TransUnion TRU

The business

TransUnion sells the answer to one question asked tens of millions of times a day: has this person paid their bills. Lenders, landlords, insurers, employers and telecoms furnish payment histories into the bureau file, and TransUnion sells that file back out as reports, scores, attributes and fraud signals every time somebody applies for credit. U.S. Markets carries the franchise at 78% of FY2025 revenue ($3.58B of $4.58B), with International the remaining 22% ($1.01B) and growing faster off a smaller base. The revenue is a per-decision toll, so it moves with credit application volumes rather than with loan balances, and the file itself is contributed by the same lenders who buy from it, which is the source of the advantage.

What the financials do not show is that the score layer and the data layer are separate businesses, and only one of them is under attack. In July 2025 the Federal Housing Finance Agency ended FICO's three-decade monopoly on mortgage scoring; TransUnion and Equifax responded by cutting VantageScore 4.0 mortgage pricing to about $0.99 and $1.00 against FICO's $10, and Fannie Mae and the FHA both cleared VantageScore 4.0 for use during 2026. The bureaus are the aggressors in that fight. The counter-move matters more to TransUnion's model: FICO's Mortgage Direct License Program, launched October 2025, lets lenders buy FICO scores from resellers rather than through the bureaus, which puts the royalty spread at risk. Management sized that exposure itself in the FY2026 guide: organic constant-currency growth of 8% to 9%, or 5% to 6% excluding FICO mortgage royalties.