So we decelerated new hires and then we’ve been in somewhat of a hiring freeze and not filling backfills, and all of that has allowed us to kind of proactively adjust the expense structure in a softening revenue environment and maintain our strong margins. But again, there will be some work that we need to do to balance the cost structure against the current revenue environment and you can count on us to do what is necessary. But in my comments, I was really referring to the benefit of the global operating model that we implemented roughly three years ago, where we have been progressively increasing the proportion of our employees that are in centers of excellence that are located in attractive talent markets that can reduce our cost structure over time.
Now we’ve moved to roughly one third of total TransUnion employees operating over those markets. That said, there’s still more opportunity as we evolve toward what we’d say, the ideal balance, both in terms of total employees and the management structure, what functions are being led over that. And we’re going to continue to push on that dimension because it will have a material impact on our structural profitability. Additionally, we’ve centralized all of the operational support functions for our different credit businesses. We will be able to streamline and balance our costs against our volumes more effectively by leveraging that. The other point I wanted to make, though, is in our technology journey. We’ve been investing to migrate to the cloud via project Rise.
We’ve taken a significant proportion of our applications. We’ve also digested all of the Neustar technology that came and we begun leveraging the core Neustar platform, OneID, which we now call OneTru as a destination for our various data product platforms globally. What you’ll see us do now is accelerate our efforts to consolidate the multiple and redundant platforms we have on this next generation and very technologically advanced platform, which is going to let us take a lot of technology costs out. So there’ll be a strong focus on that. And finally, we’ve got to complete the work on acquisition integration. We continue to do really well on that front. We’re highly confident we’re going to take $80 million out of the Neustar cost structure.
We’ll get some benefit going forward from the full realization of those synergies. And we’re going to hit our integration takeouts for Argus and Sontiq as well. So really think about cost management along those dimensions. Yes, there’s been a drop in revenue, it takes some time to correct the cost structure, but there’s also a lot of structural benefits in the pipeline that we’re going to accelerate and there will be margin improvements as a result of acquisition integration.
Operator: The next question comes from Andrew Steinerman of JPMorgan.
Andrew Steinerman: I think you talked about bringing out a new fraud platform today. I just wanted to see within Neustar, is fraud still about a quarter of the business? And then strategically, I wanted to know on the — again, this is on the fraud side, how you’ve done an integrated Neustar with iovation and TLO or is that really kind of part of the next reiteration of fraud?
Chris Cartwright: So the Neustar risk or fraud business is roughly 20% of their total revenue. Communications would be the largest, it grew quite nicely, low double digits in the quarter and marketing grew high single digits in the quarter. We just expected it to grow much faster. Risk didn’t grow very much, right? It grew low single digits, and it’s really because of the impact we see on the risk volumes that are coming through call centers and online. And look, our contracts are volume bounded. And when we budget or set expectations, we’re assuming a certain degree of up charges because of volume excess. That just didn’t happen this quarter, we believe it’s tied to the softening macro conditions. Now in terms of platforms and the next generation of this, look, fraud is a substantial part of our business.
We have multiple fraud products and platforms in the US. When we acquired CallCredit, we got another set of attractive, although largely duplicative fraud solutions in the UK market. Then when we bought Neustar where we got a variety of risk point solutions but we also got a great platform in OneID upon which we can unify all of these different fraud mitigation products, on a common data repository with orchestration and advanced analytics in machine learning and AI. We have been working for really since the outset of the acquisition to accomplish all of that technical work. We launched that version of the product in the early part of next year. Now you can think of that as like an advanced beta launch with friendly customers. but it’s going to allow us to do two things.
One, it is truly a platform of the future. It’s next generation. It’s a global consolidation of all of our point solutions and it can be leveraged across the globe, right? So we’re very excited about that, and it should allow us to accelerate growth in this important product category. It’s also going to allow us to retire all of the legacy cost structures, whether it’s the variety of solutions in the UK or it’s iovation, or it’s the legacy solutions here in TransUnion in Chicago.
Operator: The next question comes from Heather Balsky of Bank of America.
Heather Balsky: I was hoping you could just dive in a little bit more on your emerging vertical segment. Just given the changes that you made in the tenant screening part of the business and what you’re seeing in insurance, can you just help us kind of think about what you need to see for those sales to accelerate and kind of visibility in the near term?
Chris Cartwright: So I mean, look, from a first principles basis, we’ve talked about the diversification we’ve achieved in our portfolio because of our investments in recent times. And even though this is a difficult quarter in a challenging macro period, you can see some of those benefits coming to the fore. Old TransUnion would be reporting results based on US credit sales only, and those would be negative. We’ve got 4% growth happening in the emerging markets, although not all cylinders are firing any emerging as you point to, right? But we are benefiting from some offset there. Now look, insurance, typically, in normal conditions, is a high single digit grower and our sales have continued to be strong in insurance. The problem that we’re seeing and it’s what we’ve been discussing and the industry has been discussing is that risk isn’t priced appropriately right now and insurers are reluctant to ramp up their underwriting engines.
And so they’re increasing their prices a lot upon renewal and they’re walking away from some consumer risk in some jurisdiction or geographical risk. Now it takes some time for those unfulfilled policies, if you will, to trickle down in the ecosystem, some go to smaller carriers, some go to nonstandard carriers, some go unfulfilled, right? And as I mentioned, the revenue dynamics is upstream, we’ve got greater penetration of the full suite of our products. So we’re realizing a higher data payload per origination for policy origination. So insurance is going to remain soft for a bit. Now the carriers are working hard to correct that. They continue to push for approvals, for higher rates and I think that will be successful over time, but right now, they’re cautious.
Tenant deployment screening is undergoing a bit of a reset because of regulatory scrutiny, which led to the settlement that we announced with the CFPB around our renter screening business. And what happened there is the current leadership of the CFPB believes that certain categories of information around evictions and even criminal records should not be used in tenant screening or should only be used in a certain way at a certain point in time. Now that is a different interpretation of the SCRA and it defers materially from historic industry practices. But in working with the CFPB, we’ve had to adjust the data that we provide. And when we provide it in accordance with their views and we’ve done that in our tenant employment screening business.
