Equifax Inc. (NYSE:EFX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

John W. Gamble, Jr.: And these redeterminations apply across multiple government subsidized programs, it’s not just Medicaid, Medicare. And so it’s more broad and we participate in many of those.

Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Jeff Meuler from Baird. Your line is now live.

Jeffrey Meuler: Yeah, thank you. Sorry to keep pulling you back to this, but just given that it’s a new metric you’re going to be providing on an ongoing basis. So on the footnote and you said this as well, you’re looking at internal data and then you’re doing a Calcon [ph] records product, price and mix. It’s not clear to me, like I know you said you don’t think there’s any change in share dynamics relative to a quarter ago. But if there are share shifts, is that accounted for in your market estimate, is it accounted for an outperformance, it’s just — it’s not clear to me if you’re looking at internal data based upon what volumes you’re seeing how you would account first year…?

Mark Begor: First off, we don’t see any share shifts, Jeff. If there were, they would be in the outperformance. And remember, we still have a grounding in originations. As I mentioned, you have to forecast originations. And there’s MBA which a lot of you look at and we look at it, too, is really diverge from what we’re seeing in originations. And remember, we see originations on two sides of our business. We see it in in the credit business in USIS, and we see it in EWS and then we get actual originations on a five to six-month lag when they actually get posted to the credit file after the mortgage is closed. So we have really meaningful data. I think we were trying to highlight that the divergence we’re seeing from some of those industry forecasts have just become larger in recent times, my view is my personal view because of the rapid change in rates.

I think rates went up overnight or the last 48 hours by 50 bps. That’s not in a forecast that MBA did a month ago, but we can see what’s happening this afternoon.

John W. Gamble, Jr.: And so what we’ll be disclosing — so what we’ll disclose every quarter, again, is the outperformance with records, product, price and mix. And then over time, obviously, you’re asking — and we’re comparing that against our volume, obviously. So over time, to the extent anything was to occur, which we’re not seeing, okay, but then we would obviously talk to you about whether we’re seeing differences between our own volume, and what we think is happening broadly in the market. But the metric we’ll disclose every quarter really is driven by records, product, price and mix, which compares effectively our revenue to our volume. Because that’s what we can actually measure. So when we talk about — and it’s what we’ve been doing in USIS for a very long time, right, as long as I can remember.

Mark Begor: 15 to 20 years.

John W. Gamble, Jr.: More than 10 years. So what we’re talking about doing for EWS now is the same thing we’ve been doing for USIS for a very long period of time comparing revenue and the drivers against our volume metrics.

Jeffrey Meuler: Understood. It’s just been uses share shift now the dynamics I wanted to make sure I understood it. And then just can you just give us what the assumption is in the guidance for Q4 mortgage origination unit volumes? And can you comment on the number of TWN pulls per closed mortgage. It took a step up, I think, to like 2.5% in the pandemic. Has that been stable since, is it still going up, has it come down at all?

John W. Gamble, Jr.: Yes. So in terms of again, we’re not forecasting mortgage originations. What we’re using is our internal volume data. So we gave you in the guidance what we’re assuming for credit inquiries in the fourth quarter. And that’s the basis we’d ask you to consider if we are going to see, I think, credit increase down 22%, which is about 18 percentage points worse than what we expected back in July. And so we think that’s an indication of the direction of the market. And it’s the basis on which we’re calculating our volumes for USIS. We have a similar metric we use internally with EWS on their own volumes. And that’s the basis on which we generated our forecast. We didn’t try to come up with a mortgage originations forecast because we’re going to focus on using the internal volume that we can actually measure.

As Mark said, we can’t measure originations at the end of the fourth quarter, in the fourth quarter. It’s something that we want to have visibility to for quite some time following.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question is coming from Andrew Nicholas from William Blair. Your line is now live.

Andrew Nicholas: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. First, wanted to touch on Boa Vista. I know you had given originally like $165 million revenue run rate. I think it was $160 million when you cited it in the second quarter, and you’re holding that here today post close. Just kind of curious if you could bridge the performance there over the past nine months with how that end market is doing, how the business is doing, just kind of an update as it’s now under your official ownership?

Mark Begor: Yes. We’re only, I don’t know, 60 days in of having it under the ownership, but pleased to have it in. The market from our perspective is growing kind of high single digit. That’s why we like the market down there in Brazil. We’re very active in driving the integration of getting our new products and solutions there. We’re going to move them to the Equifax Cloud over the next number of quarters to get them on our new cloud environment. We’re going to bring down our large platforms like Interconnect, which they don’t really have a version of that as well as Ignite, our analytics platform, which will really drive some strong competitiveness with Serasa Experian in the marketplace. The business performance, I would say, is probably lagging a bit that market performance, primarily through the integration.

This is — it was a complex integration for a small publicly traded company to go through the process. It was a long process to go through. Gosh, it was almost seven to eight months of the process to do the take private, but we’re energized around the future of the business and focused on getting this integration complete and getting into new solutions and to help them drive their top line.