Equifax Inc. (EFX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

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' business and information services analyst, and we're pleased to have here with us Mark Begor, who's the CEO of Equifax. Mark, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having us.

I guess we'll get right into the discussion. Maybe just to start with, maybe not your favorite topic, but at least your most frustrating topic, which is mortgage.

Yes, yes.

And so I think in the last call, you talked about the mortgage environment and what the current run rate implied. So I was just hoping you could either repeat that or what's your latest views on just the mortgage inquiry volume environment out there today?

Sure. Yes. And I think it's obviously been a challenging 24 months with us on the mortgage side, obviously, with a mortgage recession like we've never seen before, the mortgage market decline. And I'll give you how we think about it. We talk about the mortgage market -- and for us, the mortgage market, we think about inquiries to Equifax on -- from mortgages, both on the credit file and the income and employment side, of being down 50% from what we would characterize as normal, which would have been the 2015-'19 time frame, where there wasn't the refi boom that happened in '20 and '21. So a 50% decline is massive. And we believe we're at or approaching a bottom in the mortgage market. As you know, we've been chasing that all year. We unfortunately weren't able to call that because of where the Fed went on rates and where inflation was. So we had to guide down the mortgage side of our business during 2023. But if we're at a bottom now, as we talked on the third quarter earnings call, if you take the fourth quarter run rate of mortgage inquiries from our measure and run it out through 2024, that would imply a 2024 that's going to be down from a mortgage market standpoint for Equifax in the neighborhood of 15% because the mortgage market declined during the year, so if you take that as a stopping off point. The other, I think, really relevant point when you think about the mortgage market, if you believe this is a bottom, which we think we're approaching, and look at that versus the inquiries we received in a normal market in that '15-'19 -- again, normal, we leave refi out, which is 2015 to '19 -- and you have a purchase volume, we've never seen purchase contract the way it has over the last 24 months. That delta is $1 billion of revenue for Equifax from a market standpoint. So when we look forward to '24, '25, '26 and likely more '25, '26, '27, of the market returning to normal from a purchase standpoint, which we would expect it to, that's $1 billion of incremental revenue at very high incremental margins going forward. Along the way, I think as you know, we outperformed the underlying market. Every quarter, we talk to you about our mortgage outperformance from price, product, penetration into existing verticals; in the case of workforce, record additions, and in the third quarter our USIS business had mortgage outperformance of 33 points, primarily from the FICO price increase in 2023. We would expect to have a meaningful -- I think it's been talked about in the industry, there's some press reports last week that FICO is going to be running through us and TU and Experian, another large price increase in '24. So we would expect to have outperformance in USIS from that as well as whatever we do on our own on price, penetration. We do some product work inside of the USIS vertical. In EWS, in the third quarter we outperformed the underlying mortgage market by 20 points. Price, product rollouts that are incremental and higher-margin and higher-revenue, penetration into the mortgage vertical because only 6 in 10 mortgages come to us today. There's another 4 in 10 that are fully manual that we go after. And then record additions, higher hit rates from records. So that's the 20 points. And then the last point around mortgage is if you go back to '20 and '21, mortgage was 30% of Equifax revenue. Because our non-mortgage businesses are performing so strongly, it's down to 15% of Equifax as we exit the year. So we think mortgage, if you believe, and we think we're getting closer to that belief, that we're at a bottom in the mortgage market with rates increases not happening in the future from the Fed, and even if they leave rates flat, we can grow our mortgage business with a flat mortgage market as we grow price and product or promotion and penetration in records going forward.

Got it. And just to clarify, some of this outperformance that you've talked about, that's relative to an inquiry number, not an origination number. So can you just help clarify that difference...

Yes. And the reason we focus on inquiries is because you want us to, that's revenue. So when you think about a mortgage, when you think about an origination, which -- we see every origination, but we see them on a 6-month lag. We don't actually see the origination show up in our database until about 6 months after it's completed. We see the inquiry every day. And an average mortgage origination will have 5 to 7 credit pulls in its, call it, 90-day -- normally, it's 2, 3 months to complete a mortgage from shopping down through to closing. We get 5 to 7 credit pulls, which is an inquiry. And then we get 2-plus income and employment pulls during that 90-day mortgage process. So those are inquiries on our income and employment database. So we've always used inquiries as a translation to revenue. And when we use that comparison of 2015-'19, and we've got a chart in our investor deck, we show inquiries over that time frame versus where inquiries are now. That's at 50% delta. And that's why we focus on inquiries. Obviously, inquiries translate into originations based on roughly that 5 to 7 credit pulls and call it 2 income and employment pulls, to create an origination.

Got it. And then going back to the outperformance. If you look at the USIS segment first, I know you mentioned a lot of it was the FICO price increase on the mortgage side. But how do you think about the pricing for your credit file? Because just like FICO is mandated, I guess, so are the credit reports, right? So how do you see that?

Yes. So we take price up in all of our products every year. So we generally do that in every product every year. We took price up this year in our mortgage file because we rolled out a new mortgage file that had additional data in it. As you know, we rolled out a file that included our cell phone utility trade lines that only Equifax has. We're appending those to our mortgage credit file to make it a more valuable mortgage file versus our competition, the other 2 guys. So we took some price up this year on that. Next year -- and then obviously, the FICO price increase was very large and is the majority of those 33 points. There's some market share in there from our tri-merge businesses and some other product stuff that we rolled out. When we look to next year, we would expect the FICO increase to be very large again. I think that's been telegraphed in the marketplace. So that will benefit us. And as you know, we mark up the FICO price increase by our margin and roll that through in order to protect our margin dollars. What we do on the rest of pricing and mortgage, I think we're still looking at what the right thing to do is. But I would think we're going to be quite balanced around that given the mortgage industry is still in a very challenging position and the FICO price increase is quite large.

Got it. If we shift gears to the Workforce Solutions business, how do you think about the pricing there? Because obviously, on the talent side, maybe because of the public customer [ situation ] -- there's been some complaints about pricing. But just help us level set how much opportunity, I guess, is still there in the pricing side of the equation.

Yes. Let me just also say that no customers like price, period. Like when suppliers come in to me and say they want to raise their price, I don't like it. And so any time you're in a pricing discussion, it's challenging. Now in the data analytics business, we're delivering value through price, meaning our data assets are always becoming more valuable, and that's how we can deliver that ROI. Before I just jump to pure price, let me just make it very clear that when you hear Equifax talk about growth levers, we talk about pure price, which is, a product we have today, we increase the price next year, right? So the same product. We also talk about product is obviously a pricing lever when we're delivering more data and we charge a higher price for that. And as you know, there's very high operating margins and leverage from that. So back on Workforce Solutions, we're in a fairly unique position. We're competing primarily with paper pay stubs or manual efforts. So we deliver instant, which has value, meaning speed; we deliver accuracy, because it's tied to the payroll every 2 weeks from the 3 million companies that contribute data to us every pay period; we also deliver productivity, because if they're not going to use our data, what they're going to do is a manual verification. They've got to call Barclays and find out someone in HR to give them the data on how much do you make. That's very complex. It takes a lot of time. And it -- there's some accuracy issues with that. So we take price up every year in workforce, generally on 1/1, in all of our verticals. As you said, there's -- no one likes price. We work hard in Workforce Solutions to be balanced around our pricing to make sure that we're delivering that value and price in a way that's balanced. And that's the approach that we've been taking for quite some time.

Got it. Is there a case where, as you get the rest of the employment data that you don't have, there's still a big pricing value gap opportunity? I mean, maybe nothing close to what FICO is doing, but...

Yes. Given the scale, I think at the end of the third quarter, we had 122 million unique individuals in our data set every pay period, and that's against 220 million Americans. And remember, what we're competing against is manual, right? For 50 years, a mortgage application would do a manual verification of income before workforce solutions had scale. An auto loan would do a manual verification, like give me your pay stub, I'm going to call the company to make sure it's really legit. A lot of friction in that. Personal loan, same thing. In a background screen, they're doing job history. And again, we collect every job title as one of the attributes in our payroll data. So we have 640 million jobs in our data set, so we can deliver a digital resume to the background screeners. Government social services is another one where manual is predominantly what's done today. So that's what we compete against. And we think we deliver a lot of value over the long term of manual. People's costs go up that are doing that manual work. Speed is super valuable. And all of our customers, they want to complete the process more quickly. When you're doing it manual, that adds friction to the process that we can eliminate. So we believe there's a lot of value. Long-winded answer. We think there's a lot of value in the uniqueness of the data set we have at scale that's verified, that's instant. And eliminates -- it delivers real speed and productivity.

Got it. Just to the point on competition, though, I mean, I think another frustrating topic which you talked about, but obviously, your other bureau peers are dipping their feet into the market. And clearly, no -- you can't be a pure monopoly. There's always going to be someone...

We don't use that word.

Yes. But is that growth -- I guess, how do you assess the competitive landscape? Is their growth coming at your expense?

We haven't seen that, no. We get that question a lot from our investors. Most of the discussions around competition are in these rooms as opposed to with our customers. I think what you're referring to is Experian 3 years ago said they were going to get in the space, and they entered through buying a UC claims processor and a few other employer-type businesses. TU announced at the same time they were going to get in the space, then they really didn't. Recently, they made a minority investment that they announced in a company called Truework, which is a fintech. So if you say toes in the water, that's maybe less than a toe, meaning a minority investment. We think our scale competes well. We're focused on investing in the technology and the product and the capabilities, in adding capabilities through bolt-on M&A to strengthen our business going forward. And we think we've got a good track record, a very strong track record, of adding new partnerships, of adding new capabilities. We announced in the third quarter earnings we added 4 new partnerships in the quarter. We've added something like 30 in the last 3 years, bringing new data in. Our data, the 122 million was up, I think, 10 million records on a year-over-year basis. That's more unique records than I think those 2 companies have, that we've added just in the last 12 months. So we're focused on growing and expanding the business and continuing to deliver a lot of value to our customers.

Got it. One last one on workforce. I mean, obviously, it started with mortgage. You have talent, government has grown into a nice segment. What are some of the other -- clearly, the use case for income should be plentiful in almost anywhere. So I guess, what's the strategy? What are some of the new verticals we should be looking out for?

Yes. I would bucket government and talent as being new verticals for us in the last 3, 4, 5 years. If you look back at workforce, where it started was in mortgage. Because I think, as everyone in this room knows, every mortgage pulls credit. You have to pull all 3 credit files, and as I said earlier, do 5 to 7 pulls. They also have to verify income and employment. And it's a big-ticket transaction, right? You think about $250,000 loan, $300,000 loan. So the mortgage originators want to invest in accuracy, and the government requires them to verify the income and employment. So that's where it started. And it's moved quickly through FI. Most -- all subprime auto loans require income and employment verification. Increasingly, some near-prime loans are including that. So that's been a growth vertical for us. Credit cards is a new vertical of adding income flag marks working to the credit file. Most personal loans pull income and employment verification in there. So there's a lot of still white space. Even in mortgage, where 100% of mortgages pull all 3 credit files, there's still 40% of the mortgage originators that are fully manual that we're still adding our instant capability. It's a big tail. If you think about it, there's small mortgage brokers in the suburbs of San Francisco that still aren't doing business with Equifax. They're doing manual for all of their income and employment verification. That's an opportunity to grow. And then outside of FI, if you think about Workforce Solutions at, call it, $2.4 billion roughly of revenue this year, what is it, 60-plus percent, $1.4 billion is outside FI. We have our employer business, which is where we deliver those regulated services to HR managers. That's a $400 million business in a $3 billion-plus TAM of HR managers outsourcing I-9 verification, unemployment claims management, Work Opportunity Tax Credit, W-2 management, those services we do for HR companies. And then you get into the other 2 verification verticals that, from our perspective, are still quite new. Talent is a $400 million business. It was up 2x last year, been impacted by the hiring market in white collar this year but still delivering outperformance to the underlying market that's declining. That's a $400 million business in a, call it, $3 billion TAM of digitizing the background screeners' work that they do. So we see a lot of growth potential there. And then government is another big one for us. That's a $500 million business for us that was up 50% last year, it will be up 20% this year. And that's where our income data is used to verify eligibility for social services at the state level. Think about food support, rent support, child care support, student lending support, all of those supports are needs-based and you have to verify income. That's a $500 million business in, again, like a $3 billion TAM. The delta, the $2.5 billion, is all manually done at the state level. And that's one where we had a couple of big contracts in the third quarter. One was an extension of an existing contract with CMS for $1.2 billion over 5 years. And then a new contract with USDA for SNAP/TANF food support that was $190 million in the government vertical. So when you think about white space of manual income and employment verifications in the verticals we're in, in that $2.4 billion business, we've got potential to go north of $10 billion just from penetration, right, inside of the existing verticals. So big focus on products, on salespeople to get to the new customers. We've got a lot of scale in each of those verticals to really drive penetration into those.

Got it. If I can just go back to some macro questions quickly, I mean, let's just say mortgage has had its recession. We'll see what the true bottom is.

By the way, it was a rough one.

Yes. So if you look at -- let's just look at auto, for example, right? I think the supply chain constraints haven't like really taken the auto volumes away anywhere. But it's also more subprime-exposed. So how do you see the risk, or where is auto today? And where do you think the pluses and minuses could be?

As we look to '24?

Just next couple of years, yes...

Yes. So auto is a very good business. It's one, like all of the verticals, where more data is being used. There's more digital transactions, which adds data to the process. You've got to do identity, meaning there's more auto purchases done online and a lot more auto loans done online versus at the F&I desk at a car dealership. And even there, they're doing more data. And remember, we have the ability to use not only credit data, some of our alternative data in the auto lending space, but also our income and employment data. And when you think about the next chapter of a lot of those FI verticals for us, post cloud completion in USIS, which is our credit business, we completed the cloud almost 2 years ago now in Workforce Solutions. When we get those both complete, our next chapter will be to do data combinations between credit and income and employment. How do we bring some of those data assets together for mortgage, for auto, for cards, for P loans, that will be very unique to Equifax, that will make our credit file stronger and then bring through not -- attributes that will allow for another revenue stream around income and employment.

Got it. But I guess the question was more on the USIS business in terms of auto volumes. And then adding to that, maybe just on the card side, card's been doing really well so far. I guess people are just taking more cards, using them more. So do you see more upside or downside risk to that business?

I don't probably see any -- I don't see any levers -- from a macro standpoint, that are going to change it up or down, short of an economic change. The levers for us are really some of the things I was trying to get into about driving our market share or our market position around new products, around our alternative data assets. The other lever for us in those FI verticals through digital is the cloud. One of the reasons we invested the $1.5 billion in our tech stack that we're working to finish over the next, call it, 6 to 12 months, is in order to be a better partner from a digital standpoint, to be always on. And we talked about on the third quarter call that a large FI in their card business is moving us from secondary to primary because of our innovation from new products we're delivering and because of our cloud investment to deliver always-on stability. And if you're in a legacy environment, you're going to have outages. And if your data provider is down, your business is down. If you're a bank, an FI, a credit union or a large financial institution, you can't originate. Because remember, they're hitting our database as a part of their digital workflow to pull a credit score or credit file or an income and employment report, and then they need to bring it back quickly in order to complete that digital transaction. If there's latency, that's an issue, and we believe a cloud is going to advantage Equifax there. And then the uptime is where we think we're going to get some share gains, along with our innovative focus around new products.

Okay. Throughout the conversation, you talked a lot about the cloud and tech and your capabilities. We're about 5, 6 years since you began the tech transformation. So...

I've only been at Equifax for 5.5. So you're rounding up on the 6. And we didn't start it until late '18. We're in -- my math is we're in like the 4-plus, 5 range...

Okay. But I guess the question is where are we today? I think USIS North America still has to be moved to the cloud. When does that get done? What is left? And what's the margin benefits there?

Yes. And just I think as you know and you've heard us talk about it, it's been a long slog. And the last 4, 5 years of doing this, it's a huge project. We made a strategic decision in 2018 after the cyber event to go to the cloud. We could have stayed in legacy and put more security around our legacy infrastructure. We really felt the window was there for us to really transform Equifax competitively for the next decade. And that's why we made the decision to put the $1.5 billion into the cloud. I believe most companies, but certainly a data analytics company, to be a great data analytics company, you have to have great technology. And that's why we decided to go down the path on cloud. We believe that cloud is going to provide a competitive advantage for Equifax around digital. So we already talked about that, about why we did cloud. It's also going to provide an advantage around our ability to roll out new products. And remember, as a part of our cloud transformation, we not only moved our tech to the cloud and we rewrote all of our applications, a huge exercise to go through over the last 4, 5 years. But we also went to a single data fabric. And that was another big part of the $1.5 billion cost, is to take all our siloed data assets, we have like 80 databases in the United States, and put those all together in a single data fabric, where Mark Begor is keyed and linked with every data element so we can do data combinations from a product standpoint and we can ingest more data more effectively in that cloud environment. Along with the ability to roll out new products, the speed of data transmission and the uptime, clearly there's cost savings that come from it. And we've been starting to deliver those in 2023. When we laid this out, we expected to get a 15-plus percent savings in our tech costs, which is our largest COGS. We're a tech company. Almost half of our employees are in technology -- as a data analytics company. And this year, early this year, back in February we announced a $275 million cost and CapEx reduction for 2023, some of that back-end loaded. So there's $65 million benefit of that in '24 that is happening in the second half. And this is a reduction in people from cloud efficiencies. And remember, as a part of the cloud transition, we're running our legacy environments until we migrate all the customers. We're also paying for and running the cloud environment. So that's where the cost savings come from, is when we go to a single environment and you get the inherent savings of cloud versus legacy. As we go to 2024 -- actually, maybe I'll start here. At the end of this year, we'll be about 65% of our revenue in the cloud at the end of 2023. Workforce Solutions substantially all in the cloud, USIS moving to the cloud and international kind of moving behind USIS. When we go a year from now, when we're at this conference, we would expect to be at the 90% range. So a lot of work over the next 6 months to complete USIS, to complete some of our international markets. And then in '25, we'll have some tail of some of the international markets to complete. So just on the cost savings, we've got the $65 million in 2024. It's on top of our long-term framework of 50 basis points of margin expansion annually from the operating leverage of the company. We would expect some additional cost savings we haven't given guidance on yet, in the second half of next year as we complete USIS. And some of the international platforms, that will roll on a year-over-year basis into '25, and then we'll have some additional savings next year. So and that's that path to expanding our margins with the core 50 bps per year from operating leverage of like workforce accreting in at their 50 basis point -- 50% EBITDA margins accreting in, along with operating leverage, and then the cloud savings going on top of that.

Got it. And maybe just to end with, since we are in a tech conference here, you've talked a lot about your -- a lot of proprietary unique data that you have there, which puts you in the bucket of benefiting from AI, GenAI, all that kind of stuff. So can you just talk about some of the initiatives, or how you think about it? When does Equifax start showing benefits from using these technologies?

We already are. So the power of being a data analytics business with proprietary data, like we have a wall around our data. So we're the only ones who can use it for new products and new solutions. And moving the data in the single data fabric in a cloud database allows us to lay AI on top of it and really deliver solutions that are much more sophisticated. When you have the breadth of data assets that we have, it's impossible to deliver sophisticated products or scores with so many different data elements without AI. And what's also unique in our world is explainability of AI. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires you to have explainability around a credit decision. And to use AI in financial services, you have to have that explainability. So we've been investing over the last 5, 7 years in the explainability technology of AI. We've got 40 patents around the explainability piece. We're leveraging that with our Google Cloud, which is where we are in the cloud, with their AI capabilities. And we're rolling out larger portions of our products and scores using AI. Now what that's going to translate into is driving our new product rollouts, driving more sophisticated new products off the underlying data assets that we have that are far more than our competitors, and then really leveraging those AI capabilities. So it's a big priority of ours. As we complete the cloud, the next chapter of Equifax is going to be around new products powered by AI.

Got it. And maybe just one last follow-up. You've mentioned single data fabric a few times. How much of a competitive differentiator is that relative to the bureaus, your most immediate peers? But also like, is that -- I mean, is that the commonplace with other broader data companies out there, too?

Yes, it's not. We think it's going to be a very significant differentiator for Equifax. Now it starts with we have data at scale that is significantly advantaged versus our competitors. Like no one else has The Work Number at that scale. No one else has our cell phone utility data. No one else has our wealth data. So the scaled data assets that we have. And then putting it all together in one data set was a big part of that $1.5 billion spend that we have. We believe it's quite unique about what we're doing versus our competitors. We don't believe they're doing that. Number one, they don't have the scale of data assets. But we don't believe they're doing the same thing we are because it's super expensive and super complex. That's going to allow us to roll out new products going forward in those data combinations because of our differentiated data and the single data fabric. And it's going to allow us to ingest more data outside of what we have. And I'll give you an example. You may remember back in, I think, April or May, we announced a partnership with Fiserv, where we're onboarding their merchant payment data into the Equifax commercial data set so we can add it to our other differentiated data. That's going to make our data richer, because that merchant payment -- think about card swipes for a small business here in San Francisco as an indicator of the revenue of that business, which you can't get in another way. And we're getting it every week, right? Every day, actually Fiserv gets it. So that's an example of what the Single Data Fabric and cloud will allow us to ingest even more data from partners. And in this case, we'll pay them a rev share for the lift that we're getting from that. Very powerful. And then at AI on top, that's the next chapter of Equifax.

Got it. Perfect. Well, we're right on time. So thank you so much, Mark, for being here. Appreciate it.

Awesome. Thanks a lot, Manav.

Thank you.