Chris Cartwright
Analyst · Barclays. Go ahead
Thanks, Aaron. And I want to welcome all of you to our call and extend our most sincere hope that you and your loved ones are healthy and safe. At TransUnion, we continue to prioritize the health and safety of our associates, our customers and the wider communities in which we operate. To that end globally, we continue to have almost every one of our 8,000 employees working from home. There is no need for us to rush back into our offices as our associates have demonstrated the flexibility to work remotely and run our business with virtually no interruption. We remain deeply appreciative of the selfless and tireless work of healthcare professionals, first responders and other essential workers. We recognize them for how much they do to keep so many of us safe. I also want to take a moment to talk about some other heroes. During the quarter, in the wake of the senseless and brutal death of George Floyd, we witnessed a remarkable and swift movement to finally make good on the American promise of equality and justice for all. The millions of Americans who peacefully and thoughtfully took a stand for racial justice, are heroes too. At TransUnion, we have a culture that embraces diversity and fosters inclusion, with more than a dozen affinity groups for employees ranging from African Diaspora for our black associates to a veteran's alliance group to a group for our LGBTQ population and many more. However, we can and we will do more. As a major employer, there are many ways that TransUnion and I connect for change. My first priority will be to ensure our company is a place where all colleagues have equal access to professional growth and career opportunities and can come to work every day as their authentic selves. And listening to many of our colleagues, I know we have more work to do to make that happen. To achieve this goal, we must cement a culture of mutual support and open communication, which we started in earnest with many of our black associates. Our focus on inclusion must exist on an ongoing basis. I believe that the whole is strengthened when we understand and embrace diversity. And I believe we can do more to make this happen. We will not tolerate racism. It has no place at TransUnion. We will have a more diverse company through how we hire, promote and retain our black colleagues and other underrepresented groups. We will improve transparency around promotions and pay. We will increase our training starting with our managers and each of us will undertake unconscious bias training this year. We will listen and learn from each other and survey our associates regularly to measure our progress. I'm grateful to so many of our black associates for having the courage and candor to have this difficult conversation with me and my executive team and help shape the next very important steps with TransUnion. I thank you. There is no easy transition from here. So I'll just move on to the agenda for this morning's call. First, I will give you a short overview of how the second quarter unfolded. Second, I'll discuss the current volume trends across our primary verticals and markets and how we have supported our customers and consumers during this crisis. You will hear a consistent story of rapidly adapting our go-to-market approach our product offerings and solutions to the current market conditions. Then, I will discuss our ongoing investments to position TransUnion for a continuation of our best-in-class growth. I'll walk you through the early progress we've made with global solutions and global operations. I will also provide you with an update on the status of our accelerated technology initiative, Project Rise. Finally, I'll then turn over the time to Todd to discuss our detailed second quarter results, balance sheet strength and several financial scenarios for the third quarter based on the trends I will describe. Todd will reiterate this, when he talks about the scenarios, but we continue to monitor the socio-economic situation across the U.S. and around the world. We recognize the fragility of the reopenings and the significant risk of returning to more stringent controls that could, again, have a meaningful negative impact on our business. As you seen in our earnings release this morning, TransUnion delivered adjusted revenue, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS solidly in our upside case scenario. When we spoke to you in April, we were in the early stages of the pandemic and we're dealing with high levels of uncertainty. It appears that April, May have been the trough and we've seen generally positive trends since then. Over the course of the second quarter, our business benefited as our associates our customers and consumers' transition into a work from home and physically distanced reality. This clearly took some time and created considerable disruption. As we were all settling in government stimulus began to reach consumers who in turn reengaged in the economy, adding momentum to the recovery. And finally, during this time, our customers developed a response stabilized their businesses and mobilized to manage risk. We participated in this range of actions, supporting them with insights and thought leadership, redesigned new products, as well as customized campaigns to strengthen our long-term relationships. We saw similar behavior across the majority of our markets and taken together led to very good results on a relative basis. Let's take a look at the specifics behind the quarter starting with U.S. markets. As we did last quarter, I want to review the overall online transaction volumes year-to-date for U.S. financial services, our largest market vertical. As you can see, performance bottomed out in April and has shown a progressive recovery through May, June and into July. Notably, the combination of our sales effectiveness programs, specific market actions that I'll discuss shortly and the efficiency created by travelling less lead to an increased sales pipeline and improved win rate in financial services as well as in our other verticals. Now I will spend some time on the key lending markets that comprise the vertical. Mortgage refinancing activity was very strong throughout the second quarter on the strength of historically low interest rates. At the same time, we saw the home purchase market recover from a sharp decline in the first quarter to modest growth in the second quarter, as pent-up demand from March and April may have flowed into the market. The strength in mortgage certainly helped our clients. But we remain cautious about how long this cycle and it is clearly cyclical growth will persist. The pool of potential refinancing candidates will eventually run its course, though it may be extended as consumers come off forbearance and we maintain a conservative stance about the sustainability of the new home purchase market. Similar to new mortgage activity, auto financing suffered sharp declines in April due to consumers' lockdown and dealer closures. As we moved into May, the market showed great resiliency and we saw the start of a rebound fueled by pent-up demand from April, stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and attractive incentives from auto manufacturers. We also saw an elevated level of used car sales and financings, which tend to entail more credit polls than with a new car purchase. As customers returned to the market, new car inventory had shrunk with factory shutdowns and used car inventory was elevated by off-lease vehicles and the liquidation of rental car fleets. We continue to have success providing relevant solutions including enhanced pre-screen, account management and fraud mitigation solutions, as more transactions have moved online. For watching the market carefully as manufacturers resumed production and government stimulus potentially at bay. Credit Card lending continues to be bifurcated between issuers who are benefiting from the pronounced transition to online commerce offset by those in the travel and terrestrial spaces that have been severely impacted. The latter group will likely experience this sort of pressure until business and leisure travel resume. At the same time, marketing campaigns, particularly using traditional mail have slowed considerably. We've seen some increase in activity around marketing recently, but it remains well below pre-COVID-19 levels. Finally, consumer lending has started to rebound during the quarter as some lenders have cautiously shifted to customer acquisition, while others remain on the sidelines working with new models and technology to prepare for a fuller consumer recovery. In the FinTech space, we continue to extend our leadership position in the emerging point-of-sale FinTech market. The POS lenders have seen a boom in activity as online retail patterns continue to shift in their direction. We also began to see additional funding in the FinTech space and believe there's considerable capital on the sidelines that will likely be deployed if the economy and consumer health continue to improve. Across our lending businesses during the quarter, we provided existing thought leadership, dozens of advisory board meetings. We also created a crisis focused solutions bundle for account management and develop relevant data to measure the impact of the crisis on consumers' credit files. As online transactions have risen considerably, so to have incidents of online fraud. To address this, we produced multiple solution bundles to address a range of fraud risk ranging from online transactions to applications, to fraudulent requests for government subsidies. Finally, we developed a suite of COVID specific attributes called CreditVision Acute Relief that includes a non-adverse actionable set of 88 attributes that identify credit relationships for consumers currently in relief status. Attributes allow lenders and insurers to understand how consumers and their accounts have been affected, creating a more complete financial picture. Lenders can utilize this information to better support impacted consumers, ensuring each person is reliably and safely represented in the marketplace, allowing businesses to transact with confidence and help support their customers. Our ability to leverage CreditVision with this expanded set of attributes has helped lenders to better tailor their risk management efforts and improve their direct relationships with struggling consumers. Our number of customers, including some very large lenders, this exposure to CreditVision has led to a significant increase in their interest in using the product more broadly in the future. As I said in my opening comments, while we have seen the early signs of recovery in the lending markets, we remain responsibly cautious about the potential for a regression if reopening stall or reverse themselves, creating the sorts of headwinds we experienced in March and April. However, regardless of the situation, we have positioned ourselves to partner with and support our customers through the crisis. We've taken a similar tact in our healthcare vertical, which helps healthcare providers navigate the revenue cycle and help improve the patient financial experience and maximize reimbursements for uncompensated care. The front-end of the cycle represents about one-third of the revenue of the vertical and includes insurance eligibility checks, identity verification and charity determination and patient payment estimation. As expected the front-end of the business experienced sharp volume declines in the second quarter has patients and providers delayed or canceled elective and preventative care. Over the course of the quarter, we saw volume softness slowly abate as patients gain comfort with returning to medical facilities. Our business also weathered the situation better than the significant volume declines would suggest. As our payment estimation solution is priced on a standard model and we have volume floors and pricing minimums in our other solution lines. The other two thirds of the vertical is the back-end of the revenue cycle, where we help providers identify opportunities to recover lost reimbursement through various revenue recovery products and services. The financial situation for healthcare providers frankly, has been quite dire as highly profitable ER visits and preventative and elective care have diminished significantly. We've seen furloughs, layoffs and even some hospital closures. In fact, the American Hospital Association currently projects $320 billion in losses for hospitals in 2020. As our back-end products health providers increased their revenue, reduce uncompensated care and avoid bad debt write-offs. We provide a critical source of cash flow and in some cases provide essential products and services to assist providers in maintaining financial solvency. As we signal last quarter, we face a potential risk as the reduced front-end volumes may translate to fewer recovery opportunities to work on the back-end. If the current situation holds or worsens, we may see some sort of impact in the back half of the year. In any scenario over the long-term, our solutions continued to represent a valuable and essential part of the revenue cycle, helping providers reduce risk and increase their cash flow. Our insurance vertical serves property and casualty life and commercial insurers with marketing, underwriting solutions and policy management, as well as analytics and investigative tools for claims. As we had expected, insurance has been a less severe impact than many other parts of our business. After an initial slowdown, insurers focused on an improved digital experience for consumers, recognizing an increased need for fraud mitigation tools and began to explore solutions to continue to realize efficiencies in the business. For TransUnion, those three initiatives contribute to our insurance vertical declining only a few percentage points in the quarter. Clearly a better shopping and application experience helps to drive our volumes as insurers pull our data in the underwriting process. At the same time, to combat fraud, we had success selling our risk verification product which helps the insurer confirm important information like garaging address, household drivers and other critical underwriting questions. Customers also recognize the potential cost benefits of implementing our driver risk solution to pre-screen whether the carrier should pull an often expensive motor vehicle report. Only about one-third of applicants have ratable violations on their record, meaning the insurer can significantly improve efficiency through the utilization of our driver risk solution. We stimulated engagement through our advisory boards where we shared valuable insight about the insurance industry while uniquely marrying them with lending trends that provide another window into consumer behavior. Our customers remain engaged on new initiatives and we saw strong contract signings during the quarter across a spectrum of insurers and insured tech players. As we continue to see consumers reengaging and our customers evolving their approach to the market, we expect our insurance vertical to continue to post solid results relative to many other verticals. Now to round out my discussion of the U.S. market segment, I want to touch on a few other verticals starting with public sector, which provides a variety of data driven solutions for federal, state and local governments. At this point, government agencies largely continue to operate unabated in support of their constituents. In the quarter, public sector delivered very strong double-digit growth actually running ahead of our original plan for 2020. Our team has proactively addressed potential opportunities with both federal and state agencies, primarily around fraud mitigation, insider threat monitoring, and contact tracing. While many of our solutions [indiscernible] our customers needs, we have also rapidly innovated to tune our products. For instance, working with our solutions team, we rapidly build a new report within our TLO product to support contact tracing. The report provides and validates contact information. So that call center is charged with reaching at risk individuals can act as efficiently and effectively as possible. We've built a fast growing diversified public sector vertical and expect to continue with strong performance through the COVID-19 crisis and thereafter. While we certainly see collections as counter cyclical overtime, we don't expect to see any significant uptick until early 2021 as forbearance programs and state imposed moratoriums on collections have delayed activity. Government subsidies have helped consumer pay off debts or stay current leading to lower delinquencies and default that we would likely see otherwise. To address the pressure many of our customers face in the near term we went to the market with a campaign that offered short-term relief in exchange for extending our contracts. We also executed a successful campaign for customers to add new products with a free introductory period to help them during this challenging time and to enhance our status as a long-term partner. The campaigns have been well received, resulting in incremental revenue over time. Within our tenant and employment vertical, tenant screening took a sharp hit initially, but has recovered relatively quickly as the rental market has shown some resilience during the crisis. During the quarter, we offered Resident ID, our fraud mitigation tool for free to customers and many have now converted to the paid version. And in May, we launched credit property review, which leverages the COVID acute relief attributes I discussed earlier to provide insights into the credit health of residents and future bad debt risk. We've seen strong initial results from this new offering. Now weak trends in employment screening persisted through the quarter as unemployment skyrocketed and hiring slowed to a near halt. As the economy slowly reopened, we expect some modest recovery in this part of the business. Small businesses and those previously employed by them are among the groups facing the greatest financial hardship as a result of the pandemic. During the quarter, we offered shareable for hires for free to small businesses, so that they can get back up and running quickly and help people get back to work faster. By implementing TransUnion's web based shareable for hires, small businesses can safely and securely conduct background checks on prospective employees within minutes instead of days. As a result of this offer, shareable for hires new account acquisition has nearly tripled since the launch resulting in a 13% increase in our total customer base. And finally, in Telco, we experienced a significant decline early in the quarter that has shifted to a faster than expected recovery due to the pace of reopenings combined with our customers quick transition to digital channels. Turning to consumer interactive, we delivered top and bottom-line growth in this segment as consumers and customers continue to recognize the value of credit and identity protection, credit monitoring and related financial education tools, like those that we offer both directly and indirectly through partners. We clearly benefit from having a diverse range of customers, including individual consumers that subscribe to our direct products, financial institutions and lead aggregators. In the quarter, we saw good performance in our direct channel behind continued successful marketing to consumers focused their credit health. On the other hand, some of our indirect partners have curtailed their marketing programs, resulting in a decline in subscribers, which is the basis of our revenue model. If these trends persist, we would expect a larger headwind in the back half of this year. At the same time, though, we continue to have meaningful conversations about long-term opportunities with a number of potential indirect partners that have expressed interest in building more robust consumer facing offerings, like financial education and modeling tools for their customers who may be facing difficult personal financial situations. And now wrapping up with our international market, this slide illustrates the sharp decline in revenue that occurred in March and the subsequent recovery we've seen across our regions. The point of this chart is less about the exact numbers and more so about the shape of the curve to help you appreciate the trends that we're seeing at this time. Let's now spend a few minutes on each region, or you will see the impact of our focus on highly relevant solutions to help our customers manage through the current situation. These solutions include CreditVision, CreditView, market leading portfolio management insights and fraud solutions. In the U.K., much like the U.S., the government has provided significant stimulus to help consumers manage through the crisis. For almost one-third of the workforce has been furloughed and is receiving government subsidies. Lending markets were weak particularly as reopenings only recently begun. We've also seen a more significant downturn in subprime and payday lending markets, where we have a particularly strong position. During the quarter, we launched TrueVision Transitional Risk Index to help lenders flag consumers currently receiving government subsidies. So they can proactively address those consumers whenever government relief ends. We've seen strong interest from many of our top 30 customers. The weakness in lending markets was partially offset by continued strength in fraud mitigation solutions, as well as some recently won COVID relief and mitigation business with the U.K. Government. Now, much like the U.K., Canadian lending markets have generally been weak, though significant government stimulus of about 14% of the country's GDP and coordination among the major banks for consumer deferral programs has moderated some of the impacts for the time being. Our business held up well falling less than 2% in the quarter and improving each month throughout the quarter that relatively good performance reflects two of our strengths. First, our team reacted quickly by providing valuable thought leadership, as well as new offerings like risk vulnerability score, COVID benchmarking for competitive analysis, and an acute relief package, which will launch in August. The second is the successful adjacency strategy that we have executed in recent years. Key adjacencies in Canada include insurance, public sector, FinTech, direct-to-consumer, including the CreditView platform and breach mitigation services. During the quarter, these areas outperformed our core financial services business. In India, we experienced dramatically different trends over the course of the quarter. In April, the government implemented an extremely severe lockdown, which depressed volumes considerably. May saw hints of improvement with the reopens in some areas outside of the major financial centers and increased government stimulus. In June, the country largely reopened and consumers began to reengage in the economy. Through the quarter and regardless of the changing circumstances, we remained highly focused on serving our customers engaging with many for as long as two hours each day for a month, helping them understand the evolving situation and how they can best navigate it. At the same time, we tuned some of our solutions to better serve these customers. For instance, we launched an improved small business score and improved our coverage of the space from 60% to 100%. We also supported the Indian government's effort to provide stimulus to small businesses by sizing the market and helping them identify who should be receiving the support. And we successfully launched a simplified version of our scores and algorithms using CreditVision for FinTech lenders, who in India tend to provide small ticket very short duration loans. And like many of our businesses portfolio reviews provided significant value to our customers. In LatAm, we serve a variety of markets and in general has seen very limited recovery as most governments have provided little stimulus and there has been a lack of coordination between lenders and governments. The exception at the moment is in Colombia, where the recovery appears to be accelerating ahead of most other countries fueled by a higher level of stimulus. We also continue to see fits and starts of recovery in South Africa, where we have a diverse portfolio. We have actively worked with our customers to accelerate their transition to more digital channels packaged with valuable fraud mitigation solutions. And in Hong Kong, where we saw the impact of COVID-19, the earliest, the country is largely returned to fairly normal activity, with schools and businesses almost uniformly open. However, the continuing protests against Chinese imposed restrictions on certain civil liberties have disrupted a normal reset of the economy. Of note, during the quarter, we relaunched our direct-to-consumer offering and expect that to contribute to our financial growth going forward, once again. Rounding out APAC, the Philippines continues to face significant headwinds. With an initial very aggressive lockdown that was partially lifted and then restored when COVID-19 cases surged. We continued to expect a very long and slow recovery in the Philippines. Despite some of the idiosyncratic challenges in our various international markets, TransUnion has enviable long-term geographic positions. We remain confident in the long-term growth prospects in all of our markets. I just described how our businesses have adapted to the radical changes our customers and our consumers have faced in the world. I'm pleased with the creativity, urgency and determination that our team has demonstrated to ensure the best possible performance for our business while also strengthening customer relationships. And I'm also pleased that the organization has maintained its commitment to our long-term growth rate at the same time. I want to highlight the direction and early successes of our newly formed solutions and operations organizations as well as Project Rise, our next major technology investment. Let's start with solutions. Our newly formed Global Solutions organization will improve our ability to aggressively and strategically develop and diffuse innovation across the more than 30 geographies in which we compete. We realized consistent success with our vertical and regional strategies with somewhat inconsistent global application of our product suite. CreditVision and CreditView have both been globalized in an efficient and highly successful manner. However, we have an opportunity to expand our approach more fully. Our vertical strategy hinges on a highly focused team of associates with deep experience in a given area like insurance or media or the public sector and our regional strategy benefits from leaders with deep in market knowledge and expertise. We've extrapolated that approach to build a series of solution focused teams populated with talented associates with deep product and market knowledge. In the short time, since we put this organization in place, we've seen a number of successes. In fraud, we had four high quality offerings that overlap in some ways and could complement each other in others. To standardize and globalize our position, we brought in Shai Cohen, a seasoned veteran from the Fraud and Cybersecurity industry, having worked at RSA, EMC, Intel. We've already pulled together three of the solutions and are actively developing our go-forward strategy with a unified global vision and approach. In other cases, this team has accelerated the launch of existing products, including the COVID acute relief attributes that I discussed earlier. I believe that we have just scratched the surface into more fully leveraging our solutions and capabilities on a global scale, which will help sustain our best-in-class top-line growth over the long-term. Another avenue to help ensure our long-term growth trajectory is our investment in global operations which allows us to expand our core capabilities through centralization, process optimization and modernization, leading to a better customer experience as well as cost savings that can be reinvested to fund growth projects. Our team has identified three focus areas where they can have the greatest impact. The first is global procurement. Historically, most of our centralized procurement has resided within our global technology organization. We intend to leverage and build on that discipline against all spend while creating consistent global standards. We started by renegotiating our 20 largest contracts and are implementing a full lifecycle procure to pay system from [indiscernible] allowing complete spend visibility globally. We will roll this tool out in August in the U.S. and Canada and follow with our remaining regions over time. Second, we also have an opportunity to replicate the success of our Global Capability Center in Chennai, India. We opened it two years ago with about 600 associates focused on global technology and will likely have more than 1000 there in the near future. Establishing this center has helped produce our technology costs and improved our technology capabilities. In fact, the great place to work organization in India recently named the TransUnion Capability Center in Chennai as the number 40 best company to work for out of the field of more than 1000 other companies. We intend to replicate our success in Chennai in other strategic locations around the world to meet the growing needs of our customers, while refining our delivery and support capabilities in eliminating concentration risk. Finally, we have brought our focus to business process optimization, where we have significant opportunities to further enhance the customer experience. Recently, we implemented a contract Lifecycle Management System to convert a very manual process to automate it and vastly improve that critical interaction with customers and suppliers. We've sped up the contract signing time by over 60% with about one-third of all contracts being executed in a single day. We also are actively transitioning to an upgraded CRM to provide more sophisticated and effective workflow management, consistent and transparent customer information and standardized processes. We will utilize an upgraded version of Salesforce that will form the backbone of these efforts. In the future, we will also address other areas, like the time for data loading, smart scoring for batch delivery and dispute acceleration in consumer operations. Over time, we are confident that our focus on operations will yield significant efficiency and cost benefits that can either be reinvested or returned to shareholders, while also furthering our market leadership through improved customer engagement. The final investment focus I want to discuss is Project Rise. Our accelerated technology initiative to ensure that across TransUnion and by design or even more effective, efficient, secure, reliable and performance and we will do this through streamlined processes, automation and more rapid adoption of a hybrid public private cloud architecture globally. We spoke extensively about these plans on our February earnings call and I would refer you back to that commentary for additional details. Project Rise began in earnest early this year, with a clear plan and an experienced leadership team in place. In early March, like so much else in the world, we experienced some delays as we transitioned our organization to a work from home model and face a more challenging environment for hiring, particularly if there were immigration requirements for a candidate, however, just as our business and customers quickly found their footing during the lockdowns, so did the Project Rise team. Already this year, the team has identified a series of critical global applications that will be redeployed in the cloud in early 2021 and others will quickly fall behind them. At the same time, we continue to progress toward our goal of making our entire organization cloud ready, not just our technology team to that end we have embarked on a company-wide education initiative to ensure that we maximize the power of these investments. This also allows us to build our workforce of the future and avoid being reliant on outside firms over the long-term. Just as we did with Project Spark, we will retain a strong internal talent base, which enables consistent and easily managed evolution of our tech stack in the future. At this time, we remain confident in both our timeline and the benefits of these investments. And as I wrap up my review of the business, I want to leave you with a clear message. TransUnion has demonstrated creativity and resilience during the crisis. And we will continue to do so. We also remained deeply committed to delivering outstanding long-term revenue growth and an attractive growing margin. And we have a broad range of opportunities that give us conviction in that outcome. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to our CFO, Todd.