Corporate bigs shrug off Equifax woes

Washington is coming down hard on Equifax, but the company’s big corporate clients are giving it a pass.

The embattled credit bureau said Friday it hasn’t lost any significant business customers since it announced in September that hackers had breached its systems and made off with the sensitive data of 143 million customers. The number was later bumped up to 145.5 million.

Equifax largely does business with banks and other financial institutions — not with the people on whom they collect information.

“We didn’t lose any contracts,” interim CEO Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. said on a conference call.

While no major customers have cut ties with the credit bureau, some have delayed new contracts until Equifax proves that it’s done enough to shore up its cybersecurity — a situation that will likely dent sales and earnings for the next few quarters, Barros said.

Meanwhile, executives won’t be receiving any bonuses for 2017 “because of the cybersecurity incident,” Barros said. Last year, the company spent more than $83 million on incentive compensation.

The comments came the day after the company announced that fallout from the hacking, including legal fees and providing free credit monitoring services, cost it $87.5 million for the quarter, hurting its profits.

Equifax also spent as much as $75 million on IT upgrades, and investment in cybersecurity could hit next quarter’s earnings, too, said John Gamble, the company’s financial chief.

Even that might not be enough to stop future hacks, the company warned.

“We cannot assure that all potential causes of the incident have been identified and remediated and will not occur again,” Equifax admitted in a regulatory filing Thursday.

The report sent shares down sharply in early Friday trading, and they closed down 21 cents to $108.74.

Separately this week, Barros and his predecessor, Richard Smith, were hauled before the fifth Capitol Hill hearing on the hacking disaster.

“If we are going to do anything meaningful, we must have the political will to hold these companies accountable,” US Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said during the hearing.