TransUnion TRU

Key data

The business

TransUnion is one of three companies, with Equifax and Experian, that hold the credit files of essentially every adult in America. When a bank, card issuer, landlord, or insurer wants to know whether you pay your bills, it pulls a TransUnion report or score, and TransUnion charges for the pull. The files are the moat. You cannot start a fourth bureau, because the data took decades of lender reporting to assemble and no lender has reason to feed a newcomer. Around that core the company bought its way into fraud detection, identity, and marketing data (Neustar and Sontiq in 2021), so a single customer now buys many things off one connection. Revenue splits into US Markets, the larger and more profitable half, and a smaller International arm across India, the UK, Latin America and Africa. The swing factor is mortgage: a mortgage pull is one of the most expensive reports TransUnion sells, and mortgage lending has been frozen by high rates for three years, so that high-margin line is running near a trough.

The numbers

Revenue has climbed every quarter without drama, from about $1.10B in early 2025 to $1.25B by March 2026, high-single to low-double-digit growth quarter after quarter.

The top line compounds steadily, but GAAP profit is jumpy. The $397.1M net income and $2.04 diluted EPS in the first quarter of 2026 carried a large one-time gain. Strip it and quarterly earnings power sits nearer the $110M to $150M the other quarters show. Q2 2026 GAAP figures were not available in the XBRL feed; on an adjusted basis, which excludes those items, TransUnion earned $1.23 a share in the June 2026 quarter and cleared consensus for the fourth straight quarter (1.23 versus 1.16).

The five-year record is the real tell. FY2021's $7.20 was a one-time tax gain. FY2023 swung to a $206M loss on a goodwill impairment when the international and consumer bets soured. Then FY2024 and FY2025 recovered to $1.45 and $2.32 as revenue kept climbing, a 7.3% annual rate off FY2022 to reach $4.6B. The stock changes hands near 17 times adjusted earnings and about 11 times EBITDA on an enterprise-value basis, below its two rivals and, on that EBITDA multiple, cheaper than at any point since it listed in 2015.

The operating leverage is the engine:

Incremental sales dropped to profit at roughly a 49% rate last year as the fixed data platform absorbed more volume. The variant here: the market is paying a trough multiple for trough mortgage volumes, and if lending merely normalizes, both revenue growth and that incremental margin swing up together. The print that settles it is US Financial Services revenue reaccelerating.

Management

Chris Cartwright has run TransUnion since 2019, and the record over the last year is capital discipline, not empire-building. Long-term debt is down to $5.1B from $6.4B at the 2021 Neustar peak, net debt sits near 2.6 times EBITDA, and the company restarted buybacks in 2025 ($302M) after pausing them for years to pay that debt down. Insiders, though, are one-way sellers: 31 sales worth about $8.0M over the past year and not a single open-market purchase, the largest a $2.0M sale by an officer on the July earnings day, plan status not disclosed. Pay rewards adjusted EPS and revenue, which is why the adjusted number keeps clearing targets while GAAP carries the impairments. Nothing alarming, nothing insiders are backing with their own cash either.

How it fails or surprises you

Mortgage comes back (right tail). Mortgage is a low-teens share of US revenue but among the highest-margin reports sold, and volumes have sat near a multi-decade low for three years. If rates ease and refinancing and home purchases reawaken, that revenue returns at close to a 49% incremental margin, and the price pays nothing for it today. First visible in US Financial Services revenue turning up.

The cycle turns the other way. The same operating leverage runs in reverse. A recession that cuts card, auto, and personal-loan inquiries would drop transaction revenue with margin following it down, on top of a still-frozen mortgage book. Watch Financial Services revenue going negative year over year.

The earnings you pay for are the adjusted ones. The market values TransUnion near 17 times adjusted EPS, but GAAP earnings have been repeatedly cut by impairments and one-time items, and were flattered this year by a one-time gain. If the add-backs hide real recurring costs, the true multiple is closer to 21 times and the discount narrows. The tell is GAAP and adjusted EPS converging, or not.

Closing thoughts

This is one where a specific print settles the setup. The stock is cheap on cash profit because mortgage volumes are near a trough and leverage still sits above where data peers rest, and US Financial Services revenue reaccelerating as rates ease is the line that tells you the thesis is playing out. Nothing in the two days since this name was last examined changed that read: the discount is the mortgage cycle, not a broken oligopoly, and two quiet days offered no evidence against it. The fatter tail is up, because the franchise is intact, the data monopoly is going nowhere, and you are buying a normal business at its cheapest cash-profit multiple in a decade with one high-margin revenue line switched off. What is at risk if the downside linchpin breaks is a further leg of lending contraction dragging transaction revenue down with the leverage against you. Against that, a mortgage normalization is worth a step-change in earnings the current price ignores.

The bet is still that American lenders keep pulling credit and TransUnion keeps selling more per pull, and that frozen mortgage volumes thaw rather than stay frozen. It breaks if US Financial Services revenue rolls over instead of turning up, and the one pair of numbers that tells you first is that segment's growth rate against the trend in adjusted operating margin. If both fall together, the leverage story was a mirage.