Equifax (NYSE:EFX) held its second-quarter earnings conference call on Tuesday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.
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Summary
Equifax Inc reported strong Q2 2026 results with revenue of $1.7 billion, an 11% increase, and adjusted EPS growth of 13%, beating April guidance.
The company signed $300 million in state government contracts, indicating strong commercial momentum and a long runway for growth in government services.
Equifax plans to acquire Circulo de Credito in Mexico for $750 million, expected to be accretive in the first year and align with their strategic focus on international expansion.
Equifax's AI initiatives are expected to double cost savings from $75 million to $150 million by 2028, enhancing operational efficiency and margin expansion.
Management reaffirmed 2026 guidance, expecting over $1 billion in free cash flow and continued shareholder returns through buybacks and dividends.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Greetings and welcome to the Equifax second quarter 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the call over to your host, Mr. Trevor Burns, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations.
Thank you, sir. Please go ahead.
Trevor Burns, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations
Thanks and good morning. Welcome to today's conference call. I'm Trevor Burns. With me today are Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer, and John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded. An archive of the recording will be available later today in the IR Calendar section of the News and Events tab at our Investor Relations website. During the call we will make reference to certain materials that can be found in the Presentation section of the News and Events tab at our IR website.
These materials are labeled 2Q 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Also, we'll be making certain forward-looking statements including third quarter and full year 2026 guidance to help you understand Equifax and its business environment. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. Certain risk factors that may impact our business are set forth in our filings with the SEC, including our 2025 Form 10-K and subsequent filings.
During this call we will be making certain non-GAAP financial measures including adjusted EPS, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margins and cash conversion which are adjusted for certain items that affect the comparability of our underlying operational performance. All references to EPS, EBITDA, EBITDA margins and cash conversion are references to non-GAAP measures. During the second quarter we recorded a $40 million charge, net of insurance proceeds, for a legal settlement associated with a resolution of claims related to a previously disclosed coding issue.
These non-GAAP measures are detailed in reconciliation tables which are included with our earnings release and can be found in the Financial Results section of the Financial Info tab at our IR website. Now I'd like to turn it over to Mark.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Trevor, and good morning. Turning to slide 4. Equifax delivered strong results in the second quarter with revenue of $1.7 billion, up 11% on a reported basis and 10% in constant currency, which was $5 million above the April guidance. Excluding FICO mortgage royalties, reported revenue was up about 7%. We also delivered very strong margin performance, driving strong EPS growth of 13%. Organic diversified markets constant-dollar revenue grew about 5.5% in the quarter and better than our expectations, principally in Workforce Solutions, benefiting from strong execution in Talent Solutions and consumer lending.
EWS government revenue declined slightly in the quarter as expected due to a tough 2025 comp. We were very pleased with the commercial execution in government during the first half, signing principally state government contracts that bring the total in the last four months to about $300 million — about $100 million of the new business that will principally benefit 2027 and $200 million of contract renewals. This is a strong indicator of the unique benefit our proprietary TWN data provides to government customers and the long runway for government against their $5 billion TAM.
USIS diversified markets revenue was slightly better than we expected, accelerating over 300 basis points sequentially, and International revenue was slightly lower than we expected at up 4%, principally reflecting market weaknesses in Canada and the UK. US mortgage revenue was up 25% in the quarter and up 7% ex-FICO. This was stronger than our expectations against a weaker than expected US mortgage market from higher interest rates. During the quarter, US mortgage rates increased meaningfully, with the current 30-year fixed rates up 30 basis points to about 6.6% versus the 6.3% when we gave guidance in April.
As a result, we saw overall industry transaction volumes run below our expectations that were offset with new products and some share gains. US macroeconomic conditions remain relatively consistent with the environment we saw in April. The ongoing Middle East conflict has resulted in continued higher levels of inflation that has disproportionately pressured the lower income or subprime consumer demographic. Despite these inflationary pressures, low unemployment continues to support overall consumer health.
Continued high employment levels have acted to limit more broad-based credit impacts which gives lenders the confidence to continue originating loans. We have not seen financial institutions increase their portfolio management reviews or decrease consumer credit lines which are actions they would typically take when they anticipate an economic downturn. The Equifax team is leveraging the power of AI to expand our margins and free cash flow through accelerating growth of high-margin proprietary database products and driving operational productivity through accelerated AI deployments across Equifax.
Second quarter EBITDA of $552 million was up about 10.5%, with an EBITDA margin excluding FICO of almost 35%, up a very strong 120 basis points year to year and 40 basis points above the midpoint of our April framework. EBITDA margin expansion was well above our 75 basis point target for 2026 and 70 basis points above our 50 basis point long-term financial framework goal. The strong EBITDA margins were driven by operating leverage and AI-driven cost productivity, principally in operations.
Equifax reported EBITDA margins, including the impact of FICO, were 32.5% in the quarter, flat with last year. EPS at $2.25 per share was up a very strong 13% and 5 cents above our April guidance midpoint. Equifax returned $366 million to shareholders during the quarter, including repurchasing almost 1.8 million shares, or over 1% of shares outstanding, for $300 million, taking advantage of the lower Equifax stock price, and Equifax paid $66 million of dividends in the quarter after increasing our dividend by 12% in February.
Over the last 12 months ended June 30, Equifax has returned over $1.6 billion of cash to our shareholders, or 100% of our operating cash flow. We continue to expect strong free cash flow in the future of over $1 billion in 2026 and cash conversion to continue at over 100%. With our financial capacity of over $1.5 billion, we can execute the Circulo de Credito acquisition while maintaining a strong balance sheet with debt leverage at under three times EBITDA and while continuing to repurchase shares in the second half, but at a slower pace than the first half.
Equifax continued its strong execution against our EFX 2028 strategic priorities, as listed on the right side of slide 4, with several big milestones during the quarter. We further accelerated our implementation of AI generative capabilities across our global analytical decisioning and operational platforms. In the first half of the year we launched 54 new products that have AI capabilities directly embedded in the product architecture, which directly benefit our customers and contributed to our strong 16% Vitality Index in the quarter.
We also expanded the deployment of AI tools and agents across Equifax in internal product and model development, operations, technology, and our G&A support functions. The pace of AI adoption inside Equifax is accelerating rapidly, which allows us to double our AI for EFX productivity goal from $75 million to $150 million from 2026 to 2028. We know we are in the very early innings of our deployment of AI and generative automation inside Equifax, both on enabling new products based on our proprietary data and driving speed, accuracy and productivity across every corner of Equifax.
In the second quarter we delivered a very strong 16% new product Vitality Index leveraging the Equifax Cloud and EFX AI capabilities. New products based on differentiated proprietary data, including our TWN Indicator solution, continue to drive strong new product growth and share gains. We were energized to sign a definitive agreement two weeks ago to acquire Circulo de Credito, the fastest growing credit bureau in Mexico, for an enterprise value of $750 million with a very attractive EBITDA multiple of 9.4 times including run-rate synergies.
Turning to slide 5, Workforce Solutions revenue was up 7% and better than our expectations, principally in Verifier diversified markets, which grew 7%. EWS diversified market revenue growth was driven by outstanding performance in Talent Solutions and consumer lending, both up high double digits in the quarter. Talent Solutions continues to outperform the underlying white-collar labor market with strong growth in employment-based solutions and increased product penetration across our incarceration and education data sets.
New solutions built co-innovating with background screeners and pricing. Talent volumes were up mid single digits in the quarter relative to an overall market decline in the first two months of the second quarter. The team continues to execute very well. Consumer lending also had another very strong quarter with strong double-digit revenue growth across the portfolio in auto, card, and consumer finance, principally due to strong volume growth and new product rollouts.
As mentioned earlier, the EWS government team delivered an outstanding quarter, signing about $300 million in principally state customer agreements in the last four months including renewals, win-backs and new customer wins. This is a very strong performance and reflects the unique TWN position in government and strong commercial momentum post OB3 legislation that was signed last July. The contract signings were a positive and stronger than our expectations.
Second quarter government revenue was down about 4% and reflects a challenging comp from a large win in 2025. EWS mortgage revenue was up 8% in the quarter and continues to outperform underlying market volumes by high single digits from record growth, new products and pricing, and Workforce Solutions. EBITDA margins of 52.1% were consistent with the first quarter. However, margins were higher than we expected given strong operating leverage from better than expected diversified markets revenue performance.
TWN record additions continue to perform well again in the second quarter with strong 10% growth in active records, up to 217 million total records and 124 million total current active records, which were also up 10%, which represents 108 million unique SSNs. EWS has a long runway for record growth against the 250 million income-producing Americans. Turning to slide 6, in the first half we made outstanding progress with our government customers, converting our record commercial pipeline with renewals, extending existing relationships and adding new principally state government customers.
In the last four months, EWS signed agreements with state agencies for the provisioning of income and employment data from Equifax supporting CMS and SNAP totaling about $300 million in annual contract value, including about $100 million in new business and $200 million in renewals, an extremely strong result that will deliver some benefits in the second half but principally drive 2027 growth. These substantial contract signings, along with our current deal pipeline up about 2.2x versus last year, reinforces our confidence in the medium and long-term growth opportunities for EWS government at the federal level and in supporting states in meeting the new OB3 federal requirements regarding accuracy and frequency of income validation in Medicaid and SNAP. On slide 6 we provided examples of some of the recent government wins including An almost $60 million annual contract value win-back supporting a state in delivering CMS benefits. The win-back is a key proof point of the value of the TWN data relative to other sources of income verification data including state wage data and consumer-permissioned data. We're also seeing expanding opportunities with multiple federal agencies in support of their big focus on reducing improper payments. Equifax is serving as a key advisor at the federal and state level, leveraging our differentiated income and employment data to drive speed, accuracy, and productivity of social service benefits delivery.
The EWS team is clearly on offense supporting the states with their social service program requirements and has significant opportunities for long-term revenue growth supporting the federal and state programs in EWS. Big $5 billion TAM. Turning to slide 7, USIS second quarter revenue was up a strong 17% and up 6% excluding FICO, inconsistent with their long-term framework. This performance was delivered despite a weaker than expected U.S. mortgage market that I discussed earlier.
Diversified markets revenue grew 6%, accelerating over 300 basis points sequentially and slightly stronger than our expectations. B2B revenue was up 5% and also up over 300 basis points sequentially. Within online, we saw high single-digit growth in FI from stronger volumes, new business and pricing, and high single-digit growth in AUTO from pricing and new business wins. The strength in FI and AUTO was partially offset by weakness in third-party bureau sales from our sales to Experian and TransUnion consumer direct.
Our D2C business delivered continued strong growth with revenue up a very strong 11%. USIS mortgage revenue was up 40% and up mid single digits excluding FICO, with hard mortgage inquiries up only 1%. As I referenced earlier, mortgage rates were up from the levels we saw in April throughout most of the quarter, and as a result mortgage origination activity was lower in the second quarter than the levels we expected when we gave guidance back in April, partially offset by share gains in Pre-Qual and Pre-Approval products.
As a reminder, USIS began to deliver significant share gains in the second quarter of last year from both Pre-Qual and Pre-Approval products that included both the unique TWN indicator in our NC data. USIS EBITDA margins were 32.8% in the quarter. Excluding FICO, USIS EBITDA margins were 40.5% and up over 140 basis points versus last year, which was a very strong performance. The improvement was driven by stronger diversified markets revenue growth and good cost management.
Turning to Slide 8, in April, the FHFA activated use of VantageScore for over 20 mortgage lenders. This was a big milestone to bring score competition to the mortgage industry. While the vast majority of these mortgage lenders have begun using VantageScore, we have also seen a groundswell of VantageScore adoption with about 1,200 additional mortgage lenders pulling our free VantageScore alongside a paid FICO score from Equifax. On the left side of Slide 8, you can see that our second quarter VantageScore volume is up almost 3x compared to the first quarter.
The vast majority of the 2.2 million transactions were pulled by the 1,200 lenders pulling a free VantageScore alongside a paid FICO score as they drive their adoption of the new VantageScore opportunity. We also have about 100 mortgage lenders, principally smaller non-GSE lenders and lenders underwriting HELOCs or home equity loans, who have moved to exclusively utilizing VantageScore at our $1 price point for their mortgage originations. Although volumes remain low at about 10,000 transactions in the quarter, we saw significant acceleration as we moved through the tail end of the quarter.
And as a reminder, we make no margin on the sale of FICO scores. FICO mortgage scores revenue is about 50% of USIS mortgage revenue and almost 7% of total Equifax revenue, delivering zero margins. We continue to expect strong adoption of VantageScore given the substantial $1 billion annual cost savings opportunity for the mortgage originators and consumers. Equifax plans to maintain the $1 VantageScore price through the end of 2027 to continue driving VantageScore adoption with our customers.
The FHFA decision in July last July to allow mortgage score choice between VantageScore and FICO is a big win for consumers and for the industry. Turning to slide 9, international revenue was up about 4% in constant currency. International saw high single-digit revenue growth in Asia Pacific and mid single-digit growth in Canada. Latin America and Europe delivered low single-digit revenue growth in the quarter. International saw market headwinds in both Canada and the UK which dampened their growth rates.
In LatAm, we saw solid mid to high single-digit growth in our largest markets like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, with lower growth rates in some of our other smaller Latin American markets. International EBITDA margins were 27.6% in the quarter, up a strong 120 basis points versus last year. EBITDA margin improvements were driven by technology savings as the final stages of our cloud tech transformation gets completed and strong cost management. Moving to slide 10, two weeks ago Equifax signed a definitive agreement to acquire Círculo de Crédito for an enterprise value of $750 million.
This represents an 11.7 times EBITDA multiple based on Círculo's expected 2026 EBITDA. With the addition of expected run-rate savings, the EBITDA multiple is expected to be about 9.4 times, which is attractive and significantly below our current EBITDA multiple. We expect the Círculo acquisition to be completed in the fourth quarter, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, and for the acquisition to be accretive in year one.
Círculo is the fastest growing credit bureau in Mexico and the only credit bureau licensed to operate both a consumer and commercial credit bureau service. With more than 1,700 bank, retail, fintech and small business lending, microfinance and telecommunications customers, and importantly, 2 billion trade lines covering 80 million validated identities in Mexico, Círculo is a leader in alternative data, or information not included in traditional credit reports in Mexico, including gig economy transactions and utility payment history.
This alternative data can responsibly expand access to credit and support a more inclusive economy, critical in a country where nearly 33 million people are engaged in informal employment, such as unregistered microbusinesses or gig employment. This acquisition will offer Círculo customers access to Equifax's industry-leading cloud-native capabilities, decision and analytic platforms, and patented EFX AI technology, and award-winning identity protection and fraud prevention offerings for the development of solutions designed to help their customers grow and expand financial inclusion in Mexico.
The acquisition fits perfectly in our balanced capital allocation framework, with our focus on highly accretive bolt-on acquisitions while continuing significant ongoing return of capital to shareholders and maintaining our strong investment grade balance sheet. Turning to slide 11, Círculo's unique market position has delivered very strong financial results. Círculo's compound annual revenue growth rate was a very strong 23% from 2023 to 2025, with revenue growth for the 12 months ended June 30 up a very strong 31%.
Círculo revenue growth has been led by their unique alternative credit data advantage enabled by deep relationships with fintechs, with over 40% of Círculo's 2025 revenue generated from fintechs with a growth rate of over 50%. Círculo's unique alternative data and the team's strong relationships with their fintech customers are a key driver of future Círculo revenue growth. In a market where consumer credit is underpenetrated and growing rapidly, Círculo delivered very strong mid-40s adjusted EBITDA margins in both 2025 and over the last 12 months through June 30th.
For the full year of 2026, Círculo revenue is expected to grow high double digits while maintaining very strong mid-40s adjusted EBITDA margins. The very attractive Círculo financial results are accretive to the Equifax long-term financial framework of 7% to 10% organic revenue growth, consistent with our capital allocation plan and driving shareholder returns. Turning to slide 12, Equifax is executing a broad AI and agentic strategy that leverages EFX AI along with our cloud-native technology, our Ignite analytics platform and our scaled proprietary data to deliver higher-performing EFX AI-powered scores, models and products to our customers.
Equifax has a strong AI data moat around Equifax's unique and proprietary data, with over 90% of Equifax revenue generated from proprietary data sources included in over 100 unique data exchanges globally. These exchanges receive contributed proprietary data directly from the data owners that is not publicly available, such as our income and employment exchanges, credit exchanges, alternative credit data exchanges and other unique proprietary data assets.
Said differently, only Equifax and our credentialed customers can access our data. The use and protection of our data has another layer of moat from both the national and local laws that restrict the data's usage and by agreements with our contributors, including requirements regarding the accuracy and currency of this data and the requirement to provide consumers in the 24 countries in which we operate these exchanges with the ability to review and dispute the data managed in these unique Equifax exchanges.
For example, in the U.S., our EWS income and employment data, our broad credit and alternative credit data exchanges are not only governed by the agreements with the contributors but also by the U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act, or FCRA. The contributory nature of this proprietary data and the complex regulatory and contractual compliance requirements that govern our data, along with the coverage and historical data these exchanges contain, create the strong data moat around Equifax's proprietary data.
Through our industry-leading technology, EFX AI capabilities and proprietary data, Equifax is accelerating a strategy to utilize AI and agentic capabilities to improve our customers' ability to utilize Equifax data and advanced technology to improve their decisions. By incorporating more data and more effective AI-defined algorithms using patented capabilities that deliver explainable results to our customers, we are expanding from being a provider of data and analytics to being an essential partner for the AI-powered decision intelligence that our customers are driving.
We are realizing this vision through a growing suite of global EFX AI-enabled solutions. In the first half of the year, we rolled out 54 new products that leverage these EFX AI capabilities that drove our strong 16% Vitality Index. This includes the commercial launch of Ignite AI Advisor and Equifax IQ on our integrated Ignite analytics and InterConnect decisioning global platforms. Ignite AI Advisor is a multi-agent system that delivers AI-driven, real-time personalized insights and actionable recommendations delivered through our natural language user interface to our customers.
Lenders can ask questions through a generative AI chat, with complementary visual dashboard illustrations and dynamic charts and graphs. This enables our customers, particularly those with limited in-house data and analytics staff, to easily compare information, discover new trends and drive more informed decisions to drive their growth and returns. For example, we have customers identifying missed opportunities to capture business from existing customers who have loans with another bank or FI, and customers comparing payoff and paydown speeds against competitors to determine if their rates and terms are competitive to drive application conversions and growth for their business. This solution is now being used by U.S. customers in auto, personal loan and credit card to pinpoint new opportunities to improve their portfolio performance, and is expanding to Canada in the third quarter with further global expansion through the balance of 2026. Complementary to Ignite AI Advisor, Equifax IQ is a multi-algorithm AI system that allows customers to transition policy management from a manual, rigid process to an AI-driven, multidimensional optimization engine.
Equifax IQ uses EFX proprietary data and customer-contributed data to help our customers better understand new market opportunities, grow their business with the right customers, reduce fraud and confidently extend more credit. It also delivers portfolio overviews, delinquency analysis, affordability assessments, fraud identification and policy adjustments, while streamlining workflows for a seamless user experience. Our first implementations of Equifax IQ are helping customers across Latin America.
In Argentina, we established an advanced origination risk policy for a global vehicle manufacturer's entry into the financing market, evaluating banked and unbanked populations. Equifax IQ will expand to the U.S. and other regions globally as we move through the balance of the year and early in 2027. Ignite AI Advisor and Equifax IQ are great examples of the advantages derived from our global cloud-native infrastructure, which is structured for the rapid expansion of AI and agentic advancements globally.
These optimizations improve customers' processes and outcomes by improving analytical outcomes and more effectively using the breadth of data assets available to customers from Equifax. We believe our investments in EFX AI will drive our new product rollouts, share gains, revenue growth and margin expansion. I'm super energized about the momentum and pace of change and the big performance lifts from EFX AI in our product models and scores development for our customers.
Turning to slide 13, in the second quarter we delivered a very strong 16% New Product Vitality Index, leveraging the Equifax Cloud and EFX AI capabilities, which is above our 2026 Vitality Index goal of 15% and our 10% long-term framework. In the first half, over 50% of our new products have AI capabilities embedded in the product architecture which the customer directly interfaces with using LLMs. New products based on differentiated proprietary data, including our Twin Indicator solution for mortgage, continue to drive strong new product growth and share gains.
As discussed over the last few quarters, our only-Equifax Twin Indicator solutions in card, auto and personal loans are starting to see early customer interest for these unique solutions. And as a reminder, we're providing the Twin Indicator solutions in all those verticals at no cost in order to drive differentiation of our credit file and deliver share gains to Equifax. Turning to slide 14, we're also rapidly expanding the implementation of AI- and agentic-based solutions across our internal Equifax processes to improve operational speed, accuracy and productivity.
Agentic and AI-assisted process redefinition and improvement is occurring across operations, technology, product development and support functions, including HR, legal and finance. The pace of adoption is ramping very quickly and delivering big productivity lifts in every corner of Equifax. As you can see from the chart on the left side of the page, total gross labor spending at Equifax on both expense and capital is currently about $2 billion, or about 40% of total gross spending.
Of this amount, about 60% of our gross labor spend is within global operations and technology organizations, where we are seeing early and big gains from AI adoption as we continue to rapidly drive rollouts and adoption of AI tools and agents that are delivering meaningful process improvement. We now expect run-rate spending savings from these AI for EFX efforts to be about $150 million from 2026 to 2028, which is double the $75 million of savings we discussed with you in February.
These AI efficiencies are expected to improve our financial performance while providing increased capability to reinvest and further accelerate our AI and agentic deployments for speed, accuracy and productivity. The foundation of our rapid AI deployment is our new Equifax cloud-native architecture and our agentic AI development and management platform that is now in production broadly across Equifax, which enables efficient AI agent process development and management that is designed to ensure our agentic processes and capabilities fully comply with our extensive security and compliance requirements.
In operations, we are executing a rapid rollout of operational AI across our business units in our call centers and document processing operations. In USIS, we are rolling out conversational AI in call centers and already seeing big lifts in customer authentication and fulfillment rates, and AI-assisted processes have delivered decreases in back-office dispute handle times, which are delivering productivity. In technology, we're seeing early but big benefits in our software development, IT operations, cybersecurity and cloud cost optimization functions.
With our agentic platform, we have moved beyond pilots to autonomous agents operating core internal processes, built and run on a standardized, secure, agentic platform, with governance, human-in-the-loop checkpoints and model risk evaluation built in. We are super energized about the pace of our AI adoption inside Equifax, but we know that we are in the very early innings of our rollout. We are confident there is significantly more opportunity to both grow revenue and reduce costs as AI and analytics capabilities become fully embedded across Equifax. Now I'd like to turn it over to John to provide our third quarter and full year framework.
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Mark. Slide 15 provides the specifics of our 2026 full year guidance. We are holding our full year 2026 financial guidance on a reported basis to be unchanged from our April guidance. On a constant currency basis, we raised our guidance consistent with our second quarter revenue beat. The impact of weakening FX on our full year results offset our 2Q beat. Our second quarter performance was stronger than our guidance driven by very good performance in both EWS and USIS diversified markets.
Diversified Markets revenue growth at the midpoint is expected to be up high single digits for the year. The US mortgage market was slightly weaker than expected in the second quarter and has shown further weakening over the last several weeks as long-term interest rates have again increased. Our guidance reflects improved share performance in mortgage as well as continued good performance in diversified markets, offsetting the weakness in the US mortgage market.
US mortgage revenue is expected to be up just above 20% with mortgage market originations weaker and down low single digits. For your perspective as you determine your view of the 2026 US mortgage market, based on a review of Equifax data on mortgage home purchase issuances since early 2022, we estimate that there are over 16 million mortgages that were issued with an interest rate over 5%, including almost 15 million with rates over 6% and over 9.5 million with rates over 6.5%.
This provides a perspective on the pool of mortgages potentially available to refinance as mortgage rates change. Business unit revenue growth rates and EBITDA margin expectations are unchanged from our April guidance. This slide also includes additional detail on revenue growth rates and EBITDA margins excluding FICO Mortgage Score royalty pass-through revenue and expected BU revenue and EBITDA margins. We expect to deliver revenue growth of 7.2% to 8.4% excluding the impact of FICO mortgage royalties in 2026 within our long-term financial framework.
And we expect to grow EBITDA margins excluding the impact of FICO mortgage royalties by a strong 75 basis points, which is 25 points above our long-term framework. In 2026 we expect to deliver over $1 billion of free cash flow and a cash flow conversion of at least 100%. As we discussed in April, with EBITDA increasing to about $2.1 billion at the midpoint and strong free cash flow, this creates $1.5 billion in capital available in 2026 for M&A and return of cash to shareholders while maintaining debt leverage at under 3 times EBITDA.
As referenced earlier, this provides the capability for us to complete the Círculo de Crédito acquisition as planned in 4Q26 while still executing share repurchases in 2H26, although at lower levels than the $560 million and 3.1 million shares we repurchased in 1H26. Slide 16 provides the details of our 3Q26 guidance. In 3Q26 we expect total Equifax revenue to be between $1.68 and $1.71 billion, up almost 10% on a reported basis year to year at the midpoint.
Constant dollar revenue growth at the midpoint is up almost 9.5% excluding the impact of FICO mortgage scores. 3Q26 reported revenue is expected to be up about 7% at the midpoint. Diversified Markets revenue is expected to be up mid-single digits on a constant currency basis and up sequentially from second quarter, principally due to stronger EWS Diversified Markets growth. US mortgage revenue is expected to be up about 20%. EPS in 3Q26 is expected to be $2.15 to $2.25 per share, up about 8% versus 3Q25 at the midpoint.
Equifax 3Q26 EBITDA dollars are expected to be $547 to $564 million, up about 10% at the midpoint. EBITDA margins are expected to be about 32.8% at the midpoint of our guidance and, excluding the impact of FICO mortgage royalties, EBITDA margins in 3Q26 would be 34.6% to 35%, up over 90 basis points at the midpoint from our 3Q25 on the same basis. We believe that our full year and 3Q26 guidance are centered at the midpoint of both our revenue and EPS guidance ranges.
As a reminder, our guidance for 3Q26 and fiscal year 26 assumes Equifax will calculate and sell FICO scores for all mortgage credit transactions and there will be limited VantageScore revenue. As we move through 2026 and there is additional clarity on Vantage conversion and the FICO Direct License program, we will update our guidance to reflect the shift and opportunity for the mortgage industry, consumers and Equifax. Now I'd like to turn it back over to Mark.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Slide 17. Equifax had another strong quarter executing very well against our EFX 2028 strategic priorities. The new Equifax is leveraging the Equifax Cloud, EFX AI and proprietary data assets to accelerate innovation and help our customers grow. Our second quarter financial results are an excellent proof point of the broad-based Equifax operating model, including the strong 120 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion in the quarter. We have strong momentum as we enter the second half of the year.
EWS signed agreements principally with state agencies with a total ACV of about $300 million. We signed the highly accretive Círculo de Crédito acquisition and we doubled our AI for EFX productivity goal from $75 million to $150 million. Our strong execution and momentum in '26 sets us up for '27 and beyond. Given our strong free cash flow generation and cash conversion over 100% in 2026, we're also delivering on our commitment to return substantial excess free cash flow to shareholders.
In the first half of the year, we returned $560 million to shareholders, repurchasing 3.1 million shares, or about 2.5% of shares outstanding. In the second half, we can complete the Círculo de Crédito acquisition and continue share repurchases, although at a slower pace than we saw in the first half, while maintaining a strong investment grade balance sheet with leverage below 3x EBITDA. I'm energized about our broad-based performance, but even more energized about the future of the new Equifax.
And with that, operator, let me open it up for questions.
OPERATOR
Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. To offer as many questions as possible, we ask that you each ask one question and one follow-up.
Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Jeff Mueller with Baird. Please proceed with your question.
Jeff Mueller, Analyst at Baird
Yeah, thank you. So you were obviously calling out the tougher government year over year this quarter in advance of the true-ups and timing of the onboarding of the large contract. The bookings figures are kind of a new figure. Obviously we have the context of the overall size of the business, but it sounds good. Can you just comment maybe on if gross retention rates are still stable and high and if pricing integrity is holding as we think of kind of using the new business to kind of build on the future revenue.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, Jeff, thanks. You know, we telegraphed, I think, in the April call that our deal pipeline in government had been growing rapidly. I think we've been talking about that really for the last year and change since the new administration came into Washington. And with the OB3 passing, you know, in July last year, we just saw a real uptick in momentum around commercial activity. And that's continued. And our deal pipeline continues to be 2x over last year.
And we're starting to convert some of that pipeline, some of it faster than we thought. But we know that there was real momentum, which we talked about really in February and again in April. So we were pleased with the $100 million of new wins. So these are new principally state contracts that hadn't been doing business with Equifax before or not in the last couple of years, and then extensions and renewals of another $200 million. So great indicators of the real value of our solution in the marketplace, the commercial momentum in there around the value of our services being used.
As you know, there's a huge TAM here. To your question around pricing and commercial terms and activity, really no change. We are continuing to have really strong success in the government vertical. We've got a long runway for growth. We've got the right solution. As you know, we're investing in new products, you know, like the GIG solution we launched late last year that we're having some traction on. And then some of the new solutions we're starting to bring to market to address some of the new OB3 requirements, you know, around Medicaid and SNAP that principally benefit 2027.
So we remain quite bullish about the government vertical. We have talked in a couple of calls over the last year and change that, you know, in some cases we're using subscription agreements versus transactional agreements with some of our new customers. That's been something that helps them with their budgets at the state level in particular. So that's been a, you know, a positive for us. But, you know, we're quite enthusiastic and quite energized around the momentum in government and to, you know, land some large contracts.
We thought it was meaningful to share those with you because they're really going to benefit principally 2027. So it gives us a great, great momentum as we move towards next year. Very helpful.
Jeff Mueller, Analyst at Baird
And then on the VantageScore-only, the 100 VantageScore-only in mortgage, the lenders—I get it's only priced at a dollar at least through '27, so it wouldn't be big revenue dollars for you yet. But does that mean that those hundred are paying for VantageScore at this point? And can you contextualize if there's anyone sizable or what do they look like?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
No, they're not sizable yet. All of the mortgage customers that we have, which is really every mortgage customer, are focused on Vantage because of significant cost savings. As you know, the FHFA is still gating the agency mortgages, the number of lenders that can be utilizing Vantage. We expect that to increase as time passes, meaning the lenders are all engaging with FHFA about their interests of accessing Vantage. So we expect that momentum to continue as we move into third quarter and into the second half.
And, you know, as we pointed out in the prepared comments, we intend to, you know, keep our pricing at a dollar in 2027 to really continue to drive that engagement with our customers, but also, you know, giving them visibility now that they can count on Vantage as an attractive, you know, scoring solution along with our credit file for their mortgage underwriting going forward. But, you know, just maybe summarizing one more time, there's a lot of momentum here, you know, by the mortgage lenders, and we expect that activity to continue as we move into second half.
OPERATOR
Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tony Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.
Tony Kaplan, Analyst at Morgan Stanley
Thanks so much. I wanted to start with the government business also. You talked about some win-backs in the presentation. And so I was hoping you could maybe expand on the opportunity that you see for those win-backs and basically maybe thinking about 3Q for government. How are you looking on that? You know, especially based on—you have this really good pipeline but, you know, maybe some of that isn't, you know, flowing into the growth rate as quickly.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, yeah. So again, we were pleased, Tony—I hope you are too—with the commercial momentum in government. It was above our expectations, but we knew it was coming when you’ve got a deal pipeline that’s up 2x year over year. We’ve got a lot of discipline around our commercial pipelines. It was just a matter of time when those convert from pipeline to contracts. You’ll remember that if you go back to July of 2024, the Biden administration changed some of the Medicare cost savings.
And I think we were clear with you, really in the second half of ’24 and into ’25, that we were able to work with many of the states to resolve the challenges they had with their budgets with that kind of unexpected cost sharing that happened in 2024 where the states had to pick up incremental costs for the data that was used. And there were some states that couldn’t manage it, and they had to turn our solution off. And I think that’s kind of well discussed by us over the last year and change, and it was reflected in our P&L. We’re winning back some of those states, and I think it’s a great reflection of the value of the income and employment data that we deliver to social services at the state level. And there was a large one, which you can see on the slide there, that was included, that’s going to be on a run-rate basis, net new revenue for us—really principally late in the year, but really in 2027 is where that will benefit. As I said in my comments earlier, that kind of $100 million of ACV from new relationships and win-backs is principally benefiting 2027.
And then of course, there’s another $200 million of renewals, which means it stays in our run rate, which we were very pleased with. So the commercial activity is strong and we’re really pleased with the momentum and the setup we have for 2027 in government. And again, as a reminder, you’ve got a business that’s approaching $800 million of revenue in government in Workforce Solutions, but it’s operating against a $5 billion TAM. And again, a reminder that the OB3 requirements that were put in place in the July bill that was signed last year really go into effect late this year and in 2027.
And we expect that to be a catalyst for growth. And you’re seeing the $100 million is at least a piece of that, which will be positive for us as we get into the new year in 2027.
Tony Kaplan, Analyst at Morgan Stanley
Great. And then I wanted to ask about the 1,200 lenders that are using VantageScore with FICO. I guess I know you’re giving Vantage for free if someone is using FICO. So out of the 1,200, is there a way that—how many are testing, or are they just getting it and hopefully they’re testing it and will convert it?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
No, no, no, no. You should think about the 1,200 as all are testing their technology systems, their processes, their workflows. And we talked over the last year or so that this is a big change for the industry that’s been using one credit score for three decades almost. So that technology and process flow change was important. That’s why we made the decision last fall to offer a free VantageScore with every paid FICO score so our customers could test their tech, their product, as well as their other workflows.
So you should think about—and we think about—that 1,200 meaning lots of mortgage lenders are really preparing to use Vantage. As a reminder, as you know, the FHFA in April—their announcement, I think, was 22 or 23 lenders that were approved, and that’s only 22 or 23. We would expect that to increase moving forward because those 1,200 lenders, using that example, they all want to take advantage of the value—to get their share of that billion dollars’ worth of cost savings that’s available to them by using the VantageScore.
So we would expect that adoption to continue to grow as the FHFA opens up more lenders to be able to utilize the VantageScore in the actual loan origination versus FICO.
Tony Kaplan, Analyst at Morgan Stanley
Terrific. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Steinerman with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.
Alex Hess, Analyst at JPMorgan
Hi, this is Alex Hess on for Andrew. Just a couple points of clarification on the government ACV number. I think it was asked earlier, but what was the associated retention dynamic like? You know, were there—
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
$100 million is all new—new, new business for us versus think about 2026, meaning additive to our revenue and principally in ’27. So no, the $200 million is renewals of existing contracts. That’s in our revenue in ’26.
Alex Hess, Analyst at JPMorgan
Understood. So no churn of note, then. You know, just switching to mortgage. Mortgage revenues in USIS were up 60% in 1Q, up 40% in 2Q. Can you just sort of walk us through the bridge of that come down, if you will?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Sure. The biggest driver—obviously the mortgage market weakened, right, as you take a look at what occurred year over year. And we talked about that. We saw weakening as rates rise as you went through the second quarter. And also, in the second quarter of last year, we started gaining share in prequal. So we had a little more difficult comp because we had picked up some share that we hadn’t had in place in the first quarter of 2025. So those are two big drivers that are impacting why the overall growth rate is lower in the second quarter year over year—growth rate is lower in the second quarter versus the first.
Alex Hess, Analyst at JPMorgan
Understood. And then final clarification, please. You say VantageScore transactions were up roughly 3x to 2.2 million. How are you defining a transaction in this case for the quarter? What is a transaction in this?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
This is U.S. delivery of a VantageScore. So that’s effectively what they are.
Alex Hess, Analyst at JPMorgan
Yeah, thank you so much.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes in line of Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Please proceed with your question.
Shlomo Rosenbaum, Analyst at Stifel
Hi, thank you very much for taking my questions. Barr, can you talk a little bit more about the twin indicator and the progress you’re seeing in auto and credit card? Are you seeing more evidence of volume shifts and just anything maybe quantitative that you can point to that, hey, this could be a longer-term game changer?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, it’s still earlier days in those verticals. We’re further deployed, as you know, in mortgage because we launched that really last summer/fall when we launched it in mortgage. And we really only launched in auto, card, and P-loan in the early parts of 2026. The response from customers is super strong. They see real value—the same value we talked about in a marketing funnel in a mortgage application process where you’re really blind to the income or whether the applicant is working because you only have credit data historically.
Now the addition of that twin indicator that shows that, you know, Mark’s working and what my compensation was in the prior year, the last 12 months, and that I work for—in my case—Equifax, is really valuable. It’s the same case in an auto loan. An auto marketing funnel is quite similar. The auto dealer or the digital transaction in auto—they’re trying to figure out, is this an applicant that I’m going to be able to get to a closing of an auto loan and how can I differentiate from those that don’t close versus the information that I’ll have, including the income and employment data from Equifax with the twin indicator really gives them a leg up in managing their marketing funnel. Same in a personal loan process—that’s typically digital, although some are physical, but the bulk is digital—same process. And then in card, it just gives the ability to give a larger credit line, which typically will result in a higher take rate from the consumer. And with the addition of income, you can actually do a lower interest rate, which will drive pipeline conversion. So we’re energized about that rollout.
There’s not a lot of share shift happening yet, but a lot of really strong commercial discussions happening in those auto, card, and P-loan verticals. So we’re energized about that momentum, and we’ll continue to drive that engagement with our customers in the second half.
Shlomo Rosenbaum, Analyst at Stifel
And then just shifting back to that VantageScore discussion, FICO is reducing the cost of, like, the 10T to like a buck by putting in a really big success fee at the other end of the transaction. And given your experience with the mortgage market, do lenders look at that as a straight-through pass-through that they don’t care about, or is that something that—a success fee at the other end—is something that weighs on the consumer and they actually do care about that?
I’m just trying to understand, does the $1 make it comparable, or is it really still not comparable in the eyes of the people that are going to be buying this?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
I think it’s the latter. We don’t hear or see any traction on that. It’s one that—the success fee thing is something FICO has been talking about for about a year. There’s nothing really happening in the marketplace on it. And I think the point you raised around the consumer is an excellent one because the consumer—there’s a RESPA regulation around mortgage originations. It’s legislation in the United States that mortgage originators have to follow.
And basically it means that they have to treat the consumer fairly with regards to services that they purchase for them and then charge the consumer for. So the idea of charging that consumer $66 for a credit score, which is what FICO is proposing with their closed-loan pricing, versus a dollar with a VantageScore, or $10 with today’s FICO score pricing, just doesn’t make a lot of sense, which is why there isn’t a lot of traction there. And I know you know this, but we don’t see any path where this really makes a lot of sense, either commercially or from a regulatory, legislative, legal standpoint.
And we just don’t see any traction on it. So we’re focused on really supporting our customers with the $1 Vantage. I think, as we said earlier, we’re going to continue that pricing in 2027 to give our customers visibility around how we’re trying to support them in credit scoring and driving credit score competition. And we think that’s going to help drive adoption and conversion to Vantage in the mortgage space as we go through the second half and move into 2027.
Shlomo Rosenbaum, Analyst at Stifel
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mana Patnaik with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.
Mana Patnaik, Analyst at Barclays
Thank you. Good morning. I guess we’re just looking for a little bit more help on the way government kind of flows through for the rest of the year and into ’27. I mean, the pipeline and the backlog, all that makes sense for the growth in ’27. But I guess you’ve grown about 5% in the first half of this year, so just trying to appreciate how it ends and then how quickly all this new business renews, rolls into in ’27 as well.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
The ’27 new business rolls in quite quickly, as I think we said—much of it’s driven off some of the OB3 changes. But the $100 million of new business is 2027 ACV run rate and would be principally in that run rate early in 2027.
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. In terms of second half, we’re expecting government to return back to growth, and we’ll start to see some of the benefits—a small amount—from these new contracts start to flow through. So again, the wins, as Mark said, are really a strong indicator of the strength of the solution and how we think it’s going to drive growth as we get not so much through the back half of this year, although we will see growth in the back half of this year, but really as you get into 2027.
Mana Patnaik, Analyst at Barclays
And beyond and sorry, when you mean return to growth, are we saying similar to the 5% in the first half or less?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
We haven't given a specific number, but you're going to start, you'll see government growth again as we go through the second half.
Mana Patnaik, Analyst at Barclays
Okay, got it. And then John, similarly on the mortgage inquiry assumption, I think low single digits technically was unchanged. So just trying to appreciate if there's a range within which you want to guide us to on the low single digits and I think you mentioned you offset that with share gains. Is that correct or did I misread that incorrectly?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
So sir, I think you're talking about originations and yeah, we continue to expect to see originations to be down low single digits. Obviously that's a range and effectively we're indicating we're going to be lower in the range of low single digits than we indicated before and we do expect to continue to win share gains, principally in soft pulls as we go through the rest of this year. We think the team's making great progress. Mark answered a question earlier about twin indicator and the progress we're making there and that's really driving the benefit.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Said differently. Manav, I want to make sure that we're getting the right response to you on the mortgage. Our view of the mortgage market, it definitely weakened from April as rates continued to stay high and actually increased a bit in May and June and we expect that to continue. It's hard to see that what's happening in the Middle East is going to be resolved and then inflation is going to come down and then, you know, rates are going to come down.
So, you know, our guide in the second half is kind of at the very low end of that low single digit, you know, kind of market outlook for the second half.
Mana Patnaik, Analyst at Barclays
Okay. Thank you. Appreciate that.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Afaiza Alweit with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.
Afaiza Alweit, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
Yes, hi. Thank you. Good morning. I first wanted to ask about talent. Like you've seen really strong growth there in the quarter, quarter and I'm curious, sort of is that sustainable, sort of what's driving that growth?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Well, we saw very good growth in talent in both the first and the second quarter and they've done an outstanding job both of continuing to grow penetration in VOE, and so verification of employment, but also to continue to drive penetration in education and then the other incarceration type of activities that we're also able to provide data on. So really good performance by the team, continuing to expand their presence and grow their penetration across background screeners generally.
And we do expect them to consistently outperform the underlying hiring market and they've obviously done that to a very wide degree in the first two quarters of this year. I can't tell you that they're going to grow at this rate consistently going forward because obviously outgrowing the market by the amount we did in the second quarter is larger than our long term guidance. But we expect them to continue to perform well and then consistent with the strong outperformance relative to the market that we've indicated, we should deliver long term.
Afaiza Alweit, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
Okay, great. And then just to follow up on the government vertical. So I think you talked about flat growth in the second quarter and it ended up being a little bit weaker than what you had indicated. So I'm curious what led to that and I guess relatedly, I'm assuming that it has to do with the usage. And so as you're signing these new contracts, are these all fixed subscription based contracts or is there a usage element to this where you could have upside downside based on what type of usage or hits you end up getting?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. So in terms of the specific performance in the second quarter, the team, as Mark said, performed extremely well in signing new agreements and renewing agreements. The timing of those is sometimes hard to predict and some agreements that we had expected that would close in the quarter actually closed just after the quarter ended and it impacted some of the revenue delivery that would have occurred in quarter and that's really the big driver of what happened in the second quarter relative to our expectations.
It's not material on a go forward basis for the business because again, they performed extremely well in signing new agreements. As Mark already mentioned, we are seeing an increase in the percentage of time that customers want to go to subscriptions because it makes it easier for them to budget. But not all contracts certainly are for subscriptions. We still have a significant number of contracts that are signed that are usage based. And you'll continue to see a mix of that, although we would expect to see probably the mix of contracts that are subscription based to grow over time.
OPERATOR
All right, thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Nicholas with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
Andrew Nicholas, Analyst at William Blair
Hi, good morning. Appreciate you taking my questions. I wanted to circle back to the AI cost savings that you increased this quarter. Obviously only been a couple months since the $75 million number. So I'm just curious, kind of what has specifically changed or what are you most kind of excited about or incrementally excited about versus last quarter and relatedly, how much, if anything, of those savings are already in the expense base or the run rate now?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. So back in February we put out the $75 million of savings from AI. And you may remember we talked about that being principally from our operations team. Think about our call centers and paper processing centers, which are a meaningful part of our cost structure. That was where we started with AI deployment. In that operation, we've had really strong success of accelerating some of the AI agent deployment. We've got AI agents starting to take calls.
We've got AI agents really managing a lot of the massive paper that we bring into the operation. So that pace of deployment and pace of productivity has really just moved rapidly. So that's a piece of the increase from 75 to $150 million. And then we also said to you that we've been deploying AI capabilities across the rest of Equifax. Technology is a very large part of our cost structure and capex structure. We've had really strong momentum in deploying AI capabilities for coding or, you know, code development, where we have large portions of our code development now being done by agents and managed by our team, you know, the QC elements of that.
So, you know, that's been moving very, very rapidly. And that's a piece of that increase from 75 to 150 million. And then in our kind of G&A functions, when you think about Finance, Legal, HR, we've also seen great deployment there in Legal, Finance, HR, so we're seeing productivity opportunities there. So we thought the time was right to increase it from 75 to 150 million. As stated, it's between this year in 27 and 28. So it's multi-year in nature.
You're seeing in 2026, you know, a piece of that benefit in our margin performance, which is extremely strong. You know, if you look at the margin performance, you know, for the quarter we were up 120 basis points. That's versus our normal, you know, kind of 50 basis point operating leverage that we get from our 7 to 10 organic revenue growth. Think 7% in the quarter. So you're seeing those AI productivity and cost savings benefits show up in 26.
And, you know, we wanted to give some visibility that it's moving quite rapidly. You know, AI is real at Equifax, you know, for sure. You know, we've been talking for the last couple of years around how AI is changing the kind of product scores and models we bring to market, our investments that we're making in our AI technology or explainable AI technology to really advance our product innovation. We talked about in the call that, you know, over 50% of our products that we delivered in the quarter now include AI capabilities or agents inside of them.
And then, you know, back to the point of your question, you know, really late last year we started, you know, as we completed the cloud, really started deploying AI, you know, inside Equifax. We call it AI4EFX. That's our kind of project team focus inside of the company. And as I said, operations was the first focus. And now we're really seeing great momentum in tech and the rest of the company. So we're energized to see those benefits will come forward not only this year, but also in 27 and 28.
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
And just specifics. So on the $2 billion gross labor spending, just so you have perspective, about 80% is expense, about 20% is capital. So the savings would impact both expense and capital. And as Mark said, the savings for 2026 are in the guide.
Andrew Nicholas, Analyst at William Blair
Got it. That's helpful. And maybe just I'll stick with the AI theme. Appreciate the operating expense efficiency, appreciate kind of the embedding of AI in a lot of your products. But I think I asked a similar question last quarter. I'm just curious, since it's all moving pretty quickly, have you noticed a change on the demand side? Like, are your clients actively pursuing your data on a more frequent basis? Are they particularly interested in AI-infused products? Just wondering if kind of the maturation of this cycle at the lender level is impacting the way that they demand your data, how they get it and how often they use it.
Thank you.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, it's all of the above. And I think you raised a really important point that every one of our customers are doing versions of what we're doing, meaning they're changing their operations, they're embedding AI in their workflows, and there's different pace of implementation with every customer, some more advanced, some moving quickly, et cetera. I would make the point that this is changing rapid, you know, and I think the productivity piece that we talked about inside of Equifax of, you know, just in a six month period, our outlook for the benefits from AI in our operations, think operations, tech and our support functions, you know, doubling in six months, that's kind of the pace of, you know, adoption is really quite remarkable. You know, to me, from a customer perspective, you know, there's no question that they're becoming more AI enabled, you know, and how they want to take, you know, access our solutions. What is really driving our top line and really driving our competitive advantage is our ability to deliver higher performing solutions using our AI capabilities. So think about a score that delivers higher performance, you know, and we've talked about that before, you know, and whether you're AI enabled or not, if you're a customer and you have the ability to approve more consumers at a lower loss rate because you've got a higher performing score that Equifax is delivering, which is powered by AI and generally includes a lot more data elements, which is part of the foundation that we have, meaning we have more differentiated data, that's a solution they want to buy whether they're AI enabled or not. So I think that's kind of the commercial activity is we are investing to have higher performing scores, models and products. And remember, what we principally sell to our customers is ROI.
So that's kind of the forefront of where we've been investing for the last couple of years in products. And then the, you know, kind of the enabler that comes with that is the investments we're making in Ignite and our other, you know, enabling tools that our customers use to access our tools and, you know, AI enabling those with agents in them that make them conversational with our customers. That's kind of another gear, you know, around the engagement with our customers.
But it starts with, you know, performance, you know, are you able to deliver a product that's going to deliver more ROI, you know, to your customers? And that's where our AI focus is on, in our products, models and scores. And we are seeing rapid, rapid adoption, some in pilots, some more extensively, of AI Advisor. Right. And it's our most advanced solution and customers are starting to utilize it already.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ashish Sabhadra with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
Ashish Sabhadra, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets
Thanks for taking my question. If you don't mind, I'll ask another question on government. Historically, except for last year, government revenue are sequentially flat from 2Q to 3Q. Is that a similar cadence that we should expect before we see a step up in sequential revenue into 4Q?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. So again, I think we were asked earlier do we expect to see growth in the second half in government? And we do. Right. And I think that's probably as far as we're going to go on specific guidance on government or specific guidance by line of business. But we're expecting to see growth in government in the second half and, as Mark said, with the $100 million of new contracts and $200 million of renewals, some of which include expansions, we would expect to see accelerating growth as we go into next year.
Ashish Sabhadra, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets
That's very helpful color. And maybe just on the diversified market, the guidance for 3Q was up mid-single digit. That's a modest slowdown compared to 2Q. I was just wondering, is that just conservatism? Any particular puts and takes that you can call out as we think about the diversified market growth for the rest of the year?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Thanks. Now, I think diversified markets, we're expecting to be pretty much consistent with what we saw in the second quarter. Right. So I think we were very happy with the performance we saw in diversified markets in the second quarter. We saw very good performance, and particularly USIS, as their diversified markets growth improved by 300 basis points. We're expecting nice performance by USIS. Again, EWS will see good improvement obviously as government growth improves meaningfully as we go into the second half.
And we're expecting to see better growth out of International as well. So no, I think we're expecting to see good performance in the third quarter in diversified markets and at least consistent with what we saw in the second quarter.
Ashish Sabhadra, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets
That's very helpful.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Haas with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.
Jason Haas, Analyst at Wells Fargo
Hey, good morning and thanks for taking my questions. When you give us the ACV bookings for government, the $100 million, are we supposed to take that and divide that by the $800 million of government revenue to imply, like, I don't know, low double-digit growth for government for 2027? Is that the right framework to show that you're confident getting back to that low double-digit plus growth for government next year?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Thanks. We're not obviously giving guidance for 2027 yet. We'll do that at the right time early next year. We thought it was prudent, you know, given the—you know, we told you on our last call in April that we saw the pipeline over the last year grow dramatically, which we expected, but it was stronger than we anticipated. And, you know, having this meaningful pipeline conversion, you know, we thought it was meaningful to share with you, so we did that this morning.
The $200 million of renewals are in the kind of base run rate and there's some expansions in there. The $100 million is new revenue versus 2026. You know, there'll be some of that small amount in the second half, but it'll be principally in 2027, which is really how we thought about government unfolding as we move into, you know, '27 and beyond. We still have a, you know, a strong degree of confidence, and that's actually reinforced by the commercial pipeline and by the pipeline conversion of the $100 and the $200.
You know, when we think about government in '27 and beyond, there's just a long runway to grow into that big $5 billion TAM, and, you know, we're seeing some real success as reflected in the $100 million of new business.
Jason Haas, Analyst at Wells Fargo
Great, got it. Okay, that makes sense. And then I want to follow up on the EWS margins. So I know nothing's changing and the margins are guided flat for this year. But just conceptually I'm trying to understand why that is. Because it sounds like you're getting some good AI benefits to your cost structure. We're certainly seeing that in the ex-FICO USIS margins which are going to expand this year. So what's the offset? Is it investment in the business?
Is it because you're selling more, like, you know, incarceration and other records that maybe makes the business lower? Like, just conceptually, why aren't those margins going higher this year?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, so we've been clear that, you know, look, 50-plus percent EBITDA margins are pretty unusual and quite attractive. And EWS has been delivering those for, I don't know, a decade. As long as I've been at Equifax, they've had those kind of 50-plus percent EBITDA margins. And when we think about our long-term framework, we've always thought about maintaining that 50-plus percent EBITDA margin. And by doing that, we want to keep reinvesting inside of EWS to really drive that above 7 to 10.
We think that they're going to grow over the long term low double digits, driving that very high top line with those attractive margins. That's how we think about the business. It's a place we want to keep investing in. And yes, they are getting some of those AI productivity savings. We're investing those to keep that top line growth moving. And then when you think about overall Equifax, they're growing faster than the rest of Equifax with those higher EBITDA margins.
That's one of the drivers of the 50 basis points of base operating leverage that we have over the long term. And then in 2026 you're seeing strong outperformance of that 50 basis point long-term frame for operating margin expansion principally from AI productivity that we've already talked about, the $75 million, which is now $150 million accreting into that margin. So that's how we think about the overall framework going forward. We should see strong margin expansions in USIS and International and Corporate, and we want to maintain those 50%, you know, EBITDA margins—I'm sorry, 50%-plus EBITDA margins—in the future at EWS.
Jason Haas, Analyst at Wells Fargo
Okay, great. That makes sense. Thank you very much.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kyle Peterson with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question.
Kyle Peterson, Analyst at Needham & Company
Hey. Morning, guys. Thank you for taking the questions. I want to start off on the consumer lending business. Seems like that was a notable area of strength you guys called out, and good to see the momentum there. I want to see how much of that is either strength with the banks—I know some of the card issuers and stuff have gotten a little more into that—versus are you guys gaining some share in fintech, or is it a little bit of both? Just wanted to get more color there.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, it's really all of the above and I think USIS had some strong momentum in the quarter. You know, we talked about, like, TWN indicator—like a lot—look at the vitality index, a lot of new products. USIS is, you know, above 10% vitality in the quarter. So, you know, that's a positive that we've got more solutions that they're bringing to market. The end markets are solid, you know, outside of mortgage, which is a positive. And then, you know, we talked about the fact that we had very strong growth in EWS where the TWN data is used in auto, card, and personal loan—performed very well.
We're seeing stronger adoption there because of the value of the combination of credit data with income and employment data. So that's been a positive momentum. And with USIS Online, we saw very good performance. The good news is right across the portfolio, very good performance in auto, strong performance online in FI, actually nice performance in Telco as well—good growth there. And we're seeing improving growth in insurance. The only place we saw some weakness is in our sales where we actually sell to our two competitors—our D2C business.
But other than that, we had very strong performance across the board in USIS Online.
Kyle Peterson, Analyst at Needham & Company
Great. Really. Thanks for the color there. And then maybe a follow-up, kind of shifting back to some of the AI discussions. Good to see the savings and efficiency gains there moved up dramatically, but the cash flow conversion seems like you guys are able to reiterate that. There's been a lot of discussion on AI investments and paybacks and CapEx commitments and such. How are you guys thinking about this conceptually in terms of initial investments, payback periods, and such in terms of deploying AI within Equifax?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, we're seeing very high returns and ROIs on our AI investments. So it's very positive. It's really—you know, I don't know how to describe it with enough enthusiasm—meaning the pace of adoption by Equifax, our organization, is something I haven't seen before, meaning the ability to do it. So very high ROIs, and $150 million really reflects our expectation of the investments we'll make in the AI tokens and tools and agents that will be used to deliver that.
And we're still optimizing that, meaning it's still early days. Think about it. A year ago we weren't talking about this, we weren't doing it. So it's really quite remarkable how rapidly we—and I think the world—are deploying these kind of capabilities. And we're being very disciplined, as we are with all of our investments, around returns and expectations on paybacks, because we want to make sure we're deploying it smartly. But we're also driving real engagement here across every corner of Equifax to look at the opportunities to deploy it.
And I think, as you pointed out, in the matter of six months, to have our outlook really double on the capabilities is just a reflection of how we're rapidly deploying it. And we think we're really benefiting heavily by the fact that we rebuilt onto a cloud platform over the past five years. Our data has already been built in a standard data fabric to make it easier for agents and AI to access it. Yes. There's additional investments that have to be made to make it easier specific for AI.
But we had made a lot of progress on that just from the cloud migration. Same thing can be said around the way we built our agentic platform that everybody can use. Right. Effectively, because we're working on standard Google tools, we can implement those capabilities, we think, much more simply and rapidly than others can because our infrastructure is very modern and built on those cloud-based services already. So we feel like, yes, there's certainly been investment.
We've been able to contain it inside the numbers that we told you we would spend in 2026, and we feel like we're addressing very, very rapidly, I think specifically because of the fact that we have a very modern cloud-based infrastructure to start with.
Kyle Peterson, Analyst at Needham & Company
Great. Really appreciate the color. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kevin McPhee with UBS. Please proceed with your question.
Kevin McPhee, Analyst at UBS
Great, thanks so much. Can you give us a sense of what type of mortgage rates you've got embedded in the second-half guidance relative to what it was in the initial '26 guidance?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Yes. So right now what we have embedded in the guidance is current mortgage rates. Right. And we actually do that in every earnings release. So we would use the February rates in February and we would have used the April rates in April. I think they're up on the order of 30 to 40 basis points—we can get to that exact number—between April and now. So that's really what we've seen occur, why we're seeing a slowdown in mortgage, and we're using current run rates and current rates.
Kevin McPhee, Analyst at UBS
And then just, you know, when you talk about the AI implementation across the expense structure going to, I guess, that slide 14.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I think we're going to where we're seeing the momentum so far and where we have our largest cost basis, which is really in operations, and tech is larger than operations. But I said earlier that finance, HR, legal, even the commercial team is using AI tools now to prepare for meetings with customers. So we're definitely doing it across the board. Conceptually, we don't think about reducing our commercial resources. We think that that's always going to be something we're going to want to invest in, but we want to AI-enable them to be more effective on how they go to market.
But, you know, we're seeing really AI deployment across every corner of Equifax.
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
And efficiencies in G&A are included in the 150 million, just as Mark said, not marketing and sales. That's an area we're investing in.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes in line of Sarinda Finn with Jeffries. Please proceed with your question.
Sarinda Finn, Analyst at Jefferies
Thank you. Mark, when you think about the savings that you've been generating through the use of AI tools and reinventing some of those workflows, are some of those costs sustainable if AI costs were normalized? I think there's a lot of debate out there about...
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
We think so, yeah.
Sarinda Finn, Analyst at Jefferies
Well, I guess what I would add here is one of the disappointments, I think, with cloud has been that the hyperscalers have constantly been raising pricing such that, I guess, the users of cloud never truly realized the savings that they were promised. I'm just wondering if you get these normal savings.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
We did. We clearly saw the cloud savings. Again, you think about cloud savings versus our legacy mainframe. We think that was a successful investment, that we delivered the returns on that one. When it comes to AI, you know, we are seeing the ability, you know, to really access the AI tools that are available that we're using and deliver, you know, very meaningful ROIs, you know, to drive, you know, the cost savings. And we're being very disciplined and deliberate around how we roll out tokens, how we manage the tokens to deliver ROI.
And we're seeing returns, you know, so I think we wouldn't have gone from 75 to 150 million if we're not. And, you know, to your question, yeah, we think they're sustainable given the scale of the benefits that can be delivered there. And cloud cost management is a discipline that we think we're very good at. And we think it extends very directly into AI and token management. And we're already managing it in that way using the same discipline. So we feel good about our ability to manage this going forward.
And it's not only a financial discipline, it's a technical discipline. It's how do you change your applications to make them more efficient? We think we'll be able to do the same thing around AI and the models we choose.
Sarinda Finn, Analyst at Jefferies
That's helpful. And then when, I guess, just turning to mortgage and maybe when looking at prequal and kind of the ongoing movement from three bureaus to kind of one-bureau pulls by lenders, I guess that would suggest that they're, you know, they're quite sensitive to the current costs. So is the goal here that you think you can take the majority of the market share in prequal or, given that your incremental costs of delivery are quite negligible, would you actually consider moving to a loan close fee where it's just all you can eat up front?
I know you've talked about RESPA, but what would be the downside of moving to that model?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
We don't think that's the model we want to move to, nor does the industry want to move to that. We already maybe covered that earlier. I want to clarify, you said the move from 3B to 1B. There's no move underway there. And I think you may have seen, you know, maybe 45 days ago the HUD statement that, you know, 3B is here to stay, you know, in their loan originations and, you know, we think the industry is very aligned around the power of 3B because of the differences in the credit files.
With regards to prequal and preapproval, you know, we definitely want to try to grow our share there and that's why we're trying to differentiate our solution. And remember, you know, we're using two unique levers to Equifax. You know, one is the Twin Indicator for free on our mortgage prequal, preapplication credit file, and we want to do that to drive share. We've seen some share gains in the second half of last year and, you know, the first half of this year, and we expect some of those to continue.
And then we're also delivering with our mortgage credit file our cell phone utility attributes for free to differentiate. That's a big data set for us. It provides a lot more credit data in the mortgage credit file than our competitors can. So that's another advantage for Equifax and those are all to differentiate ourselves going forward. So we are super pleased to have the assets that we have, and now with the cloud behind us, we can deliver those to our customers in a way that can differentiate our credit file solution to drive those share gains.
Sarinda Finn, Analyst at Jefferies
Got it. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Curtis Nagle with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.
Curtis Nagle, Analyst at Bank of America
Great. Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe, John, just a quick one for you. Just talk about the flow-through of the EBITDA margin through the second half. I think there's a bit of a step down in 3Q and then a reacceleration sequentially implied for 4Q. So maybe just walk through the puts and takes there and then a follow-up.
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. So for the full year, again, we're indicating that we're going to deliver EBITDA margin growth of 75 basis points or higher. We feel very good about that—much higher than our 50 basis point long-term model. And I think in the third quarter we're still talking about growth even well above that 75 basis points, on the order of 90 basis points. So we feel great about what we've done year to date. We feel good about the guide for the third quarter, and we believe we're being consistent with what we talked about full year in terms of being able to deliver very strong EBITDA margin growth ex-FICO, again at north of 75 basis points for the full year. So we feel good about our margin expansion. As Mark's already said, some of that is being driven by AI benefits. But in 2026, those aren't that large yet, and they're going to accelerate as we go through 2027 and 2028 with the increased level of 150 million that we announced today.
Curtis Nagle, Analyst at Bank of America
Okay. And then just going back to 200 million in renewals, I guess any stats you'd be able to give in terms of, I don't know, rate of improvement or change in renewal rate compared to some of the priorities?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Renewal rate, very, very high. Very, very high. So you think about that as something that is super high and it's a big number. So when we made a decision to share the new business, which we typically don't do, but it's such a sizable number, we wanted to share the $100 million and we opted to share also the renewal rate—similar pricing, similar structure. There's not like changes happening there. It just reinforces the market presence and the market position that our unique Twin solution has.
And again, as a reminder, I think investors sometimes forget this: there's a long runway here, meaning you've got $5 billion of potential customer relationships, and we're at 800 million and heading towards that 5 billion with 100 million of incremental new contract signings that we shared this morning.
Curtis Nagle, Analyst at Bank of America
Okay. All right, appreciate it. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from line. Reyna Kumar with Oppenheimer and Company. Please proceed with your question.
Reyna Kumar, Analyst at Oppenheimer & Co.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Just I want to better understand your appetite for more acquisitions here. And, like, you know, if you do have an appetite, which areas do you expect your M&A efforts to be focused on going forward?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Sure. And I think we've been very clear, you know, since I've been at Equifax that, you know, we're super disciplined around bolt-on M&A. We're looking for, you know, businesses like Circulo is a great example—unique opportunity to enter the Mexico market. Really fast-growing market, fits with our international strategy, kind of a market leader, super attractive growth. You know our financial criteria for bolt-on M&A is to buy businesses that are accretive to our 7% to 10% long-term growth rate.
Circulo checks that box as an example—accretive to our margins, you know, their mid-40s EBITDA margins are clearly accretive—and then, you know, deliver shareholder value, meaning we bought it well, after synergies, the nine and a half or 9.4 times multiple. And when you think about where we want to buy, we're also very clear that international platforms is one. And as you know, a couple years ago we bought Boa Vista in Brazil to enter the Brazilian market.
We bought Circulo to Credito, the leader in Dominican Republic, and now Circulo. I'm sorry, we bought the number one player in Dominican and now Circulo in Mexico. So international platforms are a priority. Strengthening Workforce Solutions is another one. And as you know, we've been quite acquisitive there. We bought Apris Insights. It's been a really successful acquisition for us—high returning with the incarceration data. So that was a real win there.
And we've done, you know, I think six or so, maybe seven over the last five years, acquisitions to strengthen our employer business, whether it's around WOTC or I-9 kind of solutions. Vault Verify that we bought in November is an example of that. So number two is strengthening our fastest-growing, highest-margin business, Workforce Solutions. Number three is unique proprietary data assets that add to our data moat. We've done a number of acquisitions there, principally in USIS, with the acquisition of PayNet on commercial data, DataX and Teletrack.
So we want to continue finding unique data assets that are alternative to the credit file. So that's a third priority. And number four is identity and fraud. And our sizable acquisition we did a number of years ago was Kount. That's been a very positive acquisition for us in that fast-growing vertical. So those are the four kind of swim lanes that we think about bolt-on M&A. And as you know, we were very clear last April when we rolled out our capital allocation plan after the cloud completion that we're going to use our excess free cash flow to do this bolt-on M&A—like a Boa Vista, like an Apris Insights, like a Circulo accredito in Mexico—and then our excess free cash flow, you know, we're going to use to buy back stock. And we've been very aggressive in our eyes, buying back stock—a billion six over the last year, 500 million in the fourth quarter, 300 million in the second quarter. So with our growing top line, with our growing margin expansion, and our very high cash conversion, we have substantial excess free cash flow after capex and dividend to do the bolt-on M&A and return substantial amounts to our investors going forward.
And as we said on the Circulo call, we expect in 2027 to have a similar, slightly larger capacity of a billion plus of excess free cash flow after dividend and capex, and then debt capacity or leverage because our EBITDA we expect to grow another billion five, just like the billion five we have this year, for bolt-on M&A and returning cash to shareholders through buyback.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from line of Kelsey Hsu with Autonomous Research. Please proceed with your question.
Kelsey Hsu, Analyst at Autonomous Research
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Any thoughts around the timeline for full-scale implementation for both VantageScore and FICO 10T? We'd also love to get your latest expectation around VantageScore adoption rate in mortgage by the end of '26 and '27.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, 10T you should talk to FICO about. I don't think we have a really strong perspective on that. I think that's going to take time would be kind of my assessment. I think the Vantage conversion, you know, is probably a reflection that, you know, the 10T change is going to be, you know, challenging, meaning it takes time to do it. On Vantage we're seeing strong momentum. Just as a reminder, it's only really a few months ago that the FHFA opened up the gates for Vantage adoption.
It's still being gated to 20 plus lenders. We would expect that to increase, but the momentum is quite strong. So it's hard to handicap how quickly the agencies are going to, you know, start allowing more lenders to deliver, you know, you know, underwrite mortgages using agency mortgages using Vantage. But we expect that to continue going forward. The billion dollar cost savings is a big number and when we meet, when I meet with mortgage originators, they're well aware of that opportunity for them.
They're under really meaningful margin and cost pressures in the current mortgage environment. So it's something that, you know, is on their radar screen. And I think, you know, a reflection of the growing number of lenders that are taking our free VantageScore to just, you know, make sure their process flows and technology is operating is a great indicator that, you know, there's going to be conversion going forward. I would remind you and others that are still on the call that, you know, whether it's Vantage, you know, full conversion or FICO stays forever, it doesn't change our business model.
You know, we get a small amount, it's, you know, it's not small but, you know, on full Vantage conversion, it's 40 to 50 million of incremental margin. But if FICO stays there forever, it doesn't change our ability to grow our underlying business. It doesn't change our ability to deliver our long-term framework of 7 to 10% growth ex FICO because we make no margin on FICO, which is why we started to talk about our margin expansion ex FICO, which is really what you should care about because that generates the free cash flow that we're able to use for capex, dividends, both on M&A and then importantly returning cash to shareholders through buyback.
Kelsey Hsu, Analyst at Autonomous Research
That's very helpful. Also want to get your thoughts on score gaming based on your conversations with lenders and the data you're seeing. Are you seeing a lot of score gaming because the two scores are fairly similar and running zero score gaming right now?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. You know, because you use the term score gaming, we don't hear anyone thinking about it that way. You know, why would they do it? And remember, in order to, if they wanted to buy two credit reports and a Vantage and FICO score, you know, they could do that but it's just, you know, cost prohibitive and there's no value in doing it. Remember, the credit score in a mortgage origination is only used in the kind of pre-application, pre-approval process for the mortgage lender to determine is this a consumer that's going to qualify or an applicant that's going to qualify for the kind of mortgage they want to take out.
It's not used in the underwriting, it's actually the pricing is revalidated based on the credit file data and trade lines that come from the three credit bureaus. That's how the underwriting is done. Done. So no, we don't hear or see anything around so-called score gaming.
Kelsey Hsu, Analyst at Autonomous Research
Just a quick follow-up. Are you seeing lenders that have set up a waterfall structure where they want to pull the cheaper score first to see if it hits the top LLPA bucket? Is that how it works right now?
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
No, no, same comment. You'd have to buy two credit files and there's just no incentive to do that. And the score difference is so small, you know, and you know, we should all understand that there'll be sooner versus later there'll be LLPA tables that will incorporate both FICO and there'll be a separate LLPA table, I would think, you know, for Vantage. So, you know, that's going to be a non-issue. And it is a non-issue today in our eyes.
Kelsey Hsu, Analyst at Autonomous Research
Thanks so much.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Appreciate it.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Scott Wurtzel with Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question.
Scott Wurtzel, Analyst at Wolfe Research
Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Just one from me. I just wanted to touch on the government bookings that you disclosed. I'm wondering if there's any seasonality with those that we should be aware of. I think just in the context of a lot of state fiscal years ending June 30, maybe 2Q is a seasonal peak for the booking. There's a bunch that end in September and there's no uniform kind of state budget windows.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
And no, I wouldn't think about contract signings as being seasonal. You know, sometimes the effective dates are, as we should all remember, you know, with a new contract. There's also an implementation process with some states as far as their technology and process flow. You know, it doesn't happen immediately, you know, meaning it takes time on their side and we support that to happen. But no, I wouldn't think about seasonality of how government, you know, operates.
It's really across the board. Thank you. Yep.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes in line of Simon Clinch with Rothschild & Co. Redburn. Please proceed with your question.
Simon Clinch, Analyst at Rothschild & Co. Redburn
Hi everyone. Thanks for fitting me in. Mark, I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on VantageScore 5.0. I know we're all talking about 4.0, but I've seen some news out on 5.0 recently and I'm just curious as to how that kind of fits into the picture over the next few years. What needs to happen to make that a reality? To compete, I guess, more effectively with 10T. Thanks.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
We think Vantage 4.0 really competes very effectively with 10T. That's our perspective. And 10T is really catching up, if you will, from FICO Classic, which is used in the marketplace, which is, I don't know if this is directionally right, I think it's about 10 years old. Maybe it's not quite 10, but something like that is when FICO Classic was put in place. So Vantage 4.0, I think the industry and the marketplace understands it much more strongly than FICO Classic.
I think 10T closes that gap. And as you might imagine, we're encouraging Vantage, which we own along with TransUnion and Experian, to continue to invest in kind of the next level of sophistication around the score that they use in the marketplace. So they're making those investments. But we're very pleased with the Vantage 4.0 positioning and our expectations of its outperformance against Classic and how it'll compete against 10T. And again, I'll remind one more time that in mortgage in particular, but more broadly in the other verticals, the score is less relevant in the underwriting.
What's relevant is the credit data that's used underlying the creation of that credit score. So while it's important to continue to invest in the credit score, what's really used in the underwriting is the credit data that comes from our credit file and TU and Experian.
Simon Clinch, Analyst at Rothschild & Co. Redburn
Thanks. And just follow-up on a slightly different topic. First of all, congratulations on the acquisition in Mexico. I noticed though in your commentary for that that you were actually considering standing up the de novo credit bureau in Mexico, which took me by surprise. I was just wondering if that's something you've always done in new markets and sort of considered that and actually done some work to do that, or is there something technologically that's made it easier for you to do that this time around?
Because I always assumed it was incredibly hard to stand up a brand new credit bureau in any market.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
It's incredibly hard and we've never done it. Mexico, as you may know, I'll use the words, was a closed market until recently. As you may know, the bank owned the only credit bureau there that competed with Circulo. Circulo was privately held, owned by principally retailers and investors in Mexico. And it competed really against the bank-owned credit bureau that was a consumer-commercial credit bureau. There was an ownership interest that TransUnion had and I think FICO had an interest in BNB in the commercial credit bureau.
And then the banks decided to break that into two businesses, a commercial and consumer credit bureau. TransUnion, because of their control position, bought the consumer bureau last year and that really opened up the market. Until that time we did decide, because we really were attracted to the market, to put an application in really about five years ago, you know, for a credit bureau launch. I think we would struggle with the economics of doing that.
But we thought strategically, you know, it would position us at least to make that decision, you know, if we could get that approval, you know, to do a de novo credit bureau. It was really not our choice. And then once the market opened up and TransUnion made their acquisition, it really gave us the opportunity, you know, to really spend time with Circulo and really make that acquisition, you know. So we much prefer, you know, the path we're on with Circulo and we're super pleased to do it.
And, you know, the fact that we were well known to the Mexican regulators because we've been in this application process for close to five years, we think it positions us well for the regulatory approval process, which obviously TransUnion went through and, you know, obviously navigated quite effectively, and we would expect to do the same. But we think we're advantaged because our, you know, de novo application has been in there for quite some time and we've been engaging with the regulators.
But, you know, clearly we're going down the path that, you know, we would have preferred, which is, you know, an acquisition. And as you pointed out, a de novo build is super hard and we've never done it. Actually, I don't know, as long as I've been at Equifax, I don't think anyone's tried it because it's just super challenging to collect the data and it would be quite expensive to build out the capabilities.
Simon Clinch, Analyst at Rothschild & Co. Redburn
That's really useful. Thank you very much.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Griffin with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
Ryan Griffin, Analyst at BMO Capital Markets
Hey, good morning. I know it's late, so I'll just ask one question on competitive dynamics in government. Understand The Work Number is a record penetration opportunity. But can you elaborate just on the right to win against some of the consumer-based verification programs and then the open-source providers like Emmy, in case we're missing anything? Thank you.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yes, I think that—hopefully for you, it certainly does for us—that strong renewals on the 200 million that we shared and 100 million new business, I think it reflects the really depth and how the marketplace, meaning our customers and new customers, really view the TWN solution. It's instant. It can be integrated very quickly. It has very high coverage. It delivers the ability to approve someone's social services instantly in that application process, which every social service administrator wants to deliver services quickly. It delivers productivity to the caseworker. If you're using consumer-consented, there's a lot of change that goes back and forth between the applicant and the case administrator in order to do that. And then it also delivers the integrity.
So, you know, we feel, you know, quite confident about the value that we deliver to our customers and the ability that we have to continue to drive higher, you know, kind of conversion or approval rates. I think we didn't talk about it—we talked about it in our comments, but no one asked a question about it—but our records, you know, were up 10% in the quarter. So that delivers higher access rates for all of our customers, including government, which is a real positive.
So we're quite pleased with the momentum by our government team. And as mentioned a couple times on the call, our commercial pipeline is still up 2x from where it was a year ago. And we're just pleased to see meaningful conversion of that pipeline in the last number of months.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our final question this morning comes from the line of George Tong with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Hey, George.
George Tong, Analyst at Goldman Sachs
Hi. Thanks. Good morning. With respect to the AI productivity initiatives, can you talk a little bit about the timing of the savings realization? Is it relatively linear over the next few years or more back end loaded towards 2028?
John Gamble, Chief Financial Officer
Well, I think you're seeing it come through in 2026. You know, from the 75 million we announced in February on our fourth quarter earnings call, you know, our—hopefully you're pleased, George, with our margin performance this year—is, I think, above your expectation and certainly above our long-term guide. And even we guided for 75 basis points ex FICO for the year and, you know, the first half are north of that. So you're seeing it crystallize, you know, in 2026 and, you know, we're not giving guidance for 27 or 28, but, you know, we've given you a good boundary and obviously with a much larger number, you know, doubling our expectation around those AI productivity benefits from 75 million to 150 million, you know, over the, you know, 26, 27, 28 timeframe.
George Tong, Analyst at Goldman Sachs
Got it. That's helpful. And of the 150 million in savings, how much do you expect to retain as margin expansion? I know some of it's flowing through this year versus reinvesting it back into the business.
Mark Begor, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I think we told you that we're going to make those decisions about reinvestment as we go through the calendar in the future. We'll give guidance in 27 around what we expect our margin expansion to be from operating leverage against our long-term framework of 50 basis points and how much incremental will be. We'll give that guidance in February. But you should reflect, George—I hope you are—on the fact that in a matter of six months, our confidence in our ability to deploy AI inside of Equifax is growing really rapidly with the increase of our savings goal from 75 million to 150 million.
George Tong, Analyst at Goldman Sachs
Great. Thanks very much.
OPERATOR
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That concludes our question and answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Burns for final comments.
Trevor Burns, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you for everybody's time today. If you have any follow up questions, please reach out to myself and Molly and have a great day.
OPERATOR
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
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