Equifax, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Equifax third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Dorian Hare, Senior Vice President and Head of Corporate Investor Relations Thank you. You may begin.

Thanks, and good morning. Welcome to today's conference call. I'm Dorian Hare. With me today are Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer, and John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded. An archive of the recording will be available later today in the IR calendar section of the News and Events tab on our IR website, www.investor.equifax.com. During the call today, we will be making reference to certain materials that can be also found in the presentation section of the news and events tab at our IR website. These materials are labeled Q3 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Also, we will be making certain forward-looking statements, including fourth quarter and full year 2021 guidance, as well as a framework for 2022 to help you understand Equifax and its business environment. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. Certain risk factors that may impact our business are set forth in our filings with the SEC, including our 2020 Form 10-K and subsequent filings. Also, we'll be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EPS attributable to Equifax and adjusted EBITDA, which will be adjusted for certain items that affect comparability of our underlying operational performance. These non-GAAP measures are detailed in reconciliation tables, which are included with our earnings release and also posted on our website.

Now, I'd like to turn it over to Mark. Thanks, Dorian. Good morning. We had a very strong third quarter in the first nine months of 2021, a continuation of our strong outperformance last year, with record revenue in the quarter of $1.223 billion, which was up over 14%, with core non-mortgage market and non-UC ERC claims revenue growth of 20%. We are executing extremely well against the critical priorities of our EFX 2023 strategy, as we highlighted on slide 4. Our focus on leveraging the new Equifax cloud for innovation, new products, and growth is clearly driving our strong financial results. Our revenue growth has accelerated from 3% in 2019 as we were recovering from the 2017 cyber event and investing heavily in our EFX cloud transformation to 17% last year. We are on track to deliver 19% core growth this year at the midpoint of our revised 2021 guidance. More importantly, our core growth, which excludes the impact of the mortgage market, unemployment claims, and ERC-related revenues, is expected to accelerate to 21% this year, a powerful figure that reflects the strength of our underlying business model and EFX 2023 growth strategy. Not only is our core growth accelerating above historical levels during 20 and 21 in challenging COVID markets, and more recently in a declining mortgage market, We are also expanding EFX beyond our traditional credit bureau routes to a more diverse data analytics and technology company with our investments in the Equifax cloud, new data assets and NPIs, along with reinvesting our outperformance in bolt-on M&A in areas such as talent, government, and ID and fraud. We are quickly pivoting from building the Equifax cloud to leveraging it for innovation and new products that will position the new Equifax for stronger and more diversified growth in the future. Our EFX 2023 growth strategy remains our compass for the future and drives all of our top and bottom line growth initiatives as we move towards 22 and beyond. Turning to slide five, Equifax had a very strong quarter. Revenue at $1.22 billion was up 14.5% with organic constant currency growth up a strong 12%. The almost 15% top line growth was off a strong 19% growth last year in a much stronger mortgage market. This was our seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. More importantly, our core growth was up a strong 20%. Our U.S. B2B businesses of Workforce Solutions and USIS, which together represent almost 75% of Equifax revenue, again drove our growth, delivering 17% revenue growth despite the 21% decline in the U.S. mortgage market in the quarter. Non-mortgage revenue was up over 30%, and organic non-mortgage revenue was up 24%, strengthening sequentially from the 16 and 20% we saw in the first two quarters of the year. Third quarter, Equifax adjusted EBITDA totaled $404 million, up slightly from third quarter last year with margins of 33%. As expected, margins were down versus 2020 due to the inclusion of cloud technology transformation costs of $45 million in our adjusted results in the quarter, which were excluded last year. and redundant cloud transformation systems costs of $15 million. These costs related to cloud tech transformation negatively impacted EBITDA margins by almost 500 basis points. Adjusted EPS of $1.85 a share was down slightly from last year. Adjusting for the cloud transformation costs of $45 million, or 27 cents a share, adjusted EPS would have been up a strong 11%. We continue to make significant progress executing the EFX Cloud data and technology transformation. In the quarter, we completed 4,000 B2B customer migrations for a total of 15,400 migrations completed so far this year. In September alone, USIS completed over 900 customer migrations. Since the beginning of the transformation, we've completed almost 97,000 B2B migrations, 3.5 million consumer migrations, and 1 million data contributor migrations. We remain on track and confident in our plan. We continue to expect the North American transformation to be principally complete in early 2022, with the remaining customer migrations broadly completing by the end of next year. International transformation will follow, being principally completed by the end of 2023, with some customer migrations continuing into 2024. We're still in the early days of leveraging the cloud, but remain confident that we'll differentiate us commercially, expand our NPI capabilities, accelerate our top line, and expand our margins from the growth and cost savings in 22 and beyond. Our NPI performance also continues to accelerate. In the quarter, we released 30 new products, and we still expect our vitality index to accelerate from 5% last year to over 8% in 2021. Given our very strong third quarter performance, we are increasing our full-year revenue guidance by approximately 320 basis points, or $131 million, at the midpoint of a range between $4.9 billion to $4.921 billion, up 19% from last year, and increasing our full-year adjusted EPS guidance by 22 cents per share to a midpoint of $7.57 per share, which adjusting for technology transformation costs implies a 23% growth in EPS. This includes our expectation that the U.S. mortgage market, as measured by credit inquiries, will decline just over 7% this year, with the bulk of the return to normalization in the second half, which we expect to be down around 20%. Roughly two-thirds of the 320 basis point increase in our revenue growth framework to 19% is from organic business performance, with the balance from the acquisitions of Aprys, HealthyFX, and Teletrax which we expect to add about $45 million to revenue in the fourth quarter. In the third quarter, Equifax core revenue growth, the green sections of the bars on slide six, grew a very strong 20%, the third consecutive quarter of core growth at or above 20%. Non-market growth in EWS and USIS and growth in international drove about 900 basis points to the core of revenue growth, excluding acquisitions and FX, with mortgage outperforms primarily in workforce solutions, driving about 800 basis points of organic core growth in the quarter. As we move through 22 and 23, we expect to continue to see strong and balanced core growth, reflecting the benefits of the new EFX cloud, accelerated NPIs, continued strong non-mortgage growth, both from organic growth and acquisitions, as well as continued strong outperformance from workforce solutions. Turning to slide seven, Workforce Solutions had another exceptional quarter, delivering revenue of $508 million, which was up 35%. This is the first quarter Workforce Solutions has delivered over a half a billion dollar of revenue in a single quarter, a big milestone. This was against a very strong 57% growth last year. Adjusted EBITDA margins were up over 54%. Non-mortgage revenue at Workforce Solutions was up over 48%, with organic non-mortgage revenue up 41%. The strength of Workforce Solutions and uniqueness of their twin income and employment data set was clear again in the third quarter. Workforce's verification services revenue of $403 million was up a strong 34%. Verification services mortgage revenue grew 22% in the quarter, despite the 21% decline in the mortgage market, with the EWS outperformance driven by increased records, penetration, and new products. Importantly, verification services non-mortgage revenue was up 55% in the quarter, consistent with the very strong growth we saw last quarter. Our government vertical, which provides solutions to federal and state governments in support of assistance programs, including food and rental support, grew over 20% in the quarter. Government remains one of our largest non-mortgage segments, with attractive growth potential in the future and represents about one-third of non-mortgage verification revenue. Our new SSA contract went live this quarter at relatively low startup volumes, and we expect to see it ramp as we move through 2022. We expect new products, the addition of APRIS, and expanded federal and state social services to fuel growth in our government vertical in the future. Talent Solutions, which provides income and employment verifications as well as other information for the hiring and onboarding processes through our EWS data hub, had another outstanding quarter from customer expansion and NPIs, growing over 100%. Talent Solutions now represents almost 30% of non-mortgage verification revenue. As you know, over 75 million people change jobs in the U.S. annually, with the vast majority having some level of screening as a part of the hiring process. The addition of AFRIS Insights and our new partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse will fuel growth and new products in this important vertical. The non-mortgage consumer lending business, principally in banking and auto, showed strong growth as well of about 90% in the quarter, both from deepening penetration with lenders and from some recovery in these markets, although auto has been impacted by inventory shortages. Employer services revenue of $105 million was up $30 million in the quarter. This is an important growth engine for workforce solutions that also delivers records. Combined, our unemployment claims and employer retention credit businesses had revenue of about $65 million, up about $14 million from last year. Substantial declines in the UC revenue in the quarter were more than offset by ERC, which grew substantially sequentially from as we support businesses in obtaining federal employee retention credit payments. Employer services non-UC and ERC businesses had revenue of about $40 million, up 60%, with organic growth of about 35%. Our I-9 business, driven by our new I-9 Anywhere product, continued to show very strong growth, up about 80%. Our I-9 business is now almost half of employer services non-UC and ERC revenue, Reflecting the growth in I-9 and the return to growth of workforce analytics, we expect employer services non-UC and ERC businesses to deliver total growth of about 40% and organic growth of about 25% in the year. Reflecting the uniqueness of the twin data, strong verifier revenue growth and operating leverage resulted in adjusted workforce solutions EBITDA margins of 54.3%. The decline versus last year is driven by investments in the tech transformation, as well as redundant systems costs, and as well as significant investments in data onboarding, sales, and marketing to continue to drive workforce solutions growth. Rudy Ploder and the workforce solutions team delivered another outstanding quarter in our position to deliver a very strong 21, 22, and beyond. Turning now to USIS, their revenue of $380 million was up slightly, from last year. Total USIS mortgage revenue of $148 million was down 17%, while mortgage credit inquiries were down 21%, slightly better than the down 23% we expected in July. USIS outperformance versus the overall market was driven by growth in marketing and debt monitoring products. Importantly, non-mortgage revenue of $240 million grew almost 16%, with organic growth of over 9%. Year-to-date non-mortgage revenue is up a strong 17%, and organic non-mortgage revenue growth is over 10%. Banking, insurance, commercial, and direct-to-consumer were all up over 10% in the quarter. Fraud was up almost 10% organically and up over 75% in total with the inclusion of our count acquisition. Auto was up mid-single digits despite supply pressures, and telco was down just over 5%. Financial marketing service revenue, which is broadly speaking our offliner batch business, was $55 million in the quarter and up about 20%. The strong performance was driven by marketing-related revenue, which was up over 20%, and ID and fraud revenue, which grew over 15%. In 2021, marketing-related revenue is expected to represent about 40% of FMS revenue, identity and fraud above 20%, and risk decisioning about 35%. The USIS sales team delivered record wins, up over 20% versus last year and 40% sequentially in the quarter. The New Deal pipeline in USIS remains very strong. During the quarter, USIS acquired Teletrack, a U.S. leader in alternative credit data. Teletrack is being consolidated with DataX, our specialty finance credit reporting agency that we acquired in 2018, to expand our capabilities in the fast-growing alternative data space serving unbanked and underbanked U.S. consumers. And USIS adjusted EBITDA margins were 40% in the quarter, flat sequentially with second quarter. Similar to second quarter, the decline in margins in the quarter versus last year was due to both costs related to cloud transformation, which include the cost of redundant systems and inclusion of our adjusted results of the technology transformation costs, which were being excluded in 2020, and the expansion of our investments in sales and marketing, as well as new products to leverage both the strengthening U.S. market and accelerate new product introductions to drive revenue growth in 22 and beyond. Turning to international, their revenue of $245 million was up 10% on a local currency basis and up 100 basis points sequentially. This was the fourth consecutive quarter of growth in our global markets following the COVID pandemic impacts. Asia Pacific, which is principally our Australia business, performed well in the quarter with revenue of $89 million, up about 7% in local currency. Australia delivered this growth despite the extended COVID lockdowns in many portions of that country. Australia consumer revenue continued to recover, up 3% versus last year, and about flat sequentially. Our commercial businesses combined online and offline revenue was up 8% in the quarter. Fraud and identity was up 13%, following 22% growth in the first half. European revenues of 68 million were up 9% in local currency in the quarter and flat sequentially. Our European credit reporting business was up about 5% with continued growth in both the UK and Spain. Our European debt management business revenue increased by about 21% in local currency off the lows we saw last year during the COVID recession. Canada delivered revenue of $44 million a quarter, up over 8% in local currency, despite a weakening Canadian mortgage market that was down 15%. Canada experienced strong growth in fintech, while supply issues continued to impact their auto business. Latin American revenues of $45 million grew 16% in the quarter in local currency, which was the third consecutive quarter of growth coming out of COVID-19. We continue to see the benefit in LATAM of the strong new product introductions introduced over the past three years. International adjusted EBITDA margins at 26.7% were down slightly from 27.3% in the second quarter. The sequential decline was driven by incremental technology costs in Australia and Canada as they accelerate their cloud transformation programs. The decline in the quarter was principally due to costs related to the cloud transformation, both the cost of redundant systems and the inclusion in our adjusted results of the technology transformation costs, which were being excluded last year. Margins were also negatively impacting the quarter by our increased investments in sales and marketing and new products. Global consumer solutions revenue of $82 million was down 6% on a reported basis, and 7% of local currency basis in the quarter, slightly above our expectations. We saw growth of about 2% in our global consumer direct business, which sells directly to consumers through Equifax.com and represents a little over half of GCS revenue. The decline in GCS revenue in the quarter was again driven by our U.S. lead gen partner business. We expect the GCS partner business and GCS business overall to return to growth in the fourth quarter. GCS adjusted EBITDA margins of 23.4% were up sequentially, reflecting lower operating costs. The decline versus last year was principally debt-driven by revenue declines. Turning now to slide 8, Workforce Solutions continues to power Equifax as clearly our strongest, fastest-growing, and most valuable business, with strong 35% growth in the quarter, up 57% growth a year ago. Core revenue growth was 42%, driven by the uniqueness of the twin income and employment data, scale of the twin database, and consistent execution by Rudy and his team. EWS's ability to consistently and substantially outgrow their underlying markets is driven by three factors. First, growing the work number database. At the end of the third quarter, twin reached 125 million active records, an increase of 12% or 13 million records from a year ago, and included 97 million unique records. At 97 million uniques, we now have over 60% of non-farm payroll, which makes our twin data set more valuable to our customers with higher hit rates. We are now receiving records every pay period from 1.9 million companies, up from a million when we started the year, and 27,000 contributors a short two years ago. The exclusive agreement with a major payroll processor that we announced on our February call went live in the third quarter and contributed to this growth. Our strong momentum continues as we signed another large payroll processor last week on an exclusive basis that will come online in the coming months. We also expect to add further payroll processors in the coming months. As a reminder, almost 60% of our records are contributed directly by employers to which EWS provides comprehensive, employer services like UC Claims, W-2 Management, I-9, WOTC, ERC, HSA, and other HR and compliance solutions. Our acquisitions of Higher Tech, I-2 Verify, and Health EFX this year strengthen our ability to deliver these unique HR services, particularly through relationships with payroll processors and HR software companies. These partnerships have been built up over the past decade by the Workforce Solutions team, The remaining 40% of our records are contributed through partnerships with payroll providers and HR software companies, most of which are exclusive. We still have substantial room to grow our income and employment database and expect to continue to add new data contributors, as well as reach agreements with several additional payroll processors in the fourth quarter to add their records on an exclusive basis to TWIN in 2022. Beyond the over 50 million non-farm payroll records not yet in the TWIN database, We're focused on data records from the 40 to 50 million gig workers and around 30 million pension recipients in the U.S. marketplace to further broaden the TWIN database. We have plenty of room to grow TWIN. Second, increasing our average revenue per transaction through new products and pricing our existing products to value, recognizing the depth of information TWIN allows us to deliver to customers. Workforce Solutions' new product pipeline is rapidly expanding as our teams leverage the power of our new Equifax cloud capabilities. And third, by increasing our penetration in the markets we serve and expanding into new markets. For example, we continue to increase our penetration in the mortgage market. At the end of 2020, Workforce Solutions received an inquiry in almost 60% of completed mortgages, up from 55% in 2019. This 500 basis point increase is a big step forward, but we still have plenty of runway to expand the customers using twin and mortgage. We're also seeing substantial growth in twin and other credit markets, including card and auto, as these verticals take advantage of the unique lift from twin income and employment data and the 60% hit rates with our database. Growing system-to-system integrations is another key lever in driving both increased penetration and increasing the number of pulls per transaction. During the quarter, about 75% of twin mortgage transactions were fulfilled system to system, up over 2X from 32% in 2019. And again, we still have plenty of growth potential here. Workforce Solutions is performing exceptionally well with attractive above-market and above-Equifax growth rates and margins that we expect to continue in the future. Slide 9 highlights the core growth performance of our Our combined U.S. B2B businesses delivered 3% revenue growth in mortgage in the third quarter, outperforming the mortgage market by 24 basis points with the market down 21%. This strong performance outperformance was again driven by workforce solutions with core mortgage growth of 43% enabled by the multiple drivers that I just discussed. Slide 10 provides an update on new product innovation leveraging the Equifax cloud and our differentiated data. a key driver of our current and future growth. In the quarter, we delivered 30 new products with 150 new products in the market so far this year, which is up 18% from the 96 we delivered in the same timeframe last year. We continue to expect our 2021 Vitality Index, defined as a percent of revenue delivered from MPIs launched in the past three years, to be over 8%. In the third quarter, we launched significant new products we expect to continue to drive growth in 22 and beyond, The SSA Payroll Exchange that went live is an EWS product that supports verifications of SSI and SSDI social services, delivering critical income and employment status based on program requirements. OneView with DataX is a new integrated consumer credit report that redefines how we deliver, display, and provide insights to our customers. It also sets the stage for integrating non-traditional credit data in a single view solution for our customers. Alternative data from DataX, Teletrak, NC+, rental payments, and other sources are a critical priority for Equifax, and we expect to continue to drive NPIs in this space in the future. Digital Identity Trust 2.0 product provides businesses with a comprehensive, passive identity verification service that delivers a trust-do-not-trust recommendation across both physical and digital identity vectors. This product will leverage count data by year-end. MarketMix Premier solution enables the ability for FIs to access market share and size of liquidity across geographics. This provides quick identification of targeted growth markets to deploy spend across branch sales and marketing efforts. And lastly, the new Equifax affordability product in Australia uses bank transaction data and sufficient categorization to provide an affordability view to customers while removing friction for the consumer. clearly focused on leveraging our new Equifax cloud capabilities to drive our NPI rollouts and new product revenue in 2021 and beyond. Growing that NPI is central to our EFX 2023 growth strategy. In detail on slide 11, in 2021, we reinvested our strong outperformance in strategic and accretive bolt-on acquisitions that strengthen our position in existing growth markets and allow us to enter new markets with new capabilities. Our 2021 acquisitions add $300 million plus synergies to our run rate revenue. We are focused on executing acquisitions that are creative to our long-term revenue growth and margins and deliver attractive shareholder returns. Our priorities for M&A are clear and aligned around, number one, expanding our differentiated data, which is at the core of Equifax. We have scale and unique data sets that we want to expand and leverage with new data elements to drive enhanced decisioning for our customers. All of our acquisitions deliver new and differentiated data, and more data drives better decisions. Second, expanding and widening our largest and fastest-growing business workforce solutions is a priority for our M&A. The Aperis Insights, Higher Tech, HealthyFX, and IQ Verify acquisitions strengthen workforce and position EWS for future outperformance. And last, broadening our IT and fraud capabilities in the fast-growing digital and e-commerce space is another priority. M&A priority. Counts strongly advanced our capabilities in this fast-growing space. We closed the APRIS acquisition on October 1st and are focused on integration, new solutions, and growth. APRIS Insights and our new partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse are big step forwards in our strategy to build out an EWS data hub centered off our almost 500 million historical twin data records to address the fast-growing talent and government markets. As detailed on slide 12, combining our scale twin data with APRA's Insights Criminal and healthcare credentialing and sections data, along with other partner data assets, including the exclusive partnership for college and university data we entered into in the third quarter with the National Student Clearinghouse, allows Workforce Solutions to deliver the most complete, real-time, 360-degree view of the prospective employee or applicant for government benefits available in the markets. The talent solutions and government verticals offer large and growing markets for our workforce solutions business through the EWS Data Hub. We estimate an addressable market of $5 billion in the U.S. hiring space and onboarding process, with around 75 million new employees onboarded annually in the U.S. Workforce Solutions' government vertical is focused on delivering data and solutions to support federal and state benefit programs, as well as law enforcement agents. This is a substantial and growing sector that we estimate to have an addressable market of about $2 billion. APRIS Insights strongly accelerates our ability to penetrate these large and fast-growing TAMs. Insights is anticipated to generate $150 million of run rate revenue during 2021 and to grow on a standalone basis at over 15% annually. We also anticipate building towards approximately $75 million in revenue synergies by 2025, leveraging the EFX cloud to integrate AFRS Insights' rich people-based risk intelligence data in the EFWS data hub to formulate new multi-data solutions and through cross-selling efforts. Acquiring AFRS Insights and partnering with the National Student Clearinghouse provides strong pillars for workforce solutions growth in fast-growing markets going forward. Slide 13 highlights our focus on adding alternative data to our database focused on the 60 million un- or underbanked population in the United States. According to a Federal Reserve study, 6% of U.S. adults do not have a checking, savings, or money market account, although two-fifths use some form of alternative financial service. More over 16% of adults have a bank account but also use an alternative financial service product, generally at much higher costs. Providing services that help bring these underserved populations into the financial mainstream is core to our purpose of helping people live their financial best and is an important priority for our customers. Our acquisition of Teletrack in September, which we are combining with our DataX business, creates a leading U.S. specialty consumer reporting agency with data on more than 80 million thin-file, unbanked, and underbanked, and credit-rebuilding consumers. Our National Consumer Telecom and Utilities Exchange Partnership is another unique data set focused on this space that has more than 420 million records and 250 million consumers, helping our customers to expand underwriting to no-hit or thin-file customers. We are focused on expanding our unique alternative data from sources including specialty finance companies, alternative lenders, telco companies, cable and satellite TV providers, municipalities, and utilities to drive growth in the fast-growing alternative data markets. And we'll continue to look for opportunities to strengthen our alternative databases through partnerships and M&A. And now I'd like to turn it over to John to discuss our outlook for the rest of the year, our increase in guidance for 2021, as well as share our early read on 2022 assumptions and our financial framework for 2022. Thanks, Mark.

As Mark discussed, our 3Q results were very strong and much stronger than we discussed with you in July, with revenue about $50 million higher than the midpoint of the expectation we shared. For perspective, the strength was driven by our U.S. B2B businesses, principally Workforce Solutions, and also USIS. Workforce Solutions Verification Services was stronger than discussed in July, principally in non-mortgage, in talent solutions, card, and auto, as well as to a lesser extent in mortgage. Workforce Solutions' employer retention credit and unemployment claims revenue was stronger than we discussed in July. We expect the strength in ERC to continue in the fourth quarter. USIS was also somewhat stronger than we discussed in July. The strength in mortgage relative to our discussion in July was partially a reflection of the mortgage market being down 21% versus the down 23% we discussed in July. Workforce Solutions' outperformance relative to the mortgage market was also stronger than we expected. This strong revenue drove upside in adjusted EPS relative to the expectations that we shared in July. Before discussing our increased guidance for 2021 and providing a framework for you to consider for 2022, let's briefly discuss our assumptions for the U.S. mortgage market. As shown on slide 14, we are expecting the 21% year-to-year decline in U.S. mortgage credit inquiries that we saw in the third quarter to continue in the fourth quarter, with the fourth quarter down about 20%. This results in 2021 U.S. mortgage market credit inquiries being down just over 7% from 2020, slightly better than the down somewhat under 8% we discussed with you in July. For 2022, based on trends we are seeing in new purchase and refinance that I will discuss shortly, our 2022 framework assumes the U.S. mortgage market as measured by total credit market inquiries will decline about 15% from 2021. The 15% decline versus 2021 is most substantial in the first half of 2022, given the significant slowing we have seen in the U.S. mortgage market already in the second half of 21. Our assumed level of 2022 U.S. mortgage market credit increase remains over 10% above the average levels we saw over the 2015-19 period. The left side of slide 15 provides perspective on the number of homes that would benefit by 75 basis points or more from refinancing their mortgage at current rates. Despite the substantial refinancing activity that's occurred over the past year and current increases in U.S. treasuries, the number of U.S. mortgages that could benefit from a refinancing remains at a relatively strong level of about $12 million. Home prices have appreciated significantly over the past 18 months, which has provided many homeowners with cash-out refinancing opportunities, which in past cycles has led to increased refinancing activity from borrowers. For perspective, based upon our most recent data from April, Mortgage refinancings remain at just under $1 million a month. As shown on the right side of slide 15, the pace of existing home purchases continues at historically very high levels. This strong new purchase market is expected to continue throughout 2021 and 2022. Our 2022 assumption for U.S. mortgage credit inquiries assumes that we see purchase mortgage financings at levels above the levels we saw in 2020. with refinancings declining significantly from the levels we saw in both 2020 and 2021. Slide 16 provides our guidance for 4Q21. We expect revenue in the range of $1.23 to $1.25 billion, reflecting revenue growth of about 10% to 11.8%, including a 0.1% benefit from FX. Acquisitions are expected to positively impact revenue by 5.4%. we're expecting adjusted EPS in 4Q21 to be $1.72 to $1.82 per share compared to 4Q20 adjusted EPS of $2 per share. In 4Q21, technology transformation costs are expected to be around $45 million or 27 cents per share. Excluding these costs, which were excluded from 4Q20 adjusted EPS, 4Q21 adjusted EPS would be $1.99 to $2.09 per share. Slide 17 provides the specifics on our 2021 full-year guidance. We are increasing guidance substantially, reflecting our very strong 3Q21 performance. The acquisitions of APRIS, HealthFX, and Teletrac are expected to add about $45 million of revenue in the quarter. 2021 revenue of between $4.901 and $4.921 billion reflects growth of about 18.7% to 19.2% versus 2020, including a 1.4% benefit from effects. Acquisitions are expected to positively impact revenue by about 3.1%. EWS is expected to deliver over 38% revenue growth, with continued very strong growth in verification services. USIS revenue is expected to be up mid to high single digits, driven by growth in non-mortgage. Combined EWS and USIS mortgage revenue is expected to be up over 18% in 2021, 25 percentage points stronger than the overall market decline of just over 7%. International revenue is expected to deliver constant currency growth of about 10%, and GCS revenue is expected to be down mid-single digits in 2021. GCS revenue is expected to be up over 5% in the fourth quarter. As a reminder, in 2021, Equifax is including all cloud technology transformation costs and adjusted operating income, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EPS. These one-time costs were excluded from adjusted operating income, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EPS in 2017 through 2020. In 2021, Equifax expects to incur one-time cloud technology transformation costs of approximately $165 million, a reduction of over 50% from the $358 million incurred in 2020. The inclusion in 2021 of these one-time costs would reduce adjusted EPS by about $1 per share. 2021 adjusted EPS of 752 to 762 per share, which includes these tech transformation costs, is up 7.8% to 9.3% from 2020. Excluding the impact of tech transformation costs of $1.01 per share, adjusted EPS in 2021 would show growth of about 22% to 24% versus 2020. 2021 is also negatively impacted by redundant system costs of about $80 million relative to 2020. These redundant system costs are expected to negatively impact adjusted EPS by approximately 50 cents per share and negatively impact adjusted EPS growth by about 7 percentage points in 2021. We remain confident in our cloud transformation plan and the savings in 2022 and beyond that we have discussed previously with you. Now let's turn to a discussion of an early framework for 2022. Slide 18 provides the macro assumptions behind our 2022 framework. Given the continued significant uncertainties in the overall U.S. and global economy, as well as in the U.S. mortgage market, we wanted to provide you with the assumptions we've been using at this stage in developing our framework for 2022. As I discussed previously, we expect the U.S. mortgage market, our proxy for which is U.S. mortgage credit inquiries, to decline about 15% in 2022 relative to 2021. Equifax U.S. B2B mortgage revenue is expected to continue to significantly outperform the overall mortgage market and show growth in 2022 relative to 2021. Our overall framework is based on a continued U.S. economic recovery that has 2022 GDP growth of about 4% for the full year. We expect our U.S., IS, and workforce solutions non-mortgage businesses to outperform their underlying markets. We expect workforce solutions UC and ERC businesses to decline by almost 30% in 2022. We also expect that international economies will continue to recover in 2022. Our international businesses are also expected to outperform their underlying markets. Slide 19 provides a view of Equifax's total and core revenue growth from 2017 through the 2022 framework. In 4Q 2021, Equifax core revenue growth is expected to be a strong 17%, with core organic revenue growth of about 12%. Almost two-thirds of that core organic growth is driven by non-mortgage growth across all four BU's. In 2022, based on the assumptions I just shared, Equifax total revenue is expected to be up about 8%. We anticipate delivering strong core revenue growth of 14%, reflecting organic core growth of 11%, and a 3% benefit from acquisitions completed in 2021, which will more than offset the significant headwinds from the assumed declines in the U.S. mortgage market and the UC and ERC businesses. Slide 20 provides a revenue walk detailing the drivers of the 8% revenue growth in 2022 from the midpoint of our 2021 revenue guidance to the midpoint of our 2022 revenue framework, 2022 revenue of $5.3 billion. The 15% decline in the U.S. mortgage market and the expected declines in the workforce solutions, unemployment claims, and ERC businesses are expected to negatively impact revenue in 2022 by 5.75 percentage points. Core organic revenue growth has anticipated to be over 11%. Non-mortgage core organic growth is expected to drive about two-thirds of the growth. The largest contributor is workforce solutions with strong organic growth in talent solutions, government, and employee boarding solutions, including I-9. USIS non-mortgage, international, and GCS are also expected to drive core growth. Mortgage revenue outperformance relative to the overall mortgage market is expected to drive the remaining about a third of the organic core growth. This is driven by strong outperformance in workforce solutions. The acquisitions completed in 2021 are expected to contribute about three percentage points of growth to 2022. Slide 21 provides an adjusted EPS walk. detailing the drivers of the expected 14% growth from the midpoint of the 2021 guidance of 757 per share to the midpoint of our 2022 framework of 865 per share. Revenue growth of 8% at our 2021 EBITDA margins of about 33.8% would deliver 11% growth in adjusted EPS. In 2022, we expect to deliver EBITDA margin expansion of about 200 basis points. This margin expansion is expected to drive 9% growth in adjusted EPS. This margin expansion is expected to be delivered by the actions we have discussed with you throughout 2021. Our transformation investments will be reduced by about $100 million in 2022, with about half of this reduction, or about $50 million, being reinvested in new product and other development. We will begin to see net cloud cost savings in 2022 defined as the savings from improving production costs driven by the decommissioning of our legacy on-prem systems and other improvements in our operations, exceeding the cost of running our new cloud-native systems. Margins will also be enhanced by leverage on corporate and G&A. Partly offsetting these benefits to EBITDA are cost increases, particularly in salaries and contracted services, as the tight labor market drives costs higher, as well as lower EBITDA margins in 2022 from the 2021 acquisitions, as we will just be ramping synergies during 2022. Depreciation and amortization is expected to increase by about $45 million in 2022, which will negatively impact adjusted EPS by about 4%. DNA is increasing in 2022 as we accelerate putting cloud-native systems into production. The combined increase in interest expense and tax expense in 2022 is expected to negatively impact adjusted EPS by about 2 percentage points. The increase in interest expense reflects the increased debt from our 2021 acquisitions. Our estimated tax rate used in this framework of 24.5% does not assume any changes in the U.S. federal tax rate. Should that occur, we will let you know the estimated impact on our 2022 results. As there remains significant uncertainty in underlying market drivers, including the pace of normalization of the U.S. mortgage market and the pace of economic growth worldwide, What we've provided today for 2022 is a framework for you to consider. We'll provide formal guidance for 2022 in connection with our 4Q21 earnings release early next year. And I would like to turn it back over to Mark.

Thanks, John. We hope this early view of our framework for 2022 is helpful and reinforces the power of the new Equifax to deliver 14% growth and 8% total growth at the midpoint of our range of thinking. Assuming the mortgage market and UC and ESI declines impact our revenue growth by almost 6% in 2022. Stepping back and reviewing the macro trends outlined on slide 22, these macros have been driving information services for the last decade. Over the last 24 months, we believe most of the macro factors have substantially accelerated, and through our 2021 acquisitions of Aprys, Count, and Teletrack, and our EFX cloud investments, advantage Equifax to benefit from these macro trends. We believe we also have unique levers at Equifax to deliver strong future growth, including workforce solutions above market and EFX growth and margins, and our expanded focus on new data assets like APRIS Insights, the USIS recovery and non-mortgage growth, and count ID and fraud growth. The new Equifax Cloud, which is driving our competitiveness, NPI's top line and cost savings, and NPI's leveraging the Equifax Cloud and our expanded resources and focus on new products, and then, of course, M&A to broaden and strengthen Equifax. These attractive market macros, along with the broad Equifax growth levers and our strong core outperformance in the past few years, give us the confidence in our ability to deliver above-market growth in the future. Wrapping up on slide 23, Equifax delivered another strong and broad-based quarter with strong momentum as we move into the fourth quarter in 2022. We've now delivered seven consecutive quarters of strong above-market double-digit growth, reflecting the power of the new Equifax business model and our execution against our EFX 2023 strategic priorities. Equifax is on offense. We remained confident in our outlook for 2021 and raised our full-year midpoint revenue growth rate by approximately 300 basis points to 19% growth for the year. And we also raised our midpoint EPS by 22 cents to $7.57 per year. Workforce Solutions had another outstanding quarter, powering our results, delivering 35% revenue growth and 54% EBITDA margins. EWS is our largest, fastest-growing, and most valuable business, and Rudy and his team remain focused on delivering outsized growth. USIS also delivered a strong quarter with 16% non-mortgage growth and 9% organic non-mortgage growth, offsetting the impact of a sharp over 20% decline in the mortgage market. Sid Singh and his USIS team remain focused competitive and are winning in the marketplace. International grew for the fourth consecutive quarter with 10% growth in local currency as economies reopen and business activity resumes outside the United States. We have high expectations for international as we move into 2022. We spent the past three years building the Equifax cloud and are now in the early days of leveraging the new and uniquely Equifax cloud capabilities. As we move into 2022 and beyond, we will increasingly realize the top line cost and cash benefits from these new only Equifax cloud capabilities. As I mentioned earlier, our 2021 M&A has added $300 million of run rate revenue to Equifax. Reinvesting our strong cash flow in accretive and strategic bolt-on M&A is central to our EFX 2023 growth strategy. We're now focused on integrating these acquisitions and executing our synergy and growth plans in order to leverage our new data products and capabilities. Our early look at a 2022 financial framework calls for 8% revenue growth and adjusted EPS growth of 14%, assuming a 15% decline in the mortgage market. More importantly, the framework includes strong 14% EFX growth, core EFX growth. 2022 will be a pivotal year for Equifax as we shift towards leveraging the Equifax cloud for innovation, new products, and growth. And lastly, turning to slide 24, Many of you have been closely following Equifax for many years and know we've been speaking to you for some time about our plan to have our first Investor Day, which will be our first Investor Day since 2012, and the cyber event. It's been a long time. Let me now turn it over to Dory, and he'll give you the details on our November 10th meeting focused on the new Equifax, and then we'll take some questions. Thanks, Mark.

I'm energized to announce that our Investor Day will take place on November 10th at 8.30 a.m. Eastern Time, and it will be held virtually. We've opened up online registration as of today, and the link to do so on slide 24 is live. We are very excited to have the opportunity to update you on the progress we have made in making and executing our EFX 2023 growth strategy, share with you our long-term financial framework and also our capital allocation plan, speak with you about how we are and will continue to leverage our EFX cloud capabilities, including by continuing to accelerate our new product innovations, and provide you with overviews of the state of affairs of our business units, relayed by their respective leaders. Investor Day will be an important day for our company and stakeholders, and we look forward to speaking with you then. With that, operator, let me open it up for questions.

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for your questions. Our first questions come from the line of David Toga with Evercore. Please proceed with your questions.

Thank you. Good morning and appreciate the helpful detail in the initial 2022 framework. It appears that you're guiding above consensus for fourth quarter 2021 revenue and for 2022 revenue, but somewhat below consensus on earnings per share for both the fourth quarter and for next year. John, you walked through some of the sources of pressure on margin for 2022 and But I'm wondering if you could talk more broadly about headwinds and tailwinds so we can understand the variance. Is it really the $50 million, for example, of tech transformation savings that you're reinvesting in the business next year?

Happy to. So, again, as a reminder, we're talking about increasing EBITDA margins by on the order of 200 basis points, so a substantial increase in 2022 versus 2021. And I think the drivers are what we've been talking about all year, as I mentioned in my In my prepared remarks, we are reducing substantially tech transformation costs, but we are taking a significant amount of that, on the order of $50 million, and reinvesting it in NPI and other initiatives to drive growth and to deliver the higher revenue growth you're talking about that you referenced in your question. Also, we do expect now to start seeing benefits of net reductions in costs from DCOMs exceeding our cloud costs, and that will ramp as we go through 2022. But we are seeing some increased costs related to – in our COGS, as you would normally expect, related to increased costs for people and increased costs for some systems costs that are reducing 2021 EBITDA margins to a degree. That's not actually that unusual. Generally speaking, we see increased costs every year that we manage through high growth. Next year, part of what's happening, obviously, right, is we're seeing substantial negative impacts on our revenue from the weaker mortgage market as well as the reductions in the UC and ERC markets. So that negative drive in revenue is also somewhat negatively impacting our margin expansion. But overall, 200 basis points of margin expansion next year we think is really an outstanding performance, especially given the fact that we're seeing such large declines in the mortgage market and then also the declines in the UC and ERC revenue that we talked about on the order of 30%.

Thanks for that. Just as a quick follow-up, in your initial 2022 financial framework, you're guiding to 11.3% core organic revenue growth. Within that number, what is your expectation for EWS organic growth, and how do you think about headwinds and tailwinds for EWS next year?

I think in terms of the details around how the BU's are going to perform next year, we're going to have to ask you to wait until November 10th, but Obviously, we expect EWS to continue to perform extremely well.

You should, obviously, you know, we've been quite clear that we expect workforce solutions to grow above the rest of Equifax, so I think you should think about it that way. You know, in 2022, I went through, and we've been through many, many times, the multiple levers that, you know, workforce, for example, has, you know, is they... you know, finish up the year and go into 2022 and, you know, record starts at the top of that list. You know, adding substantial records in the third quarter, you know, those become a benefit, you know, through the next year, their new product introductions, continued penetration. You know, there's a lot of levers in that business. USIS, their new deal pipeline, you know, is a positive lever going forward. The workforce, you know, is clearly going to be above that, the rest of Equifax, you know, for really as long as we can see in the future from a growth rate standpoint. Understood.

Thank you very much. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Kevin McVeigh with Credit Suites. Please proceed with your questions.

Great. Thanks so much. Hey, Mark, you talked about the Vitality Index up over 8%. Any sense of where you think that can go to? I mean, obviously, there's been a really significant step up in the new product innovation and what that can mean to the organic growth longer term.

It's clearly a priority, Kevin. As you know, since I joined almost four years ago and really in the last, call it 24 months, we've really stepped up our focus on new products. As you know, we've expanded the team. John and I both talked about it in our comments this morning about continuing to invest there. And, of course, the cloud transformation is central to that. That's really important. you know, we're going to get great benefits from the cloud around cost, but we really did it to change our competitiveness. And the big piece of that is the ability to bring new products to market that we couldn't do before, you know, through multi-data solutions. And, you know, that's really what our focus is. And we're in the early days of really leveraging that. So we see, you know, real opportunities going forward. We'll certainly talk in depth, you know, our investor day in a couple of weeks, you know, around, you know, our longer-term outlook for new products. But, you You know, it's an area that, you know, we've invested heavily, you know, foundationally in the cloud. You add to that our existing differentiated data assets, which we've expanded substantially this year with the addition of new data solutions, you know, from Aprys, from Count, from Teletrack, and then our focus on new products. You know, we believe it's an important lever for, you know, delivering strong future growth going forward, and we'll give you much more detail during our investor day.

Thank you so much. And then just real quick on the customer migrations, it seems like you've made a lot of progress on that. Where are you in that process? And then are you seeing any incremental step up in revenue as these customers have cut over? Is there any way to think about what the revenue impact has been? I know it's a hard question, but just what percentage step up you're seeing as these customers have converted?

Yeah, you know, first on the progress, you know, this is a big undertaking. I think you know that. We talk to you about it every quarter. We try to be quite transparent about the efforts. You know, 2018, 19, and parts of 20, we're building the technology in 20 and 21. You know, we've been heavily focused on, you know, implementing that with our customers in the migrations. You've seen the great progress. We've still got, you know, more to do. And, you know, we were clear that we expect North America, you know, which is, Canada, EWS, and USIS, and, of course, TCS, you know, to be substantially completed as we, you know, get into 2022 and really complete the migrations next year. So we can see the finish line, but there's still plenty of work to do in the coming months, you know, to complete that. With regards to, you know, our impact commercially, there's a number of layers on that, and this is another area our intent is to go and, you know, substantial detail about, you know, how we think about that, what we're seeing during our investor day. You know, we'll have our chief technology leader and product leader, Bryson Keller, as well as the business unit leaders will talk about that. But you're starting to see some of the early days of that in our view. You know, the strong core growth, the ability to roll out new products are driving our competitiveness and driving our ability to, you know, drive our core growth. And, you know, there's no question, you know, when we sit down with customers, you know, We believe we're advantaged having a new tech stack that's in the cloud that can deliver nine nines of stability, meaning very high always-on stability, deliver data more quickly to our customers. We can deliver new products to them more quickly. It just changes who we are as a company, and it allows us to be a different company. So it's quite central to how we think about the new Equifax going forward and you know, it'll be central to our long-term growth framework that we share with you in a couple of weeks.

Makes sense. Thanks so much. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Kyle Peterson with Needham & Company. Please proceed with your questions.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Just wanted to touch on the U.S. auto market. I know there's been a lot of concerns over, you know, chip shortages and support constraints potentially impacting auto credit. I think you had said previously that it's been a little bit of a headwind in Canada, but what are you guys seeing in the U.S., particularly in the USIS segment for auto credit?

Yeah, similar. We could have and should have commented on that in the U.S. also. There's no question that the supply shortages are impacting the ability for consumers to you know, identify cars or get cars, you know, new and used. And then, you know, of course, the financing that comes with that and the business we get from that. You know, what's been offsetting that to some regards and not fully, but, you know, is our continued penetration of new products and new solutions and, you know, like workforce solutions, continuing to grow the use of twin data, you know, in the auto spaces, you know, has been a positive. Would you add anything, John?

Now I'd say that covers it. And the good news is we're continuing to grow in USIS and auto on an organic basis, even in the headwinds of the difficult market. But yet it certainly isn't at the pace that we expected when we started the year.

Got it. That's helpful. And then I guess just to follow up on EWS, obviously good to see really strong records growth in twin and continued share gains. Moving forward, how should we think about records growth? And I know you guys mentioned a few additional payroll processing partnerships in the pipeline. But, you know, how should we think about records and kind of the green field between, you know, some of these alternative data sources like big workers and pension versus traditional, you know, W-2 records that you guys kind of see as, you know, prospects?

Yeah, you know, it's obviously an important focus of Rudy and the Workforce Solutions team. You know, you've seen, you know, continued success there. And remember, we've got, you know, two really levers for growth. First, our employer services business, which is large and comprehensive, is we've delivered new solutions to HR managers around I-9 or HSA or W-2 or WOTC, all the other services. We access payroll records. So that's a very powerful engine for us to go to individual companies to obtain records. And, of course, we feel like we have some real momentum in adding the payroll processors that are not with us and going after them. the traditional non-farm payroll. And, you know, there's still 60 million-plus consumers or individuals that are available for us in the traditional non-farm, and we're chasing that. So that's one. And, of course, with records being up 12% in the quarter, you know, that is a very strong lever for growth that translates pretty directly into revenue because of higher hit rates. You know, as you point out, there's also a larger universe than nonfarm payroll, the 160, 70 million that are in nonfarm payroll, the gig workers as well as pension recipients. Those are two big areas. There's 40 to 50 million gig workers. So we're working different strategies to obtain those records and then the same with pension recipients. So there's a long runway, you know, from our roughly 60% of nonfarm payroll, if you include self-employed and gig in there, it's much less than the 60% to continue to grow our records, which is a very unique business growth lever for our business to continue to add new data assets because, as you know, in our system-to-system integrations in Workforce Solutions, we're getting the inquiries. We can only fulfill those that we have records on. And as we grow our records, they become monetized tomorrow afternoon. So that's very powerful. And the scale of Workforce gives us the ability to have large, dedicated teams, you know, both on the partnership side and on the direct side through employer services to continue to grow our records. And, you know, we'll likely talk a little bit at Investor Day about our international expansion, which, as you know, we're already in Canada, Australia, and India. And those businesses are also growing their records, you know, leveraging the core tech stack that we have from Workforce Solutions in the U.S., but also relationships that we have either with multinationals, you know, or with payroll processors, and of course, you know, growing those records locally. So big, big focus and, you know, big opportunity going forward. You know, when you think about records, you know, I think about us being in kind of middle inning still, you know, as far as the opportunity, you know, for workforce solutions. And, you know, these take time. You know, the payroll processor we signed last week, we were probably talking to them for three years, you know, and It takes time to get organized around that, you know, but there's real momentum, particularly in that area of acquisition, you know, because so many others have signed up with Equifax and are having, you know, a positive experience. We're seeing real momentum there in adding other processors.

Got it. That makes sense and was really helpful, Clark. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of George Mahalos with Cowan & Company. Please proceed with your questions.

Hey, George. Great. Good morning, guys, and appreciate your willing to go out to 2022 in this environment. Very helpful as always. I guess first question for me, John, if we can kind of circle back to the first question, just as it relates around margins for 2022, I think you had said previously savings from redundancies and obviously the tech transformation were going to be about, call it $150 million. You're reinvesting $50 million of that now, it sounds like, so net $100. That, roughly by my math, gets us to kind of the 36% margin at sort of the high end, the 200 basis point increase. Is the reason why margins aren't expected to be higher than that, that the natural margin expansion within the business is being offset by some dilution from M&A and just sort of higher inflation-related expenses as it relates to wages? Is that roughly the way to think about it?

So, George, as I walk through my comments, right, so you're absolutely right. So we indicated we would improve our cost structure by on the order of $100 million by taking down transformation costs. And then we also said we'd improve our cost structure as we drove net savings, right, as e-comm and other cost production efforts exceeded cloud. And so we absolutely have indicated we're going to deliver on those savings, and we're still committed to delivering substantial savings in both of those areas in 2022 and beyond. But you are correct also, as I mentioned in my comments, we're reinvesting a substantial portion of that, $50 million in new development and new development-related activities. Also, if you think about what's going on, given the fact that we're seeing a 600 basis point headwind, like the natural growth that you'd see in our underlying business that has the very high variable margins, that's somewhat lower than you would see in a period in which mortgage is not as negative as you're talking about. And you're correct, right? We're getting a nice bump from growth in acquisitions next year, but the EBITDA margins on those acquisitions in their first year are substantially lower than than the contribution margin we get by growing our internal data assets. So when you kind of line all that stuff up, and you include the fact that we are seeing cost increases as we do every year, right, that's certainly something we see every year, but there is a tighter labor market, so there's an expectation that some of those cost increases will be greater. When you line all those items up, you end up at about a 200 basis point increase is where we're comfortable talking about right now. Also, I just want to remind everybody, 200 basis points, right, on, again, a 6% reduction in mortgage and UCERC is really a substantial improvement. We feel very good about delivering that. And so hopefully the investment community can look at it in that vein.

George, I would add to that, you know, we'll obviously talk about a long-term framework for revenue and margins in a couple of weeks. And, you know, we've been quite clear that, you know, we see, you know, a lot of ability to grow the top line. We're confident in our ability to grow our top line long-term. at an above-market level as well as expand our margins. And we've also been very clear that, you know, while we have the ability to expand margins over the long-term basis, we're also going to invest in the business. You know, we have the ability to, you know, invest in new products and obviously, you know, the tech transformation which we're completing, it has really high leverage in driving the top line. So, you know, we'll continue to have that balance going forward of expanding margins while investing in the future of Equifax.

Okay, great. I appreciate that because I think that's what's weighing on the stock this morning. So really, really appreciate your breaking it down like that. And then just quickly, Mark, I think if I caught it correctly, you talked about as it relates to record growth, you know, going after some more of these, what I, you know, think of as more unbanked individuals, gig workers and the like. Can you talk about the challenges or how you go about sourcing data from that constituency as opposed to, you know, traditional, you know, W-2, you know, worker and the like, is it going to require sort of a different effort in terms of going after like FinTechs to partner with, or how are you thinking about that?

Yeah, and, you know, first our, you know, our primary focus is to continue to grow W-2 income, you know, kind of payroll records, and you see that we've had strong success in that over the last couple of years, and, you know, certainly again in the quarter, and, you know, we're continuing to add to that. There's still a long runway there, you know, when you think about 60, 70 million of additional individuals, you know, that are not in our data set that, you know, are inside of that. So that's kind of a primary focus. And then, as you point out, you know, we're expanding into gigs. Some of the same relationships we have, you know, companies process on their own. Contractor payroll will be able to pick that up. Some payroll processors have kind of self-employed, you know, solutions where there's an ability to pick up data that way. There's other HR processes. software providers that will help us through partnerships lead to some of those kind of records. And, of course, the pensioner income at $20 to $30 million comes from individual companies that process their own pension income or other companies that do that for companies. So we've got a multifaceted approach on that. Really the point we make in identifying that is that our lens is wider now and there's still a long runway, you know, of this important lever to grow records, you know, workforce solutions. As you know, we don't talk about adding data assets in our other businesses. What's unique about Workforce is that it, you know, it's only a decade old, and it only has 60% of non-farm payroll, so there's a ton of room to grow, and then that gets bigger, as we both pointed out, as you add gig and pension, you know, into that space.

Great. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Tony Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your questions.

Thanks so much. I wanted to start with APRIS. At the time of the acquisition, you had talked about strong accretion in 22 from that deal along with the HealthyFX and Teletrax acquisitions. I guess how much is embedded in your 22 EPS expectations from the deals and Maybe you could help with some of the assumptions behind the significant accretion, because I think some investors and myself were getting a little bit more neutral.

So it's absolutely accretive in 2022. Certainly I'm not going to give a specific number for the level of accretion for the acquisitions, but kind of similar to the response I just gave with regard to margin movements. So we do expect good EBITDA margins from those acquisitions. And the level of margin that we're generating from that certainly exceeds the cost of the interest expense, which we also detail in our revenue walk. So we're seeing nice accretion, which would be consistent with strong from what we talked about back in August. But just in general, right, the level of margins we look at from an acquired company like Apres or anybody else in the first year out, the incremental margin we generate from those companies isn't anywhere near the level of incremental margin we generate from incremental organic sales at Equifax. So the reason why they're somewhat dilutive to our EBITDA margin in total is because of the fact that the variable margin we achieve on our direct sales is certainly substantially higher than the level of margin we generate from the acquired company in its first year out.

Got it. And then just looking at the revenue trends in the appendix, It looked like non-mortgage online info in the U.S. was good at positive 15%, but it did decelerate relative to last quarter. Is that because of the auto softness, or are there other verticals that are impacting that as well? It does seem like the banks are talking about the lending environment getting better. Are you expecting that in the fourth quarter or next year? It did look like in your levers page, your macro levers page, that maybe it gets better. But, you know, I'm just trying to understand sort of how much of that's going to be a driver and what you're seeing in the lending environment. Thanks.

I think the biggest driver of the growth rates that you're looking at really is the fact that in 2020, we saw meaningful improvement in the third quarter relative to the second, right? So the growth rate in the second quarter of 2020, as we talked about when we did the release, was elevated partially because of the fact that it was such a weak quarter. and we saw some improvements in the third quarter last year. So that's part of what's driving the fact that that's a significant driver of what's driving the growth rates to be down. But in terms of overall performance, I think as Mark referenced, we feel good about banking and lending. We had a nice growth there in the quarter. Again, we had nice growth in insurance, nice growth in commercial. Identity in fraud was strong. And importantly, financial marketing services was very strong. But again, as you look into the fourth quarter, similarly to what I just talked about, the fourth quarter of last year, was a nice improvement from the third quarter. So we'll have some of the grow-over effects that we talked about in the third quarter, but we continue to believe we're going to see nice non-mortgage growth in USIS in the fourth quarter.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Andrew Nicholas with William Blair. Please proceed with your questions.

Thanks. Good morning. My first question was just going to be on the talent solutions business. Obviously, as it gets to become a bigger and bigger piece of workforce solutions, I think you said 30% of non-mortgage. Just wondering how you think about the cyclicality of that business. We've talked about the tight labor market, but as you're thinking about 22 in particular and embedding that type of growth or some level of growth for that business, how do you think about you know, new product innovation relative to, you know, existing client growth or hiring activity and how that impacts performance in that business over a shorter timeframe?

Yeah, you know, first, I think the underlying macro of 75 people, 75 million people changing jobs every year, you know, that macro doesn't really change much, you know, over time, meaning lots of people change jobs and that may go up or down some. And, Underlying that is that there's some level of data use in each of those job moves. So that's a macro that's quite good. The other thing that's changing that we think is going to be a permanent change is the desire by companies to complete that process more quickly, meaning they've made an offer to someone, getting them on the floor in the warehouse or the factory or in the retail establishment or in the restaurant, you know, in hours or days versus weeks. And the only way you do that is through instant decisioning. So I think that's the fundamental structural change in the business, the ability to use, you know, data to speed up the process. You know, for us, what we're really having the growth in is building out this data hub, which, you know, remember is, you know, only a year old or whatever. You know, we're starting to leverage the four and a half, five jobs we have in the average American from our twin database. Remember, uh, a half a billion of historical records, and then adding to it new data elements like APRIS Insights, like medical credentialing, the National Student Clearinghouse of Education. You know, that's all new turf for Equifax as we combine those. And you're going to see products coming out. You already are. We're rolling out new products quite rapidly for talent solutions where we have different solutions of more or less historical data. And we'll move to, in the coming year, solutions that are more targeted to specific jobs. A job that requires what was your last employer, what was your last two employers, verifying your licenses, verifying where did you go to school. Some jobs require that, some don't. So we'll come up with solutions that will be packaged to speed up that process for the background screeners and the hiring managers in order to speed up the process ability to, you know, hire that individual more quickly. So we see a lot of opportunity, you know, for growth in that. That's a $5 billion TAM. You know, our business is quite small, you know, when you think about $5 billion worth of data. And that's why we're investing through new products and through innovation and, of course, through, you know, the acquisitions that we've made or the new partnerships like the National Student Clearinghouse.

Great. Thank you. That's helpful. And then just two quick modeling questions. The first was I think the legacy system savings that you had outlined in prior investor presentations was $85 million year over year. I just want to make sure that's still the number to think about. And then also, if you wouldn't mind speaking to whether or not the SSA contract was fully ramped this quarter. Thank you.

So in terms of modeling, again, for 2022, what I'd ask you to focus on is the guidance we just gave, right? So what we try to do is give you a fairly detailed walk from this year to next year. And obviously there's a lot of moving parts in what's driving our EBITDA margin movement, which was some of the questions we had earlier. So my ask would be to focus on the walk we gave in the 200 basis points of margin expansion when you think about 2022 relative to 2021. Okay.

And on SSA, you know, in our comments, you know, I noted that we launched a program. We started, you know, delivering data to them at kind of early levels, and we expect that to ramp as we go through the fourth quarter and into 2022 and get to run rate, you know, sometime in 2022. You know, a substantial and positive contract for us, but it's, you know, in the startup mode now, which is, you know, positive to have it started after, you know, a lot of years of building, you know, this new solution and getting it integrated with SSA.

Great. Thank you. Sorry for missing that second part. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Hamza Mazari with Jefferies. Please proceed with your questions.

Hey, good morning. Thank you. My question is just around, you know, the integration of the M&A you've done. You know, you kind of talked about 2022 seeing synergies roll through. could you just give us, you know, examples maybe, what integration is yet to come, what's behind you, and then when do you re-engage in the M&A market? Is it more of a can you do that next year, or is sort of we wait until this integration is done, and then you get back more aggressive on M&A? Just any thoughts on that?

Yeah, no, we're actively, as you know, we've completed eight acquisitions this year, and a couple of them substantial, you know, particularly count in the And Aprys, we're much further along an integrating account, as you might imagine, you know, because we completed that deal in the first quarter. Aprys was only completed a couple weeks ago, so we're still early days, you know, of starting that integration. You know, the cloud allows us to integrate, you know, more quickly. And as you know, our focus is to bring their unique data into our single data fabric. So that's underway with all of the acquisitions, you know, in order to drive their growth going forward. And you know, we're seeing in count, you know, early positive days, you know, of top-line synergies and, you know, very pleased with, you know, the plan on that acquisition. And we're very energized about APRIS and, of course, all the other acquisitions that, you know, we completed. You know, the synergies from these acquisitions, I think we've been very clear when we announced the acquisitions, you know, come in over multiple years. You know, they start in year one, like in 2021. There's some early synergies. They build in year two, in this case, 2022, for those two acquisitions, and then they'll continue. And, you know, we've talked about, you know, kind of year five synergies in some of the acquisitions, you know, being quite substantial. And those build over time as you roll out the new solutions, the new products, and, you know, fully integrate the business into our cloud capabilities and our single data fabric. With regards to your second question, you know, we were clear when we announced Aprys, you know, a couple of months ago that we were going to pause, you know, you know, on substantial M&A for a number of quarters. Number one, to focus on integration, and number two, to bring our leverage back in line. So to answer your question, you know, we would expect to be, you know, back doing M&A, you know, in the latter half of 2022 or somewhere in that timeframe. We haven't stopped our corporate dev team of continuing to be in the market to look for M&A that, you know, would be, you know, meaningful and creative. And I hope you get a sense that we're quite disciplined about the kind of M&A we want to do. We've been very clear for a number of years about acquisitions we want to do around differentiated data, identity and fraud, and broadening and strengthening workforce solutions. And the deals we've done this year have checked all those boxes, and you should expect the deals going forward to do the same. And also with the financial discipline that, you know, over the long term, they're accretive to our long-term growth rates and assets. into our margins. We want to do deals that strengthen Equifax, broaden Equifax, but also enhance our financials and drive shareholder value.

That's very helpful. Just a follow-up question. Just on the international business, I know you flagged your expectation of Australia GDP for 2022, but do you expect to see benefits from the tech transformation on the international business as early as next year, or or does that come a bit later? Thank you.

Most of it comes later, although Canada is well down the path of their tech transformation. They should get some benefits in 2022, and there's some early benefits in the U.K. and Spain and Australia as we get into 2022. But the bulk of that is going to really come, particularly in Latin America, in the latter parts of the year as we get into 2023. Got it. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Andrew Stouderman with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed with your questions.

Thanks. Two questions. The first one, could you just tell us how much mortgage revenues as a percentage of total third quarter Equifax revenues there was? My second question is about tech transformation expense. I want to know if you can indicate what the tech transformation expense drag on 22 EPS is. is compared to the 101, the $1.01 for 21, which is referenced on slide 7, footnote 5.

Yes, so in terms of the mortgage as a percent of total, it's just under 32%, and that's obviously down significantly from where it was last year, and it'll go down again in the fourth quarter. So in terms of tech transformation expense, I think what we've indicated is that this year we expect to incur about $165 million, and that's how you get to the $1. And we've indicated that we expect to reduce by about $100 million. It's not a perfect number, right, but by about $100 million next year. So that would be on the order of $60 to $65 million next year, but obviously we'll refine that as we move through the fourth quarter and give you really formal guidance as we get into early next year.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of George Tong with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your questions.

Hi, thanks. Good morning. Your 3Q revenues beat guidance by about $50 million, while your full-year guidance increased by about $130 million at the midpoint. I know Prince is adding $150 million in annual revenue, but how much of the increase in the guide above the 3Q of performance is due to contributions from, for instance, other acquisitions? is improved assumed performance in 4Q in the underlying business.

Yeah, I think we indicated in our prepared remarks it's about $45 million. In the fourth quarter. In the fourth quarter, sorry. In acquisitions, George.

Okay, got it. The remainder from outperformance in the underlying business.

Correct.

Okay. And then... In your slides, you mentioned that USI's bond mortgage is expected to outperform the underlying markets in 2022. How much of that outperformance is due to M&A, and how much is due to organic outperformance versus underlying markets?

You're breaking up, but I think your question, George, was in 2022, our mortgage outperformance, how much is from M&A versus the core business? Is that right?

Yes, versus organic, yes.

Yeah, it's substantially all organic. Yeah, so if the question was non-mortgage and USIS, then our statement was intended to be organic, right? So we're expecting them to outperform their core market on an organic basis.

And the workforce solutions acquisitions really don't have an impact on their outperformance in mortgage.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Jeffrey Mueller with Baird. Please proceed with your questions.

Yeah, thank you. On 22 margins, are you viewing 22 as a year where it's still pretty depressed by one-time expenses, or are you viewing it as a good kind of underlying baseline where there's always going to be some puts and takes? I guess there's still $65 million of TTI On top of that, I think even though the net cloud costs are going down, there's still probably some fairly material duplicative systems costs that you can work down over time. Not trying to ask if you're at peak margin, because I know you can increase margins at the acquired businesses. You have good incrementals on organic. But just trying to understand if you're viewing 22 as still a fairly depressed figure or if it's a good underlying for us to consider how we go forward from there on forward.

I'll start on that one and then John can jump in. In a couple of weeks in our Investor Day presentation, we'll certainly give you our long-term framework around top line and margin growth. We've been very clear you should expect that to include our ability to grow our margins going forward. 22 is clearly a mortgage market impact, obviously, and then, as you point out, we still have substantial cloud transformation costs in 2022, so we're not at a normal runway in 2022.

John? No, you covered it, right? So we just had an earlier question about how much transformation expense was still, investment was still in 2022, and we gave a number of, we're at 165 this year, and we said we'd reduce by about 100, so that's still in the P&L next year. And then also we are delivering cloud savings, so our net cloud cost over decommissioning is a positive next year. But we've given a long-term model where we expect to deliver substantial savings when the cloud transformation is complete. We're still committed to that, right? So the exact timing as you move through any given year obviously moves around a lot based on decommissionings and the pace of ramp of individual systems. So it's hard to be specific about any specific number as far as 15 months out, but we're absolutely committed to delivering a net savings next year versus the net cost this year. And then also there's substantial savings still to come as we get through 2022 and then into 23 and 24. Obviously, those don't complete until we complete the international transformation.

Very helpful. And then we get asked a lot about BNPL and if it's cannibalistic to card, including from a bureau transaction or underwriting perspective. I would expect you to have a pretty unique view into that, given Australia is a more developed BNPL market, plus you obviously have a nice bureau share there. So we just love your thoughts on BNPL and over time, if you'd expect it to be cannibalistic to card or not. Thanks.

You know, that's a different question about cannibalistic card. You know, as far as a card issuer, I think some card issuers are probably seeing some pressure from BNPL, meaning consumers are using that instead of using their credit card to make purchases. When it comes to Equifax and our industry is providing data, you know, BNPL, we sell a bunch of identity data to BNPL players around the globe, and increasingly they're starting to use alternative data is a part of their underwriting, even in many cases credit data, meaning credit file data going forward. I think if you look at the total pie on consumers using cash or debit versus BNPL and credit, the pie is growing, meaning consumers are using this as another way to finance their purchases, which from an Equifax perspective, we view as a good thing. We've got... discussions with all of the BNPL players about using our data and our identity data because you have to verify the identity of the consumer, you know, before you offer them financing even on a pair of jeans. So going forward. So we view it as a net positive for the credit bureaus and Equifax.

Thank you both.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Please proceed with your questions.

Thank you. Good morning. John, I agree the 200 basis point margin expansion is obviously strong given all the headwinds, but I was hoping you could just help us maybe with some order of magnitude. I heard three things. It was the tight labor market and that increase in cost, the acquisition impact, and then the 600 basis point decline in EC and UC revenues or whatever. So how much of a headwind were each of those?

I would start with number one is, you know, Manav, we're continuing to invest, you know, more next year than this year we're intending to around new products, innovation, DNA, customer, you know, customer growth. We see real leverage in doing that. So John talked about that. Go ahead, John. Absolutely.

Look, Manav, I'm not going to cite them specifically, right, but we referenced them because they're all meaningful to us, right? So they're all impacting margins. But, again, 200 basis points increase in a market where there's, 600 basis points of headwinds from mortgage, and then obviously UC and ERC, which we think is a very good outcome. So we think we're delivering substantial savings from reduction and transformation, and as we indicated, we will start delivering savings on net cloud relative to DCOM and other cost savings. So we feel good about the direction we're headed, and we feel good about delivering 200 basis points of growth.

Got it. Okay. And then maybe just some modeling items, you know, just so that we get the directional numbers right. Could you just give us what the 2021, you know, EC and UC revenues were so that we can model that 30% decline? And then the same thing, I guess, the DNA interest expense and capex, please.

For the third quarter? I think we gave it in the script. I think we...

For 2021, what is the number, just so that we can do the 2022 modeling and give us some changes?

I understand the question, so we'll think about that. Obviously, we're going to be together again in a little over two weeks, and perhaps we can provide a bridge. But I think we gave details on a 30% reduction. We said the 30% reduction was 1.25% of revenue. So I think between those two Numbers, you'll get pretty close to the exact number, but we haven't disclosed it yet. And I apologize. I don't have it at my fingertips. But I think with those two pieces of information, you can get really close to the UC and ERC revenue in 21 and 22. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Ashish Sabhadra with RBC Capital. Please proceed with your questions.

Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Two questions. First one is on pricing. You obviously have a very strong pricing power, and there were some pretty good pricing increases in the verification business. How do we think about pricing increases going forward? And then just second one, on the $50 million of investment, how do we think about that investment? I know you talked a lot about it, but is this like a one-time investment, or should we think about having these like $50 million investment every year or the next several years. So color on both fronts. Thanks.

Yeah, and so on the investment one, you know, we will continue to balance as we have since I've been here, you know, balance, you know, growing our origins while investing in the business. And, you know, the $50 million that was referenced is, you know, areas where we see opportunities to continue to grow our investments in new products and DNA. you know, in order to drive our top line. And that's really around leveraging the cloud. You know, I'll leave the long-term discussion until a couple of weeks on November 10th during Investor Day, you know, where we can, you know, talk in more detail about that balance. But we've been very clear that we expect, you know, our margin, we expect to expand our margins going forward while investing, you know, in Equifax. And there'll be a balance there that we think is the right thing, you know, for Equifax and for our shareholders over the long term. John, you want to take the first question? The first question was around verification revenue.

That's right, pricing power.

Pricing, yeah, yeah. Pricing is one lever that we use across Equifax. Workforce clearly has more pricing power than our other businesses, and we expect to have price be a positive for us in 2022, and that's inside our early framework And, of course, we've got many, many other levers that we focus even more strongly on. New products is a big one in verification. Of course, the number of polls, penetration, those all drive the business. And, of course, records underlie driving verification.

That's very helpful, sir. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Craig Huber with Huber Research Partners. Please proceed with your questions.

Thank you. Maybe if you could touch on your personal finance area and the credit cards area within your traditional credit bureau business. How did that do in the quarter? What's your near-term outlook for that, please?

Yeah, I don't think we gave any real specific details on it. I'll give you some color is that, you know, as we expected coming out of COVID, you know, we expected cards and P loans, you know, to see some positive momentum, which we have, particularly around marketing. You know, as you know, the card issuers and P loan issuers in 2020, you know, really stopped a lot of the marketing because of the uncertainty around where the consumer was going to be. And now, As you got into 2021 and certainly through the third quarter, we've seen an increase in marketing. You've seen that in our numbers. A lot of our marketing performance in USIS is from cards and some from P-loans. And we expect to see issuers continue to try to acquire more customers and build up their balance sheets, which have come down as consumers have been paying down a lot of balances. So there's a quite a bit of marketing activity going on, and we expect that to continue in the future.

And the bulk of that business for us, obviously, is in banking and lending, and Mark talked about the growth we're seeing in banking in the third quarter and second quarter, right? So we've seen double-digit growth both quarters.

I appreciate that. My follow-up question on the global consumer solutions area, maybe just touch on your outlook there the next couple quarters, if you could, on the direct versus the indirect side. I think you just sort of touched on it a little bit right there, but just go a little further in detail on that. Thanks.

Yeah, I think we talked in our comments that we expect the partner business to return to growth in the fourth quarter. That was clearly impacted by the tightening of – of originations by a lot of their customers, and on the direct business, you know, we expect the same.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Gary Bisbee with Bank of America. Hey, guys.

Good morning. I wanted to go back to records growth for a minute. You know, you've had tremendous success with the payroll channel, and it sounds like you've got maybe at this point, the three major players. I know there's some reasonably chunky players after that, but then it fragments my understanding pretty quickly. Is that enough to continue to deliver double-digit records growth? And I guess how meaningful at the moment or over the next 12 to 24 months are some of these other opportunities like the 1099 workers or pensions? And are there other types of players beyond payroll that have data that you could do deals with to further support growth of records. We get why it's been unbelievable. I guess I'm just not certain if payroll being a big piece of that can drive the next few years like it has the last few.

Gary, as we've talked about, we get the bulk of our records through our employer services business, and that's a steady increase in records, and 60% of our records come from that. So that's clearly – you know, a base area of focus where we have a dedicated team. On the partnership side, you know, they can be a little bit lumpy when you bring in a larger payroll processor, but there's still a lot of runway in that vertical, if you want to call it that, you know, of continuing to expand those partnerships. And as we said, you know, we've got continued momentum there and very active dialogues about them wanting to join. Another area for records is around HR and software partnerships where they have access to records because of the software being embedded in an individual company. Most companies, as you know, process their own payroll. Some use their own systems, but most use some third-party systems. So that's another avenue for us in order to access records. And then we talked about our focus on gig and pension to go even further as far as record addition. So we see a lot of runway and our ability to continue to grow records, which is, as you know, is a very valuable lever for top- and bottom-line growth at Workforce Solutions.

And then just one more on that topic. You mentioned new products a lot, and I know a few times in the past you've talked about substantially higher-priced products, like $100, $150, $200 versus $10 and $20 or whatever the typical price But can you give us just maybe an example of one that is in the market, driving revenue, you know, what the price point is or what is unique about the new offering versus the traditional levels of income and employment?

Yeah, sure. There's a bunch of them. I'll give you a couple in mortgage. You know, in mortgage, our typical solution is a report that shows current income and employment levels. and it verifies that, and that might sell for $20 to $40, somewhere in that range. And as you know, because we have the half billion of historical records, in some mortgage applications, the complexity of the consumer's income, let's say that they've changed jobs recently, so they don't have a lot of job history, or let's say that they get a lot of incentive-based income. It's either a salesperson or some other incentive-based income, meaning it's lumpy. You know, when the income comes in, they get it at the end of the year. In many of those solutions, you require more history. So we have it. So instead of selling that, call it $20 to $40 solution, we'll sell a solution that has 24 months or 36 months or even 48 months, all different products. And those price points are, you know, in the $100, $150, $200 range, meaning substantially higher. And again, leveraging our historical data. Another mortgage solution is Mortgage Duo, which we rolled out in the last couple of months. Some mortgage applications have two income earners on it, a husband and wife, using that example. And in the old solution, it's still used, the originator would pull on the husband for $20 to $40 and on the wife for $20 to $40 using that kind of a couple. We have a solution now that's priced between, I think, $175 and $200 now. It provides both reports at the same time. It also allows, I think in that solution, a second pull somewhere in the mortgage application process. So substantially above, you know, the price point. And again, delivering value to the originator because they're looking for speed and looking to complete it quickly. You know, that's really the solution there. You know, turning to I-9, you know, we've got an I-9 solution that typically, John, the I-9 traditional is in the $10 to $20 range. Yep.

More like $30 to $40. $30 to $40.

I-9, sorry, you're right, $10 to $20. $10 to $20 range is I-9, and we've got a new solution we've talked about the last couple of quarters that we rolled out. It's an I-9 anywhere that allows the applicant to complete it on an Equifax app, the I-9 process, and then go verify it at a couple thousand different sites across the United States that we do through a partnership. And that solution, instead of being and call it that $10 range, is in the $75 to $100 range, you know, providing real value. Now, the value is to that applicant and the employer to speed up the I-9 process so that individual can get on the job, on the floor, in the factory, in the restaurant. So, you know, a couple different solutions in talent, same thing. You know, we're starting to, you know, have solutions instead of just pulling a where does Mark work now solution, having more history because some employers want that. Some employers want Where is Marco working now or the job that he's leaving? They want to verify that. Others want to verify employment for the last two or three or four jobs. And as we mentioned earlier, we're going to be productizing a more comprehensive solution that combines not only work history from our twin database, the half-billion records that we have are the average four-and-a-half jobs on the average American. That work history, we're going to be adding to it incarceration data from APRIS, medical licensing and credentialing data from AFRIS, university, secondary education, college degrees from National Student Clearinghouse. And those will all be productized in a solution that will deliver more value, deliver more speed at a higher price point than the individual solutions because of the value that it adds in speeding up that process. So those are all some examples of where we're focused on. And these are all driven by the new Equifax cloud. You know, these are things that would have been very challenging to do with the pace that we're doing it. You know, in this case, we're talking mostly about workforce solutions, but the same across Equifax. Thank you.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Dorian Hare for any closing remarks.

Thank you for joining today's call. We look forward to joining you again for a robust discussion when we have our Investor Day on November 10th. Once again, the registration is currently open, and there is a link to the slide 24 where you can register for our Investor Day. We'll also be releasing a press release later today with those details. This does conclude the call.

Thank you for your participation. This does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Have a great day.