Good morning, and welcome to the TransUnion 2024 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions]. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions]. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Greg Bardi, 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 Cello, 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 8-K that we filed this morning. Our earnings release and 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 the corresponding reconciliation 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 and the comments made during this conference call and in our most recent Form 10-K, Forms 10-Q, and other reports and filings with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. With that, let me turn it over to Chris.

Thanks, Greg. Let me add my welcome and share our agenda for the call this morning. First, I'll provide the financial highlights of our fourth quarter 2024 results and recap our progress against our strategic initiatives throughout the year. Second, I'll discuss how we're building upon that momentum with our 2025 strategic priorities. Finally, Todd, will detail our fourth quarter results, 2025 guidance, and refresh capital allocation priorities. In the fourth quarter, TransUnion exceeded guidance on revenue and adjusted EBITDA for a fifth consecutive quarter. Revenue grew 9% on an organic constant currency basis above our 6% to 8% guidance. Excluding mortgage, our growth of 4% also exceeded expectations. Our U.S. market segments grew 8% in the quarter. Within that, Financial Services grew 21%. Mortgage was up 80% but was slightly below expectations as volumes moderated as interest rates rose. Non-mortgage Financial Services accelerated to 7%. Credit volumes were broadly consistent with the prior quarter, supported by overall healthy U.S. household finances. Unemployment remains low and real wages grew, although lower income consumers continue to face affordability pressures. Consumer delinquencies decreased in personal lending, remain stable in credit card and auto, and are well below historical trends in mortgage. While the Fed announced 100 basis points of interest rate reductions in September through December, they signaled a slowing pace of easing going forward. Emerging Verticals grew 4% led by double-digit growth in insurance. Consumer Interactive declined 11% as expected as we lapped a large breach win in the prior quarter and International grew 12% on a constant currency basis. India grew 18%. Asia-Pacific and Latin America also grew double-digits and Canada and Africa were up high-single-digits. During the quarter, we prepaid $45 million in debt for a total of $150 million in 2024. We also successfully refinanced over $2.3 billion…

Thanks, Chris, and let me add my welcome to everyone. As Chris mentioned, in the fourth quarter, we exceeded our guidance for revenue and adjusted EBITDA, driven by outperformance in non-mortgage financial services and international. Fourth quarter consolidated revenue increased 9% on a reported and organic constant currency basis. There was no impact from acquisitions and an immaterial impact from foreign currency. Our business grew 4% on an organic constant currency basis, excluding mortgage from both the fourth quarter of 2023 and 2024. Comparison against high breach activity in the prior year quarter was a 1% revenue headwind. Adjusted EBITDA increased 16% on a reported and constant currency basis. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 36.5%, up 230 basis points and above the high end of our expectations. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was $0.97, an increase of 21%. Our adjusted tax rate for the quarter was 25.1%, slightly higher than expected due to the mix of foreign earnings. Finally, in the fourth quarter, we took $34 million of one-time charges related to our transformation program, $8 million for operating model optimization and $26 million for technology transformation. We incurred $179 million of one-time transformation expenses in 2024. Looking at segment financial performance for the fourth quarter, U.S. markets revenue, which includes Consumer Interactive was up 8% compared to the year ago quarter. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 39.4% or up 300 basis points, driven by revenue growth and transformation cost savings. Financial Services revenue grew 21%. Excluding mortgage, Financial Services revenue was up 7%. Trends remained consistent with year-over-year growth improving sequentially as we lapped the slowdown in activity from late 2023. We continue to outperform modest volume growth, driven by the successful cross-sell of our innovative solutions. Our credit card and banking business was up 6% against tempered online volumes.…

Thanks, Todd. To wrap up, we finished the year strong, exceeding fourth quarter guidance for revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We expect to deliver 4.5% to 6% organic constant currency revenue growth in 2025, assuming a muted but stable market backdrop, with material future revenue and margin upside when U.S. credit market conditions improve, and we're executing well against our business transformation to create a world-class operating model to modernize our technology capabilities and accelerate innovation. And with that, I turn it back over 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.

[Operator Instructions]. And the first question will come from Jeff Meuler with Baird. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you. Good morning. So I hear you on fifth consecutive quarter above consensus and you're saying prudent conservative guidance methodology and the numbers appear conservative. But I'm trying to reconcile that with the high end of the guidance range, assuming similar conditions in 2024. I guess are you viewing stable markets as a prudent or conservative assumption given that you're showing the markets are cyclically depressed and leading indicators are looking better? Or just any help reconciling those thoughts? Thank you.

Yes. Sure. Good morning, Jeff, let me start off. What we're trying to convey here in the guide is that the business conditions that we experienced in the fourth quarter and in roughly the first six weeks of the year are fairly consistent. We appreciate the stability that we experienced over the course of 2024 and in Q4 and year-to-date. But it's important to point out that those market conditions, while stable, are still muted relative to longer-term origination patterns. So in this first call of the year, where we're establishing the guidance framework for 2025, we want to be prudently conservative in establishing the guardrails. We're not assuming any substantial improvement in market conditions over the course of the year. We're not assuming lowering of interest rates or anything like that. We're just saying the macro conditions, which are pretty good, but not great, will continue to be so, and we'll continue to increase our bookings, convert that to revenue, retain our customers benefit from our improved innovation across the range of products and post solid growth over the course of the year. Now if you look back just a year when we guided at the beginning of 2024, we had a very similar view of market conditions. We guided 3% to 5%. At that point in time, we said it was prudent and it was conservative, and it wasn't assuming any macro upside over the course of the year. And we were fortunate we were able to materially outperform those numbers. So hopefully, that gives you some context to how to think about the guide for 2025. Todd, is there anything I -- no, Todd's good. Okay.

Okay. Thanks, Chris.

Our next question will come from Andrew Steinerman with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, I wanted to ask about the CI revenues for 2025, looking up low-single-digits, excluding the breach revenues from 2024. How do you think indirect and direct will each fare in 2025? And might the new branded freemium offer affect TRU's revenues from other indirect partners.

Yes. I mean, let's step back just for a second, Andrew, from the specific growth rates of those two components of the business. And just recognize that today's announcement is a big step forward in TransUnion's innovation and also kind of rehabilitating the consumer business. For some time, we've said that we needed to have a broader range of products to fully monetize the consumer traffic that we were naturally generating from our brand and also our advertising efforts. Of course, we were good about credit education, credit score access and single and tri-bureau monitoring, but we needed identity protection and breach remediation. We got it with Sontiq, and we've grown that business dramatically. We also needed a broad offers capability to support a freemium product. And we needed to redesign our front-end user interface to integrate those three key service areas into something that was appealing and accessible to consumers. In this partnership with Sesame, and again, Sesame has been a strategic partner of ours for some time now. We get a great user interface. We get a great app. We get a mature offers engine. And again, as we mentioned in our commentary with the acquisition of Monevo, which we feel is a world-class offers engine. We've got a path to integrating that product into the Revised GUI. So we have accomplished all of the strategic improvements in the product line that we set out to do. That should translate into better growth in our direct-to-consumer business, but also better growth in our indirect business over time because we're now bringing multiple products with a refined user interface in API to our indirect customers. So it's a strategic reset in the business, and I think it's a real positive.

Okay.

And our next question will come from Toni Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much. I want to ask about India. I know that your guidance does typically try to be conservative. 10% just does seem like a really big slowdown, but I know that there's a lot that's going on in that market. I guess, how much visibility do you have into sort of the growth there? And what could drive upside or downside to the 10%? Thanks.

Yes. Let me start at a high level here because we've been talking about the slowdown in the Indian market, as orchestrated by the RBI for about four quarters now. And there have been a number of policy as well as leadership changes within the RBI that are important to understand. The previous governor of the RBI whose term ended late last year after five years has been replaced by a different governor. There has also been a shift in the stated policy toward the lending markets by the RBI, and you can read the recent announcement from the RBI about this. But in short, last year, the previous administration was purposely trying to decelerate lending volumes. They were concerned by some of the practices they saw in the market and they asked certain lenders to pause their lending operations, right? And they also were trying to get banks the loan-to-deposit ratios to improve. They felt like they'd become a little bit stretched. As a consequence of that, GDP in India slowed. And so the RBI has now stated a bit of a policy modification where they're going to emphasize, of course, safety and soundness as the prior leadership did, but also the efficiency of the economy, right? So they're signaling that they are rebalancing toward growth and driving India GDP growth overall. And to support that, they recently cut rates by 25 bps, and they've announced that they have achieved their goals on loan deposit ratios and those few lenders that have been sidelined now have permission to begin origination. So we think that's a sea change in policy. That said, the conflict in the policies has led to some bumpiness in the performance of the consumer lending side of our India business, which again is about 60%. So it's been slowing down over 2024 quarter-over-quarter against very high comps, I might add, and we would expect in 2025 quarter-over-quarter reacceleration as the shift in policy permeates through the market.

Thank you.

Our next question will come from Faiza Alwy with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Yes. Hi, thank you. I wanted to ask about mortgage. So a couple related questions. So the down 10% inquiry decline in the first quarter and then modest declines for the year. I'm assuming that, that is related to what you're seeing with soft pulls or prequal. So maybe give us some perspective there and whether you think we're done with the shift towards these one bureau soft pulls. And any perspective on pricing that you're taking broadly in mortgage?

Okay. Great. Good morning, Faiza. Thanks for the question. I'll take this one for you. So as far as what we're seeing and then how we're guiding mortgage, as you said, first quarter, we're saying down 10% and then down modestly for full year 2025. Consistent with Chris -- how Chris has talked about the guide for the full year, we are assuming consistent trends with the fourth quarter, and what we've been able to see in the first quarter of 2025 to-date. So what that means is we don't have any assumption of a benefit from interest rate reductions in our numbers. If you're looking to compare our volume number to other numbers that you see from other players in the market space, it is important to remember that we calculate our inquiries differently in that we do include prequalification volumes into that. So as far as what we see is that we're taking a consistent approach as it pertains to pricing as well. We do have a material increase in mortgage from a third-party score provider, that we're taking the same approach that we did last year on the pass through of that. And it also does assume normal course type of pricing on our credit file, which is exclusive of the score, which we also took some opportunistic pricing actions on as well. And specifically to the point on prequalification, what we're seeing today is that the majority of the mortgage revenue is still tri-bureau. But however, we have in the prequal space, seen some shift from three to one to maybe two poles for a prequalification throughout 2024. We've contemplated further shifts within our 2025 guide, where we have visibility. But I think what's most important and instructive is our sales team continues to win our fair share in the prequalification market.

Yes. And I would just add that it's important that investors understand that it's unlikely the market at prequalification is going to go from pulling three credit reports to one credit report because savings, while important is also -- has to be balanced with revenue generation. So what I mean by that is, if you're a mortgage provider in a consumer shows up at your door, you've got a revenue opportunity if that consumer qualifies. Now if you pull one bureau, the consumer may not qualify. But bureaus have different data and different scores. If you pull more than one to odd of qualifying that consumer and thus recognizing revenue improve. And so you may see some efficiency here in terms of a reduction in the number of reports pulled, it's not going to be a race to one.

Great. Thank you.

The next question will come from Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I just wanted to touch on Slide 8, where you talked about the below trend levels. Broadly, I mean, are you able to quantify like if those kind of return to trend, what -- how that might impact your business? And just as a quick follow-up. I mean it looks like cards and key loans might be above trend if you're thinking of it as pre-COVID trends. So just curious how you think about that one.

Well, Manav, I can't offer you an on-the-fly estimate of value to be captured when we return to normal trend lines. But as you know, volumes have been depressed for a couple of years now, plus because of inflation, because of the aggressive rate hikes by the Fed. Now that is normalized and eased we're in a more stable condition, which is allowing us to post growth. That said, this administration has said that they're about reducing regulations, to enable further growth. They want to adopt various fiscal policies and others to accelerate growth and, over time, manage down interest rates. If successful, you would expect that consumers and banks themselves will continue to strengthen, and we can expect higher lending activity across these various categories. So I guess, in sum, I would say the opportunity for volume rebounds, it's not simply mortgage refinancing which may or may not happen to the degree that's been estimated. But it's really across the whole lending portfolio. And the way we're positioned currently is the upside on a product mix that shifts more toward credit origination, not only does it drive revenue, but it's substantially more profitable because the fall-through is so high. And in recent years, we have been posting higher growth in areas that have a lower contribution margin because they come with a licensing cost or just a higher cost of goods sold than the credit products that we originate. As the cycle shifts and as the mix shifts more toward credit, you're going to see margin profit revenue upside that is material across our enterprise. So I think I'll leave it at that.

All right. And our next question comes from Jason Haas with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I'm curious if you could provide an update on how you're thinking about the regulatory environment, if you've seen any changes or expecting any changes with the new administration coming in either on your customers or you directly? Thank you.

Well, Jason, you win the award for most understated question of the call thus far. Yes, we've seen a few changes at the CFPB and elsewhere. I mean, obviously, this administration has radically different views about regulation and regulation in the financial services industry. And I expect the impact of that is going to be quite material. As we all know, the incoming administration has asked the CFPB to really cease all activities. They put them on hold, whether it's supervision or enforcement or litigation or whatever the case may be. And they are currently appointing new leadership that is expected to -- well, I guess, to effect really substantial changes in the regulatory environment. And I think we're just going to have to wait and see how that plays out. But right now, it's a pause. It's a limbo, if you will. It really has not affected how we operate, though. We just have to keep focused on doing the right things for customers, trying to serve them as best we can, minimize the errors that we make. And when we do make a mistake, do what we always do, which is work hard to make the customer hold and to fix whatever problem has happened operationally that led to the error. So we're going to keep doing that, and we're going to wait for the regulatory landscape to calm down a bit, and then we'll move forward.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Our next question will come from Andrew Nicholas with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask on Neustar specifically and kind of the outlook for next year, maybe not quantitatively, but trying to understand the kind of state of the advertising and marketing business, in particular, whether or not there appears to be any acceleration in appetite or demand from your end clients outside of trusted call. Thank you.

Yes. Well, clearly, of the three pillars of the Neustar business, fraud, marketing and communications. Communications has been the outperformer over the first three years of our ownership. And it's helped us average up to mid-single digit growth during what has been a soft market on both the credit side and our various other product offerings. The Neustar story, we believe is strongly positive in a variety of ways. First, it has been accretive to our average earnings over this period although I do acknowledge it's certainly below what we'd expected when we first guided the revenue. We've also done a great job at driving profitability at Neustar. We committed to $70 million in savings. We've delivered $100 million of integration synergies, and we've entirely reconstituted the product portfolio on our new OneTru platform and are accelerating our pipelines in our bookings, in fraud, in marketing and, of course, trusted call. So over the intermediate longer-term, I expect Neustar growth is going to increase and increase over time to what we guided initially mainly because we're done digesting the asset, and we have realized much of the innovation benefits of pulling together all of the great marketing solutions that we own with all of their great marketing solutions. And again, the hidden value in this deal was the underlying technology, which has now ceded a complete modernization of our tech stack in the U.S. and eventually globally starting in 2026, as I indicated in my remarks, we've already identified the countries that we're going to migrate on to this platform. And look, I think it's really powerful. We have said as part of our next-gen program that we're going to save $200 million in free cash flow once we fully realize the benefits of our tech modernization and our global operating model, that $200 million in savings, hard savings from our tech modernization. First, it's unique in our industry, right? And I think it reflects how profound the tech benefits are. And secondly, it's also accelerating our innovation, as you can see, with the long list of next-generation products that we brought to market next year. Now in terms of the next quarter over the course of this year, do we see a material improvement in the market, perhaps -- but we don't see any worsening, and we're highly confident that we're positioned to compete much, much better in both fraud and marketing over the course of 2025.

Our next question will come from Ashish Sabadra with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to focus on the margins. Obviously, the growth investments are almost like a 70 basis point of headwind to margins this year. But as we think about over the mid-term, how do you balance the growth investments with the operating leverage and continue to drive much more robust margin expansion? Thanks.

Good morning, Ashish. Thanks for the question. So yes, if you're referring to the bridge that we provided for our adjusted EBITDA growth year-over-year. When you look at the -- let's just talk about the columns that you're seeing there. When you look at the first column, we're basically -- if you look at the high end of guidance, it's about $209 million of revenue, incremental and EBIT is about $104 million, which would suggest about a 50% margin flow through. What's important to callout here is that, that bar doesn't just capture our revenue less our variable product cost. We also put a lot of our other normal course expenses in there, such as merit increases as well as the cost for our technology and the re-platform and the software expense, the cloud expense. The revenue growth, as Chris just said, in a prior response, has been skewed more towards our trusted call solutions as well as third-party scores, which do carry higher operating expense and has a lower contribution margin, still a really attractive contribution margin, but nevertheless, lower than just selling pure -- pure credit. So to the point that Chris was making it was pertaining to the question that Manav had asked. There's a material impact in positive impact in credit volume throughout 2025, you'll see a really good flow-through and this bar will look significantly better. If you look at the second bar, that is the $10 million. That's on top of the $85 million that we realized in 2024. So we get another $10 million benefit. And as you know, we're not done with the transformation program. Always our intention that the -- our transformation program would take through the end of 2025 and that we were going to enjoy a significant amount of…

All right. The next question will come from Surinder Thind with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Chris, as you think about innovation in terms of your product road map and everything that's coming out. As the rollout of products accelerate, what does that mean for your growth rate? Is that -- should we be -- when we look in the outer years, perhaps entering a period of above-trend growth all else equal? Or is that intended to kind of support what would be a normalized growth rate?

Well, during the turbulence of the prior years, we withdrew our long-term growth guide. But I think we have said that we continue to believe that this business can and will compound at high-single-digit revenue growth. And we achieved 9% last year. That's terrific. We're guiding 4.5% to 6% this year. Now that said, this is the beginning of the year, and we've been prudent and conservative in issuing that guide. And look, last year, been offset again this year, we orient ourselves more towards the high end of these things. That's what we're trying to achieve over the course of the year. I think this innovation and the improvement in our product competitiveness in all these categories is only a net positive to our ability to win and retain and to grow over time. That's the point of it. And look, the reengineering, the replatforming, the innovation is enormously profound. I'll give one quick example. Post the Neustar acquisition in the marketing category, if you looked at all of the products that we had built, they had built or had been acquired, we had 87 different marketing point solutions across TransUnion. Those solutions were built on six different technology platforms. We have since integrated all 87 down into one integrated end-to-end market solution called TruAudience. And that solution is now a destination workspace for marketers, and it's built on the same platform that has all the print data and all the fraud-related signal. It's a very powerful step forward in terms of our product capabilities and it's representative of what we're doing in every product category.

And our last question will come from Kelsey Zhu with Autonomous. Kelsey, please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. So 2024 saw pretty tight credit supply. And I think many investors hold the view that supply side will see improvement in 2025, particularly in the second half of the year. How should we think about customer demand for more credits? What's going to drive the recovery in customer demand, particularly in a higher or longer rate environment?

Yes. Good question and a good place, I think, to finish on. Well, first, on the supply side, if you go back to 2023 in the third quarter where we experienced a real step down in origination activity in September of that quarter, it was because of a disruption in supply. Rates were -- had increased materially. In Q3, money was migrating out of bank deposits into money market accounts. And of course, the market itself had been destabilized by some uncertainty in bank safety and soundness, Silicon Valley Bank and others. And so the lending industry, the supply side clamped down on deposit seeking stability. And since that point, they have been consistently replenishing their deposit bases, right? And so if you look at the mid-tier, if you look at community investment, banks et cetera, they've all replenished the supply side, and they're increasingly eager to deploy that, which is why I think the growth rates for the third and the fourth quarter reflect greater availability. Now you had to contrast that with some concerns about consumer health, right? We had some rising delinquencies in categories that gave some lenders pause. Some of those delinquencies -- many of them actually related to loan vintages that were issued in the COVID era where there was noise in the credit scores. All of the various financial support that the government offered to consumers caused credit scores to drift up, which led to more origination offers under the presumption of stronger consumers. It turned out that, that inflation was temporal, if you will, and that led to higher delinquencies. Now the delinquencies are normalizing, if you will, in terms of rates of change, and the supply side is healthy, and I think we'll remain healthy with higher interest rates driving higher net interest income across financial services, you're positioned to see some improvement in lending activity. I also think consumers are starting to adjust to higher interest rates and realizing that the current rates, while a lot higher during the era of quantitative easing are not high by historical standards. And so you're seeing some more comfort and therefore, more transaction activity. And then the last thing I would point out is that a lot of consumers who got loans, particularly subprime consumers during the COVID era, they levered up their card balances pretty quickly. Now they need debt consolidation loans. And you're seeing more funding flow back into the FinTechs who are really overweight on debt consolidation and many of them are starting to post material increases in their origination volume. So look, those are the dynamics we're looking at. It seems stable to solid. Clearly, things are a bit bumpy right now. Part of that is the change in administration. But some of the underlying dynamics, the macro conditions, the health of the supply side of the industry and consumer fortunes seem pretty solid. So hopefully, that discussion of puts and takes gives you some context.

Thanks a lot.

Perfect. I think that's a great place to end the call. Thanks for your time, and have a great rest of the day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.