Beyond those kind of savings, we’re going to keep our belt tight in 2024. We’re going to want to continue to invest in the right places, but I’d characterize that as we’re going to be balanced around it given the environment.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question today is coming from Simon Clinch from Redburn. Your line is now live.
Simon Clinch: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. A lot of my questions have been asked already, but maybe we could zero in again on EWS mortgage. And I just wanted to — just going back to your — the way you’re measuring the outperformance this time and the implied decline in origination volumes this quarter that you’ve seen versus what the sort of industry forecasts have been for third quarter. And there’s quite a wide gap. And I just wanted to make sure that there’s nothing else at play here in terms of I don’t know, maybe sort of just you’re not seeing all the volumes that you would otherwise be seeing or for any sort of color you can give around that sort of divergence would be useful?
Mark Begor: We try to forecast what the originations are as mentioned earlier. We know what actual originations are like, a five to six-month lag. Between that time frame, we try to forecast. If you’re referring to like NBA and some of the other forecasts, if you look back over the last two years, three years, four years, five years, they’re consistently long. It’s a hard thing to forecast, and we just try to use our best data on it. And then we also factor in our current run rates on originations. So that’s the way that we’re forecasting to try to get more current because MBA is done on a survey basis. I think they survey like half of the mortgage originators in order to get that data. Ours is actual originations on a lag and then our current forecast based on what we’re seeing in current time frame.
John W. Gamble, Jr.: And again, going forward, what we’re going to try to make sure we do is we’re going to make sure we’re providing you with actual data, right. So I mean we’ll be able to give you the benefit we’re seeing from records, product, price and mix which are really the big drivers of our outperformance. And we’ll be measuring that against our actual volumes across USIS and TWN separately so that we can validate the information. We know what the actuals are and we can explain how we’re performing and driving those levers, which we think is what’s really important to make sure we explain because that’s what we’re driving and delivering outperformance through.
Simon Clinch: Great, thanks. And just as a follow-up. I mean if we want to talk about or think about a tougher mortgage market for longer sort of current levels, does that in any way change the I guess the pricing power, the competitive dynamics for EWS and mortgage going through a period like that, a prolonged period like that. Just wondering if you could help us think about the puts and takes in that regard?
Mark Begor: We don’t think so. The power of instant data, and in this case, we’re talking about income and employment data is super valuable to every mortgage originator. They want to make sure that they have accurate data. We get it directly from the company every two weeks on the consumer. We deliver it instantly. In this environment of more shopping, a mortgage originator that’s investing in a consumer, they want to make sure that they close that loan as they get down the path of delivering it. So we don’t see a change in our ability to deliver new solutions, meaning products to the industry. Obviously, with more records, we’re going to drive higher hit rates that happens really because we’re getting the inquiries from our customers for all their applicants.
And then we still believe that we have pricing power going forward because of the uniqueness of our data set, the alternative for our customers is to do it — the mortgage customers to do the verification manually, which is very challenging, meaning getting a company on the phone to verify the income is very hard to do and it takes time, and that’s labor and also time. So speed and productivity and accuracy is the value we deliver.
Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Shlomo Rosenbaum from Stifel. Your line is now live.
Shlomo Rosenbaum: Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Hey Mark, just my first question, I just wanted to talk a little bit more like how we should be thinking about the future with some of the items that you were talking about, the increase in subprime delinquencies. We talked about auto for a while, we’re talking about credit cards, cash being used up, like how does that impact the business over the next 12 months, I mean I know the employment has been fairly good at the lower end of the spectrum, but like there’s a lot of parts of the spectrum where there’s open jobs. They’re not really filling those open jobs. And so I guess the first question is, how are you thinking about this on a go-forward basis? And then I have a follow-up.
Mark Begor: Yes. Go forward, you got to kind of talk time frames. When you think out the next couple of quarters, it doesn’t feel to us or to me like there’s going to be a lot of change, meaning it’s a fairly — outside of the mortgage market, obviously, let’s leave that aside. That’s obviously super challenging and really unprecedented what’s happening with interest rates. But when you have people working and very low unemployment rates, generally, they’re able to pay their bills. When they pay their bills, delinquencies stay generally low, and then you have the ability — our customers have confidence in continuing to extend credit through loans and other solutions to those consumers. Subprime has been challenged for a year.
That’s generally subprime is with the fintechs. Most of the big banks don’t do subprime business. And that’s been challenged for a year. And we’re actually, as I mentioned earlier, starting to comp against fairly low levels. I would expect subprime to stay high as we go through 2024 because those consumers are really more challenged, not around being unemployed, but around inflation is still pressuring them. But the big metric that I always think about and you should, too, in my view, is unemployment. So back to your question about 2024, give me your forecast for unemployment next year. Is it going to go up, down or sideways, if you think unemployment is going to spike or go up, which I don’t think it will in this environment with 10 million open jobs and only 5 million people looking right now, that’s a pretty good environment to go into 2024 in kind of the core elements of our business outside of mortgage.
Shlomo Rosenbaum: Okay, thank you. And then just going back to those government redeterminations, can you talk about like how does that work exactly, like once they get done, let’s say they get done by June of next year. Is this something that the government is going to be doing annually or is this kind of a big onetime bang and then we’re going to end up with tough comps on that after we’re done with it?
Mark Begor: Yes. Remember that the redeterminations were suspended during COVID. So they didn’t happen over the last couple of years. Once President Biden lifted the COVID pandemic rule or requirement, these redeterminations went back into place. So it’s really the completion of the annual verifications are happening in this 12-month time frame in third, fourth and first and second quarter next year. Post second quarter, they’ll have the requirement to do the annual redeterminations that are a requirement of the programs. So there may be some elements of comp that from a timing standpoint, but we don’t expect it to be meaningful.
