Verisk Analytics, Inc. (VRSK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Hello again, everyone. I'm Alex Kramm, senior research analyst at UBS, covering exchanges and business services. Excited to have Verisk Analytics here today, Elizabeth Mann, CFO. This is actually the first time I'm doing a fireside with Verisk. So in my, I don't know, 10-plus years of covering the company. So thanks for coming out all the way to Scottsdale.

Look, why don't we just get started? I usually like to start these things at a very big picture for the audience, which is very diverse. So at your Investor Day a couple of years ago, you laid out your medium-term financial model, which calls for 6% to 8% organic growth on the top line. Since this is your first time at this conference, can you lay out the different building blocks on how you get there from here?

Yes. Thanks a bunch for the question, Alex. Thanks for having us. I can't believe we haven't done a chat before, but it's great to be here, and we're enjoying the conference here. Yes, so thank you for following us. I know some of you may have been around for a while. Some are new to the story. We talked -- we have a very consistent 6% to 8% organic constant currency revenue growth, and we gave some of the building blocks at that. But I also want to point to the consistency of that 6% to 8% organic constant currency growth. We went public in 2009. And every year since then, we have been in that range or slightly above. The only years where we were outside of that 6% to 8% organic constant currency growth were in 2009 in the depths of the financial crisis and in 2020 in the COVID year. In both of those years, we had 5 and change percent organic constant currency growth, which we think is a pretty strong mark of the stability in those moments of global crisis. But yes, how do we get there, kind of the building blocks that we laid out sort of through the cycle and on average, you can say it's about 3 to 4 percentage points from pricing, so about half of that growth from pricing, kind of 1.5 to 2 percentage points of growth from cross-sell and upsell, another 1.5% to 2% from new products. And then we'd say plus 50 to 150 basis points from new customers offset by, on average, 50 to 150 basis point headwind from attrition that can happen over time in the insurance industry, driven mostly by either industry M&A or liquidations in the insurance industry.

Great start. And then for again, people who are newer to the story, when I first covered Verisk again, 10-plus years ago, the company was still trying to be in various industry verticals. A few years ago, the decision was made to focus entirely on the insurance industry. And since then, you really tried to become, I would call it, more of an important partner to your clients. There's been more engagement on the C-suite level even. So maybe you can talk about the benefits you've seen, and this is kind of the time you came on board as well. So how that increased focus has really translated into better performance?

Yes. And let me take you through just a bit of the history of it. Verisk was founded or it starts came in the '70s as a consortium of U.S. property and casualty insurance players. So we started out actually owned by the U.S. P&C industry, separated out from the industry in the 1990s and have kind of grown ever since as a partner to the insurance industry. Somewhere along that history, we also -- we decided that with our -- so the thesis was with our strength in data and analytics, and what was at the time, a question of, is the insurance industry really going to be a mid-single-digit growth kind of end market? So should we enter with our data and analytics into other end market verticals? So that was the path at the time, I would say, kind of in the 20 teens that there were acquisitions made in other end market verticals. Since then, we have kind of divested those businesses. I think the synergies -- the supposed synergies between those end market verticals was maybe less than anticipated. And there was some variability in those other end markets. So we returned to focus on our core in the insurance industry. What -- with that refocus on the core, Alex, I'll get to your question on customer focus. But before I do that, I want to bring back as I -- as we were refocusing on the insurance industry core, there was, as we thought about it, we -- in revisiting that assumption of the insurance industry is going to be only a mid-single-digit end market growth because while the industry itself may on average, be growing that, which, by the way, is not terrible. But the technology spend within the industry and the need for digitization and modernization in the insurance industry, that's really the end market that we're playing into, and that is growing faster than the industry overall. So that's kind of the end market that we're tying to. What are the benefits then that we've had from focusing purely on that business, and that's one where we have a great set of products that have kind of deep embeddedness with our customer set. With today's technology, the innovation cycle in those products is accelerating significantly. And kind of Lee's major focus as he came in as CEO in 2022 when I joined was to really engage with the industry, engage at the C-suite level of our clients. That was an approach that, for whatever reason, historically, we hadn't done as much of. Maybe it goes back to our roots in coming from the industry, but we were more of a product-focused engagement level. And so our sales motion, if you like, was often at the user level, at the product focus by elevating the dialogue to the C-suite, number one, we found significant receptivity to that. Customers are interested in what we have to say, what we see in trends across the industry. And that has opened up real doors for us, real ideas on the product innovation cycle to understand where the industry is going, where they are looking to us to support their growth and kind of what are the data and analytics solutions that they really need to drive growth in this modernization cycle.

So maybe as a follow-up then, some investors are certainly hoping that this increased focus and dialogue could actually lead to a faster growth algorithm over time. And to be fair, like over the last couple of years, there have been quarters where you've grown significantly above that 6% to 8%, again, on a quarterly basis. So maybe to bring it back then, where do you see some of those biggest opportunities to actually increase share of wallet with your clients to maybe get to that acceleration, if I'm not dreaming too much.

Yes. So it is an exciting time in the industry. With our engagement with our clients, we sort of see the need that they have to develop more digitization and more usage of our industry standard tools. One way to think about it is we give a very cost-efficient way for the industry to develop a set of tools off of which they can operate and they can then modify and customize or use the tools as they wish in terms of their own internal strategies and development priorities. When I say a cost-effective way, one of the ways we've measured it is that our revenues are relevant insurance industry revenues are about 30 basis points of the total U.S. P&C insurance premiums. So it's a pretty cost-effective way to deliver industry standard tools on that as their capacity to use those tools and build AI into their workflows, as their own technology gets more digitized, they have more of an appetite for analytics, benchmarking and other data. So that's the opportunity for us to continue to grow into that spend.

I'll stay tuned for maybe more specifics on the numbers in the future. Hopefully. There's an Investor Day coming up early next year.

March.

Exactly. Now speaking a little bit more near term, I need to talk about the near-term numbers. Of course -- now you flagged on the last earnings call that growth in the business was going to be soft in the 4Q, tougher comps, in particular, on lower weather-related activities, et cetera. Now we're sitting here with less than a month left to go in the year. So given that this is a public forum, any more detail or real-time insights you can give us as we're sitting here right now?

Yes. No specific sort of interim updates on the fourth quarter, if that's what you're looking for. But just to say the trends that we observed and talked about, I guess, on the third quarter earnings call at the end of October, those are consistent with what we're seeing today. In a year -- in the second half of 2025 has had lighter weather incidents than in prior years. That's probably a good thing for people overall, and it's certainly a good thing for the insurance industry and our customers. It creates a little bit less volume on the claims processing side. So we called that out at the end of the third quarter. And I think it's fair to say that persists into the fourth quarter and we will have a carryover effect then into early next year.

Fair enough. Speaking about next year, again, I understand you haven't reported full year 2025, that's in February, then you have your Investor Day. But if I'm thinking out loud here at the performance recently, and I just obviously talked about softer 4Q, but your subscription growth in 2025 has actually been way above your -- or it's been nicely above the overall growth of the business. The softness has really been on the transactional side. And again, that's more because of weather-related things that we just talked about. So -- and then finally, to look at my notes here, you actually said also that you've had your best sales year, I think, ever so far this year. So if I put all these things together, and again, I talk about loud into 2026 a little bit, like you actually are setting up for a pretty robust year. So where could I be wrong in that when I put all these things together?

Yes. Look, I think we're excited that the fundamental health of our business is strong. The health of the end market is good. I think we said on the last call, we have confidence and excitement in continuing to deliver continued -- consistent with our revenue growth targets in 2026 and beyond, I think, was the way we put it. So that all makes sense. And the only thing to think through about the year, 2025, while it's a softer for transactional reasons, in particular, in the second half of the year, we actually -- it came out pretty strong in the first half of the year. So as you think about kind of the exit run rate of the year and the year-over-year comps into 2026, it may be a more -- maybe a softer start as you think about that comparability. But absolutely, we think the growth profile is consistent.

Excellent. Somewhat related to the prior question, though. Can you talk about the end markets, and we've touched upon them a little bit already. But can you talk about the end markets a little bit more and also how they impact your business? I think there are really a few things or 3 things that investors are generally focused on. So one, it's net premium growth, which is a major input into some of the pricing structures you have on a 2-year lag, we can get into that. There's also the overall profitability of the insurance industry. So maybe talk about what you're seeing there. And then you had said it at the beginning, the level of end market M&A that sometimes can work against you. So can you talk about what you're seeing out there and how you think that could impact your business over the next couple of years?

Yes, happy to. So first question was on the premium growth, net written premium growth, which is a driver for us in some of our contracts. Look, we're coming off a couple of year cycle where that was almost abnormally elevated. Carriers were looking to raise premium in order to make up for challenging profitability across their books. So there was elevated premium growth for a while. That is probably normalizing to more of a typical historical run rate. Very rough numbers, if it was high single digits there for a while, we're getting more to a mid-single-digit zone. It's important to keep in mind that, that does and will always kind of vary line by line. So personal lines versus commercial lines, auto trends, property trends, casualty trends will be slightly different. There will be different growth characteristics in each of those, and we serve the entire industry there. So premium growth normalizing versus very, very high levels of growth. Profitability returning to health. Again, that premium growth was driven by a concern of unprofitable business. So it's worth noting that while premium growth may be normalizing to more of a standard level versus where it was before, the driver of that premium growth is that carriers are getting more comfortable with the profitability in their book and interested in being more aggressive in growing and driving business. So in a funny way, while it may look like growth is coming down from where it was, that's actually a sign of the interest in the industry in investing more in growth and competing, therefore, for more customers and more policies. So in a way, it's a sign also of the health of the industry and the profitability that they have is kind of the outcome of that. And your third, there was a...

M&A -- and multiple questions here.

M&A, yes, industry consolidation. So yes, so one of -- over the last couple of years, I would say, industry M&A was relatively muted. We may be seeing some signs that, that's picking back up on the carrier side. And so we've seen a couple of deals get announced, and we may see that. That can, over time, be a bit of a modest headwind for us just as the leverage changes with kind of more larger customers. But we're confident that even after a merger, we have data that suggests that we continue to grow with the post-merged company. The final point I want to make on the health of the industry is -- I forgot the final point that I want to make...

The industry seems good.

Yes, the industry... And focus -- and therefore -- so as they have that profitability, I think we've talked about the insurance industry's focus on modernization. So I think as they have a bit more profitability and a bit more room to invest, they're thinking about where they can invest on their own and to improve the usability of their data and where they can better use data and analytics, including from us to continue to drive that growth.

Hopefully, from you.

Yes.

Okay. Great. And then this kind of ties into the same thing a little bit, but people always like to talk about pricing, and you mentioned it as a building block in the algorithm earlier. So can you talk about how that has evolved maybe more recently? There was a big key initiative over the last couple of years, which you call it core lines reimagine. If you want to go into that more, and that seems to have really helped on the pricing side. So the question really is, is there more to go on that? And are there any other initiatives that we should be looking forward to where maybe you have a little bit more value add that you're bringing to your clients that obviously then flow through pricing as well?

Yes. So on the pricing side, look, you referenced the fact that we have some contracts that have an input from the premium growth of that customer. So that's one of the drivers of our growth, and that's been a good supporter over the last couple of years. But I want to make sure I emphasize, it doesn't -- you can sit back and rely on premium growth. That's not, at the end of the day, going to drive the needle unless your customers feel that your products are bringing value to them and that they want the new stuff that you're introducing, that's when they'll pay for it. And if you're not bringing new and exciting things to the table, it doesn't matter what price you ask them for, they're not going to be very excited about it. So it's really the product innovation cycle that's going to drive it. We talked about Core Lines Reimagine you referenced. So that is in the single biggest part of our business, the forms rules and loss cost business, which is built on contributory data from the industry and from a revenue model, this business is the one that goes back to the foundation of Verisk as a consortium of the industry. The reimagine project over the last 5 years-ish, was the reimagining of what should that product set look like today in the mid-2020s as opposed to how it developed and evolved and was, frankly, a little bit lacking on the interface standpoint and on the usability and interoperability standpoint. So Core Lines Reimagine has been kind of an umbrella term for over 20 different investment projects, everything from the underlying data architecture, which we had previously moved that contributory data set to be housed in the cloud. We've moved it on to modern database architecture and built kind of the core.verisk.com platform as one place to access the data. And then we've been focusing on better -- more currency, more -- in other words, more frequently updated data sets, more ease of contribution to the customers and then presenting back to them more insights, not just data, but kind of insights and results from that data and a much more modern usability of those data sets, meaning instead of -- so if the policy forms are updated with legislative changes in multiple different states, how can they access and interact with that data. It used to be that they would have to flip through forms to identify where things have changed. That has been modernized into much more interlinked clickable, here's a map, what were the legislative changes in this state and how does that flow through to all my policies to now today, if they are authorized to do so and if they want to, they can interact with that form language on a natural language basis using Gen AI.

Exciting. So one quick one on -- a quick one on competition. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. A lot of people don't think about you facing all that much competition. But over the last couple of quarters, you talked about seeing increased competition in particular or specifically in auto, which is weighing a little bit of the growth. Auto is a very small subsegment of your business. But maybe you can talk about maybe what you're seeing in particular and more importantly, what you're doing about it and how long that headwind may last? And then since we're talking about competition, maybe you can talk about quickly a little bit more broadly, again, your legacy business, you seem to have a very, very strong moat, but you've expanded your offerings over the years. So maybe you're now running into more players out there. So maybe just bring it back to that and how you feel about the competitive environment.

Yes. Thanks. Yes. Look, it's -- everyone should be on their toes at all times, and we're aware of that and kind of focused on what others are doing and what we can do. And there's no question that today's technology makes it easier to do things than it was. And so we're well aware of that. It's making it easier for us to do things as well and participating in that competition. On the auto side, there's a large incumbent in the space. We've always said they were the incumbent and we were the challenger. So we've taken some significant wins, and it will be a give and take over time as we build that business. We're thinking about what are the ways that we can be differentiated in what we have to bring to the table. In other places, we -- there are places that we compete on the property data side. There's places that we compete on the catastrophe and risk models in our Extreme Event Solutions business. So there are definitely competitors out there. I think what's unique about Verisk is these competitors compete with different parts of our business. And -- but kind of the universe of things that we have, the universe of data sets that we have can make us unique. For example, in property data, if you look across the Verisk portfolio on property data, we have kind of the forms, rules and loss costs underlying property data. We have -- in our underwriting data and analytics solutions, we have solutions based on personal property and underwriting tools for that data and analytics around roof age and roof analytics and valuation materials for carriers. We carry that through on the claims side to the property estimating solutions part of our business and anti-fraud as well. So kind of if you think about the theme of property, which is a significant kind of value in the overall industry, we have a unique data set that no one else kind of has that full scope of. The last part of your question kind of on competition. I want to address because some people have said, well, gosh, isn't it -- particularly in an AI world, is there more competition from InsurTech? And can you come up with a great idea and vibe code it in 3 days with -- in a garage. Yes, you can. So that's true, but there's a couple of different things on that. So that competitive environment has always been there. There have always been InsurTechs coming to the market with new solutions, and we think that's great. More solutions for the industry is better. The challenge -- so first of all, the challenge is not kind of the idea or developing the idea. The challenge is refining it into something that is useful for the industry and then getting the focus and attention of the industry to help you refine that because we don't think that can be done in a garage without real industry-focused subject matter expertise. And then how do you bring that into the industry to drive adoption at scale. And we know more than anyone else that the sales cycle with these large carriers is significant. They need trusted partners. They care about data contribution. They care about data usage rights. They care about auditability. They are themselves regulated entities. So we think that, yes, there is a robust environment of innovation. We think that we're an important -- we have an important role to play in that and that many of our carriers are looking to us. We have an open ecosystem kind of philosophy. So we think we can do a lot for the industry to help enable via partnership, what we think are the best solutions.

Since you just mentioned AI and you'll find yourself at a tech and AI conference, we need to dig a little bit deeper. I think over the last couple of years, you started flagging investing more into capabilities and integrating Gen AI into your products. So can you talk about where we are with that? What are the biggest offerings? Where are you seeing traction? How has it helped pricing to come back to that? And really, what's the road map from here?

Yes. Thanks a bunch. We've been working with AI really since it came out and doing kind of experimentation on the product side. I would say kind of -- each of our businesses has their own AI road map and is building it into the products in different ways, everything from document summarization capabilities on the workers' comp processing side to photo identification and tagging in our XactAI product, which is on the property estimating solutions side to -- I think I already talked about kind of the natural language interaction with our forms and our premium audit services into kind of our -- in our Extreme Event Solutions business using AI to help build the models in a more physics-based view of risk rather than just the stochastic modeling. So we're really using it and investing in it kind of across our products. There is a range of appetite and interest across the industry. But I think we're now getting to a point where the industry is very much interested in and building the ways to adopt AI. They're building their AI governance boards and kind of getting ready to accept the products. So there's a lot of dialogue with our clients. They will be doing things on their own as well. And so it's not an either/or of like are they going to do it in-house? Are they going to do it with you? It's both and both. And so as our -- the ease of use of our content becomes more and more accessible, we see more and more opportunity for people to do things with it.

Now I wanted to -- and I'm still going to ask about the other side of that coin, but you mentioned it already a couple of questions ago, but like I think there has been concerns by investors for the whole sector of how AI could actually disrupt and enable start-ups. And some people, like you said before, believe clients can actually maybe do them more themselves, not rely on your services and data as much anymore. So maybe just -- again, you've talked about a little bit, but can you react a little bit more of how to understand how much proprietary your data is, how integrated it is? And yes, if there are actually pieces where you do see some actual risk because maybe it is not as proprietary or must-have or differentiated.

No, look, most of the data across our portfolio, we would call either contributory from the industry or proprietary and built on unique or nonpublic content. So we think that's the majority of our stuff. Maybe we can give -- we'll dig into that more over time, I think. But significant amounts of barriers on the proprietary and contributory data side. And from our perspective, obviously, models are only as good as the data that they're trained on. So that contributory and proprietary data set is the first sort of obstacle to disintermediation. It's not the only obstacle to disintermediation. So we think it's worth emphasizing even, say, for the contributory data that we get from the industry that's not publicly available elsewhere. It's also not easily turned into like what we do with it is not an easy thing to do. It comes to us in all types of technological status. Yes, there are customers that are kind of fully integrated via API. There's other customers, believe it or not, that are still mailing us CDs of data that still happens. So there's a wide range of technological infrastructure. And even as you get beyond that, the actual -- when you think about the complexity of what large national or in some cases, multinational insurance carriers are structured, they each have their own data formats. They each have their own policy structures in a policy program. And so what we do with the contributory data is even if somebody else could get it, they'd end up with a basket of apples and oranges and pairs and the mapping exercise is not at all easy. So where I'm going with that is it's not just the proprietary data. There's quite a bit of subject matter expertise off of what you do with that data. And then yet another barrier, again, is, if you like, the distribution or the relationship that we have with the industry, with the carriers, with the regulators and the position of trust that we have in working with their data today. And so we think we can continue to build on that trust to help them develop the solutions at scale that will be beneficial to the industry.

Okay. Well, I think is actually a good place to stop. I would have liked to get into some more of the financials, but I think everybody got a good picture, at least on the top line and the positioning. So thank you very much for coming and helping us learn more about Verisk.

Thank you so much for the attention. Really appreciate it. Thanks.