You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: I am Dorian Hare.
Today's call is being recorded.
An archive of the recording will be available later today in the Investor Relations section in the About Equifax tab on our website at www.
Certain risk factors that may impact our business are set forth in our filings with the SEC under our 2020 Form 10-K and subsequent filings.
Also, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted earnings per share attributable to Equifax and adjusted EBITDA, which will be adjusted for certain items that affect the comparability of our underlying operational performance.
We continue to make the health and safety of our employees a top priority, and I hope that you and those close to you remain safe.
Turning to Slide 4, and as I will cover in a moment, Equifax delivered an outstanding first quarter with record revenue and strong sequential growth versus fourth quarter.
The tremendous progress we have made, executing against our strategic priorities and building out our Equifax Cloud capabilities is allowing us to outperform our underlying markets and deliver outstanding revenue growth and margin expansion.
In U.S., where the economy is still recovering from the COVID pandemic more rapidly than we anticipated, we continue to outperform the overall mortgage market, which remains strong in the first quarter.
We're also seeing a real recovery and strong growth across our core banking, auto, insurance, government and talent business segments.
First quarter was a great start to 2021.
We are energized by our strong momentum in pivoting to our next chapter of growth with the launch of EFX2023, our new strategic growth framework that will serve as our companywide compass over the next three years.
With our new Equifax Cloud foundation increasingly in place, we're focused on leveraging our new Equifax Cloud data in technology infrastructure to accelerate innovation, new products and growth.
Innovation in new products will fuel our growth in 2021 and beyond as we leverage our new EFX cloud capabilities to bring new products and solutions and multidata insights to customers faster, more securely and more reliably.
As you know, we ramped our investments in product and innovation resources over the past 12 months to accelerate our new product roll outs, leveraging the new Equifax Cloud.
Our highly unique and diverse data assets are at the heart of what creates Equifax's differentiation in the marketplace.
We have data assets at scale that our competitors do not have, including TWN, NCTUE, DataX, IXI and more, and we are committed to expanding and deepening these differentiated data assets through organic actions, partnerships and M&A.
We are also relentlessly focused on a customer first mentality, which moves us closer to our customers, with a focus on delivering solutions to help their -- help solve their problems and drive their growth.
Another critical lever of our strategy is to reinvest our accelerating free cash flow in smart, strategic and accretive bolt-on acquisitions, that both, expand and strengthen our capabilities with a goal of increasing our revenue growth by 1% to 2% annually from M&A.
And data security is deeply embedded in our culture.
We have clearly established Equifax as an industry leader in data security.
Working together as one aligned global Equifax team, where we leverage our commercial strengths, our new products, and our capabilities across our EFX cloud global platform, will allow us to deliver solutions that only Equifax can bring to the marketplace.
We're energized around our new EFX2023 strategic priorities that will serve as our guide post over the next three years and support our new long-term growth framework that we plan to put in place later this year.
Turning now to Slide 5, Equifax performance in the first quarter was very strong.
Revenue at $1.2 billion was the strongest quarterly revenue in our history.
In first quarter, constant currency revenue growth was a very strong 25% with our organic growth at 23%, which was also an Equifax record.
As a reminder, we're coming off a solid 13% growth in first quarter last year.
All business units performed -- outperformed our expectations and we are seeing positive signs of a COVID recovery beginning to accelerate, particularly in the U.S.
Our growth was again powered by our two U.S. B2B businesses, Workforce Solutions and USIS, with combined revenue up a very strong 38%.
Mortgage-related revenue remained robust, and importantly, our non-mortgage-related verticals grew organically by a very strong 16%.
The adjusted EBITDA margins of our U.S. B2B businesses were 52%, up 400 basis points with EWS delivering close to 60% margins.
As a reminder, Workforce Solutions and USIS are over 70% of Equifax revenue and 80% of Equifax business unit EBITDA.
First quarter Equifax adjusted EBITDA totaled $431 million, up 36% with over 250 basis points of expansion in our margins to 35.6%.
This margin expansion was delivered while including all cloud technology transformation costs in our adjusted results, which negatively impacted first quarter adjusted EBITDA margins by over 300 basis points.
Excluding cloud transformation costs, our margins would have been up over 500 basis points.
We are clearly getting strong leverage out of our revenue growth.
Adjusted EBITDA -- adjusted earnings per share at a $1.97 per share was up a very strong 37% from last year, which was also impacted by the inclusion of cloud transformation costs.
Adjusted earnings per share would have been $2.20 and up 54%, excluding these costs.
We continue to accelerate our EFX Cloud data and technology transformation in the quarter, including migrating an additional 2,000 customers to the cloud in the U.S. and approximately 1,000 customers Internationally.
Leveraging our new EFX cloud infrastructure, we also continue to accelerate new product innovation.
In the first quarter, we released 39 new products, which is up from 35 launched a year ago in the first quarter, continuing the momentum from 2020 where we launched a record 134 new products.
And we're seeing increased revenue generation from these new products, leveraging our new EFX Cloud.
For 2021, we expect our vitality index defined as revenue from new products introduced in the last three years to exceed 8%.
This is a 100 basis point improvement from the 7% guidance we provided on our vitality index back in February.
And in that first quarter, we completed five strategic bolt-on acquisitions with a focus on identity and product capability through our acquisition of Kount and accelerating growth in Workforce Solutions with the acquisitions of HIREtech and i2Verify.
Acquisitions that will broaden strength in Equifax are a strong lever for continuing to accelerate our growth and a big focus.
We're energized by our fast start to '21 and are clearly seeing the momentum of our only Equifax model leveraging our new EFX Cloud capabilities.
Our first quarter results were substantially stronger than the guidance we provided in February with over 90% of the revenue outperformance delivered in our two U.S. B2B businesses, Workforce Solutions and USIS.
Importantly, as we'll discuss in more detail shortly, over 60% of this outperformance in the U.S. B2B revenue was in our non-mortgage segments in both USIS and Workforce Solutions.
Non-mortgage revenue strengthened consistently during the first quarter with March revenue up significantly versus February in both USIS and EWS.
This broad-based strength was above our expectations and gives us confidence about further strengthening in the second quarter and second half as the COVID recovery unfolds.
Mortgage revenue was also stronger than we expected despite the growth in U.S. mortgage market at 21% being slightly below our expectations from a slowing -- from slowing mortgage inquiries in late March, which have continued into April.
Our continued strong mortgage results and outperformance was driven by Workforce Solutions with stronger market penetration, record growth and positive impact from new products.
USIS mortgage revenue also exceeded expectations slightly.
This stronger revenue delivered strong operating leverage with substantial improvement in our EBITDA margins and adjusted EPS.
The strength of our first quarter results in Workforce Solutions and in U.S. non-mortgage revenue across USIS and Workforce Solutions broadly gave us the confidence to substantially raise our 2021 guidance for both revenue and adjusted EPS.
We're increasing our revenue guidance by $225 million to a midpoint of $4.625 billion and increasing our adjusted earnings per share guidance by $0.55 a share to a midpoint of $6.90 per share.
This includes our expectation that the U.S. mortgage market for 2021 as measured by credit inquiries will decline more in our February guidance of down 5% to a decline of approximately 8%.
Our framework assumes that the mortgage market slows primarily in the third and fourth quarter, which is consistent with our prior guidance.
And John will discuss our mortgage assumptions in more detail in a few minutes.
Turning to Slide 6, our outstanding first quarter results were broad-based and reflect better than expected performance from all four business units.
Workforce Solutions had another exceptional quarter, delivering 59% revenue growth and almost 60% adjusted EBITDA margins.
Workforce Solutions is now our largest business, representing almost 40% of total Equifax revenue in the fourth quarter and is clearly powering our results.
Verification Services revenue of $385 million was up a strong 75%.
Verification Service mortgage revenue again more than doubled for the fourth consecutive quarter, growing almost a 100 percentage points faster than the 20% underlying growth we saw in the mortgage market credit inquiries in the first quarter.
Importantly, Verification Services non-mortgage revenue was up over 25% in the quarter.
This segment of Verification Services continues to expand its market coverage and benefit from NPIs, new records, new use cases and is a long-term growth lever for Workforce Solutions.
Talent Solutions, which represents over 30% of verifier non-mortgage revenue almost doubled, driven by both new products and a recovery in U.S. hiring.
Government solutions, which represents almost 40% of verifier non-mortgage revenue also returned to growth driven by greater usage in multiple states of our differentiated data.
As a reminder, we continue to work closely with a social security administration on our new contract that we expect to go live in the second half and ramp to $40 million to $50 million of incremental revenue at run rate in 2022.
Our non-mortgage consumer business, principally in banking and auto, also showed strong growth in the quarter as well, both from deepening penetration with new lenders and from some recovery in those markets that I'll cover more fully in the discussion of USIS.
Debt management, which now represents under 10% of verifier non-mortgage revenue was, as we expected, down versus last year, but is stabilized and we expect to see growth in that vertical as we move through 2021.
Employer Services revenue of $96 million increased 17% in the quarter, driven again by our unemployment claims business which add revenue of $47 million, up around 47% compared to last year.
In the first quarter, Workforce Solution processed about $2.8 million UC claims, which is up from $2.6 million in the fourth quarter.
EWS processed roughly one in three U.S. initial unemployment claims in the quarter, which was up from one in five that they had been processing in recent periods, reflecting the growth in Workforce Solutions UC market position.
As a reminder, we continue to expect UC claims revenue to decline sequentially in the second quarter and throughout the balance of 2021 as the U.S. economy recovers and job losses dissipate.
We currently expect a decline in the second quarter UC revenue of about 45% versus last year and a full year 2021 decline in UC claims revenue of just under 30%.
Employer Services non-UC businesses had revenue down slightly in the quarter.
Our I-9 business driven by our new I-9 Anywhere solution continued to show very strong growth with revenue up 15%.
Our I-9 business is expected to continue to grow substantially to become our largest Employer Services business in 2021 and represent about 40% of non-UC revenue.
Reflecting the growth in I-9 and the return to growth of workforce analytics, we expect Employer Services non-UC businesses to deliver organic growth of over 20% in 2021.
The HIREtech and i2Verify acquisitions that we closed in March had a de minimis impact on revenue in the quarter, but will add -- will further add to Workforce Solutions growth during the rest of '21.
I'll discuss both HIREtech and i2Verify a little bit later.
Reflecting the power and uniqueness of TWN data, strong verifier revenue growth and operating leverage resulted in adjusted EBITDA margins of 59.3% and almost 800 basis point expansion from last year in Workforce Solutions.
Rudy Ploder and the Workforce Solutions team delivered another outstanding quarter and are position to deliver a strong 2021.
Workforce Solutions is clearly Equifax' largest and fastest growing business.
USIS revenue was up a very strong 19% in the quarter with organic growth also a strong 17%.
Total USIS mortgage revenue growth of $177 million was up 25% in the quarter, while mortgage credit inquiry growth up 21%, was slightly below the 24% expectation we shared in February.
As I mentioned, John will cover our updated view of the mortgage market for 2021 in a few minutes.
USIS mortgage revenue outgrew the market by 500 basis points in the quarter, driven by growth in marketing and new debt monitoring products.
Non-mortgage revenue performance was very strong with growth of 15% and organic growth of 11%, which is a record for USIS, and off a fairly strong first quarter last year.
We view this outperformance by U.S. as meaningful and a reflection of the competitiveness and commercial focus of the USIS team.
Importantly, non-mortgage online revenue grew a very strong 16% in the quarter with organic growth of almost 11%.
We saw non-mortgage revenue growth accelerate in February and March as vaccine rollouts increased and financial institutions gain confidence in the consumer and the economy.
Banking, auto, ID and fraud, insurance and direct to consumer all showed growth in the quarter which is encouraging as move into second quarter and the rest of 2021.
Commercial was about flat, while only telco was down in the quarter as we expected.
Financial Marketing Services revenue, which is broadly speaking our offline or batch business was $53 million in the quarter, up almost 12%, which is also very positive.
The performance was driven by marketing related revenue, which was up over 20% and ID and fraud revenue growth of just under 10% as consumer marketing and originations ramped up.
In 2021, marketing-related revenue is expected to represent about 45% of FMS revenue with identity and fraud about 20% and risk decisioning about 30%.
This strong growth across our non-mortgage businesses, including strong growth in marketing-specific offline revenue is very encouraging for both the recovery of our underlying markets and our non-mortgage performance as we move into second quarter and the rest of 2021.
The USIS team continues to drive growth in their new deal pipeline with first quarter pipeline up 30% over last year, driven by growth in both the volume and the size of new opportunities and NPI roll outs.
First quarter win rates were also higher than levels seen in 2020.
Sid Singh and as USIS team continue to be on offense and are competitive in winning in their marketplace.
In addition to driving core business growth in the first quarter, USIS achieved an important strategic milestone in closing the acquisition of Kount, an industry leader in providing AI-driven fraud prevention and digital identity solutions.
Integration efforts are now under way with a key focus on technology and product, leveraging the joint Equifax and Kount data and capabilities.
Kount's technology platform will migrate to the Equifax Cloud in the next 12 to 18 months, which will allow for the full integration of Kount and Equifax capabilities for new solutions, new products and market expansion in the fast growing identity and fraud marketplace.
USIS adjusted EBITDA margins of 42.9% in the first quarter were down about 180 basis points from last year.
About two-thirds of the decline was due to the inclusion of tech transformation costs in our adjusted EBITDA in 2021.
The remainder of the decline was principally driven by the higher mix of mortgage products and redundant system costs from our cloud transformation.
Moving now to International, their revenue was up 3% on a constant currency basis in the quarter, which is the second consecutive quarter of growth in our global markets, but are still very challenged by COVID lockdowns and slow vaccine roll outs.
Revenue growth improved significantly in Canada, Asia Pacific, which is our Australian business and Latin America.
This was partially offset by revenue declines in the U.K., principally due to continued U.K. lockdowns in response to the COVID pandemic.
Asia-Pacific, which is principally our Australia business had a very good performance in the first quarter with revenue of $87 million, up 7% in local currency.
Australia consumer revenue continues to improve relative to prior quarters and was down only about 2% versus last year compared to down 5% in the fourth quarter.
Our Commercial business combined online and offline revenue was up a strong 9% in the quarter, a solid improvement from fourth quarter.
And fraud and identity was up 15% in the quarter following strong performance in the fourth quarter.
European revenues of $69 billion were down 5% in local currency in the first quarter.
Our European credit business was down about 5% in local currency.
Spain revenue was down about 1%, while the U.K. was down about 6% in local currency similar to the fourth quarter from continued challenging COVID environments.
Our European debt management business revenue declined by about 4% in local currency in the quarter.
Both, the CRA and debt management businesses were impacted in the quarter by actions taken by the U.K. government to curtail debt placements in response to the pandemic resurgence in the United Kingdom.
As the lockdown and other actions lift in April and May, we anticipate improvements in U.K. CRA revenue in the second quarter and improvements in debt management revenue in the second half of 2021 as collection activity restarts in the latter part of the second quarter.
Latin American revenues of $42 million grew about 1% in the quarter in local currency, which was an improvement from the down 1% we saw in the fourth quarter.
These markets also continue to be heavily impacted negatively by continued COVID lockdowns and slow vaccine rollouts.
We continue to see the benefit in LatAm of strong new product introductions over the past three years, which is benefiting their top line.
Canada delivered record revenue of $44 million in the quarter, up about 13% in local currency.
Consumer online was up about 3% in the quarter, an improvement from the fourth quarter.
Improving growth in commercial, analytical and decision solutions and ID and fraud also drove growth in Canadian revenue in the first quarter.
International adjusted EBITDA margins at 28.2% were down 30 basis points from last year.
Excluding the impact of the tech transformation cost that we've included in adjusted EBITDA, margins were up about 200 basis points.
This improvement was principally due to revenue growth and operating leverage, partially offset by redundant system costs from our cloud transformation.
Global Consumer Solutions revenue was down 16% on a reported basis and 17% on a local currency basis in the quarter and slightly better than our expectations.
We saw better than expected performance in our global consumer direct business, which sells directly to consumers through equifax.com and myEquifax and which represents about half of total GCS revenue.
Direct-to-consumer revenue was up a strong 11% in the quarter, the third consecutive quarter of growth.
Decline in overall GC revenue in the quarter was again driven by our U.S. lead generation partner business, which has been significantly impacted from COVID beginning in mid-2020.
As we discussed, we expect a decline in total GCS revenue from our partner vertical to moderate substantially as we move into the second quarter and return to growth in the fourth quarter of 2021.
GCS adjusted EBITDA margins of 24.6% were up about 150 basis points.
We expect margins to be pressured to around 20% in the second quarter, reflecting planned cost to complete the migration of our consumer direct business, cloud transformations in the U.S., U.K. and Canada through our new Equifax cloud platform.
Moving to Slide 7, this chart provides updated view of Equifax core revenue growth.
As a reminder, core revenue growth is defined as Equifax revenue growth excluding number one, the extra revenue growth in our UC claims business in '20 and '21, and number two, the impact on revenue from U.S. mortgage market activity as measured by changes in total U.S. mortgage market credit inquiries.
Core revenue growth is our attempt to provide a more normalized view of Equifax revenue growth excluding these unusual UC and U.S. mortgage market factors.
In the first quarter, Equifax core revenue growth, the green section of the bars on Slide 7, was up a very strong 20%, reflecting the broad-based growth across Equifax and this is up significantly from the 11% core revenue growth we delivered in the fourth quarter and well above our historic core growth rates.
Workforce Solutions and USIS have continue to strongly outperform the mortgage market.
The 16% organic growth in U.S. B2B non-mortgage revenue also drove our core revenue growth.
Importantly, our core revenue growth has accelerated over the past five quarters from 5% in first quarter of 2020 to 11% in the fourth quarter of last year and to 20% this quarter, reflecting the strength and resiliency of our broad-based business model, power of Workforce Solutions, the market competitiveness of USIS and benefits from our cloud Equifax -- our cloud data and technology investments and our increasing focus on leveraging the cloud for innovation in new products.
As you know, the strong growth is in the midst of a global market that is still recovering from the COVID pandemic.
Turning to Slide 8, Workforce Solutions continues to power Equifax and clearly is our strongest and more valuable and largest business.
Workforce Solutions revenue grew a very strong 59% in the first quarter with core revenue growth accelerating to 46%.
As a reminder, the 59% growth is of 32% growth in first quarter of 2020.
The strong outperformance and sequential improvement reflects the power of the unique TWN database and Workforce Solutions business model.
At the end of the first quarter, the TWN database reached 115 million active users and 90 million unique records, an increase of 9% or 10 million active records from a year ago.
And as a reminder, over 60% of our records are contributed directly by employers that Workforce Solution provides employer services like, UC claims, W-2 management, I-9, WOTC, and other solutions too.
And we've built these relationships over -- with these -- with our customers and contributors over the past decade.
The Remaining 35% are contributed through partnerships, most of which were exclusive.
The major payroll processor agreement that we announced on our February call is still on track to go live later this year, which will add to our TWN database.
And we have a dedicated team, as you know, focused on growing our TWN database, with an active pipeline of record additions to continue to expand our TWN database.
The Workforce Solution team continues to focus on expanding the number of mortgage companies and financial institutions with which we have real time, system- to-system integrations, which, as you know, drives increased usage of our TWN data.
The team is also focused on extending our offerings into card and auto verticals, as well as across our growing government vertical.
And as I mentioned earlier, we continue to work closely with the SSA, and expect to go live with our new solution in the second half of this year, which will deliver $40 million to $50 million of incremental revenue and run rate in 2022.
The Workforce Solutions new product pipeline is also rapidly expanding as our teams leverage the power of our new Equifax Cloud infrastructure.
We are anticipating new products in mortgage, talent solutions, government, and I-9 in 2021.
New product revenue will increase in '21 and '22, as we begin to reap the benefits of our new products introduced to the market during last year and in 2021.
Rudy Ploder and the Workforce Solutions team have multiple levers for growth in '21, '22 and beyond.
Workforce Solutions are most -- Workforce Solutions is our most valuable business and will continue to power our results in the future.
Slide 9 highlights the ongoing exceptional core growth performance in mortgage for our U.S. B2B business -- mortgage businesses Workforce Solutions and USIS.
Workforce and USIS outgrew the underlying U.S. mortgage market again in first quarter, with combined core growth of 48%, up from 37% in 2020, and in line with the 49% growth they delivered in the fourth quarter -- 49% core growth.
This outperformance was driven strongly by Workforce Solutions with core mortgage growth of 99%.
Consistent with past quarters, Workforce Solutions outperformance was driven by new records, increased market penetration, larger fulfillment rates, and new products, proof that lenders are increasingly becoming reliant on the unique TWN income and employment data when making credit decisions.
USIS delivered 5% core mortgage revenue growth in the quarter, driven primarily by new debt monitoring solutions with further support from marketing.
Our ability to substantially outgrow all of our underlying markets is core to our business model and core to our future growth.
As Mark referenced earlier, U.S. mortgage market inquiries remained very strong in 1Q '21 and up 21%, but that growth was slightly lower than the 24% we had expected when we provided guidance in early February.
As shown in the left side of Slide 10, as mortgage rates increased over the past few months and refinancing activity continues, the number of U.S. mortgages that could benefit from a refinancing has declined to about $30 million.
Although, still very strong by historic standards, this is down from the levels we saw in 4Q '20 and early 1Q '21.
Based upon our most recent data from 4Q 2020, mortgage refinancings were continuing at about $1 million per month.
As shown on the right side of Slide 10, the pace of existing home purchases continues at historically very high levels.
This strong purchase market is expected to continue throughout '21 and into '22.
Based on these trends and specifically the reduction in the pool of mortgages that would benefit from refinancing, we are reducing our expectation for the mortgage market financing activity in 2021.
As shown on Slide 11, we now expect mortgage credit inquiries to be about flat in 2Q '21 versus 2Q '20, and to be down about 25% in the second half of '21 as compared to the second half of '20.
Overall, for 2021, we expect mortgage market credit inquiries to be down approximately 8%.
This compares to the down approximately 5% we discussed with you in February.
Slide 12 provides our guidance for 2Q '21.
We expect revenue in the range of -- revenue in the range of $1.14 billion to $1.16 billion, reflecting revenue growth of about 16% to 18%, including a 2.1% benefit from FX.
Acquisitions are positively impacting revenue by 2%.
We are expecting adjusted earnings per share in 2Q '21 to be $1.60 to $1.70 per share compared to 2Q '20 adjusted earnings per share of $1.63 per share.
In 2Q '21, technology transformation costs are expected to be around $44 million or $0.27 per share.
Excluding these costs that were excluded from 2Q '20 adjusted EPS, 2Q '21 adjusted earnings per share would be $1.87 to $1.97 per share, up 15% to 21% from 2Q '20.
This performance was being delivered in the context of the U.S. mortgage market, which is expected to be flat versus 2Q '20.
Slide 13 provides the specifics on our 2021 full year guidance.
We are increasing guidance substantially, despite the expectation of a weaker U.S. mortgage market.
2021 revenue of between $4.575 billion and $4.675 billion reflects revenue growth of about 11% to 13% versus 2020, including a 1.4% benefit from FX.
Acquisitions are positively impacting revenue by 1.7%.
EWS is expected to deliver over 20% revenue growth with continued very strong growth in Verification Services.
USIS revenue is expected to be up mid to high single-digits, driven by growth in non-mortgage.
International revenue is expected to deliver constant currency growth in the upper single-digits and GCS revenue is expected to be down mid-single-digits in 2021.
2Q '21 revenue was also expected to be down mid-single-digits for GCS.
As a reminder, in 2021, Equifax is including all cloud technology transformation costs and adjusted operating income, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS.
These one time costs were excluded from adjusted operating income, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share through 2020.
In 2021, Equifax expects to incur one-time cloud technology transformation costs of approximately $145 million, a reduction of about 60% from the $358 million incurred in 2020.
The inclusion in 2021 of this about $145 million in one-time costs would reduce adjusted earnings per share by $0.91 per share.
This is consistent with our guidance for 2021 that we gave in February.
2021 adjusted earnings per share of $6.75 to $7.05 per share which includes these tech transformation costs is down approximately 3% to up 1% from 2020.
Excluding the impact of tech transformation costs of $0.91 per share, adjusted earnings per share in 2021 which show growth of about 10% to 14% versus 2020.
2021 is also negatively impacted by redundant system costs of about -- of over $65 million relative to 2020.
These redundant system costs are expected to negatively impact adjusted earnings per share by approximately $0.40 a share.
Slide 14 provides a view of Equifax total and core revenue growth from 2019 through 2021.
Core revenue growth excludes the impact of movements in the mortgage market on Equifax revenue as well as the impact of changes in our UC claims business within our EWS Employer Services business, and also the employee retention credit revenue from our recently acquired HIREtech business.
Employee retention credits are specific U.S. government incentives for companies to retain their employees in response to COVID-19 and the associated revenue is not expected to continue into 2022.
The data shown for 2Q '21 and full year 2021 reflects the midpoint of guidance ranges we provided.
In 1Q '21, we delivered very strong core revenue growth of 20% and expect to continue to deliver strong core revenue growth in 2Q '21 of about 20%,and 16% for all of 2021.
This very strong performance, we believe, positions us well entering 2022 and beyond.
And now I'd like to hand it back over to Mark.
Turning to Slide 15, this highlights our continued focus on new product innovation, which is a critical component of our next chapter of growth as we leverage the Equifax Cloud for innovation in new products and growth.
We continue to focus on transforming Equifax into a product-led organization, leveraging our best-in-class Equifax Cloud Native Data and Technology to fuel top-line growth.
In the first quarter, we delivered 39 new products, which is up from the 35 we delivered last year.
We are encouraged by this continued strong performance, especially following the record 135 new products we delivered last year.
We wanted to highlight some of these new products, which we expect to drive revenue in '21 and beyond.
First, Insight Score for credit card launched by USIS provides the credit card industry with a specific credit risk score created using credit and alternative data that predicts a likelihood of a consumer becoming 90 days past due or more within 24 months of origination.
USIS also launched a new commercial real estate tenant risk assessment product suite, which provides real time and unmatched data analytics and risk assessment or tenants buildings in portfolio strength delivered through an interactive Ignite Marketplace app or as a stand-alone report.
And Workforce Solutions continues to expand its suite of products focused on the government vertical.
Their government enhanced solutions social, Social Services Verification product gives the ability for the customer to choose the desired period of employment history with options ranging from three months, six months, one year or three years or the full employment history.
These products help government agencies quickly and efficiently administer federally -- federal supplement -- supplementary nutrition, child health insurance, medicaid, Medicare benefits, many child support and ensure program integrity.
In the first quarter, over two-thirds of our new products launched or in development leveraged our new Equifax cloud-based global product platforms.
This enables significant synergies and efficiencies in how we build the new products, our speed to bring the products to market and our ability to move the new products easily to our global markets.
Our new cloud-based Luminate platform for fraud management is a great example which is launching in Canada and the U.S. simultaneously and will soon launch in the United Kingdom, Australia and India.
This would have taken much longer and been much more expensive in a legacy environment.
We're also rolling out our Equifax cloud-based Interconnect and Ignite platforms for marketing and risk and decisioning and management products throughout Latin America, Europe, Canada as well as the United States.
As we discussed on our call in February, we're focused on leveraging our new cloud capabilities to increase NPI rollouts and new product revenue growth in '21 and beyond.
As a reminder, our NPI revenue is defined as the revenue delivered by new products launched over the past three years and our vitality index is defined as the percentage of current year revenue delivered by NPI revenue.
As I mentioned earlier, we've increased our 2021 vitality index guidance from 7% by a 100 basis points to 8% as you can see from the left side of the slide is significant is a significant increase from about 500 basis points in 2020.
NPIs are a big priority for me and the team as we leverage the Equifax Cloud for innovation, new products and growth.
Turning to Slide 16, M&A plays an important role in our growth strategy and will be central to our long-term growth framework.
Our team is focused on building an active pipeline of bolt-on targets that will both broaden and strengthen Equifax.
Our M&A strategy centers on acquiring accretive and strategic companies that add unique data assets, new capabilities, deliver expansion into identity and fraud or expand our geographic footprint.
In the first quarter, we closed five acquisitions totaling $866 million across strategic focus areas of identity and fraud, Workforce Solutions, open data and SME.
We discussed three of these transactions with you in February which were the acquisitions of Kount, AccountScore and Creditworks.
As I just discussed earlier, we're excited excited about expanding opportunities we see from the combined Kount and Equifax in the fast growing identity and fraud marketplace.
In March, we closed two Workforce Solutions bolt-on transactions HIREtech and i2verify, which will further broaden and strengthen our Workforce Solutions business.
HIREtech is a Houston-based company that provides employee-related tax credit services as well as verification services.
HIREtech also has unique channel relationships to provide these services through payroll providers, consulting firms and CPA firms.
I2verify is a Newburyport Massachusetts-based company that provides secure digital verifications of income and employment services.
The company has a unique nationwide set of record contributing employers with concentrations in the healthcare and education sectors.
i2verify also brings unique records to the TWN database, which are contributed by direct relationships.
You should expect Equifax to continue to make acquisitions in these strategic growth areas that offer unique data and analytics to our customers with the goal of increasing our top line by 100 to 200 basis points annually from M&A.
Before wrapping up, I want to speak to you about an area of significant focus at Equifax and importance to me personally.
Slide 17 provides an overview of Equifax's ESG strategy and how it helps position us for long-term sustainability.
I hope you saw and had a chance to read our annual report letter that highlighted our increased focus on ESG.
First, Equifax plays an important role in helping consumers live their financial best.
A primary example of this is that our alternative data assets such as utility and phone payment data provide lenders with a better picture of the approximately 30 million U.S. individuals who do not have traditional credit files or access to the formal financial system.
I've also made advancing, inclusion and diversity, a personal priority since I joined Equifax.
Believing that diversity of thought leads to better decisions, we're taking clear steps to broaden diversity at Equifax, including the last three directors added to our Board are diverse and all seven individuals who have added to my senior leadership team since I joined three years ago have also been diverse.
We're carrying out this focus on inclusion and diversity across Equifax.
We're also focused on environment -- on our environmental impact in our greenhouse gas print.
Our cloud transformation will move our existing legacy technology infrastructure to the cloud which will dramatically reduce our environmental impact as we leverage the efficiencies and carbon-neutral infrastructure at our cloud service providers.
Over the course of this year we -- over the course of last year we decommissioned six data centers, over 6,800 legacy data assets and over 1,000 legacy applications.
We have a detailed program under way to baseline our energy usage and benefits from our cloud transformation as we work toward a commitment regarding carbon emissions and a net-zero footprint.
We're also committed to be an industry leaders regarding security.
With the leadership of our CSO, Jamil Farshchi, our culture puts security first.
All employees are required to take a mandatory security focused training sessions every year.
And all of our 4,000 bonus eligible employees have a security goal in their annual MBOs.
We believe -- we also believe in sharing our security protocols and strategies with our partners, customers and competitors to collaborate to keep us all safe.
In 2020, we hosted our inaugural Customer Security Summit where we detailed our progress on security transformation and discussed advancements in supply chain and security.
As threats continue to involve, we remain highly focused on continuing to advance our security efforts.
Wrapping up on Slide 18, Equifax delivered a record setting first quarter and we have a strong momentum as we move into second quarter in 2021.
Our 27% overall and 20% core growth in first quarter reflects the strength and resiliency of our business model, while still operating in a challenging COVID environment.
We've now delivered five consecutive quarters of sequentially improving double-digit growth.
We're confident in our outlook for 2021.
And as John described, are raising our full year midpoint revenue by 500 basis points to $4.625 billion and our earnings per share midpoint by 9% to $6.90 a share.
Our revised revenue estimate of 12% growth in 2021 at the midpoint of the range off a very strong 17% in 2020, reflects the resiliency, strength and momentum of the EFX business model.
Our increased 2021 growth framework incorporated our expectation as John discussed that the U.S. mortgage market will decline about 8% in 2021 and while operating in a still recovering COVID economy.
Our expectation for core revenue growth of 16% in 2021 reflects how our EFX 2023 strategic priorities are delivering.
Workforce Solutions had another outstanding quarter of 59% growth and will continue to power Equifax operating performance throughout 2021 and beyond.
The Work Number is our most differentiated data assets and Workforce Solutions is our most valuable business.
Rudy Ploder and his team are driving outsized growth by focusing on their key levers, new records, new products, penetration and expansion in the new verticals with our differentiated TWN database.
USIS also delivered an outstanding quarter of 19% growth, highlighted by non-mortgage revenue growth of 15% and 11% organic non-mortgage growth.
We expect our non-mortgage growth to accelerate as the U.S. economy recovers.
The acquisition of Kount is providing new opportunities and products in the rapidly expanding identity and fraud marketplace and USIS continues to outperform the mortgage market from new products, pricing and increased penetration.
USIS is clearly competitive and winning in the marketplace and will continue to deliver in '21 and beyond.
International grew in the first quarter for the second consecutive quarter, overcoming economic headwinds from significant COVID lockdowns and slower vaccine rollouts in our global markets.
Our expectations are high for ongoing sequential improvement in International during 2021 and for accelerating growth as their underlying markets recover from the COVID pandemic.
We're also making strong progress rolling out our new EFX Cloud technology and data infrastructure and remain confident as John described in the significant top line cost and cash benefits of our new EFX Cloud capabilities.
These financial benefits will ramp as we move through 2021 and continue to grow in 2022 and are enabled by our always on stability, speed to market and ability to rapidly build new products around the globe.
Our strong performance -- operating performance is allowing us to continue to accelerate investments in new products, leveraging our new Equifax Cloud capabilities.
And we're off to a strong start in 2021 with 39 NPIs in the first quarter, on top of the record 134 we launched in 2020.
And our strong outperformance is fueling our cash generation, which is allowing us to reinvest in accretive and strategic bolt-on acquisitions.
As discussed earlier, we closed five acquisitions in strategic growth areas in the first quarter and we have an active M&A pipeline.
We look for bolt-on acquisitions that will strengthen our technology and data assets and that are financially accretive with the goal of adding 100 to 200 basis points to our top line growth rate in the future.
I'm energized about what the future holds for Equifax.
We have strong momentum across all of our businesses as we move in the second quarter.
We're on offense and positioned to bring new and unique solutions to our customers that only Equifax can deliver, leveraging our new EFX Cloud capabilities and our strong results and the increased guidance that we provided reflect that.

user
compname posts q1 adjusted earnings per share $1.97.
q1 adjusted earnings per share $1.97.
reported revenue of $1,213.0 million in q1 of 2021, up 27 percent compared to q1 of 2020.
sees q2 2021 adjusted earnings per share $1.60 -$1.70.
sees fy 2021 adjusted earnings per share $6.75 to $7.05.
sees fy 2021 revenue $4.575 billion to $4.675 billion.

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