First Advantage Corp (FA) September 9, 2026 Conference Transcript

Good afternoon. Welcome to Citi's TMT conference. My name is Pete Christensen, covering tech services for Citi Equity Research. For this session, I am joined by Joel Smith, president of First Advantage Corp., along with Stephen Marks, CFO. Welcome back, Stephen. Great to have you, Joel. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. So this is, I think, one of the better performing stocks, at least in our group, in the last few weeks, certainly Q2 results. But I do want to backtrack a little bit here. I think since we last spoke, sterling synergies are nearly fully actioned at this point. It leverages down to 3.7. Base growth positive again. F.A. joined the S&P small cap 600. What's the single business biggest change in the business that investors might be underappreciating, you think?

Well, it's hard to pick one. Those are all probably pretty good events that have all happened over the last 12 months or so. But I think the consistency of the business results is probably number one, right? I think, you know, you came out of the last number of years and there's been, you know, wild swings in what's either perceived or actually happening in the macro. Obviously, we have an acquisition and leverage moved around. And then a lot of other just noise in the system, whether that be from the markets themselves, whether that be, you know, big IPOs, you know, big, big other events going on, AI, the storylines that came out earlier this year. But I think the consistency of the first advantage results, certainly over the last three or four quarters, where, to your point, base growth at the end of last year was effectively flat. Now it's turned positive. Our upsell, cross-sell, a new logo, so our go-to-market momentum really powering growth. 17% new logo upsell, cross-sell last year in Q4. Double digits consistently in Q1 and Q2 this year. very consistent for a number of years, our retention levels at 96 plus percent. So the fact that we've been able to perform that consistency through the noise, and then you have all of those other compounding effects of getting the synergy values flowing through our EBITDA and profitability, getting cash flow now rebalanced after the acquisition and getting leverage marched down. So I think that just that consistency of the results through the noise, And then you're starting to see, I think, the markets reflect a little bit of that. Obviously, the S&P inclusion back in June was a nice little milestone event to cap that off. But I just think that overall consistency, despite everything that everyone is sensing and hearing and the reliability of BLS data and all this other noise, our ability to perform very consistently and positively through all that has been the number one driving factor.

So let's dig a little bit deeper into two-key results. So roughly half of the 70% base growth that kind of came from episodic re-screening, reshaping initiatives that you expect to normalize somewhat, I guess, in Q4. Excluding that, what underlies some of the confidence that you have that you have a structurally healthier base versus what you had in 2025?

Yeah, I think, look, we've been talking about this for a number of quarters. and over the last couple of years there's always been a couple really good you know verticals in our set and there's been a couple laggards and that's that's balanced out to this slightly negative number that we've had the last number of years i think a couple of of big you know changes has been the good guys have gotten stronger and the laggards have started to just stabilize down and then when you've got you know really good demand that we talked about this earlier upstairs from you know your blue collar verticals like you know for us that would be retail, transportation, which is a lot of home delivery and logistics. Our industrials vertical has been doing phenomenally well. Joelle reminded me how great our staffing was doing earlier today as well. So when you have your core base doing really well and there's fewer laggards, you know, international has been growing, you know, for eight quarters in a row, you get to what compounds are really good. So if you break down our numbers, right, you know, that 7% number that we posted on base growth in Q2, roughly 50% is related to those kind of customer-specific initiatives. But that also means you got roughly three, three and a half percent growth coming from core base, which is a great number in long term.

That's above your two to three, which you've talked about.

Correct. And that's and that's like you get all those those verticals stabilizing and growing all at the same time. And you get some good runway out of that. So I think it's, you know, being a diversified vertical base, having diversified geographies. And then, you know, we talked about upstairs, you know, an enterprise customer focus on these large enterprises that have much more stability. S&B waivers a lot more quarter to quarter and month to month. These large enterprises have much more strategic long-term mindset. So add up both of those kind of concepts and you get to, you know, good, diversified, stable growth. To your point, you know, those customer initiatives, it's hard to underwrite them being long-term. And certainly we don't know if BASE will be full 3% for the rest of the year, but we certainly feel better about where BASE is today than we did six months ago when we put out our original guidance for the year.

What's the benefits of the Sterling acquisition coming to life?

Well, look, we've seen that diversification play out in our hands over the last year or two. There was quarters where retail and transportation were down right after we were talking about the tariff noise last year. That would have been, not a death sentence, but that would have been really bad news for just the traditional first advantage vertical set. Likewise, we've been talking about some sluggishness in health care. That would have been a big struggle for Sterling. We're much more balanced and consistent now, and that's why you're seeing that less quarter-to-quarter volatility and a more stable glide path.

A little bit more on the growth algorithm here. So the 12%, 13% combined upsell, cross-sell, new logo contribution leaned heavily on in 2025, go lives, that fully annualized by Q4. How deep is your late-stage pipeline once, I guess, that vintage starts rolling off?

Yeah, absolutely. So we're feeling really good about pipeline in general. It's actually the largest it's really ever been. And the nice part about the pipeline is it's across all the verticals. So it's not being carried by one or another. The products that we currently have are resonating across all verticals and all regions. So when you look at kind of the go forward plan, we feel really good about where we are with implementations, late stage, and annual contract value, which is continuing to improve across the base because we just have more products to sell and more interest in those products because our customers are very focused on risk right now. That's kind of the number one priority.

I'm going to get, let's do a deep dive on digital identity in a second. But I guess overall package density is your top upsell driver here, global expansion number two. As those mature, like what's the next leg of growth? Is it new screening types, monitoring, post-onboard, post-hire, or something else?

Yeah, well, package density has been, and we don't see any reason why it won't continue to be our biggest growth driver. Customers are always trying to figure out better ways to manage their risk. So when you look at that package density, we are going deeper and broader across, you know, regions. And whether we like it or not, the world isn't getting, you know, nicer. And so as long as risk continues to be this top priority, which it is for, you know, all of our customers, we actually just put out our global trends report. And for the second year in a row, the top buying signal is risk. And then 89% of the 5,000 people that were interviewed say that they plan on increasing package density over the next two years. So this is not something that's going away. You take that complemented by the global expansion, which you just talked about, which we absolutely are seeing a big driver in. That's U.S.-based organizations that have expansion into other regions globally and also organizations that are headquartered in countries outside of the U.S. that are expanding into the U.S. And they all want to centralize. They want everything consistent. They want a standard risk profile.

And when you have a package suite as dense as ours, it just makes it really easy for them to come for a one-stop shop. the only other thing i'd add too is every time we win a new logo we create more white space for upsell cross-sell because generally speaking we win a new customer and it's it they start off with a a smaller set of our suite of services and then that creates a a path for our customer success and sales teams to be able to grow into those accounts and sell more of cross-selling to other products you know expand geographically with global expansion so it's kind of a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy the more success we have with new logo it creates more opportunity for upsell cross-sell.

It's perfect land and expand. It is igniting. So back on REST-JOL, digital identity is now a C-suite and a board-level conversation. How do you think about converting that access into greater wallet share? And what might be perhaps maybe like a standalone metric that you can perhaps maybe at some point later and talk about that specific area?

Yeah. So digital identity is the hottest topic with all of our current customers and as well as prospects. And the way we position it, it's really kind of the tip of the spear when you think about it from a opportunity and go to market perspective. We now include it as part of any and every background check. And so it's not a do you want this and it's more this comes with because it really is necessary in order to conduct a thorough background check. You really do need to validate that the person is who they say they are. They don't have a deep fake. They don't have a synthetic identity. And it really does come a compliment to kind of what we're overall selling. And so when we package that up, it's included kind of in that package density number. And we really are seeing that customers really aren't differentiating between the two. It really is just kind of one package and really just an add-on to what they're already buying.

That's a great go-to-market point right there. I think if we were to think about your competitive tech set there on the identity side, you know, and I think First Advantage is cited at $10 billion incremental TAM in this category of digital identity and fraud. Is the competitive set or the know-how, is that specific to First Advantage IP? Is that something special, I guess, about your offering maybe versus some of the other competitors? Or is it just a function of the scale that First Advantage has, or maybe both?

Sure, yeah, both. Scale certainly doesn't hurt, right? So that really helps kind of with the know-how, the benchmarking, education, all of that. And that was kind of the early stage. I mean, this is something we've had out in the market for multiple years. And so, but recent, you know, within the last 18, 12, 18, 24 months, headlines have really become, you know, a friend in the marketing, not that we planned it that way, but obviously not hiring a North Korean bad actor and some other things have really hit the market and have helped us kind of with that, you know, go to market conversation. But when it comes to, you know, the TAM itself, we really do see them kind of merging. And so when you think about the differentiation that we have, we have all the data. We have over a billion proprietary records of data. We understand kind of the whole work-life cycle of millions of people. And so when you take the tech, which we have a great partner network of technology, And not all tech is created equal. Some are better in some regions, some are better in certain industries. And so when you couple the technology, which is more of the biometric data, so that's the facial recognition, that's the driver's license or passport information. And then you couple that with the biographic data, which we have, which is all of the underpinning data on that individual. and you couple that together that's what makes our product so valuable because it's really difficult to fake both of those things and when you have a platform like ours that can connect the dots across the life cycle so you can connect is that person who is interviewing for that job the same person that you are now running the background check on is the same person that starts on day one where you have to run an I-9 or a right-to-work check, you need to be able to validate at every stage of the cycle. And that is really where our differentiation comes into play. We're the only platform that connects those dots, including that biometric and biographic data.

Steven, you know, a lot of info services providers talk about value-added pricing all the time, you know, adding more features, functionality to drive pricing. A lot of it's nice to have. This seems like a must-have. So it seems to me like there's a lot of runway here for pricing at some point, or is it right now about land and expand a little bit?

Well, it's always about both. I mean, look, we feel good about the margins that Digital Identity has as a standalone product. So to Joel's point, when you include it in a package, it just makes that package better. So we certainly don't give it away, and we feel good about our pricing model. And obviously, you know, we feel good about the margins it creates. You don't have to go buy third-party data like a criminal check or a verification. So it's margin accretive overall to the business. So overall, not only is it driving, to Joelle's point, great go-to-market, competitive differentiation and growth. It's going to ultimately provide some margin accretion as it becomes a bigger mix of the business.

I do want to talk a little bit about AI in-house. You recently moved customer care chat all in-house rather than using a third-party model. Kind of what drove that decision? And where else? maybe fulfillment, smart hub routing, sales enablement, do you see the best near-term kind of ROI from proprietary AI?

Yeah. So we have, we're very excited about that. This has been an area of focus for us for years now. Click, chat, call, as you mentioned, we rolled out a number of years ago. And really that was moving people from more of a, you know, phone base and email base to a chat. And we rolled that out a few years ago. And then last year we did it because Sterling actually did not have that. So the entire Sterling customer base also got chat. So that was like another kind of level up for us. And then recently, as you pointed out, using kind of a third party AI tool, an intelligence tool, when you bring that in-house, one, obviously you can control the experience much better. But two, you can use kind of your own internal data and knowledge base to create a much better experience for those folks calling in. And so that has allowed us to not only save money, as Stephen always really likes to do, but it really improves that experience. So we're getting higher satisfaction rates. We're deflecting more because we're able to use our own knowledge repository. We've been doing this for decades. So we know a lot about what our customers and candidates need. And it just improves that conversion time for them to get the answer they need really quickly.

Well, I think, Joel, too, besides it saving money, I think to your point, it's not just customer care. It's starting to expand into other places in the fulfillment functions, in the cost of sales part of the P&L, obviously in product and tech and how we build our product and using it there, and even down through SG&A, finding ways to get more yield, get more efficiency, get more scalability. And look, we're kind of open-minded when it comes to vendor selections. We'll use things internally where it makes sense. We'll go to third parties where the tech's just better and more turnkey. And they haven't gotten overly aggressive pricing models, too. When they turn those ways, luckily, we have the tech expertise in-house to build some of our own things. So we're kind of, I would say, a hybrid model of using the best athlete, if you will, kind of the same approach we took for the synergies in terms of where we're using AI and whose tooling we're using for the AI. But it's throughout the P&L.

It seems like you're very methodical about this, taking your time. I mean, you do have some implementations that are extending into 27. Walk me through some of that decisioning and, I guess, that discipline as you think about enabling more and more AI functionality throughout the firm.

Well, I think almost two different issues. One is how we're going to use AI and making sure it is methodical to an extent, especially on the fulfillment front because of the FCRA and the compliance overhang in our industry of making sure we do it right, right, making sure that we don't overstep, because there are some regulatory and compliance limitations of when the automation has to stop, when a human and a decision maker has to pick it up, because in some states, the law prohibits AI on the hiring process. When we become brought into that, the FCRA in and of itself has rules and regulations that that don't prohibit, but certainly limit the application of automation technologies through its workflow. So it obviously creates some insulation into the industry. And we actually, you know, like that, that was obviously helpful back in February and March when that was the storyline. But we're working to make sure that we can automate what is reasonable to be automated. You know, then on the other side, to your point, you know, we've, you know, like Joe always mentioned, we've got a great pipeline, the deals have just gotten a little bit more complicated, We're selling bigger deals with more features and it's not really it's separate from the the AI concept But it is taking just a little longer to implement those plus, you know certain verticals there You know they kind of have this coding freeze and hiring freeze and change freeze in the back half of the year So, you know a lot of those with those wins this year We'll start to see trickle into q4 But we're more excited about that growth opportunity and into early next year But look we've raised guidance and feel good about growth rate So we don't think Q4 will be a slouch. Obviously, we got some really big comps in Q4 that it'll compare against when we grew to my earlier point, 17% new logo upsell, cross-sell. Had a monster Q4 last year that we're benchmarking against. But, you know, overall, business health is really good and setting up, you know, gets some good early year success next year.

We've heard from other info services providers, by the way, just to add in, who are selling AI-enabled kind of solutions. The sales process, the implementation process is taking longer. This is all new to everybody. Legal departments are taking deep, hard looks into these things. So it is still, it's great to see, though, yes, it is stretching the implementation or the sales cycle a bit longer, but you still feel confident about closing some of these new enablements.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, look, we talked about in last Irving's call, 20 enterprise new logo upsell cross-sell bookings. You know, that's up from 17, you know, that we've been running the last few quarters. the market demand is there and the team is doing a really good job of selling it. And now we just, you know, there's some hard work of getting those, getting the attention from the customers to get kind of the plumbing laid so we can start generating the revenue. But that revenue will come and, you know, we feel good about how it sets us up for the first part of next year.

Again, a nice difference between nice to have and must have. Joelle, I do want to ask you a hot button question here. Scott talked about the AI impact on hiring as highly overblown. And I think everybody in this room will be interested to hear your perspective here. Are you seeing any early signs of AI compressing white collar hiring at specific verticals?

Yeah, I mean, there definitely was overblown for sure. There's even been a number of articles out there saying that it was AI washing a lot of that. And when you talk to our customers, that's our best indicator is our customers. We talk to our customers all the time. We do thousands of, you know, connects monthly, quarterly, whatever, and we're talking to the senior execs there. So the short answer is it's still a very neutral, positive tone. We don't hear a lot of restrictions on hiring, changes in philosophy. Are they all using it? Absolutely. Are they experimenting? Yes. Are they, you know, rolling it out like we have? Yes. As far as constriction, we haven't seen that. We are seeing an uptick with some of the blue collar hiring though. That's been our bread and butter for a really long time. The hourly worker, the more wage worker roles has always been a high turnover, high movement industry. That churn in the market is always very good for our business. We're also seeing a big trend with job stacking. That is changing pretty dramatically. And this is an intentional thing where people are working multiple jobs. And so they may be doing a nine to five job Monday through Friday, but then in the evenings or the weekends, they're doing some type of gig work or something else. And when that happens, they need to get screened on the platform for the gig worker. They need to get screened for their day job. And so all of these trends are working really well for our business and I think you know some of it is intentional with these workers because they aren't making as much money as they need to there are increasing gas prices and consumer inflation and things like that right so like I'm not sure that this is something that we're gonna see go away anytime soon but the general sentiment across our enterprise customer base is you know business as usual they have to run their business They're not going to get caught up in week-to-week headlines. They're going to run their business they've been running for decades.

It's also ironic because, I mean, when those headlines are coming around, we service a lot of those customers. And you'd read the headline, and then you go look at the revenue volumes and go, well, they're up. So the cuts are, you know, we've always told people, you know, don't read the headline. Read the second and third paragraphs because it's they're cutting X number of jobs. And then, oh, to fund investment in all these other areas. And to Joelle's point, that creates this bigger churn in that industry. So for us, that's a good customer that year because they're getting rid of some jobs, replacing them with other jobs. That's all new screening population that wouldn't have been there before, which is great for base.

For the benefit of our audience solely, maybe myself included, what about specifically in financial services?

Yeah. So financial services has been an interesting trend with what we're seeing is consolidation. So there's global consolidation kind of across the board where we've seen large global banks and some others that have had individual kind of vendors across regions or individual vendors for a specific product. product like one person would use a company for an i9 they'd use one for like an interview tool one for a background screen and then one maybe for monitoring kind of longer term we're seeing all that consolidate right now and so that trend is obviously helping us we have a great product suite where we can sell all of that in in kind of under one umbrella but we are seeing a little bit of flat to slightly positive with financial services in particular this quarter. But that ebbs and flows. And financial services is always kind of that tip of the spear. So when we saw a lot of the identity stuff start popping, it was all the banks and all the financial services started making all the phone calls to us. So I think as we see things normalize, we'll see you guys kind of have that tip of the spear.

Okay, I'm going to ask you that question every quarter going forward. Okay. I do want to dig more into some other interesting verticals and dynamics going on. Healthcare showed only a minimal decline this quarter, despite some uncertainty there in that vertical. How do you see that trending in 27? And then on the other end of that, you have aerospace and defense, obviously benefiting from some tailwinds there. if you could just kind of juxtapose what you're seeing maybe in those two verticals, what you're hearing from clients.

Sure. Yeah. So Stephen talked about it, but the fact that we have this like wide diversification of our vertical mix is so great right now. And we're, our verticals now are large enough where we actually have like sub verticals that are kind of starting to really show. And so I'll take healthcare first. We have definitely seen trends in health care where, you know, yes, it is slightly positive this past quarter here, but if you look at the sub-verticals we have in there, we have acute care, post-acute care, pharma, and then we also have health care staffing. The Medicare and Medicaid challenges that a lot of these hospital systems have started to see over the last several quarters is manifesting in lower hiring volumes. Where we've seen the volumes pick up is on the health care staffing side. So where you would see more short-term nursing care, shorter-term positions being hired because they need staff. You need doctors and nurses in these hospitals. You know, the health care system is stressed right now because you have more people that need care than people that can give the care. So when you look at that vertical, you're seeing we may lose a little bit in the actual like hospital acute care side but we pick it up on the deep entrance we have with healthcare staffing and so that's kind of where we feel good about that but we do watch it and i think once medicare and medicaid come back a little bit you know if it comes back i'm not a crystal ball i certainly don't know what's going to happen in government policy but one would think we would need to get the hospital systems back up and running in a in a high efficiency way you know we will we will probably see that normalize out too um and then very similar with industrials it's been a it's been a high growth area for us or you know pipeline is really strong there too we're excited about it but when you saw some of the government funding get reduced and pulled back from like education um which is kind of a sub vertical inside of that group because it's industrials and gov ed we saw it pick up in aerospace and defense and so that's where a lot of the investment and funding went so you've got the defense contractors and you've got a lot of that so it's really interesting to see kind of the dynamics of where a policy changes in washington and then you see the hiring dynamics kind of change but because we have such a deep vertical you know depth and and breadth across we we can see it pop and and and normalize in the

other so that we're managing through those ebbs and flows and that's one of the greatest things i think we got out of the sterling acquisition is just being able to have kind of that broad base you know vertical um depth and plus three percent base growth and knowing that yeah absolutely i do want to get steven i want to talk about uh operating leverage here a little bit digital identity monitoring, reportedly carry better unit economics and legacy screening, how much of your path to 31, 32% adjusted EBITDA margins by 28 depends on product mix versus synergy capture and automation you believe?

Yeah, I mean, how we get to that number is kind of a few different facets. So certainly synergy capture, right? So we've actioned a healthy portion of the synergies. there's still a little bit more to go that we'll get through the rest of this year and in Q4, which obviously means you'll get that rollover benefit into your P&L in 2027. So that's certainly a function of it. But being able to scale our revenue growth is obviously a big piece of it. And I think you've seen that the last couple of quarters, especially with more broad-based growth, where instead of, you know, in Q4, certainly a lot of the growth came from like transportation networks, where just the mix of services, you have to go buy more third-party data for the driver records and some of these other areas relative to the service fee revenue. That mix is stabilized out and you saw our EBITDA margins in Q2 be well ahead of our expectations. So just being able to get that broad-based growth and scaled growth and as we continue to scale our revenue growth, the rest of our P&L is very fixed. We've automated a lot of those things to create scalability and cost of sales. Product and tech is already highly scalable. SG&A also highly scalable. So we can get a lot of leverage just out of the P&L and flow through. Product mix is a little bit of it, but I think it's more just, you know, getting back to broad-based growth that helps you even that out. And then there's still a few other things that, you know, if you kind of go back into first advantage corporate, you know, DNA, there are some just, you know, savings opportunities we have that are unrelated to the synergies. They're just things we need to do as a business, whether it's leverage some AI, which, you know, continuation of our journey of RPA and machine learning and just, you know, making sure we automate what we can. And we still have a few other cost savings areas to go and kind of take care of and address. Unrelated to the acquisition, it's just kind of that P&L debt, if you will, that's kind of been sitting around for a while. So between, you know, scaling growth, getting synergies, and kind of just getting back to good corporate governance, that's kind of our path line to get into that 31% number.

I mean, considering the growth, you haven't added any headcount, which I think is pretty interesting. Well, it's been limited, maybe. But I mean, does that change your, do you think there's a chance that you may rethink incremental margin upside here?

It's a little bit mixed dependence. So I think it really depends on where we think our long-term growth from a vertical standpoint. So certain verticals, when you're growing in a transportation vertical, which is a great vertical, we obviously are beneficiaries of it today. There's certain services you have to offer to that vertical and how you fulfill them and where you have to buy the data and how expensive that data is. There's a little bit of geographic mix, too. The state of New York charges a lot for their data, whereas maybe the state of Missouri charges a lot less. So when we get this broader base growth, that becomes less of a factor. But it's really a matter of just growing and growing in the right areas. And we call it our ideal customer profile and making sure that we're investing in those areas. And we're doing a good job of making sure our strategy aligns to that margin appreciation.

You're closing in on sub three times leverage faster, I think, than most expected. It was also a nice $45 million debt prepayment, suggesting continued focus on deleveraging there. I guess once you cross it, which the glide path kind of looks at some point in 27, how does the capital allocation playbook change in your view? Is it faster buybacks? Is it dividend? Maybe M&A? What's the calculus right now?

Yeah, I think all of those will be on the table. I think we've proven that we're always going to focus on being opportunistic on creating value. Even if you just look at the last six months, I mean, we didn't have, you know, go back and look at our discourse. We didn't have buybacks in that equation, but, you know, we're gifted with good cash flow. And to your point, leverage is flushing out. You know, we always expected it to, but faster than I think, you know, outsiders might have thought it would. So we've got the luxury of a high cash flow generating business and the ability to be flexible with that approach. So we'll be opportunistic, you know, from now till the end of time, at least as far as I'm concerned. You know, as leverage comes down, it allows us to open up the playbook a little wider. You know, certainly there would be opportunity to fund organic growth, inorganic growth, obviously finding ways to create, you know, incremental shareholder value and returns. Our focus right now is getting to that point where we have those luxuries. So for the next little bit of time, we're kind of heads down on how do we create value? How do we get the leverage down? And then just like we decided to buy back shares and look, I hope we don't have the opportunity to buy back shares at under 12 bucks again. But certainly if the market presents opportunities to create shareholder value that way, we'll certainly execute. And look, just because the price is higher doesn't mean we're not necessarily a buyer, but we'll focus on getting leverage to where it needs to go.

And I guess we'll see where our macro will go, right? Who knows? But, I mean, obviously, you're tracking ahead of your 2024 growth algorithm targets for 47% revenue, 9 to 12 adjusted EBITDA CAGR. Right now, we're kind of in, I mean, 160, at least the BLS data was really positive last month. Quits kind of seem flattish right now. and job openings, at least the JOLTS data, which I know we can go back and forth on headlines and all that stuff, which I get. But is there anything in particular macro-wise that you're focusing on that investors should appreciate?

Yeah, I mean, as Joel mentioned, we care a lot less about that data than maybe you'd think. I mean, what our customers are telling us and what their views on the market, on their planning is what's most important to us. You know, we're certainly focused on making sure that we continue to have a diversified, you know, focus on in verticals, larger businesses. So those enterprise size customers, large big market customers that are more stable. And then look, you know, we can't control what they do, but then we can certainly can control where we grow in putting our resources behind areas that provide long-term, you know, growth generation. And then also providing more, you know, products because we could take customers and, you know, provide more more value more products some of these products have a more recurring you know revenue nature to them as well so we think all of that sets us up you know and then having that wide that wide array of verticals allows you to be very diversified and very durable during during all these kind of implied vertical you know fluctuations so feel good about where we're setting cap off joelle 12 next year's conference yeah what are you going to be most excited to talk about?

I think it's still going to be digital identity. I'm not going to lie. It's really an interesting dynamic change in how companies are managing and measuring risk. And we just want to be the company that brings the trust to them to help them manage it. That's great.

Thank you so much, Joelle Smith, Stephen Marks. Always great to have you. Appreciate it. Thank you, guys.