TransUnion Q1 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good day and welcome to the TransUnion 2021 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Aaron Hoffman, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us today. I hope 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 their 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 the conference call and in our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and other reports and filings with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. With that said, let me turn the time over to Chris.

Thanks, Aaron. Let me add my welcome and my best wishes that you and your families are healthy. At TransUnion, our associates continue to largely work from home and continue to demonstrate their ability to support the needs of our customers and consumers. I remain grateful for their efforts and commitment. Now I'd like to lay out the agenda for this morning's call. First, I will discuss some of the broad macro and TransUnion-specific trends that we experienced in the first quarter, and how they set the stage for a much stronger year than we previously anticipated. Next I will discuss our portfolio and strategies, which position us for high single-digit revenue growth at an attractive growing margin over the long term. Finally, I'll pass the baton to Todd to discuss our first quarter results in detail along with second quarter and full-year 2021 guidance. Let me start with our strong performance in the quarter. We significantly outperformed our guidance as we experienced a rapid recovery in many markets throughout February and March. Todd will discuss some of the specific revenue trends later as part of his remarks. But the takeaway is that we broadly saw trends improve across our business, consistent with the many improving macro indicators. Notably, according to a JPMorgan report, U.S. consumer spending accelerated during the first quarter, outpacing 2019 levels, and according to the labor department, unemployment fell to 6% a pandemic low. In March, small business owners felt the most optimistic since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the National Federation of Independent Business. Taken together these and many other salient points from the first quarter indicate the start of what we hope will be a long sustained economic recovery in the U.S. as Americans return to more normal work and social behavior. We’ve seen similar trends in our key international markets. In the U.K., consumer confidence reached its highest level in a year, while income is expected to grow along with consumer spending in the coming quarters. In Canada, unemployment reached its lowest levels since March 2020. Consumer confidence hit pandemic-era highs and in India reported unemployment dropped below pre-pandemic levels, while consumer confidence and spending continue to recover. Like these metrics, our business improved as uncertainties resolved themselves positively. Business prospects improved and health concerns moderated. In short, the consumer is strengthened and businesses have regained confidence. For our business that led to a resurgence in demand for lending and new customer acquisition, resulting in improved non-mortgage performance in our financial services vertical even as the rate of mortgage growth slowed. Similarly, results accelerated as demand strengthened across our emerging verticals highlighted by double-digit growth in public sector, tenant and employment screening and media. In our Consumer Interactive segment, we saw better-than-expected performance as our direct business remained strong and declines in indirect channels moderated. We saw similar results in our international markets, with trends improving quarter-over-quarter in all our regions except the U.K. I would note that we continue to see the fragility of reopenings around the world, as evidenced by recent targeted lockdowns in Canada, lockdowns in almost all major cities in India, including Mumbai, and in parts of Colombia and elsewhere. This illustrates that recovery from the pandemic will be volatile and nonlinear, which we've attempted to accommodate in our financial outlook. Nonetheless, given our strong first quarter, and the more positive macro environment, we have substantially raised our full year 2021 guidance. Todd will provide you with the details later. Importantly, we remain confident in our long-term growth algorithm of high single-digit revenue growth at expanding attractive margins with double-digit EPS growth. Now I want to spend a few minutes on TransUnion's differentiated market position and approach which fuels this long-term growth algorithm. I've discussed these points on past earnings calls, but want to review them again as we continue to progress in each area. First, we have a track record of delivering outsized growth across the markets we serve through innovation and disruption leading to share gains. For example, in the U.S., we've grown rapidly in financial services due to our first-mover advantage in trended and alternative data, which provides better credit insights for lenders and our deep understanding of their needs. This innovation and customer intimacy has helped us to grow much faster than the market as a whole. We also have developed deep partnerships with leading FinTech lenders positioning ourselves uniquely to grow, as ecommerce continues to disrupt traditional delivery of financial services. We've attacked the insurance market by expanding from a credit and scores-only position in personal auto underwriting into a broader set of solutions, serving multiple insurance sub-verticals and use cases. And we've applied this approach of increasing breadth and depth of solutions in the healthcare and public sector verticals, and across the spectrum of diversified markets, such as telecommunications, ecommerce and tenant and employment screening. Most recently, we established a media vertical and have won meaningful new relationships with partners such as Comscore, MediaMath and Blockgraph, which is owned by Comcast, Charter, and ViacomCBS. Earlier this month, we signed an agreement with OpenAP, a consortium of Fox, NBCUniversal, and ViacomCBS. We also announced earlier this month that we will extend our presence in the fast growing online gaming and gambling markets in the U.S., building on our success in the U.K. In both cases, we provide valuable digital identity and fraud solutions to site operators to ensure they comply with local regulation and thwart the efforts of fraudsters. Importantly, we will not offer solutions designed to extend credit to gamblers. In our Consumer Interactive segment, we engage consumers directly and indirectly through channel partnerships across industries, with solutions for personal financial management, identity protection and targeted credit offers. We established this attractive combined approach more than a decade ago by partnering with market leaders and benefiting from their growth. Recently, we've moved our direct-to-consumer business under our U.S. markets leader, Steve Chaouki. These two businesses can now combine the best of their offerings and pursue opportunities primarily in the indirect channel, where we help our customers serve consumers with engagement solutions, such as the CreditView dashboard. By closely aligning U.S. markets and consumer interactive, we can better leverage our combined capabilities. I will continue to share our progress as we develop this new strategy in our new organization. In addition to our attractive market positions, we have a proven and scalable enterprise playbook. Based on a foundation of customer and consumer insights, we've developed a repeatable approach to client engagement, product innovation, and adjacency expansion. This approach fuels our ability to grow in excess often by multiples of a given underlying vertical or geographic market. In our recently established global solutions and global operations organizations, we will enhance and accelerate the use of our playbook across TransUnion. As an example of how this approach has produced meaningful results, I'll highlight the development of our insurance vertical in the U.S., which has substantially outgrown its underlying market. Historically, we focused on providing credit solutions to personal auto underwriters. Over time, we expanded systematically across the insurance value chain. Today, our offerings include fraud mitigation, customer acquisition, data prefill, underwriting assessment, policy renewal, analytics, collections and claims investigation. We've built a broad and differentiated position that is fueled by many years of strong organic growth in the vertical. At the same time, we've entered adjacent insurance verticals using these solutions. From personal auto, we expanded into commercial auto bringing powerful driver insights. We also launched a data-driven life insurance underwriting score, which we later extended to group life customers. And we also provide impactful solutions to assess the risk of apartment and condo buildings for commercial habitational insurers. All together, these innovations have enabled us to generate superior growth in our insurance vertical. In international, we've consistently utilized our growth playbook to outperform underlying markets regardless of their inherent growth rate. I want to use two examples of dramatically different markets, India and Canada, to illustrate the point. In India, we delivered a 32% revenue CAGR from 2016 to 2019. Now clearly, the underlying market grew rapidly during that time, perhaps low double-digits, suggesting that we outperformed by a factor of two to three times. We did that through thought leadership and by becoming a valued partner to the commercial banks, FinTech and government agencies that support lenders and consumers alike. We delivered a steady stream of innovation including CreditVision, CreditView, a powerful commercial credit score, and many other solutions. And we moved into adjacent markets including commercial credit, direct-to-consumer and insurance. In Canada, where we grew at a 12% CAGR from '16 through '19, our approach was much the same, but in a much more mature market. The underlying market likely grew in the low single digits and we outperformed by multiples. We did this again through thought leadership and close partnership with our customers. Our growth benefited from numerous centrally developed solutions that we leveraged in Canada, including CreditVision, CreditView, fraud mitigation, and Prama. We also extended into adjacent markets including insurance, public sector, and direct-to-consumer. The story repeats itself across verticals in geographic markets around the world. This approach allowed us to successfully enter new markets like the U.K., Colombia, and the Philippines, where our growth playbook enabled us to quickly deliver above-market growth. We complement the growth playbook with powerful proprietary and third-party data assets. In addition to our traditional attractive positions in consumer credit data, we've developed an array of alternative data assets to serve core and high growth use cases. I'll provide you with some significant examples, but not a comprehensive list. For lenders, we have trended credit, payday and online short-term loans data, consumer-contributed data through our MX partnership, and income and employment verification from the largest U.S. payroll processor. For fraud mitigation, we have a massive repository of device-based fraudulent behavior that spans more than 15 years, and 8 billion devices from virtually every country in the world. We have access to public records from thousands of sources delivered through TLOxp that powers investigative solutions used in virtually every one of our verticals. From our recent acquisition of Tru Optik, we have data on streaming devices and activity for more than 80 million U.S. households. In our insurance vertical, we offer comprehensive driving violation data and state-issued motor vehicle reports. And in our international markets, we have a similarly broad array of information including commercial credit data, public record data, and other alternative data, as well as differentiated data used by insurers in a number of countries. While we internally developed much of our data and analytics capabilities over the last eight years, we've also executed 20 acquisitions and a host of strategic partnerships that have meaningfully augmented our data assets and created value for our shareholders. And we continue to aggressively pursue new differentiated data assets. We also differentiate ourselves by how we manage the data entrusted to us. To that end, last week, we announced a preferred equity investment in and strategic cooperation with Spring Labs, a leading financial technology firm transforming the exchange of sensitive data. Their advanced cryptography allows strict control of information visibility and their permissioned blockchain provides a timestamp, immutable record and audit trail. Together, we can increase access to Spring Labs' data exchange network and products, while enabling us to expand protection of sensitive consumer data initially for fraud and identity verification. Our industry-leading technology remains a competitive advantage. I've regularly discussed our track record of delivering on large-scale complex technology initiatives, as well as Project Rise, our current program to make TransUnion's technology more scalable, secure, efficient, and effective. So I won't recount them here. Project Rise keeps us on the cutting edge of cloud computing and information security, and remains on plan to deliver considerable operational and financial benefits. As we achieve key milestones in the program, we'll continue to provide you with updates. Now underpinning these market positions, our culture is rooted in customer focus and partnership. We've built a company that understands the needs of the customers it serves and can deliver best-in-class solutions to meet those needs. We also balance a sense of humility with a deep inner drive to be successful and accountable, while also taking the collaborative approach both internally and externally. As a result, we have built a track record of winning in the marketplace and delivering superior results. And our success in growth has allowed us to hire extremely high-caliber talent across the organization. At the same time, our culture has always embraced diversity, equity and inclusion. Over the past year that has taken increased importance as we've witnessed an unprecedented wave of social activism aimed at remediating the historical injustices inflicted on minority populations. I've spoken before about our task force for racial equity, which continues to make progress. Most recently, we hired an experienced executive to lead our supplier diversity efforts and joined three nonprofit organizations, which serve as chambers of commerce for diverse-owned businesses. I'll highlight a few other items relevant to this work. First, you can read in our most recent proxy about our Board's decision to link a component of our executive team's compensation to diversity hirings and promotions. Second, I'd encourage you to read our recently published diversity report, which highlights the good work that we're doing to create a more inclusive and diverse employee base. I was pleased to see that over the past year, we increased our percentage of global female leaders from 27% to 30%, a solid improvement, although we still have a lot of work to do to achieve our goal of gender parity at all levels. Third, in our sustainability report, you'll see that we have embraced the FASB and SASB reporting frameworks, along with making significant progress on all three dimensions of ESG. And finally, I would like to say unequivocally that TransUnion stands in opposition to the surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans. These actions are deplorable and unacceptable in any form. Now this morning, I've laid out TransUnion's differentiated market and portfolio positioning that has enabled industry-leading growth since our IPO. I fully expect the same differentiators in which we continue to invest aggressively to fuel strong performance over the years to come. Now with that, let me turn the baton to Todd to walk you through our financial results and our second quarter and full-year 2021 guidance, Todd.

Thanks, Chris. I want to start by building on Chris's commentary about the accelerated recovery we experienced in the middle of the quarter. This slide shows monthly year-over-year revenue growth for all our reported segments, verticals and geographies. With only a few minor exceptions, you can see a clear inflection over the course of the quarter, reflecting the positive macro dynamics that Chris highlighted. I will note that while total financial services shows relatively consistent monthly growth rates, if you look at the non-mortgage business, it progressed from down mid-single-digits in January to up strong double-digits in March. This timing had a significant impact on how we guided the quarter and the full year on February 16 compared to the actual results we delivered in the quarter, and the revised guidance that I'll share with you shortly. When we built our forecasts for the 2020 year-end earnings call, we had seen actuals for January, and heard limited incrementally positive comments from our customers. Macro indicators still hadn't definitively flipped to more positive trajectories; that all changed in the middle of the quarter. More specifically with February's results, we gained additional conviction in the outlook. And March came in substantially better than we would have expected based on all the information we had in early February. As we've always stressed, we want to provide guidance that is based on the best available data and what we have line of sight to which is exactly what we did in February. And that's what we're going to do again this quarter by raising full year guidance based on a more constructive view of our markets supported by concrete macro indicators, and clear signal from our customers. With that context in place, I'll start my review with our consolidated results. And for the sake of simplicity, all of the comparisons I discussed today will be against the first quarter of 2020 unless noted otherwise. Starting with the income statement, first quarter consolidated revenue increased 8% on a reported and constant currency basis. The Signal and Tru Optik acquisitions had just under one point of impact, so organic constant currency growth was 7%. Excluding mortgage from both the first quarter of 2020 and 2021, our business grew 4% on an organic constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA increased 14% on a reported and 13% on a constant currency basis. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 40.3% up 200 basis points, compared with a year-ago quarter driven primarily by the significant revenue outperformance. First quarter adjusted diluted EPS increased 25%. This was largely driven by strong adjusted EBITDA growth, benefit from reduced interest expense related to our debt refinancings, prepayments and lower LIBOR rates, as well as a slightly lower adjusted tax rate of 22.8%. Now looking at segment financial performance, U.S. markets revenue was up 11% compared to the year-ago quarter. The two media acquisitions had about one point of impact on revenue. Excluding mortgage, organic revenue would have grown 4%. Adjusted EBITDA for U.S. markets increased 16% as reported, and 17% on an organic basis. Adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 180 basis points, largely as a result of the strong revenue growth and offset partially by our continued strategic and operational investments, and the costs to integrate and scale our recent media acquisition. Diving into the results by vertical, financial services revenue grew 14% and was up 5% excluding mortgage. Notably, consumer lending, auto and credit card each improved over the course of the quarter, while the growth rate in mortgage, as expected, began to slow. As Chris discussed, we have seen improvement in most of our end markets, and we are well positioned to see an outsized benefit from this recovery. That view comes from a number of factors including our strong position with FinTech players and their expansion into new lending markets like credit card and buy now pay later, as well as accelerated customer adoption and usage of CreditVision, as it provides unique insight into consumers in a post-pandemic lending market and our continued success winning business. Looking at the individual end markets, in consumer lending, lenders and our investors are primed to resume more aggressive customer acquisition though their plans were somewhat delayed as the quarter began, and ended with a stimulus check for more consumers. In auto, markets surged in March on the strength of another round of stimulus that further strengthened consumers’ personal balance sheets. While there is some disruption to OEM production from the well-publicized chip shortage, we've seen a shift to used car purchases, which is an area of strength for our business. And in card, we've seen an increase in marketing activity and expect that to continue as we progress through the year. For mortgage, we now expect the market to be roughly flat, instead of down 10% in 2021, as we previously shared. Let me now turn to our emerging verticals, which grew 7% on a reported basis, and 4% excluding the revenue associated with the two media vertical acquisitions. As Chris discussed, we experienced generally improved trends across almost all of these verticals led by double-digit organic growth in public sector, tenant and employment screening, and media. Public sector remains a very strong growth vector for TransUnion as we benefit from work-from-home trends and certain new programs being advanced by the Biden administration. At both the federal and state level, we continue to see significant growth in the fraud and identity space as agencies administer additional programs to provide support to their constituents during the pandemic. In tenant and employment screening, we saw a modest improvement in employment screening, while our tenant screening solutions continue to deliver strong revenue growth behind key partnerships and accelerated usage of our SmartMove solution. And our media vertical continues to deliver attractive growth, while also inking new customers as Chris highlighted. We're pleased the momentum and scale we've developed in this vertical, as our recent acquisitions are tracking to our expectations. We also saw insurance continue to deliver growth driven in part by improving market trends, but even more so by the strength of our sales efforts, and customer adoption of our innovative solutions like DriverRisk, National Driving Record Solution, CreditVision, Prefill and TruValidate. Finally, our healthcare vertical revenue was down slightly, but showed improvement compared to recent pandemic-impacted quarters. In particular, we are seeing continued growth in front-end patient visit volumes, suggesting people are gaining comfort with returning to healthcare venues. As vaccines are administered more broadly, we believe this trend will continue to improve. Consumer Interactive revenue increased 3% driven by growth in the direct channel. Adjusted EBITDA was up 2% as we continue to increase marketing in the direct channel during the quarter. That marketing helps drive double-digit revenue growth in our direct business, and a solid increase in our subscriber base. Consumers value our credit health and identity protection services. Our team is also beginning to engage the sophisticated people-based marketing solutions we've developed through our recent acquisitions. Given their efficacy, we believe they will help our direct business deliver solid growth in the years to come. Our indirect channel remains soft as financial product aggregators saw modest improvement over the course of the quarter. As we've seen lenders increase marketing intensity, we would expect that to provide some incremental benefit to our business as the year progresses, and subscriber bases are rebuilt. For our comments about international, all comparisons will be in constant currency. For the total segment, revenue grew 3% as we saw trends improve in most of our regions, adjusted EBITDA for international increased 16%. Let me dig into the specifics for each region. In the U.K., revenue declined 5% though trends improved considerably over the course of the quarter as the country has moved closer to being fully reopened. We continue to see strength in our fraud and online gaming businesses. And while the lending market remains depressed relative to pre-COVID levels, we are seeing encouraging signs from lenders. We also benefit from a strong position with the fast-growing buy now pay later players. Our Canadian business grew 9% in the first quarter, while key end markets like lending neared pre-pandemic activity levels. We generated growth from the portfolio diversification that we've intentionally developed, including insurance, direct-to-consumer offerings, and the emerging FinTech space. In India, we grew 11% as the country has largely reopened, though with the caveat that the situation there has worsened significantly in recent weeks, highlighting just how fragile some markets remain. We continue to benefit from our diverse product portfolio including commercial credit scoring, fraud mitigation solutions, direct-to-consumer and government-sponsored programs to assist lenders through the pandemic. In Latin America, revenue was up 5% on the strength of double-digit growth in our two largest markets, Colombia and Brazil. Many of the smaller countries in Central America continue to see sharp declines as customers, consumers and governments navigate the challenges of the pandemic. In Asia Pacific, we grew 5% and continued recovery in our largest market, Hong Kong. There, we are seeing very positive momentum with our relaunched direct-to-consumer offering and are beginning to pursue more indirect partnerships. The Philippines remains very challenging and our current expectation is for a highly delayed recovery. Finally, Africa declined 5%. In our largest market, South Africa, the economy remains challenged and vaccination rollout has been slow. Based on recent market wins though, we do expect continued improvement in revenue as the year progresses. One of the many 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 $433 million of cash on the balance sheet after voluntarily prepaying $85 million of our term loans. At the same time, our net leverage ratio continues to decline from 2.8 times at the end of the fourth quarter to 2.7 times at the end of March. With our strong balance sheet, we remained in a good position to continue to proactively pursue additional attractive investments, which remain an important part of our long-term growth strategy. That brings us to our outlook for the second quarter and the full year. Starting with second quarter revenue, we expect slightly less than one point of M&A contribution from Signal and Tru Optik, as well as a two-point tailwind to revenue from FX. And we expect two points of benefit to adjusted EBITDA from FX. Revenue is expected to come in between $744 million and $754 million or a 17% to 19% increase, reflecting the improved macro-environment and very easy second quarter 2020 comparables. This results in organic constant currency revenue growth being up 15% to 16%. Embedded in our revenue guidance is an approximate two-point headwind from mortgage. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $296 million and $303 million, an increase of 22% to 25%. Adjusted diluted earnings per share are expected to be between $0.89 and $0.92, an increase of 35% to 39%. And for the full year, we expect 50 basis points of benefit from M&A and one point of tailwind to revenue from FX. Revenue is expected to be between $2.949 billion to $2.992 billion, up 9% to 10%. Our guidance includes 1 to 1.5 points of headwind for mortgage reflecting the fact that we only expect mortgage to be a tailwind in the first quarter, and that it will be progressively more challenging in the remaining three quarters. For our business segments, we expect U.S. markets to grow revenue high single digits, financial services to be up high single digits and emerging verticals to be up low double digits. Excluding the impacted mortgage, U.S. markets would be up low double digits and financial services would be up low double digits as well. We anticipate that international will grow mid-teens on an as-reported basis as we continue to see a varied pace of recovery across our markets. And we expect consumer interactive to be up low single digits. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $1.157 billion and $1.189 billion, up 11% to 14%. We expect one point benefit from FX. We expect our adjusted EBITDA margin to expand 80 to 130 basis points this year, even as we continue to aggressively invest in the business. Adjusted diluted earnings per share for the year expected to be between $3.45 and $3.58, up 15% to 19%. At this time, we have no material updates to our other guidance items like tax rate, D&A, interest expense, and capital expenditures. I'll now turn the call back to Chris for some final comments.

Thanks, Todd. And to conclude this morning, we took you through a strong first quarter and a much more bullish outlook for the full year based on significantly stronger macro trends across most of our markets. And we've discussed the differentiated portfolio market positions that have propelled TransUnion to best-in-class growth since our IPO, and that we believe will allow us to remain on this path in the future. I'll end by reiterating my hope that all of you and your families remain safe and healthy. And with that, I'll turn the time back to Aaron.

Thanks, Chris. That concludes our prepared remarks. As always for the Q&A, we ask that you each ask only one question so that we can include more participants. And now we'll be glad to take your questions.

And the first question comes from Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Good morning, gentlemen. And thank you for all that color. I was just hoping you guys could give us some more color on your FinTech vertical. It was obviously a very fast growing area before it did get hit during the pandemic. I was just wondering if you could give us some anecdotal color on what that pace of recovery and outlook looks like today?

Yes, sure Manav. Todd and I'll tag team on this one. But first, I would say that the consumer lending sub-vertical in financial services was one of the components of our business that strengthened month over month during the quarter, and that we expect will continue to benefit from the recovery. And of course, the FinTech players are material components of consumer lending. And generally we see strengthening there, we see an increased interest in new customer acquisition, which is terrific. And again, the longer-term we feel like e-commerce is going to become increasingly important to the delivery of financial services and we're very grateful for the partnership we have with so many of the players in that space, but generally speaking, I'd say it's a strengthening component of the portfolio that should benefit us in the quarters ahead. Todd, anything you want to add to that?

Yes, for sure. Chris said it well. I definitely would add that the FinTech players are expanding into new lending markets like credit card and especially the buy now pay later segment, where we've got a meaningful position as well. In addition, the story that we've told about how we won share with FinTech, with accelerated adoption and usage of our CreditVision suite of products continues to hold true with this customer group as they enter into new markets. So we're very encouraged and excited about the potential with the FinTechs for the remainder of the year.

Yes, and then I would just add, as we've talked about in other calls, the FinTech space has been more stable during this downturn than many expected. And we've seen funding begin to flow back in a substantial way to the space. So it's all very encouraging. Next question?

The next question comes from Andrew Steinerman with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

So I am going to ask two questions. When looking at Slide 11, I just wanted to make sure for the U.K. line that you felt the revenue declines in the quarter would just related to the lockdowns. Obviously, I saw the plus seven in the month of March and wanted to hear how cross-selling TrueVision and CreditView are going in the U.K. Secondly, I also wanted to know if you want to give us kind of the percentage of revenues for the U.S. financial services revenues, card, mortgage, fee loan, et cetera?

Yes, I'll leave that second question Andrew to Todd. But I will say, obviously, the U.K. has been very hard hit by COVID and the lockdowns had a negative impact on our business. We also just have some revenue lumpiness in the quarter, because we had a very large piece of business, a non-recurring business last January. And so that exacerbated the decline. What I'll say about TrueVision is that there has been a lot of interest in the product since we introduced it. We generated some revenue last year on a whole variety of customer pilots. We've built a very nice pipeline and we're beginning to convert into recurring revenue some of the banks that are part of that pipeline. So I would say, TrueVision penetration in the U.K. is encouraging and it's very much following the path that we experienced in the U.S. Todd?

Thanks, Chris. Hi, Andrew, just to finish off the question on the U.K., first to open up the quarter a little bit and show you what the trends look like by month, a couple of things are important. In January, we had a comparison to the prior year where we had a large one-time prior year deal in there. And then also you may recall that in January of 2020, that was the last month that we recorded revenue for a business we divested by the name of Recipero. So if you exclude those two items, the U.K. actually would have been down mid-single digits in January. But typically, these are things we would never talk about, because we don't show the monthly trends and you would have just seen the quarterly number, but hopefully that provides the context that you need. As it pertains to your second question about percentage breakouts of the end lending markets in financial services, what I can tell you is mortgage in particular on a trailing 12-month basis revenues were about 13% of total TransUnion mortgage. At this time, Andrew, we are not providing the details on auto, card and consumer lending. So probably that gives you enough with mortgage.

The next question comes from Jeff Meuler with Baird. Please go ahead.

Chris, as you refresh this, I guess on the growth playbook just wanted to revisit Prama, which was I guess an area that investors were optimistic about a few years ago, it seemed to fade a bit to the background. So interested when it got a recent call out at an investor conference, and then again this morning as it relates to Canada. So I guess the question is, is Prama starting to gain more traction as part of the broader ongoing business wins that you’re talking about? Thanks.

Yes, good question. Prama remains a vital part of our new product offerings and technology integration with our clients. We continue to invest materially in the product not only because it represents a new revenue stream for us as we mature the feature functionality and we increasingly license it across the markets that we serve, but I think Prama and tools such as Prama are going to become more a supporting way of engaging with the marketplace. They provide direct access to the range of information that TransUnion and other bureaus provide, a lot of analytic and modeling technology, the ability to upload and append other types of information or unique financial institution information with the other data TransUnion provides, the ability to place orders and monitor the status of the orders. So it's a new interface layer to the range of services that the industry provides that we'll be building out over time. And we think it's going to provide uplift on revenues, one through direct licensing, but also really through improved utilization, and increased stickiness with our customers.

The next question comes from Gary Bisbee with Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead.

Todd. I think I heard you say your guidance now implies mortgage flat for the year versus the prior down. Since you last reported, industry trends have clearly deteriorated. So can you help us understand like what you mean or why you now see it that way? And then part two of the question: I guess that would be a portion if I heard that right of the improvement in the guidance, but it seems like a smaller portion. Can you just sort of give us a sense of what are two or three of the key areas that have improved most since you last provided the initial outlook for the year? Thank you.

Hi, Gary, thanks for the question. Obviously an important one for us to go through this morning. So we are starting with our assumption around mortgage. First, in our February earnings call, we did call for a 10% year-over-year decline. And I think what we saw happen in the first quarter, mortgage actually continued to perform relatively well, albeit though, we did start to see the year-over-year growth rates start to taper off throughout the quarter as the comparison obviously gets significantly more difficult, because if you think back to March of 2020, that's really when mortgage took off significantly when interest rates plummeted. So that's definitely a part of it. The Q1 performance was definitely stronger. In my opening remarks, hopefully I provided the necessary context on what our business would have grown with and without the mortgage contribution. As we extrapolate mortgage out for the remainder of the year, I think we had a little bit more of a pessimistic thought about what was going to happen and I think what we're seeing is the market is relatively holding in particular with refinance, but also we continue to see good activity on the purchase side of things. So with that being said if you just dive a little bit more into mortgage, what we talked about for Q1, as we said, we had a 3% benefit in the quarter from mortgage. And the guide that we’re providing for the second quarter calls for a 2% headwind. So now we're starting to run into the comparables. And for the full year, we're calling for a 1% to 1.5% headwind. So if you just do the math, and kind of come up with what's going to happen in the second half of the year, we were anticipating to be down about 3% in mortgage. So there is definitely a tapering forthcoming. I think what's more instructive though, about our outlook and the portfolio of businesses that TransUnion has is everything else that we're anticipating to recover in the second quarter and into the second half. In particular, financial services excluding mortgage, we're talking about expectations of low double-digit growth. So that comes across all the other verticals and lending markets like auto, consumer lending, and card — so obviously strong recovery there. In our emerging verticals, similar story, we’re expecting low double-digit growth throughout. As I highlighted in my prepared remarks, think about public sector and insurance and media all performing very well. Our healthcare vertical a little bit slower to recover, but nevertheless, it is improving. So when you look at the emerging verticals and exclude healthcare, low double-digits would be up mid double-digits, so a lot of strength that we're anticipating in the emerging verticals. Our international business, expecting mid-teens growth on a reported basis; there are caveats. There is unfortunately some news coming out of India with surging cases, as well as other geographies like Brazil and even Canada. So the recovery there won't necessarily be linear. And then finally, I'd say that the consumer interactive business we’re expecting low single-digit growth as well. So all in all, across the portfolio I think Todd and I both feel very confident about what's taking hold.

Yes, Todd here, adding a little more color. For Q1, mortgage provided about a 3% benefit to our revenue. For Q2 we expect a roughly 2% headwind, and for the full year we expect a 1% to 1.5% headwind compared with our prior assumptions. The larger improvements that have driven our raised guidance are broad-based, including strengthening in auto, consumer lending, and card within financial services, and strong demand across our emerging verticals such as public sector, tenant and employment screening, and media. Additionally, our direct consumer business showed double-digit growth, and our international businesses improved in most regions. Those combined improvements drove a meaningful portion of the upside to our outlook.

Yes Todd, that's great color. And I appreciate the breakdown. The one small thing I would point out on mortgage is that we're incredibly focused on this as well; forecasts will no doubt vary. As rates have increased, that has impacted the business, but mortgage lenders are still very busy. There's a tremendous amount of work in process and they've been operating on a generous spread, and as we've talked about in prior calls, there's the opportunity to cut into that spread in order to stimulate further demand.

The next question comes from Hamzah Mazari with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

My question is just around a little more around the playbook that you guys articulated, which had great color, specifically on the media and digital ad offering. Could you maybe talk about how differentiated that offering is, what the competitive set looks like there? And then, do you continue to expect to scale this up through M&A just given the leverage today is at an all-time low for you?

Yes, thanks for the question. As we've talked about for quite some time now, we think that the media and digital marketplaces will benefit from the precise matching logic and high data quality that TransUnion can bring. We've been doing matching and append operations in this ecosystem for many years. There is a slightly different set of players in advertising, so we decided to formalize our approach and enter the market. Initially, we bring a lot of quality data sets. As I mentioned, our match logic is very powerful given the core credit markets that we serve and more recently we did acquisitions to acquire underlying data management technologies that allow us to bring together the range of data that we have and our match logic in a very user-friendly way, where digital marketers can generate audiences on the fly. Also, recent acquisitions have brought us data and insights as to which households are subscribing to various streaming services, both audio and video streaming services, which will allow advertisers to tap a rapidly growing marketplace that does not have the same level of insights or ad precision that other parts of the marketplace have. So, we bought a couple of businesses, Tru Optik and Signal, and we're merging them into our existing operations. We're integrating management teams and product and platform integration at a variety of levels. We're building out our product, support, and platform integration activities quite materially; that's going to continue to be a focus. It's an area where we expect higher-than-average growth for the foreseeable future. We think it's a large end market that can mature into one of our larger emerging verticals over time. And certainly, we're open to M&A to add additional capabilities as we see fit.

The next question is from Toni Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

I wanted to start by saying I appreciate the strength and acceleration from January to March. But you mentioned the non-mortgage financial services growth of 5%, which is below what your closest competitor reported in the quarter of 11% organically. And I'm sure you have some ideas on what you think is driving the delta? Just want to know if you think it's a tough comp or is there a mix component here, or is it a sign that the environment is getting a little bit more competitive for you — anything else? I just wanted to give you a chance to explain your thoughts on that. Thank you.

Toni, as it pertains to the comparison to the prior year for our non-mortgage financial services business, a couple of things. First, remember that Q1 of 2020 was a relatively strong quarter for us. We were not heavily impacted by the pandemic in that quarter; it was only about two weeks into it in the U.S. So if you think back to that period, the performance that we were seeing from our FinTech customers was exceptionally strong last year. So we're comping against that. While we've seen a good recovery in many of our end markets like auto, card and banking and consumer lending, the comps can make the year-over-year growth rate appear lower. Our position with the FinTechs remains strong and we have deep relationships with these customers. As they branch into new businesses, we're right there partnering with them. Another factor is timing: stimulus checks arrived for many consumers in the quarter — one early January and another when the quarter ended — which can impact customer acquisition timing. Also, the strength in auto in March was a specific area of performance boost for us. So some of the delta you referenced is simply due to tough comparisons and timing rather than a structural loss of competitiveness.

Yes, Toni, the engine was firing on all cylinders in Q1 of 2020 with the exception of the last two months of March when the lockdowns occurred. The non-mortgage portion of financial services grew strongly in Q1 of 2020. The fact that we're now posting growth over that high level of growth is encouraging going forward. I think you're going to see that growth rate and spread accelerate against easier comps in Q2 and beyond.

The next question comes from Andrew Jeffrey with Truist. Please go ahead.

I appreciate taking the question, guys. I think TransUnion has a particularly enviable position in fraud and ID, which you highlighted. Chris, can you talk about whether you think there's any sort of pandemic-affected demand in those horizontal offerings or is that also sort of more digitally structural, driven by the pandemic? Just trying to get a sense of where the puts and takes are on reopening of it.

Yes, I'm not sure about the dynamic specifically related to reopening. But the pandemic and lockdowns were an enormous ecommerce forcing mechanism and ecommerce penetration worldwide grew by multiples. That caused a structural change in consumer behavior and an increase in anonymous digital transactions, which require increasingly sophisticated identity and authentication. That's where our portfolio is well positioned because of the historic strengths we have: we know a lot about individual consumers and can differentiate them, we have sophisticated fraud propensity models, and we've infused this with digital information from iovation that's collected from almost every country in the world. So we see the increase in demand as structural and long-term rather than purely pandemic-driven.

The next question comes from Kevin McVeigh with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Great, thank you and congratulations. Hey Chris and Todd. Just wanted some question around framing the recovery relative to prior cycles and just feel like you're better positioned given the pace of disruption as we're coming out of this season. The way to think about how that can impact the revenue growth longer term, particularly the positioning at FinTech as it becomes more pervasive across the enterprise? And is there any frame on the incremental growth and margin profile of the business as you're seeing on the FinTech opportunity given the pace of disruption?

Good question. We are well positioned coming out of this recovery. It feels a bit premature to be fully confident given what's happening in some international markets like India and Brazil, but things are substantially better in the U.S. Vaccination rates are improving, and consumption is rebounding which plays to our strengths. The benefits are in almost every vertical across our U.S. portfolio with the exception of mortgage, which will face some headwinds as interest rates normalize, and healthcare which needs more time to fully recover. The portfolio is not firing on all cylinders yet, but it's positioned for meaningful recovery quarter by quarter. You'll see acceleration in financial services from the non-mortgage verticals and emerging verticals in the U.S. are poised to accelerate. In direct-to-consumer, as lenders focus on customer acquisition, our indirect channel will again be a strength and propel further growth. Internationally, prior to the pandemic our portfolio was growing organically in the low double digits to mid-teens, and as vaccines roll out, we expect that organic momentum to return over time.

The next question comes from Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Please go ahead.

Thanks very much for squeezing me in. Hey Todd, I thought I would just ask you about the organic growth expectation for the year. Is there some way you can parse it, and if it’s not quantitative maybe qualitatively, in terms of the economic recovery boost versus the company getting back to aggressively driving sales from internal initiatives? Just trying to figure out how you guys are looking at that internally: how much is going to be the boost from the economic recovery and how much is us getting back on our front foot again?

Shlomo, good question. Much of the improvement is a combination of both macro-driven recovery and our own sales execution and product momentum. Over the last year our sales teams pivoted to help customers manage portfolios and address immediate pandemic-driven needs, which changed our pipeline composition. As markets have started reopening and customers are looking to acquire again, that pipeline has evolved. So when we provide guidance we factor in macro indicators and the deals our teams have won. Our pipeline is robust, our sales force is executing and we're winning. That mix — a better macro backdrop plus our pipeline conversion — is what underpins our guidance.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Aaron Hoffman for any closing remarks.

Great, I'll just thank everyone for joining us today. And I hope that you have a wonderful rest of the day. We look forward to speaking with many of you over the course of the quarter. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

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