And again, I’d reiterate that the pipeline is strong and the bookings are strong. The usage as it goes up is driving a faster result for our clients. So we’re very enthusiastic about the wealth data offering. The bank market, as you know, has had a tough, very difficult first half of the year. There’s some delays on a particular client deployment and that’s impacted our outlook for the rest of the year. And then in the fintech market, particularly the larger fintech type companies which utilize our verification business, there’s lower volume and that’s also had an impact and impacts our outlook for the rest of the year. The real challenge, though, I’ll put a circle around the research business. And in that research business, what we do is we de-identify data.
We look at underlying consumer activity separated from, separated into kind of generic data sets. We share that with a universe of asset managers who utilize that to help understand momentum or activity for a particular company. It’s been a very useful capability and something that we, really innovated in that space and we’re a leader in that space. But over the years, there’s been competition. And the competition began to match our data set and, in fact, our data set was degrading over the last couple of years given, the data make-up and the characteristic make-up that we were able to utilize and share with our research clients. That said, so that’s been a focus of ours. A focus of ours has been to restore that data set to improve it and to create a characteristic set that was once again unique and preferenced or, kind of more competitive than what was in the marketplace.
That can’t happen overnight. It happens over quarters. And I would tell you that as we get to this year versus the beginning of the year to when we end the year, contracted in the door, being processed and beginning to be shared with our research data clients is a data set that has profoundly been enhanced in the many, many, many millions of users and many, many, many millions of characteristics that have real value because of geographic reasons, because of demographic reasons. And it is now, I believe, the high watermark for the quality of data that we’re able to provide to our research clients and the high watermark for the quantity of data that we’ll be able to share with our research clients. So that doesn’t solve the short-term, revenue headwind that we faced in the first half of the year.
I believe, over the last couple of earnings calls, I’ve called out that the first half is going to be weak and that we’d begin to see stabilization and restoration as we got to the back half of the year. I’m reiterating that outlook, that the first half of the year was, was a challenge in that research business, but that now, as we’ve, acquired, processed, beginning to share that level of data with our research clients, we believe that that business will be stabilized and that towards the end of the year, we’ll start to see a restoration of the revenue for that research business. I hope that’s helpful.
Michael Cho: Thanks. Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it.
Operator: Thank you. And our next question is from Devin Ryan with JMP Security. Please proceed with your question.
Bill Crager: Hey, Devin, how are you?
Devin Ryan: Very good, Bill. How are you? Hey, Pete. I guess the first question just, kind of hitting on expenses. And if I look at the guidance for the third quarter, I think it implies for the fourth quarter, something like $0.64 to $0.70 for fourth quarter EPS. And so it implied pretty nice step up in EPS from the third quarter. And so it sounds like that’s expense driven primarily. And so I just trying to think about some of the moving parts there. So there’s kind of two things going on. There’s these efficiencies are driving, but then I think there’s also a little bit of timing or seasonal dynamics. I’m just trying to think about the kind of pieces to getting to a better expense level at the end of the year, based on some of the things you said. And then maybe to a little bit earlier, but just thinking about a jumping off point for 2024, just given that expenses are obviously in focus.
Pete D’Arrigo: Yes. So this is Pete. Thanks, Devin. You’ve caught kind of the highlights on the expense side. It’s not entirely expense driven. There’s some revenue growth assumptions that kind of meet sort of our ongoing growth trajectory, although we’ve obviously pulled things down a little bit from what our prior expectations were. But yes, on the expense side, it’s a couple of things. It’s the activities that Bill mentioned that is going to kind of lower our run rate. And then there is that seasonality aspect where we typically see that the fourth quarter coming a little bit lower. And then probably in Q1 comes in a little bit higher, but still a general run rate is going to be significantly lower compared to where we have been in 2022. So I’ll let Bill get into the higher level strategy of that.
