Fair Isaac Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to FICO's third quarter 2025 Rendings Conference call. At this time, more participants on a listen-only mode. After this previous presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Please note that today's conference may be recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker host, David Singleton. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and thank you for attending FICO's third quarter earnings call. I'm Dave Singleton, Vice President of Investor Relations and I'm joined today by our CEO, Will Lansing and our CFO, Steve Weber. Today we issued a press release that describes financial results compared to the prior year. On this call, management will also discuss results in comparison with the prior quarter to facilitate an understanding of the run rate of the business. Certain statements made in this presentation are forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements involve many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Information concerning these risks and uncertainties is contained in the company's filings with the SEC, particularly in the risk factors and forward-looking statements portions of such filing. Topics are available from the SEC, from the FICO website or from our Investor Relations team. This call will also include statements regarding certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the company's earnings release and Regulation G schedule issued today for reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure. The earnings release and Regulation G schedule are available on the Investor Relations page at the company's website, FICO.com or on the SEC's website, SEC.gov. A replay of this webcast will be available through July 30th, 2026. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Will Lansing.

Thanks, Dave, and thank you everyone for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. In the Investor Relations section of our website, we've posted some financial highlights slides that we'll be referring to during this earnings announcement. We had another strong quarter and are increasing our fiscal year 25 guidance. As shown on page two of the third quarter financial highlights, we reported Q3 revenues of 536 million, up 20% over last year. We reported 182 million in GAAP net income in the quarter of 44% and GAAP earnings of $7.40 per share of 47% from the prior year. We reported 211 million in non-GAAP net income in the quarter of 35% and non-GAAP earnings of $8.57 per share of 37% from the prior year. As shown on page 10, we delivered record-breaking free cash flow of 276 million in our third quarter. We continue to return capital to our shareholders through buybacks by repurchasing 284,000 shares in Q3. We repurchased over half a billion dollars of shares this quarter, the largest single quarter buyback in FICO history. In our score segment, as shown on page six of the presentation, our third quarter revenues were 324 million, up 34% versus the prior year. While B2B scores was the key driver of growth, we also saw encouraging growth in B2C scores. FICO score 10T is the most predictive broad-based credit scoring model in the US industry today. Through our early adopter program, participating clients are already seeing measurable benefits. Even since the recent FHFA announcement, we signed our latest lender deal just last week, and we've now secured adoption from institutions representing over $313 billion in annualized mortgage originations, and approximately $1.52 trillion in eligible mortgage portfolios under servicing, all of which underscore the strong momentum and confidence in FICO score 10T. Lenders in the program have been able to validate the power of FICO score 10T in real-world mortgage underwriting, in loan production, in execution, and in servicing. This quarter, we announced the launch of FICO score 10BNPL and FICO score 10TBNPL. These are the first credit scores from a leading credit scoring provider to incorporate buy now, pay later data. These scores will provide lenders with greater visibility into consumers' repayment behavior, enabling a more comprehensive view of their credit readiness, which ultimately improves the lending experience, and will expand financial inclusion by helping more consumers to gain access to credit. These scores will initially each be offered side by side with existing versions of the FICO score at no additional fee from FICO. This approach allows lenders to evaluate the new BNPL enhanced credit scores while continuing to use FICO's industry-leading models that they use today, ensuring a seamless transition and added value. Lastly, our FICO score mortgage simulator penetration is gaining speed in the US industry. We now have multiple resellers and mortgage technology platform providers, hundreds of active lenders, and thousands of orders placed. In our software segment, we delivered $212 million in Q3 revenue, up 3% from the prior year. The revenue increase was driven mainly by growth in platform SaaS. We continue to drive growth in ARR and NRR through our land and expand strategy, with expand driven by increased customer usage. Pages seven and eight of our investor deck highlight the total ARR increase by 4%, with total NRR at 103%, both driven largely by the FICO platform. ACV bookings for the quarter were $26.7 million, compared to $27.5 million in the prior year. With the help of product innovations announced at FICO World, our pipeline is stronger today than this time last year. Before passing on to Steve, I'll highlight our strong innovation in the software business. The FICO platform revolutionizes how organizations make decisions and apply intelligence across their customer lifecycle. Innovation is at the core of our ability to power an intelligent enterprise. This quarter, we hosted FICO World, bringing together customers and partners from around the world. Participants collaborated on how FICO platform makes real-time decisions at scale and optimizes interactions with consumers. On main stage, we unveiled innovation, spotlighting advancements that will shape the future of decisioning and enterprise AI. We will bring next generation FICO platform, enterprise fraud solutions powered by FICO platform, and FICO marketplace to general availability in the second half of calendar 2025. These innovations will bring new use cases to the market. They will enable smarter, explainable outcomes, they'll improve performance, they'll improve the speed of deployment, and yield better customer ROI. On the AI frontier, we leveraged our AI principles, trustworthy, ethical, explainable, and responsible, and provided a sneak peek of the upcoming FICO Focus Foundation model, the FICO Focus Language Model, and FICO Focus Sequence Model, built for financial services, delivering greater accuracy, explainability, and control in high-stakes domains. This will be released for general availability this calendar year. Our industry analysts are delighted with our innovation. Forrester recently recognized FICO platform as the leader in AI decisioning platforms. This for the fourth time. AI decisioning platforms transform how organizations operationalize both human intelligence and AI at scale, enabling faster, more accurate decisions across complex business processes. AI decisioning is an important enabler for agentic AI, which is natively available in the next generation of FICO platform. Our partners continue to value our innovation. In the quarter, we signed a new strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services. Under the new agreement, FICO and AWS will amplify their work to bring more organizations worldwide the power of AI-driven automated decision workflows with FICO platform. In addition, FICO will broaden its participation in AWS partner programs to accelerate client adoption of FICO platform. Let me now pass it over to Steve to provide further financial details. Thanks, Will, and good afternoon, everyone. As Will mentioned, we had another good quarter with total revenue of $536 million, an increase of 20% over the prior year. Score segment revenues for the quarter were $324 million, up 34% from the prior year. B2B revenues were up 42%, primarily due to higher unit prices, an increase in volume of mortgage originations, and a multi-year US license renewal on our insurance score product. Our B2C revenues were up 6% versus the prior year, primarily due to increased revenue from our indirect channel partners. Third quarter mortgage originations revenues were up 53% versus the prior year. Mortgage origination revenue accounted for 53% of B2B revenue and 44% of total score of revenue. Auto originations revenues were up 23%, while credit card personal loan and other originations revenues were up 3% versus the prior year. Software segment revenues for the quarter were $212 million, up 3% from the prior year. On premises and fast revenue grew 2% year over year, while professional services grew 7%. This quarter, 87% of total company revenues derived from our Americas region, which is a combination of our North America and Latin American regions. Our EMEA region generated 8% of revenues, and the Asia Pacific region delivered 5%. The updated guidance we're releasing today assumes fourth quarter revenues of $505 million. This is down sequentially due to lower point in time revenues, including insurance scores licenses and software licenses. We also expect scores originations volumes to be slightly lower due to seasonality, as well as the sequential decline in PS revenues. Our total software ARR was $739 million, a 4% increase over the prior year. Platform ARR was $254 million, representing 34% of our total Q325 ARR, up from 30% of total Q324 ARR. Platform ARR grew 18% versus the prior year, while non-platform declined 2% to $485 million this quarter. Our CCS business, which spans both platform and non-platform, saw a slight uptick sequentially, but overall, headwinds we highlighted last quarter continue to be present, putting pressure on -over-year ARR growth. Our platform land and expand strategy continues to be successful. Our dollar-based net retention rate in the quarter was 103%. Platform NRR was 115%, while our non-platform NRR was 97%. Platform NRR was driven by a combination of new use cases and increased usage of existing use cases. Our software ACV bookings for the quarter were $26.7 million, compared to $27.5 million in the prior year. Turning now to expenses for the quarter, shown on page five of the financial highlight presentation, our total operating expenses were $274 million this quarter versus $253 million in the prior quarter, an increase of 8%. Quarterly expense growth was driven primarily by our FICO World event. Two other expense drivers were incremental headcount, as well as the marking to market of our supplemental retirement and savings plan, which is offset in other income and expense, and thus has no net impact to our net income. In our fourth quarter, we expect increased interest expense. We also expect to have increased marketing expenses, as well as some one-time items that could exceed $10 million. These expenses are all embedded in our updated guidance. Our non-GAAP operating margin, as shown in our Reg G schedule, was 57% for the quarter, compared with 52% in the same quarter last year. This means we were able to deliver non-GAAP margin expansion of 470 basis points year over year. Gap net income this quarter was $182 million, up 44% from the prior year's quarter. Our non-GAAP net income was $211 million for the quarter, up 35% from the prior year's quarter. Gap earnings per share this quarter were $7.40, up 47% from the prior year. Our non-GAAP earnings per share were $8.57, up 37% from the prior year. The effective tax rate for the quarter was 23.3%. The operating tax rate was 24.6%. We expect our full year net effective tax rate to be around 20%, and our recurring tax rate to be around 25%. This quarter, we delivered very strong free cash flow of $276 million, a 34% increase from the prior year. Over the last four quarters, we've delivered $748 million of free cash flow, which represents an increase of 36% over the trailing 12-month period ending June 3rd, 2024. At the end of the quarter, we have $240 million in cash and marketable investments. In May, we issued an AK detailing our debt refinancing. Our total debt at quarter end was $2.78 billion, with a weighted average interest rate of 5.25%. As of June 30th, 2025, all our debt was held in senior notes with no term loans and no balance on our evolving line of credit. So at that time, 100% of our total debt was fixed rate. Turning to return of capital, we bought back 284,000 shares in the third quarter and an average price of $1,802 per share. And we continue to view Chevy purchases as an attractive use of cash. With that, I'll turn it back to Will for his closing comments. Thank you, Steve. Elevated interest rates and ongoing affordability challenges continue to weigh in the mortgage market, keeping loan originations below historical norms. While the macro environment remains fluid, our strategy, our innovation, our execution remain disciplined and consistent. I'm pleased to report that today we're raising our full year guidance as we enter the fourth quarter of our fiscal year. Revenue guidance will remain at 1.98 billion. Gap net income guidance is 630 million, with gap earnings per share of $25.60. Non-gap net income guidance is $718 million, with non-gap earnings per share of $29.15. Before we take questions, I'd like to discuss the interim FHFA decision and how we are engaging with the industry. First, I'd like to emphasize that the FICO score is the industry standard measure of consumer credit risk in the US. The FICO score is the backbone of safety and soundness in the mortgage industry. Over the last 30 years, the FICO score has fundamentally transformed the mortgage industry, enhancing stability and liquidity in secondary markets, standardizing credit evaluation for investors, expanding fair and objective access to credit, and empowering cost-effective and sustainable homeownership for Americans. FICO scores are used across the US and internationally for more than just mortgages. In the US, 99% of all FICO scores are freely chosen by market participants outside the mortgage market. In the non-conforming mortgage market, FICO is also widely used. Classic FICO was specified over 20 years ago for use by the GSEs while they were publicly traded companies and before the FHFA even existed. As the mortgage industry standard, thousands of industry participants use models incorporating classic FICO. FICO scores are critically relied on throughout the mortgage credit ecosystem in mortgage insurance, in underwriting, in pricing models, in investor credit risk and prepayment models, in models used by the GSEs, in those used by mortgage insurers, by investors, and prudential regulators for capital requirements, and by credit rating agencies for mortgage-backed securities ratings. Therefore, classic FICO is critical to driving investor pricing of mortgage-backed securities and ultimately the costs consumers pay. Our innovations are best in class, including our latest innovation, FICO 10T, FICO 10T BNPL, and the FICO Score Mortgage Simulator. As you all know, FICO 10T was approved by the FHFA and remains the most predictive general purpose credit scoring model in the US. While previous FICO score versions included rental, telco, and utility data, FICO 10T also now includes trended data. During the process required by the Credit Score Competition Act, the GSEs originally concluded, based on predictiveness and accuracy, that FICO 10T significantly outperforms the Tantid Score 4.0. We join a longstanding industry demand that FHFA released that analysis and the recommendation of each of the GSEs publicly as part of this process in the spirit of transparency and responsible policymaking. We recently posted a white paper that reached the same conclusion, which can be found on our website. As for lender choice, the FHFA has long rejected the practice because it undermines the safety and soundness of the enterprises and their counterparties, damaging liquidity in the $12 trillion mortgage industry. Lender choice encourages mortgage participants to shop for the most lax score, which drives unavoidable gaming and adverse selection for all risk holders. It creates a race to the bottom by incentivizing score providers to weaken their credit decision criteria to score more consumers and one more business with their score, which will lead to increased costs for consumers. Lender choice will result in higher capital requirements from regulators that the holders of mortgage risk will have to bear, and American taxpayers will bear significant additional risk. Any initiative to promote competition and ultimately lower costs should include the best score, which is FICO Score 10T. FICO Score 10T's superior predictiveness will drive significant loss avoidance savings for market participants and billions of dollars of savings for consumers. Lastly, so long as there are tri-merge mandate coupled with the credit bureau's common ownership of Vanish score, lender choice will harm competition rather than foster it, because it further entrenches the credit bureau's market power. In speaking to numerous market participants since the FHFA announcement, it's clear there are many significant outstanding questions by the industry. FICO will continue to remain engaged with market participants, the GSEs, the FHA, FA, and other stakeholders. With that, let me turn this call back to Dave, and we'll open up the Q&A session.

Thanks, Will. This concludes our prepared remarks. We're now ready to take questions. Operator, please open the lines.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question at this time, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, simply press star 11 again. And our first question, coming from the line of Madame Patnick with Barclay, we'll see you on the phone.

Thank you. Will, I just want to touch on FICO-10T again. I think you said you had customers already using it, adding to about $313 billion, I think is what you said. I was just wondering how many customers are using it? What is the pipeline for that? I guess what I'm getting at is, do they have to upgrade the systems in order to use FICO-10T? Is it another -by-side workflow at the moment? Just hoping for some color on the speed of adoption if FICO-10T were to be pushed in the market again.

All good questions, Manav. I have to get back to you with the exact number of customers, but I would tell you that the pipeline is strong. There's customers testing it now. There's customers who are using it now. There's a certain amount of retooling required, but it is modest.

Okay, and then maybe just as a follow-up, for the insurance score product that had the renewal, this quota, can you just remind us what that is and if there's a bunch of these that could occur over time or is this one-off, just any kind of... No, I think it's a...

Yeah, Manav, this is Steve. I think it's a one-off. We have some insurers that use FICO scores in their underwriting processes, and this was just a quick reminder that we had a licensed deal over a multi-year that we claim in the quarter that we signed it, so this is kind of a one-off.

Okay,

thank you,

guys. Thank you. Our next question, coming from the line of Jason Huss with Wells Fargo, Yolana Snellfin.

Hey, good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. I'm curious, following the FHFA announcement, if you've seen any lenders start to move over to Vantage score. I'm curious if you could describe maybe some of the technological challenges that they may have faced along the way, if that's something you've heard of. Thank you.

We are not aware of anyone moving to Vantage score since the announcement. There are significant challenges kind of at every step of the way. With the FICO score, which has been in place now for over 20 years, virtually every participant in the industry has built models and infrastructure around that score. It's the only score that has actually been in use and therefore for which we have data going through a full economic cycle, including 2008, the downturn. And so anytime you make any kind of a move away from that, you have to think through what are the implications for remodeling. And I'm talking about everything from consumers to mortgage originators, to lenders, to the government sponsored entities, to Fannie and Freddie, and on downstream to the securitization market, the mortgage backed securities players and the mortgage insurers, CTI, and ultimately the prudential regulators. All of these participants or nearly all of them have models that are built and have the risk assessment understood around the FICO score. And so it's not a simple thing to just swap three digits out and swap new three digits in. It really isn't that simple. So I would say there's significant obstacles and I think that's why the industry has a lot of concerns and is thinking through under what circumstances and how it could work.

Thank you, that's a very helpful explanation. In light of that, is there any change in terms of how you're thinking about where you can take mortgage score practices over time given it's been years where the pricing of what you charge in the mortgage scores is beneath the value that's provided to the ecosystem. So is there any change in the thought about how you can normalize that going forward?

I think probably everyone on this call is curious about what's FICO's pricing strategy going forward in light of some of the pronouncements from the FHFA. Here's what I would say to you. First of all, no decisions have been made. We make our decisions about pricing towards the end of our fiscal year and they go effective Jan one of the subsequent year. So it's early days still. What I would say is that we continue to believe that there's a pretty big value gap between what we charge and the value that we provide. And so we're always looking at how we're gonna close that gap and we don't wanna do it in a reckless way. We don't wanna do it in a rapid way. We wanna do it in a very understandable, predictable way so that the people affected can budget for it and see where it's going. And so we continue to be bided to that philosophy on price change. I would just say, I'm not sure how much different the world is today after these pronouncements because we have been competing with Bandit Score virtually everywhere for the last 15 years and we remain the industry standard for all kinds of good reasons. So obviously mortgage is an important business for us and a lot of people focus on mortgage pricing but we welcome competition and at some level, the way we go about running our business is unchanged.

So that's very helpful, thank you.

Thank you. Our next question coming from Delina. Simon Clinchwood, Ratchchiles & Company, Redburn. Yolana Smalpen.

Hi everyone, thanks for taking my question. I was wondering maybe if you could expand a little bit more on Jason's last question actually but more in terms of your approach to engaging with regulators right now. And how you're thinking about what is the best pathway of that engagement for the benefit of like a shareholders and the industry and has that approach changed at all?

So we have always been relatively close to the people at FHFA and at the GSEs, at Fannie and Freddie because they rely on our data, they build models around to the FICO score, they're interested in the innovations coming along and frankly, we've just been through a multi-year process in which they were deeply involved in evaluating the benefits of FICO score 10T. And so those relationships are in place and the communication is there and I would imagine that would continue. With respect to other industry participants, I believe that there's a lot of industry input still to come on the latest recommendations because we went through this multi-year process with a lot of industry input, with all kinds of evaluation analysis and it's a fairly rapid reversal of the conclusions that that process brought us to. And so I think quite a few members of the industry have been, participants in the industry have been taken a little bit by surprise, but I'm confident that given the importance of safety and soundness in the industry and the importance of the mortgage market in the United States, that rash things will not occur, but that careful, thoughtful, measured analysis and evaluation will occur. And so some of the problems that we've been pointing out around gaming and adverse selection and risk to safety and soundness, I don't imagine that those issues will be ignored. I imagine that they have to be wrestled with and evaluated. And so we participated in that, but frankly, it's not just a FICO thing, it's really the whole industry.

Yeah, I appreciate that. That's very useful, thank you, Will. Just as a follow-on question then, I mean, just theoretically, how should we think about the value gap potential in your other categories outside of mortgages and the ability for those areas, those segments, to take on the heavy lifting so it were, if pricing and mortgages were to slow down compared to what we've been used to?

Every year, we look at everything. We do billions and billions and billions of scores per year. And each year, as we think through our growth strategy, we think about different parts of the market, and that continues this year as it has in every year of the last decade. So again, no real change in terms of, do we look broadly across the portfolio to see where the growth opportunities are? So I think that's largely the same.

Okay, great, thank you very much.

Thank you. Now, our next question, coming from the line of Faisal Albi with Deutsche Bank, Yolana Snalpan.

Yes, hi, thank you.

I

wanted to ask about the software business, maybe how's the feedback been on the next generation launch of the platform, and how do you expect sort of bookings to trend from here and just what the general demand environment is like?

We continue to grow nicely. We continue to have customers very interested in the platform. We're bringing them on. I think that we are, we're not completely immune to the care that goes into IT spend right now. But we feel pretty good. We're not growing at the rate we were over the last 40 quarters. We're more like the rate we had in the last several quarters. I continue to hope that that'll tick upward. I mean, I would love to see us growing in the 20s in the platform. And our bookings feel pretty good. And so from a visibility standpoint, we think that's potentially achievable. So we'll have to see.

Okay, got it. And then just wanted to ask about the auto B2B origination revenue, which saw a nice acceleration from last quarter. And I'm curious if there was, so if you saw higher volumes, maybe it was customer mix. I know you took some pricing, so maybe talk about some of the feedback that you've gotten on the pricing and what led to that acceleration and growth.

Yeah, I mean, most of it's related to pricing. Obviously we had some pricing there. There was a little bit of a growth on the volume side as well, but most was related to pricing. I don't think it was a significant shift in mix. We have seen in the past, sometimes the mix shift between the different hearing levels can have an impact. But there wasn't a lot of that. It's primarily just a combination of price and volume.

All right, thank you.

Thank you. Now next question coming from the line of Georgetown with Goldman Sachs, Yolanda Snellen.

Hi, thanks, good afternoon. Given the FHFA's decision to move to lenders choice for mortgages, how much of a priority is it to drive industry migration to micro 10T, which could be facilitated by the release of historical benchmarking data, or would you rather see the industry stay with classic FICO to minimize disruption?

I think that that's gonna be the decision made by the industry. FICO 10T is available. It's been approved by the FHFA. There are lenders using it today, and we imagine that will continue. It really is far and away the most predictive score. And so if you're in the risk business, if you actually retain any kind of risk, you care about these things. And so I think that leads us to a pretty bright and rosy future for 10T. That said, there's a lot of reasons why in parts of the industry we're in 10T, we're in what we call FICO classic, and that's likely to continue for quite a long time. I mean, that is a highly tuned, optimized score developed over 20 years with 20 years of models built around it with all the historical data that you could possibly need. And so I don't imagine the switch away from FICO classic will be rapid. But to the extent that you have people who bear the risk, who care about the risk, 10T is a pretty good alternative.

Got it, that's helpful. And then switching to the software side, if you look at FICO platform ARR growth that accelerated a bit to 18% in the quarter, can you elaborate on some of the trends that you're seeing there with respect to client adoption, new client adoption and client consumption trends that can drive further growth acceleration?

You know, we have always believed that what would happen with the platform adoption is we would initially penetrate a large number of the top 300 global financial institutions, and then the growth would shift, as a percent of the total, the growth would shift more to expand. So we have very much a land and expand strategy. And over the last several years, as you know, we've now penetrated roughly half of the top 300 financial institutions globally. And so it's not surprising to us, it's exactly for our plan, that the shift is now coming more in the direction of a bit more expand business and not quite as much land business. That's not to say that we don't win new customers, we are, but the customers who've been using it for a while, they very much expand their usage. And so we're seeing more revenue there. Very helpful, thank you.

Thank you. And our next question coming from the line of, to render thin with Jeffrey, C.L. and his name.

Thank you. Just building upon some of the FICO-10T questions, well, can you talk about, for the clients that have been willing to adopt the score, I assume it's mostly in the non-conforming market, can you talk about the, I guess, the decision in the sense that, is all of the data out there that you need to make a decision, given that, obviously you're asking for public release of some of the benchmarking data of like, why upgrade to 10T now versus maybe waiting a little bit?

Well, we would like to see the FHFA and the GFCs release the data in the evaluation process that led to 10T being identified as the most predictive score in the market. We've obviously done that analysis independently and we've put it into a white paper, which you can find on our website. There are some pretty significant advantages to 10T. It's more predictive, it has higher KS. What does that translate into? It translates into lower credit defaults than you would get with classic FICO and lower credit defaults than you would get with Vantage score. So, there's a real benefit that comes with it and yet it's a new score and so it takes time to adopt and there's all the transition issues that go with that.

That's helpful. And then just following up in terms of the next generation of the FICO platform going GA in the second half here, can you talk about the update process of your existing FICO platform customer? What is the update process and what is the benefit of moving to the new platform at this point? I think that the

transition for existing platform customers to the new FICO platform will be very straightforward. Seamless is probably an overstatement, but straightforward because we planned for it and that will work nicely. I think that the benefits of the platform are more realized around the returns to scale that we get. If we have a lower cost structure in serving our customers, that'll translate into lower pricing for them and I think those are some of the benefits. There's definitely a cost benefit and then the new platform has a lot of new features and needs of use and so I think you'll see some of that. I think our customers, existing platform customers and new ones will be delighted with the new platform. Thank

you. Thank you. Our next question coming from the line up. As you saw, Budrob with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to drill down on opportunities for using FICO scores at having more use cases for FICO scores or using it in more places within the processes where it may currently not be used. Like for example, secretization market where they may not have access to real-time FICO scores. So is that an opportunity? How should we think about that opportunity presenting itself? Thanks.

Well, thank you for that question. We're always looking for ways to provide more value and benefit to our customers and to potential new customers and an obvious place for us to do it is to give the securitization market, the downstream investors, the ability to refresh the score. And so today, the pricing and models are typically built around the score that was used when the mortgage loan was originated. But over time, that becomes a stale score. Over time, it's frozen, it's not dynamic. And so we are very much looking at how we would be able to deliver to the securitization market the ability to refresh those scores.

That's a very helpful color. And then just going back to the mortgage score question. The non-conforming market doesn't really are not bounded by the GSE requirements. However, most of them continue to use FICO or FICO-10T. And so I was just wondering, what are the modes around the business? And then in the event that if there is a lender's choice for the GSE, could that affect the non-GSE market? Thanks.

Well, so it's funny how people talk about modes around the FICO business. I mean, what is the mode really? The mode is that we have the most predictive score. That's the mode. I mean, if you're in the business of measuring risk and you benefit when you reduce the risk and you suffer when the risk comes home to roost, you want the most predictive score. You wanna avoid as much credit default as possible. That's what you achieve with FICO-10T. And with respect to FICO Classic, I would say it's also very, very good. And it's not just very good for a -year-old score. It's very, very good in absolute terms. Not as good as FICO-10T, but still very, very good. And it has the advantage of having been the backbone of the system for all this time. And so it's extremely well understood. All the models, everything's optimized around it. And that's truly the mode. It's not some government-conferred monopoly. That's not what makes it successful.

That's great, Philip. Thanks, Phil.

Thank you. Our next question coming from Delina, Kyle Peterson with Needham, Yannis Mountain.

Great, good afternoon, guys. Appreciate you taking the question. Want to start off with your thoughts on capital allocation. It does seem like you guys have kinda stepped up the pace of buyback. It seems like things are dislocated here. Given where the stock is and what your cash flow is like, now do you guys anticipate you being able to kinda continue to buy back at an accelerated pace, or how are you guys looking at capital allocation, specifically buyback versus debt paydown at these levels?

Kyle, thanks for that. We've always believed that we should run FICO with kind of an optimal capital structure and not have on hand more cash than we need. And we've historically returned it through share buyback, and I would expect that will continue. We've obviously done a lot in the last quarter, but we've done a lot in the last 13 years, and that'll continue. We say that we're not market timers. We target spending our free cash flow on stock buyback each year. But over a period of time, that results in the leverage dropping to levels that are unacceptably low. And so periodically, we dial up the amount we buy back to maintain kind of a healthy level of leverage, somewhere between two and three times. We also are mindful of corrections in the stock price. So when you see things like what's occurred over the last couple of months, that represents a big opportunity. And so do we lean into that? Of course we do. And you can see it in the buyback pace that we had over the last quarter. We have a lot of dry powder, a lot of capacity. And although we're not gonna spend it all in one week, we're buyers at this level. Yeah, and Kyle, I would just add, you look at what our leverage is today, it's still pretty modest by historical standards. It's even down a little bit from last quarter. So there's a lot of opportunity for us.

Okay,

okay.

Yeah, that is really hopeful. And then, I guess, just a little bit on how you guys are kind of thinking about the environment right now. Are you guys still kind of thinking, has anything changed, I guess, like I would say, whether it's

in terms of, Kyle, we lost you. Yeah, I think we lost Kyle.

I think we lost Kyle. We lost the second half of that question.

I was gonna say, operator, we can just go to the next question and we'll see if Kyle jumps back in line.

Sure. Our next question in queue, coming from the line of on-line with Oppenheimer, Eli Snellen.

Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. So follow up on that question, that mode question, Will, could you please talk about auto markets, such as credit card, auto, and personal loan, when there's no requirement from anyone? Do you see any traction that VantageScore is gaining any market shares?

No, no, it's a good question, and we do not see any traction of VantageScore gaining market share. As I mentioned earlier, we've been competing with VantageScore for a very long time, well over a decade. And we have not experienced any kind of significant share loss advantage. And I would say that's because of the two things that we talked about before. One is that we have the best score, and second, that there's a lot of benefit to working with the industry standard, which is FICO.

Got it, that's helpful. Just if lenders were to move to VantageScore, usually how long does it take for lenders to switch over? Can they do it within one or two years, or it will take longer than that? Thanks.

You know, that's a question no one can answer, because it hasn't happened.

All right, good. Thanks a lot.

Thank

you. Our next question coming from the line of Jeff Mueller with Baird, Elon Ismaelpin.

Yeah, thank you. Hey, Will, what are you being told is kind of the next steps for NT usage for conforming, or what are you getting asked to do from your end to make that happen?

Well, I think it's up to the FHFA to decide to implement. And I think from an industry standpoint, I don't think you want to stagger implementations of multiple scores, because it requires much more complicated retooling on the part of the industry. So I would imagine that we're going to get to a point where NT is not just approved, but implemented sooner rather than later. So we'll see. We're in a conversation with the FHFA about how to make that happen.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Ryan Griffin with BMO Capital Markets, Elon Ismaelpin.

Hey, thanks a lot. You made a comment on ACV Booking's pipeline being stronger than last year. I was just wondering what's driving that and how we should expect that to flow through to Booking. Thank you.

I think a lot of it's coming out of FICOworld. We saw a lot. We've developed a lot of new functionality, as Will talked about, and there's a lot of excitement at FICOworld. So with that coming online, it's strengthened our pipeline. We see a lot of people that see the advantages of the current platform. And with the new version coming online, they're excited about that. So we think there's just a lot of industry understanding it more and having more proof cases.

In FICOworld, we had a lot of companies get up and talk about how they've been successful using the platform. So you end up at a point in time where you start to gain some momentum, and that's what we're seeing now.

Great, thank you. And then just on the Amazon partnership, I'm wondering what the mechanics are for that and how you expect that to impact the distribution model and Bookings going forward. Thank you.

A little early to say. I mean, you know, we're optimistic. Every one of these things helps us, but we'll just have to see how that plays out.

Thank

you. Now, next question coming from the line of Alexander Hess with JPMorgan. Yalan is now open.

Hey, guys, just want to piggyback off of, I think it was Jeff and George's questions from earlier. You know, we're about a year removed from Vantage score providing the loan level data set to the banks. And, you know, my understanding was that was a prerequisite for them getting their score approved. Are you guys, for some reason, hesitant to provide that data to the banks or, you know, the FHFA? Is there some sort of negotiating with the FHFA on what that looks like? I'm just not quite clear as to why FIGO 10D doesn't have a data set like that in the market.

We are working with them to get the data out.

Got it. That's super helpful. And then just maybe as a maintenance question, you know, I think you guys have said in the past that the mortgage scores are less than 1% of scores, and that's presumably, you know, GSE and non-GSE channels. Can you sort of give us a sense of, you know, how many scores are being generated, you know, on an annualized basis now and, you know, where you've seen particularly strong adoption in volumes and over the last, say, two, three years?

You know,

are

you talking about mortgage or across the board?

No, I'm talking across the board.

Excuse me. Across the board. Mortgage volumes across the board are down. They're, you know, from the peak, you know, not down as much as in mortgage elsewhere, but down some, which, you know, gives us a lot of optimism about volume growth going forward, particularly in a declining rate environment, if that ever happens. So, you know, I think there's upside there. You know, I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at, but...

His question is about adoption of scores just in general, like credit card, personal loan, like all the different places, and what have we seen over the last few years in terms of adoption? Oh, well, of course.

Our scores are being used more widely than ever. You know, we introduced new scores. We have all kinds of new scores based on alternative data. You know, we talked about the BNPL score. We have scores that are built around TELTO and utility payment data off the Equifax NCTUE Plus database. So, you know, we're finding adoption of additional scores, and scores are being used, you know, more frequently than they were in the past in things like account management. So it's not just like the scores volume goes up and down with GDP. I think that it's fair to say that, you know, we're finding new uses and expanding market for scores.

Great. That's super helpful. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Scott Wurzel with Wolf Research. Elon is now open.

Hey, good afternoon, guys, and thank you for taking my question. I just had one on the pricing side in light of this, all the Vantage and FHFA stuff. I mean, is there a world where you would potentially consider having different pricing on conforming versus nonconforming mortgage given your share in the nonconforming market relative to Vantage right now and, you know, the potential uncertainty on what happens in the conforming market? Thanks.

You know, I think that everything is always under review. I mean, there are many, many other pricing models besides the ones that we've used historically. And so we look at everything. And, you know, there probably are models that we don't use that would be better for everybody. They'd be better for the industry. But again, because it's such a big and important industry, you don't make any kind of changes rashly. You know, you study them and you figure out whether it's going to work. And the last thing we want is unforeseen consequences. And so although we've evaluated many, many other pricing models, and obviously that includes pricing differently in different markets, but it also goes to structure of how we price and how the IP is used and how the IP is monetized. You know, we look at it all the time, but I think whatever we discover, and we've discovered some pretty interesting things, you know, we think about implementing with quite a big measure of caution.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Thank

you. Our next question coming from the line of Matthew O'Neill with FT Partners. The line is now open.

Yeah, hi. Thanks so much. I'll try to avoid subsequent pricing question here. I was wondering, I don't think I missed it, but would you be willing to give us the numbers around the one-time license for O'Neill just for modeling purposes going forward?

No, I mean, we don't separate that

out. But I mean, you can kind of take a look at our overall numbers in terms of how much -in-time revenue we had. It's in the queue, and you can, you know, that's included in that number, so you can kind of, you know, look at it that way. I mean, it's a pretty significant number for this quarter.

Got it. Thanks. And I guess this is a follow-up more broadly on guidance, what's implied for fourth quarter versus where consensus sits today. There's a little bit of a delta there. Obviously, I know you're not guiding to consensus. I was just curious how you think about the opportunities to outperform in the last fiscal quarter and, you know, what could go right or, you know, what degree of macroconservatism is built into the remainder of the FY guide here. Thank you.

Well, we only got two months to go, so there's not a whole lot of uncertainty. You know, we guided what we guide. We're pretty confident in that. And, you know, if I was to say something else, then it wouldn't really be guidance anymore. So that's the number we put out there. And, you know, again, when we guide for the full year, there's a lot of things that can happen. But when you're only guiding with a couple months left, there's not nearly as much uncertainty. Totally fair. Thanks a lot.

Thank you. And our next question coming from Delina.

Greg Huber with Huber Research Partners. Yelena Snellman.

Great. Thank you. A couple questions I could ask. In your scores segment here, I just wanted to understand a little bit better about the expense growth here year over year, about 39% up about 23%, 24% sequentially. Is there any extra maybe internal investment spending going on there that you can talk about publicly? Just curious why it's up so much. I thought this was largely a pretty fixed cost model here, but any elaboration? You asked

that again.

You're talking about revenue or the expense? The expenses within your scores segment are up, as you know, roughly 39% year over year or 23%, 24% sequentially. So the

biggest piece of expense in our scores business is in our B2C business, where we actually have a higher cost of goods sold. You know, we have to pay for credit file and data. And so as that grows, you're going to see a little bit of movement on the expense side. Apart from that, I can tell you that we've hired more people and we're doing a lot more innovation there than ever before. And so that also drives a bit of expense, but not enough to move the needle dramatically. Yeah, I think one of the things you'll see there is that it's a relatively low cost model. So when you have some additional incremental costs, it can skew the numbers, because again, because the margins are so high.

But it is

a fairly fixed cost model, except for the B2C piece, which we'll mention.

But do you guys think in general this new expense level in scores here, all being equal in the environment and so forth, that you might repeat that again in the subsequent quarters or does it dip back down? It sounds like it's going to get to a higher level here.

Yeah, we're probably at a higher level. Again, it's not all that significant in the scheme of things. But I mean, it's kind of fluctuated a little bit. We're putting some more money into marketing, particularly on the B2C side.

So we see some opportunities there that we're pursuing, and that's what's driving the biggest portion of it. Again, because we think we did some testing on it. I think we talked about this in previous quarters. We did some testing on this last year, and we saw there's a pretty big payback on this. So we're willing to invest a little more heavily in this, because it drives some pretty good growth on the B2C side.

And my unrelated question, please, can you share with us what you think your market share is for FICO scores in auto, credit cards, say, and personal loans and also nonconforming mortgages? What do you think your market share is?

Yeah, I mean, there's been external third-party analysis done on this, and it's in the mid-'90s probably. If you look at the – if you look at securitizations that take place, it's very high. It's in the high 90% range. So it's hard to come up with exact numbers on this because it's not really reported anywhere. But from third parties that have done the actual work on this, it's a pretty high number.

Great. Thank you both.

Thank you. Our next question, coming from the line of Kevin McVeigh with UBS. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks so much. I just wanted to see if you could help us reconcile. You had a pretty good beat in the quarter and reaffirmed the guidance for the full year. Any puts and takes on kind of what the reaffirm was as opposed to the beat in the quarter?

Did I – Well, they increased – I'm sorry.

You – the amount of the raise on the guidance relative to the beat looks like you beat by more than you raised. Was there any kind of change in the guidance? Was it conservatism or anything to kind of call out just based on where the quarter came versus how much the full year guidance was increased?

Yeah. Well, I mean, we did have – we talked about in the – we've got some one-time expenses that we're going to have in the fourth quarter. And there's some of that that probably wasn't in – earlier in the year. There's some things – as we get to the end of the year, we can take some charges. And we've done it in the past. And I think we'll probably be doing some of that this year as well. So that's probably the delta.

That's super helpful. And then just with all the questions, I know the regulation is so hard to frame, but are there any goalposts in terms of timing or just events that you could kind of point us to where there may just be some clarification, whether it's out of the FHFA or a broader organization? And just as we're thinking about expectations over the course of the year, I mean, just given – it feels like there's

–

No, I think if we take where we are today as the status quo, which is what it is, I think you're looking at years to figure out how market share settles out because it's not easy to switch and because we have a better score. So, you know, TBD, under what circumstances and whether at all, you know, there's share shift. But we'll see. But it won't happen fast. You know, it will take time.

Thank you.

Thank you. And I'm showing up for the questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to David for any final comments.

Yeah, thanks very much. I just want to circle back, Mon, I've asked the question at the beginning around the number of FICO-10T lenders and attraction to market. So I think it's just important to remind the audience, you know, lenders use, you know, FICO-10T for a lot of use cases, underwriting, loan production, execution, servicing. We have over 30 forest lenders today using FICO-10T. Some of those lenders use it for securitization. They're securitizing with FICO-10T already. And the MCT is a platform where the MBS market flows through and they also have adopted FICO-10T. So we have a lot of places where FICO-10T exists in the ecosystem and the traction is very strong.

So thanks, everyone, for the call. Appreciate it.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. Thank you for your time.