Moody's Corporation (MCO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

August 11, 2025

US Financials Capital Markets Company Conference Presentations 39 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#1

All right. Our next section is with Moody's. So first of all, thank you, everyone, for joining this session. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Owen Lau. I cover information services, exchanges and also blockchain at Oppenheimer. Moody's is well known to be a credit rating agency. But over the years, they have been building out a software business in Moody's Analytics. They're also making a big push into AI. In the first half of this year, Moody's Analytics accounted for about 46% of total revenue. Joining us today is Steve Tulenko, President of Moody's Analytics. So first of all, thank you for your time, Steve.

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#2

Thanks, Owen. Thanks very much for having us. Pleasure to be here. Look forward to a good session.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#3

Exactly. Good to see you, Steve. So we asked this question last year, but we have been hearing quite a bit about the AI adoption in the investment community recently. I'm wondering how you would see your software business in MA today and where you want to be in 5 years?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#4

Yes. Yes, this is a question, we get a lot, right? I think the -- maybe the first thing to note here is software is a part of the program. In a lot of ways, it's a chassis that we use at Moody's to deliver content and deliver analytics and deliver insights. Sometimes the software is there to create the ability to interact in a way where we can bring our expertise to the table. So we often use it and have used it for years as a way of delivering value to customers in terms of their lending operation, for example, where we bring the data on the companies that they might lend to the table, maybe to help them do prospecting. We also bring data on maybe the companies and whether or not they might have political exposure or their beneficial owners might have political exposure that we might bring to the table to help them decide whether or not they can do business with that company at all, and we use software to deliver that. And then we also have analytic models to help them evaluate and maybe decide whether this is a good risk for them, what the price might be, how they might structure that deal and maybe how they might think about doing business with that company in the future. The software is the way in which we record those decisions and record that capability, creating a database often that's a system of record that we can rely on and refer to in the future as we do more analytic work. So I think it was really as an analytics business that leverages software as a chassis, and it's really a way in which we might package the expertise that we can bring to the table to help the customers do their jobs even better.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#5

Got it. So is there any area that you could invest into more and accelerate growth in MA?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#6

Yes. I mean there's always investments we can make, especially in light of what's happening here with AI, right? So we've been pretty active about investing in those areas where we see the best growth opportunities. Sometimes those are in the form of data tools or sometimes those are software applications or companies that produce software that we thought would be helpful. And sometimes it's just internal development, those kinds of tools, especially leveraging some of the new AI capabilities. But the lending space is a place where we are very focused and see some really good growth trends, either because banks continue to digitalize their activity or because we see -- and by the way, the Numerated acquisition is a good example of that, right, where we're bringing -- onboarding capabilities to our other elements in the value chain that we offer to banks to help them do their lending. That acquisition was a good example of an investment in the lending franchise for us. We do a lot in insurance underwriting. You, of course, know about the RMS capabilities where we have the preeminent cat models in the world here, helping people understand what the risk might be of a particular climate event, a hurricane or a wildfire affecting their book from an insurance perspective and maybe in other areas as well. So we've made an investment with CAPE Analytics, which was the company that does a geospatial video AI work to help us understand properties and what's on those properties from an overhead perspective so that I can see, gosh, that roof right there has a patch on it and maybe there's a branch over hanging in that roof, and maybe I need to think about that insurance policy differently than I might have just based on that, which is in the public records. Of course, KYC is another place where we are investing. And then in general, the AI concept is another place that we think will help us accelerate growth. So those are big examples of areas where we're concentrating our efforts around an ecosystem that we can really add value in supporting maybe needs to consume some data from an external benchmark like us, maybe some analytic models from us, maybe some software to help streamline the process. But really, I think of it as we're making bets on big sets of activities or ecosystems of activities that our customers are engaged in.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#7

Got it. So is there any area that you could deemphasize on the other hand?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#8

I mean there's always redeployment work that we're doing. And so we look at our portfolio very carefully, as you can imagine, and where are we on the product life cycle. You can picture an S-curve, each of our product suites is at some point along that S-curve. And at the beginning of an S-curve, your investment cycle is a little different than it might be toward the end of an S-curve, and we aim to keep in the portfolio those products that generate good growth profiles, but also good margin profiles when they get towards the end of that S-curve. So there's redeployment all the time. And maybe a good example of that would be maybe what we've done with the ESG activities, right? So a redeployment of resources internally and a partnership with MSCI is a good example of one where we felt the portfolio, I'll call it, a rebalancing in the portfolio made sense in terms of the resource deployment. And partnering with MSCI is a tremendous opportunity for us to bring world-class capabilities in that space to our customers. Maybe we are not investing quite the same way we were in terms of producing that content ourselves. And then, of course, it's a bilateral concept. So we can help them just the same in the private credit space, for example, where we have great expertise in private credit. And they, of course, have great tools that support the asset management community. So that's a good example of a redeployment where it makes sense given our portfolio.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#9

That's good. So you mentioned AI multiple times. Could you please talk about the traction of your AI products? And I think your Research & Insights revenue was stronger than expected in the second quarter. Part of the reason was Research Assistant, which is embedded within CreditView, I think. And I think you have over 100 customers and a healthy pipeline. Could you please give us an update on that?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#10

Yes. I mean the Research Assistant is a good example of the way I think our product strategy will develop here as GenAI becomes more important to our customers in the way they do their work, right? It's an important capability that enables us to draw inference across multiple areas of expertise and leverage it in the context of the work that our customers are doing. And we're using the same technique. Sometimes we price for it independently as a new module. Sometimes we include it in the product itself. So it depends a bit on where we are and which product family we're talking about. But about -- I think Noemie talked about this in the most recent earnings call, about 40% of our products, when you measure that by revenue or by ARR, now includes some form of GenAI capabilities. So for example, the RMS IRP, which is the platform that we offer to help people manage their models across different catastrophic risks and engage those models through that platform. That platform has a set of GenAI tools, for example, that help you understand what the models can do, maybe understand how they work and actually writes code for you in order to implement and leverage those models in a way that makes the most sense for it. And that's something we didn't actually charge for incrementally. But when you look at the products that had these -- call it the product families that had these tools available in the suite, you see a growth rate that's better than the average overall, sometimes maybe even twice the growth rate. So that is the other thing that we're pretty excited about is you get a very positive impact on the value that is generated by those products as well as the potential for growth by cross-selling, and sometimes we charge for that module independently. Sometimes we just include it in the program, and then we see growth coming through expansion of those relationships. So this is something that is, I would say, already at almost half of our product array is now making contributions, this capability of these new technologies, and we expect this is going to permeate our product array as we move through the next 12 to 18 months.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#11

Got it. And then a follow-up on that. I think the NPS, the Net Promoter Score, it's much higher with these clients, I think just talked about and a much better cross-sell opportunities. Could you please maybe unpack a little bit more why that's the case?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#12

Yes. I mean the cross-sell opportunities are probably obvious, but let's just connect some dots for people. As we make more content available through our website, right, so historically, CreditView is the flagship product that Moody's has offered to help explain ratings and provide credit analysis on rated companies. We're now expanding that to cover literally thousands and thousands more companies, not just the rated universe, but maybe the names that might be relevant from the private credit perspective. And so that coverage is expanding literally by thousands. So coverage itself is expanding, but we're also layering in more areas of expertise. For example, the economic scenario analysis that we often do, we've sold separately before. We're now making that available in the same place. So you can use these GenAI tools to draw inference across all of it. So the question, what would Moody's say about this name? Maybe it's a name in the private credit space where we don't actually formally rate them. We can use one of our rating scorecards in order to give you a sense for what that rating might look like. And then we also can use economic content, maybe it's interest rate forecast in order to say what might happen to this company in light of that interest rate forecast. So these tools give you the ability to introduce new content sets and maybe even suggest have you thought about doing an interest rate forecast in light of this scenario? Or have you thought about applying this scenario to that credit? So there's the introduction part. And then, of course, deliver through especially GenAI tools. But in general, we can just make it available on the same website as well. So there's some good cross-selling capabilities there that are pretty rich. You mentioned the NPS concept. We look at this, the scores themselves are useful, but much more interesting is the feedback you get. So you get a great feedback move from your customers there, and we rely on that quite a bit. We actually have a regular cadence of meetings to look at that and make sure that we're not missing something that's brewing or something that's interesting from a customer perspective. But what's really, really cool is the NPS scores are higher when these GenAI products are in place. But what's really interesting is when you dive in and you look at the activity. They are spending more time on our website, which could be good or could be bad, right? Maybe it's harder to find stuff, so they have to [ spend, right ]? That's not the case. They're spending more time and they're engaging more. They're getting more -- they're tapping more research and using more of our content than they are spending. So the rate of increase and the time they spend is going up, but the rate of engagement is going up faster. There's sort of a velocity to this that we're pretty excited about, I'll call it an engagement velocity that is pretty interesting, right? So these GenAI tools are enabling people to -- they're spending more time with us, which means they're spending less time with somebody else, which is great. More importantly, they're getting more from us in that same period of time than they ever did before. So I think very exciting.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#13

Yes, I agree. I do feel like I spend more time with ChatGPT these days, honestly. And then maybe a follow-up on that is AI can be an opportunity for MA and many other companies. It could also be a threat to your business. I mean there has been a narrative that AI can replace some software products or some software codes. How do you see this risk to MA workflow tools and software solutions such as CreditLens going forward?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#14

Yes. I mean this is a great kind of existential philosophical question. You could think about the disruption factor or you could think about the tremendous opportunity that's before us, and we definitely land on the opportunity side of this. If you think back what I mentioned before about software and kind of thinking as a chassis, AI and especially these GenAI tools, the agentic tools that we're now developing. And by the way, Owen, we may be able to show your colleagues here a quick video to give you a sense for what we're doing next with respect to these AI tools. GenAI is just another form of software development. It happens to be that the code that we're using is often language rather than your traditional software code. So packaging our expertise either in the form of deterministic software like CreditLens or converting that into agentic software so that you do credit scoring or you do spreading or you do covenant monitoring, those are the kinds of things that we can do agentically just the same as we have done deterministically. And we see this as a great opportunity maybe to actually make that capability available to more customers by helping them convert from, I'll call it, software tools that were systems of record to leveraging the data that's resident in those systems of record to do more analytics. So I can show you a quick demonstration of the work we're doing with our website right now. This is -- we've done this on video. And in the one-on-one meetings that we have scheduled today, we can do live demonstrations if you'd like. But just to give you a sense, this is -- if you're a customer of our website -- of our products via our website, moodys.com, we have a module here where we have our agents that we're making available. And this is just a demo version we've got in the video right now. But we've got agents that help you do these kinds of tasks. We can glean insight from an earnings report. You can dive in on -- in this case, we dove in on the D&O insurance work that you can hit pause for a second, the D&O insurance work that one of our insurance customers might do. Each of the boxes here represents an agent that we've already created, right, in order to help them do the underwriting work on the D&O policies. So step 68 -- sorry, step 22 is get information about the company. Another step too is to search through the annual report on that company to understand things. There is another step here where we review news stories on a name like Boeing. So we're pulling in across dozens of agents the content and capabilities we bring through our data estate, maybe also with content that might be in their systems and then bring that together, hit run again and pull that together and let these agents do some work for us. So on the right-hand side, you've got those different steps firing away, right, and you've got the results generated. On the left-hand side, you can see the agents going to work for us. And again, I can show this to you guys live. This is a production website. Green means that, that step has been accomplished. Blue means that step is actually being activated. And each of those boxes that we have organized through that schematic, we can add or delete and we can reconnect the way we want to in order to deliver in a way that's relevant for our customers. So the software opportunity here deterministic SaaS-based software is actually more constrained than what we can do with this. So we're actually pretty excited about the growth opportunity here. And what you'll see here is we're generating content. I don't know if you can skip through to the end. We're generating content on the right-hand side. This will generate a report that might be 20 or 30 pages long, and we're going to help insurance underwriter think about D&O insurance for this name and then consider the news that might be relevant, consider the financials that might be relevant, look at the people and then understand how they might be exposed politically or not. And then in light of all that, you have a much more holistic understanding of who you're doing business with and what you might want to do in terms of pricing that policy. So it gives you a sense for -- you can see we're very excited about the opportunity to actually use agents to do the same work that software was doing before. And maybe some of the software applications that we have serve as a system of record to help us bring the customer data in a way that's relevant to really add value to them going forward.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#15

Right. So that's part of like one of your agentic solutions to like hire the agent to write a credit memo and stuff like that, right?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#16

What you just saw there is a button that we will make available. We have it in preview with some customers now. We've actually sold some of these agents to customers already. So we have -- people actually paid us money. But the most important thing here is we're going to make that layer of agents available on all of the items in our data estate as we make them available through moodys.com. And this is something we're in the process of doing now. We've been -- you've undoubtedly been aware, we've been scaling up our coverage there. We're adding in more and more content there. And as the AI capabilities are available across all of the things in our data estate, we expose it through this set of agents and really hone in on what's important to a bank or an insurance company, an asset manager or whatever might be relevant.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#17

Got it. We have around like maybe 20 minutes left. I do want to touch on the growth potential for MA because there are lots of questions from investors about how can you guys reaccelerate the ARR or the potential. So for me, I think in the last quarter, you have mentioned 4 products. Let me -- like let us walk through these one by one. I think the first one is the so-called enhanced capabilities in CreditLens. We know it's a very embedded product in commercial lending, but could you please unpack what that upgrades are?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#18

The upgrades related to CreditLens?

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#19

Yes, upgrades related to CreditLens and how they are going to drive ARR?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#20

Yes. I mean maybe the way to think of this is, again, this ecosystem concept, right? CreditLens is the software application we use to bring customer data, bring our external -- or the data in our data estate together along with scoring models, spreading tools, right? So it's -- there's an ecosystem here that we help people do lending. And so I guess what's really good news is we have lots and lots of customers in the lending space, that's good. But not all of them have bought all of our capabilities. So as you apply, as you become relevant from one piece of the value chain, we are offering other elements in the value chain that are quite synergistic for you to leverage right then and there. And some of those could be delivered through software. Some of those might be delivered through these agents that we just talked about. But at the beginning of the value chain might be a clarification. Am I able to do business with this person by doing a KYC check? Then you might do your evaluation from a credit perspective and score it with one of our models. And then you might decide that you want to lend to that company and then you might also need to project your impairments related to that company downstream in the finance and accounting department. So these things all link together and create a great cross-selling opportunity that I think we think is really quite rich. We see a good pipeline in the banking space I think partially because banks are now through some of the crisis moments they had a couple of years ago and are now also, I think, investing in this AI capability and learning more about it and I think are looking forward to actually leveraging it to really make themselves more productive and maybe save some money.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#21

Got it. And the second one is the new model launch, I think in insurance space in the second half of 2025. Steve, you mentioned RMS. We actually haven't talked about RMS for a long, long time. Why don't you give us more color and give us an update?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#22

Yes. I mean the platform that RMS brings to the table here, think of this as an industrial strength modeling for the largest insurance companies and reinsurers and brokers in the world or I should say, for those who are interested in those exposures and can help anyone because the scale here can handle, I'll call it, industrial strength application. So this thing is built for resiliency and the ability to handle a lot of activity. And what happens here when you do these cat models is you run scenarios, often thousands and thousands of years of scenarios in order to project what your losses might be. So it's not terribly unlike a lot of other work we do. You have frequency and severity and you do the math to get expected losses, but you do it with projections of what might happen to weather and what might happen to weather patterns for a particular location on a particular building over the course of maybe literally 50,000 years that are simulated. So you need a lot of compute to do that well. This platform is built for that. Maybe more interesting, we have a whole host of models that we're releasing through that platform that we call high-definition models. The one that's most famous probably are the most interesting, to I would say, the largest number of insurers in the U.S. at least would be the severe convective storm capability, where you look at thunderstorms and large wind events and what do they do to your house and my house, right? These happen everywhere in the country, happen everywhere in the world, and they are relevant for the most number of insurance policies in the world. Hurricanes tend to be a little bit more important on the coast. Fires tend to be more important in sort of area, regions. The severe convective storm model applies almost anywhere in the world. And we have applied it and done forecasting and simulations with it in mind. And that, I guess, is why we're excited about the launch that you're mentioning there, right? So our platform enables you to really do some really good work. The high-definition models are more effective than anybody else's. And we've got data increasingly available for things like the acquisition of CAPE to even inform the raw data and the raw material that comes into those models to inform them to make them even better. So this is a pretty rich set of capabilities, very relevant for insurance. It's also relevant, I think, for other places that are concerned about whether they might do to their assets, banks, public sector entities, et cetera. Corporations too, right?

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#23

Got it.

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#24

Where should I put my warehouse?

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#25

Right. Exactly. Exactly. So Steve, you mentioned CAPE a number of times already. I think there's an integration process going on. And I think CAPE, it's not in your ARR number yet.

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#26

Correct. Not organic yet. Yes.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#27

Not organic. Yes. So how should we think about the time line of this integration and how much and when it will show up in your MA ARR?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#28

Yes. The acquisition of CAPE was, when was that?

Kiera Kilkowski Bridges

Executives
#29

In January.

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#30

Yes, January.

Kiera Kilkowski Bridges

Executives
#31

I think after a year of being part of the company, it will be part of that ARR.

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#32

Yes. Yes. So CAPE, I think we're really excited about from a cross-selling perspective, very excited because the idea of -- I think this is a very helpful way to think of this. We can tell you about virtually any roof in the United States and any plot of land in the United States from an overhead visual perspective. So literally, I have a garage that I insured through one of our larger carriers in the United States, and they have to be a CAPE customer. They insured my building for a couple of months and then decided they didn't want to cover me anymore and cited that there were some issues with my roof. This is a building I was refurbishing and rehabilitating, but it gives you a sense for how accurate this kind of tooling can be, right? So I had to go seek insurance from a different provider because the visuals they were able to glean from the overhead shot gave them a good sense for what they were dealing with. It's true. I had patched my roof, and it was a different color. So I have first-person experience with this, right? So you can imagine what this does when you can actually see that at scale for any roof in America, right, any property in America that has a branch overhanging the roof. Anywhere you see a few cars in the backyard, right? Maybe you wonder what those barrels are next to the building, right? These are the kinds of things that you can now see and you don't have to do a site inspection. So that gives you a sense for the opportunity. It will move into the organic ARR number next year, probably -- I guess, we'll probably report that way in the first quarter.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#33

Got it. And then I guess the other potential support for ARR is KYC, you mentioned that maybe some new sales to corporate. Could you please talk about your existing customer mix for KYC and why corporate become a new opportunity for MA?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#34

Yes. I mean we -- the history of that business, we had Orbis, which was very useful in the KYC sector, right, because Orbis brought all of the connections between the corporate entities, which was very useful. And we also bought Regulatory Data Corporation a few years ago, right? So that brought a database of politically exposed people and sanctions data. So the combo of the 2 is really attractive. Orbis, of course, was very important to the banking world, but also to the corporate world. RDC had their history. They started in the banking space. So we have a very good franchise among banks that are doing KYC work and supporting their regulatory compliance as well as their efforts to be more productive and more efficient. But in the corporate space, I think that this concept of resiliency has become more and more important. People are more aware of this notion of, gosh, I wonder how resilient my supply chain is. I wonder who it is that's walking into my building, right? We literally have customers that use our tools to consider who it is that's literally walking into their building at the reception desk. We have immigration authorities that are considering who it is that's flying into their country, right? So it's the combination of all this data. And the same concept applies whether you're in the banking sector where there are heavy regulations that require you to check and see who it is you do business with. Those same concepts, I think, apply to corporates and corporations that might not have the same regulatory situation. They might have increasing regulatory obligations, but it's early days in that respect. And I think -- but the resiliency driver is the thing that's really driving them, right? They want to make sure they understand, is there something out there that I should be aware of before I rely on this company to deliver for me? And that is the -- that's really the nature of the demand. By the way, it's the same as financial strength from an analogy perspective. Will they pay me back? It's the same as are they exposed to weather? Is their headquarters in a floodplain? Well, we might also be able to tell them about whether or not that company or those individuals have any kind of sanctions risk associated with them.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#35

Got it. And then another hot topic is related to private credit. I mean we talk a lot about the private credit on the rating side. Is there a role MA can play here in terms of offering tools, right, to private credit firms and stuff like that?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#36

Yes, yes, sure. So I mean, I think a private credit as another area where Moody's can offer a lot of value. I mean think about the continuum of credit may be going from the top of the house or the largest credit exposures or the biggest companies that borrow are often rated. And then Moody's has credit scoring capabilities and data on every other company in the world as well. So Orbis, for example, along with financial statements that we gather through Orbis or maybe we might use AI to spread for our customers. We have financial statements on literally 20 million or 30 million companies. We have lots of other data you might use to proxy what that company might look like compared to their peers and then use our credit models to help generate a quantitative score on basically any name that is incorporated, right? So our models reach down into sole proprietorships and provide value. So at the top of that, as we talk about the rated names, private credit is just the next slice. It's the mezzanine level just before you start doing your kind of traditional lending. And often, private credit is a substitute for some of the lending, right? So our biggest customer base is the banking customer base because of lending. So private credit is -- it's literally in our wheelhouse. We have data on those names. We have financial statements on those names. We can confirm who the people are. We can tell you what business they're in. We know and can project what those data might imply in terms of credit risk and in the private credit space. That's the one thing that you would expect Moody's would be able to do, right? So we help with the risk premia associated with a debt instrument, especially when it comes to the risk associated with credit, which is a big portion of it. It's the one thing you can probably get a good -- do a good job of predicting. So we are excited about the opportunity here. We're working with many of the largest players in the private credit space. And maybe one way to sum it up is what would Moody's say about this name if it were rated, right? That question, what would Moody's say about this one, is something that MA can answer even if the rating agency hasn't yet rated that name, right? So this tens of thousands of companies that might potentially tap the private credit segment of the markets that we can actually address that question.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#37

So is it like you can even provide a pre-rating to customers when they subscribe to MA or kind of...

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#38

In Moody's CreditView, for example, right, we have all of the rated names and all the research that explains that, right? We have all of our industry research, but we also have all the scorecards that the analysts use. These are -- we make them available, right, to explain here are the most important quantitative criteria that we review in the rating process. Here are the most important qualitative criteria that we review in the rating process. We can help you use those scorecards, and we often -- this is one of the things we might do agentically, for example, right? We can help you pull the data together to be -- that's relevant for the scorecard on that name in that industry, right? So what would we say about this name that isn't rated yet, might be rated someday depending on what -- whether they tap the public market and the private market. Maybe it's a name you've seen in the syndicated loan space. What would we say about that one? And we have economic content, we have benchmark content, we have scorecards that you can use and analytic models to populate and maybe come up with something that would be very helpful in addressing the credit premium in the bond price or the -- yes, in the instrument price.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#39

Got it. So we only have like maybe like 4, 5 minutes left. Maybe my final questions are I want to touch on two things. Number one is the KYC business, and then the other one is the expense program. Maybe on the KYC business, the growth rate has been very strong. I think ARR was about 15% in the second quarter. Could you please talk about the driver of this growth and how sustainable it is?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#40

Yes. I mean I think we're -- we continue to be very excited about this is a place we are investing. We mentioned it at the top of the program here. There is great opportunity for us to provide tools and whether they take the form of databases or data feeds or analytic models or software applications to streamline the operations in these efforts. These efforts, I would actually think of as KYC and third-party risk management because when we help people evaluate suppliers, we put this in the same -- we think of this in the same business unit. So that's, I think, an important note. There's good growth in the supply chain space as well. But maybe just -- maybe more importantly, the opportunity to address the labor required to investigate a name that showed up on the list, right? So think of this, a bank, for example, processing thousands of these a day. And 90-something percent of them get taken out an address, we got a match. We're good. I know that this is Owen Lau. He's a guy who works at Oppenheimer, in good shape, right? That's confirmed. Then there's another one named Owen Lau, who works at another company, and we're not sure if it's the same guy and that requires an investigation. The work required to do the investigation is multiple. It's just hours and hours of work. And if we can find a way to streamline that maybe agentically, we've actually sold an agent to help people do the screening, right? That's a place where we can really access another TAM because we earn economic rent by replacing the labor, right? So 5 investigators can do the work of maybe even 50 investigators before by leveraging these tools. It's not just Google searching, it's all of our tools at once leveraged for you agentically to really save you time and money. That's, I think, why we're so excited about this business.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#41

Yes. That's why there are lots of opportunities in AI, combining AI to many different areas. And then I guess my final question is about your expense. You had -- I think you gave us an update on the efficiency program back in the fourth quarter of 2024. When would you complete this program? And how much expense runway you expect to save?

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#42

Yes. I think the restructuring window is open. I actually think it's declared in the statements. I think it's open for more than a year, right? So we are continuing to do work here and acknowledge that work through that restructuring process. If you ask me how long will this go on? I would say we are actively engaging and continue to engage in redeployment efforts, taking the good people who are doing the work that we want to do and maybe applying it to a new activity, maybe a new activity that we consider to be worthy of us doubling down on some of these bets. The lending space is a good example. We're doing a lot of that. We're doing a lot of work to drive productivity, especially in the engineering space, leveraging AI, for example. Some of these new tools that have come through are really quite valuable, and they enable us to do a lot more work in a shorter period of time. The same thing goes for product development. Same thing goes for sales, right, where we're leveraging some of these AI tools to generate more productivity per head. That's an affirmative objective, and it's one that we are continuing to do, and you'll see that reflected through that restructuring window.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#43

Got it. I think we're about time. Steve, again, thank you for your time and Kiera as well, and thank you all for joining us today.

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#44

Thanks, Owen. Hopefully, that was helpful. We look forward to talking with you next time. And if anybody has any questions or follow-up, you let us know.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#45

Sounds great. Thanks a lot.

Stephen Tulenko

Executives
#46

Thanks, Owen. Thanks a lot.

Kwun Sum Lau

Analysts
#47

Thank you. All right. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

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