Equifax Inc. EFX Moat

Key data

The moat

Equifax holds two very different assets. One is the ordinary credit file, the same reciprocal-furnishing arrangement its two rivals have, where a lender contributes data and buys it back and no fourth entrant can start.

The other is The Work Number, a database of payroll records that employers hand over so that lenders, landlords and government agencies can verify someone's income without telephoning anyone. Employers supply it free, Equifax sells it many times over, and no competitor assembled the equivalent. That is the reason Equifax is the larger of the two listed bureaus.

What the moat produces is pricing power on a dataset with no marginal cost, and the second asset should be the stronger of the two.

Widening or narrowing

The revenue acceleration is real and it is not where the moat is.

The inflection is the March 2026 quarter and it came from the ordinary credit bureau, not from the proprietary dataset. United States Information jumped 15% in a single quarter on mortgage volume. Workforce Solutions, the segment carrying the premium, grew 7% over the same year, and within it the employer services line grew 3%.

The overrated case, and the company writes it themselves. The annual report states that the verification business is highly competitive with low barriers to entry, naming in-house employer verification, direct lender-to-employer channels and numerous third-party providers. That is Equifax's own assessment of the asset everyone else describes as its moat. The 7% growth rate is consistent with it.

There is a disclosure change alongside. The company reported cloud migration as a percentage of revenue through the March 2025 quarter, at over 85%, and has referenced completion only qualitatively since. A metric that stops at 85% is not a finding on its own and it removes the ability to verify when a multi-year spending programme actually ends.

On profit pool, Equifax takes a few dollars per verification on a loan or a hire worth far more. Thin, and in the verification business, contested.

The moat is stable, with the growth coming from the cyclical half.