Equifax Inc. ($EFX)

All right. We will get going. I'm Jeff Meuler, Baird's Information Solutions analyst. Pleased to introduce Equifax as the next presenting company. Equifax is by far the #1 provider of employment and income verification across a range of end markets and one of the big 3 global consumer credit bureaus and a broader information solution provider. With me on stage is the CEO, Mark Begor; and CFO, John Gamble.

With that, I want to start with a high-level question. Investor sentiment for the sector is very different than it was a year ago. I think a lot of investors are bucketing information solutions companies into AI loser and AI at risk buckets. And I think a lot of the management teams view AI as a benefit to the business. So just what do you view as the biggest AI-related opportunities for Equifax? And then are there any AI-related risks that you're looking to insulate from or manage the business in a different way to prevent from becoming negatives.

Yes. Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. We think about AI as an enabler and really a growth opportunity for Equifax quite broadly. We've talked over the last year and change about the AI data moat that we have around Equifax. Over 90% of our revenue comes from proprietary data. And I think everyone knows you can't do AI without data. So I think we are one of the winners in this AI environment because we're going to be able to deploy AI in our scores, models and products, but also deploy AI for productivity in our operations and technology. On the AI data moat, if you think about our proprietary data assets, whether it's the credit file, our income and employment data, all the other data elements we have, none of that's from public market data. So it's all from proprietary data from contributors. We have over 10,000 financial institutions that contribute data to us every cycle, about every month...

Sorry about that. This one working? That's better.

So you think about our data, whether it's the credit file or the income and employment data, it all comes from proprietary data sources. And if you're OpenAI or Anthropic, you can't go out to the worldwide web and get to our data. So that AI data mode, I think, is very significant and differentiates Equifax from others in the info services space that really others rely more on public market data. So I think that's an important element. The AI offense, I think, is really a big deal. We've been investing in explainable AI capabilities. And as you know, our customers typically can't use in decisioning black box AI. So explainable AI is super important. The Fair Credit Reporting Act in the United States requires that. Most other regulatory environments require the explainability of the decision as well as the explainability of the decision process. So we've been investing for a long time around explainable AI. Just in the first quarter, we added 10 new Equifax patents on explainable AI. That's on top of 40 last year, a total of like 450. So you should think about that the way we do that one of the places we're investing is to differentiate ourselves in how we deliver our product scores and models to our customers using AI capabilities. And what we're seeing on the product score and model standpoint is a real lift in performance when we use AI to calculate and deliver that score or that product or that model. And historically, you think about kind of performance in financial services and risk underwriting using that as an example, like 100 basis points, 50 basis points would be a meaningful lift. Using AI, we're seeing 1,000 basis points. So really big performance lifts. And what underpins that is, number one, the technology investments we're making. Number two, our cloud investment. I think people in the room know that we've completed substantially our cloud investment, which was a long and expensive process. We invested an incremental $3 billion over the last 6 years. That's behind us now. That enables us to really deploy AI. But the fundamental piece is that proprietary data we have. We have more data than our competitors. We have more data and you need data to calculate scores, models and products. So that's a big opportunity for us. The other areas that we're really focused on, and we're seeing some of that lift in 2026 and '27 and beyond is deploying AI inside of Equifax. We call it AI for EFX. We're deploying it in operations and technology as well as our support teams, and we're just seeing big performance lifts. So think about we have a multi-thousand call center and operations people. We're deploying AI there to make that more efficient. We're using AI agents to take that first call from consumers. So seeing big productivity there. And we size that piece from operations is $75 million worth of cost savings over the next couple of years. That's inside of our guide for 2026, where over our long-term framework, we want to grow our margins 50 basis points a year on top of our -- driven off our 7% to 10% revenue growth from operating leverage. This year, we have a guide of 75 basis points. So another 25 basis points of margin expansion, and that's principally from this operations cost savings like the first phase of that. What's next is technology. We're seeing like amazing capabilities now. Our largest workforce, we have 15,000 employees, a little less than half of our workforce is technology. We're a technology company, and we're using AI to do coding. And we're seeing big lifts there. So that's kind of the next chapter of AI capabilities. And then all our support functions, John's finance team, legal, HR, we're seeing a lot of capabilities with AI. So back to your question, we think we're well positioned with our customers to deliver higher-performing scores, models and products, leveraging all of the AI capabilities to bring those to market. That's going to drive share gains. It should drive revenue growth and margin expansion. And then on the productivity side, deploying it in operations, technology and our support teams, we'll see margin expansion and productivity growth like the 75 basis points we're guiding this year.

And just AI advisers are now in market for Equifax that allow midsized and small banks and small customers, even moving to small governments have an opportunity to understand how to use more of our alternative data in their solutions to get better scores. So we could always do that effectively with a large financial institution. We're now putting small financial institutions in a situation where they can understand how they can perform much better by using alternative assets, which again drives our growth.

I think super important, you can't do AI without data. Only Equifax can do AI with its data. And our data is proprietary.

So you did a really good job of summarizing the potential AI benefits. And I think investors over time have gotten more comfortable with AI risk mitigants on the credit bureau side. One question that does seem to be coming up more from investors is what are the risks to the employment and income file from Agentic AI or AI lowering the friction that currently exists in manual or consumer permission and those becoming a tougher competitor? Why do you not worry about that, if not?

We think about it, but frankly, we don't worry about it. It's quite similar. When you think about the credit file data we get from 10,000 financial institutions, that's in a walled environment. It's not available on the worldwide web. Same with payroll data. The payroll data is -- we have 5 million companies now contributing data to us every pay period, every 2 weeks. That data from them is in a walled environment. So you can't get to the worldwide web. And then the incentives, how is AI going to make it easier for someone to go through consumer consented? You still have to get their user ID and password for their HR system in order to access their payroll. What's the incentive for the consumer to give that data out. Remember, we do it friction-free. When a consumer applies for a mortgage or they're applying for social services, we'll deliver their income verification in a nanosecond and the consumer doesn't have to do anything, same as the credit file. The idea of what's the incentive for consumer to do consumer consented, a lot of friction. And that's why it is really fairly nascent. AI will make it more easier to do? Maybe. But why would the consumer want to do anything there when they can have their mortgage process happen instantly. So that's -- I think that's the challenge of where AI -- we really don't see it as a threat in that side of the business or the other parts of the business with regards to the data moat that we have. And I think the other...

And I think the other point to remember, we offer income and employment verifications for free, right? And they get all the regulatory requirements fully covered by Equifax. All this data that we're talking about is governed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act, whether it comes to us or comes from the employer directly, and they're obligated to those same requirements. And again, we provide all of that service to the employer at no cost.

And payroll partners get that regulatory compliance and governance and data security along with revenue share, so they're absolutely benefiting.

Correct.

So within Workforce Solutions or TWN, principally employment and income verification accounts for the majority of consolidated EBITDA, fastest-growing segment over the intermediate term. TWN governance over time has been a real bright spot, grew at 53% CAGR through 2024, slowed in '25. We came into '26 optimistic for reacceleration in that business. It felt like there were some puts and takes in your government messaging on the last quarterly call. So give us a broad view of what's going on, including address why a growing pipeline is maybe converting at a slower rate.

Yes. So just to size for the room, I think you know that's one of our verticals. It has been our fastest-growing vertical. We still expect it to be our fastest-growing vertical. And what we do in our government vertical in Workforce Solutions is we help in the delivery of social services to Americans that are on either food support, rent support, medical support, child care support, et cetera. There's almost 100 million Americans that receive some level of federal and state and local social service support. All of it's income verified, and we have a unique solution to deliver that data. Our business is about $750 million roughly in 2026. As you point out, very fast grower until 2024 -- I'm sorry, 2025. There was a change in CMS with the Biden administration around cost sharing that impacted a number of states that didn't have budget dollars at the time that reduced the growth rate last year. Going forward, the big change is the OB3 bill that was signed last July that puts more teeth into the state's requirements around government social service delivery. And I think everyone knows the vast majority of government social services are delivered by the states and paid for by the federal government. So that's why the federal government puts requirements in place on how do you verify that income. And remember, you're verifying the income because if you make less, you get more social services or you qualify for those social services. The federal government has sized the improper payments being $160 billion a year in government social service delivery. So there's a lot of incentive to use more data. We size the TAM if the principally manual verifications, which is what most agencies and most states do today were to move to our solution of being $5 billion versus our $750 million. So there's a lot of white space for us to grow. And remember, we're principally competing against manual verifications, where they've been doing it manually for 20 years or whatever. There's a lot of complexities with doing business with federal and state government. You've got contracting processes, you've got approval processes. You've got budgeting processes in the case of the states, many times, they have to go to their individual legislatures in order to get budget dollars, in order to do something new. There's a lot of process flow change. Remember, if you've been doing -- an agency has been doing manual income verifications for 20 years and then they're going to switch to using our solution, that has to be integrated into their tech and it also has to be integrated in their workflows with the case workers. They can have thousands of case workers that are doing the adjudication for those that are applying for those specific social services. So it's something that is more complex, but we know how to do it. And as you pointed out, 2026 is a year that we still think is going to be a solid one for the government vertical. We have a tougher comp in the second quarter from a large contract we won last year with the SSA, Security Administration that's really in our run rate now. That was a positive for parts of last year. But we're really energized around the growing engagement at both the federal and state level around using our solution broadly, but also using our solution for the new requirements that come through OB3 that was put in place last July. And we shared on the call in April that if you look at our pipeline in April versus a year ago, April, it's up 2x. And that's a really strong indicator, one that typically doesn't happen in pipelines unless there's a lot of commercial activity. So we remain energized. When we think about the long term, we still expect government to be our fastest-growing Workforce Solutions vertical to grow above that long-term growth rate. We expect a lot of the OB3 kind of new requirements that are going to go on states to really come into our revenue in '27. That's when the really effective date is for a lot of those requirements. But we're just seeing broadly really strong commercial activity, both at the federal and at the state level. And again, just to put a point out one more time, remember, we have a large business, but we have a large white space between the $750 million and $5 billion roughly TAM of opportunity for us.

But given that white space, given the legislative catalyst, given the change in administration, I would have thought that you have a lot of shots on goal because you sell at the state agency level. And the pipeline sounds really strong, but it doesn't seem to be closing at the historical rate. You don't give that exact data. But is there like a root cause as to why things in all of these different state agencies maybe aren't closing?

All the states are different. Every agency is different. They're all individual customer relationships and their tech is all different. So it's all timing elements to this. It doesn't change how we think about the business. And I think as you know, we reconfirmed our guide for the year in April. There's no change in how we think about the year for the business. We're going to have a very strong year at Equifax and really our strongest margin expansion in probably the last 5 years. So we're really excited about that. So we're -- we don't really have a change in how we think about the business.

Okay. And then I want to be clear, I'm sounding like I'm conflating 2 issues when I'm going to ask about Emmy after asking about the government trajectory. But there's been more investor questions about CMS, Emmy eligibility made easy. Is it an opportunity for Equifax? Is it a risk for Equifax? And has it had any impact on your business thus far?

So one question 3, no. It's really early days for that. It's something that is a platform that CMS developed. It's an option for states to use. We haven't seen any real traction of states wanting to use it now. We continue to have direct kind of pipeline with states around Medicaid. It is really where this is focused on. And this is really a solution that we would integrate into if there is any traction on it. We would expect to be really at the top of the waterfall in that solution just because we have the instant access to data in order to deliver on it. But it's really just another way to get into that TAM. I would say it's really early days for this solution and really hasn't penetrated the market in any manner yet.

One of the other big use cases for the employment of income data is the talent vertical. Talent returned to high single-digit growth the last couple of quarters, and I don't think it's been a great white-collar hiring environment. That follows a few years of slower growth for you. So what's driving the reacceleration? Or how sustainable is the faster growth?

Yes. So just sizing that and maybe framing for everyone in the room, one of the unique elements, we get 50 attributes every pay period on an individual payroll. So we have gross pay, net pay, hours worked, et cetera. And we also get the job title. And we maintain all those data elements. So we have a digital resume on the average American. And as you know, a background screener, one of the things they have to verify is work history. So we can deliver that to our customers. So that's the principal product. We also have our incarceration data, we sell there. That's growing nicely in the talent space. We bought a company called Appriss Insights, the only incarceration data set. Another data check that's done on individuals applying for jobs is your past incarceration history. So we're able to do that verification for them. What's driving the growth is really all of the above. It's a business that's roughly $400 million of rev in a $3 billion TAM. We've been growing penetration into the background screeners, like not every background screener uses us. Not every background screener uses us first. They still do manual operations, background screeners on employment verification are principally historically BPO shops. They'll have teams in the Philippines or India. When they get a background screen, they'll do many things. One of them is they would historically send it to their BPO shop and they get on the phone and try to verify, hey, did Mark work at General Electric? Yes, I did. Tracking someone down to do that takes time and energy and everything else. What we deliver is an instant digital resume. We deliver productivity because we can do it more quickly. And we also deliver speed. And for a background screener -- in every vertical, whatever you're doing, speed is important. But remember, in a background screen, a company's desire to hire that individual, they're doing the background screen before they can start work and the chair is empty. So speed is a really important element. So we've been rolling out new products. That's been a real positive there. We've been driving penetration, some element of price, but price is a smaller part of that. And then record growth also helps. As you know, we're adding records every quarter. We were up 11% in the first quarter of records. When you add more records, you just have higher hit rates where you're able to deliver a verification to the background screeners. We've also been expanding into other data elements, and we have aspirations of acquisitions or partnerships to really get all of the data that's used in a background screen. We want to be the data provider. And the incarceration data was a great example. In that acquisition, we got some medical credentialing data for the health care space. That's one that we'd either through partnership or acquisition, like to grow into. That's a very data-rich background screen that also has annual kind of rechecks on the credentials in the health care space. So we like that business and like that space, and we've been investing in new products in order to continue to drive the growth. And like you said, it has not been a great hiring environment. We skew as does the background industry to white-collar jobs because they're generally more detailed background screens, going back 5 years' worth of employment history versus an hourly might be last job worked. But we've rolled out products to try to penetrate the hourly space to have more of a solution that fits that kind of a background screen.

Got it. Your U.S. mortgage revenue was plus 24% in Q1, excluding FICO mortgage royalty revenues and TWN Mortgage was plus 14% for your revenue. You reported a hard inquiries figure of plus 2%. I think there's a lot going on with like a shift to soft inquiries and 1B activity, some other market indicators suggest a faster growth rate. Like do you have another estimate for what you think the market did as we think about bridging your outperformance? And then can you talk through the factors driving your outperformance in terms of revenue relative to market for each -- the credit file, USIS and the employment and income business.

And I hope you'd agree there were strong numbers.

Yes.

Yes, yes. So do you want to touch market first?

Sure. The big driver of our growth is all around market share gain, and it's around growth in soft pulls, right? And our growth in soft pulls, which we believe is much faster than the market overall because of market share gain, driven by the fact that we've now added work number or employment and income indications on our credit file, and we're also adding now telco and utility data onto our pre-qual, pre-approval and credit file, which we think are differentiated assets, which are driving share. And we're adding those additional data assets at no cost to allow us to drive share, right? Overall, the market indicators we gave, I think I don't have any other comment on how the market is growing. We gave hard inquiries. That's our best current view. We are moving toward just disclosing originations, and we'll continue to do that as we go through this year and shift toward more of a discussion of originations on a trailing basis. But really, the driver for us is the share gains that we started talking about last year related to adding more assets, TWN and telco and utilities to our pre-qual and hard pulls, and we think we're starting to see that flow through, and that's why this has performed...

This is something that we wanted to do for a long time. It was really hard to do until we completed the cloud. The idea of leveraging our credit file data and our income and employment data, 2 valuable data sets and then add to it our cell phone utility data. Putting those together was really hard. And last summer, we started down the path post cloud of really adding some of those income and employment indicators to our credit file. And why is that important? In the prequalification stage of a mortgage, historically, a mortgage originator would pull a credit file to see, hey, does John or Mark look like someone that we can move through the application process for the kind of loan they want to get. And remember, in mortgages and auto and P loans, not only do you verify credit, you also verify income and employment. So in that early stage of that application process before it's put in, you don't have the visibility is Mark working? You don't have visibility of how much does Mark make, but you have to verify it later in the process. And uniquely, only Equifax has credit data and income and employment data. So the idea of putting some income and employment indicators that Mark is working on our credit file, adding it to our credit file that Mark works in my case for Equifax. Mark's income is this range last year really differentiates our credit file. And as you know, in the mortgage process, the pre-application or prequalification file has really moved to more of a 1B market, meaning one credit worth is the application process of 3 because of FICO pricing. We want to differentiate our credit file, and we've seen some share gains there. And if you think about it, we're really focused on -- we're not charging additional cost for that. So we want to drive share gains. And that next -- if we get one more credit file, it's very high incremental margins. So we saw the starts of that in the first quarter. We expect that to continue going forward where we can get some share gains there. And as a reminder, we're doing the same thing in card, auto and P loan. We're going to add income and employment indicators to our credit file. And card, auto and P loan is principally a 1B world. So if we can get some incremental share in auto, card and P loan credit file pulls, big lift. And obviously, the art of this is to make sure that we don't cannibalize in the verticals that do income and employment verifications at closing principally, where we have a large business in Workforce Solutions. We want to maintain that, but add enough value to differentiate our credit file. And we think we have a path that's working well. We've actually kind of a surprise to us, we've actually seen in mortgage, those customers that are starting to use our TWN indicator in the credit file are pulling more TWN at closing because they know we have the record, right? So that's been another kind of byproduct to this that we've had a small lift there. But really unique to Equifax is that we have these differentiated data assets post cloud, we can start really leveraging our whole platform of data assets and differentiation. John mentioned that we're also doing the same thing with our cell phone utility attributes. So we have a large cell phone utility data set on payment records around cell phone payments, streaming service, water, gas, electric bills. Only Equifax has it. It's about 190 million Americans. So we're taking 40 attributes from there, adding it to our mortgage credit file at no charge to differentiate our mortgage credit file much like the TWN indicator. And it's just an example of some of the things we can now do in the cloud environment. And it's kind of early days both in mortgage as far as adoption there because it takes process flow change for our customers. And then earlier days in auto card and P loan, but if you think about it, if you're a customer, the idea of someone's visibility around credit and are they working in their income and employment, you can make a better credit decision. You can deliver a higher credit line, higher approval rates at lower losses by having more information on that consumer, particularly upfront in the marketing process, and you can optimize really that marketing flow.

And you referenced 3 bureau or tri-merge as part of the underwriting process in mortgage. That's a requirement in the agency market. Director Pulte, who has an expanding resume for you to verify has made some references to potentially changing or the credit bureaus being next on considering some changes for mortgage underwriting policies. There was also an announcement from HUD last week. So go into what you think could be under consideration for changes that could impact the credit bureaus. And then maybe double-click on the HUD announcement in case anyone hasn't seen it.

Yes. So HUD put out an announcement last week that tri-merge is something they're going to continue, which is not news to us, but maybe to the investment community. The reason there's a tri-merge pull is because of the significant differences between the 3 credit bureaus on the data that's in there. Not every bank, financial institution, fintech contributes their data to all 3 credit bureaus. And the numbers are really substantial, which is why in mortgage, because it's federally guaranteed and the government is on the hook for the loan after it's originated, that's why it's been a tri-merge market in our view and what we hear from the regulators, it's going to continue to be a tri-merge market, which is what HUD said last week an announcement they made. The reason is, is that there's upwards of 10 million U.S. consumers that are only on one credit file. So if you only pulled 1 or 2, you might not pull the one that, that consumer is on. 10 million is a big number. Most of us in this room, if you ever look at your credit score between TU, Equifax, Experian, it's likely different by 40 to 50 basis points. And that can mean a different pricing tier if you only pull one, let's say, you pull your low credit score, not all 3, where they really average them, you're just -- you're going to really impact that consumer negatively. And then from a safety and soundness standpoint, if you pulled the good credit file, meaning the higher credit score, but not the lower one because maybe someone has a missed payment on their lower credit score from one of their banks or financial institutions, you now have a riskier loan. Those are all the reasons why tri-merge is going to stay. I also use the example. If you look at the most sophisticated lenders outside of mortgage that don't have to pull tri-merge, they do because they get a more complete picture on the consumer, meaning that incremental cost of pulling three gives them the ability to approve more people at lower losses because they're seeing all of the financial information on that consumer. So long-winded, we think tri-merge is something that is going to be here to stay. We don't think about it as a threat or a risk going forward. And I think HUD, their announcement was quite clear last week.

From a consumer perspective, mortgage is obviously rate sensitive, other categories of lending a little bit less so. I know you often lead with employment, but it felt like a more dynamic macro and consumer environment in March with increasing gas prices and everything else. Just what's your current view on consumer and end market health? Or where do you see potential risk?

Yes. So I think you got to -- we think a lot about consumer health, small business health to a lesser degree, we have small business, and then our customer health. So start with the consumer, they're still working. I think it's really important to -- while there's pressure, particularly at the lower income bands, the subprime bands from energy inflation over the last number of weeks for sure, and then inflation broadly in that demographic over the last number of years, really post-COVID, the fact that people are working is really strong for a consumer's ability to still repay. Even though there's pressure on delinquencies, what most of our customers look at, we think a lot about if unemployment ticks up and employment ticks down, that's going to be a challenge going forward for the economy. It's hard to see that still, at least in 2026. And then if you look at our customers, the financial institutions, they're super strong. They're operating well. They have strong balance sheets. Their consumer commercial data businesses, underwriting businesses are important to them. Really no change in how they're originating. We haven't seen them. For example, when our customers think there may be a downturn coming, they'll want to do more portfolio management reviews. What's my portfolio look like? Do I have to do credit line decreases? We don't see that activity happening.

All right. And that's all the time we have for questions in this room. Please join me in thanking Mark and John for their insights on Equifax. They will be available for a breakout now in Astor Suite 1A. The next presenting session in this room will be all about Agentic, debating the future of e-commerce and search, it's panel. Also at this time, Simpson Manufacturing, Paymentus, ServiceNow and BlackRock.