TransUnion ($TRU)

All right. Thank you to everyone in the audience who's joined us today. My name is Andrew Nicholas, and I am the business services analyst here at William Blair. Before getting started, I am required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. Very pleased to have TransUnion at the 46th Annual Growth Stock Conference. With me today is TransUnion CFO, Todd Cello. We're going to spend the 30 minutes here just doing a brief Q&A, walking through the major drivers of the business, but we're going to try to do it at a relatively high level for those that aren't familiar. So with that preamble finished, maybe start, Todd, with just a high-level overview of the business. What -- I think most people know you as a consumer credit bureau. Where are your businesses unique to maybe some of the other bureaus, where are some key areas of competitive differentiation? We can kind of go from there.

Okay. It sounds like a good place to start. So thank you, Andrew. Thank you for having us. It's always a pleasure to be at this conference, a great group of investors to meet with. So been a very productive morning. So talk a little bit about TransUnion and where perhaps we're different. I mean, I guess I'll start with where we're the same. Everybody understands TransUnion's legacy being 1 of the 3 large credit reporting agencies in the U.S., but also globally. We operate in 30-plus countries. Credit is the core of what we do, but what we've done over the last several years is we've developed our capabilities in fraud and marketing as well. Reason for that is TransUnion has been in fraud and marketing using credit data forever, in essence. So we see a significant opportunity to continue to expand our offerings in those markets. So we've been quite intentional in repositioning our portfolio over that period of time through mergers and acquisitions and different partnerships to be able to, in essence, build up the capabilities there. When you think about TransUnion just overall, primarily in the U.S., it makes about 80% of our business is in the U.S. Of that, to speak to the diversification I was just talking about, about 50% of the revenue in the U.S. is just pure credit. Another 15% is consumer, which is also credit. So arguably, about 65% of the U.S. is credit. That other 35% though is going to skew towards the marketing and the fraud revenues that I talked about. And in the U.S., we go to market through vertical markets, financial services through lines of business like mortgage, auto, credit card, banking and consumer lending, those are the core areas. We also have what we refer to as an Emerging Verticals segment. And in there, we -- these are adjacencies, in essence, where we're able to take the core credit, augment it with products and services like fraud and marketing to go after vertical markets like insurance, tech, retail, e-commerce, public sector, media, tenant and employment, to name a couple of them there. Outside the U.S., we have another 20% of our revenues come from our international business. There, we have some really nice pieces of our portfolio, in particular, in India. We operate the largest credit bureau in India. We were an initial shareholder of that business. We're going to -- we've consolidated it for about the last 12 years. It's about 25 years old, really great part of our portfolio with a significant amount of runway going forward. We recently closed on an acquisition in March of the largest credit bureau in Mexico. So now TransUnion has coverage across North America. We have a -- obviously, I talked about the U.S. We also have a very meaningful business in Canada, but adding Mexico, similar to India, original shareholder, a minority basis, we were able to acquire a majority. We're really excited about the potential there. Our business has been growing double digits without our involvement. So we're very opportunistic that we're going to continue that and then add to the growth rate of the business.

Fantastic. Well, I appreciate that as a start. I think one of the things you've also been highlighting as a company over the past several years, including your Investor Day earlier this year, is the technology infrastructure and the tech platform that you've built, OneTru. Can you spend some time kind of walking through what that platform is, what makes it unique? And maybe most importantly, what it unlocks for you as an organization?

Yes, for sure. It's a really important question because it's what underpins how we deliver our products and services to our customers. So OneTru is the platform that TransUnion acquired through the Neustar acquisition in 2021. It was called OneID, we named it OneTru. So when we acquired Neustar fraud and marketing, came with the acquisition because that was one of the areas of expertise. So what we're doing now with OneTru is we're adding credit to it. So in essence, what that means is OneTru, it's going to house all of TransUnion's data assets. And that's significant because having all of our data in 1 place enables our developers to be able to work a lot more efficiently, also enables us to be able to deliver to our customers quicker as well. All within a really good compliance structure, making certain that the data that we house together is being used appropriately, right? There's different regulatory requirements for credit data versus noncredit data. So that's kind of foundational OneTru. It's really exciting about what we're doing from a technology perspective is historically, TransUnion has operated its businesses with physical data centers. So when I talk about us operating in 30-plus countries, think of each one of those countries has a data center that we would maintain. So if we were to deploy intellectual property, new products and services, in essence, have to go to each one of those data centers and deploy it. It's a little inefficient. So underneath OneTru, what we're doing is we're using cloud services from AWS and Google Cloud Services. So that's what -- that's the layer underneath OneTru. And why that's important is no longer will we need those physical data centers anymore. So if we put OneTru on top of that, in essence, we're able to quickly deploy our product innovation into market as well as TransUnion is entrusted with a lot of personal data as well to financial related. So with that, we want to make certain that our security posture is also able to be quickly deployed out. So we'll be able to do that. So where we're at right now with OneTru is we are migrating U.S. credit, as I already said. So we expect by the end of this year that we will be complete with the tech migration. So the U.S. business will be fully on OneTru by the end of 2026. We're intentionally taking our time because it's customer impacting. Nothing is more important than making certain that our customers can transact with us in an efficient and obviously smooth way. So we're handling that with care. We'll get that done by the end of the year. We've made really good progress to this point through May. Once we're done, our plans then are to move to Canada and the U.K., which are 2 of our larger developed markets, and then we'll also hit the Philippines in 2027 as well. At that point in time, we'll have about 90% of TransUnion's revenue on the OneTru platform. And then the game plan is every other geography that we operate in will also fall. And so it's really exciting when you think about having everything all in 1 environment. And then really, what it ends up being is that customization, that last mile delivery, so to speak, where in each market, things are going to be a little different maybe from a regulatory perspective. We'll still customize our products in those ways, but having so much of the data and the technology all in 1 place,really is going to enable us to set us up for a significant amount of innovation. And I think what I've been remiss in talking about throughout this point is this is an AI-enabled platform as well, too. So when you think about what is already in production with fraud and marketing, we're already using AI capabilities. Credit is going to benefit from that when we're there.

Great segue. So obviously, I have to cover the AI topic. It's a broad one, but maybe I'll start with the data itself. Can you just kind of hit home for everyone in the audience, the data moat that TransUnion has, the uniqueness of the sources, alternative data, how difficult it would be to replicate and just kind of outline that for everyone since it's top of mind in market right now?

So as a credit reporting agency, TransUnion receives credit data from tens of thousands of lenders across the world, right? And the value that TransUnion and our competitors play is that we have the ability to link and match that data to put together a comprehensive report on the consumer. But because of the sensitivity of the data that we are entrusted with, it's heavily regulated. In the U.S., it's called the Fair Credit Reporting Act. So there's certain obligations and use cases as to how that data can be used. I already talked about all the contributors to that data, right? So think of the scale there, like just the number of data contributors, we call them furnitures as well, that enable us to make the file, but then you also have the regulatory framework itself, right? And what's so powerful about credit data is it's sourced independently. Right? And so it's coming from the lenders, and it's refreshed frequently. So we call the top of the credit report, we refer to that as the header. And in essence, what that means -- is that your name, it's your address, it's your phone number, date of birth, social security number, e-mail addresses, your phone number, indicative information about who the consumer is. So we're able to leverage that data. And it's permissible, where you take that header data, and we're able to use that to build identity graphs. So what that means is to then take noncredit data and add it to the consumer profiles that we maintain. And that's really where the value comes for TransUnion, right, is that we are looking to best represent a consumer in the marketplace by fully showing who they are. And then why is that beneficial then for our customers is they're then able to transact with more confidence that they know who they're dealing with and what the potential risks are before they get into any type of potential engagement. So off that credit file, TransUnion has a proprietary data assets. And I'll just go through a couple of them. So think of what I talked about with the credit header is spine. I like to refer to it maybe as like the glue that holds everything together. Noncredit data then that we have, for example, one would be our short-term lending credit bureau data. So think of short-term lenders, payday lenders not part of the traditional credit ecosystem. We're able to -- we bought a business several years ago that has that data. We're able to take that data and then append it to that spine that I was talking about. Another example would be our Argus database. This is where we have a contributory database from credit card issuers where we have credit card transactions and deposit data. We're able to take that data and also put it on the identity graphs. We have -- from a fraud perspective, we have device-based fraud information. We have about 14 billion devices that we've built up through a consortium that we know if a device has been associated with fraud or not and what consumer that links to. So you put that on this identity graph. And then another area is TransUnion is responsible for helping to run caller ID, landline in the United States. So we get a tremendous amount of signal from phone calls as well, too. So those are good examples of the proprietary data that we have. But we're not done yet at that point. I'd like to say we have an insatiable appetite for data, right? It goes back to wanting to be able to represent the consumer more comprehensively, right? So what we do then is we engage with third parties where we might have a need to build out that profile for the consumer. We'll engage with third parties who might have different data elements, and we buy that data. So we'll also append that to the identity graph as well, too. Now we're in market with the identity graph, and you're using the capabilities that we have. By just simply using our products, we're also able to derive signal from it. So a good example of that would be, if you think of its fraud mitigation and we're able to help our customer identify a fraud instance. Well, we're able to capture that information and then we're able to use it within the identity graph, and it makes it stronger. So we refer to that as like a flywheel effect that we have. Marketing is another example of that, right, where we help our customers build audiences to tailor their marketing campaigns to those offers that they send out if a consumer engages and corroborates that they want their data can be used or able to bring that information in. So the whole flywheel effect is incredibly powerful.

Very helpful. Obviously, with proprietary data as kind of the anchor, one of our kind of theses for the space or the information services sector as a whole has been that AI will benefit the sector through increased supply or product innovation, demand generation and operational efficiency. So I just kind of want to hit those 3 things. You've alluded to some of them, but just on the supply side. Are there specific things that AI is enabling in term -- or OneTru from a new product innovation perspective that you'd call out new products that maybe weren't able to be facilitated before that's -- or at least now easier to do on a quicker time line?

Yes, for sure. So let me go through, and I'll address that question through credit market in fraud, but you asked me a couple of other questions. Let's get back to -- because that's a big question you just asked me. So if we just focus on the innovation and how we're using AI today, let me answer it in the 3 categories that I've talked about with credit marketing and fraud. So from a credit perspective, a great example today is what we call our TruIQ Analytics Orchestrator. And in essence, what TruIQ is think of it as an analytics sandbox. It's where our customers come to build their models to understand different risk scenarios and if they would engage and how they would engage with a particular consumer. So what we've done with this new capability is we've been able to partner with Google Gemini to use some of their models in essence to enable our customers to use -- to speak, basically, to do the work on the analytics that I was talking about. Historically, what TransUnion has done is we've hosted innovation labs. We've brought our customers to the office, and we do the analytic work with them. What this capability does is it puts more autonomy back in the customer. Of course, we want to work with our customers and we want to be side-by-side with them, but it's a lot more efficient if they're able to do some of the work themselves. So that's been a significant change for us that we feel is going to drive some incremental revenues going forward. From a marketing perspective, in marketing, a lot of what we've done from audience generation in the past has been good data on audiences, but static. Maybe not as fresh. So what we're able to do now with OneTru is because of how fast the platform operates is we're providing more real-time, fresher data to build those audiences. And then the final area would be in fraud. And in fraud, what we've seen there is that just by leveraging our OneTru platform, the turn times and building scores is 2x to 3x faster. And just as an example, last year, we built 10 new [ scores ], and that would have taken a significant amount of time. And we were able to do that in a short period of time last year. And you made reference in our Investor Day earlier, I mean we highlighted a credit washing score, or capability, I should say, at the Investor Day. And in essence, that's where consumers are trying to manipulate their credit file. They're trying to almost move faster than TransUnion can move. So we're able to use AI capabilities to detect that and to make sure that, that doesn't happen. So those are good examples on the...

Yes. So that supply, demand. I think one of the things that was super interesting at the Investor Day was just kind of how you talked about how your clients are interacting differently with you in this new paradigm. So can you flesh that out?

Yes, for sure. So from a demand perspective, what we see is from customers that are more sophisticated early on in using AI capabilities, they're more frequent users of our data. So in particular, again, I've been talking a lot about analytics and scoring. But typically, our customers would refresh their own scores or their analytics maybe once a year, maybe 2 or 3 years, right, because it was an arduous process. What we're seeing now is customers that have AI capabilities, they're requesting more of our data so they can refresh their models, to the point where we've seen some even get to monthly. So think about from what was years to they're able to do it monthly. So what that means is they're ingesting more of our data more frequently so they can continuously calibrate. So those are -- typically, they're more sophisticated. They're larger customers under multiyear type of agreements. They got volumetric pricing with us. So we do see incremental revenues, but it's not prohibitive, right? So that's why that's an important point to make there. So that's been a positive. And the second area as well, too, is these same customers that are more sophisticated with AI capabilities. They want to ingest more of our products and services. So they want to ingest more of our marketing, and one of our Trusted Call Solutions, just as 2 examples. And what's kind of fascinating to me about that, where the bottleneck is at. It's really more on the customer side. It's not our ability to give it to them. They can take it, but where there's a little bit of a pause is their validation of these products. So for them to go back and test and make certain that it's something that will be beneficial to their decisioning criteria. So that's encouraging to me, right, because they can take the product innovation, but it's that testing piece that they're going to check.

So third, efficiency benefits. So it just seems like the data and information services space would be really well positioned to benefit from this technology from an operating efficiency perspective. So maybe you could highlight kind of what you're seeing on that front, what the opportunity looks like, where you are finding savings, if any? And we can go from there.

There's two really good examples of how we're being able to leverage AI internally. So I already talked about the OneTru platform being AI-enabled. But when you think about our developers, people are working with OneTru every day to build their products and services, their software coding. And we've built something called OneTru Assist, which in essence, enables our developers to be able to speak code and code cleanup. So what we've seen there is about a 20% productivity gain. So before anyone asks like when is that going to show up in adjusted EBITDA margin, we're being intentional because that's increased capacity for us. So we're able to point that excess capacity towards product innovation. So we're really encouraged about that opportunity. The second area that we've seen some meaningful traction is how we handle consumer disputes. So if I go back to your second question about credit bureau and being regulated, one of those criteria is that if a consumer thinks that they have an inaccuracy in a credit report, as a credit reporting agency, you are required to answer that consumer's call and investigate and come to a resolution within a set number of days. So as you can imagine, we have a high volume of disputes that come in on consumers' credit files. But as you can probably imagine, there's a lot of commonalities in the requests that do come in. So we're able to use AI capabilities to be able to find those similarities and to build a better workflow to most efficiently handle the consumers when they come in. We want them to have a good experience when they come in and deal with this, right? So if there's that much commonality and there's repetition, we now know, oh, we've seen that before. And AI is helping us do that. So that's a positive from an engagement and a relationship with the consumer, plus there's productivity gains because we're not necessarily having to answer the phone, right? We might be able to do that in a digital kind of frictionless manner for the consumer.

All right. Great. We have maybe 5 minutes left. I think we've hit a lot of the major points on the AI topic. Maybe we could switch gears to just the current environment. What are you seeing in terms of the health of the consumer? I think you described April-to-date activity on your earnings call as being at or ahead of expectations. What are you seeing now? How would you describe the overall market environment in the U.S. in particular?

Yes. So high level, what we're seeing is a continuation of the trends that we talked about on our April earnings call. So if I look at where we're at through the middle of May, we are trending towards the high end of our guidance, if not being ahead, which is what we messaged, right? We said that if trends persisted, we oriented the market to that level. So we're -- that's what we're seeing to this point, that's where we're at. So what underpins that in the U.S. is a generally resilient consumer. So a big driver for TransUnion is employment. And if consumers are employed, obviously, they can live up to their financial obligations. But they also can aspire to a higher quality of life as well, too, such as maybe buying a house or buying a car or paying for college education, things that you may need loans for. We really haven't seen much of a deterioration there. But a common question we get and what -- we recently put something out in our newsrooms is about this K-shaped economy that we're operating in. And that is -- it's prevalence, right? I mean, we definitely see that happening. Consumers that are in the lower -- the part of the K that's pointing down are definitely impacted by higher energy costs, higher inflation. We've seen their delinquencies tick up a little bit. Still within historical ranges, but not ideal, where it should be. So that's all in the market. But what our research has shown us -- and our research is leveraging our core credit reporting database right, so it's a phenomenal place to look -- is that we're seeing that in prime -- near-prime prime and super prime, we're actually seeing the proportion change in that there's more consumers compared to 4 years ago in those categories, and that subprime place is kind of held flat. So what that means is we're seeing consumers actually, in aggregate, actually getting better, but there still are the consumers on the lower part of the K that are definitely being impacted. So the way we're thinking about it is you kind of net those together, and that's the resiliency. And then that's also the employment piece that I talked about, that's there as well, too. And across our businesses, like core lending businesses, mortgage continues to be incredibly low. I mean, we're still talking about volume levels we haven't seen since the mid-90s, right? Before the conflict with Iran, we saw the 30-year mortgage go below -- around 6 or below, and we saw a significant increase in our volumes. And then unfortunately, that was short-lived, and it went up. So the reason I bring that up is, if we're talking about volumes from the '90s and you think about population growth in the U.S., right, there's -- if interest rates get much higher in mortgage, there's really not going to be that much of an impact to us. But a 50 basis point reduction in interest rates, so let's just say we get back to 6% or below and that it's going to unlock a significant amount of mortgage, in particular. Like we can see, again, looking at our credit file that there's 10 million mortgages that have an interest rate at 6% or above. So that just speaks to the refinance opportunity that's out there. Markets like auto, kind of tepid right now, right? Home -- I'm sorry, new car sales and used car sales are kind of flattish, right? And the average life of the used car, 7 or 8 years right now. So that, I would look at that as under trend as well, too. So there should be some upside coming from mortgage and auto in a more normalized environment. Our carbon banking business has been resilient, low to mid-single-digit grower. I still think that, that's a little bit below trend. And then probably the strongest part of our core lending has been in consumer lending, home to our fintech customers. They're healthy. They've got funding. Delinquencies are manageable. And that -- the personal loan has become more of a mainstream product. So they're selling to more in the subprime product consumer.

Sure. We have 8 seconds. I don't know that we can finish this whole question in that second, but I'm going to try to squeeze it in. Is there any major distinction between what you just described in the U.S. versus what you're seeing internationally? Or any kind of major changes? Obviously, conflict in the Middle East might have a very specific impact in those regions, but...

Conflict in the Middle East, we're watching closely. India and the Philippines because of the Strait of Hormuz being a source of where energy comes from. Not a material impact at this point in time. Otherwise, the other geographies that we operate in, it's more dealing with the higher energy price and inflation. So think about the U.K. and Canada. But again, what we're seeing is through May. I don't want to get into the high end of the guide right now.

Great. Thanks a lot, Todd.

Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.