Prospectus Summary
PROSPECTUS SUMMARY This summary highlights certain significant aspects of our business and this offering. This is a summary of information contained elsewhere in this prospectus, is not complete and does not contain all of the information that you should consider before making your investment decision. You should carefully read the entire prospectus, including the information presented under the sections entitled “Risk Factors” and “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements” and the consolidated financial statements and the notes thereto, before making an investment decision. This summary contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ significantly from future results contemplated in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain factors such as those set forth in the sections entitled “Risk Factors” and “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements.”Unless the context indicates otherwise, all references herein to “TransUnion,” the “Company,” “we,” “us” and “our” refers to TransUnion and its consolidated subsidiaries, including TransUnion Intermediate Holdings, Inc. (“TransUnion Intermediate”). The historical financial statements and financial data included in this prospectus are those of TransUnion and its consolidated subsidiaries or, prior to the formation of TransUnion, to TransUnion Intermediate and its consolidated subsidiaries.
Our Company
TransUnion is a leading global risk and information solutions provider. Our mission is to help people worldwide access opportunities that lead to a higher quality of life. Businesses embed our solutions into their process workflows to optimize their risk-based decisioning and to drive better financial outcomes. Consumers use our solutions to view their credit profiles and access analytical tools that help them understand and manage their personal information and take precautions against identity theft. We are differentiated by our comprehensive and unique datasets, our next-generation technology and our analytics and decisioning capabilities, which enable us to deliver insights across the entire consumer lifecycle. We believe we are the only provider of scale in the United States to possess both nationwide consumer credit data and comprehensive, diverse public records data, which allows us to better predict behaviors, assess risk and address a broader set of business issues for our customers. We have deep domain expertise across a number of attractive industry verticals, including financial services, insurance and healthcare, as well as a global presence in over 30 countries across North America, Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Our addressable market includes the big data and analytics market, which continues to grow as companies around the world recognize the benefits of building an analytical enterprise where decisions are made based on data and insights, and as consumers recognize the importance that data and analytics play in their ability to procure goods and services and protect their identities. International Data Corporation (“IDC”) estimates worldwide spending on big data and analytics services to be approximately $52 billion in 2014, growing at a projected compounded annual growth rate (“CAGR”) of approximately 15% from 2014 through 2018. There are several underlying trends supporting this market growth, including the creation of large amounts of data, advances in technology and analytics that enable data to be processed more quickly and efficiently to provide business insights, and growing demand for these business insights across industries and geographies. Leveraging our 47-year operating history and our established position as a leading provider of risk and information solutions, we have evolved our business by investing in a number of strategic initiatives, such as transitioning to the latest big data and analytics technologies, expanding the breadth and depth of our data, strengthening our analytics capabilities and enhancing our business processes. As a result, we believe we are well positioned to expand our share within the markets we currently serve and capitalize on the larger big data and analytics opportunity.
We believe that we have the capabilities and assets, including comprehensive and unique datasets, advanced technology and analytics, to provide differentiated solutions to our customers. We have over 30 petabytes of data, growing at an average rate of over 25% each year since 2010, representing over one billion consumers globally. We obtain financial, credit, alternative credit, identity, bankruptcy, lien, judgment, insurance claims, automotive and other relevant information from an average of 90,000 data sources, including financial institutions, private databases and public records repositories. We refine, standardize and enhance this data using sophisticated algorithms to create proprietary databases. Our next-generation technology allows us to quickly and efficiently integrate our data with our analytics and decisioning capabilities to create and deliver innovative solutions to our customers and to quickly adapt to changing customer needs. Our deep analytics expertise, which includes our people as well as tools such as predictive modeling and scoring, customer segmentation, benchmarking and forecasting, enables businesses and consumers to gain better insights into their risk and financial data. Our decisioning capabilities, which are generally delivered on a software-as-a-service platform, allow businesses to interpret data and apply their specific qualifying criteria to make decisions and take actions. Collectively, our data, analytics and decisioning capabilities allow businesses to authenticate the identity of consumers, effectively determine the most relevant products for consumers, retain and cross-sell to existing consumers, identify and acquire new consumers and reduce loss from fraud. Similarly, our capabilities allow consumers to see how their credit profiles have changed over time, understand the impact of financial decisions on their credit scores, manage their personal information and take precautions against identity theft.
We leverage our differentiated capabilities in order to serve a broad set of customers across multiple geographies and verticals. We have a global customer base of over 65,000 businesses and 35 million consumers. We offer our solutions to business customers in financial services, insurance, healthcare and other industries. Our customer base includes many of the largest companies in each of the primary industries we serve. For example, in the United States, we contract with nine of the ten largest banks, all of the top five credit card issuers, all of the top twenty-five auto lenders, fourteen of the fifteen largest auto insurance carriers, thousands of healthcare providers and federal, state and local government agencies. We have been successful in leveraging our brand, our expertise and our solutions in our global operations and have a leading presence in several high-growth international markets, including India, Hong Kong and Africa.
We believe we have an attractive business model that has highly recurring and diversified revenue streams, low capital requirements, significant operating leverage and strong and stable cash flows. The proprietary and embedded nature of our solutions and the integral role that we play in our customers’ decision-making processes have historically translated into high customer retention and revenue visibility. For example, our top ten financial institution customers have an average tenure of over ten years. We continue to demonstrate organic growth by further penetrating existing customers, innovating new solutions and gaining new customers. We have a diversified portfolio of businesses across our segments, reducing our exposure to cyclical trends in any particular industry or geography. We operate primarily on a contributory data model in which we typically obtain updated information at little or no cost and own most of our data. We augment this data with a growing set of public record and alternative data as we expand into new solutions and adjacencies. We also directly manage and control our technology, which provides us with an efficient cost structure and allows us to benefit from economies of scale. Additionally, our technology investments enable us to grow and expand our business with low incremental cost, providing significant operating leverage.
Our total revenues increased from $1,183.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2013 to $1,304.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2014, representing year-over-year growth of 10.3%. Our Adjusted EBITDA (as defined below in note 4 to “Selected Historical Consolidated Financial Data”) increased from $408.5 million for the year ended December 31, 2013 to $451.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2014, representing year-over-year growth of 10.6%.
Our Evolution
Our business has a 47-year operating history and a long track record of providing risk and information solutions to businesses and consumers while continuing to innovate to meet their changing needs. Since our founding as a provider of regional credit reporting services, we have built a comprehensive database of U.S. consumers and used that as a base to expand our operations. We have strengthened our analytics and decisioning capabilities and acquired complementary datasets enabling us to enhance our solutions, diversify our revenue base and expand into high-growth verticals. We have grown our global presence to over 30 countries and also expanded the reach of our consumer solutions by partnering with other market leaders and innovators.
As part of our continued evolution, we have invested in a number of strategic initiatives that we believe will allow us to cater to the growing demand for data and analytics, provide differentiated solutions and better serve our customers. These initiatives include:
We believe that our ongoing focus on evolving with the market and with our customers’ needs ensures continued improvement in our overall services to businesses and consumers. Leveraging our trusted brand, global scale and strong market position in the verticals we serve will allow us to capitalize on business opportunities worldwide and contribute to our long-term growth.
Our Market Opportunity
We believe there is a long-term trend of businesses and consumers using data and analytics to make more informed decisions and manage risk more effectively, resulting in a large and rapidly growing market. According to a September 2014 report from IDC, spending on business analytics services worldwide is projected to reach approximately $52 billion in 2014 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 15% from 2014 through 2018. We believe there are several key trends in the global macroeconomic environment affecting the geographies and verticals we serve that will create increasing demand for our solutions:
to developed markets. The widespread adoption and use of mobile phones in emerging markets have also enabled greater levels of financial inclusion and access to banking and credit. We expect the populations in emerging markets to continue to become more credit active, resulting in increased demand for our services.
Our Competitive Strengths
Comprehensive and Unique Datasets
We have over 30 petabytes of data, growing at an average rate of over 25% each year since 2010, representing over one billion consumers globally. We refine, standardize and enhance this data using sophisticated algorithms to create proprietary databases. We believe that our data is unique and differentiates us from our competitors. We own several proprietary datasets such as consumer credit information, driver violation history, healthcare eligibility information, business data and rental payment history. Internationally, our data assets also encompass alternative data, such as the voter registry in India and the vehicle information databases in South Africa. We have also acquired public record datasets, which are time consuming and difficult for others to obtain and associate with the correct person. We believe we are the only provider of scale in the United States to possess both nationwide consumer credit data and comprehensive, diverse public records data, which allows us to better predict behaviors, assess risk and address a broader set of business issues for our customers.
Next-generation Technology
Our transformation to next-generation technology allows us to continually improve our overall services to businesses and consumers and ensures that we are well positioned to differentiate our datasets and capabilities.
Sophisticated and Flexible Analytics and Decisioning Capabilities
We have developed sophisticated and flexible analytics and decisioning capabilities by investing in technology, tools and people. Our technology allows us to quickly build sophisticated analytics and decisioning functionality that caters to our customers’ evolving needs. Our analysts leverage our next-generation technology and data matching capabilities to gain real-time access to our entire dataset across different data sources and run analyses across this data while remaining compliant with permitted data use. Our analysts are equipped with a diverse modeling and analytical toolkit which allows them to quickly build and deploy these capabilities. We have an experienced analytics team with substantial industry experience, complemented by a deep knowledge of consumer credit data. Our team is highly qualified with advanced degrees or doctorates in statistics, math, finance or engineering, and is instrumental in understanding customer requirements, sourcing raw data and turning that data into solutions that provide insights and decisions to solve our customers’ problems.
Innovative and Differentiated Solutions
We consistently focus on innovation to develop new and enhanced solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. We believe our specialized data, analytics and decisioning services and collaborative approach with our customers differentiate us from our competitors. Our solutions are often scalable across different customers, geographies and verticals. Recent examples of our innovative and differentiated solutions include:
Medicare and TRICARE as well as commercial insurance benefits at the time of service and also monitors an account for up to three years for retroactive eligibility that providers may have missed.
Deep and Specialized Industry Expertise
We have deep expertise in a number of attractive industry verticals including financial services, insurance and healthcare. Our expertise has allowed us to develop sophisticated vertical-specific solutions within these targeted industries that play an integral role in our customers’ decision-making processes and are often embedded into their workflows. Our team includes industry experts with significant experience in the verticals that we target and relationships with leading companies in those verticals. We also possess regulatory compliance expertise across the industries that we serve. Together, this provides us with a comprehensive understanding of business trends and insights for customers in these verticals, allowing us to build solutions that cater to these customers’ specific requirements. We have been able to apply our industry knowledge, data assets, technology and analytics capabilities to develop new solutions and revenue opportunities within key verticals.
Leading Presence in Attractive International Markets
We have been operating internationally for over 30 years and have strong global brand recognition. We have strategically targeted attractive markets in both developed and emerging economies and have a diversified global presence in over 30 countries and a leading presence in several attractive international markets across North America, Africa, Latin America and Asia. We have local, senior management in many of our international markets, and we believe this provides us with deeper insights into these markets and stronger relationships with our customers. We have leveraged our brand, operating history, global footprint and technology infrastructure to establish new credit bureaus in several international markets, such as Canada in 1989, India in 2001 and the Philippines in 2011. Once established, our model is to expand the services we offer within these markets and then move into adjacent emerging markets. In addition, we have been able to leverage our technology and experience from our U.S. operations to develop and grow our international operations.
Proven and Experienced Management Team
Our senior management team has a track record of strong performance and significant expertise in the markets we serve, with an average of over twenty years of industry experience. We continue to attract and retain experienced management talent for our businesses. Our team has deep knowledge of the data and analytics sector and expertise across the various industries that we serve. Our team has overseen our expansion into new industries and geographies while managing ongoing strategic initiatives, including our significant technology investments. As a result of the sustained focus of our management team, we have been successful in consistently driving growth, both organically and through acquiring and integrating businesses.
Our Growth Strategy
Enhance Underlying Data, Technology and Analytics Capabilities to Develop Innovative Solutions
As the demand for big data and analytics solutions grows across industries and geographies, we will continue to expand the scope of our underlying data, improve our tools and technology and enhance our analytics and decisioning capabilities to provide innovative solutions that address this demand. As the needs of businesses and consumers evolve, we plan to continue to help them meet their challenges, which our recent investments in data, technology and analytics enable us to do more quickly and efficiently. For example, we enhanced our solutions with incremental data such as rental trade lines, additional contact data and auto asset data in order to address a broader set of customer requirements. Our recent technology investments have also reduced the time to market for new solutions, in certain instances from several weeks to a few days, which allow us to react quickly to customer requirements. We also intend to continue to take advantage of strategic partnerships to develop innovative services that differentiate us from our competitors.
Further Penetrate Existing Industry Verticals with Current and New Solutions
We are a leading provider of risk and information solutions in several industry verticals today, including financial services, insurance and healthcare. We believe there is significant opportunity for further growth within these industries by expanding the number of customers to whom we sell our current solutions as well as by creating innovative new solutions that we can use to grow our presence in these industries. We focus on developing new solutions that address evolving customer needs within our industry verticals. For example, in the financial services vertical, we developed CreditVision, which provides customers with a time-based risk trend and increases the total eligible population of consumers. In order to more effectively address these opportunities, we have redeployed and reallocated our sales resources to focus either on new customer opportunities or on selling additional services and solutions to existing customers. With our leading market positions, existing strong relationships in financial services, insurance and healthcare verticals and with our consumer partners, we believe we have the opportunity to further penetrate our existing customer base and capture a greater proportion of their spending across the consumer lifecycle.
Establish Positions in New, Adjacent Industry Verticals
In addition to increasing penetration in industries where we have a substantial presence, we also intend to create solutions that address customer needs in attractive new industries. Our strategy is to develop new solutions for a specific application, industry vertical or geography and then deploy them to other markets where they may be applicable. We believe that our capabilities allow us to quickly create and deliver solutions to new industries and geographies where information-based analytics and decisioning capabilities are currently underutilized. For example, our strong position in financial services and insurance verticals has allowed us to establish a presence in the healthcare vertical to capitalize on the increasing demand for data and analytics solutions. We have created innovative solutions that automate the insurance and payment processes at the beginning of the revenue cycle, help payers analyze claims-related data, facilitate performance reporting and help patients make informed decisions. Similarly, we are targeting other verticals such as government, rental screening and investigative services, where we see an opportunity to leverage our existing data, analytics and decisioning capabilities.
Expand our Presence in Attractive International Markets
We believe international markets present a significant opportunity for growth, as these economies continue to develop and their populations become more credit active. We leverage solutions developed in the United States and deploy them to international markets, after localizing them to individual market requirements. In markets where we have established a presence in a particular vertical, we will expand further into adjacent verticals, such as insurance and consumer solutions. We intend to expand into new geographic markets by forming alliances with financial services institutions, industry associations and other local partners, and by pursuing strategic acquisitions. Across all our international expansion initiatives, we will continue to leverage our next-generation technology to drive speed to market, scale and differentiation.