All right. I'm Jeffrey Meuler, Baird's Information Solutions Analyst. Pleased to introduce TransUnion, which is one of the big three global consumer credit bureaus and a broader information solution company anchored by a proprietary consumer identity graph that powers credit, ID and fraud, marketing, and consumer solutions. I'm joined on stage by TransUnion CFO, Todd Cello. Also at the conference, the IR team, Greg and Jason in the audience. Maybe to start, Todd, you had an investor day this March. I want to unpack some of the messages. From a company description perspective, I just gave a bit of it, but there's a concept of a 360-degree view of a consumer with multiple different use cases and a common identity graph. I think there's still some investors that think of you as credit bureau first. Just help us understand how broad the data that you know about a consumer is and how you tie it all together, what's hard about that so investors can start to think through implications in an AI world? Sounds good. I think it's an appropriate place to start. Thank you for having us. This is always a great conference to be at. For TransUnion, data is the differentiator for us. Those are the competitive advantages that in essence, we have to enable our customers, to what Jeff just said, to assess credit, but also to tailor marketing campaigns and to help mitigate fraud. It all starts with our heritage being a credit reporting agency. If you think about the data that TransUnion is entrusted with, in essence, on the credit report, you have indicative information about the consumer, such as name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, email. In essence, what that data does is it provides a spine for our identity graph then. If you think about the sourcing of that data, it's difficult to get to. We're only one of three companies in the U.S. that gets this data. The expertise we have is we link and match, and we're able to put a consumer profile together. With that identity spine then, what we're able to do is append our other data assets that we have. Good examples of that would be data that we have on short-term lending, is one example. We made an acquisition of a business called FactorTrust several years ago that gives us those short-term lender trade lines. Another area is Argus. Again, another acquisition we made several years ago, where we have transaction-level data on credit and deposit information on the consumer. We also have data pertaining to device-based fraud that we're able to append on this identity graph. On top of that, we manage caller ID for the U.S. All that phone signal information we have. The expertise then is how do you pull all that together, put it on an identity graph? It's not that this is necessarily something that's easy to do as well. Yes, those are proprietary assets that we have. It's the linking and the matching that we do to know that it's Jeff Meuler, to put that identity graph together. That's an area where we differentiate ourselves. What we do is we also have relationships with thousands of other data providers that we augment our proprietary data with. Lots of different relationships where again, we're taking fragmented and maybe not consistent data, pulling it together. We like to say we have this insatiable appetite for data. The more and more information that we can have on a consumer, the better we're going to be able to represent that consumer in the marketplace, and the better that our customers are going to be able to transact with confidence with those consumers. That's something too when you think about just the years of us with those third-party relationships. Think of that as the network effect. Now you've built from our proprietary to the third parties. When our products and services are actually used, we get signal from that. For an example, in fraud mitigation, we're helping our customers mitigate, but if we come across something that's fraud, we're able to capture that. Now you've got this flywheel effect that's happening. Marketing is another good example of that. When we are helping our customers build their audiences and there's corroboration with the consumer, we're able to know that information, and we're able to append that to the identity graph. The identity graph is only as good as it being as fresh as possible. We're constantly updating the graph itself. Got it. I think a lot of investors have gotten more comfortable with AI risks on the credit bureau. Maybe anything else that you can say about the fraud and identity or marketing businesses in terms of why they're AI resilient? I thought there was an interesting announcement from you, a partnership with Google for YouTube, a multi-touch attribution. A lot of investors probably say, "Hey, doesn't Google have a lot of data natively that AI can make sense of?" Maybe that would be a good illustrative example of something that you do that investors may not inherently think of. Okay, let's start with marketing and fraud. First of all, the markets themselves, there's not necessarily a clear leader in the space. Highly fragmented competition but we are a scaled provider. How we go about doing that is through identity. I just talked through how we manage identity and are able to represent the consumer in the marketplace. As a result of that, what we're able to do is help our customers better tailor their marketing campaigns, build their audiences, know the performance. In marketing, what we're doing is we're doing identity, we're building audiences, and then we are measuring. To the second part of your question, we're really excited to announce the partnership recently with YouTube, where in essence, they are using our multi-touch attribution capabilities, for measurement purposes. In essence, what they're doing is they've come to TransUnion to say, "Help us understand how advertisers are performing on our platform." That's powerful for them because they want to know if you've seen a video on YouTube and you saw an advertisement, what did you do with that advertisement? Did you convert? Did you go and buy something there? The position that TransUnion's in is very unique, because we represent the top, think of the Fortune 100, in brands. We have those relationships, and that's where the value we add to Google or YouTube, is we bring those relationships. We're also a neutral party as well too. We're not placing ads, we're just helping to measure. Another good example of that is we have a similar relationship with Meta. The walled garden see value in using these capabilities. These can be contracts that are seven digits for TransUnion. I think a lot of investors broadly in the market have placed information solutions companies in the AI loser or AI at risk buckets. I think a lot of the management teams are sitting there seeing a lot of opportunity from AI. One of the anecdotes that you've given is the most AI-enabled or most AI-resourced customers consume more TransUnion data. Yeah. Can you provide more detail on that? Is it frequency of data? Is it additional use cases? Help us understand what that means. Yeah. No, it's a great question. The more sophisticated customers that we have, they want more and more of our data. Probably the best example is just models themselves, the risk models. Historically, lenders would update their risk models maybe on an annual basis, maybe every two or three years. What we're seeing is customers that have adopted AI into their workflows, they've been able to refresh those models a lot more frequently. We've seen examples of monthly now. In essence where because they can take our data, they're refreshing. What's that do? Fresher data, like how I was talking about the identity graph, right? We have to keep it fresh. Fresher data helps them mitigate risk. They're constantly updating their scoring models. That's specific to credit that I'm talking about, but these models are also being updated in fraud and marketing as well too. There's models that are built there. Overall, that's one big way that we're seeing a benefit. We highlighted some of this in our first quarter earnings materials as well. The second important area is AI-enabled customers, they're going to be more receptive to taking more of our product innovation. Whether that's scores or attributes or products like I talked about already in marketing with our audience generation or fraud mitigation or Trusted Call Solutions as another example, they're going to be able to take more and more of that data. What's interesting there is the biggest bottleneck actually is more on the customer side, not on our side, because before they'll take all this data, they need to pause to test it and make certain that it's working appropriately. Is that because of regulatory reasons or what is the reason for that? Yeah, that's one of the main areas that we would differentiate ourselves in is just the rigor that TransUnion operates in as far as being a regulated entity under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It's in our DNA. We take being in compliance very seriously, and we've rolled that out to all the other products. When I talk about marketing and fraud, we bring that same posture. From a customer's perspective, they value that deeply because they see how we treat the data and how we're able to then use it appropriately in the marketplace. You're on the tail end of a multi-year tech transformation, and you have a modern data management platform, OneTRU. It seems like that should align well for the AI era. How is OneTRU impacting your go-to market or partnerships or monetization potential? I know you've given anecdotes on. Yeah Snowflake and Snowflake seeing increased utilization lately. Yeah. Let me start the answer to that more on the partnership, because you alluded to Snowflake. Snowflake and Databricks are two larger relationships that we have. What's powerful about those partnerships is that we are able to meet our customer where they're at. If their data is in Snowflake or if it's in Databricks, we're able to bring our identity product to that environment to help them be able to, in essence, resolve identities and to better market or mitigate fraud. That's a really powerful capability that we have. In addition, OneTRU has brought us pretty significant cost savings. We had a transformation program that we announced back in 2023. We generated $130 million of cost savings, as well as on an ongoing basis, we're bringing our capital expenditures as a percentage of revenue down from 8% to 6%. The OneTRU platform enabled all of that, because in essence, what we're doing is as opposed to managing disparate data centers all across the world, what OneTRU is enabling us to do is to put all of those products and services on a common platform, and we're able to leverage that across the world. Needless to say, that drives product innovation. At our investor day in March of this year, we highlighted that in 2026, we're introducing 30 new products, 40 product enhancements that are going to generate $500 million of revenue over the next three years. That speaks to the monetization part of your question, in that we're able to see some pretty significant growth from that. Your financials have been good. Good compounding growth. No evidence, I think, from the outside of AI disruption. Lots of good anecdotes. You kind of just gave us some revenue that could accrue over the next three years. I know this is a guess, how do you think from the outside in your financials, when do you think we're going to start to see some of the benefits from AI more tangibly from the outside to your business? I think as I've already walked through, the OneTRu platform is AI-enabled. I'd make the argument that we are starting to see that. Our expectation as far as the growth algorithm that we put out again back in our investor day in March is for high single-digit growth over that period of time. What's important is that guide does not include any upside from AI capabilities. We talked already about the identity graph and products and marketing and fraud that we feel very confident that we're going to benefit from. We look at that as all upside to the medium-term guide that we provided. We've been performing I think pretty well over the last couple of years with high single-digit growth, underlying margins growing at least 50 basis points. That's kind of an okay type of macro environment that we've been able to post those results. We've been busy innovating and driving AI into our products and services. The expectation is that if the market holds the way that it is and we continue to execute, the AI products and services are going to be upside to that number. On the if the market holds, I'm not going to lie, when I saw TransUnion announce an investor day, I got a little cautious. Yeah. Correlation doesn't mean causation, but 2019 you had an investor day within a year we had COVID. Yeah. 2022 the next day the Fed's raising rates. Right on cue for March we have an Iranian conflict. You said that Q1 results were good. You said volumes were holding up into mid-April. Can you just give us any update on with gas prices where they are, with any other macro factors, are things still holding up in your business? Well, thank you for the sobering update on our timing on investor days. For sure it's been challenging in that regard. What I would say is we talked about in our April earnings call really strong quarter. With the conflict in Iran, we felt it was the prudent thing to do was to not raise for a pretty meaningful beat that we had in the quarter just as we navigated a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace. What I can tell you is through the middle of May right now the volumes that we talked about on the earnings call at the end of April have continued at that same level. Consistent with what we said on the earnings call, the expectation would be if that continues for the rest of the quarter that we should be at the high end of our guidance or above. That's where we're at right now. You talked about 50 basis points of underlying margin expansion, which is good, but you're using the phrase underlying and I think. Yeah investors are pushing back on your margin trajectory for a couple of years. It felt like you were approaching an inflection with tech transformation and other things. Just help us understand what you mean by underlying and maybe talk through what type of margin trajectory you're on. That's an important point to clarify for those of you who aren't familiar with TransUnion. You probably are aware that FICO, a partner of TransUnion in its scoring, increased pricing for mortgage quite significantly at the end of 2025 for pricing in effect in 2026. We treat that product from FICO as a passthrough. What they charge, we pass that through to our customers. If you think about it from a margin perspective, there's revenue, there's an equal amount of cost. FICO, over the last several years, has been more aggressive with their pricing. What's happened is our margins, if you look at them in aggregate, because of the dynamic I just talked about, the margins were kind of flattish. What, in essence, that was doing is it was masking a lot of the really good work that we've done from an operational perspective. I talked about this already with the transformation program and the cost savings that we've been able to achieve. We report our adjusted EBITDA margin as reported with the FICO royalty in there, but we are also showing excluding that, so excluding it from the revenue and excluding it from the expense so investors can see the underlying margin of the business on the things that are more controllable. Just to expand a little bit more, in FICO, it's predominantly in mortgage that there's this pricing power that they're able to leverage. That's what we're adjusting for is FICO mortgage. Your mortgage revenue grew 24%, excluding FICO royalties in Q1, with inquiries plus 7%. What all goes into that delta? And then maybe more importantly, what do you expect for go-forward mortgage pricing on the credit file post-2026? Yeah. Obviously, a tremendous amount of value on data. When I talked about the identity graph earlier, hopefully you got an appreciation for the power of the data. I've talked about scores as well, too. Scores don't work without the data, right? We maintain the data. We have an appropriate price to reflect the value that we bring to our customers for the data. Specific to mortgage on an ongoing basis going forward, I would expect us to have a CPI-like price increase for mortgage. How do you think about the pricing on VantageScore and mortgage? You came out with an intended price. You cut the price earlier this year around Investor Day. Yep. What's the go-forward opportunity, including if FICO continues to take aggressive mortgage pricing? Anything you want to say about what you're seeing on the initial rollout of VantageScore in terms of uptake or what the market's doing or how it's using VantageScore? Yeah. The FHFA, who regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in essence, have enabled VantageScore to be used in the underwriting of a mortgage. Think over the last 30-plus years, Fannie and Freddie were only buying mortgages in the secondary market if a Classic FICO score was part of the transaction. In essence, there was a monopoly situation there. The FHFA acknowledged that and have enabled competition in the space. VantageScore has existed, I think, since 2006. It's a collaborative effort between TransUnion Equifax and Experian. It's used quite extensively in other areas of the market outside of mortgage. You'll see it as an example on our direct-to-consumer platform. That's the score that we leverage, and some leading credit card issuers also use it as well, too. We're looking at the opportunity now that there's competition in the market. What we did right before our Investor Day is we lowered the price for VantageScore to $0.99. That compares to $10.95 for the FICO score. What we're trying to do is to just drive awareness and ultimately adoption of the score. To this point, we've seen a lot of receptivity from lenders. Just in the last couple of weeks, Rocket Mortgage said that they'll be using VantageScore. United Wholesale Mortgage also has indicated that they'll be using it. There seems to be some good movement. With that being said, this is going to take some time to do. It's not something that's going to just simply flip over because as I already said, we're looking at three decades of a process being a certain way. Our expectation is that the market's going to take some time to assess, and as a result of that, we didn't put in our guidance this year any type of VantageScore adoption for that reason. Got it. Maybe just to move to U.S. markets, I think investors sometimes have a perception about TransUnion being more cyclical than it is, or the stock trades higher beta. In your consumer lending business, or you're very strong in fintechs, it's been growing at a teens to 20% range recently. Just how cyclical do you think it is? Maybe go into some of the structural growth factors that are contributing to that growth? In consumer lending, primarily it's relationships that we have with Fintechs. Just personal lending itself has become more of a mainstream product. What started off initially as a subprime targeted type product, now you're seeing that mainstream. I get offers for it all the time when I sign into my credit card issuers, unsecured personal loans. It's very prevalent in the marketplace. With it being more mainstream, in essence, what we're then able to do now is we're able to sell more products and services to the consumer lenders. As opposed to just selling credit and scores, we're also bringing a lot of our product innovation. Marketing, Trusted Call Solutions, a couple of good examples that we're able to sell in there. Where there could be some cyclicality in the business, we look to offset that by selling those products and services. Overall, it's a strong grower in our portfolio. It grew over 20% in the fourth quarter. It grew 13% in the first quarter. We have a unique position. We're not overexposed to it either, right? It's about $145 million worth of revenue for us on a $5 billion plus. Peak was about $175 million back in 2022. We still see some good upward trajectory in this space. Outside of financial markets in the U.S., you have an emerging vertical segment that does about $1.3 billion of revenue. It was growing 3% to 4% in 2023 and 2024. It accelerated in 2025. What are the biggest factors going into its acceleration, or how sustainable is the recently faster growth? Yep. One of the bigger drivers within the emerging verticals is our insurance vertical, and this is where we're servicing property and casualty insurers, but a whole host of other insurers as well. In 2022 and 2023, with high inflation, many of these insurers pulled back in underwriting, and as a result of that, their marketing activity also pulled back. What we've seen over the last couple of years is the insurance business snap back quite nicely. As the insurers have gotten rate adequacy, they've come back to market, and marketing is almost fully recovered in the insurance space. That's a big driver. That's about 30% of the overall revenues within the emerging verticals of about $1.3 billion. Once you get out of insurance, the remaining verticals, we call them diversified markets. We serve just that, right? Diversified. Think of retail, e-commerce, media as an example. Where we're seeing the growth rates there tick up, especially is the fraud and the marketing products that I spoke about earlier. That's where the growth has been coming from. In the first quarter, we saw about 6% growth in the emerging verticals. What I would tell you is that the bookings and the retention that we've seen with those customers in the diversified markets, it's actually been very strong. We expect that those growth rates are going to accelerate as the year goes on. We only have a minute. International's a big part of your business that's not growing at its typical growth rates. There's lots of things going on there, India, Mexico. I guess, what are you most excited for in international over the next several years, or what are the key pieces to getting it back to its typical growth rate contribution to TransUnion? I think the portfolio international is amazing. We continue to be super excited about the potential in India. Took a step back. Regulator cooled the market down. I could tell you there is in May, volumes that we've seen in India would suggest that we are on that path to mid-single-digit revenue as we've guided. We're really excited about that. There's just huge runway. We made an acquisition of a credit bureau in Mexico that we were an initial shareholder on going back 30 years ago. We were the technology partner. We finished that acquisition in March. Similar type of dynamics in India as well, where we can bring our growth playbook and drive some meaningful shareholder returns. Excellent. We will wrap there since we're at time. All right. Todd, thank you for your insights on TransUnion. Thanks. The TransUnion team will be available for a breakout session now in Astor Suite 1. The next presenting companies at the conference in this room, Cheesecake Factory, also at this time, RB Global, APi Group, BlackBerry Limited.
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