Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Lindsay and I will be your conference operator on this call. After the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time. If at any time during the conference you need to reach an operator, please press the star key followed by zero. Please note that this call is being recorded as of today, Tuesday, February 14 at 8:00 am Central time. I would now like to turn the meeting over to your host for today’s call, Aaron Hoffman, Vice President of Investor Relations at TransUnion. Please go ahead.

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. This morning, I’m joined by Jim Peck, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Al Hamood, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We’ve posted our earnings release on the TransUnion Investor Relations website at www.transunions.com/tru. Our earnings release includes schedules which contain more detailed information about revenue, operating expenses and other items, including certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures are also included in these schedules. As a reminder, today’s call will be recorded and a replay will be available on the TransUnion website. We will also be making statements during this call that are forward-looking. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements because of factors discussed in today’s earnings release and the comments made during this call and in our most recent Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements. With that, let me turn it over to Jim.

Thanks Aaron, and good morning to everyone joining us on the call and webcast today. TransUnion had a very strong full year and fourth quarter in which we delivered double-digit revenue, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS growth along with strong cash flow. These results are all the more impressive when put in the context of the past three years. Looking at the three-year CAGR, revenue grew 13%, adjusted EBITDA grew 16%, and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded by about 300 basis points, and since 2014 adjusted EPS has nearly doubled. This impressive performance has come from broad-based innovation-driven growth across the company and reflects the incredible progress we’ve made in building TransUnion into a leading information services company. It is the outcome of our strategy to fully and effectively leverage the power data assets and analytical capabilities within the company by layering end market and geographic growth opportunities on top of our core assets to consistently deliver top tier performance. Underpinning this broad strategy is a series of five focused, highly impactful themes that provide the engine for our current and long-term growth. They are: driving growth through innovation, expansion into new vertical markets, growth in international markets, capitalizing on growth opportunities in consumer interactive, and global operational excellence. I’m going to spend the majority of my time today walking you through these themes and how we have benefited and will benefit from them over the long term. You’ve heard us talk frequently over the past several years about driving growth through innovation. That has been a meaningful catalyst for our strong results for several years now, and I have no doubt innovation will continue to fuel growth in the future. In fact, new products, emerging markets, and high growth verticals have generated approximately 50% of our growth in each of…

Thank you, Jim, and good morning. Today I’m going to walk through our consolidated and segment results, through adjusted operating income, and review the balance sheet and cash flow statements. I will then finish up with a discussion of key assumptions concerning 2017 guidance. Fourth quarter consolidating revenue was $436 million, an increase of 13% on a reported and constant currency basis compared with the fourth quarter of 2015. Revenue from acquisitions contributed about 3 points of growth in the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $169 million, an increase of 24% on a reported and constant currency basis compared with the fourth quarter of 2015. Furthermore, adjusted EBITDA margin was 38.8%, an increase of 340 basis points compared with the fourth quarter 2015. Adjusted net income was $82 million, an increase of 46% compared with the fourth quarter 2015. Adjusted diluted EPS was $0.44, an increase of 45% compared with the fourth quarter 2015. The adjusted effective tax rate for the fourth quarter was approximately 34%. During the fourth quarter, we completed an initiative to assess and calculate U.S. taxable income reductions for our software development and research and development activities. The benefits of this went into effect in the fourth quarter, which resulted in the full-year benefit being fully recognized in the quarter and significantly reducing rate. We fully expect this benefit to continue in 2017 and going forward, and it is reflected in the full year tax rate 2017 guidance that I will discuss shortly. Now let me walk you through the details of our P&L. As I mentioned, fourth quarter revenue was $436 million, an increase of 13% on a reported and constant currency basis compared with the fourth quarter of 2015. Cost of services was $145 million, an increase of 4% compared with the fourth quarter of…

Thanks Al. To wrap up, TransUnion continues to deliver outstanding broad-based top and bottom line financial results, and we are well positioned to see this performance continue in 2017 and beyond. We remain focused on growing through innovation, diversifying through new faster growth verticals, expanding internationally, continuing to strategically build our consumer interactive business, and driving global operational excellence. We remain in an enviable position with significant growth prospects, meaningful opportunities to invest organically and through acquisition, and should benefit from a largely positive macroeconomic backdrop. All of these points give us great conviction in our 2017 guidance and allow us to begin appropriately returning cash to our shareholders in the $300 million share repurchase program we announced today. I will conclude by simply saying that TransUnion has never been in a better position, and we are very bullish about the next chapters in our history. Now let me quickly turn the time back to Aaron.

That concludes our prepared remarks for today. For the Q&A, we ask that you limit questions to one. Now we’ll be good to take those questions.

[Operator instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Thank you. Good morning gentlemen, and congratulations on the results. I guess my question, I’ll focus more on the healthcare side of things. I think you called out 21% growth - that’s the first time you’ve given us an explicit number in healthcare. I think in the guidance, you implied continued double-digit growth there. So a two-part question - one, in terms of--you know, I think you’ve talked about before at some point that the rate that it’s growing, you’re going to have to break it out, so just wondering in terms of where we are from a sizing perspective and just some thoughts around the new administration and if you see that impacting your ability to grow in healthcare at all.

Sure, Manav. So we don’t have a definite time period for when we might break it out. I think what we’ve told you before is that it’s a meaningful portion of our revenue, and at some point we’ll be required to break it out and we will do that. Regarding the new administration, just given the dynamics, there’s really not an impact on us from any change in the Affordable Care Act or anything that--what we’re combating or what we’re helping with is just the confusion that exists in the market for consumers and providers, and we don’t see that getting any better or, frankly, any worse [indiscernible] given any of the things that the administration might do. Our pipeline is really strong. We still have a long way to go to fully penetrate the market, so it’s a business that’s not on the verge of tipping over into meaningfully penetrated, and with the two acquisitions we’ve made, we’ve really put ourselves in a nice position just kind of geographically as well as the different kinds of hospital systems that we see. It’s just a real strong grower, very clear line of sight going forward.

Your next question comes from the line of George Mihalos with Cowen. Your line is now open.

Great. Nice job, guys, nice results. Just wanted to ask, the outlook as it relates to margin expansion, the increase of 150 basis points, which is certainly a lot more than what we were thinking originally, can you maybe rank order for us by segment - you know, U.S. IS, international, and I guess to a lesser extent consumer - where we should really look for the bulk of the margin expansion to be, or at least kind of rank order the three segments, please.

Sure. I think first and foremost, let me start at the adjusted EBITDA margin. Since 2013, we’ve grown adjusted EBITDA margin by almost 300 BPs, and we expect this year based on the guidance we’ve provided you to add another 150 basis points. A significant improvement that we’ve experienced is a combination of very strong top line growth and focus on high impact productivity initiatives, which is driving obviously EBITDA margin but then too making its way down to operating income margin. I think as we look forward, you’ll see continued expansion across our businesses and across each business. I don’t know if there’s one that’s going to particularly outweigh the other because all of them this quarter, and for 2017 as we talked about, are showing nice top line growth while we continue to look at across each one of them ways to further scale and leverage our IT, our sourcing and our infrastructure. So I would assume you’re not going to see any massive step function change in margin growth in one particular business. It will be growth across the board, across each business. We’re going to continue to focus on growing margin, as we’ve said, and the long term objectives that we gave, and we’re on the road show and we continue to talk about, always has implied margin expansion in it.

Our next question comes from the line of Gary Bisbee with RBC. Your line is now open.

Hey guys, good morning, and I’ll add my congratulations on an incredibly strong year. I guess I just wanted to ask, innovation has been a huge change element in the business in the last few years. Can you give us a sense, when you think about your pipelines and when you think about the road map that you’ve followed thus far, where are we in that? And maybe just two sub-questions - are these new growth verticals more a penetration story or is there real innovation and broadening of the offerings there; and within the core financial services market, do you still have a pipeline of new opportunities to create growth streams from more sales of the existing data assets? I mean, you just had so much progress, the question is how much longer can it go? Thank you.

Yes, some good questions. That’s pretty much the name of the game - how do we keep innovating so that we can continue to drive growth? We’ve structured the organization in such a way that there are people who are specifically responsible consistently working those ideas by really intimately understanding their markets, which I think I’ve explained before, and that kind of controls the demand side - you know, what is it the market needs? Then on the supply side, we now have firmly in place our technology platforms and our analytics platforms so that we can deliver this stuff, because we can program, simply program much faster and act on the data much faster. The other part of the formula that’s really working now is the people who are building this platform called Spark, they’re now working on innovation that is actually driving incremental revenue specifically, rather than infrastructure, so we’ve also increased our capacity to deliver. Then more specifically to your question, things like CreditVision, and even CreditVision Link but specifically CreditVision, obviously they’re starting to really penetrate the market and they’re kind of in their golden period, so to speak. As we continue to take share, because we have--the version of CreditVision in the U.S. can be used on any credit type application, not just mortgage, so we’re seeing ourselves gain a lot of market share there. You’ve seen how it’s worked in Canada, and we’ve just--and I’ve told you, we have it in Hong Kong and now we’re introducing it into our newer markets, or our other markets like Colombia and India. CreditVision Link, which is an alternative data version of that, for example, is just getting its legs, and I think we’ve used baseball examples before so this guy is probably just starting to round…

Thank you, that’s helpful.

You’re welcome.

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Steinerman with JP Morgan. Your line is now open.

Hi. Al, I want to dive more into the 150 basis points of EBITDA expansion for 2017. I was wondering if 2017 might mark kind of a new juncture for where TransUnion has really kind of caught up and got ahead of growth investments, and so maybe from this point forward higher revenue growth will drive higher margins, or are there any one-time step up in margins in 2017 that you want to highlight, perhaps like the platform change to Shape that happened last year?

Yes, I would say the simple answer - no, there are no one-time benefits in 2017 that are propelling our margins to be at the levels which we believe are industry leading as we move forward. I would say what’s really happening is early in the transformation process and progress, like I talked about, in 2013 when we really launched on innovation and a new technology platform and really trying to scale our business, there was a significant amount of investments that we talked about had to be put into the business. What’s happened over that time period now are two things: one, those investments are generating returns which is driving margin expansion; and two, you’re still able to invest those types of dollars in your business for future innovation, but now you have it built into your cost and capital structure so you’re not taking an early wait-and-see return approach like you did in 2013 and ’14 when we really started to drive investment. So we feel very good about--well, I mean, just look at the quality of our earnings over the last several quarters. You’ve seen really nice revenue growth with really nice bottom line growth, and the drivers of that are obviously top line growth; but then a lot of the things Jim’s been talking about, such as our technology platform and scaling that out, what we see in ’17 is no different. While still being able to invest what we want to invest, you’re seeing those returns now make its way into our P&L as we move forward. So I believe in ’17 and beyond, the way we look out in the future, quality of earnings are going to be very, very good, and at this point in time we’re not anticipating any big one-time positives or negatives.

Okay, thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Tim McHugh with William Blair. Your line is now open.

Yes, thanks. You touched on capital allocation a little bit, but can you talk about the M&A environment? Is there anything--obviously you have flexibility given the improvements in the balance sheet to put in place the repurchase program, but how should we think about the potential for M&A going into 2017?

We’ll continue to follow the same path that we’ve told you we’re going to follow. As we look for acquisitions that either enable us to take our current capabilities into new verticals or countries, we specifically kind of like emerging markets or emerging countries because we see them trying to grow their middle class and create financial inclusion, and we’ll also look for companies like TLO, for example, that allow us to take new capabilities into our current markets. So you won’t see us get away too far from what we do well - we’ve kind of made that decision. We constantly are looking at new opportunities. We’ve truly created an engine here that you can apply our technology to many different kinds of data, something I’ve kind of gotten good at, I guess, over my career, so there’s nothing imminent but we continue to have opportunities to take really good looks at things, and I think because of our technology capabilities and the markets we play in, we probably I think have really good opportunities to create synergies, and really clear synergies when we do these things. All the acquisitions we’ve done so far have proven that it works, right, so you just go right in, you take out your synergies, you put in your technologies, and you’re driving top line growth. We’re taking all these innovations that we’ve done primarily in the U.S, but even in some of these other countries, and we’re moving them from country to country and even vertical to vertical as we do the new acquisitions. So it’ll still be and continue to be part of our strategy.

Our next question comes from the line of Toni Kaplan from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Hi, good morning. You mentioned you’re expecting mortgage to grow in 2017 given growth in CreditVision, and if not for that you might have 100 basis point headwind if not for the new products. Could you just give us a little bit more granularity on how much growth you are expecting for mortgage in ’17 and incorporated in the guidance, and also how much runway you see left for CreditVision? Thanks a lot.

Sure. I’ll take the mortgage question. As Jim said and as we went through, and I’ll answer your question directly, we spent a lot of time in the quarter looking and studying the mortgage market. We looked at approximately 165 million inquiries over the last three years to really triangulate and correlate on what we think obviously has happened, but what we think could happen. As we did that, we believe that the refi mortgage in 2017 could be down in the teens; however, new purchases could be up single digits, which means from a simple volume perspective, we believe volumes in the mortgage market will be down mid single digits. When you look at just volumes, and assume just constant pricing for a second, you would show the impact on our overall TransUnion revenues to be less than a percent of 2017 growth. When you add in CreditVision and our tier-based pricing models to those particular volumes, we get growth in our business; however, it’s lower than over the last couple of years. I think the important point for us and what has completely changed within our business model since 2007, ’08 and ’09, when I was here, is we’ve added, if you look at that time period, almost $900 million of revenue. The majority of that revenue has come from higher growth verticals, differentiated sources of revenue, international emerging markets, and new product growth. The point being is, and even over the last couple of years when people say mortgages were good, it has an immaterial impact versus what it used to have on our overall growth rate, given the diversification that we’ve participated in. So as we look into 2017, there will be growth in the mortgage business, it’ll just be a little bit less than what we had in previous years. That’s okay, because it’s the maturation of the overall mortgage market, but more importantly for us why it’s okay is because of the diversification that we’ve put in place now to become a bigger, stronger, more diversified business model, both from an operating standpoint but obviously from a revenue standpoint.

I guess I’ll take the second half, which was how much headroom we have in CreditVision. Like I said before, we have meaningful headroom in CreditVision. Why? Many, many customers still have not implemented it. It truly changes the way your models work because it’s such a powerful tool, and so it takes time to do that and so there’s still a lot of implementation that has to happen. For us, this is not only a mortgage product, it works in card, HELOC, auto, so there’s a lot of room to go there, and it also isn’t just at the point of underwriting. It also is a portfolio monitoring tool so that you can start understanding how your customers’ evolving and decide if you need to market them new products, or even in some cases decide if you need to see if they’re getting themselves in trouble. So given that kind of broad footprint and the footprint across the whole market, we believe there’s continued penetration. We’re very highly penetrated - obviously Fannie is using us, but in fintech because they didn’t have some of the same implementation constraints. That’s just in the U.S, and then internationally--you know, in Canada, just to remind you, we’ve used it as a primary tool to get significant share and to have well above market growth. In Hong Kong, where we’re the only player, it drove significantly more use of our solutions, and we’re just implementing it in India, in South Africa and Colombia this year. So that just gives you kind of a whole road map of how that’s going to continue to be a nice growth driver for us going forward.

Thanks a lot. Congrats on the quarter.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Shlomo Rosenbaum from Stifel. Your line is now open.

Hi, thank you very much for taking my questions. I’m going to kind of slip in two over here. I just wanted to ask, maybe Al, you can parse for us if there is a way to do it, how much you’re seeing underlying volumes just increase like-for-like credit report polls, either in batch or one-off type stuff, and how much is what you’d call innovation-driven growth in the quarter. Then just as a separate thing in terms of guidance, can you just talk about what level of free cash flow we should think of in ’17? 2016 was particularly strong, is there something we should that will not recur, or should we use that as kind of a base year? Thanks.

I would say growth is--I mean, the actual underlying volumes correlate to the comments Jim said about the market, particularly for our core business. It’s a steady volume-based growth in the environment, just like the macro environment has been. Even when you normalize for some of the things that are perceived within the mortgage market, I would say solid GDP plus a point market. I think as you look at the split of revenues for the quarter, the underlying business grew very nicely, but the majority of the growth, more than approximately 50%, came from new product growth, international emerging markets, and higher growth verticals, all of the things that we have been talking about over the last three or four years ago where we have been investing heavily, and those continue to grow and the runway of growth looks very, very good. So what’s happening is our core business is growing as you would expect it, and then the international markets, the higher growth verticals and new product growth are lifting our enterprise growth even higher. So that’s why when we talk about it and Jim talks about it, we feel very, very good about what we’re seeing and where it’s going, which is the reason for our 2017 solid guidance. From a free cash flow perspective, I don’t--I think 2017--I think 2016 was a good year. I don’t think that there was any significant one-timers in it, and I think 2017 will be equally good and maybe even a little bit more normalized, because if you remember in 2016, we had in our adjusted EBITDA number, which we adjusted out, the costs associated with the Spark implementation. Since we’ve completed that, those costs will no longer be a deduct, so I think as you look at 2017, free cash flow will be very good. I think free cash flow will continue to track right to our adjusted--you know, quality of numbers like around our adjusted EBITDA, and then obviously you have to back out things that aren’t in EBITDA, like interest cash expense and cash taxes, but should be very, very good. In other words, the quality of our free cash flow should match the quality of our earnings; and no, I don’t see any big negatives or positives going into 2017.

Great, thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of David Togut with Evercore. Your line is now open.

Good morning, this is Rayna Kumar for David Togut. Can you discuss the timing of your CreditKarma Canada deal and if you expect any revenue and earnings uplift to your consumer interactive business with the new contract?

Yes, so the timing--you know, it was signed at the end of last year, and so we’re in the middle of implementation. Frankly, that has a lot to do with CreditKarma’s timing, but it will definitely have a reasonably meaningful impact on the growth of our Canadian business.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Kevin McVeigh with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Great, thank you. Just following up on that, the Chase agreement, how does that sit in terms of impact on ’17, and is there anything potentially of that size as you look to kind of expand those opportunities?

So in what we call our indirect business in our consumer business, just to give you a little history, we’ve kind of been a trendsetter in the way that we started working with the Karma’s of the world very early on, and that taught us a whole lot and we signed some other pretty big customers. You will see the Chase impact in our overall consumer numbers, but I think--we believe that there is going to continue to be a trend, and we’re just seeing it in our pipeline, that we’ll continue to grow through closing these kinds of deals going forward, so there’s meaningful ones, there’s midsized ones, there’s small ones in the pipeline, so we believe that’s going to continue to bear fruit for us going forward. That’s just in the U.S., and I think what we talked about is that in these other countries that we’re in, that process is really just starting. Karma is just an example in Canada of us being able to close these kinds of deals in some of these other countries.

Got it, thank you very much.

Our last question comes from the line of Jeff Mueller with Baird. Your line is now open.

Yes, thank you. Jim, can you talk to how the Prama contracts are structured? I know that it’s still early days in terms of penetrating a number of customers that are using it, but how do you up-sell the relationship with existing customers? And then, should we also think of Prama leading to new product development in conjunction with your customers? Then Al, can you just confirm if ASU2016-09 benefit is not accounted for in your tax rate guidance? Thank you.

Let me take the first question. The ASU is not in our guidance. We’ll be transparent on the quarters as we move forward, but it is not in our guidance.

Thank you.

With regard to the Prama model, obviously it’s different depending on sizes are different, customers. The footprint we have, generally speaking, and this is a very complicated question because each customer group is different, what we intend to do with each customer is try to get as big a footprint as possible by adding as much value as possible, so that often means different approaches. So that can be on a per-seat basis, it could be on a usage basis, and so it’s hard for me to answer specifically what we do; but there is definitely incremental revenue that comes from the value we’re adding by allowing them to basically have real-time access to such a massive quantity of data. But if you were to sit and listen and watch the reaction as we present, they instantly understand the value and they want to get at this stuff, and that gets to the next part of your question. It definitely leads to further innovation or even more customization. Sometimes they will even come on our site - we have a whole lab set up so that they can give us three or four problems they may want to solve, and rather than solving it on their own, they want us to help and kind of pull all-nighters for them, show them the results in the morning that they can inject right into their own models. So there’s many different ways to go about this. In addition to the revenue part of this, it also is building our reputation as a thought leader and an innovator, which frankly leads to drag revenue and why they may shift other kind of more traditional parts of their business to us as well, so that helps us all the way around.

Thank you.

Great. That brings us to the conclusion of the call. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Have a wonderful Valentine’s Day.

This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.