TransUnion Q3 FY2024 Earnings Call

Good day, and welcome to the TransUnion 2024 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Greg Bardi, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for attending today. Joining me on the call are Chris Cartwright, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Todd Cello, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We posted our earnings release and slides to accompany this call on the TransUnion Investor Relations website this morning, and they can also be found in the current report on Form 8-K that we filed this morning. 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 reconciliation 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 it over to Chris.

Thanks, Greg. And let me add my welcome and share our agenda for the call this morning. First, I will provide the financial highlights for our third quarter 2024 results. Second, I will detail progress against our transformation program and next milestones. Finally, Todd will detail our third quarter results along with our fourth quarter and full-year 2024 guidance. In the third quarter, TransUnion again exceeded guidance across all key financial metrics. Given the strength in the quarter and ongoing business momentum, we are raising our full-year 2024 guidance, which Todd will discuss later. Revenue grew 12% on an organic constant currency basis above our 8% to 10% guidance. Excluding mortgage, our growth of over 8% also exceeded expectations. In the U.S., we continue to experience stable economic and lending conditions. Household finances remain healthy due to low unemployment and some real wage growth, although lower-income consumers face affordability pressures from higher shelter, transportation, and other expenses. Consumer delinquencies have improved for personal loans and appear to be stabilizing for credit cards and auto loans. In mortgages, delinquencies have risen but remain below historical averages. In September, the Fed announced a 50-basis point interest rate cut with market expectations for further gradual reductions over the next several quarters. We expect an interest rate easing cycle will benefit our volumes over the medium term. In mortgage, we expect there will be a notable refinancing opportunity for loans opened over the last three years, as well as potentially higher purchase activity resulting from improved affordability. Outside of mortgage, we expect lower rates to benefit consumers, who will see lower borrowing costs and our customers, who will benefit from lower funding costs and increased consumer demand. These dynamics are in the context of lending volumes that remain below historical trends. In our U.S. markets segment, revenue grew 12% in the third quarter. Financial services grew 17%, led by over 60% growth in mortgage and growth across all our non-mortgage lines of business. Emerging verticals grew 3%, driven by double-digit growth in insurance. Consumer interactive grew 21% due to our large breach remediation wins. In our International segment, we grew by 12% on a constant currency basis, the 14th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. India led with 23% growth, while Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Africa all grew double-digits. And finally, we prepaid $25 million in debt during the quarter for a total of $105 million year-to-date with the intent to make additional prepayment in the fourth quarter. Our leverage ratio is on track to be within our near-term target of 3 times or under by year-end. As we approach the one-year anniversary of announcing the next step in our transformation, I want to provide an update on the strong execution throughout the year. As a reminder, this phase of our transformation comprises two complementary programs aimed at reducing cost and accelerating innovation. First, we're optimizing our operating model by expanding our global capability center network. Second, we're modernizing our technology capabilities on state-of-the-art data management and product platforms. Let me detail the progress made to date in the next steps to complete the programs in 2025 as intended. Our operating model optimization is the continuation of a multi-year journey to build scale across the organization, foster knowledge sharing, and standardize ways of operating. We leverage our Global Capability Centers, driving workforce productivity and allowing us to provide more services from talent-rich geographies such as India, South Africa, and Costa Rica. Over the last 12 months, we substantially completed the relocation of roughly 1,000 roles from local markets to our GCCs. As of the end of the third quarter, nearly all new positions in the GCCs have been filled. We now have roughly 5,600 employees in our GCC network, largely in India, but with significant presence in Africa and Costa Rica to support 24x7 availability. We also strengthened our local GCC leadership by hiring senior management roles within the regions to support these deep talent pools. A majority of our GCC employees are software developers within our technology, data, and analytics organization, in addition to sizable teams supporting our corporate functions and business transformation efforts. As more work shifts to the GCCs, we're implementing a rigorous playbook to mitigate knowledge transfer risk. Our centralized transition team systematically tracks and documents work processes and develops a feedback loop for continuous process improvement. We also emphasized training, development, and assessment for recent hires to ensure success in their new roles. We're very pleased with the execution of our GCC strategy, which is driving material realized cost savings in 2024. Our focus now is further refining our processes to enhance and expand our best-in-class GCC network. Last quarter, we laid out how we're aligning TransUnion around global technology and product platforms powered by OneTru. Today, I'll focus on the innovative capabilities and product launches in recent months. Earlier this year, we tested and demonstrated that OneTru can materially improve the speed and efficacy of FactorTrust, our short-term credit lending bureau in the U.S. We recently went live with several enhanced capabilities, including triggers, innovation labs, new attributes, and customer prescreens. We plan to migrate FactorTrust customers over the remainder of this year. In 2025, we plan to migrate our primary U.S. credit system customers and decommission the legacy platforms. We also released the first capabilities of TruValidate integrated fraud suite for general availability. The suite produces notable predictive uplift and allows us to deliver our fraud point solutions to customers via a common API. In the third quarter, we signed our first contract for the integrated suite in a competitive win against top fraud vendors. TruIQ Data Enrichment provides instant access to TransUnion credit from within a customer's technology environment. This privacy-first approach enables our customers to develop highly targeted marketing campaigns while retaining control of their sensitive IP. In August, we launched data enrichment on the Snowflake platform to high customer interest with strong new sales and a growing pipeline. We see significant opportunity to embed identity-centric solutions like data enrichment directly within cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, enabling customers to access our data within the environments of their choice. In our TruAudience marketing solutions, we achieved another key milestone in integrating products and building capabilities. Earlier this year, we unified the underlying identity graphs of our solutions to deliver more accurate identity resolution. This quarter, we consolidated the product so that customers can experience our identity products on a common and modern user interface with improved features and functionality. Over the next few quarters, we expect to release further enhancements as well as roll out the capability internationally. Finally, we're in the process of migrating our internal big data and analytics environment, which we call SHAPE, onto OneTru. SHAPE is frequently the starting point for new product innovation and is also used for customer analytics work, including our innovation labs. And we've onboarded and trained approximately 400 of our data scientists onto OneTru and delivered 10 innovation labs utilizing the platform. We plan to onboard and train all 1,000 plus of our data scientists by the end of this year, allowing us to decommission the legacy SHAPE platform in early 2025. OneTru is accelerating our innovation and enabling new products that resonate with our clients. We've already built a pipeline approaching 50 million and growing from recently introduced OneTru-powered products. Now the early success of OneTru strengthens our conviction in our technology modernization strategy. In addition to delivering continued innovation, 2025 will focus on application development and customer migration. Let me discuss our key initiatives for the coming year. In core U.S. Credit, we aim to have end-to-end capabilities for both online and batch services on OneTru by early next year. We plan to start parallel runs and initial migrations of customers in the first quarter with continued migrations throughout 2025. In India Credit, we are similarly migrating all data and analytics work on the OneTru next year. This will enable us to launch our TruIQ analytics suite and innovation labs into the region. We anticipate strong demand in India for our next-generation analytics solutions. We are also well underway in modernizing our consumer solutions technology, which underpins our credit education and identity protection offerings for our indirect channel partners. We plan to consolidate our offerings, including those acquired through Sontiq onto a single global platform. We also plan to launch a comprehensive new interface for our direct-to-consumer product in early 2025. Finally, given the positive early indications of OneTru strengthening our core credit applications, we are evaluating opportunities for further international bureau migrations. Remember that our announced program focused on the U.S. and India through 2025, but we view OneTru as our destination platform for all bureau applications. Next year, we plan to lay the groundwork in four other key markets for their eventual migration to OneTru. We remain on track to complete our transformation program in 2025 with full savings benefits expected in 2026. We continue to expect to incur $355 million to $375 million of one-time expenses to capture the benefits of our transformation programs, including $200 million in 2024. We now expect CapEx to be 8% of revenues in 2024 against a prior expectation of 9%, driven by more efficient spending throughout this year in addition to higher revenues. We continue to expect CapEx to be approximately 8% of revenues in 2025. We continue to expect to deliver roughly $200 million of free cash flow benefit by 2026, driven by $100 million to $140 million of operating expense savings as well as $70 million to $80 million of CapEx savings as we lower our CapEx requirements to a sustainable 6% of revenues. In 2024, we now expect to deliver $85 million of in-year operating expense savings ahead of our $65 million expectations at the start of the year and supporting almost 100 basis points of margin expansion in the year. The higher savings in 2024 have been largely driven by our people-related actions and expanded GCC network. The remaining $45 million of expected savings will be driven primarily by our technology modernization. We expect to complete the investment program in 2025 and most of the technology cost rationalization will be actioned late in 2025 near the completion of the program. That means that the remaining savings will not be realized until 2026. Taken together, our transformation programs are driving tangible benefits across the organization and will enable us to reach new levels of performance and scale. We look forward to updating you on our accelerating innovation, as well as progress against our remaining cost savings targets. Now, Todd will provide further details on our third quarter financial results and our updated full-year 2024 outlook.

Thank you, Chris. And let me add my welcome to everyone. As Chris mentioned, in the third quarter, we exceeded our guidance across all key financial metrics. Mortgage was the largest driver of our outperformance, and our non-mortgage financial services businesses and International segment also contributed positively. Third quarter consolidated revenue increased 12% on a reported and organic constant currency basis. There was no impact from acquisitions and an immaterial impact from foreign currency. Our business grew 8% on an organic constant currency basis, excluding mortgage from both the third quarter of 2023 and 2024. Adjusted EBITDA increased 11% on a reported and constant currency basis. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 36.3%, above the high end of our expectations. Margins were down 50 basis points on a year-over-year basis, which includes an 80-basis point drag from our lower-margin breach wins, as well as an over 100-basis point impact from lapping last year's lower-than-typical incentive compensation. Excluding those items, we delivered another strong quarter of underlying margin expansion driven by revenue growth and transformation savings. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was $1.04, an increase of 14%. Our adjusted tax rate for the quarter was 24.6%, higher than expected due to a recently started internal project to restructure our legal entities to maintain a tax-efficient structure as we expand our global footprint. Finally, in the third quarter, we took $69 million of one-time charges related to our transformation program, $47 million for operating model optimization, primarily related to our planned exit of an office lease, and $22 million for technology transformation. We incurred $145 million of one-time transformation expenses year-to-date. Looking at segment financial performance for the third quarter. U.S. markets revenue, which includes Consumer Interactive, was up 12%, compared to the year-ago quarter. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 37.7% or down 120 basis points. Excluding the impact of breach revenues and last year's lower incentive compensation, margins were up strongly. Financial services revenue grew 17%. Excluding mortgage, financial services revenue was up 4%. Trends remain consistent with the last several quarters with year-over-year growth improving sequentially as we start to lap the slowdown in activity from last fall. We outperformed flattish volumes driven by successful cross-sell of our broader solution suite. Our credit card and banking business was up 5% despite tempered online volumes. This customer segment has seen some of the strongest interest in data enrichment and the broader TruIQ analytics suite, in addition to other highly relevant products such as Trusted Call Solutions. Consumer lending revenue grew 2%. FinTech online activity remains muted but stable, with lenders slowly resuming some level of marketing activity. The FinTech market appears to be trending in the right direction and should be a longer-term beneficiary of falling interest rates, which lowers funding costs and supports increased consumer demand, particularly for debt consolidation. Our short-term lending business improved, benefiting from recent wins. Our auto business grew 1%. The market remains choppy across both the new and used car markets as consumers face persistent affordability challenges. Against this backdrop, we drove new business wins, including in TruAudience marketing solutions, as well as Trusted Call Solutions. For mortgage, revenue grew 63% ahead of our expectations compared to inquiry volumes down 8%. For the first time this year in late September, we experienced volumes that were ahead of last year's pace as average mortgage rates moved below 6% following the Fed's announcement. Mortgage rates have since crept back above 6%, which has tempered the pace of activity in recent weeks. We continue to take a conservative approach to forecasting fourth quarter volumes even as originations remain significantly below historical averages. On a trailing 12-month basis, mortgage represented above 10% of total TransUnion revenue. Emerging verticals grew 3% in the quarter, led by double-digit growth in insurance. Public sector, tenant and employment, and tech, retail, and e-commerce also grew, offsetting declines in telco and media. Insurance grew double-digits as market trends progressed as anticipated. Insurers continue to gradually increase marketing activity, driving demand for our credit and identity-based marketing solutions. While marketing activity has improved, it remains below levels seen a few years ago as select insurers still work to achieve rate adequacy. Shopping remains strong with increased activity across all demographics. We see good momentum expanding our value proposition to the insurance market with products such as TruVision, Driving History, Trusted Call Solutions, and our fraud and marketing products. And employment returned to growth as we lap the impact of our product recalibration with further improvement expected in the fourth quarter. Public sector grew low-single-digit, led by communications and fraud solutions. Public sector had favorable project timing in the second quarter that reversed in the third quarter, and we expect this vertical to grow low-double-digits for the year. Tech, retail, and e-commerce also grew low-single-digit, primarily led by trusted call solutions. Media declined mid-single-digit, lapping mid-teens growth in the prior year, which was aided by one-time project wins. We expect this vertical to return to growth in the fourth quarter. Collections were flat and telco declined low-single-digit, both as expected. Turning to Consumer Interactive. Revenue increased 21%, driven by recent breach remediation wins. Our cross-functional teams executed well against these contracts, supporting consumers and building our credibility in this space. Excluding the breach benefit, revenue declined mid-single-digit, primarily due to our direct channel. We are making good progress on broadening our value proposition and go-to-market strategy in direct-to-consumer, and we expect to have more to share in the coming quarters. For my comments about international, our revenue growth comparisons will be in constant currency. For the total segment, revenue grew 12% with four of our six reported markets growing by double-digits. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 45.7%, up 110 basis points. Now let's dig into the specifics for each region. In India, we grew 23% with broad-based growth across consumer credit, commercial credit, fraud, marketing, and direct-to-consumer. While growth remained strong, we experienced some deceleration in the last two quarters. As previously noted, the Reserve Bank of India has tempered the pace of lending activity by tightening regulations on unsecured lending and targeting lower loan-to-deposit ratios industry-wide. This resulted in our online volumes slowing in the third quarter, compared to strong growth throughout the first half of 2024. We believe the RBI is taking a proactive approach to support financial stability over the long term as they build a world-class lending market. These actions are also in the context of good GDP growth, inflation in line with historical trends, and an overall healthy consumer with delinquencies below long-term averages. In this period of consumer credit tightening in India, we are benefiting from our ongoing product and vertical diversification. Our team is doing an excellent job outgrowing the underlying market, leaning further into our commercial credit solutions and new products like our API marketplace. We are monitoring lending conditions in India and expect strong growth in the fourth quarter. Our U.K. business delivered another quarter of growth, up 4%. The market is trending positively with gradually improving banking and FinTech activity, as well as higher consumer optimism, supported by lower inflation and the Bank of England's first interest rate cut in August. We delivered strong new business, including wins across our FinTech, insurance, government, and gaming verticals. In Canada, we grew 9%. We outperformed flattish market volumes, driven by strategic cross-sell into financial services and alternative lenders, recent breach and consumer indirect wins, and strength in insurance. We anticipate mid-to-high single-digit growth from Canada in the fourth quarter. In Latin America, revenue grew 13%. Colombia grew high-single-digit, outpacing muted volumes. Brazil grew double-digits, supported by new business wins, and our other Latin American countries also grew double-digits. In Asia-Pacific, we grew 11%, led by strength in the Philippines and a solid quarter in Hong Kong. Finally, Africa increased 10% with broad-based growth led by our retail vertical. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with roughly $5.2 billion of debt and $643 million of cash. We finished the quarter with a leverage ratio of 3.1 times. We made a $25 million voluntary repayment in the third quarter for a total of $105 million year-to-date. We expect to make an additional prepayment in the fourth quarter with excess free cash flow after funding our transformation initiatives. Remember that the majority of the roughly $280 million of accrued one-time transformation expenses from the fourth quarter of 2023 through the end of 2024 will be paid out this year. Since announcing our Neustar acquisition, we have voluntarily prepaid $1.6 billion while executing on three refinancing transactions to lower our interest expense and extend our maturity profile. Net of our swaps, our all-in average effective cost of debt at today's rates is roughly 4.7% below current SOFR. You can find a slide on our debt profile in the appendix of our presentation. Based on our expectations for adjusted EBITDA and cash generation, we expect our leverage ratio to be roughly three times by the end of 2024. We continue to target a leverage ratio of under 3 times and view debt prepayment as an attractive use of cash. Turning to guidance. We are pleased with our outperformance over the first three quarters of the year, but our guidance approach remains unchanged. In prior guides this year, we assumed no benefits from interest rate cuts. With the Federal Reserve announcing a 50-basis point interest rate cut in mid-September, we have incorporated modest improvements in mortgage volumes based on what we have experienced over the last few weeks. While we expect interest rate reductions to benefit our broader U.S. financial services business over the long term, we do not expect those benefits to manifest meaningfully in 2024. We assume muted, but stable lending volumes will persist through the end of the year. That brings us to our outlook for the fourth quarter. We expect foreign exchange to have a less than 0.5% impact on revenue and an insignificant impact on adjusted EBITDA. We expect our revenue to be between $1.014 billion and $1.034 billion or up 6% to 8% on an organic constant currency basis. Our revenue guidance includes approximately 5 points of tailwind from mortgage, meaning that we expect the remainder of our business to grow 1% to 3% on an organic constant currency basis. In terms of other drivers of revenue in the fourth quarter, we expect mortgage revenues to increase over 80% based on roughly 10% volume growth. We continue to expect financial services excluding mortgage to grow mid-single-digit. We expect emerging verticals to accelerate from 3% growth in the third quarter and grow mid-single-digit. We anticipate another quarter of strong growth from international and we expect Consumer Interactive to decline roughly 10% as the business laps a sizable breach win from the prior year. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $360 million and $375 million, up 10% to 15%. We expect adjusted EBITDA margin of 35.5% to 36.2% or up 130 basis points to 210 basis points. We also expect our adjusted diluted earnings per share to be between $0.92 and $0.98, up 14% to 21%. Turning to the full-year. We now expect revenue to come in between $4.161 billion and $4.181 billion or up roughly 9% on an as-reported and organic constant currency basis. We expect our organic constant currency growth excluding mortgage to be up about 5%. For our business segments, we expect U.S. markets to grow high-single-digit or up low-single-digit excluding mortgage. Across U.S. markets, Neustar remains well on track for mid-single-digit growth in 2024. We anticipate financial services to be up mid-teens or low-single-digits excluding mortgage. We expect mortgage revenue to increase about 60% based on mortgage inquiries down less than 5% for the year. We now expect emerging verticals to be up mid-single-digit. We expect Consumer Interactive to increase low-single-digit and we expect International to grow low-double-digits. Turning back to total company outlook. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $1.488 billion and $1.503 billion, up 11% to 12%. That would result in adjusted EBITDA margins of 35.8% to 36% or up 70 basis points to 90 basis points. We anticipate adjusted diluted earnings per share to be $3.87 to $3.93, up 15% to 17%. We now expect our adjusted tax rate to be approximately 23.5%, higher than our previous guidance due to the previously mentioned internal project, which we expect to complete in 2025. We remain focused on maintaining the most efficient tax structure, but expect our future adjusted tax rate to be modestly higher than our recent historical rate given the evolving tax landscape, including initiatives like the global minimum tax. Depreciation and amortization is now expected to be approximately $535 million. We expect the portion excluding step-up amortization from our 2012 change in control and subsequent acquisitions to be about $250 million. We anticipate net interest expense will be about $245 million for the full year, and we now expect capital expenditures to be about 8% of revenue. We expect to incur approximately $200 million in one-time charges in 2024 related to our transformation program. With today's guidance raise, we have raised our revenue expectations over the course of the year by $161 million, adjusted EBITDA by $62 million, and adjusted diluted earnings per share by $0.19. Our revenue increase has been driven by stronger mortgage revenues, large breach remediation wins, and broad-based business momentum. We also modestly increased our adjusted EBITDA margin expectations, despite adding lower-margin breach revenue, supported by revenue flow-through and higher in-year transformation savings.

Thank you, Todd. And to wrap up, we exceeded third-quarter expectations driven primarily by U.S. financial services and international. We're executing well against our transformation program, driving material savings and a step-change improvement in innovation with several new capability and product launches powered by OneTru. We're raising our 2024 guidance and expect to deliver strong high-single-digit revenue growth and mid-teens adjusted diluted earnings per share growth for the year. Now let me turn it back to Greg.

That concludes our prepared remarks. For the Q&A, we ask that you each ask only one question, so that we can include more participants. Operator, we can begin the Q&A.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Faiza Alwy with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Yes. Hi, good morning, and thank you. So, Chris, I wanted to touch on your comments around OneTru and the transformation. You talked about around $50 million, I think, of pipeline related to OneTru products. I'm curious if we should consider those potentially as incremental revenues and how should we think about really the additional revenue benefit from the transformation as we look ahead to '25 and beyond?

Good morning, Faiza. Thank you for your question and welcome everyone to the Q3 call. OneTru is significantly impacting our business and enhancing our competitiveness across various product lines and markets. The most exciting development has been completing the integration of our acquisitions and the technology transformation, allowing us to focus on strong innovation. In recent quarters, we've announced numerous product innovations in areas such as analytics, marketing solutions, fraud prevention, and short-term unsecured lending. The market should expect this accelerated pace of innovation to support our revenue growth and forecasts as we approach next year. Recently, we announced the next generation of our TruAudience marketing solutions, merging the best of Neustar and TransUnion’s marketing tools for identity resolution, market segmentation, and onboarding, all with a new user interface on the OneTru platform. Throughout 2025, we have significant product enhancements planned. The same applies to our fraud solutions with the launch of TruValidate, our global fraud solutions brand, integrating strong point solutions for e-commerce fraud prevention and transaction authentication onto a unified platform. Our predictive models have become much more effective, resulting in new client acquisitions and a cumulative benefit of approximately $50 million in bookings driven by this innovation. Over the past few quarters, sales of our marketing products have improved significantly, especially considering the challenging advertising and marketing environment, where CMOs are tightening budgets due to a difficult revenue climate and a more cautious approach to client acquisition. As rates decrease in 2025 and we achieve a soft landing, if economic conditions remain stable or improve, we might see our customers shift focus toward acquisition, which would be beneficial. While we haven't provided guidance for 2025, I believe this situation reduces risk and supports our expectation of returning to steady high-single-digit revenue growth in the mid-term. The good news is we are projecting that type of growth in 2024 with this raise. So far, we've observed a transition from a negative volume environment over the past 18 to 24 months to one with stable, albeit subdued, market conditions, demonstrating our growth potential through our diverse product offerings and geographic reach, along with the stability we are now experiencing.

Great. Thank you, Chris.

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

Hi, could you just tell us your assumptions around the consumer credit activity kind of through the fourth quarter and the guide? And do you anticipate that there's a direction as we head into next year around credit activity.

Good morning, Andrew. This is Todd. I'll address that question specifically regarding financial services, excluding mortgage. As noted in the third quarter, we experienced a 4% growth, which exceeded our initial low-single-digit expectations. As Chris mentioned, while volumes are stable, they remain subdued, showing a relatively flat trend. It's important to consider that we're comparing against a period of slowdown and the challenges that Chris referred to. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, we anticipate mid-single-digit growth in this sector, assuming current conditions continue and comparisons become less challenging. It's essential to note that we do not expect any significant immediate benefits from the recent Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, but we believe we will see medium-term advantages from those cuts starting in 2025. Within financial services, excluding mortgage, consumer lending appears to be more sensitive to rate changes, which is relevant since most of our FinTech clients operate in this space. Lower interest rates provide FinTechs with cheaper capital access, enhancing their funding models. Additionally, when rates drop, consumers tend to seek products like debt consolidation, which will positively impact demand. For our auto business, lower rates improve affordability as vehicle prices have significantly risen since before the pandemic, and there may also be refinancing opportunities for loans taken out at much higher interest rates. As for our credit card business, the impact from lower rates is expected to be limited. Lastly, regarding the banking sector, small and medium-sized lenders have faced considerable challenges due to higher rates and deposit dislocations following certain banking failures last year. We believe this customer segment will benefit from lower interest rates in the medium term.

Makes sense. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Toni Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I wanted to ask about the mortgage situation. Could you explain the difference between mortgage revenue growth and inquiries? I suspect much of this is related to the increase in FICO prices, but I would appreciate insight on any other factors, especially since the gap has widened significantly from the previous quarters. Additionally, I noticed that inquiries are down about 8%, which seems somewhat low compared to competitors and third-party sources. Is there anything we should interpret from this decline in inquiries?

Good morning, Toni. Thank you for your question, which is an important one to discuss. As you mentioned, our mortgage volumes in Q3 declined by 8%. However, this was expected and aligns with our initial projections for the quarter. It's essential to note that the mortgage volumes reported by TransUnion include all mortgage-related figures, such as pre-qualifications, which may not directly compare to other market numbers. In the third quarter, the early access program saw growth, although it moderated as we compared it to the ramp-up period from the second half of 2023. As I mentioned earlier, we did notice a positive shift in volume in late September when mortgage rates were 6% or lower, but since then, rates have increased again, leading to a decline in tri-merge mortgage volumes. We've adjusted our guidance based on recent rate cuts and a few weeks of mortgage performance. We are now forecasting a 10% increase in the fourth quarter, which typically sees low activity, but considering the weak fourth quarter of 2023, this comparison is important. We expect the second-half volumes to remain approximately flat, a change from our previous forecast of a 5% decline. Regarding your question about the gap between revenue and volumes, in Q3, we achieved 63% growth while volumes were down 8%, resulting in a delta of about 71%. For our fourth-quarter guidance, a 10% volume increase is essentially predicting 80% in revenue. This reflects a positive mix and pricing from TransUnion's products, including the shift to early access and enhanced reporting on our credit products. Additionally, it is crucial to remember that our mortgage revenues encompass more than just online volumes; we collaborate with mortgage lenders to target and reach consumers who may be looking for mortgages, and we are seeing that aspect of our business grow significantly.

Thank you.

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

Thank you. How significantly do you believe the RBI actions have impacted the market and your financial services or consumer credit business in India at this time? Additionally, can you provide some insight into the growth outside the U.S. consumer credit business in India, given that you mentioned growth should remain strong? I’m just unclear about what that means in light of the recent deceleration despite a 23% growth rate.

Okay, Jeff, I'll take the India question. And I'm going to take your question about the diversification component as applying to India and not to the U.S. markets.

Yes, it's correct.

Yes. As we mentioned in the last call, the RBI has expressed concern about the speed of lending growth in India and has implemented measures to reduce the loan-to-deposit ratio in that market. We see this as a wise move to maintain the stability and integrity of lending practices in India, which has been growing rapidly year-on-year. I believe the RBI will continue this approach in the coming quarters until they are satisfied that there is genuine integrity in all lending practices, especially in unsecured lending, which has received more scrutiny. It's important to note that India remains a dynamic market for many reasons we’ve discussed before, including population growth, economic development, the adoption of financial products, and ongoing innovation. India aims to establish a top-tier financial services sector, and the RBI's actions are aligned with that goal. The lending market remains robust, with delinquency rates at three-year lows, indicating that there isn't a significant issue at hand. Recent actions against certain lenders were largely concerned with ensuring that consumers are charged appropriate interest rates rather than excessive ones. This reflects an anti-usury stance and emphasizes the need for banks to properly assess loan affordability for consumers. Therefore, we see this as a careful and conservative approach by the RBI to prevent a cyclical boom-and-bust scenario. We are also accelerating our growth beyond core consumer lending and expanding the number of use cases in consumer lending, particularly in agricultural lending, small-dollar lending, and micro-lending, while enhancing the analytic products we offer in this space. The team is optimistic about sustaining strong growth in the near future due to diversification in commercial, direct-to-consumer, fraud prevention, and marketing solutions, alongside a range of new analytic products for the Indian market. Although growth has moderated from the low-30s to the low-20s, we anticipate that this market will continue to compound at appealing rates over the next three to five years, and we will provide further guidance on this early next year.

Thank you.

And our next question comes from Ashish Sabadra with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking my question. I was just wondering if you could talk about what's driving the improvement in emerging verticals in the fourth quarter. And as you think about going forward with some of these innovations from OneTru, how should we think about that momentum going forward?

Yes. So emerging verticals in the U.S. grew 3% in the third quarter. It's down a touch from the 4% growth rate we achieved in the first couple of quarters; we don't really view it as a concern. We think things will accelerate and we'll be back mid-single-digits for the fourth quarter and for the full year. I mean, on a quarterly basis, there's always some lumpiness or noise. In the third quarter for emerging public sector, which is a lumpy business, grew, but not as fast as it typically does and will for the full year. We were also lapping some very large comps in media. You may recall next year; we had a big media quarter in the third quarter of '23 and so there was a difficult comp there. The good news is that insurance is returning to its former growthfulness, and we saw some double-digit growth, low double-digit growth in the third quarter, technology, retail, and e-commerce, solid, tenant and employment screening, et cetera, still looking good. So our prospects are improving, and momentum is improving in emerging verticals. And again, we saw a lot of marketing and fraud solutions into emerging, and I feel like we're pretty well positioned to deliver a good year of growth and continue into next year.

That's great color. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Kelsey Zhu with Autonomous. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. So we've seen really strong growth in Canada for the last few quarters and I think you previously mentioned that part of the strength comes from share gains. So I was just wondering if you could provide a little bit more color around what has worked really well in that market and what level of medium-term growth rate we should expect going forward?

Yes. Thank you, Kelsey. So I've been in the business for 11 years now, and for 10 of them, we've had outsized growth rates in Canada and that team has done a great job of consistently gaining market share. The playbook has been consistent innovation. They have done a great job of innovating in country, but also importing just a range of relevant product innovations from the U.S. and adapting it to the Canadian market. We were also the first mover in launching trended data in the Canadian market and we've got a very rich trended dataset, many attributes that perform extremely well vis-a-vis our competition and we've been able just to bring down shingles year after year in Canada. And I expect that the team will continue to do so. Now we're starting to lap some very large growth rates in a mature market. And so the rate of growth is going to decelerate from the mid and sometimes high teens that we've enjoyed over these last few quarters. But the Canadian team knows what they're doing. They're going to continue to innovate, they're going to continue to focus on ways to make Canadian lenders more effective and more profitable. And I think we're going to do quite well going forward.

Thanks a lot.

Our next question comes from Jason Haas with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my question. I'm curious to focus on the Consumer Interactive segment. I'm curious if trends worsened excluding that breach. It sounds like maybe that was due to DTC. And then I'm just curious what can drive sort of improvement there going forward?

Yes, thanks for the question, Jason. Direct-to-consumer in the consumer business overall remains an area of intense focus for innovation, and we've talked a lot about it in recent quarters. I feel like we're still on the path to deliver what we need to strategically to return this business to growth. Now, look, in any one quarter you're going to have some noise, but it's important to understand that on the direct-to-consumer side, we are broadening the value proposition and improving our go-to-market strategy, so that we can better monetize the audience that we're getting: one, just our natural flow given our brand in the U.S., but also through our marketing efforts, which we've continued to fine-tune to be both effective and entirely compliant. When I talk about broadening the value proposition, I mean, obviously, we've got to bring all things credit to the consumer. We've got to have education and access and simulation, and we're good at that. But we've been able to bring identity protection and breach remediation services. And I believe in the relatively near future, we will also launch offers capability, which has been a missing link to the component and we're very excited about bringing that capability to the U.S. markets and beyond and enabling our indirect business to bring the full complement of consumer solutions, which again is credit, identity protection, breach mitigation, and a financial and insurance offers engine, right? So that's kind of the strategy and we are making great progress in delivering that. And in fact, that will probably become a focal point of an upcoming earnings call. So that's what I would say about consumer.

That's great. Thank you.

Next question comes from Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Chris, I just wanted to understand the expected drop in CapEx from 8% to 6% in '26. I think part of it might just be your expectations of high-single-digit top-line growth, maybe a bigger revenue base, but maybe just trying to appreciate, perhaps the power of all the spend in the tech platform because I imagine there's always going to be the need to spend on analytics, software, data, et cetera. So a whole two-point drop seems like a lot assuming things keep changing.

Yes. Well, thanks for the question, Manav. There is a bit of a revenue element, but it's secondary. The core is that we're actually achieving the technology transformation with a lower level of spend. Now when we announced in the early fourth quarter of last year this current chapter of the transformation, which is really the two components of an operating model shift, we're relocating more work to the GCCs, but also an acceleration of technology investment on the backs of Project Rise to consolidate applications on the platform. We're just getting that done with a lower level of spend this year. And so we've reduced guidance on our CapEx to 8% from 9%, but it really has to do with effectiveness. Now some of these other areas that you mentioned, they are important areas of investment. We're continuing to invest disproportionately in innovation, but not all of it is capitalized, right? So the component that is capitalizable, we're getting the work done with less, and so I think it's good news.

And Manav, I would add on to it because I think you're more referring to how do we get to 6% of revenue in 2026, like is there any risk? Are we foregoing anything? An important thing to remember here is that we're migrating all of our applications to the cloud. And by doing that, we no longer have the need for hardware and software purchases, which historically would have been capital expenditures. So now as we have cloud computing costs, that comes into the P&L as an operating expense as opposed to a capital expense that we would depreciate over the life. So what's left in that capital spend when we get to 2026 is primarily our innovation. It's the internally developed software to develop our products and services for our customers.

Yes. And the other wrinkle on that is, given that we are actually consolidating on a global platform and not just migrating the same stuff to the cloud, we will have fewer systems to care and feed for, and we can concentrate our engineering on a common configurable global platform. And I think that's really going to be a point of leverage in our earnings and our innovation going forward.

Thank you.

And our final question comes from Simon Clinch with Redburn Atlantic. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you could discuss the long-term competitive landscape in what has traditionally been a stable core credit business for the credit bureaus. As you and your peers are developing new products and have the capability to bundle additional services beyond just the traditional credit file, do you expect this to change the intensity of competition in the long term? How do you plan to compete in that environment?

Thank you for the question. From my perspective, each bureau provides excellent data and analytics, serving our customers effectively, and there is a healthy level of competition along with significant innovation. Over my decade here, I've seen a lot of innovation. Each of us has a unique value proposition, which I believe is well understood. I don’t see this as a zero-sum competition. Rather, I see it as each bureau expanding the range of services and the value they offer to clients in order to capture more market share. I think we will each pursue our differentiated strategies to achieve this. Overall, this is a growing market. Many clients conduct work internally that I believe the bureaus are well-positioned to take over and integrate into their offerings. Additionally, data and analytics are crucial for lenders, insurers, and the entire client base for effective operations. Consequently, they are willing to pay a premium for quality data and insights that enhance their overall profitability. This is why I believe it's a thriving business. There is a continuous stream of innovation, we can demonstrate the value we add, and I think TransUnion is certainly well-positioned to grow alongside and surpass the market in the regions where we operate.

Perfect. That brings us to the end of today's call. Thank you for your time and have a great rest of the day.

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