TransUnion (TRU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to the 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders of TransUnion. Our host for today's meeting is Pam Joseph. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the meeting over to your host. Pam Joseph, please begin the meeting when you're ready.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I will now call the meeting to order. I want to welcome all of you to the 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting of Stockholders of TransUnion. I'm Pam Joseph, the Chairperson of the Board of TransUnion, and I will be presiding over today's meeting. Attending our virtual meeting today are the other members of our Board of Directors, whom I'd like to recognize: George Awad; Billy Bosworth; Chris Cartwright; Suzanne Clark; Kermit Crawford; Russ Fradin; Bobby Mehta; Tom Monahan; and Andy Prozes. I would like to personally thank our Board of Directors for their engagement and their stewardship during a very difficult year. The Board met continuously with the executive team over the last 12 months to provide support and guidance during this extraordinary period. I would also like to remind all of you that our conversation today may include statements that constitute forward-looking statements. Such statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, and we assume no obligation to update them. To lead off our meeting today, Chris Cartwright, TransUnion's President and CEO, will talk in more detail about the business. Chris will then turn the meeting over to Heather Russell, who will act as Secretary and lead the formal business of the meeting. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Chris.

Thank you, Pam, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for joining us today for our annual meeting. I'd first like to thank our highly engaged and very effective Board of Directors. All of our stockholders should be aware of the diligent, thoughtful level of Board and management interaction at TransUnion as it creates real differentiation and stockholder value. TransUnion is clearly much more than a portfolio of businesses. It is really about people and the culture ahead of all. I want to thank all of the amazing associates of TransUnion for their dedication, passion and incredible work during a particularly challenging year. TransUnion would not be the company that it is without you. I'd like to recognize a few members of my leadership team and some of our other executives who are participating in the annual meeting. Todd Cello, CFO; Heather Russell, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary; Katie Coleman, Interim Chief Human Resources Officer; Julie Springer, Chief Marketing Officer; Tim Elberfeld, Chief Accounting Officer; Aaron Hoffman, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations; and Rachel Mantz, Assistant Corporate Secretary. I want to welcome all of you to our Virtual Annual Meeting of Stockholders. 2020 was a year of compounding crises, a global pandemic that took millions of lives and crippled economies around the world, profound social justice movements and significant political unrest in the United States and other nations. Amidst these unprecedented challenges, we also witnessed the resiliency of the human spirit, the ability to stay connected even while distant, the resourcefulness to manage caregiving, working in all facets of life simultaneously and the strength to persevere through fear and uncertainty. I'm proud of the work that TransUnion and our over 8,200 associates did to help our customers and consumers around the world to manage through the uncertainty of 2020, and to position themselves to emerge from the pandemic safe and sound. We accomplished this through collaboration and innovation, finding new ways to make trust possible for consumers, customers and the broader communities we serve. To highlight our success, I want to focus on 3 areas: one, our ability to deliver financial results, with revenue growth at an attractive margin even during a period of global economic disruption; two, our continued investments in growth areas that will help us deliver strong, long-term value and performance; and three, our heightened commitments to sustainability through focus on environmental, social and governance issues and particularly supporting racial equity, both within and outside of TransUnion. Despite the challenges of 2020, we delivered solid financial results, achieving 2% organic constant currency revenue growth and maintaining an attractive margin. We diligently manage our balance sheet to protect against pandemic-related uncertainties, and we voluntarily prepaid $150 million of debt. We also invested in growth initiatives for our long-term success, funding several acquisitions to build our Media vertical and making a number of smart minority investments across our business units. Our financial results were bolstered by our ability to quickly address the urgent needs of both consumers and customers through the pandemic. We supported consumers by providing free weekly credit reports. We delivered relevant new solutions such as CreditVision Acute Relief Scores and Attributes, providing customers with actionable insights into consumers' behaviors. And we saw the benefits of our diversified portfolio with a Consumer Interactive, Public Sector, tenant and employment screening and Insurance verticals all growing in 2020. To ensure our continued success, we invested in several ambitious initiatives to fundamentally strengthen TransUnion, Project Rise, our technology transformation; Global Operations and Global Solutions. Let me provide an update on the significant progress we made in 2020 on these key projects. Project Rise is our initiative to create a more scalable, secure, efficient and effective technology foundation for TransUnion, like many technology-enabled companies. We have the opportunity to streamline our software universe through reworking our applications using a common set of enterprise software services, while migrating to a public cloud services provider. Already, we have analyzed more than 1,000 applications to determine whether to refactor, rehost, replatform or retire them, which will allow us to simplify the delivery of intellectual property on a global basis, reduce our costs and increase our speed to market. Our transition to a hybrid cloud model has already allowed us to power key international opportunities in countries such as India, Chile as well as to integrate the companies within our Media vertical. As we leverage the growing arsenal of innovative cloud-based tools to enable faster product development, we have delivered the first set of foundational cloud services to our development teams and migrated key applications. We have also made considerable progress in training our internal cloud team, with 80% having completed or currently enrolled in cloud training, including hundreds receiving full AWS certifications. This allows us to continuously evolve and stay nimble in the future as well as providing a meaningful and attractive destination for top tech talent from around the world. Global Operations embarked on a series of initiatives in 2020, focusing on our global collaboration systems, teams and processes. These efforts are resulting in greater efficiency through centralization, process optimization and automation, creating meaningful improvements toward an optimal consumer journey. We continue to expand on the success of our Global Capability Center, or GCC, in Chennai, India, which now employs more than 1,000 associates. Over the past year, we have added 2 new GCCs to the TransUnion footprint, one in Pune, India; and 1 in Johannesburg, South Africa, further expanding our ability to flex capacity and safeguard our global business continuity. They also allow us to cost effectively process more sophisticated and confidential work than we could using third parties. And of course, we are focused on business refinement and automation to enhance the customer experience. Most significantly, we are implementing a standardized global CRM system that, coupled with our GCCs, forms an effective technology and operational fulfillment spine for transparent, high-quality customer support. And Global Solutions enables us to develop key solutions centrally and deliver them across our geographies and verticals. This central team incorporates inputs and ideas from all our regions, allowing TransUnion to offer truly innovative solutions to our customers. We have quickly executed against many opportunities, and I highlight some representative examples below. We undertook a thorough review of our diverse set of fraud solutions and recognized the opportunity to integrate the best of our various offerings into a standardized, unified global solution, which we are rebranding under the TruValidate brand. We are refocusing our sales efforts to bring these improved fraud solutions to existing and new customers around the world. We also created and offered several solutions to assist customers with the uncertainties created by the COVID-19 pandemic, including our CreditVision Acute Relief Attributes, which allow financial institutions to enhance their portfolio risk assessments when historical models were no longer reliable. We built a digital onboarding solution for our international customers to address the massive increase in e-commerce activity, allowing them to easily leverage our bundled suite of data prefill, ID verification, credit scoring and origination decisioning tools. We are expanding into the income and employment verification space through partnerships with a leading U.S. payroll processor and an aggregator of consumer contributed financial data. Finally, we are providing social determinants of health tools to keep Americans healthy, which has never been more important than it is now. At TransUnion, we recognize success means more than commercial results. It is also dependent upon our commitment to making a material and sustained difference to society. Across our company, we continue to focus on diversity, equity and inclusion among our associates, our offerings and in the communities we serve. In 2020, we appointed Teedra Bernard as our first ever Chief Talent and Diversity Officer, ensuring a diversity and inclusion lens is applied to all of our human capital management decisions. With Teedra and the support of TransUnion's executive leadership, we are formalizing our commitments toward diversity. I was a founding signatory to the Chicago Network's Equity pledge, the strive toward achieving gender equity in global leadership roles by 2030, and I signed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace. In 2021, executive compensation at TransUnion will be dependent on the company's increasing the year-over-year representation of underrepresented minorities in director-and-above positions within the United States and increasing the year-over-year representation of females at the Vice President level or above globally. In 2020, we also created the TransUnion Racial Equity Taskforce to prioritize and coordinate efforts to support racial equity and social justice, both within and outside of TransUnion. The Taskforce will amplify our advocacy and outreach through consumer tools and support designed to improve access to economic opportunity like our partnership with the Credit Builders Alliance, which helps underserved communities build credit. The Taskforce is also reexamining the use of data in our analytics and solutions to ensure that all uses are consistent with our values and the goal of financial inclusion in the economies that we serve. We continue to strengthen our overall commitment to sustainability through greater measurement and disclosure around salient ESG metrics as well as the establishment of meaningful targets. I encourage you to read our recent sustainability report, where we provide details around limiting our environmental footprint and maintaining robust security, compliance and governance programs to ensure consumer privacy, data integrity and the overall security of information under our stewardship. I hope my comments have provided a glimpse into the innovative, solutions-oriented approach we're bringing to our customers and consumers as well as our ongoing commitment to making a difference in society. In wrapping up, I want to thank our stockholders for their ongoing support and our associates for the amazing work they do every day to make TransUnion a great company. Thank you again for joining us at our Virtual Annual Meeting today, and we appreciate your support. With that, I will now turn it over to Heather Russell, who will act as Secretary of the meeting. Heather?

Thank you, Chris. Also participating in the meeting are [ Charlie Zade ] of Broadridge Financial Solutions, who has been appointed to act as Inspector of Election; and Colleen Harrison from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, our independent auditor. On our virtual meeting website, we've included an agenda for the meeting. Also included on the meeting site is a list of the Rules of Conduct for the meeting. To conduct an orderly meeting, we ask that participants abide by these rules. At this time, any stockholders who are logged on to our virtual stockholder meeting website and wish to vote their shares may do so by following the instructions on the screen. If you previously voted by proxy, you don't need to vote today unless you wish to change your vote. If you'd like to ask a question during the meeting, please type your question in the Q&A box on the virtual meeting website. Please refer to the rules of conduct for additional guidance. I have a copy of the affidavit of mailing establishing that notice of this meeting was duly given. A copy of the notice of meeting and the affidavit of mailing will be incorporated into the minutes of this meeting. All stockholders of record at the close of business on March 15, 2021, are entitled to vote at the annual meeting. Our first order of business is to determine whether the shares represented at the meeting, either at our virtual meeting or by proxy, are sufficient to constitute a quorum for the purpose of transacting business. The stockholders' list shows that holders of 191,272,627 shares of common stock of the company are entitled to vote at this meeting. We are informed by [ Charlie Zade ], Inspector of Election, that there are represented at our virtual meeting or by proxy 172,682,111 shares of common stock, approximately 90.28% of all of the shares entitled to vote at this meeting. Because holders of the majority of the shares entitled to vote at this meeting are present at our virtual meeting or by proxy, this meeting is duly convened for the purposes of transacting such business as may properly come before us. Our next order of business is the matters to be voted on at today's meeting. The first proposal to be voted on is the election of 6 directors to serve on the Board of Directors for a term of 1 year. The nominees for election as directors are: William P. Bosworth; Suzanne P. Clark; Kermit R. Crawford; Russell P. Fradin; Pamela A. Joseph; and Thomas L. Monahan, III. Their qualifications are described in this year's proxy statement. Based on the recommendation of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, the Board recommends a vote for the election of each of: William P. Bosworth; Suzanne P. Clark; Kermit R. Crawford; Russell P. Fradin; Pamela A. Joseph; and Thomas L. Monahan, III as a Director of TransUnion. Are there any questions or discussion? The second proposal before the stockholders is the ratification of appointment of the company's independent public accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. The Audit and Compliance Committee of the Board of Directors has appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers to audit TransUnion's consolidated financial statements for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021. Our Board recommends a vote for the ratification of the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as our independent registered public accountants for 2021. Are there any questions or discussion? We have now completed the discussion regarding the proposals for consideration. Voting has concluded, and I hereby declare the polls closed. The proxies will be held in the possession of the Inspector of Election, and the Inspector of Election will tally the votes. I can now report the preliminary results of the voting. We have been informed by the Inspector of Election that the preliminary results are as follows: each of the 6 nominees for election to the Board of Directors has been duly elected for a term of 1 year; PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP has been ratified as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2021. We will now begin our Q&A session. I'd like to introduce Aaron Hoffman, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, who will be managing our Q&A session. Aaron, I'll turn it over to you.

At this time, we have no questions. Thanks, Heather. At this time, we have no questions in the queue. So maybe we'll give folks, just a minute, 15, 20 seconds. If we don't have anything, we can certainly move along. And again, we have no questions submitted in the queue.

Thank you, Aaron. Since we've not received any stockholder questions, I'll turn the meeting back over to Pam Joseph for her closing remarks.

Thank you, Heather. Thank you, Aaron. And thank you, Chris Cartwright for the business insights that you provided. Thanks to all of you for attending today's meeting. The meeting is now adjourned.

This now concludes the meeting. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day.