax that's the same. Our differentiated data is the same as it was before. We believe we have data assets, which is the heart of Equifax that our competitors don't. You could talk about the work number, you can talk about NC Plus, our cellphone utility database; you can talk about IXI, our wealth database. We have some scale databases that really differentiate Equifax. Pre the cyber event, Rick and the team had a real focus on innovation, and that innovation focus never changed. If anything, we're doubling down on it. I think a differentiator is the cloud investment. We think that that's really quite transformational. We think it's going to differentiate Equifax quite dramatically from our competitors. They're not doing it. It's going to be hard for them to do it in the mode that they're in. They'll chip away at it. But we had a window and we took it to really not only solve our security issues and really take our security to industry-lead capabilities, but more importantly, to change not only our technology, but our data. And I think those 2 elements are really quite important. We'll be the only cloud-native data analytics company out there, which we think that's going to really deliver a competitive edge in how we deliver solutions, the stability of our operations, the speed of data being delivered. The wealth of data we can deliver our customers is going to be really unmatched by our competition. And second is the single data fabric. That's going to allow us to put all of our silo data thesis into a single data solution that will facilitate multi-data solutions to our customers, which goes back to the macro we talked earlier about, more data and more alternative data. And we think that's really a differentiator. The focus on new products, that was here before. It's much stronger today. And we really have, we believe, a lever now with the cloud to allow us to do products we couldn't do before. I think, Andrew, you know we've ramped up new products in the early days of where we are with the cloud. Last year, 134, up from 70 to 80 that you would have been used to, so really a big focus on that. And we launched earlier this year a new 3-year strategy for the company internally and externally called EFX2023. And central to that is leveraging the cloud for innovation in new products. And we've added new resources there and new -- more people. We've got a Chief Product Officer that's a part of my leadership team, and we just retooled the organization. John and I have a monthly cadence with that team about their pipeline of new products, so it's really across the company on the new products. So -- and then the last thing I would say that's different going forward than it was in the past is the scale of Workforce Solutions. Workforce Solutions has been around for a long time. We've owned it for over a decade. We've been -- it's been a great business for a decade. It's been growing faster in the last couple 3 years than it was the prior 7 or 8. Part of that, we believe, is the catalyst of getting over 50% of the nonfarm payroll. I think, as you know, we're at 60 now. And the second is the cloud. The cloud is allowing us to do things in Workforce Solutions that we couldn't do before. That includes ingesting more data or records. We're up to over 1.2 million contributors, companies contributing data to the data set. You remember when it was 100,000, so massive difference. And then on new products. You've seen a cadence of new products coming out of Workforce Solutions in -- like I-9 Anywhere, our Mortgage 24 solution, our Mortgage 36 solution, our Mortgage Duo solution for co-borrowers. These are all at higher price points. And then, of course, Workforce is clearly growing faster than the rest of Equifax. It has for a decade. And we expect that to continue at a stronger rate. It's really been accelerating in its growth rate going forward. And for the first time in our history, since we've owned Workforce, it's our largest business. And we only expect it to get larger, short of acquisitions with USIS. It's just clearly going to grow step change difference than USIS and International and GCS, which will make it an even more important part of Equifax. So when we think about our long-term framework going forward, these are factors that are going to be embedded in that. The impact of the cloud on the top line and bottom line, the impact of new products on the top line and bottom line and then the increasing contribution of Workforce Solutions, which is growing faster than Equifax, with margins in the high 50s that are highly accretive to Equifax. So those elements, we think, are more powerful Equifax going forward. And back to your question on era, I'm in the early innings of my era at Equifax and more energized about the future than the past because we're really at the point now where we can really start leveraging what we've built over the last 3 years.

Okay. Great. And if you're going to talk about verticals, so you talked more about products recently, just in your conversation. Talk about verticals. Which verticals over the next couple of years do you think will be the biggest needle movers just over the next 2, 3 years?

I'm not allowed to say yes? It really is broad-based, Andrew, and I think you know that. We're very bullish on mortgage. We have a very big mortgage business, and you've seen us have strong outperformance of the underlying mortgage market. And all of the levers we talked about, new products, penetration, new customers, pricing, records in the case of Workforce Solutions, that's clearly a vertical. Our traditional financial services, whether it's auto, P loan, cards, we're investing in new products and new capabilities on. And when you couple Workforce Solutions data with the credit data, we think we've got a very powerful solution to do more bundling in that space. You talk about government. That's a very fast-growing vertical for us with the delivery of social services and then increasingly, fraud prevention as being 2 areas of growth in government. I think as you know, we've got a large contract that we won a year ago. It comes online later this year that -- with the SSA, that will be $40 million to $50 million at run rate next year. That's an example, a very sizable non-mortgage growth there. And then the last one I would say is talent solutions, which is uniquely Workforce Solutions for the most part, but is in the hiring process. We don't talk a lot about it, but it's one we've been building new solutions in. There's 70 million people hired in the United States every year. And we have data that's very valuable and is used in that hiring process with the work history we have in Workforce Solutions. As you know, not only do we have 115 million active records, we have 450 million total records. And that's an average of 4.5 jobs on the average American. That data is used in the hiring process between offer and employment. Most jobs require verification of the past work history, and that's an area that we're growing in. We now have a data hub that's used in the talent solutions space where we're collecting data on university degrees, accreditations, licenses, other data like that. So that's another vertical that we're growing. And the last one I would say, which is very new for Equifax, is e-commerce and retail through Kount. That's one we were in before. It's kind of a byproduct of buying Kount because the data and presence they have in that space. So we see opportunities to bring some of our data solutions into like marketing in the retail space.

Yes. John, help me out with something in the guidance, which just struck me as a little odd, and it's about mortgage. You guys have recognized that the mortgage market would be down a little bit more than expected than you previously expected. And you said, oh, the mortgage market will be down 8 instead of 5, but that the mortgage revenues at Equifax, and yes, you could correct me if I missed anything, are still going to be up 10% or maybe you even said 10% or more. I forgot exactly how you phrased it. But what that means is, even though you recognize the mortgage market will be somewhat softer, the outperformance will be greater than previously expected. And so you really feel like your mortgage revenue growth this year is going to be the same as what you thought earlier in the year. So just first, tell me if I framed the question right, and help me understand that increased outperformance.

I think you framed it properly, right? And what's happening is that some of those areas of specific growth, a lot of this is around Workforce Solutions, around pace of record growth, around the increase in the penetration that we have in the mortgage market. So the number of inquiries we see and the work number relative to the number of inquiries we see in the credit file as well as the penetration we're seeing in new products, so really our average unit revenue, were all a little stronger than we expected when we started the year, right? So that gave us -- and you saw it in our first quarter results, right? And the fact that it materialized in the first quarter, as a very strong level of performance, it gave us confidence we could carry that out through the rest of the year. So even though the market was going to be somewhat weaker, we still believe we can deliver the same level of revenue performance that we did before, and it's really driven by those unique factors that we control ourselves, and it's principally in Workforce Solutions.

Makes total sense. And since you guys reported like over the past month, when you look at consumer credit application and activity and the backdrop that you're up against, I assume you would describe it as constructive and favorable, but I want to give you guys an opportunity to describe the last month in terms of the backdrop that you're operating in.

I would say it's consistent with our guidance. We haven't changed what we said back with our first quarter earnings a month ago. We expect the recovery to continue. We saw that through the end of April, and we expect that to continue going forward. And you see the same things we do about vaccine rollouts and consumer activity increasing. That's in our framework that we shared with you with the guide up for 2021 in nonmortgage and our framework for mortgage that we gave for the rest of the year.

Great. So I'm going to ask you a series of questions on Equifax Workforce Solutions. And again, you can always pass, pass as an answer, if that's what you choose, but these are the things I'm curious about. The payroll processors. The payroll processes have really been partners to Equifax. Some have chosen to be partners to more than one, let's say, income verifier...

Not many on that one, Andrew. As you know, the vast majority of our relationships are exclusive.

Right. No. Look, again, Dorian asked me not to speak about specific ones, so I'm going to try not to speak about specific ones. But my question is, do you see the payroll processors, and I [indiscernible] in HR software firms with payroll processors, role changing in the Equifax ecosystem? Is it -- why don't you have all the top 20 already? Like out of the top 20 payroll processors and HR software companies, how many of the top 20 do you have? I know you're bringing on a large one the second half of this year. I don't think you mentioned which one it is but...

We did not.

I'd be interested, if you were willing. So just give us a sense. Collectively, the top 20, how many do you have? And you said most of them are exclusive, if you could be any more specific?

I'd actually say more than -- most, I'd say the vast majority are exclusive. There's very few that are not. It's our intention to be exclusive. The new one that's coming on later this year is exclusive, and the relationships we intend to have going forward will be exclusive. And we think that's in the interest of both of us. Just as a reminder, for the rest of the group, 60% of our records are from individual companies that we've collected over the last decade. We collect those individually by going to HR managers. We deliver services to the HR managers. Our Benefit Solutions business, as you know, whether it's W-2, et cetera. So we have, we believe, a very strong moat around those because we provide a lot of services. And our thesis is that a company is not going to give the records to 2 people. They give them to us because we provide real services to them. And second, they give them to us because we have very high security, privacy protections that is what the HR manager wants to protect with their payroll records. With regard to the payroll processors, we have like 30-plus relationships, somewhere in that range. They're both payroll processors and software companies, as you point out. We are in conversation with every one of them. And this is not new. Those conversations typically take time because payroll processors in the business are processing payroll and providing other services to an HR manager or an accounting officer at a company, and they want to make sure they manage that relationship well. Now the positive is the services that we deliver, the income and employment verification, is a value-added service that they can deliver through Equifax for free to their customers. So they become more valuable to their customers. That's part of the value prop for them. But they also want to make sure that this relationship doesn't impact their core business. So that's why it takes time to have these conversations. The relationships we have are exclusive. It's what we want. It's what generally our partners want because we can monetize those records via a revenue share to them instantly because of the flows of the inquiries that we have. I think you know that we have real scale. Today, we're only able to fill, call it, 60% of our inquiries. As we add new records, they get monetized Day 1, and we can share that with our partners. So we fully expect to continue to grow our data set through individual companies through our Benefit Solutions business and through the payroll partnerships. I could tell you that there's been some momentum in the last year in these conversations. When 1, 2, 3, 4 of the big guys come with Equifax, it's well-known in the industry to those that haven't. And if you think about it, they're at a competitive disadvantage. They're not providing this value-added service for free to their customers. And then second, they don't have the revenue share, so they're less competitive by not having that incremental margin. So we've got conversations going with the rest of them. And just a last reminder, we tend to talk about nonfarm payroll, the 157 million versus the 90 million uniques we have, which is the 60%. We're very focused on the gig economy, which is another 40 million, 50 million people that's either their second or their third job or their primary job is a self-employed individual. So we want to build-out those data sets. And then the other data set that we're working to build-out is defined benefit retirees that are getting pension payments every month. That's another valuable data set that's used in a lot of our use cases. So we're - we've got a lot of runway, if you will, to add records. And we have a dedicated team on all the fronts I talked about. And because of our scale, we have the capabilities to resource those kind of people that all they do is work on adding records.

Yes. That makes sense. No, I don't mind reminders at all. I definitely agree with you, scale begets scale, and the ecosystem is self-reinforcing. You know what interests me is the 40% of the time where you don't get a hit rate on the work number. And increasingly, you guys have been talking about helping out the lender with the other 40%, which inherently will be a manual process. I know you're ramping up a call center in Iowa. Like just tell me how far along are you on filling the 40%, the manual side where there isn't a hit for a specific lender?

Yes. And we're talking about mortgage. It varies by vertical. It's generally close. Yes, it's generally in the same ZIP code. And we announced some new solutions last week actually out of our Iowa center with a 24-hour product and a 48-hour product to the manual. We think we can do it more efficiently than our customers can in a verified basis because of the scale we have and the technology we've invested in and some of the connections that we have. So that's just a service that we're providing. It's one we make money on. The primary way we're going to focus on it is adding records. And that's where -- our customers want 100%. They want us to have all of these. They'd like to have a one-stop shop where they get it 100%. It slows down their process when they don't get a hit with us, and they have to either do their call center or have us do it for them. And we think we can do it quite efficiently for them, and that's one of the focuses we have with our -- some of our new solutions coming out of the Workforce Solutions' manual processes.

The manual side, you say, really is a new area for you?

It's one we've invested in, and we have some new products. We just announced some new products actually last week into the marketplace. You may have seen them on our press release.

I did. I did. And the other...

We have a long outstanding solution there, Andrew. So that's something that we're very strong in. We've just added a bunch of new products. And we're investing very aggressively with the technology providers and technology to have them integrate to us. And we'll actually support them in building integrations into Equifax through the modern APIs we've deployed in the -- as part of tech transformation. So that's a very significant effort that we continue to focus on and where we have a lot of good information because we're a tri-merge vendor as well as a workforce solutions vendor. So we know who all of these players are because we sell to them on the tri-merge side.

Right, right, right. And I know there's other providers that do that call center type of work to help on the manual side. I know they kind of typically charge $50 or $100 per manual pull or verification. And truly, everybody wants to get to digital. But we're going to be with manual for a while. And so my question is, you -- does a typical lender want to consolidate with Equifax and move away from, let's call them, other manual lenders to just use a single provider for digital and manual?

The answer is yes. If we can do it in a complete way form. And our biggest competitors are really those that do it themselves. And a lot of the mortgage originators have their own in-house operations. It's a nuisance form. They prefer not to have it. They prefer to have the instant verification. And then if we can prove to them that we can do the manual better than they can, we'll pick up that business and then convert them to our automated process as we add records. That's really the focus that we have and why we're investing more in it in both people and technology and product.

And the price point is going to make sense to them to outsource this, the manual side?

[indiscernible].

Okay. Okay. That's good. That's good. My question is, obviously -- I'm not going to overplay this card. But obviously, there's more providers in the marketplace. Experian just announced an Experian Verify Plaid. [indiscernible] announced an income product in beta a few weeks before that. My question is, is this just a fast enough large pie where more than one provider could grow quickly?

Well, they're different solutions. If you're okay, I'd like to separate to a degree Plaid from maybe what we think Experian and TU might be trying to do. So on the Plaid one, we have a partnership with a company called Yodlee, as you know, which is singular to Plaid. It's consumer-consented bank transaction data. We think there's a place for that, which is why we have this exclusive partnership. But it's a niche. How many consumers on this call are going to hand over your JPMorgan Chase credentials to log into your bank account to a third party? And it's generally those that are credit-needy and really searching maybe their first financial product, so there's a place for it. We don't think there's going to be at scale. It also creates friction in the process. A mortgage originator, a credit card issuer, an auto lender, if you're at the F&I desk on a Sunday, buying a new car on -- with a loan, the friction of, "Okay, you've got a key in this information. Can we get the data?" And it's also a single data element. It's generally net pay, which isn't sufficient for many, many use cases. And as you know, in our mortgage solution, we provide 50 attributes as a part of our income and employment report. So then on the TU, Experian, we're curious about what they're trying to do. We think it's going to be quite hard, given our scale. If you're a customer of Equifax where you can get 60% hit rates from us or get 5% or 3% of 10%, whatever the percent hit rate is from somebody else, we think it's quite challenging to play in the space. And given the scale of our data set, we think it's going to be difficult to catch up and get meaningful. It took us a decade to get to 50%. It took us a couple of years to get from 50% to 60%. And that is -- scale really does drive scale, so we think it's going to be quite challenging. So we're watching them. It's not lost on us. We're investing more in the business, you've seen us do that. We've done M&A. We did 2 acquisitions in the first quarter to strengthen Workforce Solutions. Think about our employee benefits -- our Benefit Solutions business. Real scale of capabilities that, over the years, we haven't talked a lot about, but it drives records. It's what drives those 60% of our records. And think about the scale where we process now 1 in 3 unemployment claims. That's a massive scale, a year ago it was 1 in 5. So we're growing our scale in there that drives records. And the path to get from a start-up mode to that kind of scale is a long road, and we plowed a ton of money into this business. I don't hear our competitors talking about investing $2 billion like we have over the last decade or even $300 million or so over the last 3 years incrementally in the tech stack. They're not talking about that. It's one that we plan to strengthen and defend our franchise going forward.

We also have 450 million records, historical records, right, not just current. And many solutions require historical records. And that's something that's hard to replicate. It can only really be done with time.

Right. So John, thanks for bringing that up. Because that -- so to me, the 2 big themes, I think, of competitive advantage of Equifax Workforce Solutions is scale, meaning coverage of your records; and history of your records. And I know you mentioned trended history of your records, which is sort of the net derivative of that. Like do you feel like Equifax Workforce Solutions will have to step up its innovation further? Or do you think those 2 key advantages, scale coverage and history trended are enough to kind of keep ahead of the pack, recognizing it's the technology and the background that's enabling it? And let me just throw out an example. I'm surprised that I haven't heard about an ongoing monitoring product from Verifier. Maybe I missed a press release, but that seems like a large addressable opportunity if the price point was right. So my question is, do you feel like we're going to hear about brand-new things like that monitoring? Is my...

We actually do some monitoring like in credit card files. We score credit card files regularly in...

No, no. I say in income. Right. Of course, I know it's -- I know you do it in credit. I'm saying an income verifer, maybe you should do a monitoring product. And so that's my question is, do we -- in Verifier, do we need brand-new white space? Or could we just continue to execute well against the opportunity that we have with the scale advantages that we currently have?

We think there's a lot of opportunity in our existing verticals, and we're kind of creating new verticals. Like government wasn't a vertical except for like 5 years ago, and we've got a lot of runway in government. Talent Solutions is a fairly new vertical, if you want to think about Equifax. And we think there's a ton of runway now. And even in mortgage, you think about -- we don't see 40% of the mortgages, meaning they're done by pay stubs. So there's a lot of opportunity at cards that are fairly new for Workforce Solutions. So we think there's a lot of opportunity there. When you talk about the moats, I agree with the 2 you described as the moats around the business. I would add to the -- how we collect our records. The fact that we have 60% of the records are collected from individual companies is a very strong competitive moat. That's hard to do. It took a decade to do that. And we already talked about the partner records we have, if you want to use that term. Most of those are exclusive. So it's going to be hard to get those records. And that's our intention going forward. And in many regards, that scale does drive scale. That next payroll processor that's thinking about Equifax versus someone else, the fact that we've invested so much in our technology, gives them comfort. We're going to do it well. And then second is we can deliver revenue share, Day 2. It's very hard for our competitors to do that when they're in a start-up mode because they don't have the flow of inquiries on a system-to-system basis, like our competitors have 0 right now.

Great. And last question...

[indiscernible] the records that are -- sorry, go ahead.

Sorry. Maybe let me just ask this, right, because we only have a minute left. I don't know if you noticed about me, but I'm an NPS junky. Client NPS score means a lot to me. I look at it across different info services companies. I know what a good B2B NPS score looks like. And I know that you guys track a client NPS score. So my question is, would you be willing to tell us what your NPS score is? What has been the direction of the NPS score? Anything that gives us insight to NPS.

Yes. It's one that's important to me. And as you know, one of our pillars around our EFX2023 strategy is customers first. So we're very field-oriented, very customer-oriented, and NPS is an element that we do track NPS. We haven't disclosed what it is. I can tell you it's a lot higher now than it was in 2018. After the cyber event, we clearly had some work to do to win back the trust and confidence of our customers, and we think we've won that back in kind of 2018 and '19. And now in 2020 and '21, we're in a more normal mode. But we're always focused on really delivering real value to our customers and putting our customers first, which is one of the pillars of our EFX2023 strategy.

Right. Do you know if your NPS score is commensurate with where you were pre-2017?

I don't know, off the top of my head. John, do you?

No, I do not, right? We didn't really track NPS in the same way back before 2017 that we do today, right? Yes.

I can imagine. I appreciate that. You'll allow me to ask the question again at Analyst Day?

Absolutely.

Okay. I want to thank you guys. The conversation is important. The dialogue will continue. And wish you a great day at the conference. Thank you so much.

Thanks for including us.

My pleasure. You got it.