Equifax Inc. (EFX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Let's go ahead and get started. Thank you all for joining us. I'm George Tong. I cover business and info services at Goldman Sachs. Really pleased to be joined by Mark Begor, CEO, Equifax, as well as John Gamble, CFO. Thank you both for being here.

Thanks for having us, George.

All right. So I want to start at a high level with some of the targets that you both presented at the recent Investor Day. One such long-term target was organic revenue growth, 7% to 10%, upwardly revised from previously 6% to 8%. We'll get into some of the details later on in the discussion, but could you, at a high level, talk about what's changed in the business? What's improved to allow this stronger longer-term organic revenue growth? What's new with the new Equifax?

We think a lot has changed, certainly in the last 3 years since the cyber event. And as you know, we've invested heavily in the cloud transformation. That was a big priority of ours. We put an incremental $1.5 billion into the business to go cloud native and then also go to a Single Data Fabric. So really a big difference at Equifax. And we think -- of course, we're still not done with the cloud transition. We talked about that at our Investor Day a couple of weeks ago. We still have work to do to complete it. We're starting to see the early days of the benefits of the cloud transformation, which is showing up in our financial results for the last couple of years, and our outperformance of the business. So that's number 1 and really a big deal for us to complete it and then start leveraging. Number 2 is our focus on new products. We've really ramped up the resources and focus of leveraging the cloud to deliver new solutions, multi-data solutions out of our Single Day Fabric or new solutions in the business. And that's a big change in Equifax from where we were before. Meaning we have more emphasis on new products, which allowed us to bring up the low end of that range, 100 basis points to high end, 200 basis points. And then third would be Workforce Solutions. Workforce Solutions is clearly our fastest-growing, highest-margin business. It's outgrowing the rest of Equifax. Its margins are over 1,000 basis points accretive. And Workforce has just been a bigger piece of Equifax now. We -- it will be close to or slightly over $2 billion of revenue this year. In 2017, it was $760 million of revenue. That $2 billion is just a little bit north of 40% of our revenue. We expect it to approach and exceed 50% of our revenue, and that accretion of that business growing substantially above the rest of Equifax the last number of years. And in the long-term framework we put out growing organically 13% to 15%, accretes in the top line the business and, of course, does the same on the margins. We also, as you know, on Investor Day, laid out some guidance around 2022, did it a little bit earlier given we're having Investor Day, so we wanted to give that framework and showing that we're going to grow even with mortgage continuing to decline. We also put a view out there where we want to be in 2025 when we showed growing from $5 billion to $7 billion of revenue by '25, taking our margins up to 39% or almost 500 basis points or 500 basis points of margin expansion over the 4 years. And then in the longer-term framework, we said we're going to take our margin growth rate from 25 bps to 50 bps over the long term. So as you get to 2025, the idea of that growing 50 basis points a year along with the top line growth that we mentioned. So back to your question, a lot's different at Equifax. And it's a really exciting time for us to be finishing the cloud. We can see the finish line. We still have a lot of work to do. It to have the early days of starting to see the benefits of that cloud transformation, showing up in our top line, where we've really outperformed in '20 and '21, our expectations like yours and our investors, and really be in the early days of starting to leverage the cloud -- going forward, the cloud capabilities and our differentiated data. And maybe probably one last point is not new with Equifax, but maybe there's more of an emphasis, bolt-on M&A. And as you know, we've really ramped that in 2021. Historically, we were doing $300 million to $500 million a year of M&A, in line with that 100 to 200 basis points of inorganic growth around M&A. This year, we've done close to $3 billion of M&A, and I think we're over 500 basis points roughly of revenue kind of impact from the M&A that we've done so far this year, and that's going to benefit us going forward. And we were clear at Investor Day that bolt-on M&A is a part of our long-term framework going forward.

Right. Now conversely, what's gotten more challenging for Equifax now versus before?

More challenging -- that's a tough question. I didn't expect that one, George. Look, business is challenging all the time. I think about Equifax of having a lot more tailwinds than headwinds. Certainly, the mortgage market is one that's on your mind, in our investors' minds. It was, when we entered 2021. Investors were concerned about will Equifax be able to grow through a declining mortgage market in 2021. We've shown that we could. That's still on investors' minds. Can we grow through a declining mortgage market? We gave you our point of view a couple of weeks ago and in our third quarter earnings about our ability to outgrow the mortgage market in total, and outgrow mortgage market itself in 2022. And I think that's one that is certainly on investors' minds. And what we tried to do is lay out the 2022 framework that we have that shows as a company, we're going to grow at the low end of our framework even with mortgage being down meaningfully again in 2022.

Right. You talked a little bit about your tech transformation as an enabling factor to fuel growth. The cybersecurity attack back in 2017 was really what prompted the journey to transform the tech stack. Can you talk a little bit about data security? Where you are now versus where you were back then?

Yes, we're light years better. I have a view on security. When I joined in April of 2018, I put a marker down that said we want to be an industry leader in data security. And if you look at our security annual report we put out, I think, in March, which most companies don't do, we put specific report out around our security capabilities. We put out third-party metrics on how Equifax is performing versus other financial institutions, banks, et cetera, and we're at the top of the class. That said, we're going to continue to invest in security. After going through a cyber event of 2017, you want to make sure it doesn't happen again. And as you know, the CISO reports directly to me, quite unusual, versus most companies. We've more than doubled our data security resources. We have a 24/7 capability. But what I really feel good about is the third-party metrics that show our capabilities are exceptionally strong above some of the best, and we still want it to be better. What we really also did in 2018 is we knew that we had to invest in security. And we could have invested a couple of hundred million dollars to enhance our legacy infrastructure and our legacy silo data assets. We made what we believe is a bold decision at the time to say we're going to do that, meaning enhance our security to industry-leading capabilities, but we're also going to transform the company. And different Equifax by investing in being cloud native in our applications and technology, which we believe enhances security. Putting security around a legacy infrastructure. In our case, we had something like 60,000, 70,000 servers that we managed in a distributed environment. You got to have security on each server. Now in a cloud environment, there's a different level of security, which we think is much enhanced. And then second, we made the decision that we're going to go cloud native with our data to a Single Data Fabric. We also believe that enhances security. And so security is very central to Equifax. As you know, our CISO presented at the Investor Day a couple of weeks ago, and it's really inherent in who Equifax is. We believe that it's a competitive advantage for Equifax going forward. Meaning that we believe that we have really strong security. It means customers are comfortable doing business with us.

Right. Sticking with the tech transformation. As part of your 2025 targets, you're aiming for EBITDA margins of 39%. How many bps -- or hundreds of bps of margin expansion do you think the tech transformation program unlocked?

Yes. I mean we were very transparent with that actually over the last couple of years, and I'll throw it to John to talk about. But we laid out what we expect the cost benefits to be. We told you and our other investors, how they're going to layer in by year. We're still on track to do that. So a little less than half, john?

Maybe a little more, but, yes.

I'll let John take that, but a meaningful chunk of that. That's part of that acceleration of our margin growth. But go ahead, John, why don't you talk about it?

Sure. And we had indicated between 23% and 25%, right? You've seen substantial acceleration, 300 to 350 basis points of growth in EBITDA margin in that 2025 framework we put forward. And the way to think about it is a little less than half of that is the 50 basis points a year we talked about in our long-term growth frame. And that's really the leverage we get on the very high variable margins we have on being in a data business. Think 70 points of variable margin or higher. On the fact that we're growing Workforce Solutions faster than the rest of the business, and it is the highest EBITDA margins of any of our businesses. Think 55% or in that ballpark. And also, we got a lot of really nice leverage on SG&A given the type of business we're in. And part of the strong EBITDA margin growth can get just out of our ongoing business, we're going to reinvest to try to get that faster organic growth rate, right? So that's how you get to a little under half of that of that 300 to 350 basis points. The rest, the 150 to 200 basis points, is really cloud. And it's 2 main factors as, as Mark said, getting the cost reductions that we talked about, driving the lower COGS that we've committed to and will absolutely deliver as we go from time. But also it's the elimination of the incremental investment we've still been incurring as we complete the cloud transformation. And that will be completed as we certainly get to 2025 in that framework. So it's those 2 things that are driving a huge benefit. One other beneficiary of the transformation also is USIS, right? So we are expecting to see USIS grow faster in this long-term framework than we did previously. And they're a big beneficiary of the Single Data Fabric of all the additional data we've added, so the multi-data solutions, the greater alternative data solutions and then also the substantial investments or acquisitions, which I'm sure we'll cover, that we made count so that we can grow in the identity business, which has an inherently faster growth rate, which lets us believe we're going to see USIS grow faster right.

Now you've previously indicated that you expect mortgage volumes to be down double digits, around mid-teens next year. What's your overall...

Primarily first half as you comp out the second half.

Yes, yes, primarily first half. What's your overall outlook for consumer credit? If you factor in the other categories like autos and credit cards.

I don't think we've given a framework on that, John. We expect it to be growth in 2022 in consumer credit. We're seeing that. In auto, you're seeing some impacts of the supply chain issues. I mean there's not enough inventory available. There's a lot of demand. So if that gets sorted out, that's a good news for 2022 as far as auto lending. Credit cards, we've seen really starting in the second quarter this year, really an increase in marketing and spending there. We don't think that it will slow down. P loan kind of picked up in the second half of this year going forward. And then even in mortgage, you still have a lot of consumers that will benefit homeowners, from a refi, there is a tail there. And the one thing that we're thinking a lot about, we haven't figured it out, and I don't think anyone has yet is there's a lot of equity in people's homes now. The home price appreciation is up higher than it's ever been. And there's never been this amount of untapped equity in homeowners to go after with a refinancing of their mortgage or a cash out refi. What does that do for mortgage, we're continuing to watch that.

What we did say is we expect our core revenue growth organic, right, to be up over 11%. And that -- that's 2 big drivers. One, obviously, is the fact that we expect to substantially outperform the mortgage market. So even with the mortgage market down 15%, we expect to be able to grow next year, our overall mortgage revenue. And then second, we're expecting to see nice growth in our nonmortgage businesses. That's in USIS, but also in EWS. EWS, we expect nice acceleration in Talent Solutions, in government. And then USIS across their nonmortgage segments driven by alternative data, identity and fraud, and commercial. Commercial is a business that we've done acquisitions in and invested in, and we think has really nice growth opportunities.

Sticking with the topic of core growth for next year, you're looking at around 14%. So if you think about potential sources of upside or downside to that target, excluding -- which excludes the mortgage market. What would that be? What were the key drivers of upside or downside to your core growth be for the next...

Maybe I'll talk about what's driving the core growth. It's certainly the competitiveness advantages we have through our cloud capabilities. That's certainly one that's driving that forward. So upside or downside is how we execute on that competitive actions in the marketplace, meaning moving from secondary to primary and trying to drive those kind of conversations. Because we're a better partner now with our cloud capabilities. New products are clearly one. And as you know, we've been ramping those new products through '20 into '21, and we continue to -- want to continue to do that next year. And our vitality index is increasing, from 5% last year to 8 and change this year. And we have a long-term goal of getting it to 10%. That's going to drive our top line. Certainly, the execution of Workforce Solutions and some of the M&A that we've done, Kount, we acquired in the first quarter, the synergies will start kicking in, in '22, '23, '24 of that acquisition. Appriss, which we acquired and Workforce Solutions late this year, the synergies of that businesses we integrated will be kicking in, in '22 and '23 and '24. So those are all positives for us going forward. And then you think about the verticals that we're in that are outside of the core credit bureau space. We talked about that in our Investor Day that we're increasingly much more than a credit bureau. We're doing things in identity. It's outside of the credit bureau space. We're doing things in employer services and Workforce Solutions, where we do employment claims management, INI, W-2, WOTC, those kind of services where we're outsourcing. Of course, we get records in return for that. The Talent Solutions space has been growing rapidly in 2021. We expect that to continue going forward. And as you know, we're working to build out a talent hub to address that $5 billion TAM in the hiring space. There's 75 million people getting new jobs or changing jobs in the United States every year. Most of them require some level of background check, and we're working to build out all the data that's used in that to really sell to background screeners and to HR managers. So that's a very fast growth area for us. And the last one is government. So as you know, we've been building out our government solutions. Workforce Solutions participates in a lot of the social services delivery in the United States, whether it's unemployment claims, it's food stamps or rental support. All of those are either income or employment based. So we've been building that business out. We have a large contract. You're well familiar with -- that we won a year ago that went live in August and is ramping with the Social Security Administration. That will ramp from 0 in August to 40-odd million next year. So that's another big area. And of course, Appriss really makes us stronger in the Talent Solutions space with their criminal justice incarceration data and in the government space, where it's also used in the delivery of the social services. So those are some of the areas that are really structural changes in Equifax that we're really investing in, whether it's cloud or differentiated data, new products, the bolt-on M&A or the widening of Workforce Solutions, which gives us confidence in putting the framework in place for 2022 that we did.

And the inorganic framework we talked about, so about 300 basis points in 2022, really only reflects the acquisitions closed in '21. So any additional bolt-ons we're able to find and execute obviously can be upside as well.

Right. So if we were to dive more deeply into some of the segments, USIS non-mortgage slowed a bit in terms of growth in the most recent quarter. Can you talk about...

Actually, it also outperformed the framework.

It did?

It did outperform the framework the last, I think, 7 quarters.

Yes. That is true. Great point. So I mean if you were to look into business trends, how would you say the business -- nonmortgage outside mortgage vertical. USIS is performing from a market share perspective and from a pipeline perspective?

And as you know, a dramatic change from 2018 and '19. You followed us then. We were still earning the trust back following the cyber event. USIS, that was most impacted. As we came into '20, that really started accelerating. And even through COVID that continued and through 2021. From a competitive standpoint, they have differentiated data in USIS that our competitors don't have. That's the advantage. I think about the alternative data that the USIS team have between DataX, which we bought in 2018, and Teletrack that we just closed on in October, we now have 80 million records that for the most part are outside the credit file on, in thin file or unbanked consumers alternative data. Payday lenders, rent-to-own company data. So very valuable data. So differentiated data is a real asset for USIS. The cloud is, and then there are new product rollouts. And we feel very positive about their competitive position and the ability to really grow and start taking some share. And then also the rollout of new products continues to drive forward, which will really benefit USIS going forward. So we talked on most of our earnings calls, quarterly calls, about their deal pipeline continuing to build, as they're bringing those new products in the marketplace and starting to have those discussions with customers or to cut the discussions around moving from secondary to primary or tertiary to secondary. We've also expanded our capabilities and efforts in fintech. That was a place we were behind in. Admittedly, when I joined in 2018, we fixed that resource-wise. We fixed that capability-wise. We've also fixed it with the cloud. Really, it makes us a strong partner with fintech. And when I think about, for example, BNPL players, that's more of a level playing field because it's fairly new. And we were scaled in fintech to really participate early with the BNPL players around their identity needs, their data needs, their alternative data needs. So that's one that's also a benefit for -- I'm sorry, for USIS. And then you add Identity and Kount acquisition. That was a really important area for us. It's a real priority. Identity is a $19 billion TAM growing at 20%. We had a couple of hundred million dollar business Kount makes us stronger there. And what's really important about Kount is the uniqueness of the data it has from e-commerce. And it's current, meaning people are shopping a couple of times a week, where our financial services identity data might be a monthly payment. Very valuable. When you add that daily or weekly data to our monthly, our financial services identity solutions gets stronger. We're putting that data together. And then conversely, you bring the financial services identity data over to e-commerce through Kount, that makes it stronger in e-commerce. So Identity is a place that we're building out our capabilities with Kount. We're building out new products, and we'd like to do more M&A. One of our M&A priorities along with differentiated data and Workforce Solutions are really the 3 priorities we have around bolt-on M&A.

Right. If you look at your long-term framework for USIS, you've increased it to 6% to 8% long-term growth, up from 5% to 7% previously. You unpacked a lot there, but what would you say are the top drivers that are enabling this better long-term organic growth just for USIS?

It starts with the differentiated data. They always have. And it's stronger today than it was in 2015, '16, '17, meaning we have more of it. The acquisitions of PayNet, of DataX, of Teletrack, of Kount now. So more data in their cloud. No question, the cloud capabilities to bring that data together in a Single Data Fabric, where everything's key to the link, so we can bring those multi-data solutions, and then the cloud technical capabilities. Meaning we're going to be a better partner to our customers. We're going to have higher uptime or higher stability, faster delivery of data to our customers, easier access in the multi-data solutions that we have. So cloud really is #2. I would add number 3 is Workforce Solutions. USIS, as you know, is the selling arm for Workforce into financial services and telcos. So the -- Sid Singh and his USIS team, having the ability to leverage the strength of Workforce Solutions' market position of our 20 income and employment data as they're bringing through and bundling in other solutions is an advantage for USIS cycling forward. Did I miss any, John?

No, I think you covered it.

Right. So on the topic of Workforce Solutions, you also increased substantially your long-term target for EWS growth, 13%, 15%, up from 9% to 11% previously. What's changed? Obviously, your records have grown, its scale, cloud, systems innovations, more use cases, other verticals, more verticals.

We hit some of those. First off, we're way outgrowing that framework just like USIS. So I think that's an important confidence for us and, hopefully for investors, that Workforce has been for certainly in the last 3 years in way outgrowing the framework we put in place. Even in 2019, they grew 15%. So what's changed in Workforce Solutions? The scale of the business. If you go back 4, 5 years ago, we had 30%, 40% of nonfarm payroll. Now we're approaching 60%, with close to 100 million actives we have every pay period. That scale of that data set, we believe, call it, 2 years ago was a catalyst that you've seen that business grow substantially in 2020 and 2021. Record additions. So #1, scale. Actually, I'll start at #2 is cloud, same thing. The ability -- we couldn't ingest the data that we're ingesting now at Workforce Solutions without the cloud. And I'll give you a stat, which I think you probably are familiar with. You go back 3 years ago, we had something like 100,000 companies contributing data to Equifax, a lot of companies. Today, we have 2 million. The ability to scale that data and ingest it into the data set is something we couldn't do before. So cloud is #2 at Workforce. Number 3 is just record additions. In our long-term framework, inside of that long-term framework, we put an assumption in there we're going to grow records 4% per year. And we've been way outgrowing that. Through the third quarter, we're up 12% in records to that. Now we're a little north of that at 97 million. And there's still a large population of records out there. If you think about nonfarm payroll, we're at 97 million today, uniques. There's 155 million, 156 million total nonfarm payroll. So we can grow the data set substantially through nonfarm payroll. And as you know, we've expanded our lens to look at gig economy, which is outside nonfarm payroll. That's another 30 million, 40 million, 50 million employees. Sometimes, they have 2 jobs. Sometimes, they have 3. The value of data records we're collecting, we're starting to get some of those. And then pension income. Pensioners is another 20 million to 30 million. So records have been a big deal for Workforce Solutions, and there's a long runway to continue to add records. And as you know, we obtain those records 2 ways. One is through our employer services business, where we deliver solutions to HR managers, like i9 verification, unemployment claims management. We do that outsourcing service for the HR manager, we get records in return. Now we also do it through payroll partnerships. Most of those are exclusive. We want them to be exclusive. They're not at all. All the new ones we've done in recent years have been exclusive and our intention is for them all to be exclusive going forward. So number 2 is records. Number three at workforce is an Equifax positive. I talked about it, USIS system products. The cloud is enabling Workforce to do things it couldn't do before. And if you think about the first 10 years we owned Workforce Solutions, we basically had one product. It's not completely fair, but we basically had one product that was how much is Mark making today and where does he work? The income and employment kind of static from the last pay period. Our legacy infrastructure really made it hard to deliver trended data from, where did Mark work over the last 2 years, how much did he make each month, every 2 weeks over the last year. That trended data was very valuable. The cloud enables us to do that. So we now have solutions, for example, in the mortgage market, a lot of applicants can be fulfilled on where does Mark work today. But many applicants will have a bonus check in the first quarter of the year. If you're doing a mortgage application in August, you need to have that historical information. You pick that up so you understand the full picture of the consumer. So we now have a 12-month and 24-month solution of history that we deliver to the mortgage market. Our static report, we sell for $20, $30, $40 per pole, which is how much is Mark making today, where does he work. The more historical data will sell for $175, $200, because there is more value in that, to really deliver that solution. Same thing in the talent space. Historically, we would deliver, where is Mark working today or what jobs do we have for Mark on our database is multiple poles, same thing $20, $30. We now have, what are the last 3 jobs Mark's at? What's the last 24 months of work history? Remember, we have 0.5 billion records, individual records or SSNs in our data set, which equates to having something like 4.5 jobs on the average American in our data set. So able to use that in the talent space. And then I'd add our expansion beyond financial services and Workforce Solutions into the talent space is growing very rapidly, faster than the financial services space and government. Those new verticals, if you will, to really repurpose the data in another way to a new use case. And those are big TAMs. As I mentioned earlier, talent is a $5 billion data TAM in the hiring space. Government is a $2 billion data TAM. We got a lot of room to grow, either through using our own data sets or combining it with other data elements going forward. Anything I missed in Workforce?

Penetration. So in mortgage, in talent, in government, right, we've substantially improved our penetration of those markets through system-to-system integration. So we've increased the number of customers we serve and also substantially increased the times we're doing it in line in their systems. So we see all of the transactions they execute in our system. So for an example, in mortgage, we still see about 60% of the mortgages at TransAct...

I would say only see 60%.

Only 60%, yes. And the -- but that's increased, say, 500 basis points over 12 to 18 months. We expect it to continue to grow nicely. And we're seeing the same type of trends and improvements in card, in auto, in talent, in government, right? So as we continue to build out the work number, as we get 200 million, north of 100 million records, then the willingness of our customers to build those integrations with us goes up, and that makes us even more unique. Because building those integrations is something that's difficult, right? The tech stacks made it easier, right? And the fact that we think we have the most modern tech stack in the industry makes it easier, we think, to interact with us than any of our peers.

Right. Within EWS, you recently closed on your acquisition, $1.8 billion, big deal. Can you provide an update...

$1.825 billion.

There you go. Can you provide an update on how the integration is progressing, synergy expectations?

Yes. So we're only a few months in. Yes. We really like it. We closed it in October. We're off to the races and integrating it. I would just maybe step back for a minute with the cloud transformation with regards to M&A, and then I'll come back to Appriss. But being cloud-enabled, having a Single Data Fabric gives us confidence around doing M&A because we believe we can integrate them more quickly and more easily and realize synergies more quickly. It makes common sense. But that's clearly another benefit of the cloud transformation. Appriss was a very strategic acquisition for Workforce Solutions. We have 3 priorities around M&A, as I already mentioned. One is differentiated data; two is to widen and strengthen workforce, our biggest business; and three is around identity and fraud. So with regards to Workforce Solutions, we believe this $5 billion TAM in talent is a very attractive place to play in. Remember, the base data assets we have is the work history out of the twin data set, where did Mark work over the last 5 years based off of 10 years' worth of data. So that becomes, in a background screen, a very attractive asset. Incarceration data is actually used just a little bit more frequently than work history. So when someone is offered a job and then goes through the background screening process with the background screener, the first thing they typically do is check if they've been arrested before. Appriss has that at scale. And what we really liked about Appriss is that, that uniqueness of that data set that no one else has. And those kind of data assets are very hard to find and very unique. And the leverage we have of combining our work history with the incarceration data -- and as you know, we signed -- we announced -- a month ago, we signed an exclusive arrangement with the National Student Clearinghouse to get university college degrees. With Appriss, we also got some medical credentialing data. We'd like to build out more of that either through M&A or partnerships. And we're really building out what we call a talent hub, so we can have -- we can be the data source for the hiring process. That's what we want to do over time. We have that asset in the work history, now we have incarceration data. We've got college university degrees. We have some medical credentialing. We want to build that out. We'd like to get other licensing data, truck drivers, financial licenses, more medical licenses and really building out all the data that's used in that background screen, we think, is a very unique way to grow and play the business. The second place Appriss is used is government. Social services, and that's only growing. And same thing is -- I already mentioned, how income and employment data is used in the delivery of food stamps or medical -- Medicaid or unemployment claims or rental support. They're all income based on how much you get. Then you have to verify that, over time, they haven't gotten a second job and they don't -- no longer qualify. So there's a redetermination element. There's the same requirement that you can't receive those benefits if you're incarcerated. So that's how Appriss data is used. And then I mentioned the medical credentialing data. So we're really excited about it. You're going to see us in '22 start to productize combining those elements together. So delivering to a background screener the work history, along with the incarceration data, along with the -- and it will be varied by job. Every job is different on what data they need. So we're going to try to build products by job category. That will be the next move for Workforce Solutions going forward. So we're ingesting the data. We're integrating the business for a couple of months in, but we're very excited about it.

Yes. International business. Maybe really quickly. Many countries still affected by COVID, Omicron, Delta, it's having its impact. And within your long-term framework, you actually reduced your long-term outlook for international from 8% to 10% previously to 7% to 9%. So what was the motivation behind that reduced long-term growth outlook for international? And what are you seeing near term for that part of the business?

What you've seen in the last couple of quarters, the businesses is -- it was later to recover from the COVID, International, because the lockdowns were much more severe. Companies didn't figure out how to flex in COVID. Perhaps, neither did consumers. They had really hard lockdowns in a lot of markets, meaning you couldn't leave your home versus the United States. United States, in my view, was more agile about buying cars online and having a dealer deliver it to your door. You never touch anyone during COVID. The international markets struggled with that. Why do we change the long-term framework? Do we think it's the right long-term framework given the mix of our international businesses today? You might describe it as derisking a little bit, how we think about the future. But if you look at our International business, which is about $1 billion out of our $5 billion this year, our big markets are Australia, U.K., Canada. Those are more developed markets which should grow in line with the Equifax framework. Latin America, growing a little bit above that. Would you add anything?

India is an opportunity, right? So we acquired our India -- the rest of our India venture last year -- early last year, and we think we have a real opportunity to grow that much faster. Still small for us, but a real opportunity.

And International is going to lag on cloud intentionally. We've always said we want to finish North America. Canada will finish in line with North America, because it's kind of on the same system. We're down the path in the other markets, but those are more '23, '24 completions versus, call it, '22 for North America.

Yes. Last question, margins. So 2025 EBITDA margin target, 39%. Is there conservatism baked into that? And then secondly...

That's a hard question to answer, George.

And then secondly, is there any structural barrier that could prevent margins from going above 40%?

Well, we said -- we did a couple of things in our Investor Day in order to try to help investors think about the company. Number one, we did kind of earlier than typically, like we did last year, we laid out a 2020 framework. With mortgage coming down, we wanted to give a view that we can grow next year. Second is that we want to give a view of the margin impact and the revenue impact of mortgage still normalizing by putting a 2025 marker out there, of $7 billion and 39%. We also put a long-term framework in there that said that post 2025 or along the way, we're going to grow revenue in that kind of frame. And then we're going to grow margins 50 basis points or -- so a year. So to your question, our expectation is that post 2025, we're going to grow our margins 50 basis points per year over the long term. So the answer to your question is there is no barrier. There is not a barrier for 40%. As you know, we've got a business it's 55%. That's now 40% of Equifax and at some point in the future, it will be 50% of Equifax being Workforce Solutions. That's accretive to our ability to continue to enhance our margins over the near term, meaning '22 to '25, and then certainly, post '25.

Wonderful. Mark, John, thank you for your time. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having us.