Mobility Global Inc. (MBGL) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Let's get started. I'm very pleased to be joined by Bill Eager, CEO of Mobility Global, as well as Matt Calderon, CFO. Bill and Matt, thank you for being here with us today. Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

So, Bill, I'd like to start with you. Mobility Global began trading as a public separate spinoff from S&P Global on July 1st. Dedicated leadership team, single strategic agenda just focused on automotive. What can Mobility do differently as an independent company that it couldn't do within S&P Global, and where is that focus already showing up in the business? Sure. Thanks, George.

And as you mentioned, we did stand out of S&P Global on July 1, and as you can imagine, there's been quite a bit of excitement throughout the business with 3,500 people in Mobility Global as we go out on our own. I think it's really showed up in two places. The first one being more structural, and then the second one being us really controlling our destiny. So from the structural side, what I would say is a year ago or a year and a half ago, we were five separately run businesses. And so part of this spin process has been bringing those businesses together into one. and leveraging the assets of the individual siloed businesses across the business. And so we're starting to see that show up in a bunch of different places. It's early, you know, but, you know, I have a conference room right outside my office. And, you know, two months ago there were folks from Automotive Mastermind and the Carfax business getting together, building, you know, some joint product plans and really talking about how we can share both data and, you know, brand assets across the customer base for both, especially with the shared customers. Another example would be our plan was to launch the Carfax product in Germany at the beginning of 27. and part of the shift was, you know, our Carfax entity in Europe now leveraging some of the Carfax U.S. platform. And because they're leveraging that platform and some of the folks and some of the expertise, we were able to move that up and we launched Germany in early July. And so those are just two examples. You know, it's a multi-year process, so, you know, I would set expectations that we will see these things coming online, But, you know, it'll be another year or two before we really feel the full effect of being out on our own. You know, and so from a structural standpoint, that's what we're seeing. The other thing is that, you know, S&P was a great parent company. And the four or five years we were with S&P, I always felt like we had a great owner. But when it came to competing for resources, a lot of the investments that S&P made over that period of time we're geared toward their core divisions and investments that multiple divisions could take advantage of. And S&P has many customers that they see show up in multiple divisions. And so now that we're on our own, we're able to go after everything we go after has to do with automotive information. And so, you know, as we prioritize, everything is in, you know, our world, our category, which is great.

Yes. Now, Bill, you've previously noted that the company has more than 90% of revenues that's tied to unique data, proprietary IP analytics that's supported by 177,000 unique data sources, 60 billion vehicle records. As AI makes applications easier to build. What elements of mobility's competitive advantage do you think become more valuable? And how can the company convert those advantages into greater adoption and greater wallet share? Yeah, great question.

And, you know, when I think about it, I think at our core, we're a data company. And, you know, on the Carfax side of our business, we've built the business on unique VIN level data. A lot of that data, we have, you know, partnerships and relationships to get that data, but the majority of it's sitting behind a firewall or a paywall somewhere, so it's not out there readily available for somebody. And, you know, when I think of AI impacting our business, I really do think about it as an accelerant for our business. And we see that showing up, especially in our core assets. If you think of our core assets being our data and our data state, our brands, and then the networks that we have and the way we're embedded in the industry. And I'll just touch on the data and maybe a little bit on the brand. On the data side, the way AI is showing up is I really see it doing three things for us right now one as we ingest data AI is helping us get so much more out of those feeds that we've established over the last 20 30 years and so that you know when I think of building our product in Europe or in some of the countries we've launched there those learnings and those tools and those setups we're able to apply globally now the second is the type of insights we are able to get out of that data so you know we're able to get insights that we never were you know able to get five you know seven years ago and then the third is there's new product opportunities that we have and I'll just give you an example of what I mean traditionally in the Carfax business we've done a really good job of telling people the history of the vehicle but the history can tell you a lot about the future of a vehicle. And what AI allows us to do is start to predict the future of a vehicle and the reliability of that vehicle at a VIN level, right? So, you know, you've always been able to kind of say from a make model, which vehicles are the most reliable? Now, can we get it down to a VIN to where somebody can look at the actual car they're going to buy and understand And in the next three years, should I be preparing for a major repair or a major expense, or is there a low likelihood that that would happen? So that's on the data side. The other thing we're seeing is that where our products show up in the marketplace, especially on the Carfax side, data rarely shows up by itself, right? It's showing up with our brand attached to it. And so in the world we're moving into where people are saying, can I trust this or can I trust that, I'm getting data overload, we're finding that the brand is actually becoming more and more valuable and people want it attached to the data so that that consumer confidence in whatever that data point is remains high because they know where it's coming from.

Right. Matt, let's talk a little bit about medium-term targets. So mobility's medium-term organic revenue growth target is 7.5% to 10%. What needs to improve from current levels to reach that range, and how much of the acceleration should come from the core business versus new solutions versus, say, international expansion?

Yeah, thanks. And we said at our investor day, we gave you a rubric where 5% to 7% of growth from the core, 1% to 2% from new product innovation, and 1% to 2% from international. And that's not just Europe. We have a very large, well-established business in Canada that has a couple of our products, but not the full product suite. And that's on the table. You know, I think it's, you know, we see opportunities across the business, not just in Carfax and Carfax US that Bill talked about globally in Canada and in Europe but on the B2B side as well. I'll just highlight since Bill covered a bunch of the opportunities on the Carfax side some things we're seeing in the B2B space, right? Automotive mastermind product, exceptional product that helps sell cars faster and target customers on behalf of OEMs and dealers. You've got a new product there that's getting a lot of traction where OEMs and dealers are bringing their data together with our data, and it's making it more efficient. So I think the nice thing about our business is they're not one thing, George. We see a lot of opportunity across the business, and as Bill said, now that we are a standalone company, we have the ability to draw assets and resources from across the company and prioritize investment across the company. We're going to run a planning process this year where we have some hypotheses, but best idea wins, and we've got a lot of levers.

And I guess as you look across those three buckets that get you to the medium-term target, where do you see most opportunity to improve over the near to medium term?

I can take that. So, you know, if you think of the three big buckets for us, enhancing our existing products, launching new products, and then our international expansion, We feel like we have, you know, really strong opportunity in all three. I would say that enhancing our existing products and growing that is probably the one that will drive the most short term. We do have new products that were launched in the first half of this year that are being really well received. And so we think those two both are, you know, in the short getting us to the midterm. big drivers. We have a material international business, but it's one that I look at that as a little bit more mid to long term from a growth perspective. I think we said on Investor Day that the international piece might constitute a point or two of the seven and a half to ten. And so the other two are really the big drivers of that growth.

We're pushing across all three fronts. If you think about what we highlighted just in Q2 alone, we launched a homegrown product and something new out of a mastermind, both of which were building into the base subscription, essentially, we're saying to our customers, here's more added value for the base subscription you get. Obviously, more added value hopefully will accrue benefits us in subsequent years. That's one. We launched product and listings. with Nat Allen, that second bucket, and we launched in Germany, that's the third. So, you know, obviously I agree with Bill, but we're going on all fronts, right? And I think the team's energized, and that's really our objective for next year is, you know, how do we filter and prioritize and sequence these range of opportunities? But, you know, not just when mobility, but AI is allowing us to innovate and launch products so much faster, you know, we see significant opportunity.

Bill, let's talk a little bit about competition in the Carfax business. So Carfax has about 40,000 dealer-customer relationships with 36-plus OEM certified pre-owned programs. It's used 28 million times per month. What would you say are the most durable sources of Carfax's competitive advantage, and how are you extending that lead?

Yeah, and I'd start by saying in the Carfax business, you know, we partner with OEMs and dealers to get our information into the hands of consumers. And if you think of the consumer life cycle, a consumer will shop for a car, they'll buy a car, they'll go through a period of time where they own that car and service that vehicle, and then ultimately they're going to sell it. And we see different competitors in each one of those stops around the life cycle. Very good competitors, by the way, and, you know, but different. I would say that we are the one player that is hyper-focused on the automotive information needs of consumers. Our true north in the Carfax business is that consumer, and that consumer drives what we do. And so we obviously pay attention to the competition in each one of those areas, but it really is the needs of the consumer that's driving us. And when I think of our advantage, our advantage comes from those unique assets that we've been building for decades. to address those consumer needs. So if you think of our data state, our data has been purposefully built to answer those consumer questions. Our brand is all about trust and transparency in the consumer space in automotive. When I think of the network and how embedded we are within the industry, we really have, you had mentioned some of the, you know, how it's easier to build an application today. We've been application agnostic for decades where, you know, our differentiation comes from the combo of that brand and data, not the application itself. And so, you know, we're, you know, embedded in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different applications throughout the industry. So, and, you know, we will continue to invest in those. We have found that as we invest in one, it tends to drive the others, and as those assets get stronger and stronger, they are what's feeding our products. They're what's feeding the exchange for the data that we get, and it's at the heart of everything we do. And so as we build those very differentiated strategic assets over time, we think it's what will set us apart from our competitors. at each one of the stops.

Let's stay with Carfax and talk about the go-to-market strategy. So packaging advantage, listings, and service loyalty together lengthened the sales cycle recently, and mobility restored an individual product sales motion in June. What gave you conviction that this was the right change, and what indicators will confirm that the new sales motion is working?

So, George, at the end of last year, what we did is we packaged our products together, and we changed our sales motion, if you will, from selling individual products to selling that package. Our conviction on that offering is still very high, and what we have changed is, one, the path to get there, and then, two, the incentive we give to our sales reps. And so what we found is right out of the gate, the low-hanging fruit signed up for the package. As, you know, time went on, we found more and more dealers that had the two decision-makers in the dealership that had to decide on that package, those that would decide on a listings product and those that would decide on a service loyalty product, weren't always in sync. And one might say, I need six more months or I don't have my budget until November, and this one was ready to go. And our sales incentive was incenting our reps to wait until they were both ready to sign them up on the package. Hindsight's 20-20, you know, we've switched back to where we lead with them individually. If they want to do them both at the same time, that's fine. And then we've changed the sales incentive to match that new approach. And I think that, you know, we're early. You know, we're a couple months in. but I would say that we're fairly confident it was the right decision, and we're headed on the right path.

So related to that, the average Carvax dealer uses about one and a half to two products, and listings and service loyalty retain a significant amount of white space. So what is historically limited product attachment, and what product represents the largest incremental revenue opportunity?

And so, you know, our products build off of each other. So we have our core vehicle history product. That's the Carfax Advantage program. And what that does is that unlocks the data, not just for the vehicle history report, but the data that would power listings or would power the service loyalty product. And that was our flagship product. That's where we started in the vehicle history space. If you think of those other two areas, whether it be the listing area or the service loyalty area, One we got into 10, 12 years ago. One we got into five or six years ago. So we are the new kid on the block in actually both those areas, even though we have the strongest recognized consumer brand and data that nobody else has. So, you know, we've built the listing business, you know, in a fairly measured way over the last 10 years. We've seen nice, consistent growth. We think we have an opportunity to accelerate that and do a lot more in that space. And then on the service loyalty side, you know, we have 53 million consumers that are using our app today to manage their vehicle. In the U.S., we'd like that to be north of 100 million, but there are a billion consumers around the globe that own a vehicle, and, you know, we'd like to help as many of them as we possibly can. And so when I think of those two opportunities, one is on the sales side and one is on the service side. The sales side is more immediate. There's things we can do on the listing side to really drive our revenue over the next 12 to 18 months. On the service loyalty side, we'll continue to gain adoption of that product. Once we have dealers using it, the retention is really high. The value that it delivers is really high. And I think that we will see strong adoption in the franchise dealers in the U.S., but it's also a product that will help us internationally get more and more consumers using us to manage their vehicle. And if our end goal is to help those billion consumers, we're going to want a relationship with as many of them as we possibly can. And so we feel like we're at 53 million and we're just getting started.

And outside of that, we still see growth opportunity, P&Q, in the core vehicle history report. We talked about how we're continuing to evolve and innovate there. We've got a significant market share, but there's more to go. And beyond that, our U.S. consumer business is doing well. And we've got a meaningful set of customers in the banking and insurance industry as well. So I think we tend to focus a lot on the core set, but it's a fairly diversified portfolio where we've got opportunity across the board.

Right, right. You know, the listings business does sound very interesting. If we double-click there, Carfax Car Listings monetizes around 23 million average monthly unique visitors, and Mobility recently launched Showroom as its first premium listing product in the second quarter. How large do you think the listing business could ultimately become, and how are you managing its growth across the broader ecosystem within Carfax?

And, you know, we think we have some unique assets to bring to that space in the Carfax brand and in the data that we can deliver. And, you know, in the U.S. alone, it's a, you know, a space that's north of $3 billion. And so, you know, it's something that, you know, we're not even at 10% of that yet. And so when we look at the assets that we have to bring there, we see a lot of opportunity. and we think we can do it without hurting the consumer experience. As I mentioned earlier, the consumer is our true north, and so you will see things on other listing sites that you don't see on ours. We are testing our way in to a lot of those opportunities to make sure that we don't see a drop in consumer experience, and we think we have a lot of opportunity to do two things. One, drive more traffic to that site, and then convert at a higher level. And so we can take the existing traffic that we have today and we think we can monetize it better than we have to date. And so I think that's why I said short-term, we think that that product gives us good opportunity over the next 12 to 18 months to change the trajectory of that product and the revenue associated with it.

Let's talk about the international piece. It does represent about one to two points of your medium-term growth framework. But recently, you've made launches in Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany. So you're clearly pushing forward with that as a growth driver. What would you say is mobility's market entry playbook internationally? And what creates a right to win where alternatives may already exist in the local market?

Yeah, I would say that, you know, we are coming into, you know, we've been in Europe for years, but we're coming into these markets from a position of strength. and we're able to bring our infrastructure to that market. So the established Carfax brand, our data operations, and our product experience, if you will. I tell people that the Carfax business has been in business for north of 40 years. We've made plenty of mistakes. We've learned from quite a few of those mistakes, and we're able to come in and take that experience And, you know, our hope is that we're able to move faster than others and really establish a leadership position in each one of those countries, leveraging our experience and, you know, the assets, the core assets that we already have. You know, you mentioned quite a few countries in Europe. You know, we're currently the market leader in Canada. and so I think of Canada and Europe representing a great opportunity for us. I mentioned that there's a billion people that own cars globally and we want a relationship with as many of those as possible. A few hundred million of them live in Europe and we would love to create those relationships with those consumers there as well.

In the B2B business, Mobility has launched quite a number of new products recently. You have Fast, Data Studio, its EEQ incentive product. And you've seen pretty encouraging results early on. Where would you say each solution sits on this customer adoption curve? And when could the portfolio begin to contribute more meaningfully to overall B2B growth?

Yeah, and, you know, you had mentioned a number of products there. On the B2B side, one of the things we did about a year ago is we aligned that part of our business to the parts of the market that we serve. And so we took the parts of the business that served those that plan and build the 90, approximately 90 million new cars each year, and we formed, you know, our planning group. And then, you know, we took the folks that were supporting those in the market that market and sell those 90 million new cars, and we formed the sales part of our B2B organization. What was really great to see for me was the innovation at both places and the innovation coming in a number of different forms. In the planning space, the innovation was on two fronts. One was on our fast platform. So giving any OEM that wanted it or any, you know, supplier that needed it the ability to, you know, use our FAST product to get more out of the data that, you know, we were selling them. And so FAST allows an OEM or a supplier to run scenarios. And historically, if they wanted a new forecast based on input, they would give us those inputs. We would build that forecast for them and send that data back to them. Now on a Tuesday morning, if they're a FAST customer, they can run all of those scenarios themselves and run 10 different forecasts based on their inputs. And it's allowing them to really, you know, shrink that planning process by getting answers faster. You know, we also, you know, in that space, that planning space, have launched our PIQ product. And what that really does is it allows an OEM to understand their options. If regulatory situations change and, say, a tariff is hitting this subset of parts that they're getting from another country and they want to know what their other options are and where those options exist and who's buying what where, they can plan for the cost change that hit them. And so that's in that space. In the sales and marketing space, we have our data studio platform. And what that really is solving for is taking an OEM's data and a dealer's data, and they traditionally haven't wanted to send their data to the other. And so we have a platform that that data can exist on. We take the Mobility Global data and put it in there with it, and now we can help them deploy their incentive dollars. And we have OEMs that are using it to deploy those incentive dollars. And what we're able to do is by, you know, really creating the scores on who's going to buy, when they're going to buy, what they're going to buy, what incentives they need to see in order to buy, we're able to help that OEM spend less and get more out of those incentive dollars. And that's on the sales side. So good to see, you know, these products, you know, all four of them are in their early stages. We have a number of OEMs that are on that Data Studio platform, but we'd like to see many more. And we're continuing to get adoption in the marketplace for all of them.

Matt, let's turn to you and talk a little bit about margins. So incremental standalone corporate expenses will create about 150 basis points of drag on margins relative to 2025. and then you have a target of at least 50 BIPs of margin expansion annually afterwards, when do you think the reset for margins will be substantially complete, and what is the appropriate starting point for margins in your medium-term financial framework?

Yes, breaking down the components of it, as you said, we do have incremental corporate expenses as a public company, about 150 basis points. margins were 40.6% in 2025. So think about resetting 2025 to 39.1-ish, right? That said, that's going to evolve over time. Obviously, we only have half the year of being standalone, so you can see 75 basis points of it this year and then the full 150 next year. At the same time, we are getting more efficient. We're getting some scale and leverage out of the business. So, you know, we're not saying the starting point is 39.1 for next year. There's a lot going on. You know, we talked about getting off the TSA and whatnot. So we're probably not going to get to the, you know, full 50 basis point expansion target until 2028. But that's when the numbers will be cleaner from a starting point standpoint as well. You know, I do want to note, you know, we also will see a slight tweak in some of our cost allocation. As part of creating one mobility and building a corporate infrastructure, As Bill mentioned, we're pulling some resources out of the businesses, more so from Carfax into corporate, and then obviously reallocate them back down. So we're going to see a slight reallocation of costs between Carfax and B2B. I think that baseline will establish the next quarter or two. So I really view, from a margin perspective, this year and next, there's going to be a little bit of a transition. A lot of these factors will be hitting simultaneously. Obviously, we haven't even talked about AI and the opportunities of efficiency there. But we should be fully reset at the end of next year, and then off we go. That's really when the medium-term targets in our minds start.

On the topic of AI, can you talk about how AI is improving internal efficiencies from product development to overhead and other areas, and how you expect that to contribute to the 50 bits of run rate margin expansion?

Yeah, so in Belenosa, the passion of yours is I'll start. And then kick it to you, obviously, we're using AI to get much more efficient. As Bill mentioned, his three areas, we've been particularly focused on data. You think about the complexity of ingesting, structuring, getting value out of the data. There have been meaningful efficiencies there. AI has been a core element of us getting more out of our product development and software development teams, which is allowing us to launch more products and more products more quickly. I think we will see the potential for additional waves of efficiencies as we create one mobility, as we get on one common infrastructure and the like. To date, we've been reinvesting most of that, either in more product development, better product development, opportunities to invest. I would anticipate over the short to medium term, That's probably still going to be true. All the things we just talked about, we see significant opportunity, and we know that what our investors want is for us to be an organic growth company first and foremost. But that said, we think as all this nets out, we can do what we need to do from an investment standpoint to meet our revenue growth targets while generating margin improvement, and AI is going to be a big part of that.

And, you know, to kind of piggyback on that, you know, when we came up with, you know, putting the 50, you know, out there, I wanted it there. We've built the company over the last, you know, decade or two with cost discipline in the business. And I want to make sure that, you know, we are fueling growth. We are investing in growth. But I also want us to be doing it in the smartest ways possible. And I want us to be, you know, making the tough choices so that we are disciplined when it comes to the expenses of the business. And so, you know, I think that it's, you know, I've been asked a number of times, you know, Bill, do you think that number could be greater? And I do think it could be greater if we weren't as focused on growth, you know, as we are.

And then, Matt, can you talk a little bit about your capital allocation priorities, acquisitions, repurchases? what leverage range, what valuations, what are the key thresholds you're looking at as you're thinking about deploying free cash flow?

So I'll start on the leverage side. We started with almost $200 million of cash in the balance sheet, gross leverage of 2.7 times, net leverage of 2.4. We said we're comfortable operating a gross leverage range of two and a half times-ish. We'll naturally delever as we grow our EBITDA, right? That should happen relatively quickly. We don't have any prepayable debt, so that's off the table. So we initiated a dividend. I think we just paid the dividend today, actually, our first dividend. We pegged at 25% of gap net income. Now, there's some noise in our gap net income for the reasons we described. so you would peg the dividend in what we call a normalized gap net income but that leaves a lot of room for internal investment, we don't have significant CapEx needs, you'll see it'll go up slightly so we're not going to be back dividend is set, we're not going to pay back debt we don't have significant CapEx needs that leaves a lot of capacity either to return value to shareholders through share purchases or M&A, as Bill said, because of where we are, we see significant opportunity just to bring the five businesses together. Think about that as a synergy opportunity from the M&A perspective. We've got a lot of work on our plate to do that. So we've said publicly we don't anticipate doing M&A in the short run, certainly nothing meaningful. When we do M&A, the criteria is going to be, is it an accelerant? Is it an accelerant to one of these growth platforms you've talked about? Is it an accelerant to our core assets? This is very much a tuck-in strategy. So when you net all of that out, I would expect that we'll be a consistent and meaningful purchaser of our shares, certainly in the near term. We've said that's going to start in early 2027, just gives us a chance for things to settle out. and that's still the path that we intend to follow.

Great. Well, we're just about out of time. Bill and Matt, thank you for the great discussion.

Thank you.