Equifax Inc. (EFX) on Q3 2021 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the Equifax Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. . As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Dorian Hare, Senior Vice President and Head of Corporate Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin. Dorian Hare: Thanks, and good morning. Welcome to today's conference call. I'm Dorian Hare. With me today are Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer; and John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded. An archive of the recording will be available later today in the IR Calendar section of the News & Events tab on our IR website, www.investor.equifax.com. During the call today, we will be making reference to certain materials that can be also found in the Presentations section of the News & Events tab at our IR website. These materials are labeled Q3 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Also, we will be making certain forward-looking statements, including fourth quarter and full year 2021 guidance as well as a framework for 2022, to help you understand Equifax and its business environment. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to material -- to differ materially from our expectations. Certain risk factors that may impact our business are set forth in our filings with the SEC, including our 2020 Form 10-K and subsequent filings. Also, we'll be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EPS attributable to Equifax and adjusted EBITDA, which will be adjusted for certain items that affect the comparability of our underlying operational performance. These non-GAAP measures are detailed in reconciliation tables, which are included with our earnings release and also posted on our website. Now I'd like to turn it over to Mark. Mark Begor: Thanks, Dorian, and good morning. We had a very strong third quarter and first 9 months of 2021, a continuation of our strong outperformance last year with record revenue in the quarter of $1.223 billion, which was up over 14%, with core non-mortgage market and non-UC, ERC claims revenue growth of 20%. We are executing extremely well against the critical priorities of our EFX2023 strategy, as we highlighted on Slide 4. Our focus on leveraging the new Equifax cloud for innovation, new products and growth is clearly driving our strong financial results. Our revenue growth has accelerated from 3% in 2019, as we were recovering from the 2017 cyber event and investing heavily in our EFX Cloud transformation to 17% last year. We are on track to deliver 19% core growth this year at the midpoint of our revised 2021 guidance. More importantly, our core growth, which excludes the impact of the mortgage market, unemployment claims and ERC-related revenues is expected to accelerate to 21% this year, a powerful figure that reflects the strength of our underlying business model and EFX2023 growth strategy. Not only is our core growth accelerating above historical levels during '20 and '21 in challenging COVID markets. And more recently, in a declining mortgage market, we are also expanding EFX beyond our traditional credit bureau routes to a more diverse data analytics and technology company with our investments in the Equifax cloud, new data assets and NPIs, along with reinvesting our outperformance in bolt-on M&A in areas such as talent, government and ID and fraud. We are quickly pivoting from building the Equifax cloud to leveraging it for innovation of new products that will position the new Equifax for stronger and more diversified growth in the future. Our EFX2023 growth strategy remains our compass for the future and drives all of our top and bottom line growth initiatives as we move towards '22 and beyond. Turning to Slide 5. Equifax had a very strong quarter. Revenue at $1.22 billion was up 14.5%, with organic constant currency growth up a strong 12%. The almost 15% top line growth was off a strong 19% growth last year in a much stronger mortgage market. This was our seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. More importantly, our core growth was up a strong 20%. Our U.S. B2B businesses of Workforce Solutions and USIS, which together represent almost 75% of Equifax revenue, again drove our growth, delivering 17% revenue growth despite the 21% decline in the U.S. mortgage market in the quarter. Non-mortgage revenue was up over 30%, and organic non-mortgage revenue was up 24%, strengthening sequentially from the 16% and 20% we saw in the first 2 quarters of the year. Third quarter Equifax adjusted EBITDA totaled $404 million, up slightly from third quarter last year with margins of 33%. As expected, margins were down versus 2020 due to the inclusion of cloud technology transformation costs of $45 million in our adjusted results in the quarter, which were excluded last year, and redundant cloud transformation systems cost of $15 million. These costs related to cloud tech transformation negatively impacted EBITDA margins by almost 500 basis points. Adjusted EPS of $1.85 a share was down slightly from last year. Adjusting for the cloud transformation costs of $45 million or $0.27 a share, adjusted EPS would have been up a strong 11%. We continue to make significant progress executing the EFX Cloud data and technology transformation. In the quarter, we completed 4,000 B2B customer migrations for a total of 15,400 migrations completed so far this year. In September alone, USIS completed over 900 customer migrations. Since the beginning of the transformation, we've completed almost 97,000 B2B migrations, 3.5 million consumer migrations and 1 million data contributor migrations. We remain on track and confident in our plan. We continue to expect the North American transformation to be principally complete in early '22, with the remaining customer migrations broadly completing by the end of next year. International transformation will follow, being principally completed by the end of 2023, with some customer migrations continuing into 2024. We're still in the early days of leveraging the cloud but remain confident that will differentiate us commercially, expand our NPI capabilities, accelerate our top line and expand our margins and the growth in cost savings in '22 and beyond. Our NPI performance also continues to accelerate. In the quarter, we released 30 new products. And we still expect our Vitality Index to accelerate from 5% last year to over 8% in 2021. Given our very strong third quarter performance, we are increasing our full year revenue guidance by approximately 320 basis points or $131 million at the midpoint of a range between $4.9 billion to $4.921 billion, up 19% from last year, and increasing our full year adjusted EPS guidance by $0.22 per share to a midpoint of $7.57 per share, which adjusting for technology transformation cost implies a 23% growth in EPS. This includes our expectation that the U.S. mortgage market as measured by credit inquiries will decline just over 7% this year with the bulk of the return to normalization in the second half, which we expect to be down around 20%. Roughly 2/3 of the 320 basis point increase in our revenue growth framework to 19% is from organic business performance, with the balance from the acquisition of Appriss, Health e(fx) and Teletrack, which we expect to add about $45 million to revenue in the fourth quarter. In the third quarter, Equifax core revenue growth, the green sections of the bars on Slide 6, grew a very strong 20%, a third consecutive quarter of core growth at or above 20%. Non-mortgage growth in EWS and USIS and growth in International drove about 900 basis points to the core revenue growth, excluding acquisitions and FX, with mortgage outperformance primarily in Workforce Solutions driving about 800 basis points of organic core growth in the quarter. As we move through '22 and '23, we expect to continue to see strong and balanced core growth, reflecting the benefits of the new EFX Cloud, accelerated NPIs, continued strong non-mortgage growth, both from organic growth and acquisitions, as well as continued strong outperformance from Workforce Solutions. Turning to Slide 7. Workforce Solutions had another exceptional quarter, delivering revenue of $508 million, which was up 35%. This is the first quarter Workforce Solutions has delivered over $0.5 billion of revenue in a single quarter, a big milestone. This was against a very strong 57% growth last year. Adjusted EBITDA margins were up over -- were 54%. Non-mortgage revenue at Workforce Solutions was up over 48%, with organic non-mortgage revenue up 41%. The strength of Workforce Solutions and uniqueness of their TWN income and employment data set was clear again in the third quarter. Workforce's Verification Services revenue of $403 million was up a strong 34%. Verification Services mortgage revenue grew 22% in the quarter despite the 21% decline in the mortgage market, with the EWS outperformance driven by increased records, penetration and new products. Importantly, Verification Services non-mortgage revenue was up 55% in the quarter, consistent with the very strong growth we saw last quarter. Our government vertical, which provides solutions to federal and state governments in support of assistance programs, including food and rental support, grew over 20% in the quarter. Government remains one of our largest non-mortgage segments with attractive growth potential in the future and represents about 1/3 of non-mortgage verification revenue. Our new SSA contract went live this quarter at relatively low start-up volumes, and we expect to see it ramp as we move through 2022. We expect new products, the addition of Appriss and expanded federal and state social services to fuel growth in our government vertical in the future. Talent solutions, which provides income employment verifications as well as other information for the hiring and onboarding processes through our EWS data hub, had another outstanding quarter from customer expansion and NPIs growing over 100%. Talent solutions now represents almost 30% of non-mortgage verification revenue. And as you know, over 75 million people change jobs in the U.S. annually, with the vast majority having some level of screening as a part of the hiring process. The addition of Appriss Insights and our new partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse will fuel growth and new products in this important vertical. The non-mortgage consumer lending business, principally in banking and auto, showed strong growth as well of about 90% in the quarter, both from deepening penetration with lenders and from some recovery in these markets, although auto has been impacted by inventory shortages. Employer Services revenue of $105 million was up $30 million in the quarter. This is an important growth engine for Workforce Solutions that also delivers records. Combined, our unemployment claims and employee retention credit businesses had revenue of about $65 million, up about $14 million from last year. Substantial declines in the UC revenue in the quarter were more than offset by ERC, which grew substantially -- sequentially as we support the businesses in obtaining federal employee retention credit payments. Employer Services non-UC and ERC businesses had revenue of about $40 million, up 60%, with organic growth of about 35%. Our I-9 business, driven by our new I-9 Anywhere product, continue to show very strong growth, up about 80%. Our I-9 business is now almost half of Employer Services non-UC and ERC revenue. Reflecting the growth in I-9 and the return to growth of Workforce Analytics, we expect Employer Services non-UC and ERC businesses to deliver total growth of about 40% and organic growth of about 25% in the year. Reflecting the uniqueness of the TWN data, strong verifier revenue growth and operating leverage resulted in adjusted Workforce Solutions EBITDA margins of 54.3%. The decline versus last year is driven by investments in the tech transformation as well as redundant systems costs and as well as significant investments in data onboarding, sales and marketing to continue to drive Workforce Solutions growth. Rudy Ploder and the Workforce Solutions team delivered another outstanding quarter and are positioned to deliver a very strong '21, '22 and beyond. Turning now to USIS. Their revenue of $380 million was up slightly from last year. Total USIS mortgage revenue of $148 million was down 17%, while mortgage credit inquiries were down 21%, slightly better than the down 23% we expected in July. USIS outperformance versus the overall market was driven by growth in marketing and debt monitoring products. Importantly, non-mortgage revenue of $240 million grew almost 8 -- sorry, 16% with organic growth of over 9%. Year-to-date, non-mortgage revenue was up a strong 17%, and organic non-mortgage revenue growth is over 10%. Banking, insurance, commercial and direct-to-consumer were all up over 10% in the quarter. Fraud was up almost 10% organically and up over 75% in total, with the inclusion of our Kount acquisition. Auto was up mid-single digits despite supply pressures, and telco was down just over 5%. Financial Marketing Services revenue, which is, broadly speaking, our off-line or batch business, was $55 million in the quarter and up about 20%. The strong performance was driven by marketing-related revenue, which was up over 20%; and ID and fraud revenue, which grew over 15%. In 2021, marketing-related revenue is expected to represent about 40% of FMS revenue; identity and fraud, above 20%; and risk decisioning, about 35%. The USIS sales team delivered record wins up over 20% versus last year and 40% sequentially in the quarter. The new deal pipeline in USIS remains very strong. During the quarter, USIS acquired Teletrack, a U.S. leader in alternative credit data. Teletrack is being consolidated with DataX, our specialty finance credit reporting agency that we acquired in 2018, to expand our capabilities in the fast-growing alternative data space serving unbanked and underbanked U.S. consumers. The USIS adjusted EBITDA margins were 40% in the quarter, flat sequentially with second quarter. Similar to second quarter, the decline in margins in the quarter versus last year was due to both costs related to the cloud transformation, which include the cost of redundant systems and inclusion of our adjusted results of the technology transformation costs which are being excluded in 2020, and the expansion of our investments in sales and marketing as well as new products to leverage both the strengthening U.S. market and accelerate new product introductions to drive revenue growth in '22 and beyond. Turning to International. Their revenue of $245 million was up 10% on a local currency basis and up 100 basis points sequentially. This was the fourth consecutive quarter of growth in our global markets following the COVID pandemic impacts. Asia Pacific, which is principally our Australia business, performed well in the quarter with revenue of $89 million, up about 7% in local currency. Australia delivered this growth despite the extended COVID lockdowns in many portions of that country. Australia consumer revenue continued to recover, up 3% versus last year and about flat sequentially. Our Commercial businesses combined online and off-line revenue was up 8% in the quarter. Fraud and identity was up 13%, following 22% growth in the first half. European revenues of $68 million were up 9% in local currency in the quarter and flat sequentially. Our European credit reporting business was up about 5% with continued growth in both the U.K. and Spain. Our European debt management business revenue increased by about 21% in local currency, off the lows we saw last year during the COVID recession. Canada delivered revenue of $44 million in the quarter, up over 8% in local currency despite a weakening Canadian mortgage market that was down 15%. Canada experienced strong growth in fintech, while supply issues continue to impact our auto business. Latin American revenues of $45 million grew 16% in the quarter in local currency, which was the third consecutive quarter of growth coming out of COVID. We continue to see the benefit in Lat Am of the strong new product introductions introduced over the past 3 years. International adjusted EBITDA margins at 26.7% were down slightly from 27.3% in the second quarter. The sequential decline was driven by incremental technology costs in Australia and Canada as they accelerate their cloud transformation programs. The decline in the quarter was principally due to costs related to the cloud transformation, both the cost of redundant systems and inclusion in our adjusted results of the technology transformation costs, which were being excluded last year. Margins were negatively impacted the quarter by -- also negatively impacted the quarter by our increased investments in sales and marketing and new products. Global Consumer Solutions revenue of $82 million was down 6% on a reported basis and 7% on a local currency basis in the quarter, slightly above our expectations. We saw growth of about 2% in our global consumer direct business, which sells directly to consumers through equifax.com and represents a little over half of GCS revenue. The decline in GCS revenue in the quarter was again driven by our U.S. lead gen partner business. We expect the GCS partner business and GCS business overall to return to growth in the fourth quarter. GCS adjusted EBITDA margins of 23.4% were up sequentially, reflecting lower operating costs. The decline versus last year was principally driven by revenue declines. Turning now to Slide 8. Workforce Solutions continues to power Equifax as it's clearly our strongest, fastest-growing and most valuable business, with strong 35% growth in the quarter, up 57% growth a year ago. Core revenue growth was 42%, driven by the uniqueness of the TWN income and employment data, scale of the TWN database and consistent execution by Rudy and his team. EWS' ability to consistently and substantially outgrow their underlying markets is driven by 3 factors. First, growing the work number database. At the end of the third quarter, TWN reached 125 million active records, an increase of 12% or 13 million records from a year ago and included 97 million unique records. At 97 million uniques, we now have over 60% of nonfarm payroll, which makes our TWN data set more valuable to our customers with higher hit rates. We are now receiving records every pay period from 1.9 million companies, up from 1 million when we started the year and 27,000 contributors a short 2 years ago. The exclusive agreement with a major payroll processor that we announced on our February call went live in the third quarter and contributed to this growth. Our strong momentum continues as we signed another large payroll processor last week on an exclusive basis that will come online in the coming months. We also expect to add further payroll processors in the coming months. As a reminder, almost 60% of our records are contributed directly by employers to which EWS provides comprehensive Employer Services like UC claims, W-2 management, I-9, WOTC, ERC, HSA and other HR and compliance solutions. Our acquisitions of HIREtech, i2verify and Health e(fx) this year strengthened our ability to deliver these unique HR services, particularly through relationships with payroll processors and HR software companies. These partnerships have been built up over the past decade by the Workforce Solutions team. The remaining 40% of our records are contributed through partnerships with payroll providers and HR software companies, most of which are exclusive. We still have substantial room to grow our income and employment database and expect to continue to add new data contributors as well as reach agreements with several additional payroll processors in the fourth quarter to add their records on an exclusive basis to TWN in 2022. Beyond the over 50 million nonfarm payroll records not yet in the TWN database, we're focused on data records from the 40 million to 50 million gig workers and around 30 million pension recipients in the U.S. marketplace to further broaden the TWN database. We have plenty of room to grow TWN. Second, increasing our average revenue transactions -- average revenue per transaction through new products and pricing, our existing products to value, recognizing the depth of information TWN allows us to deliver to customers. Workforce Solutions' new product pipeline is rapidly expanding as our teams leverage the power of our new Equifax Cloud capabilities. And third, by increasing our penetration in the markets we serve and expanding into new markets. For example, we continue to increase our penetration in the mortgage market. At the end of 2020, Workforce Solutions received an inquiry in almost 60% of completed mortgages, up from 55% in 2019. This 500 basis point increase is a big step forward, but we still have plenty of runway to expand the customers using TWN mortgage. We're also seeing substantial growth in TWN in other credit markets, including card and auto as these verticals take advantage of the unique lift from TWN income and employment data in the 60% hit rates with our database. Growing system-to-system integrations is another key lever in driving both increased penetration and increasing the number of poll per transaction. During the quarter, about 75% of TWN mortgage transactions were fulfilled system-to-system, up over 2x from 32% in 2019. And again, we still have plenty of growth potential here. Workforce Solutions is performing exceptionally well with attractive above-market and above Equifax growth rates and margins that we expect to continue in the future. Slide 9 highlights the core growth performance of our U.S. B2B mortgage businesses, Workforce Solutions and USIS. Our combined U.S. B2B businesses delivered 3% revenue growth in mortgage in the third quarter, outperforming the mortgage market by 24 basis points, with the market down 21%. This strong performance -- outperformance was again driven by Workforce Solutions with core mortgage growth of 43%, enabled by the multiple drivers that I just discussed. Slide 10 provides an update on new product innovation, leveraging the Equifax Cloud and our differentiated data, a key driver of our current and future growth. In the quarter, we delivered 30 new products with 150 new products in the market so far this year, which is up 18% from the 96 we delivered in the same time frame last year. We continue to expect our 2021 Vitality Index defined as a percent of revenue delivered from NPIs launched in the past 3 years to be over 8%. In the third quarter, we launched significant new products we expect to continue to drive growth in '22 and beyond. The SSA payroll exchange that went live as an EWS product that supports verifications of SSI and SSDI social services delivering critical income and employment status based on program requirements. OneView with DataX is a new integrated consumer credit report that redefines how we deliver display and provide insights to our customers. It also sets the stage for integrating nontraditional credit data in a single view solution for our customers. Alternative data from DataX, Teletrack, NC+, rental payments and other sources are a critical priority for Equifax, and we expect to continue to drive NPIs in this space in the future. Digital Identity Trust 2.0 product provides businesses with a comprehensive, passive identity verification service that delivers a trust/do not trust recommendation across both physical and digital identity vectors. This product will leverage Kount data by year-end. MarketMix Premier solution enables the ability for FIs to access market share and size of liquidity across geographics. This provides quick identification of targeted growth markets to deploy spend across branch sales and marketing efforts. And lastly, the new Equifax Affordability product in Australia uses bank transaction data and sophisticated categorization to provide an affordability view to customers while removing friction for the consumer. We're clearly focused on leveraging our new Equifax Cloud capabilities to drive our NPI rollouts and new product revenue in '21 and beyond. Growing the NPI is central to our EFX2023 growth strategy. As detailed on Slide 11, in 2021, we reinvest our strong outperformance in strategic and accretive bolt-on acquisitions that strengthen our position in existing growth markets and allow us to enter new markets with new capabilities. Our 2021 acquisitions add $300 million plus synergies to our run rate revenue. We are focused on executing acquisitions that are accretive to our long-term revenue growth and margins and deliver attractive shareholder returns. Our priorities for M&A are clear and aligned around, number one, expanding our differentiated data, which is at the core Equifax. We have scale and unique data sets that we want to expand and leverage with new data elements to drive enhanced decisioning for our customers. All of our acquisitions deliver new and differentiated data, and more data drive better decisions. Second, expanding and widening our largest and fastest-growing business, Workforce Solutions, is a priority for our M&A. The Appriss Insights, HIREtech, Health e(fx) and i2verify acquisitions strengthen Workforce and position EWS for future outperformance. And last, broadening our ID and fraud capabilities in the fast-growing digital and e-commerce space is another M&A priority. Kount strongly advanced our capabilities in this fast-growing space. We closed the Appriss acquisition on October 1 and are focused on integration, new solutions and growth. Appriss Insights and our new partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse are a big step forward in our strategy to build out an EWS Data Hub centered off our almost 500 million historical TWN data records to address the fast-growing talent and government markets. As detailed on Slide 12, combining our scale TWN data with Appriss Insights criminal and health care credentialing and sections data, along with other partner data assets, including the exclusive partnership for college and university data we entered into in the third quarter with the National Student Clearinghouse, allows Workforce Solutions to deliver the most complete, real-time, 360-degree view of the prospective employee or applicant for government benefits available in the market. The talent solutions and government verticals offer large and growing markets for our Workforce Solutions business through the EWS Data Hub. We estimate an addressable market of $5 billion in the U.S. hiring space and onboarding process, with around 75 million new employees onboarded annually in the U.S. Workforce Solutions government vertical is focused on delivering data and solutions to support federal and state benefit programs as well as law enforcement agencies. This is a substantial and growing sector that we estimate to have an addressable market of about $2 billion. Appriss Insights strongly accelerates our ability to penetrate these large and fast-growing TAMs. Insights is anticipated to generate $150 million of run rate revenue during 2021 and to grow on a stand-alone basis at over 15% annually. We also anticipate building towards approximately $75 million in revenue synergies by 2025, leveraging the EFX Cloud to integrate Appriss Insights' rich people-based risk intelligence data in the EWS Data Hub to form a new multi-data solutions and through cross-selling efforts. Acquiring Appriss Insights and partnering with the National Student Clearinghouse provide strong pillars for Workforce Solutions growth and fast-growing markets going forward. Slide 13 highlights our focus on adding alternative data to our database focused on the 60 million un or underbanked population in the United States. According to a Federal Reserve study, 6% of U.S. adults do not have a checking, savings or money market account, although 2/5 use some form of alternative financial service. Moreover, 16% of adults have a bank account but also use an alternative financial service product generally at much higher costs. Providing services that help bring these underserved populations into the financial mainstream is core to our purpose of helping people live their financial best and is an important priority for our customers. Our acquisition of Teletrack in September, which we are combining with our DataX business, creates a leading U.S. specialty consumer reporting agency with data on more than 80 million thin-file, unbanked and underbanked and credit rebuilding consumers. Our National Consumer Telecom & Utilities Exchange partnership is another unique data set focused on this space that has more than 420 million records and 250 million consumers, helping our customers to expand underwriting to no hit or thin-file customers. We are focused on expanding our unique alternative data from sources, including specialty finance companies, alternative lenders, telco companies, cable and satellite TV providers, municipalities and utilities to drive growth in the fast-growing alternative data markets. And we'll continue to look for opportunities to strengthen our alternative databases through partnerships and M&A. And now I'd like to turn it over to John to discuss our outlook for the rest of the year, our increase in guidance for 2021 as well as our -- share our early read on 2022 assumptions and our financial framework for 2022. John Gamble: Thanks, Mark. As Mark discussed, our 3Q results were very strong and much stronger than we discussed with you in July, with revenue about $50 million higher than the midpoint of the expectation we shared. For perspective, the strength was driven by our U.S. B2B businesses, principally Workforce Solutions and also USIS. Workforce Solutions Verification Services was stronger than discussed in July, principally in non-mortgage and talent solutions, card and auto as well as, to a lesser extent, in mortgage. Workforce Solutions employee retention credit and unemployment claims revenue was stronger than we discussed in July. We expect the strength in ERC to continue in the fourth quarter. USIS was also somewhat stronger than we discussed in July. The strength in mortgage relative to our discussion in July was partially a reflection of the mortgage market being down 21% versus the down 23% we discussed in July. Workforce Solutions' outperformance relative to the mortgage market was also stronger than we expected. This strong revenue drove upside in adjusted EPS relative to the expectations that we shared in July. Before discussing our increased guidance for 2021 and providing a framework for you to consider for 2022, let's briefly discuss our assumptions for the U.S. mortgage market. As shown on Slide 14, we are expecting the 21% year-to-year decline in U.S. mortgage credit inquiries that we saw in the third quarter to continue in the fourth quarter, with the fourth quarter down about 20%. This results in 2021 U.S. mortgage market credit inquiries being down just over 7% from 2020, slightly better than the down somewhat under 8% we discussed with you in July. For 2022, based on trends we are seeing in new purchase and refinance that I will discuss shortly, our 2022 framework assumes the U.S. mortgage market as measured by total credit market inquiries will decline about 15% from 2021. The 15% decline versus 2021 is most substantial in the first half of 2022, given the significant slowing we have seen in the U.S. mortgage market already in the second half of '21. Our assumed level of 2022 U.S. mortgage market credit inquiries remains over 10% above the average levels we saw over the 2015 to '19 period. The left side of Slide 15 provides perspective on the number of homes that would benefit by 75 basis points or more from refinancing their mortgage at current rates. Despite the substantial refinancing activity that's occurred over the past year and current increases in U.S. treasuries, the number of U.S. mortgages that could benefit from a refinancing remains at a relatively strong level of about 12 million. Home prices have appreciated significantly over the past 18 months, which has provided many homeowners with cash-out refinancing opportunities, which in past cycles has led to increased refinancing activity from borrowers. For perspective, based upon our most recent data in April, mortgage refinancings remain at just under 1 million a month. As shown on the right side of Slide 15, the pace of existing home purchases continues at historically very high levels. This strong new purchase market is expected to continue throughout '21 and '22. Our 2022 assumption for our U.S. mortgage credit inquiries assumes that we see purchase mortgage financings at levels above the levels we saw in 2020, with refinancings declining significantly from the levels we saw in both 2020 and 2021. Slide 16 provides our guidance for 4Q '21. We expect revenue in the range of $1.23 billion to $1.25 billion, reflecting revenue growth of about 10% to 11.8%, including a 0.1% benefit from FX. Acquisitions are expected to positively impact revenue by 5.4%. We're expecting adjusted EPS in 4Q '21 to be $1.72 to $1.82 per share compared to 4Q '20 adjusted EPS of $2 per share. In 4Q '21, technology transformation costs are expected to be around $45 million or $0.27 per share. Excluding these costs, which were excluded from 4Q '20 adjusted EPS, 4Q '21 adjusted EPS would be $1.99 to $2.09 per share. Slide 17 provides the specifics on our 2021 full year guidance. We are increasing guidance substantially, reflecting our very strong 3Q '21 performance. The acquisitions of Appriss, Health e(fx) and Teletrack are expected to add about $45 million of revenue in the quarter. 2021 revenue of between $4.901 billion and $4.921 billion reflects growth of about 18.7% to 19.2% versus 2020, including a 1.4% benefit from FX. Acquisitions are expected to positively impact revenue by about 3.1%. EWS is expected to deliver over 38% revenue growth with continued very strong growth in Verification Services. USIS revenue is expected to be up mid- to high-single digits, driven by growth in non-mortgage. Combined, EWS and USIS mortgage revenue is expected to be up over 18% in 2021, about 25 percentage points stronger than the overall market decline of just over 7%. International revenue is expected to deliver constant currency growth of about 10%. And GCS revenue is expected to be down mid-single digits in 2021. GCS revenue is expected to be up over 5% in the fourth quarter. As a reminder, in 2021, Equifax is including all cloud technology transformation costs and adjusted operating income, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS. These onetime costs were excluded from adjusted operating income, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS in 2017 through 2020. In 2021, Equifax expects to incur onetime cloud technology transformation costs of approximately $165 million, a reduction of over 50% from the $358 million incurred in 2020. The inclusion in 2021 of these onetime costs would reduce adjusted EPS by about $1.01 per share. 2021 adjusted EPS of $7.52 to $7.62 per share, which includes these tech transformation costs, is up 7.8% to 9.3% from 2020. Excluding the impact of tech transformation cost of $1.01 per share, adjusted EPS in 2021 would show growth of about 22% to 24% versus 2020. 2021 is also negatively impacted by redundant system costs of about $80 million relative to 2020. These redundant system costs are expected to negatively impact adjusted EPS by approximately $0.50 per share and negatively impact adjusted EPS growth by about 7 percentage points in '21. We remain confident in our cloud transformation plan and the savings in 2022 and beyond that we have discussed previously with you. Now let's turn to a discussion of an early framework for 2022. Slide 18 provides the macro assumptions behind our 2022 framework. Given the continued significant uncertainties in the overall U.S. and global economy as well as in the U.S. mortgage market, we wanted to provide you with the assumptions we've been using at this stage in developing our framework for 2022. As I discussed previously, we expect the U.S. mortgage market, our proxy for which is U.S. mortgage credit inquiries, to decline about 15% in 2022 relative to 2021. Equifax's U.S. B2B mortgage revenue is expected to continue to significantly outperform the overall mortgage market and show growth in 2022 relative to 2021. Our overall framework is based on a continued U.S. economic recovery that is 2022 GDP growth of about 4% for the full year. We expect our USIS and Workforce Solutions non-mortgage businesses to outperform their underlying markets. We expect Workforce Solutions' UC and ERC businesses to decline by almost 30% in 2022. We also expect that International economies will continue to recover in 2022. Our International businesses are also expected to outperform their underlying markets. Slide 19 provides a view of Equifax's total and core revenue growth from 2017 through 2022 -- through the 2022 framework. In 4Q 2021, Equifax core revenue growth is expected to be a strong 17%, with core organic revenue growth of about 12%. Almost 2/3 of that core organic growth is driven by non-mortgage growth across all 4 BUs. In 2022, based on the assumptions I just shared, Equifax's total revenue is expected to be up about 8%. We anticipate delivering strong core revenue growth of 14%, reflecting organic growth of 11% -- organic core growth of 11% and a 3% benefit from acquisitions completed in 2021, which will more than offset the significant headwinds from the assumed declines in the U.S. mortgage market and the UC and ERC businesses. Slide 20 provides a revenue walk detailing the drivers of the 8% revenue growth in 2022 from the midpoint of our 2021 revenue guidance to the midpoint of our 2022 revenue framework, 2022 revenue of $5.3 billion. The 15% decline in the U.S. mortgage market and the expected declines in the Workforce Solutions unemployment claims and ERC businesses are expected to negatively impact revenue in 2022 by 5.75 percentage points. Core organic revenue growth is anticipated to be over 11%. Non-mortgage core organic growth is expected to drive about 2/3 of the growth. The largest contributor is Workforce Solutions with strong organic growth in talent solutions, government and employee boarding solutions, including I-9. USIS non-mortgage, International and GCS are also expected to drive core growth. Mortgage revenue outperformance relative to the overall mortgage market is expected to drive the remaining about 1/3 of the organic core growth. This is driven by strong outperformance in Workforce Solutions. The acquisitions completed in 2021 are expected to contribute about 3 percentage points of growth to 2022. Slide 21 provides an adjusted EPS walk, detailing the drivers of the expected 14% growth from the midpoint of the 2021 guidance of $7.57 per share to the midpoint of our 2022 framework of $8.65 per share. Revenue growth of 8% at our 2021 EBITDA margins of about 33.8% would deliver 11% growth in adjusted EPS. In 2022, we expect to deliver EBITDA margin expansion of about 200 basis points. This margin expansion is expected to drive 9% growth in adjusted EPS. This margin expansion is expected to be delivered by the actions we have discussed with you throughout 2021. Our transformation investments will be reduced by about $100 million in 2022, with about half of this reduction or about $50 million being reinvested in new product and other development. We will begin to see net cloud cost savings in 2022 defined as the savings from improving production costs, driven by the decommissioning of our legacy on-prem systems and other improvements in our operations exceeding the cost of running our new cloud-native systems. Margins will also be enhanced by leverage on corporate and G&A. Partly offsetting these benefits to EBITDA are cost increases, particularly in salaries and contracted services as the tight labor market drives cost higher as well as lower EBITDA margins in 2022 from the 2021 acquisitions as we will just be ramping synergies during 2022. Depreciation and amortization is expected to increase by about $45 million in 2022, which will negatively impact adjusted EPS by about 4%. D&A is increasing in 2022 as we accelerate putting cloud-native systems into production. The combined increase in interest expense and tax expense in 2022 is expected to negatively impact adjusted EPS by about 2 percentage points. The increase in interest expense reflects the increased debt from our 2021 acquisitions. Our estimated tax rate used in this framework of 24.5% does not assume any changes in the U.S. federal tax rate. Should that occur, we will let you know the estimated impact on our 2022 results. As there remains significant uncertainty in underlying market drivers, including the pace of normalization of the U.S. mortgage market and the pace of economic growth worldwide, what we provided today for 2022 is a framework for you to consider. We'll provide formal guidance for 2022 in connection with our 4Q '21 earnings release early next year. Now I would like to turn it back over to Mark. Mark Begor: Thanks, John. We hope this early view of our framework for 2022 is helpful and reinforces the power of the new Equifax to deliver 14% growth and 8% total growth at the midpoint of our range of thinking, assuming the mortgage market and UC and ERC declines impact our revenue growth by almost 6% in 2022. Stepping back and reviewing the macro trends outlined on Slide 22. These macros have been driving information services for the last decade. Over the last 24 months, we believe most of the macro factors have substantially accelerated. And through our 2021 acquisitions of Appriss, Kount and Teletrack and our EFX Cloud investments advantaged Equifax to benefit from these macro trends. We believe we also have unique levers at Equifax to deliver strong future growth, including Workforce Solutions above market and EFX growth and margins and our expanded focus on new data assets like Appriss Insights, the USIS recovery and non-mortgage growth and Kount ID and fraud growth; the new Equifax Cloud, which is driving our competitiveness NPIs top line and cost savings; and NPIs leveraging Equifax Cloud and our expanded resources and focus on new products; and then, of course, M&A to broaden strength in Equifax. These attractive market macros along with the broad Equifax growth levers and our strong core outperformance in the past few years give us the confidence in our ability to deliver above-market growth in the future. Wrapping up on Slide 23. Equifax delivered another strong and broad-based quarter. We had strong momentum as we move into the fourth quarter to 2022. We now delivered 7 consecutive quarters of strong, above-market, double-digit growth, reflecting the power of the new Equifax business model and our execution against our EFX2023 strategic priorities. Equifax is on offense. We remain confident in our outlook for 2021 and raised our full year midpoint revenue growth rate by approximately 300 basis points to 19% growth for the year. And we also raised our midpoint EPS by $0.22 to $7.57 per share. Workforce Solutions had another outstanding quarter, powering our results, delivering 35% revenue growth and 54% EBITDA margins. EWS is our largest, fastest-growing and most valuable business, and Rudy and his team remain focused on delivering outsized growth. USIS also delivered a strong quarter with 16% non-mortgage growth and 9% organic non-mortgage growth, offsetting the impact of a sharp over 20% decline in the mortgage market. Sid Singh and his USIS team remain competitive and are winning in the marketplace. International grew for the fourth consecutive quarter with 10% growth in local currency as economies reopen and business activity resumes outside the United States. We have high expectations for International as we move into 2022. We spent the past 3 years building the Equifax Cloud and are now in the early days of leveraging the new and uniquely Equifax Cloud capabilities. As we move into '22 and beyond, we will increasingly realize the top line cost and cash benefits from these new only Equifax Cloud capabilities. As I mentioned earlier, our 2021 M&A has added $300 million of run rate revenue to Equifax. Reinvesting our strong cash flow in accretive and strategic bolt-on M&A is central to our EFX2023 growth strategy. We're now focused on integrating these acquisitions and executing our synergy and growth plans in order to leverage our new data products and capabilities. Our early look at a 2022 financial framework calls for 8% revenue growth and adjusted EPS growth of 14%, assuming a 15% decline in the mortgage market. More importantly, the framework includes strong 14% EFX growth -- core EFX growth. 2022 will be a pivotal year for Equifax as we shift towards leveraging the Equifax Cloud for innovation, new products and growth. And lastly, turning to Slide 24. Many of you have been closely following Equifax for many years and know we've been speaking to you about -- for some time about our plan to have our first Investor Day, which will be our first Investor Day since 2012 and the cyber event. It's been a long time. Let me now turn it over to Dorian, who will give you the details on our November 10 meeting focused on the new Equifax, and then we'll take some questions. Dorian Hare: Thanks, Mark. I'm energized to announce that our Investor Day will take place on November 10 at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time and will be held virtually. We've opened up online registration as of today, and the link to do so on Slide 24 is live. We are very excited to have the opportunity to update you on the progress we have made in making and executing our EFX2023 growth strategy; share with you our long-term financial framework and also our capital allocation plan; speak with you about how we are and will continue to leverage our EFX Cloud capabilities, including by continuing to accelerate our new product innovations; and provide you with overviews of the state of affairs of our business units relayed by their respective leaders. Investor Day will be an important day for our company and stakeholders, and we look forward to speaking with you then. With that, operator, let me open it up for questions. Operator: . Our first questions come from the line of David Togut with Evercore. David Togut: I appreciate the helpful detail in the initial 2022 framework. It appears that you're guiding above consensus for fourth quarter 2021 revenue and for 2022 revenue but somewhat below consensus on earnings per share for both the fourth quarter and for next year. John, you walked through some of the sources of pressure on margin for 2022. But I'm wondering if you could talk more broadly about headwinds and tailwinds so we can understand the variance. Is it really the $50 million, for example, of tech transformation savings that you're reinvesting in the business next year? John Gamble: Yes. Happy to. So again, as a reminder, right, we're talking about increasing EBITDA margins by -- on the order of 200 basis points, so a substantial increase in 2022 versus 2021, yes. And I think the drivers are what we've been talking about all year, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks. We are reducing substantially tech transformation costs, but we are taking a significant amount of that in the order of $50 million and reinvesting it in NPI and other initiatives to drive growth and to deliver the higher revenue growth you're talking about, that you referenced in your question. Also, we do expect now to start seeing benefits, so net reductions in costs from decoms exceeding our cloud costs, and that will ramp as we go through 2022. And then -- but we are seeing some increased costs related to -- related -- in our COGS, as you would normally expect, related to increased costs for people and increased cost for some systems costs that are reducing 2021 EBITDA margins to a degree. That's not actually that unusual, generally speaking. Generally speaking, we see increased cost every year that we manage through high growth. Next year, part of what's happening, obviously, right, is we're seeing substantial negative impacts on our revenue from the weaker mortgage market as well as the reductions in EC -- sorry, in the UC and ERC markets. So that negative drive in revenue is also somewhat negatively impacting our margin expansion. But overall, 200 basis points of margin expansion next year, we think, is really an outstanding performance, especially given the fact that we're seeing such large declines in the mortgage market and then also the declines in the UC and ERC revenue that we talked about on the order of 30%. David Togut: Just as a quick follow-up. In your initial 2022 financial framework, you're guiding to 11.3% core organic revenue growth. Within that number, what is your expectation for EWS organic growth? And how do you think about headwinds and tailwinds for EWS next year? John Gamble: Yes. So I think in terms of the details around how the BUs are going to perform next year, we're going to have to ask you to wait until November 10. But Obviously, we expect EWS to continue to perform extremely well. Mark Begor: You should obviously -- we've been quite clear that we expect Workforce Solutions to grow above the rest of Equifax. So I think you should think about it that way in 2022. I went through -- we've been through many, many times, the multiple levers that Workforce, for example, has as they finish up the year and go into 2022, and records starts at the top of that list. Adding substantial records in the third quarter, those become a benefit through the next year, their new product introductions, continued penetration. There's a lot of levers in that business. USIS, their new deal pipeline is a positive lever going forward. But Workforce is clearly going to be above that -- the rest of Equifax for really as long as we can see in the future from a growth rate standpoint. Operator: Our next questions come from the line of Kevin McVeigh with Crédit Suisse. Kevin McVeigh: Great. Mark, you talked about the vitality index up over 8%. Any sense of where you think that can go to? I mean, obviously, there's been a really significant step-up in the new product innovation. And what that can mean to the organic growth longer term? Mark Begor: It's clearly a priority, Kevin. As you know, since I joined almost 4 years ago and really in the last, call it, 24 months, we've really stepped up our focus on new products. As you know, we've expanded the team. John and I both talked about it in our comments this morning about continuing to invest there. And of course, the cloud transformation is central to that. That's really -- we're going to get great benefits from the cloud around cost, but we really did it to change our competitiveness. And the big piece of that is the ability to bring new products to market that we couldn't do before through multi-data solutions. And that's really where our focus is, and we're in the early days of really leveraging that. So we see real opportunities going forward. We'll certainly talk in depth in our Investor Day in a couple of weeks around our longer-term outlook for new products. But it's an area that we've invested heavily, foundationally in the cloud. You add to that our existing differentiated data assets, which we've expanded substantially this year with the addition of new data solutions from Appriss, from Kount, from Teletrack and then our focus on new products. We believe it's an important lever for delivering strong future growth going forward, and we'll give you much more detail during our Investor Day. Kevin McVeigh: And then just real quick on the customer migrations, it seems like you made a lot of progress on that. Where are you in that process? And then are you seeing any incremental step-up in revenue as these customers have cut over? Like is there any way to think about what the revenue impact has been? Just -- I know it's a hard question, but just like what percentage step-up you're seeing as these customers have converted? Mark Begor: Yes. First on the progress, this is a big undertaking. I think you know that. We talk to you about it every quarter. We try to be quite transparent about the efforts. 2018, '19 and parts of '20 were building the technology. In '20 and '21, we've been heavily focused on implementing that with our customers, the migration. You've seen the great progress. We still got more to do. And we were clear that we expect North America, which is Canada, U.S. and EWS and USIS and, of course, TCS to be substantially complete as we get in 2022 and really complete the migrations next year. So we can see the finish line, but there's still plenty of work to do in the coming months to complete that. With regards to our impact commercially, there's a number of layers on that. And this is another area -- our intent is to go in substantial detail about how we think about that, what we're seeing during our Investor Day. We'll have our Chief Technology leader and product leader, Bryson Koehler, as well as the business unit leaders will talk about that. But you're starting to see some of the early days of that, in our view. The strong core growth, the ability to roll out new products are driving our competitiveness and driving our ability to drive our core growth. And there's no question, when we sit down with customers, we believe we're advantaged having a new tech stack that's in the cloud that can deliver 9-9s of stability, meaning very high, always-on stability, deliver data more quickly to our customers. We can deliver new products to them more quickly. It just changes who we are as a company, and it allows us to be a different company. So it's quite central to how we think about the new Equifax going forward, and it will be central to our long-term growth framework that we'll share with you in a couple of weeks. Operator: Our next questions come from the line of Kyle Peterson with Needham & Company. Kyle Peterson: Just wanted to touch on the U.S. auto market. I know there's been a lot of concerns over chip shortages and supply constraints potentially impacting auto credit. Thinking out that it's been a little bit of a headwind to Canada, but what are you guys seeing in the U.S., particularly in the USIS segment for auto credit? Mark Begor: Yes, similar, we could have and should have commented on that in the U.S. also. There's no question that the supply shortages are impacting the ability for consumers to identify cars or get cars, new and used and then, of course, the financing that comes with that and the business we get from that. What's been offsetting that to some regard, not fully, but is our continued penetration of new products and new solutions, like Workforce Solutions continuing to grow the use of TWN data in the auto space has been a positive. Would you add anything, John? John Gamble: No, I'd say that covers it. And we're -- the good news is we're continuing to grow in USIS and auto on an organic basis even in the headwinds of the difficult market. But yes, it certainly isn't at the pace that we expected when we started the year. Kyle Peterson: Got it. That's helpful. And then I guess just a follow-up on EWS. Obviously, good to see really strong record growth in TWN and continued share gains. Moving forward, how should we think about records growth? I know you guys mentioned a few additional payroll processing partnerships in the pipeline. But how should we think about records and kind of a greenfield between some of these alternative data sources like gig workers and pension versus traditional W-2 records that you guys are going to see as prospects? Mark Begor: Yes. It's obviously an important focus of Rudy and the Workforce Solutions team. You've seen continued success there. And remember, we've got 2, really, levers for growth. First, our Employer Services business, which is large and comprehensive as we've delivered new solutions to HR managers around I-9 or HSA or W-2 or WOTC, all the other services. We access payroll records. So that's a very powerful engine for us to go to individual companies to obtain records. And of course, we feel like we have some real momentum in adding the payroll processors that are not with us and going after the traditional nonfarm payroll. There's still 60 million-plus consumers or individuals that are available for us in the traditional nonfarm, and we're chasing that. So that's one. And of course, with records being up 12% in the quarter, that is a very strong lever for growth that translates pretty directly into revenue because of higher hit rates. As you point out, there's also a larger universe, the nonfarm payroll, the 160 million, 170 million that are in nonfarm payroll, the gig workers as well as pension recipients. Those are 2 big areas. There's 40 million to 50 million gig workers. So we're working different strategies to obtain those records and then the same with pension recipients. So there's a long runway from our roughly 60% of nonfarm payroll. If you include self-employed and gig in there, it's much less than the 60% to continue to grow our records, which is a very unique business growth lever for our business to continue to add new data assets because, as you know, in our system-to-system integrations in Workforce Solutions, we're getting the inquiries. We can only fulfill those that we have records on. And as we grow our records, they become monetized tomorrow afternoon. So that's very powerful. And the scale of Workforce gives us the ability to have large, dedicated teams both on the partnership side and on the direct side through Employer Services to continue to grow our records. And we'll likely talk a little bit at Investor Day about our International expansion, which, as you know, we're already in Canada, Australia and India. And those businesses are also growing their records, leveraging the core tech stack that we have from Workforce Solutions in the U.S. but also relationships that we have, either with multinationals or with payroll processors and, of course, growing those records locally. So big, big focus and big opportunity going forward. When you think about records, I think about us being in kind of middle innings still as far as the opportunity for Workforce Solutions. And these take time. The payroll processor we signed last week, we were probably talking to them for 3 years. It takes time to get organized around that. But there's real momentum particularly in that area of acquisition because so many others have signed up with Equifax and are having a positive experience. We're seeing real momentum there in adding other processors. Operator: Our next questions come from the line of George Mihalos with Cowen and Company. Georgios Mihalos: I appreciate you're willing to go out to 2022 in this environment. Very helpful as always. I guess, first question for me, John, if we can kind of circle back to the first question, just as it relates around margins for '22. I think you had said previously savings from redundancies and obviously, the tech transformation, we're going to be about, call it, $150 million. You're reinvesting $50 million of that now, it sounds like, so net $100 million. That roughly, by my math, gets us to kind of the 36% margin at sort of the high end, the 200 basis point increase. Is the reason why margins aren't expected to be higher than that, that the natural margin expansion within the business is being offset by some dilution from M&A and just sort of higher inflation-related expenses as it relates to wages? Is that roughly the way to think about it? John Gamble: Yes. So George, as I walked through in my comments, right, so you're absolutely right. So we indicated we were going to -- we would improve our cost structure by -- on the order of $100 million by taking down transformation costs. And then we also said we'd improve our cost structure as we drove net savings, right, as decom and other cost reduction efforts drove us -- or exceeded cloud. And so we absolutely have indicated we're going to deliver on those savings, and we're still committed to delivering substantial savings in both of those areas in 2022 and beyond. But you are correct. Also, as I mentioned in my comments, we're reinvesting a substantial portion of that $50 million in new development and new development-related activities. Also, if you think about what's going on, given the fact that we're seeing a 600 basis point headwind, like the natural growth that you'd see in our underlying business that has the very high variable margins, that's somewhat lower than you would see in a period in which mortgage is not as negative as you're talking about. And you're correct, right, we're getting a nice bump from growth in acquisitions next year. But the EBITDA margins on those acquisitions in their first year is substantially lower than the contribution margin we get by growing our internal data assets. So when you kind of line all that stuff up and you include the fact that we are seeing cost increases as we do every year, right, that's certainly something we see every year, but there is a tighter labor market, so there's an expectation that some of those cost increases will be greater. When you line all those items up, you end up at about a 200 basis point increase is where we're comfortable talking about right now. Also, I just want to remind everybody, 200 basis points, right, and again, a 6% reduction in mortgage and UC, ERC is really a substantial improvement. We feel very good about delivering that. And so hopefully, the investment community can look at it in that vein. Mark Begor: And George, I would add to that, we'll obviously talk about a long-term framework for revenue and margins in a couple of weeks. And we've been quite clear that we see a lot of ability to grow the top line -- or we're confident in our ability to grow our top line long term at above-market level as well as expand our margins. And we've also been very clear that while we have the ability to expand margins over the long-term basis, we're also going to invest in the business. We have the ability to invest in new products. And obviously, the tech transformation, which we're completing, it has really high leverage in driving the top line. So we'll continue to have that balance going forward of expanding margins while investing in the future of Equifax. Georgios Mihalos: Okay. Great. I appreciate that because I think that's what's weighing on the stock this morning. So really, really appreciate you are breaking it down like that. And then just quickly, Mark, I think if I caught it correctly, you talked about as it relates to record growth going after some more of these -- what I think of as more unbanked individuals, gig workers and the like. Can you talk about the challenges or how you go about sourcing data from that constituency as opposed to traditional W-2 worker and the like? Is it going to require sort of a different effort in terms of going after like fintechs to partner with? Or how are you thinking about that? Mark Begor: Yes. First, our primary focus is to continue to grow W-2 income kind of payroll records, and you see that we've had strong success in that over the last couple of years. And certainly again in the quarter, we're continuing to add to that. There's still a long runway there. When you think about 60 million, 70 million of additional individuals that are not in our data set that are inside of that, so that's kind of a primary focus. And then as you point out, we're expanding into gig. Some of the same relationships we have, companies process on their own contractor payroll, we'll be able to pick that up. Some payroll processors have kind of self-employed solutions where there's an ability to pick up data that way. There's other HR software providers that will help us through partnerships lead to some of those kind of records. And of course, the pensioner income at 20 million to 30 million comes from individual companies that process their own pension income or other companies that do that for companies. So we've got a multifaceted approach on that. Really, the point we make in identifying that is that our lens is wider now, and there's still a long runway of this important lever to grow records Workforce Solutions. As you know, we don't talk about adding data assets in our other businesses. What's unique about Workforce is that it's only a decade old, and it only has 60% of nonfarm payroll, so there's a ton of room to grow. And then that gets bigger, as we both pointed out, as you add gig and pension into that space. Operator: Our next questions come from the line of Toni Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Toni Kaplan: I wanted to start with Appriss. At the time of the acquisition, you had talked about strong accretion in '22 from that deal along with the Health e(fx) and Teletrack acquisitions. I guess, how much is embedded in your '22 EPS expectations from the deals? And maybe you could help with some of the assumptions behind the signific
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Equifax Inc. (NYSE:EFX) Earnings Report Highlights

  • Earnings Per Share (EPS) of $2.12, aligning with estimates and showing growth from the previous year.
  • Reported revenue of $1.42 billion fell short of the estimated $1.44 billion.
  • Valuation ratios such as the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 55.08 and price-to-sales ratio of 5.55 reflect high market expectations and investor confidence.

Equifax Inc. (NYSE:EFX) is a leading global data, analytics, and technology company, known for its comprehensive credit reporting services and data analytics capabilities. The company competes with major credit reporting agencies like Experian and TransUnion, operating across various segments including Workforce Solutions, US Information Solutions, and International.

On February 6, 2025, Equifax reported an EPS of $2.12, which was in line with the estimated EPS of $2.12. This performance marks a positive trend, with the company having reported an EPS of $1.81 in the same quarter of the previous year, indicating a growth in earnings. However, Equifax's actual revenue of approximately $1.42 billion fell short of the estimated $1.44 billion, according to Zacks Investment Research.

The company's strong performance in the fourth quarter of 2024 was driven by robust growth across its various segments, despite missing revenue targets. The price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 55.08 and the price-to-sales ratio of 5.55 suggest high market expectations for future earnings growth and reflect investor confidence in its revenue-generating capabilities.

Further financial metrics such as the enterprise value to sales ratio of 6.44 and the enterprise value to operating cash flow ratio of 27.23 provide insights into Equifax's valuation relative to its revenue and cash flow generation. The earnings yield of 1.82% offers a perspective on the return on investment for shareholders. Additionally, Equifax's debt-to-equity ratio of 1.11 indicates a moderate level of debt compared to its equity, while the current ratio of 0.88 suggests potential challenges in covering short-term liabilities with short-term assets.

Equifax Inc. (NYSE:EFX) Sees Positive Analyst Outlook Amid Strategic Expansions and Innovations

  • The consensus target price for Equifax Inc. (NYSE:EFX) has been steadily increasing, indicating growing analyst optimism.
  • Strategic international expansions and innovations in fraud detection and identity verification are key drivers of Equifax's positive outlook.
  • Equifax's strong performance in non-mortgage businesses and anticipated growth in mortgage revenue due to potential interest rate cuts are bolstering confidence.

Equifax Inc. (NYSE:EFX) is a prominent player in the information solutions and human resources business process automation outsourcing industry. The company operates through three main segments: Workforce Solutions, U.S. Information Solutions (USIS), and International. These segments provide a variety of services, such as employment and income verification, credit information and scoring, fraud detection, and identity verification. Equifax serves a wide range of clients across industries like financial services, healthcare, and government, and has a global presence.

The consensus target price for Equifax's stock has been on an upward trajectory over the past year. A month ago, analysts set the average price target at $320.50, up from $317.18 a quarter ago, and significantly higher than the $299.89 target from a year ago. This trend suggests growing optimism among analysts about Equifax's stock performance, as highlighted by the recent strong quarterly earnings report. The company's robust performance in its Workforce Solutions and USIS segments has likely contributed to this positive outlook.

Equifax's strategic expansion in international markets, particularly in Asia and Latin America, is another factor driving analyst confidence. This expansion is expected to fuel future growth, as evidenced by the anticipated revenue growth in Europe and Latin America for the third quarter of 2024. Analyst Georgios Mihalos from Cowen & Co. has set a price target of $295, reflecting a positive outlook for Equifax's international ventures.

Innovations in fraud detection and identity verification are also bolstering Equifax's competitive position. The company's investment in advanced technologies is likely to enhance its service offerings, contributing to the optimistic target price outlook. Equifax's strong growth in non-mortgage businesses and expected recovery in mortgage revenue further support this positive sentiment, as indicated by the 'Strong Buy' rating and a one-year price target of $360 per share.

Equifax's recent achievements, such as an 8% organic revenue growth in the second quarter and a notable 13% increase in non-mortgage sectors, demonstrate its resilience and adaptability. Despite a decline in mortgage credit inquiries, the company has maintained strong performance. The anticipated interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve are expected to boost Equifax's mortgage revenue and overall Workforce Solutions, potentially accelerating growth from fiscal year 2025 onwards, as supported by analyst Georgios Mihalos.

Equifax Stock Plunges 9% After Q1 Results

Equifax (NYSE:EFX) shares tumbled more than 9% in premarket trading Thursday following the company's announcement of second-quarter and full-year financial guidance that didn't meet analysts' forecasts.

In its fiscal first quarter of 2024, Equifax reported earnings per share (EPS) of $1.50, beating the consensus estimate of $1.44. However, its revenue for the quarter was $1.39 billion, slightly below the expected $1.4 billion.

For the upcoming fiscal second quarter, Equifax expects its adjusted EPS to be between $1.65 and $1.75, which is below the analyst forecast of $1.86. The company also anticipates revenue for the quarter to be between $1.41 billion and $1.43 billion, which falls short of the expected $1.44 billion.

Looking ahead to the full year of 2024, Equifax predicts adjusted EPS to range from $7.20 to $7.50, whereas analysts had projected $7.64. The company maintained its full-year revenue forecast, expecting it to be between $5.67 billion and $5.77 billion, slightly below the analyst consensus of $5.8 billion.

Equifax Posts Q3 Miss Due to Weaker Mortgage Market

Equifax (NYSE:EFX) reported its third-quarter results, which fell below Wall Street expectations, primarily driven by a weaker U.S. mortgage market.

In the third quarter, the company reported revenue growth of 6% to reach $1.319 billion, slightly missing the Street estimate of $1.33 billion. Adjusted EPS increased by 2% to $1.76, also falling short of the Street estimate of $1.79.

For the full year, Equifax revised its revenue guidance downward by $44 million to $5.256 billion, and its adjusted EPS guidance was lowered by $0.31 to $6.67 per share. These figures also fell below the Street expectations of $5.29 billion and $6.91, respectively.

Equifax anticipates the challenges in the U.S. mortgage market, driven by current high-interest rates, to persist in the fourth quarter. As a result, the company now forecasts a 34% decline in Equifax mortgage credit inquiries for the full year, which is a 3% reduction from its previous forecast.

Equifax Inc Investor Day Takeaways

Analysts at RBC Capital provided their views on Equifax Inc. (NYSE:EFX) following the Investor Day, where the company unveiled its long-term financial framework, which came in slightly below the analysts’ expectations.

The brokerage sees cloud transformation driving sustainable top-line growth moving forward in the 8-12% range (7-10% organic) in combination with around 39% EBITDA margins, around $1.9 billion in FCF, and EPS of $12.75 by 2025. While the $12.75 figure came in modestly below expectations of $15, the analysts believe the company has baked in conservatism. Bottom line, RBC Capital sees the cloud transformation and technological leadership driving further upside to conservative estimates. With greater visibility and confidence into the longer-term revenue and earnings growth outlook, which should help the stock re-rate higher, the brokerage increased its price target to $294 from $270, maintaining its sector perform rating.