Done. Fantastic. All right. Hold on. Bear with me one moment. Good afternoon. Welcome to Citi's TMT Conference. My name is Pete Christiansen, covering tech services for Citi Equity Research. For this session, I am joined by Joelle Smith, President of First Advantage Corporation, along with Steven Marks, CFO. Welcome back, Steven. Great to have you, Joelle. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. This is what I think one of the better performing stocks in, at least in our group, in the last few weeks, certainly Q2 results. I do want to backtrack a little bit here. I think since we last spoke, Sterling synergies are nearly fully actioned at this point. Leverage is down to 3.7. Base growth positive again. FA joined the S&P SmallCap 600. What's the single biggest change in the business that investors might be underappreciating, you think? Well, it's hard to pick one. Those are all probably pretty good events that have all happened over the last 12 months or so. I think the consistency of the business results is probably number one, right? I think you came out of the last number of years, and there's been wild swings in what's either perceived or actually happening in the macro. Obviously, we have an acquisition and leverage moved around, and then a lot of other just noise in the system, whether that be from the markets themselves, whether that be big IPOs, big other events going on, AI, the storylines that came out earlier this year. I think the consistency of the First Advantage results, certainly over the last three or four quarters, where, to your point, base growth at the end of last year was effectively flat. Now it's turned positive. Our upsell, cross-sell, and new logos, our go-to-market momentum really powering growth. 17% new logo upsell, cross-sell last year in Q4. Double digits consistently in Q1 and Q2 this year. Very consistent for a number of years. Our retention level is at 96% plus. The fact that we have been able to perform that consistency through the noise, and then you have all of those other compounding effects of getting the synergy values flowing through our EBITDA and profitability. Getting cash flow now rebalanced after the acquisition and getting leverage marched down. I think that just that consistency of the results through the noise, and then you are starting to see, I think, the markets reflect a little bit of that. Obviously, the S&P inclusion back in June was a nice little milestone event to cap that off. I just think that overall consistency, despite everything that everyone is sensing and hearing and on the reliability of BLS data and all this other noise. Our ability to perform very consistently and positively through all that has been the number one driving factor. Let us dig a little bit deeper into 2Q results. Roughly half of the 7% ish base growth that came from episodic rescreening, reshaping initiatives that you expect to normalize somewhat, I guess, in Q4. Excluding that, what underlies some of the confidence that you have that you have a structurally healthier base versus what you had in 2025? Yeah. I think, look, we have been talking about this for a number of quarters, and over the last couple of years, there has always been a couple really good verticals in our set, and there has been a couple laggards, and that has balanced out to this slightly negative number that we have had the last number of years. I think a couple of big changes has been the good guys have gotten stronger, and the laggards have started to just stabilize down. When you have got really good demand, and we were talking about this earlier upstairs, from your blue-collar verticals, like for us, that would be retail, transportation, which is a lot of home delivery and logistics. Our industrials vertical has been doing phenomenally well. Joelle reminded me how great our staffing was doing earlier today as well. When you have your core base doing really well, and there is fewer laggards. International has been growing for eight quarters in a row. You get to what compounds to really good. If you break down our numbers, that 7% number that we posted on base growth in Q2, roughly 50% is related to those kind of customer-specific initiatives. That also means that you got roughly 3.5% growth coming from core base, which is a great number in long-term scheme. That is above your two-three, which you have talked about. Correct. That is like when you get all those verticals stabilizing and growing all at the same time, and you get some good runway out of that. I think it is being a diversified vertical base, having diversified geographies. We talked about upstairs, an enterprise customer focus on these large enterprises that have much more stability. SMB wavers a lot more quarter- to- quarter and month- to- month. These large enterprises have much more strategic long-term mindset. Add up both of those kind of concepts, and you get to good, diversified, stable growth. To your point, those customer initiatives, hard to underwrite them being long term. Certainly, we don't know if base will be full 3% for the rest of the year, but we certainly feel better about where base is today than we did six months ago when we put out our original guidance for the year. That's the benefits of the Sterling acquisition coming to life. Well, look, we've seen that diversification play out in our hands over the last year or two. There were quarters where retail and transportation were down right after we were talking about the tariff noise last year. That would've been, not a death sentence, but that would've been really bad news for just the traditional First Advantage vertical set. Likewise, we've been talking about some sluggishness in healthcare. That would've been a big struggle for Sterling. We're much more balanced and consistent now, and that's why you're seeing that less quarter-to-quarter volatility and a more stable glide path. A little bit more on the growth algorithm here. So the 12%-13% combined upsell, cross-sell, new logo contribution leaned heavily on in 2025 go lives that fully annualized by Q4. How deep is your late-stage pipeline once, I guess, that vintage starts rolling off? Yeah, absolutely. We are feeling really good about pipeline in general. It is actually the largest it has really ever been. The nice part about the pipeline is it is across all the verticals, so it is not being carried by one or another. The products that we currently have are resonating across all verticals and all regions. When you look at the go forward plan, we feel really good about where we are with implementations, late stage, and annual contract value, which is continuing to improve across the base because we just have more products to sell and more interest in those products because our customers are very focused on risk right now. That is kind of the number one priority. Let us do a deep dive on Digital Identity in a second. I guess overall package density is your top upsell driver here, global expansion number two. As those mature, what is the next leg of growth? Is it new screening types, monitoring, post onboard- Yeah post hire, or something else? Yeah. Well, package density has been, and we do not see any reason why it will not continue to be our biggest growth driver. Customers are always trying to figure out better ways to manage their risk. When you look at that package density, we are going deeper and broader, across regions. Whether we like it or not, the world is not getting nicer. As long as risk continues to be this top priority, which it is for all of our customers. We actually just put out our Global Trends Report, and for the second year in a row, the top buying signal is risk. Then 89% of the 5,000 people that were interviewed say that they plan on increasing package density over the next two years. This is not something that is going away. You take that complemented by the global expansion, which you just talked about, which we absolutely are seeing a big driver in. That is U.S. based organizations that have expansion into other regions globally, and also organizations that are headquartered in countries outside of the U.S. that are expanding into the U.S. They all want to centralize, they want everything consistent, they want a standard risk profile. When you have a package suite as dense as ours, it just makes it really easy for them to come for a one-stop shop. The only other thing I would add, too, is every time we win a new logo, we create more white space for upsell, cross-sell, because generally speaking, we win a new customer, and they start off with a smaller set of our suite of services. That creates a path for our customer success and sales teams to be able to grow into those accounts and sell more of cross-sell into other products, expand geographically with global expansion. So it is kind of a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more success we have with new logo, it creates more opportunity for upsell, cross-sell. It is perfect land and expand. It is. Yeah. There's a big room right there. Exactly. Fantastic. Back on risk, Joelle. Digital Identity is now a C-suite and a board level conversation. How do you think about converting that access into greater wallet share? What might be perhaps like a standalone metric that you can perhaps at some point later talk about that specific area? Yeah. Digital Identity is the hottest topic with all of our current customers as well as prospects. The way we position it's really kind of the tip of the spear when you think about it from an opportunity and go-to-market perspective. We now include it as part of any and every background check. It's not a, "Do you want this," it's more, "This comes with" because it really is necessary. In order to conduct a thorough background check, you really do need to validate that the person is who they say they are. They don't have a deepfake. They don't have a synthetic identity. It really does come a complement to what we're overall selling. When we package that up, it's included kind of in that package density number, and we really are seeing that customers really aren't differentiating between the two. It really is just kind of one package, and really just an add-on to what they're already buying. That's a great go-to-market point right there. I think if we were to think about your competitive tech set there on the identity side, and I think First Advantage has cited a $10 billion incremental TAM in this category of Digital Identity and fraud. Is the competitive set or the knowhow, is that specific to First Advantage IP? Is that something special, I guess, about your offering maybe versus some of the other competitors? Or is it just a function of the scale that First Advantage has, or maybe both? Sure. Yeah, both. Scale certainly doesn't hurt, right? That really helps with the knowhow, the benchmarking, education, all of that. That was kind of the early stage. This is something we've had out in the market for multiple years. But recent, within the last 18, 24 months, headlines have really become a friend in the marketing, not that we planned it that way. But obviously not hiring a North Korean bad actor and some other things have really hit the market and have helped us with that go-to-market conversation. But when it comes to the TAM itself, we really do see them kind of merging. When you think about the differentiation that we have, we have all the data. We have over 1 billion proprietary records of data. We understand the whole work life cycle of millions of people. When you take the tech, which we have a great partner network of technology, not all tech is created equal, some are better in some regions, some are better in certain industries. When you couple the technology, which is more of the biometric data, so that is the facial recognition, that is the driver's license or passport information, and then you couple that with the biographic data which we have, which is all of the underpinning data on that individual, and you couple that together, that is what makes our product so valuable, because it is really difficult to fake both of those things. When you have a platform like ours that can connect the dots across the life cycle so you can connect, is that person who is interviewing for that job the same person that you are now running the background check on? Is the same person that starts on day one where you have to run an I-9 or a right to work check? You need to be able to validate at every stage of the cycle, and that is really where our differentiation comes into play. We are the only platform that connects those dots, including that biometric and biographic data. Steven, a lot of info services providers talk about value-added pricing all the time. Adding more features, functionality to drive pricing. A lot of it is nice to have. This seems like a must-have. Yep. It seems to me like there is a lot of runway here for pricing at some point, or is it right now about land and expand a little bit? Well, it is always about both. Look, we feel good about the margins that Digital Identity has as a standalone product. When you, to Joelle's point, when you include it in a package, it just makes that package better. We certainly do not give it away, and we feel good about our pricing model. Obviously, we feel good about the margins it creates. You do not have to go buy third party data like a criminal check or a verification. It is margin accretive overall to the business. Overall, not only is it driving, to Joelle's point, great go to market competitive differentiation and growth, it is going to ultimately provide some margin accretion as it becomes a bigger mix of the business. I do want to talk a little bit about AI in-house. You recently moved customer care chat all in-house rather than using a third party model. What drove that decision, and where else? Maybe fulfillment, Smart Hub routing, sales enablement. Do you see the best near term ROI from proprietary AI? Yeah. We are very excited about that. This has been an area of focus for us for years now. Click. Chat. Call., as you mentioned, we rolled out a number of years ago, and really that was moving people from more of a phone base and email base to a chat. We rolled that out a few years ago, and then last year we did it because Sterling Check Corp. actually did not have that, so the entire Sterling Check Corp. customer base also got chat. That was another level up for us. Then recently, as you pointed out, using a third party AI tool, an intelligence tool, when you bring that in-house, one, obviously you can control the experience much better. But two, you can use your own internal data and knowledge base to create a much better experience for those folks calling in. That has allowed us to not only save money, as Steven always really likes to do, but it really improves that experience. We are getting higher satisfaction rates. We are deflecting more, because we are able to use our own knowledge repository. We have been doing this for decades, so we know a lot about what our customers and candidates need. It just improves that conversion time, for them to get the answer they need really quickly. Well, I think, Joelle, too, that besides it saving money, I think to your point, it is not just customer care, it is starting to expand into other places in the fulfillment functions, in the cost of sales part of the P&L, obviously in product and tech and how we build our product and using it there and even down through SG&A, of finding ways to get more yield, get more efficiency, get more scalability. Look, we are open-minded when it comes to vendor selections. We will use things internally where it makes sense. We will go to third parties where the tech is just better and more turnkey, and they have not gotten to overly aggressive pricing models, too. When they turn those ways, luckily we have the tech expertise in-house to build some of our own things. We are kind of, I would say a hybrid model of using the best athlete, if you will, the same approach we took for the synergies in terms of where we are using AI and whose tooling we are using for the AI, but it is throughout the P&L. Seems like you are very methodical about this, taking your time. You do have some implementations that are extending into 2027. Walk me through some of that decisioning and I guess that discipline as you think about enabling more and more AI functionality throughout the firm. Well, I think almost two different issues. One is how we are going to use AI and making sure it is methodical to an extent, especially on the fulfillment front because of the FCRA and the compliance overhang in our industry of making sure we do it right. Making sure that we do not overstep, because there are some regulatory and compliance limitations of when the automation has to stop, when a human and a decision maker has to pick it up, because in some states, the law prohibits AI in the hiring process, and we become brought into that. The FCRA in and of itself has rules and regulations that do not prohibit, but certainly limit the application of automation technologies through its workflow. So it obviously creates some insulation into the industry, and we actually like that. That was obviously helpful back in February and March when that was the storyline. We are working to make sure that we can automate what is reasonable to be automated. Then on the other side, to your point, and like Joelle was mentioning, we have got a great pipeline. The deals have just gotten a little bit more complicated. We are selling bigger deals with more features, and it is separate from the AI concept, but it is taking just a little longer to implement those. Plus, in certain verticals, they have this coding freeze and hiring freeze and change freeze in the back half of the year. A lot of those wins this year, we will start to see trickle into Q4, but we are more excited about that growth opportunity and into early next year. Look, we have raised guidance and feel good about growth rate, so we do not think Q4 will be a slouch. Obviously, we got some really big comps in Q4 that it will compare against when we grew, to my earlier point, 17% new logo upsell, cross-sell. Had a monster Q4 last year that we are benchmarking against. Overall, business health is really good and setting us up, gets rid of some good early year success next year. We have heard from other info services providers, by the way, just to add in, who are selling AI-enabled kind of solutions. The sales process, the implementation process is taking longer. This is all new to everybody. Yep. Legal departments are taking deep- Exactly hard looks into these things. It is still, it's great to see though. Yes, it is stretching the implementation or the sales cycle a bit longer, but you still feel confident about closing some of these new enablements. Yeah, I think, look, we've talked about in last earnings call, 20 enterprise new logo upsell, cross-sell bookings. That's up from 17, that we've been running the last few quarters. The market demand is there, and the team is doing a really good job of selling it. Now there's some hard work of getting the attention from the customers to get the plumbing laid so we can start generating the revenue. But that revenue will come, and we feel good about how it sets us up for the first part of next year. Again, a nice difference between nice to have and must have. Yeah. Yeah. Joelle, I do want to ask you a hot button question here. Oh, boy. Scott talked about the AI impact on hiring as highly overblown. Yep. I think everybody in this room will be interested to hear your perspective here. Are you seeing any early signs of AI compressing white collar hiring in specific verticals? Yeah, there definitely was overblown, for sure. There's even been a number of articles out there saying that it was AI washing a lot of that. When you talk to our customers, that's our best indicator is our customers. We talk to our customers all the time. We do thousands of connects monthly, quarterly, whatever, and we're talking to the senior execs there. The short answer is it's still a very neutral to positive tone. We don't hear a lot of restrictions on hiring, changes in philosophy. Are they all using it? Absolutely. Are they experimenting? Yes. Are they rolling it out like we have? Yes. As far as constriction, we haven't seen that. We are seeing an uptick with some of the blue collar hiring, though. That's been our bread and butter for a really long time. The hourly worker, the more wage worker roles has always been a high turnover, high movement industry, and that churn in the market is always very good for our business. We're also seeing a big trend with job stacking. That is changing pretty dramatically, and this is an intentional thing where people are working multiple jobs. They may be doing a 9:00 - 5:00 job Monday through Friday, but then in the evenings or the weekends, they're doing some type of gig work or something else. When that happens, they need to get screened on the platform for the gig worker. They need to get screened for their day job. All of these trends are working really well for our business. I think some of it is intentional with these workers because they aren't making as much money as they need to. There are increasing gas prices and consumer inflation and things like that, right? I'm not sure that this is something that we're going to see go away anytime soon. But the general sentiment across our enterprise customer base is business as usual. They have to run their business. They're not going to get caught up in week-to-week headlines. They're going to run their business they've been running for decades. It's also ironic because when those headlines are coming around, we service a lot of those customers, and you'd read the headline, and then you go look at the revenue volumes and you're going, "Well, they're up. Right. We've always told people, "Don't read the headline, read the second and third paragraphs because it's they're cutting X number of jobs," and then, oh, to fund investment in all these other areas. To Joelle's point, that creates this bigger churn in that industry. For us, that's a good customer that year because they're getting rid of some jobs, replacing them with other jobs. That's all new screening population that wouldn't have been there before, which is great for base. For the benefit of our audience solely, maybe myself included, what about specifically in financial services? Yeah, financial services has been an interesting trend with what we are seeing is consolidation. There is global consolidation kind of across the board where we have seen large global banks and some others that have had individual vendors across regions or individual vendors for a specific product. Like one person would use a company for an I-9, they would use one for an interview tool, one for a background screen, and then one maybe for monitoring kind of longer term. We are seeing all that consolidate right now, and that trend is obviously helping us. We have a great product suite where we can sell all of that in under one umbrella. But we are seeing a little bit of flat to slightly positive with financial services in particular this quarter. But that ebbs and flows, and financial services is always kind of that tip of the spear. When we saw a lot of the identity stuff start popping, it was all the banks and all the financial services started making all the phone calls to us. I think as we see things normalize, we will see you guys kind of have that tip of the spear. Okay. I am going to ask you that question every quarter going forward. Okay. Well, good. Okay. I do want to dig more into some other interesting verticals and dynamics going on. Healthcare showed only a minimal decline this quarter, despite some uncertainty there in that vertical. How do you see that trending in 2027? On the other end of that, you have aerospace and defense obviously benefiting from some tailwinds there. If you could just kind of juxtapose what you are seeing, maybe in those two verticals, what you are hearing from clients. Sure. Yeah. Steven talked about it, but the fact that we have this wide diversification of our vertical mix is so great right now. Our verticals now are large enough where we actually have sub-verticals that are kind of starting to really show. I will take healthcare first. We have definitely seen trends in healthcare where, yes, it is slightly positive this past quarter here. But if you look at the sub-verticals we have in there, we have acute care, post-acute care, pharma, and then we also have healthcare staffing. The Medicare and Medicaid challenges that a lot of these hospital systems have started to see over the last several quarters is manifesting in lower hiring volumes. Where we have seen the volumes pick up is on the healthcare staffing side. So where you would see more short-term nursing care, shorter-term positions being hired because they need staff. You need doctors and nurses in these hospitals. The healthcare system is stressed right now because you have more people that need care than people that can give the care. So when you look at that vertical, you are seeing we may lose a little bit in the actual hospital acute care side, but we pick it up on the deep entrance we have with healthcare staffing. That is kind of where we feel good about that, but we do watch it. I think once Medicare and Medicaid come back a little bit, if it comes back, I am not a crystal ball, I certainly do not know what is going to happen in government policy, but one would think we would need to get the hospital systems back up and running in a high-efficiency way. We will probably see that normalize out, too. Very similar with industrials. It's been a high growth area for us. Our pipeline's really strong there, too. We're excited about it. When you saw some of the government funding get reduced and pulled back from education, which is kind of a sub-vertical inside of that group because it's industrials and GovEd, we saw it pick up in aerospace and defense. That's where a lot of the investment and funding went. You've got the defense contractors, and you've got a lot of that. It's really interesting to see the dynamics of where a policy changes in Washington, and then you see the hiring dynamics kind of change. Because we have such a deep vertical depth and breadth across, we can see it pop and normalize in the other. We're managing through those ebbs and flows, and that's one of the greatest things I think we got out of the Sterling acquisition, is just being able to have that broad base vertical depth. Plus 3% base growth. And- Not only that. Yeah. Absolutely. Steven, I want to talk about operating leverage here a little bit. Digital Identity monitoring reportedly carry better unit economics than legacy screening. How much of your path to 31%, 32% adjusted EBITDA margins by 2028 depends on product mix versus synergy capture and automation, do you believe? Yeah. How we get to that number is kind of a few different facets. Certainly synergy capture, right? We have actioned a healthy portion of the synergies. There is still a little bit more to go that we will get to through the rest of this year and into Q4, which obviously means you will get that rollover benefit into your P&L in 2027. That is certainly a function of it. Being able to scale our revenue growth is obviously a big piece of it, and I think you have seen that the last couple of quarters, especially with more broad-based growth. In Q4, certainly a lot of the growth came from transportation networks, where just the mix of services, you have to go buy more third-party data for the driver records and some of these other areas, relative to the service fee revenue. That mix has stabilized out, and you saw our EBITDA margins in Q2 be well ahead of our expectations. Just being able to get that broad-based growth and scaled growth, as we continue to scale our revenue growth, the rest of our P&L is very fixed. We have automated a lot of those things to create scalability and cost of sales. Product and tech is already highly scalable. SG&A, also highly scalable. We can get a lot of leverage just out of the P&L and flow through. Product mix is a little bit of it, but I think it is more just getting back to broad-based growth that helps you even that out. There are still a few other things. If you go back into First Advantage corporate DNA, there are some savings opportunities we have that are unrelated to the synergies. Just things we need to do as a business, whether it is leverage some AI, continuation of our journey of RPA and machine learning, and just making sure we automate what we can. We still have a few other cost savings areas to go and take care of and address, unrelated to the acquisition. It is just kind of that P&L debt, if you will, that is kind of been sitting around for a while. Between scaling growth, getting synergies, and just getting back to good corporate governance, that is our path line to get into that 31% number. Considering the growth, you have not added any headcount. Which I think is pretty interesting. Well, it has been limited maybe. Yeah. Does that change your Do you think there's a chance that you may rethink incremental margin upside here? It's a little bit mix dependent. I think it really depends on where we think our long-term growth from a vertical standpoint. Certain verticals, when you're growing in a transportation vertical, which is a great vertical, we obviously are beneficiaries of it today. There's certain services you have to offer to that vertical and how you fulfill them and where you have to buy the data and how expensive that data is. There's a little bit of geographic mix, too. The state of N.Y. charges a lot for their data, whereas maybe the state of Missouri charges a lot less. When we get this broader base growth, that now becomes less of a factor, but it's really a matter of just growing and growing in the right areas and, we call it our ideal customer profile, and making sure that we're investing in those areas, and we're doing a good job of making sure our strategy aligns to that margin appreciation. You're closing in on sub 3x leverage faster, I think, than most expected. There was also a nice $45 million prepayment, suggesting continued focus on deleveraging there. I guess once you cross it, which the glide path kind of looks at some point in 2027, how does the capital allocation playbook change in your view? Is it faster buybacks? Is it dividend, maybe M&A? What's the calculus right now? Yeah, I think all of those will be on the table. I think we've proven that we're always going to focus on being opportunistic on creating value. Even if you just look at the last six months, go back and look at our discourse. We didn't have buybacks in that equation, but we're gifted with good cash flow, and to your point, leverage is flushing out. We always expected it to, but faster than I think outsiders might have thought it would. So we've got the luxury of a high cash flow generating business and the ability to be flexible with that approach. So we'll be opportunistic from now till the end of time, at least as far as I'm concerned. As leverage comes down, it allows us to open up the playbook a little wider. Certainly, there would be opportunity to fund organic growth, inorganic growth, obviously finding ways to create incremental shareholder value and returns. Look, our focus right now is getting to that point where we have those luxuries. So, for the next little bit of time, we're kind of heads down on how do we create value, how do we get the leverage down? Then, just like we decided to buy back shares, and look, I hope we don't have the opportunity to buy back shares at under $12 again. But certainly, if the market presents opportunities to create shareholder value that way, we'll certainly execute. Look, just because the price is higher doesn't mean we're not necessarily a buyer. But we'll focus on getting leverage to where it needs to go, and then obviously creating value along the way. I guess we'll see where our macro will go, right? Who knows? But obviously, you're tracking ahead of your 2024 growth algorithm targets for 4%-7% revenue, 9%-12% adjusted EBITDA CAGR. Right now, we're kind of in on 160, at least the BLS data was really positive last month. Quits kind of seem flattish right now. Unemployment job openings, at least the JOLTS data, which I know we can go back and forth on headlines and all that stuff, which I get, but is there anything in particular macro-wise that you're focusing on that investors should appreciate? Yeah, as Joelle mentioned, we care a lot less about that data than maybe you'd think. What our customers are telling us and what their views on the market, on their planning is what's most important to us. We're certainly focused on making sure that we continue to have a diversified focus in verticals. Larger businesses, so those enterprise size customers, large big market customers that are more stable. Then look, we can't control what they do, but then we can certainly control where we grow and putting our resources behind areas that provide long-term growth generation. Then also providing more products because we could take customers and provide more value, more products. Some of these products have a more recurring revenue nature to them as well. We think all of that sets us up, and then having that wide array of verticals allows you to be very diversified and very durable during all these kind of implied vertical fluctuations. We are feeling good about where we are sitting. To cap off, Joelle, next year's conference. Yeah. What are you going to be most excited to talk about? I think it is still going to be Digital Identity. Yeah. I'm not going to lie. Yeah. It's really an interesting dynamic change in how companies are managing and measuring risk, and we just want to be the company that brings the trust to them to help them manage it. That's great. Thank you so much, Joelle Smith, Steven Marks. Always great to have you. Appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Thanks, all.