First Advantage (FA) 46th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference summary

Business overview and market positioning

• Provides global workforce solutions for screening, hiring, and talent management, operating in over 200 countries and territories with $1.6 billion in revenue and 80,000 customers.

• Differentiates through scale, proprietary data, and a tech platform integrated with customer workflows, underpinned by AI and compliance expertise.

• Operates in a highly regulated industry, leveraging compliance and data infrastructure as key competitive moats.

Labor market trends and customer sentiment

• Labor market has shown stability over the past 12-24 months, with enterprise hiring remaining neutral to positive across all verticals and regions.

• Layoffs reported in media are often offset by new hiring and investments, resulting in net positive screening activity.

• Retains 97% of business, driven by upsell, cross-sell, and new logo wins, even in a neutral base growth environment.

AI, compliance, and competitive moat

• AI is used to optimize data sourcing and search speed but not for employment decisioning due to legal restrictions in multiple states.

• Compliance requirements (FCRA, GDPR, etc.) and the complexity of data sources create significant barriers to entry and disintermediation.

• Proprietary data and infrastructure, including 1,000s of data sources and a network for drug testing, reinforce the competitive moat.