TransUnion

Good day and welcome to TransUnion's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. To withdraw it, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would like now to turn the conference over to Mr. Greg Barty, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for attending today. Joining me on the call are Chris Cartwright, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Todd Sello, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We posted our earnings release and slides to accompany this call on the TransUnion Investor Relations website this morning, and they can also be found in the current report on Form 8K that we filed this morning. Our earnings released in the accompanying slides include various schedules, which contain more detailed information about revenue, operating expenses, and other items, as well as certain non-GAAP disclosures and financial measures, along with their corresponding reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures. Today's call will be recorded, and a replay will be available on our website. We will also be making statements during this call that are forward-looking. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements because of factors discussed in today's earnings release, in the comments made during this conference call, and in our most recent Form 10-K, Forms 10-Q, and other reports and filings with SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. With that, let me turn it over to Chris.

Thanks, Craig. Let me add my welcome and share our agenda for the call this morning. First, I'll provide the highlights of our second quarter 2025 results and an overview of market conditions. Second, I'll discuss progress toward our 2025 strategic priorities, including a spotlight on our fast-growing trusted call solutions business. Finally, Todd will detail our second quarter results and updated 2025 guidance. In the second quarter, TransUnion exceeded all key financial guidance metrics. For a sixth straight quarter, we delivered high single-digit organic revenue growth, highlighting our strong execution in a stable but still subdued market and the benefits of our accelerating pace of innovation. Revenue grew 9% on an organic constant currency basis, well above our 3% to 5% guidance. Excluding mortgage, our growth of 6.5% also exceeded expectations. U.S. market segment delivered 10% growth in the quarter. Financial services grew 17%, and growth excluding mortgage accelerated to 11%. Across all lending types, we continue to outperform overall market growth by driving new business wins across our solution suites. Consumer lending and auto grew double digits, and card and banking grew mid-single digits. We experienced robust activity from fintech lenders supported by healthy funding and heightened consumer demand for debt consolidation products. Mortgage was up 29% compared to flat inquiries, both modestly above expectations. Earlier this month, The FHFA announced it would allow lenders to use VantageScore 4.0 for conforming mortgages and that the tri-merge credit report requirement will remain in effect. We believe these policies will provide choice for lenders and enhance safety and certainty within mortgage markets, benefiting homebuyers, lenders, and taxpayers over the long term. Emerging verticals grew 5%. Insurance grew double digits, driven by a gradual recovery in marketing and healthy consumer shopping activity, in addition to new wins across our solutions. We also grew across our diversified verticals, led by communications and tech, retail and e-commerce. Consumer Interactive grew 2% organically, driven by the successful launch of our freemium solution, marking a key step in our turnaround strategy. International grew 6% on an organic constant currency basis. India's growth accelerated to 8% as anticipated. We experienced a modest pickup in consumer lending and delivered strong growth in our non-consumer businesses. Within the remainder of the international portfolio, Canada and Africa were standouts, each growing double digits. Supported by our strong financial results, our leverage ratio declined 2.8 times. We believe we're positioned to delever to 2.5 times before funding our planned Mexico acquisition, which we expect to close by the end of this year. We also opportunistically accelerated our share repurchases in the quarter. Through mid-July, we have repurchased $47 million in shares. We expect that our financial results will further support disciplined capital deployment throughout the year. Now, our second quarter results reflect a strong performance in stable but still muted market conditions. U.S. credit volumes in the second quarter were slightly above expectations, particularly in consumer lending. Activity in cards remained steady, while auto and mortgage activity is below historical trends. Based on our overperformance in the first half of the year, we're increasing our 2025 full-year revenue and adjusted diluted earnings per share guidance. Even with this increase, we believe our updated guidance remains prudently conservative to accommodate ongoing macro uncertainties, as we will detail later in the call. In the U.S., consumers and lenders remain sound and resilient, supporting stable lending activity. Consumers are benefiting from low unemployment, modest but positive real wage growth, and manageable inflation. Consumer sentiment in June improved from low levels earlier in the year, reflecting a better outlook for the economy, inflation, and personal finances. Major lenders reported solid second quarter earnings with strong profitability, adequate capital, and good credit performance. Now, in April, we noted that trade and fiscal policy proposals added uncertainty to employment levels, inflation, interest rates, and economic growth. The U.S. has reached trade agreements with several countries since then, and more are expected soon. However, the recently passed U.S. fiscal package extends the 2017 rate cuts, increases the deficit, and raises the debt limit. This has raised concerns about higher inflation and interest rates, which could negatively impact economic and lending conditions. The 10-year U.S. Treasury rate remains elevated, although below its mid-January peak. And we will continue to monitor the impact of these policy changes on rates, consumers, and our customers. In July, I attended the TransUnion Sybil Annual Credit Conference in India, celebrating Sybil's 25th anniversary. The event drew over 2,500 clients, including more than 100 CEOs from major Indian lenders and key Reserve Bank of India regulators. We discussed future innovations to increase financial inclusion and introduced new solutions and market insights. This event reinforced Sybil's strong reputation and the positive impact it has on the Indian economy. Our India strategy reflects our vision to foster trust in global commerce between consumers and businesses. We recognize significant opportunities in India supported by our scale, well-known brand, high-quality data, innovative products, and strong relationships with bankers and regulators alike. Our future innovation aims to expand credit access for underserved markets such as small and medium-sized businesses, new to credit consumers, and microfinance, all identified by India's government as vital economic drivers. After the event, I'm even more confident that India represents an enormous long-term growth opportunity for TransUnion, with the potential to grow over 20% annually over the medium term. In the near term, consumer lending in India is experiencing a gradual volume recovery due to manageable delinquency levels, lower interest rates, in the return to market of non-bank lenders who were sidelined by the Reserve Bank last year. The RBI has reduced interest rates by 100 basis points thus far in 2025 and is balancing lending safety with economic growth. We anticipate our growth in India will accelerate later this year as lending volumes continue to recover, resulting in nearly 10% organic constant currency revenue growth for the full year and with fourth quarter growth in the high teens. We also continue to transform the company by modernizing our technology, enhancing our global operating model, and accelerating innovation across our product suites. I'll detail our recent progress. In the quarter, we accelerated U.S. credit customer migrations and further enhanced the core capabilities of One True, our global, configurable, cloud-native platform. Our customer migrations are focused on minimizing conversion disruptions while delivering our targeted savings within the committed investment levels. To achieve this, we strengthen OneTrue's functionality to manage our most complex and customized batch and online workloads. We're achieving notable performance and innovation improvements on the new platform, including over 50% faster processing, robust cybersecurity and compliance controls, and rapid development of new scores, attributes, and models. We also migrated several key consumer indirect customers to our new global consumer technology platform. The scalable platform enables faster product releases, seamless multi-region deployment, and reduced operational complexity. To further enhance OneTrue's capabilities, We have augmented its underlying identity graph with our comprehensive public records database. This integration enhances data fidelity and introduces more robust attributes related to addresses, phone numbers, and emails. Our identity graph now encompasses a wide array of TU's proprietary data assets, including traditional credit header information, public records, communication and device identifiers, streaming data, and other unique data sources. Together, these elements enable industry-leading consumer identity resolution, improved data onboarding, more targeted marketing, and optimized fraud prevention and risk management. During the quarter, we successfully transitioned over 20,000 specialized risk clients to the enhanced One True Identity graph, resulting in significant performance gains for these customers. We also expanded adoption of our AI-driven developer tool, One True Assist, which employs advanced language models to automate repetitive coding tasks, facilitate code translations, and detect and address security vulnerabilities. One True Assist supports the entire One True software development lifecycle and has contributed to 20 to 50% productivity increases for developers. Additionally, We recently launched One True AI Studio, which provides low-code and no-code AI workflow solutions for broader non-engineering use cases. We're improving our global operating model as well by strengthening product development practices and our leadership. In Q2, Brian Silver joined us as head of marketing solutions under Mohamed Abdel-Sadak, bringing significant digital marketing experience. We continue to refine our approach to product management to better align resources, streamline decision-making, and accelerate new product iterations. These changes will improve commercial outcomes by integrating our geographic and vertical-led go-to-market strength with enhanced product development expertise. Our technology stack and operating model are contributing to faster innovation and growth across our six global solutions families. We've increased the pace of new product introductions while also completing foundational technology modernization. Factor Trust customers can now use OneTrue with its improved processing times, expanded scores and attributes, and more rapid model development. Factor Trust growth rates have reached double digits due to competitive wins and with a strong pipeline of new opportunities. In fraud, we launched new models using our materially enriched identity graphs and our analytics and machine learning capabilities. Additionally, we developed a solution to identify consumers who dispute credit trade lines by falsely claiming to be fraud victims. Early demand for this solution is strong, representing a cross-sell opportunity into credit customers. Marketing solutions reported stronger retention and increasing sales momentum, particularly within audience and identity products. Within U.S. Consumer Solutions, we rolled out a new freemium offering with updated web and app experiences, resulting in strong growth in the number of new free users. We plan to further expand these capabilities and our offer inventory. With Manevo, we integrated lenders' underwriting criteria to personalize pre-qualified offers through online publishers and improve consumer experience and ad conversions. We will continue to build this marketplace by adding new publishers and top-tier lenders to the platform. Now, I'll conclude my remarks with a deeper dive into the innovation and growth of our communication solutions, particularly trusted call solutions, or TCS. We entered the communication solutions market through our NewStar acquisition, which leveraged its relationships with telco companies to build a suite of data-driven authentication solutions. Our communication solutions help make trust possible in the phone experience by authenticating and clarifying the purpose of phone calls. Our customers report better answer rates and higher consumer satisfaction when using the service. The use cases typically combine fraud mitigation and brand identification to improve consumer engagement. Now, communication solutions overall has grown 10% plus per annum since 2022 and and should achieve $320 million in revenue in 2025. Trusted Call Solutions has grown from $50 million in revenue in 2022 to an expected $150 million this year. Financial Services accounts for almost 30% of TCS revenues, with the remaining 70% spread across our emerging verticals. The remainder of communication solutions includes legacy products such as landline caller ID and listings management. These products embed us with telco companies and provide the data necessary for new products such as TCS and are very profitable, although their revenue growth is flat to declining slightly. In sum, we believe communication solutions can deliver at least high single-digit growth driven by the sizable market for trusted calls. Now, I'll detail how TCS works, why we're the market leader, and how we will build on our momentum. Trusted Call Solutions enhances the phone channel, closing the user experience gap of digital channels. As most businesses rely on phone calls for important communications and consumers prefer them for urgent matters, unanswered calls and robocalls remain major issues. Over 80% of outbound calls go unanswered, and consumers receive 55 billion robocalls annually, leading to $12 billion in fraud. Our solution adds caller name, logo, and call context to outbound calls. It authenticates inbound calls to block fraudsters and leads to better engagement, brand protection, and financial results. Customers across industries report improved contact and conversion rates. Now, TCS integrates TransUnion into the mobile call ecosystem, establishing an essential framework that benefits telecommunications carriers, enterprises, and end users. Enterprises serve as our primary clients. We authenticate and onboard their phone numbers and enrich call data into our comprehensive data management platform. Telecommunications carriers are our strategic partners. When a call is initiated via a mobile network, the carriers access verified rich call data, such as name, logo, and contextual information from TransUnion to present on the recipient's device. Enterprises compensate TransUnion for displaying authenticated information, and we in turn provide royalties to the carriers. Consumers benefit from an enhanced and trustworthy calling experience. enabling them to make informed decisions when responding to calls. Now, TCS is positioned at the forefront of the industry, addressing an estimated opportunity exceeding one billion in the U.S. alone. We've identified several sustainable competitive advantages that underpin our success in this market. First, TCS covers 94% of U.S. wireless consumers through our exclusive relationship with AT&T and strategic partnerships with First Orion and T&S. This collaboration enabled the delivery of 5 billion authenticated branded calls across the top three carriers in 2024. Leveraging our broad phone coverage and scale, we partnered with AT&T this year to introduce branded call displays featuring call reasons and providing context to phone calls and improving consumer engagement. Our innovation roadmap includes upcoming releases such as omni-channel capabilities and advanced fraud detection signals. Second, we steward expansive and authoritative data sets to rigorously verify enterprises and telephone details, which enable us to authenticate and enrich calls. Our robust industry relationships and integration with over 800 carriers enabled us to develop TCS. Third, we possess extensive distribution channels through TransUnion that allow us to deploy TCS in numerous vertical markets. We see significant interest and strong sales across all sectors we cover, including financial services, insurance, healthcare, and the public sector. And finally, TCS integrates seamlessly with our market-leading fraud solutions to safeguard against data breaches, account takeover attempts, phishing, and other impersonation-related threats. Collectively, TCS enhances TU's long-term growth prospects, providing a pathway toward near $250 million in revenue by 2028. As the market leader, we maintain robust integration with telecom companies and businesses, positioning us to capitalize on a large market opportunity in the U.S., Our strategy includes deeper penetration of our core verticals, scaling existing solutions, and broadening the product portfolio. Furthermore, we believe that we can take this solution to many of our markets globally in the coming years. Recently, we launched a branded call display in Canada, developed in collaboration with Telus, a leading Canadian telecommunications provider. And we have introduced initial solutions in Brazil and France, and are evaluating additional opportunities in markets such as India. We will continue to provide updates on our progress as we scale TCS in the coming quarters. And with that, I'll hand it over to Todd.

Thanks, Chris. And let me add my welcome to everyone. As Chris mentioned, in the second quarter, we exceeded our guidance across all key financial metrics driven by broad-based outperformance in our U.S. market segment led by financial services. Second quarter consolidated revenue increased 10% on a reported and 9% on an organic constant currency basis. The Munivo acquisition contributed half a percent to growth. Most of Munivo's revenue is recognized in the UK, with the remaining U.S. revenue recognized in Consumer Interactive. The impact from foreign currency was immaterial. Our business grew 6.5% on an organic constant currency basis, excluding mortgage from both the second quarter of 2024 and 2025. Adjusted EBITDA increased 8%. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 35.7% ahead of our 34.8% to 35.3% guidance due to flow-through on stronger revenue growth. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was $1.08, 9 cents ahead of the high end of our guidance, and an increase of 9%. Finally, in the second quarter, we took $29 million of one-time charges related to our transformation program, $5 million for operating model optimization, and $23 million for technology transformation. To date, we have incurred $315 million of planned one-time transformation expenses over the course of the program and remain on track for $355 to $375 million in one-time expenses by the end of 2025. Looking at segment financial performance for the second quarter, U.S. markets revenue was up 10% compared to the year-ago quarter. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 37.9%, down 110 basis points, due to the timing shift of investments from the first quarter to the second quarter, as we discussed in April. Financial services revenue grew 17%, or 11%, excluding mortgage. Credit card and banking was up 5% against flattish online volumes. We saw good growth from alternative data sales and trusted call solutions, as well as healthy batch activity. Consumer lending growth accelerated to 18%. We experienced further strengthening in marketing and online volumes from FinTech and point of sale lenders. We also delivered strong factor trust growth. Auto grew 19% driven by pricing of our data and third party scores, as well as good growth in our communications and marketing solutions. Volumes remained elevated in April, likely due to a pull forward of demand ahead of tariffs, but normalized in May and June towards levels seen early in the year. For mortgage, Revenue grew 29% despite flat inquiry volumes, benefiting from third-party score pricing and non-tribural revenue. Mortgage accounts for about 12% of trans-unions trailing 12-month revenue. Emerging verticals grew 5%, led again by double-digit growth in insurance, tech, retail, and e-commerce, telco, and tenant employment all grew mid-single digits. Media was flat, and public sector and services declined. We expect media growth to improve in the second half as marketing wins convert to revenue and public sector to return to growth later in the year. In insurance, we delivered another strong quarter supported by stable market conditions. Marketing activity continues to recover as insurers benefit from improved rate adequacy, especially in personal lines auto. Consumer shopping also remained active. We delivered broad-based new business wins, including in core credit and driving history, as well as trusted call solutions and our modern marketing products. Turning to consumer interactive, revenue grew 2% on an organic constant currency basis. Both our direct and indirect channels grew in the quarter, excluding the impact from lapping a large breach remediation win in the third quarter of 2024. We expect growth in the direct and indirect channels in the second half of the year. For my comments about international, all revenue growth comparisons will be in organic constant currency terms. For the total segment, revenue grew 6%. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 42.7%. Looking at the specifics for each region, India growth accelerated to 8%, as anticipated, and up from the 1% growth in the first quarter. Commercial credit, direct-to-consumer in new products like our API Marketplace, drove growth, offsetting still-muted consumer credit volumes. Our UK business grew 5%. Batch and online activity remain healthy for our largest banking customers, and we continue to ramp new business wins across our verticals. In Canada, we grew 10% in a muted market. We drove growth through sales of our innovative fraud, identity, and consumer indirect solutions, share gains across financial services, auto, and insurance, and increased portfolio review batch activity. We also benefited from some one-time revenues in the quarter. In Latin America, revenue grew 4%, with modest growth in Colombia and Brazil and high single-digit growth in our other Latin American countries. In Asia Pacific, we declined 8% as we lapped one-time consulting revenue in the prior year. Philippines' growth remains strong, while Hong Kong faces a softer economic backdrop. we expect Asia Pacific to return to growth in the second half of the year. Finally, Africa increased 14% with broad-based growth across financial services, retail, and insurance. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $5.1 billion of debt and $688 million of cash. Our leverage ratio at quarter end was 2.8 times. We have repurchased $47 million in shares year-to-date through mid-July, in line with our balanced approach to capital deployment. We remain focused on delevering to under 2.5 times leverage ratio. Throughout the remainder of the year, we plan to balance debt prepayment and share repurchases based on market conditions. We also plan to preserve capital ahead of our TransUnion to Mexico acquisition which we expect will close by year end. Turning to guidance, as Chris mentioned, we are raising our guidance for the full year primarily to account for strong first half results as well as continued business momentum. Even with the guidance raised, we maintained a prudently conservative posture for the remainder of the year to account for ongoing market uncertainty. We believe we can manage some level of U.S. lending activity softening within our guidance range. Should current conditions persist, we would expect to deliver results at or above the high end of our guidance range. That brings us to our outlook for the third quarter. We expect FX to be less than half a percent headwind to revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We expect Monevo acquisition to add a percent to revenue. We expect revenue to be between $1.115 and $1.135 billion, or up 2% to 4% on an organic constant currency basis. These growth rates include a 4% headwind from lapping the large breach remediation win in last year's third quarter. Excluding the breach comparison, our organic constant currency growth guidance would be 6% to 8%. Our revenue guidance includes approximately two points of tailwind from mortgage. In the third quarter, we expect mortgage inquiries to decline modestly. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $397 and $411 million, up 1% to 4%. We expect adjusted EBITDA margin of 35.6 to 36.2%, down 10 to 70 basis points. Our margin expectation for the third quarter is consistent with our results in the first half of the year, as well as our expectation for the full year. We expect our adjusted diluted earnings per share to be between 99 cents and $1.04, down 5% to flat. Turning to the full year, we anticipate FX to be less than a half a percent headwind to revenue and adjusted EBITDA, and the Monevo acquisition to contribute half a percent to revenue. We expect revenue of between $4.432 and $4.472 billion. We expect organic constant currency revenue growth of 6% to 7%, an increase from our prior guidance of 4.5% to 6%. Including mortgage, we expect organic constant currency growth of 4% to 5%. These growth rates include a 1% headwind from lapping the large breach win from last year's third quarter. Specific to our segment organic constant currency assumptions, we expect U.S. markets to grow mid-single digit, both including and excluding mortgage. We anticipate financial services to be up low double digits, or high single-digit excluding mortgage. We expect mortgage revenue to increase by over 20% against modest declines in mortgage inquiries. We expect emerging verticals to be up mid-single-digit. We anticipate Consumer Interactive decreasing low single-digit but increasing low single-digit when excluding the impact of last year's large breach win. We anticipate international growing high single digit. Turning back to the total company outlook, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $1.58 and $1.61 billion, up 5% to 7%, an increase from our prior guidance of 3% to 6%. That would result in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 35.7% to 36.0%, down 30 basis points to flat. We anticipate adjusted diluted earnings per share to be $4.03 to $4.14, up 3% to 6%, also an increase from prior guidance of flat to 4% growth. Our expected adjusted diluted earnings per share growth reflects strong underlying performance and is inclusive of a 400 basis point headwind from foreign exchange and a higher tax rate in 2025. We expect depreciation and amortization to be approximately $570 million. We expect the portion excluding step-up amortization from our 2012 change in control and subsequent acquisitions to be about $285 million as technology modernization initiatives go into production and start to depreciate. We now anticipate net interest expense will be about $200 million for the full year. We expect our adjusted tax rate to be approximately 26.5%. Capital expenditures are expected to be about 8% of revenue. We continue to expect to incur $100 to $120 million in one-time charges in 2025 related to the last year of our transformation program. Given those investments, we expect our free cash flow conversion as a percentage of adjusted net income to be 70% in 2025 before improving to 90% plus in 2026. In closing, we delivered strong results and are quickly approaching a period in 2026 and beyond that we believe will see stronger free cash flow generation and a leverage ratio within our target range. This will enable discipline, and shareholder-friendly deployment of capital, similar to our approach throughout the first half of the year. I will now turn the call back to Chris for final comments.

Thanks, Todd. In summary, we delivered a robust second quarter, surpassing our guidance across all key financial metrics and marking our sixth consecutive quarter of high single-digit organic revenue growth. Based on our strong performance in the first half of the year and sustained business momentum, We're raising our 2025 guidance, now anticipating 67% organic constant currency revenue growth. And we continue to make substantial progress toward our strategic priorities. Following several years of investment, our current focus is on execution and value creation. Our growth playbook, which has historically emphasized differentiated vertical market engagement and geographic expansion, has driven our industry-leading growth over the past decade. As a result of our transformation, we are equipped with an expanded suite of solutions for our customers. Product innovation is an increasingly essential component of our growth playbook, complementing our established vertical and geographic strategies. We are confident that our strategic investments and our disciplined execution will further enhance our product offerings and customer experience positioning us for another phase of industry-leading growth. And with that, let me turn over the time to Greg.

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

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw it, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. And as a final reminder, we ask that you keep your questions to one at a time. Our first question comes from Faista Ali from Deutsche Bank.

Please go ahead. Hi, thank you. Good morning. Chris, you mentioned in your prepared remarks that, you know, across all lending types, you're outperforming the overall market driven by new business wins. And I'm curious, sort of, is this more customer mix or is it related to some of the, you know, new technology and product innovation or, you know, something else you're doing? Just would love a little bit more color there.

Yeah, sure, Faiza. Well, I would say it's a combination of some of those elements. On the customer mix side, you know, consumer lenders have come back strong in recent quarters, as we expected. Funding is flowing again to the space, and they're addressing an attractive market opportunity to consolidate revolving card balances at lower rates. It's what they're really good at. And as we know, consumer lending, fintech in particular, was really bruised during the market slowdown in 22 and 23 But now they're back and they're back in force And it's going to benefit us disproportionately because we have very large share there We are comfortably above two-thirds of the market in terms of market share And they have a standout quarter and they've got good momentum I would say We're also selling into these financial services subcomponents, whether it's mortgage, consumer lending, card, auto, a broad array of products. Remember, these are market segments for us. They're not products. So, yes, we're selling credit and credit analytics, but we're also selling trusted call solutions. We're selling marketing solutions. In particular, you know, in the auto vertical segment, We posted really great growth in the second quarter. Less than half of that was the price benefit from the score price increases. And it was just a little bit from volume. The rest of it is coming from the performance of our product suite in the auto segment. So I think it's an important thing to mention there. But look, we've got good momentum in financial services, as you can see from Q2 and the whole first half. And that's allowed us to raise the guide materially for the year while still maintaining a very conservative posture.

The next question comes from Andrew Steinerman of J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi. Just two quick questions. One, you know, I definitely noted the – Momentum and Factor Trust and other, you know, kind of alternative bureaus in the marketplace. Could you just, you know, give us a comment of why there's good momentum right now to the alternative, you know, data bureaus? And is that tied to stronger P loan growth? And then let me just give you my second question about the Mexico acquisition. You know, how is that asset performing now? And just remind us why it takes kind of a longer period of time to close. meaning longer than a traditional U.S. acquisition.

Yeah, for sure, Andrew. Okay, so regarding alternative credit data, of which Factor Trust is a market leader, for us it's really a story of replatforming and innovation and then relaunching Factor Trust. We acquired Factor Trust some years ago. It's a great data set with good coverage, but it was on an antiquated technology platform And so we prioritized moving it to One True. In the process of re-platforming it on One True, you know, one, of course, we did prove out that we could handle, you know, credit at volume with real-time reporting and the various complexities on the One True platform. But we also considerably innovated on the analytics side. We implemented a better identity spine underpinning the data. We added a lot of data attributes. We enabled our true IQ analytics solution for more rapid modeling. And as a result, we're just winning more business with Factor Trust than we did previously. And we have a very robust pipeline. So I think the momentum at Factor Trust is going to continue. Perhaps we're getting some benefit, you know, selling it as an add-on. into some of these other segments. Consumer lenders are, you know, the fintech guys do like this alternative data. Anybody with a subprime focus is also interested in the subprime data. And we posted some nice sales of Factor Trust in the auto vertical as well. Now in terms of the time for Mexico, or just the performance, the asset continues to perform well. It's on plan. And we're still on plan in terms of clearing the government review and regulatory hurdles to closing the acquisition. We are targeting and hoping to close the deal before the end of the year. And look, some of this just takes a bit of time. But the fact that it takes time shouldn't raise any concerns. That's just the operating standard in Mexico. But we're getting a great asset at a really fair price. And we're going to bring a ton of innovation to the Mexican market that I think is going to, you know, sustain and increase the growth rate for many years to come.

Our next question comes from Jeff Muller of Baird. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you. So on the CI freemium and marketplace rollout, it sounds like it's a little bit staggered or there's kind of like a beta period there. So what are the most important initial learnings? And then what's the timeline to more fully integrate capabilities and build out marketplace? And then I guess finally, are you willing to share anything on what you now expect intermediate term for growth out of the consumer interactive business? Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So look, it was a solid quarter for the consumer segment overall. The direct business and the indirect business both grew low single digits. As you know, and everybody on the call knows, we've been investing heavily in this space for several years now to add the capabilities that you need to grow in this current environment. We've launched our new freemium solution. That means new user interface, integrating subscription offerings, and integrating a full complement of consumer loan offers, as well as identity protection and breach remediation. You know, we exited the beta period in the first quarter. In the second quarter, we've been converting our core customer base, and we're probably plus 75% at this point, and we're converting over the offer inventory to the new platform that's probably at 75 or 80 percent too but you know right away you can see that it's going to have a positive impact on the growth rates of the business particularly on the direct side where you know we've been working hard to mitigate the decline I think you know we've got that behind us now and our goal is to kind of stabilize this low single-digit growth in the coming quarters and As we start to optimize these different elements that we've got now, offers, freemium, an integrated offering of subscription, freemium, breach, all of these things coming together, the interplay, we're going to be optimizing our marketing, optimizing our customer flows and conversion, if you will, the pricing, all of this stuff. And then, look, over time, we're going to bring more and more lenders and offer types onto the platform. It won't be so card focused. There'll be a lot of different opportunities for consumers to engage with TransUnion in a freemium way and get the full range of consumer lending and insurance offers and other opportunities there. And in terms of the guide, look, right now, you know, we're just executing on a whole bunch of goodness, bringing it together and returning this you know, $600 million chunk of business to consistent growth. In the intermediate term, mid-single-digit growth, and I think once we're firing on all cylinders, we would expect to push even beyond mid-single digits. So hopefully that clarifies.

The next question comes from Tony Kaplan of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I was hoping to talk about the consumer lending environment I think late last year and early this year, you had talked about it being a stable but muted environment. Now it seems like you're seeing it's a little bit better than expected and better than that. And when I look at U.S. financial services, you grew double-digit ex-mortgage. So just it sounds like you're still being a little bit cautious on how the environment plays out just with potential for deficits and inflation and that potentially impacting lending, but maybe just talk through how much better is it now? Where do you think for the remainder of the year we sort of are in terms of market strength and into next year and just the puts and takes around all of that? Thanks.

Yeah, well, we'll give you some flavor there around financial services. You know, yes, it's stable but muted. I think that's a fair assessment, although perhaps a little bit less so than it has been in recent quarters. I mean, as you can see, consumer lending is coming back, and I've already talked about that opportunity. Card is still a more tempered environment, kind of flattish online volumes. We are selling in, you know, alternative data and trusted call solutions into cards. You know, the – The big banks all reported over the past couple of weeks, and their commentary on card was a bit more optimistic, I think, than we've seen. And we're starting to see some nice positive batch activity in card, which means card lenders are moving more toward, you know, the front foot, if you will, which is good. But, you know, it's far short of saying, you know, happy days are here again. You know, auto I talked about, the volumes are still, you know, net positive a bit a lot of that is the pull forward because of tariff fears but we're selling you know a lot of products into the auto vertical essential volume levels the tenure rates you know remain elevated and they're still you know, I don't know, kind of neutral in terms of whether they're going to go up or they're going to go down. We're going to have to see how that plays out. And so I don't expect a big refinance boom to happen, you know, anytime soon. And asset affordability is still a challenge because of, you know, the supply side of the housing equation. But what it really shows is, one, as an industry, we're trading on rather tempered volume levels because of all of the rate increases that happen in the 22, early 23 time period, as we've said. And so if you get just a little perk up in volume activity, you get nice growth rates. It also speaks to the portfolio diversification that we've achieved. Again, when we talk about consumer lending or card or auto, these are market segments. We're not just selling credit products. We're selling analytics. We're selling alternative data, marketing fraud. phone solutions, et cetera, right? And the breadth of the offering is appealing, and we're putting good points on the board.

The next question comes from Manav Patnik of Barclays. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Yeah, I was just hoping for maybe a quick update on your FinTech you know, exposure, how that's performing, you know, some of this positive business momentum they're talking about, you know, how much of that is from that customer category?

Sure. You know, so, Manav, I've touched a couple of times on consumer lending. And while the category is broader than just fintech, fintechs are an important part of that. And as you can see from, you know, the results of the larger players, they're doing much better. In fact, they've recovered significantly. You know, the stability that we see in the market environment, even at an elevated interest rate, allows funding to flow back into the market. And that takes care of the supply side of things. The demand side is good because, you know, during the COVID era, when credit scores, you know, artificially were inflated, a lot of cards were issued to a lot of consumers that might not have qualified for them previously. And they took advantage of that, and they levered up, and they're revolving those balances, and that creates a great demand-side opportunity for loan consolidation. So we're definitely seeing a pickup in fintech within consumer lending. But look, I just want to emphasize it's more than just consumer lending. The growth is great. We expect it to continue, but we're really doing – solid performance across all of the financial services subcategories.

Our next question comes from Ashish Savadra of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Apologies, Ashish. I seem to have lost your line. We will be going with the next question answerer Scott Wurzel from Wolf Research. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to touch on the mortgage side and specifically on the pre-qual environment and just wondering if you could speak to what you're seeing in the market from general shopping activity to also the competitive dynamics in that space. Thanks.

Hey, Scott. Good morning. Thanks for the question. I'll jump in here with that. As far as mortgage is concerned, I think we've been pleased with the performance that we've seen to date. In general, through the first half, inquiries have been in line. And as a reminder, when we talk about our inquiries, we're talking about pre-qualification as well as tri-merge. So in the second quarter in particular, we were roughly flat. And this goes to what Chris just said in a previous response. We believe we're at a bottom here and that there should be upside in the space. The revenue that we saw did outperform specifically to your question due to pre-qualification. We have seen, you know, good traction with our customers, you know, in that space, especially after the change last year with the early access program. So we've been able to maintain our position, if not even gain, you know, on what we have there. But in mortgage, we've, you know, outside of just the pricing that we all know about, you know, and what drives the majority of the 29% revenue increase that we saw, We've also had some success selling other parts of our product portfolios, such as batch marketing, as well as trusted call solutions, which we obviously covered in depth on the call here today. So as we look to go forward into the second half of the year, I mean, for all intents and purposes, we're pretty much holding you know, to the guidance that, you know, we've been providing thus far. So that will call for the second half for inquiries to be, you know, sound modestly, and then for the full year also, you know, be down modestly as well, too.

All right. Once again, I will introduce Ashish Sabhadra of RBC Capital Markets as our next question asker. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to go back to India. Obviously, we saw some pretty material acceleration in India from 1Q to 2Q. You've talked about 20% plus growth over the midterm. I was just wondering if you could provide some color about the second half of the year. How should we think about the puts and takes there? Thank you.

Yeah, I just got back from a week in India. It was very exciting, invigorating, in fact. First, it's great to see the business pick up materially as it did, increasing from 1% to 8% organic. I feel like consumer lending momentum is returning in that market as we expected. Now that the posture of the Reserve Bank is pivoted to balancing growth as well as safety and soundness. The team there is still confident that for the full year we can hit a 10% growth rate. And that means by the fourth quarter, we should be back to high teens organic growth. And then that sets us up to a return to probably low 20% kind of compounding and potentially better. As I mentioned, I was over there because we were celebrating the 25th anniversary of our bureau over there. It's called Sibyl. And I interacted with just a ton of CEOs and a ton of senior regulators. And they confirmed that because of the actions of the RBI, they expect consumer lending to return full force over the next four quarters. And so that's in addition to this improvement in volume that translated into 8% growth for us in the second quarter. And look, the reasons are the RBI has cut rates by 100 bps already, very focused on stimulating economic growth. Inflation is lower in India than it has been in quite a number of years. That's encouraging, too. So that's part of the pro-growth stance. The RBI has also indicated that they're comfortable with the loan-to-deposit ratio in consumer lending currently and with the lending practices of certain key non-bank financial players who were sidelined over much of the past six quarters but have now come back into the market and are beginning to resume lending. And look, delinquencies overall are holding up nicely. They're manageable. They're within historical standards. So we're really setting up for the recovering consumer lending in India that we expected. It took about six quarters for India to slow down to the bottom in Q1. It'll probably take about six quarters until they are fully back rolling along, and we're two quarters in. But look, India represents an enormous long-term opportunity. What's exciting about being over there is regulators and lenders, they really – appreciate the value of credit reporting agencies and having a foundation of objective and quantitative data to base their lending practices on. They've only had a functioning score in that market for about 20 years. And these CEOs can tell you what it was like lending to consumers previously, which is they were very conservative, they were very cautious. And they recognize that in working with us over this period, they've been able to bring literally hundreds of millions of Indian consumers into mainstream consumer finance. So financial inclusion has been great. That's helped drive their economic growth. And in addition to all the secular tailwinds of great demographics, further financial penetration potential, the continuing digitalization of commerce there and urbanization trends, there's a ton of of growth opportunity, and we're maintaining our market share in the low 70s, which is great. We have a data quality advantage, and I think it sets us up for at least 20% compounding over the longer term. It's also a diversified portfolio with all this growth potential in consumer. Consumer is 60% of our revenues today, and there's a lot of opportunity for innovation there. microfinance, agri-lending, lending to small and medium businesses. Plus, we're setting up to bring marketing and fraud solutions to India on OneTrue. And we just launched the TrueIQ analytics platform there and completed our first innovation lab. And there's an enormous appetite for more analytics in the Indian market. We partnered with this customer. We earned several hundred thousand dollars worth of consulting fees. Now we've got their their data business for the long term, and there's great potential. And I guess the last thing I would say is, look, I had the privilege of meeting with the governor of the Reserve Bank of India while I was there, my team and I, and really their focus is all about how they can bring more of the Indian population into the mainstream lending economy. While they're pleased that there are now hundreds of millions of folks participating in that, there are still hundreds of millions of people, particularly in rural areas, that want access to capital on more favorable terms. And they want to understand how they can leverage all of this alternative data that they've created with their federal registry for wealth, for real estate, for the data that's flowing through their universal payment interface. And we're positioned to help them think through the opportunity and partner on the execution. So India is indeed a very bright growth opportunity for us, and we're fortunate to have it.

The next question comes from Kelsey Zhu of Autonomous. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. With the recent announcement from the FHFA in terms of validating the usage of Vantage 4.0 in mortgage underwriting, I was just wondering how you really think about the strategy to gain share for Vantage score, not just in mortgage, but also in non-mortgage verticals. Thanks a lot.

Yeah, fair enough, Kelsey. So, look, first I would just say that, you know, we appreciate and we support the clarification around policy that the FHFA has made recently with their pronouncements around the mortgage trimurge and score competition. We think they're the right decisions for consumers, for the GSEs, and for just the safety and soundness of the mortgage economy overall. And basically, they're just founded on the principle that more data, particularly when the data is accurate, curated, and predictive, will result in better outcomes across the board. And look, that was our positioning all along on the mortgage trimurge, right? You know, the bureaus have differences in their data, and a mortgage decision is enormously important for the typical American consumer. It's not only a quality of life issue, it's one of the best wealth-building opportunities And we should bring to bear all of the accurate curated data that's available to make the best possible decision for behalf of that consumer as a borrower, but also on behalf of all those consumers who are also taxpayers and ultimately bear the risks of the GSE. So maintaining the tri-merge makes a ton of sense. Regarding scores and score competition, clearly we think it's time to modernize scoring. The current score that has been in effect since 2004, you know, can be improved. And it also relies on point in time credit data, right? And, you know, for over a decade now, the entirety of the consumer lending industry has been pivoting to trended credit data. Now, we led that with the introduction of our credit vision, trending credit data in the U.S. in 2012. But all of the bureaus have trending credit data. All of the clients across all lending categories are using trending credit data. And it's so much more predictive and effective that all the clients pay a material price premium to use it. So for the purpose of evaluating whether a mortgage application qualifies as conforming or not for the GSEs, by all means, let's pivot to credit scores that are based on trended data, and let's encourage competition. The competition leads to innovation. It leads to sharpening the pencil on price. And so we're very supportive of the policy decisions. Now look, with any major policy pivot like this, it's going to take some time until all of the operational nuances are ironed out. You know, the regulators are working hard on that now. And look, we're standing at the ready along with Vantage to complete whatever analytics or comparisons that they want between the various score that are out there in the market. And look, we hope that the GSEs will pursue that. We know that they're interested and we know that we're willing. And we'll just have to see how this plays out because it is a complex industry in a complex situation. but I'm confident that the right policies are in place for the right reasons and that ultimately it's going to benefit the overall mortgage economy.

Our final question this morning comes from Jason Haas of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning and thanks for taking my question. I wanted to follow up on some of the figures that you've given around the investment you expected that benefits from the cost savings program. So you've called out 100 to 120 million of investments this year. Can I confirm that next year the expectation is that that goes to zero? And then alongside that, the expected benefit is 120 to 140 million of OPEX savings. Are you able to give me a sense for how much will be incremental for next year? So how much versus this year? And then, yeah, that'll be it. Thank you.

Hey, Jason, this is Todd. I'll take that question. So the answer to the first part of your question is it pertains to the investment. You're referring to the one-time cost for both the optimization of our org model as well as our technology transformation. We committed to a spend of up to $375 million. We are on track. to hit that number and probably not even exceed it. We'll be right around it. And the expectation is that it's going to stop at the end of 2025 as we committed to. The benefits from that program as we shift into 2026, what we're focused on is the free cash flow benefits. And if you remember, when we announced the transformation program in November of 2023, we committed to a $200 million free cash flow benefit going forward in 2026. And we have a really good line of sight to that. Now, as a reminder, on the operating expense savings from the program, we achieved a significant portion of that in 2020. It was about $85 million. The remainder of those cost saves are going to largely come in 2026, because in 2025, we always planned to complete our tech transformation work, and that's what we're in the midst of doing right now. Last component of this is capital expenditures. We are running at about 8% of our revenue, which has been historically where TransUnion has ran at. The commitment for 2026 and beyond is that capital expenditures will drop down to 6% of our revenues. And a lot of that just pertains to moving our computing environment to a cloud-based environment where the expense shows up in the P&L as opposed to being capitalized. So the net-net of all of this is the free cash flow conversion. This year, we anticipate to make significant progress in improving the free cash flow conversion to 70%. And what's most important with those free cash flow savings that I already talked about, in 2026, we are committing to 90% plus on the free cash flow conversion.

Yeah, and so look, the net of it is the program is on track. We are very confident that we're going to deliver the savings that we articulated and that we're not going to spend more than the investment that we articulated, and it's going to happen within the timeframe that we targeted. And so that's great, and that's all the kind of financial savings aspect of it. But again, this modernization is also leading to a real acceleration in our innovation. And that's why in my comments I talked about the retooling at Factor Trust and how we're getting great commercial value out of that. the launch of our true IQ analytics in multiple markets around the world, including data enrichment, innovation in fraud, innovation in our identity graph. This is all being enabled by this one true platform that we're creating, and we're gonna get tremendous leverage about it. And look, I'd be remiss if we ended the call if we didn't just reinforce that we have put forth improved guidance for 2025 And we firmly believe that it is conservative guidance. We grew 8% and 9% organically in the first two quarters. And if you do the math, which I'm sure all of you smart analysts have, our guide still assumes that we are decelerating in the third quarter and particularly in the fourth quarter. And the reason we're doing that is because we're being prudently conservative. We want to have guidance that, while elevated, would still allow us to support and offset a slowdown in lending that may or may not arise. What I do want to be clear is that this slowdown is not reflected in our current business momentum, right? We're almost done with July. July is a continuation of the strength that we saw in the second quarter. And unless there's a slowdown in lending or a slowdown in the economy generally, we would expect to exceed the high end of the guidance that we've provided today. And that's true not only on revenue, but EBITDA and all of the different financial metrics. So I just want to be clear on that before we end the call.

Perfect. That's a good place to end. Thanks for all your questions today, and have a great rest of the day.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation, and you may now all disconnect your lines.