TransUnion Q4 FY2020 Earnings Call

Good day and welcome to the 2020 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Aaron Hoffman. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I hope that all of you remain safe and healthy. On the call today, we have Chris Cartwright, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Todd Cello, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We’ve posted our earnings release and slides to accompany this call on the TransUnion Investor Relations website. Our earnings release and the accompanying slides include various schedules, which contain more detailed information about revenue, operating expenses, and other items as well as certain non-GAAP disclosures and financial measures, along with the corresponding reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures. Today’s call will be recorded and a replay will be available on our website. We will also be making statements during this call that are forward-looking. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements because of factors discussed in today’s earnings release and the comments made during this conference call and in our most recent Form 10-K, Forms 10-Q, and other reports and filings with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. With that, let me turn the time over to Chris.

Thanks, Aaron. And let me add my welcome and my best wishes that you and your families are healthy. As we started the New Year, I want to once again thank the more than 8,000 TransUnion associates, who continue to work diligently from their homes throughout this pandemic in order to support the needs of our customers and consumers in these uncertain times. Our client service hasn't missed a beat and it's all due to their amazing efforts. I also appreciate how they've supported TransUnion’s embrace of social justice causes during this time of turmoil and transition in the U.S. We continue to focus on diversity and inclusion among our associates and in the communities we serve. On our last call, I discussed our total impact task force, and we renamed it the Racial Equity Task Force. While the name has changed, the mission remains the same: to combine and connect TransUnion’s efforts to support racial equity and social justice. The task force will amplify our advocacy and outreach through consumer tools and support designed to improve access to economic opportunity. For example, we partner with the credit builders alliance, which helps underserved communities to build credit. Additionally, we will double our corporate giving in 2021, in Chicago and Philadelphia, the locations of TransUnion’s two largest offices. We also have reallocated funds from sports partnerships to charities in our communities that support racial equity. We see further opportunities to partner with local organizations that promote grassroots targeted support for underserved communities, such as 'My Block, My Hood, My City' in Chicago and the Covenant House in Philadelphia. The task force will also reexamine the use of data in our analytics and solutions to ensure that all uses are consistent with our values and the goal of financial inclusion in the economies that we serve. To that end, we engaged a specialized consultancy in the fourth quarter of last year to objectively assess our data and model development to identify opportunities to improve our practices. And finally, the task force, working with TransUnion’s Chief Talent and Diversity Officer, is formulating clear commitments for diversity in new hires and promotions. We've also expanded racial bias training throughout the organization and provided managers with direction and tools to build a more inclusive workplace. These actions support our public commitments, including the Chicago network's equity principles campaign and the pledge to work toward achieving gender equity in global leadership roles by 2030. And the CEO action for diversity and inclusion pledge to advance diversity and inclusion in our workplaces. In a short time, the task force has made encouraging progress, and I have no doubt that we will achieve our goal of making TransUnion a truly diverse and inclusive organization that plays a positive role in the communities that we serve. Now, I'd like to lay out the agenda for this morning's call. First, I will review the global organizational changes we've made and the considerable investments we are making in solutions, operations, and technology to ensure that we continue to deliver strong growth and margins in the years ahead. Over the past 18 months, we established global centers of excellence and solutions, operations, and technology. We also commenced Project Rise, a multiyear effort to streamline, standardize, and migrate our technology stack to a hybrid public and private cloud model. These considerable efforts and investments we've self-funded will improve our core solutions and establish an effective and shared global operational spine, as these actions strengthen our foundation for future success. Next, I'll review the performance trends in the fourth quarter across the various geographies we serve. Throughout this presentation, you will hear a consistent story of TransUnion advancing our solutions, services, and go-to-market approach to respond to the current conditions while also re-architecting our business to free resources to invest in future growth. Finally, I'll pass the baton to Todd to discuss our fourth quarter results in detail along with first quarter and full year 2021 guidance. Since taking over as CEO of TransUnion, my leadership and I have developed an ambitious set of initiatives to fundamentally strengthen TransUnion while navigating the challenges created by the global pandemic and the need to address social justice issues. Clearly, we began with a strong business with a history of success. However, we’ve recognized the opportunity to raise our performance and create an even better version for our stakeholders. Over the past year, you've heard me discuss the areas for improvement on which we're focused: technology via Project Rise, global operations, and global solutions. Today, I want to review the opportunities before us and our progress to date. These various initiatives together form a transformational program to strengthen TransUnion. Internally, we refer to this program as our path to possible, meaning our path to building the best version possible of TransUnion and to maintain high rates of revenue growth and increasing margins into the future. So let's start with Project Rise, our accelerated initiative to make TransUnion’s technology more scalable, secure, efficient, and effective. I begin here as technology forms the bedrock of TransUnion. And in many ways, we are a technology company, built upon Project Spark, a systems migration from costly complicated mainframe technology to a modern, flexible, distributed, and hybrid cloud architecture. Since Spark’s completion, we've implemented new technologies and tools as they became available to improve systems reliability and security. Importantly, we also integrated acquisitions, such as Callcredit, iovation, and eBureau that utilize the public cloud, gaining important experience in hybrid public and private cloud architectures. This consistent investment in technology has laid the groundwork for Project Rise. Let me remind you of some of the expected benefits. First, like many technology-enabled companies, we have the opportunity to further streamline our application ecosystem. We've already worked through more than 1,000 applications and determined their path forward, whether we re-factor, re-host, or retire them, allowing us to simplify the delivery of intellectual property on a global basis, reduce costs, and increase our speed to market. Second, we'll implement a hybrid cloud infrastructure to create economies of scale around computing and intellectual property distribution. Our on-premise infrastructure currently operates at high levels of efficiency, and the additional use of public clouds helps us to optimize our computing capabilities. This approach has already allowed us to power key international opportunities in countries such as India and Chile, as well as to provide the backbone for our media vertical, which I'll talk about in more detail shortly. Third, we will leverage the growing arsenal of innovative cloud-based tools to enable faster product development. Examples include new compliance tools, analytic stacks, model training, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technologies. We've delivered the first set of foundational cloud services to our development teams and expect the first deployments into production in the second half of this year. Given our focus on talent and building continuity for the long-term, we continue to embrace up-skilling our workforce. In this regard, we've made considerable progress in training our internal teams, with 80% having completed or currently enrolled in cloud training, including hundreds receiving full AWS certification, in addition to the new hires that we brought on this past year. We believe developing our internal talent will make our company cloud-native just like our technology. This will allow us to continuously evolve and stay nimble in the future. The attractive marketplace benefits we expect Project Rise to deliver between $20 million and $30 million per year of operating expense reductions, beginning in the year 2023. Project Rise represents a critical evolution of our technology strategy and enables significant long-term opportunities and efficiencies for TransUnion. Global operations provides another way to deliver efficiencies and facilitate commercial success through centralization, process optimization, and automation leading to a better customer experience as well as cost savings that we will reinvest in growth projects. Our team has identified three areas of greatest potential impact and they've made significant progress thus far. First, we expanded our disciplined procurement processes to all of our purchasing. We've renegotiated our largest contracts and recently begun to focus on the remaining opportunities. We've reduced costs while adding features and functionality. We also have begun implementing a lifecycle procure-to-pay system from Coupa, enabling complete spend visibility globally. We've already deployed the tool in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., and we'll add more of our major markets in 2021. Second, we continue to expand on the success of our Global Capability Center (GCC) in Chennai, India, which now employs more than 900 associates. We added another center in Pune, India, in the fourth quarter of last year, focused on providing analytics services across our organization. This year, we opened a GCC in Johannesburg, South Africa to provide a range of business services in order to flex capacity and create continuity safeguards. Each GCC meets the growing needs of our customers while refining our delivery and support capabilities and eliminating concentration risk. They also allow us to cost-effectively process more sophisticated and confidential work than we could using third parties. Finally, we're focused on business process refinement and automation to enhance customer experience. Most significantly, we are implementing a standardized global CRM system that, when coupled with our GCCs, forms an effective technology and operational fulfillment spine for transparent, high-quality customer support. Set another way, we're creating a structure to efficiently process work so we can focus on delivering the best experience for our customers. Together, we are confident that global operations will deliver significant effectiveness and cost benefits. We will reinvest these in growth and enhanced margins in order to drive shareholder value. Moving to global solutions. In a short time, this team has delivered some exciting successes along with an array of important partnerships and acquisitions. We've organized around key horizontal solutions, such as credit, fraud, analytics, decisioning, and others and staffed these teams with experienced leaders to develop and diffuse configurable platform solutions across our various geographies and vertical markets. Let me talk about our internally generated opportunities, and then I'll turn to how we've leveraged our core capabilities into new areas with partnerships and acquisitions. Starting with our refocused strategy in fraud, the second largest solution offering at TransUnion behind credit, we have an outstanding starting point with our suite of fraud solutions. In fact, in November of last year, Javelin Strategy & Research ranked TransUnion best-in-class among 26 providers on its identity proofing scorecard. After hiring security industry veteran Shai Cohen, we undertook an extensive review of our solutions and market position. The outcome of this work suggested an opportunity to rebrand, standardize, and integrate our various fraud mitigation products into a unified solution that utilizes our best capabilities. While this will require time and investment, we've already begun to rebrand all of our product solutions globally under the umbrella of TruValidate. We will also refocus our sales efforts on the most appropriate market segments and user profiles. This strategic repositioning represents a starting point for creating a truly integrated and global fraud mitigation business within TransUnion. I also want to share another recent success in solutions from our international markets. As COVID led to an explosion of e-commerce, many customers in emerging markets lack an integrated data-enabled solution for activating new accounts. To meet this need, we created a digital onboarding solution that bundles our suite of data pre-fill, ID verification, credit scoring, and origination decisioning tools through a common orchestration layer. We deliver this tool in a single API that customers can deploy as a mobile application, as a mobile website, as a white-label tool, and integrated into their own platforms. The modular design allows them to buy a full solution or individual components based on their needs. The digital onboarding solution suite represents a great example of our global diffusion strategy at work. We rapidly launched in India, South Africa, Colombia, and the Philippines, creating a multimillion dollar business in under a year. We have a strong inventory of sales wins in these markets that will ramp this year, and we're also exploring applications in more developed markets. In addition to these two efforts, we brought to market several solutions to aid customers with the uncertainties created by the COVID pandemic, including our CreditVision Acute Relief attributes, which were rapidly adopted to enhance portfolio risk assessment, as well as new customer acquisition. Now turning to how we've leveraged partnerships to create new growth sectors, let's talk about employment and income verification. On our October earnings call, we announced a partnership with MX, which aggregates financial information on more than 45 million consumers through consumer permission connectivity with a myriad of banks, credit unions, and FinTech players. Through this partnership, which covers the U.S. and Canada, TransUnion will enable consumers to enrich their credit profiles while helping lenders to make more informed decisions. I'll ask you to hold on to these thoughts about MX for a moment while I review another highly complementary partnership with the largest payroll provider in the U.S. Just a few days after our last earnings call, we announced this partnership and introduced a differentiated income and employment verification solution. We understood that our customers wanted these tools combined with their credit search in order to simplify their workflow. The solution we launched in late October did exactly that, and customers have responded favorably. Since the announcement, we received numerous inbound inquiries from a variety of industries and lenders and closed multiple contracts with clients who have begun to transact. Now let's talk about how these two partnerships work together. Fundamentally, they provide a more complete view of consumers to make better-informed decisions about customer acquisition and risk. More tangibly, we will create a solution that first pings our payroll processing partner. If we don't get hit there, we can then query MX to determine if they have checking account data that indicates employment and income. By doing so, we expand the universe of consumers that we can reliably verify. We expect this tailored solution to launch in the second half of 2021. Verification solutions complement our credit-based solutions, thus expanding our addressable market and providing another long-term growth sector. Before I move on, I want to note that the solutions team also played an instrumental role in several recent investments. We completed a minority equity investment and formed a commercial partnership with FinLocker, a secure online data store that enables consumers to gather their financial information online and then grant permission to lenders, initially in mortgage, to access it for underwriting purposes. We also partnered with Socially Determined, the social health risk analytics company, to create tools to assess and mitigate health risks by using a combination of social risk and clinical data. This creates another growth path for our healthcare vertical. On the last earnings call, we highlighted our growth plans in media, which focused primarily on digital marketing solutions. We built the vertical through a series of acquisitions – TrueSignal, Signal and TrueOptik – that complement the array of data and world-class linking and matching logic of TransUnion. Together, these acquisitions in our in-house capabilities allow us to compete for audience segmentation and identity resolution market share in growing categories within the larger digital marketing ecosystem. As we scaled up this business, we've added new high-caliber talent, like Jessica Hindlian, who recently joined us from Nielsen, where she served as SVP of Product for advanced video advertising and identity. She will lead our vertical-specific channel and our product partnerships. We've also quickly realized meaningful commercial success. We have completed partnerships with Comscore to enable precision targeting in a cookie-free environment and WideOrbit to bring enhanced audience targeting to their streaming radio and podcast advertising solutions. We have expanded existing relationships and will now power connectivity for leading retailers in the marketplace. This concludes my discussion of our significant investments. I'll reiterate that there are immense opportunities that we've created through Project Rise, Global Operations, and Global Solutions. We've accomplished a lot in a short time, giving us even greater confidence in the long-term impact from these initiatives. Now I'd like to pivot to our fourth quarter results and walk you through some of the business and market trends. I'll start with U.S. markets. With a review of the online transaction volumes for financial services, our largest vertical market, volumes remain strong in mortgage and improved in consumer lending, while auto and card held relatively stable quarter-over-quarter. I would note that in the card, we continue to compare against strong volumes from the successful launch of a new card in the second half of 2019. Now excluding that impact, our volumes in the card would better reflect the underlying market. I also want to let you know now that going forward, we do not intend to provide this level of volume detail. We introduced these slides in response to the severe impact of the pandemic on financial services. Given the relative stability in the market and hopefully the early stages of recovery, we will return to our normal disclosure practices beginning with the first quarter of 2021. Now let's spend some time on the key lending markets that comprise the vertical. Beginning with consumer lending, it continued to recover during the quarter, as larger FinTech lenders slowly returned to customer acquisition, fueled by solid levels of investor commitment to funding loans. Consumer demand remains tepid as low credit card balances, cash out refinancings, and stimulus payments have reduced the demand for certain installment products like debt consolidation and short-term loans. On the other hand, we continue to see significant growth with point-of-sale lenders both from their own success as well as share gains. Auto lending was relatively stable quarter-over-quarter, as new car sales picked up while the used car market tightened as inventory levels remain a challenge. As digital auto retailing grows, we continue to see demand for our prequalification solutions, including auto payment shopper. Positively, we also have seen some early signs of lenders returning to marketing activities as their portfolios stabilized. The credit card market remains fairly stable as the industry showed modest signs of recovery from the sharp declines in the second quarter. We also continue to see a slow recovery in marketing and believe that there is considerable pent-up consumer demand that should fuel this category in the future. Now I want to spend a minute taking a slightly deeper dive on our mortgage business, which delivered outstanding growth in 2020 on the strength of both refinancing and home purchase activities as interest rates remain historically low. On this chart, you can see the incredible growth in the market app over these last two years, creating a very challenging stack of comparisons as we enter 2021. As always, we have spent considerable time with our customers and advisory boards while also incorporating an array of public data to develop our outlook for the market this year. Based on this rigorous work, we believe that the mortgage market will decline about 10% in 2021. More specifically, we anticipate continued strength in mortgage in the first half of the year, particularly in the first quarter, and then a weaker second half as volumes taper off and comparisons remain very challenging. We will update you if our view changes as the year unfolds. I want to wrap up, though, with a quick view of our financial services sales pipeline. Despite the impact of the pandemic on our markets, our sales team delivered exceptionally strong results. Our healthy pipeline reflects our effective customer engagement and highly relevant product offerings, including a substantial number of credit visual wins that demonstrate the long runway for the solution. For the full year, we increased our new wins in dollars by almost 40% behind a win rate that's just shy of 50%. We attribute the success to the nimble changes our sales teams made to conduct business virtually, along with our thought leadership that provided tangible assistance to customers, and of course, the strength and breadth of our product portfolio. Now shifting to our U.S. emerging verticals. Most of them saw trends generally improve or at least stabilize during the fourth quarter. Beginning with healthcare, performance played out largely as we expected during the quarter. Front-end volumes continued to slowly recover as providers saw outpatient volumes return to pre-COVID levels. In-patient visits remain depressed but stable as patients showed caution about returning to healthcare venues. Emergency department volumes continued to show weaker but stable trends. The impact of reduced front-end volumes negatively affects the back-end of the business resulting in a reduced number of potential coverage discovery opportunities. Despite the headwinds that we faced, the vertical only declined mid-single digits for the full year reflecting the importance of our offerings. Even if the U.S. healthcare system lost more than $320 billion in 2020, we saw solid levels of new business wins last year. As our business helps providers recover cash, we remain well-positioned to help healthcare providers protect their revenue and balance sheets. Looking forward, we see no structural change to this market, such that we won't return to a more steady growth profile post-pandemic. Now shifting to insurance. This vertical defined slightly in the fourth quarter as we faced a modestly more challenging comparison than in the third quarter. However, the vertical delivered growth for the full year as a result of our successful diversification into areas such as commercial auto, life, group life, and other types of property and casualty insurance. Notably, we realized significant growth in our sales pipeline with new business won in 2020, exceeding our strong 2019 levels. Many of the deals involved multi-product wins, reflecting our attractive suite of products. Our partnership with Neuro-ID began to generate revenue. As a reminder, Neuro-ID helps customers understand biometric behavior during the online application, providing insight into potential fraud based on how consumers enter data. The solution uses the same data to explain why consumers abandon applications so processes can be refined. As online applications increase in insurance, this partnership positions us to capitalize on that trend. The public sector grew significantly as most government agencies operated as business as usual, providing necessary support for their constituents. We posted strong new sales in the quarter at the state and federal levels and also increased our opportunity pipeline. Our media vertical grew both on a reported and organic basis as we continue to make meaningful progress against the strategy I highlighted earlier. We also delivered growth in our screening business, which includes both tenant and employment screening. We saw solid performance in tenant screening as leasing companies remained active, and our SmartMove screening product made additional inroads in the marketplace. Employment screening remains depressed as it mirrors employment trends. The telco market recovered largely as we expected with consumers returning to more normal device purchasing levels. Finally, although collections are counter-cyclical over time, we don't expect any uptick in the near future as loan forbearance programs and collections moratoriums delay demand. Furthermore, government payments during the pandemic have helped many consumers to stay current on their loans or reduce their debt loads. Moving to consumer interactive, we delivered double-digit revenue growth in our direct business due to increased advertising and higher conversion rates on our subscription products. Consumers continue to value our credit health and identity protection services. Our indirect channel remains soft as financial products lead aggregators have experienced diminished demand from the lenders they serve for new client acquisition. Reduced acquisition levels have caused some of our clients to cut back on their own marketing, causing a decline in their subscribers and negatively impacting our revenues, a portion of which are based on subscriber levels. Although this dynamic has now stabilized, and we are seeing some recovery, it created a growth headwind for our business in 2020. Wrapping up with our international segment, let's look at revenue trends, which illustrate the ongoing recovery across our geographic footprint. Generally, successful re-openings have allowed economies to restart, leading to increased overall economic activity. However, as we've all seen, the duration and durability of re-openings vary greatly market-to-market. At the same time, our team's done an outstanding job partnering with customers to assist them in managing through the impacts of the pandemic. You'll hear about new products, new business wins, and creative ways that we deliver thought leadership. Now, let me turn to the specifics for each region. In the U.K., we returned to growth, excluding the impact of a divestment earlier in the year. While lending markets remained depressed, they did improve in the fourth quarter, particularly for mortgage. As in previous quarters, the alternative lending market continues to see pressure, though the burgeoning buy-now pay-later space has provided a source of growth, as we hold a strong leadership position. Our fraud in gaming and gambling positions also showed further improvement and set the stage for future growth. We have eight contracts with one of the U.K.'s largest lenders to provide them with the credit view platform and our open banking solution. Our Canadian business grew again in the fourth quarter, despite generally weak lending markets and continually escalating COVID mitigation restrictions. Our good performance reflects the meaningful portfolio diversification that we've intentionally developed, including insurance and public sector expansion, direct-to-consumer offerings, and growth in the emerging FinTech market. In India, the country has now fully reopened, resulting in slowly improving transaction volumes, including very strong volumes during the festival season, which typically drives the strongest business of the year. We continue to benefit from our diverse product portfolio as well as specific programs to address critical pandemic-driven issues. For instance, we extended our string of significant business wins supporting the Indian government, as they work with lenders, small businesses, and consumers to provide incremental oversight and stimulus during the pandemic. We also engaged with our FinTech customers by setting up our innovation lab on the cloud and inviting them to compete with our developers to see who can deliver the best performing models. Through our TGIF or TransUnion Great Insights Fridays, we've had interactions with more than 300 discrete lenders, bringing them important insights about the market, consumers, and their own businesses. Looking ahead, India remains a singularly vibrant and innovative market with significant growth potential for years to come. As the lending market transitions from traditional products, we expect hundreds of millions of Indians to enter the credit economy. In the case of small businesses, only about $10 million of the $60 million currently have loans. These changes have meaningful implications for TransUnion’s addressable market, and we remain extremely well positioned to benefit from them. In Latin America, we serve a variety of markets, and most remain somewhat stable, albeit at depressed levels compared to last year. Notably, Colombia delivered a solid quarter of growth on the strength of our FinTech, insurance, and telco businesses. As we've discussed previously, we expect a slow and long linear recovery in many of these markets. In Asia Pacific, the market in Hong Kong has stabilized at generally depressed levels as the fallout from the pandemic and political unrest continues. We returned to growth on the strength of our relaunched direct-to-consumer offer. We expect this to provide a meaningful source of growth in 2021, likely exceeding the previous revenue run rate over time. Roundings up APAC, the Philippines continues to face significant headwinds, as the country has struggled to reopen, impacting consumers and our customers. Our team held its first lending summit to bring more sophisticated thought leadership to the market. Even as we roll out CreditVision, which provides a superior tool for our customers to assess lending risk, particularly in this current environment. Longer term, we remain confident and optimistic that the Philippines will return to attractive growth. The South African economy remains challenged, particularly with the second wave of COVID spread causing further lockdowns recently. As in other markets, our team has responded by prioritizing our customers' needs, like account management, collections, and e-commerce. They have successfully expanded uptake of key solutions, such as CreditVision, TruValidate, and digital onboarding to drive value for customers. Taking you through how TransUnion has managed effectively through the global pandemic while also accelerating investments that set up our path to what is possible. So I'll now turn it over to Todd to walk you through our financial results in detail and our first quarter and full year 2021 guidance.

Thanks, Chris. We delivered solid results at the high end of our guidance as we benefited from gradual improvement across almost all of our markets as well as the strength and diversity of our portfolio. I'll start with our consolidated results. For the sake of simplicity, all of the comparisons I discuss today will be against the fourth quarter of 2019 unless noted otherwise. Starting with the income statement, fourth quarter consolidated revenue increased 2% on a recorded and constant currency basis, where Signal and TruOptik acquisitions had just under one point of impact. Adjusted EBITDA decreased 2% on a reported basis and constant currency basis. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 38.5%, down about 170 basis points compared with the year-ago quarter. As Chris pointed out, we have aggressively invested in our business this year, and that had some impact on the margin along with the broader macro challenges of the pandemic. Fourth quarter adjusted diluted EPS increased 7%. Despite our adjusted EBITDA being down slightly, we continue to benefit from reduced interest expense related to our debt refinancing and lower LIBOR rates, as well as a lower adjusted tax rate of 21.9%. The lower tax rate reflects our tax planning initiatives and the reduction in the statutory rate in India. Now looking at segment financial performance, the U.S. markets revenue was up 4% compared to the year-ago quarter. The two media acquisitions had about 1.5 points of impact on revenue. Our financial services vertical revenue grew 7%. As Chris discussed, we saw improvement in consumer lending, continued strength in mortgage, as well as stability in card and auto. To address the significant impact of the mortgage in the quarter, excluding the cyclical growth, the vertical would have declined mid-single digits. Emerging verticals were flat on a reported basis and down 3%, excluding the revenue associated with the two media vertical acquisitions. Growth in public sector, media, and tenant and employment screening helped moderate declines in the other verticals. Adjusted EBITDA for U.S. markets decreased 2% as reported and 1% on an organic basis. Adjusted EBITDA margin declined largely as a result of the strategic and operational investments that Chris discussed, as well as the cost to integrate and scale our recent media acquisitions, and the normal quarter-over-quarter seasonality from the third to the fourth quarter. Consumer Interactive revenue increased 3% driven by growth in the direct channel; adjusted EBITDA for Consumer Interactive was down 2% as we continued to increase marketing behind the direct channel during the quarter and saw solid returns on that investment. In terms of the international segment, all comparisons will be in constant currency. For the total segment, revenue fell 2% as we saw trends improve in most of our regions, as Chris discussed in detail. As we mentioned on our February 2020 call, we divested a small business in the U.K., Recipero; excluding that divestiture, international would have been down only 1% and our U.K. business would have flipped from being down 1% to up 2%. Adjusted EBITDA for international declined 4%. One of the managed strengths of TransUnion is our balance sheet and our ability to rapidly generate cash. This provides us with consistent optionality to make the best decisions for the company and our shareholders. We finished the quarter with $493 million of cash on the balance sheet after voluntarily prepaying $150 million of our term loans and funding the first tranche of the TruOptik acquisition and several smaller investments. For clarity, the TruOptik transaction entails an initial payment and a subsequent smaller earn-out in 2021 based on the performance of the business. At the same time, our net leverage ratio continued to decline from 2.9 times at the end of the third quarter to 2.8 times at the end of December. With our strong balance sheet, we remain in a good position to continue to be proactive in pursuit of additional attractive investments as an important part of our overall long-term growth strategy. This brings us to our outlook for the first quarter and the full year, which is based on the current market conditions and doesn't incorporate the potential for a much stronger second half driven by the possibility of a more rapid economic recovery. As you've come to expect from us, we won't hopefully build plans based on best-case scenarios; rather, we'll take a balanced, realistic approach. We firmly believe that doing so is in the best interest of our shareholders, as it avoids unnecessary risk. Starting with first quarter revenue, we expect slightly less than 1 point of M&A contribution from Signal and TruOptik, as well as a similar tailwind to revenue from FX. We expect a 50 basis point benefit to adjusted EBITDA. Revenue is expected to come in between $698 million and $707 million, a 2% to 3% increase. This results in organic constant currency revenue growth being flat to up 1%. Embedded in our revenue guidance is an approximately 3 point benefit from mortgage, which lines up with Chris's comments about our expectations for a strong first half, followed by headwinds in the second half of the year. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $268 million and $275 million, an increase of 2% to 4%. Adjusted diluted earnings per share are expected to be between $0.78 and $0.81, an increase of 6% to 10%. For the full year, we expect 50 basis points of benefit from M&A and 1 point of tailwind to revenue from FX. Revenue is expected to be between $2.817 billion and $2.877 billion, up 4% to 6%. Based on the mortgage expectation Chris shared, our guidance includes about 2 points of headwinds from our anticipation of a 10% decline in our mortgage revenue. So on an organic constant currency basis, excluding mortgage, the remainder of the business is expected to grow 4% to 6%. I would also like to point out that the cadence of the year will be fairly lumpy. The first quarter should look somewhat similar to the third and fourth quarters of 2020. The second quarter of 2021 should be the strongest on a year-over-year basis given the relatively easy comparisons. In the back half, we expect the benefits of ongoing economic recovery to be offset by mortgage headwinds. Through our business segments, we expect U.S. markets to grow revenue mid-single digits. Financial services could be flat and emerging verticals to be up high single-digits, including the impacts of mortgage. U.S. markets would be up high single-digits, and financial services would be up mid-single-digits. We anticipate that international will grow high single-digits in constant currency as we continue to see the pace of recovery across our market, and we expect Consumer Interactive to be up slightly as lead aggregators slowly return to customer acquisition. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $1.083 billion and $1.121 billion, up 4% to 7%. We expect 1 point of benefit from FX. Adjusted diluted earnings per share for the year are expected to be between $3.16 and $3.31, up 5% to 10%. I want to wrap up with some thoughts about some of our other annual guidance items. First, we expect our tax rate to be about 23%, which is fairly consistent with the 2020 rate of 22.6%. Second, total depreciation and amortization is expected to be about $375 million, a modest increase from 2020. Excluding the step-up from our 2012 change in control and subsequent acquisitions, depreciation and amortization should be approximately $190 million. Third, net interest expense should be about $100 million, down about $20 million in 2020, as a result of a lower forward LIBOR curve and our voluntary debt prepayment. Fourth, capital expenditures will be around 8% of revenue. Finally, for the full year 2020, we spent about $19 million on Project Rise. That was added back for our non-GAAP metrics. We expect this add-back to nearly triple in 2021, a significant step up from the first second year of the project, as we expected and as we've built significant momentum. I'll now turn the call back to Chris for some final comments.

Thank you, Todd. To conclude this morning, you've heard more about the meaningful progress we've made in fundamentally improving TransUnion through Project Rise, Global Operations, and Solutions. Each delivers immense value to TransUnion over the long term, and in tandem, they have even greater potential to help us sustain industry-leading top-line growth and an attractive and growing margin. At the same time, our business continues to perform well in the midst of some very challenging conditions. I'll end by reiterating I hope that all of you and your families are safe and healthy, and thank you for joining us this morning. With that, I'll turn the time back to Aaron.

Great. Thanks, Chris. That concludes our prepared remarks. So for the Q&A, we ask that you each ask only one question so that we can include more participants. And now let's jump into those questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Jeff Meuler with Baird. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. On mortgage, what percentage of your consolidated revenue was U.S. mortgage in 2020? The reason I ask is, I thought it was lower than 20%. But you're saying its 10% market declines about a 2 point headwind, I wouldn't think that there's share shifts given that it's mostly selling to the tri-merge resellers. But if you could just clarify what's the exposure and maybe help score the minus 10 two-point headwind? Thanks.

Hey, Jeff. Good morning. Thank you for the question. This is Todd. I'll take that one. So as far as your mortgage earned, historically, TransUnion has spoken about our overall exposure to U.S. mortgage being roughly maybe 7% to 8% of revenue that went up last year to about 13%, which is obviously very significant, but not something that we anticipate that will stay at that level throughout 2021, as we both kind of alluded to in our opening remarks. We do expect mortgage to continue to be relatively stable to maybe slightly decline in the first half of the year. But right now, the visibility we have with mortgage would just suggest that there would be a slowdown, and the way that we've put it is a 10% decline in our mortgage revenues specifically for the full year, and that will temporarily happen in the second half of 2021.

Thank you. Just a broad question, Chris. 2021 was always going to be a lot of moving pieces. And it sounds like you've taken a relatively conservative approach to stock, correct me if I'm wrong there, but just looking out into 2022? Do you see any notable moving pieces, perhaps media, gaming, or some other categories where you think could be a notable contributor to the growth to get you back to what we used to historically?

Yes, good morning, Manav. As I commented before, I think 2021 will be a bit of a mixed bag; the first half and the second half will be different. The first half is likely to be choppier just given the state of the public health situation. But in markets like the U.S., as vaccines are rolled out and I think the population returns to health, you'll see a material strengthening across the different verticals in which we compete. That leads to a stronger second half, and I also expect that we will roll with some good momentum into 2022 and start to compound the top line in a manner consistent with what we have done previously. That's certainly the aspiration at this point. I would say that mortgage remains the critical wildcard here, over the course of 2021. As Todd just said, we are modeling in about a 10% decline in the category, and it has swelled to about 30% of our revenue, so it's more material than previously. With that said, nobody's crystal ball is perfect, and it is quite material to the financial results that we've outlined in our guidance this morning. So the best I can tell you is one, we provided more detail into how we arrived at the number than we typically would and will ongoing. And two, if we see a material change in our assumptions, we'll certainly communicate with the market quickly because we will have a direct bearing on the results. And the last thing I would say is, look, as our economy heals from the pandemic, we start to get back to normal. I take more of a global perspective here; there are key components of our portfolio that will return to health and growth that have been somewhat uniquely impacted by the pandemic. The first comes in our consumer direct business, where 60% of the revenues are focused on providing reports and analytics to indirect players, the marketing lead aggregators for financial services. As lenders pulled out of the market in terms of client acquisition, their businesses were materially impacted and that became quite a headwind for us. Additionally, we have strong and disproportionate market share in the FinTech space and in consumer lending, and that was also an area that I think was the hardest hit of the different financial services verticals in the U.S. Finally, our international portfolio, which has over $600 million now, was a consistent double-digit compound grower. These three have been muted somewhat because of the pandemic, but they're all stable now and they're all resuming growth. As the global health situation improves and the pandemic recedes, you're going to see acceleration in those three components, as well as the other piece parts of our portfolio. I think we're well-positioned for recovery. I guess just one concluding remark: if you look at the guidance we've provided, we broke out financial services performance and attempted to isolate the mortgage component, while also highlighting growth rates across our emerging verticals portfolio in the U.S., you can see that we're really expecting quite a bit of strengthening across the vast majority of our portfolio in 2021, some very attractive high single-digit organic growth rates, but again somewhat muted by the mortgage headwind and the general uncertainty in that category. I'll pause there, Todd, if you want to add anything?

Yes, Chris. Yes, I think that was a very comprehensive response. I would just highlight a couple more things. I think it just comes again out of our opening remarks. We've deliberately made a significant effort into the media vertical. We expect, at least in about 2022, that media will start to be a meaningful contributor for us, as well as our fraud business. We've done significant work to get that on a common platform, rebranded it to TruValidate, and we're expecting some really good growth there. As Chris again spoke about in his opening comments, we've done a significant amount of work to get that on a common platform, and we fully expect that market to rebound. So that'll be another really nice growth driver for us.

Thank you. I wanted to ask about verification: how quickly can you ramp up that business? I know you mentioned some wins already in the pipeline with your MX partnership. Can you just talk about your go-to-market strategy and the differentiation versus competition? In terms of records growth, I guess, have you added more records since that initial payroll provider? What kind of pace do you expect to grow records going forward? I imagine it may be tougher after that sort of initial really large number that you got from that partnership? Thanks.

Yes, sure, Toni. This is obviously a really exciting extension to our product portfolio. We think we can differentiate by really streamlining access to the credit and employment and income verification through a common digital connection, really leveraging the pathways that were already established. As you know from my comments last time around, I tried to caution the market that this is not a category that we're going to achieve parity with the market leader in one quarter. This is an entry into an area that is strategically important and complementary, and we're going to put the full weight of our product resources and innovation behind developing a product that can truly compete, but that will take time. In the interim, we're in a phase where we are productizing the data and the pipeline relationships that we've established via the large payroll processor and MX Technologies. Over time, our focus is going to be on broader and broader market coverage, which means you've got to establish more relationships. Market coverage will be both with payroll processors, potentially other types of data providers, and these financial aggregators that will allow us to cascade broad market coverage across banks, FinTechs, and credit providers. So we're in this for the long haul; I'm just not able to give you like financial precision on dollar or growth rates. But as you know, this is a really big market, and I love the competitive dynamics. I love the fact that we can pull together an offering, and we can start attacking and learning and gaining share, and that's our intention.

Hi, it’s Andrew. I'd like to look back at Slide 11 and 12 for the U.S. financial markets. This is the consumer credit activity, which really is broadly up in not just mortgage, but auto, card, and consumer lending. This orange line over the blue and yellow line. I'm just a bit puzzled by the first quarter organic revenue guide of 0 to 1 year-over-year, which is a bit of a deceleration total company from the 1% you guys just reported. Given that credit activity, I'm asking, do you see organic revenue growth acceleration in financial services in the first quarter? If not, why might this puzzle together the other segments to help us understand the zero to one veteran total?

Hey, good morning, Andrew. This is Todd, let me take that question for you. I think it’s an important one to talk through in some more detail. Starting first, when you do look at Slides 11 and 12, it's important to remember that this represents online credit report volumes for our U.S. markets financial services vertical only. Just to give you some perspective on that, in 2020 our financial services vertical did about $939 million, so roughly about 35% of our revenues. So that’s important to keep in mind, even though the $939 million volumes represent a certain percentage of that, probably higher than online but we also do a significant amount of batch work as well. That’s also part of that number. The context is really important. When you look at that, it's important also to keep in mind the comparable that we're up against in Q1 of 2021 compared to last year. At a consolidated basis, if you were to look at Q4, 2019 to Q1, 2020, our growth rate on a consolidated basis went from 9.9 times to 10.8, which was about 1 point of growth. For our U.S. market, financial services vertical, the growth rate went from 16.5 up to 21.8 in Q1, 2020. So that's about 5 points of growth. When you look at that then you go, okay but now go sequentially from Q4, 2020, the quarter we just exited, where our percentage grew at 1.5%, now you're looking at our guidance or we're calling for flat to up 1%. When you get into the decimals on this, that 1 might actually be maybe 1.5, potentially at the high end. So for all intensive purposes, if we achieve the high, we could be asking for the same growth rate that we experienced in Q4 of 2020. The comp and that growth rate is important. Now, to the point about just the overall mix of what we’re looking at on Slides 11 and 12, please do keep in mind the international business has had a different recovery than what we've experienced in the U.S. When we look at 2021, we expect our international business to experience their softest quarter in Q1 relative to the rest of the year. As you saw, we're calling for the full year to be up high single-digits for international. So that hopefully answered your question, Andrew.

Hey, guys, good morning. This is I think the second quarter in either in a row or in the last couple where you've given some numbers around new business wins in U.S. financial services. I guess I'll ask you a question that was asked last time: if you can help us understand anymore. But how does that 40% increase in dollar value flow through to revenue? Is there anything about that that would make it flow through more slowly, like a higher mix of multiyear versus one-year deals? What about losses or what about customers leaving, that kind of stuff? Just help frame how to think about that as a driver of revenue in the next year? Thank you.

Yes, good question, Gary. The first thing I would say is that in terms of attrition for whatever reasons, there's no change that we're aware of. There's nothing to really counteract that increase in the estimated annual contract value of the deals that we closed in 2020. Now, revenue arrival is a different annual than contracted sales, and it varies based on a variety of factors. One is the time it's going to take to integrate the clients and establish those relationships, and in certain cases, how long it takes them to incorporate their data or render our data into their models – either marketing or origination or collections, et cetera. So there can be a lag time. Related to that, there can also be some time until clients ramped to their full volume potential. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that sometimes salespeople can be overly enthusiastic with the potential deal, size of the deal; although I can't give you any evidence that their enthusiasm has changed over the course of the pandemic. A 40% increase in dollar close doesn't lead to a 40% increase in the new portion of our revenues in the coming year, but it is a really tremendous indication of the health of our product line, our sales efforts, and our client’s health as well. The new wins represent a new layer of revenue that we're laying upon a deep and established foundation. The volume movements in the foundation have a much more material impact on our revenue in the coming year or in the current period than does the increment. So I'll just pause there.

Hi, good morning, gentlemen. I appreciate the question and all the comments and color. There are a lot of moving pieces here. Chris, I've got a question specifically about your media initiatives. TransUnion has terrific differentiated data, and you've done a great job of commercializing it in the past. It strikes me media is one of these spaces that is very competitive. Some companies we've seen in and around FinTech have tried to crack the code and have maybe been less successful than they would have expected. Can you just elaborate on why you think you have the ability to outperform in that vertical?

Yes, sure. The media market or the market for digital advertising services is enormous and varied. We've chosen a surgical entry into a portion of that market, where I feel that our matching logic and some differentiated data provide us with an advantage and an opportunity to introduce a best-in-class solution. Before we had a media vertical, we were supporting different various ad tech companies in matching online and offline data, as TransUnion and the Bureau's in general are just really good at that. We know that our matching logic is superior to the standard that prevails in that marketplace. With that experience and insight, we decided to formalize the offering into a specific vertical offering. As we started to gain more experience, we realized that we needed to deliver our data, all of our customer identifying data, demographic and segmentation-type data on a different platform with user-friendly access. So immediate clients can come in and slice and dice and create the audiences that they are interested in. Then we can append the digital identity and other offline characterizing information that they could use to drive their advertising campaigns. When we bought TruOptik, we gained a differentiated data set because they are one of the early leaders in the market to provide insight as to which homes are consuming content via which streaming devices, whether via video or audio. We now have differentiated data sets that we can add to our universe of data in our segmentation tool. A practical example of it is an advertiser can find out now that a particular home address—mine or yours—has Apple TV but uses Netflix, Hulu, etc. They don't know much about the household. With TransUnion, we can do that matching and say that the occupants of the household have certain characteristics—demographics, a whole range of marketing characterizing and segmenting variables. It's our narrow and surgical focus into a portion of this market where I think we're upping the game. That's our value proposition, and that's why we're confident we can achieve growth.

Hey, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Hey, Chris, can you talk a little bit more about the reorientation of the fraud business strategically? What's involved in that besides pulling it together under one platform or one brand? What's going to change now that the business is, from what I understand, already a pretty strong business?

Yes, thanks for the question, Shlomo. Yes, it is a strong business that continues to deliver nice growth across all of our markets. As you know from my prior commentary, it's a business that's composed of a variety of piece parts, some of which are overlapping or redundant as you look at the different geographies that we serve. Part of what we're trying to do, or what we have done, is looked across our portfolio and said what are the best-in-class within TransUnion product components that we have, and how do we integrate those on top of this single product platform with orchestration, case management, and all of the different reporting and measurement controls that you would like. The ultimate integration around an enterprise architecture, any single product platform, is going to happen over a period of time because that's heavy-lifting engineering work. The need to do the work is just a function of the fact that the business developed in the U.S., it developed internationally, we acquired innovation in some great fast-growing businesses, and frankly, when you talk about integration, there's multiple levels from the kind of more surface to the deep and foundational, and we're committed to doing all of it. The next thing is really just a function of the market segments that we're prioritizing. Different types of customers have different fraud needs. We have a particular strength serving those market segments where they are initiating a financial relationship of some nature, where the magnitude of the transactions and the risk associated with transactions over the term of the relationship is significant. The upfront customer identification, device verification, and the general authentication process will take a little bit of time and be triangulated from multiple points. It's really important to know who you're dealing with—the counterparty you're dealing with—and have confidence in that. So we're focused on that part of the market, and again, this is an enormous and multifaceted market. We have a great constellation of products that come together to serve it most effectively. That will get most of the focus for our product development. We will continue to serve the market in its entirety; it's just the product development focus will be more around the segments I described, those customers that are really looking for broad, authoritative solutions, which we possess, but also assistance from their provider in implementing and configuring the solutions to get best results.

Hey, good morning. Thank you. You touched a little on Project Rise contributing $20 million to $30 million in savings in 2023. But could you just touch on how to think about global operations and global solutions? What inning are we in terms of seeing those benefits roll through the P&L? Is that more of a 2023 event too?

Yes, good question. Yes, I think global operations and global solutions, and the latter solutions, if you really think of this vector product management layer within TransUnion, they're delivering benefits already. However, as I've mentioned, we're aggressively investing in new product development and entering new markets and also in operational streamlining and automation. We're using some of the early benefits we're getting from those initiatives to sell those phones and accelerate the implementations of full global programs that are going to free up a lot of resources that we will then invest in both product development to accelerate and really secure high single-digit or top-line compounding that we aspire to, but also delivering margin improvements to the business. Collectively, Project Rise with the technology retooling, the operations, and solutions, they are going to have a really material impact on how effectively we operate in the market, and having spent a year strategizing and implementing which was 2020, and now going into 2021, we will really accelerate the implementation. I'm really excited about the confidence we have in the positive impact we're going to have.

Great, thanks so much. Hey, Chris, I wonder, given the investments you're making, particularly around products, how that impacts your new product innovation. Ultimately, what can that lead to in terms of the organic growth of the business if those products come to market?

Yes, good question. I think the current wave of tech innovation is going to speed up new product ideas, right? Because one, we'll be leveraging IP globally and two, by utilizing the public cloud, there's a lot of utility functionality around the acquisition, the care, and the maintenance of underlying hardware and connectivity, and even security infrastructure that we will purchase and service. The technology new product development for TransUnion becomes more focused on the areas of unique IP and value added that we bring, as diversified information services provider anchored in credit and all of the unique insights we have around the vertical market needs.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.