This business has enjoyed 16 consecutive years of annual growth, despite two major recessions and many business cycles. We have a strong market position, produce great operating margins and generate considerable cash. Equifax customers attest to the high quality of data, the excellent system uptime and the trusted reputation of the franchise.

Clearly, our challenge is to make a great business even greater. Our customers count on us to provide solutions to their challenges — to acquire new customers, retain them and expand their share-of-wallet through prudent risk management tools and analytics.

We also are delivering more integrated Equifax solutions to more customers. Through market segmentation studies, for instance, we know there is a significant opportunity to expand our customer base by better penetrating credit unions, thrifts and regional banks. There also is considerable room to capture more business from existing customers through new products, unique data and fully integrated solutions.

The importance of enabling technologies and predictive sciences to our future growth cannot be overstated. Enabling technologies create product demand and new revenue streams for us. And, for customers, it increases operational efficiency and empowers front-line employees to make better risk and marketing decisions through application processing, loan origination, credit risk management and cross-sell solutions. The result is more profitable relationships with both their new and existing customers. Since 2002, our revenue growth has been 10 percent higher and volume growth 7 percent higher with customers who utilize our enabling technology solutions.

A vision to further move our business from individual products toward a total solution set is inherent in all of our growth strategies. Look for us to go to market with more targeted, customer-centric solutions. When we help a customer solve a complex problem, our value increases dramatically. We become partners in growth, which results in a win-win proposition.