The Q2 earnings season has been another strong reminder of why we focus on owning exceptional businesses. While several portfolio companies have yet to report, the results so far have been encouraging across the board. Revenue growth remains healthy, margins continue to expand, and management teams are allocating capital intelligently through disciplined buybacks and strategic investments.
What stands out most is that the underlying investment theses remain intact. Rather than chasing short-term gains, these companies continue to strengthen their competitive advantages - whether through AI-enabled products, deeper customer integration, network effects, or expanding mission-critical data assets. The market may focus on quarterly beats and misses, but we believe the more important story is that these businesses are extending their moats while continuing to compound intrinsic value.
Below is a summary of the earnings reports released so far. The remaining portfolio companies will be added as they report over the coming weeks.
MA (July 30, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
Net Revenue Growth: Increased by 12% year-over-year on a non-GAAP, currency-neutral basis.
Adjusted Net Income: Rose by 16% year-over-year.
Value-Added Services: Net revenue grew by 18%.
EPS: Reported at $5.04, up 19%.
Capital Allocation: Repurchased $4.9 billion in stock during the quarter.
Key Takeaways
Strategic Network Flexibility: Mastercard is evolving its network architecture to capture incremental volume, exemplified by its partnership with the Central Bank of the UAE to provide switching technology for the domestic “Jaywan” scheme. These transactions are incremental to the company’s global switch volume.
Agentic Commerce and Machine-to-Machine Payments: The company is positioning itself as a first-mover in “agentic commerce”, launching “Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines” to facilitate high-velocity, low-value payments between AI agents. This initiative is supported by over 30 industry leaders, including Adyen and Coinbase.
Security and AI Integration: Mastercard is aggressively scaling its security suite, notably through the acquisition of Recorded Future. Its “Threat Intelligence” tool has identified over 7 million card testing transactions, preventing an estimated $172 million in fraud.
Digital Assets and Interoperability: The company continues to integrate stablecoins and digital assets into its network, with crypto co-brand volume tripling over the last two years. The upcoming acquisition of BVNK is intended to serve as a “trusted interoperable layer” for digital asset commerce.
AMZN (July 30, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
Total Revenue: $200.6 billion, up 20% year-over-year.
Operating Income: $27.5 billion, up 43% year-over-year.
AWS Revenue: $42.2 billion, reflecting 36.7% growth.
AWS Annualized Run Rate: $169 billion.
Capital Expenditure: $53.1 billion in Q2, with a full-year 2026 forecast raised to $220 billion.
Advertising Revenue: $19.8 billion, up 26% year-over-year
Key Takeaways
AWS Growth Acceleration: AWS revenue growth accelerated for the fifth consecutive quarter, marking the fastest growth in 18 quarters. The backlog has reached $496 billion, growing at triple-digit rates.
AI and Silicon Dominance: Amazon’s custom silicon business (Trainium and Graviton) and AI services have each reached an annual revenue run rate of over $25 billion. Management noted that growth in AI is actively pulling core cloud services along, as reinforcement learning and agentic tool use rely heavily on CPU-based infrastructure.
Strategic Shift in AI Models: While Amazon continues to integrate third-party models into Bedrock, the company confirmed it is pursuing its own frontier model to gain better control over costs, prioritization, and speed.
Retail Efficiency Gains: The company is seeing significant success with its “same-day” fulfillment network. In cities where same-day perishables are available, monthly active customers have grown over 50% since the start of the year, and orders average 3x more units per order.
New Security Offering: Amazon launched AWS Continuum, a service that uses frontier models to discover, prioritize, and remediate code vulnerabilities, addressing a critical pain point for enterprise customers.
VRSK (July 29, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
Consolidated Revenue: $806 million, representing a 4% increase year-over-year.
Adjusted EBITDA Margin: 57.5%, reflecting disciplined expense management and operational efficiency.
Subscription Revenue Growth: 8% on an OCC basis, underscoring the resilience of the company’s core business model.
Transactional Revenue: Declined 4.2% on an OCC basis, impacted by lower commercial property volumes and tough year-over-year comparisons.
Diluted Adjusted EPS: $1.98 per share, a 5.3% increase driven by capital return activity
Key Takeaways
AI-Driven Monetization: Verisk is successfully transitioning AI from experimentation to production. The company launched two Verisk MCP connectors for Anthropic’s Claude, becoming the first insurance data provider to do so. Adoption of XactAI has surged, with the number of users increasing nearly 10 times since March to reach almost 7,000 licensees.
Strategic Innovation: The company launched Verisk Synergy Studio, a cloud-native platform for catastrophe modeling, alongside a re-engineered U.S. Tropical Cyclone Model. Additionally, Verisk acquired McKenzie Intelligence Services to bolster its geospatial intelligence and real-time event response capabilities.
Market Dynamics: The insurance industry is experiencing improved profitability and lower catastrophe losses, with 2026 tracking to be the first year since 2020 with global catastrophe losses below $100 billion. This profitability has led to price competition across property lines, which Verisk is navigating by focusing on underwriting discipline and risk selection tools.
Operational Leadership: The company announced the departure of CIO Nick Defond after two decades of service, with CTO Jeff Negrete stepping in as Interim CIO.
SPGI (July 28, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
Revenue Growth: 11% year-over-year on both reported and organic constant currency bases.
EPS Growth: 23% increase in adjusted diluted EPS.
Margin Expansion: 200 basis points of expansion to 54.3%.
Capital Return: Increased 2026 share repurchase target by nearly $3 billion to over $7 billion.
Ratings Performance: 17% revenue growth with a 68.5% operating margin.
Indices Performance: 20% revenue growth, marking the 13th consecutive record quarter.
Key Takeaways
Strategic Realignment: Following the July 1st spin-off of the Mobility division, S&P Global has consolidated its operations into four core divisions, with a specific focus on integrating supply chain assets into the Energy division and restructuring Market Intelligence to prioritize high-growth AI-ready data products.
AI Monetization Momentum: The company is seeing rapid adoption of its AI solutions, with over 500 clients using Kensho LLM-ready APIs and MCP connectors. API call volume in the second quarter was more than five times the volume of the first quarter.
Market Leadership: S&P Dow Jones Indices remains the world’s largest index provider by AUM, with ETF AUM reaching $6.35 trillion.
M&A and Partnerships: The company announced the acquisition of datacenterHawk to bolster its energy and data center forecasting capabilities and a majority stake in Agusto & Co. to expand its credit rating footprint in Africa.
Operational Efficiency: The Enterprise Data Organization (EDO) has achieved nearly 60% of its $100 million annualized cost savings target through AI-driven efficiencies.
CSU (Aug 11, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
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EFX (July 21, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
Revenue Growth: Reported revenue grew 11% (10% in constant currency), exceeding the April guidance midpoint by $5 million.
Earnings Performance: Adjusted EPS reached $2.25, representing a 13% year-over-year increase and outperforming the April guidance midpoint by $0.05.
Margin Expansion: EBITDA margins (excluding FICO) reached 35%, reflecting a 120 basis point improvement year-over-year.
Capital Allocation: The company returned $366 million to shareholders in the quarter, including $300 million in share repurchases and $66 million in dividends.
Key Takeaways
AI-Driven Productivity: Equifax doubled its AI-related productivity savings goal for 2026–2028 from $75 million to $150 million, citing rapid adoption of agentic AI across operations, technology, and support functions.
Strategic M&A: The company signed a definitive agreement to acquire Círculo de Crédito in Mexico for $750 million. This acquisition is expected to be accretive in year one and provides access to a high-growth market with unique alternative data assets.
Government Momentum: Equifax secured approximately $300 million in new and renewed state government contracts over the last four months, reinforcing the long-term growth potential of its $5 billion TAM in the government sector.
VantageScore Adoption: Mortgage lender adoption of VantageScore is accelerating, with transaction volumes up nearly 3x sequentially in the second quarter as lenders seek to capture cost savings.
Product Vitality: The company achieved a 16% Vitality Index in the second quarter, driven by the launch of 54 new products featuring embedded AI capabilities.
FICO (July 29, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
Total Revenue: $674 million, representing a 26% increase over the prior year.
GAAP Net Income: $237 million, up 30% year-over-year.
Non-GAAP Earnings: $12.18 per share, a 42% increase from the prior year.
Free Cash Flow: $370 million for the quarter, contributing to $961 million over the last four quarters.
Scores Segment Revenue: $459 million, up 41% versus the prior year.
Software Platform ARR: $413 million, reflecting 62% growth year-over-year.
Key Takeaways
Predictive Superiority: Independent analysis by Milliman confirmed that FICO Score 10T outperforms VantageScore 4.0 across all three key statistical measures of predictiveness, providing a 10% advantage for first-time homebuyers.
Strategic Partnerships: FICO expanded its collaboration with Accenture to accelerate the adoption of the FICO Platform, pairing FICO’s AI decisioning technology with Accenture’s operational expertise.
Market Gaming Dynamics: Management acknowledged that the “Lender Choice” policy has created a “gaming” environment where lenders pull both FICO and VantageScore scores to identify which provides a more favorable outcome for consumers, though FICO reports no significant loss in overall volume.
Platform Milestone: For the first time in company history, Platform ARR has surpassed non-platform ARR, validating the long-term shift toward cloud-based, AI-driven decisioning solutions.
UltraFICO Launch: The company achieved general availability for the next-generation UltraFICO Score, which integrates consumer-permissioned cash flow data from Plaid to improve credit risk assessment for subprime and near-prime populations.
BR (Aug 4, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
Revenue Growth: 8% constant currency recurring revenue growth for the full year.
Earnings Performance: Adjusted EPS grew 12% to $9.60.
Sales Momentum: Record $158 million in closed sales during Q4.
Capital Returns: Returned over $1 billion to shareholders via dividends and a record $600 million in buybacks.
Dividend Increase: Board approved a 12% increase in the annual dividend.
Free Cash Flow: Generated $1.2 billion in free cash flow, representing 110% of adjusted earnings.
Key Takeaways
Strategic Focus on Tokenization: BR is positioning itself as a primary infrastructure provider for tokenized assets. The company’s Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform now processes $360 billion in daily volume, and the firm is launching DLX, a multi-asset platform to unify traditional and digital asset servicing.
Agentic AI Integration: The company is actively deploying agentic AI to drive operational efficiency, targeting $25 million in productivity gains for FY2027. This technology is being integrated into core offerings such as BondGPT and trading algorithms to reduce clients' operational costs by up to 30%.
Governance Innovation: BR completed its first proxy season using an AI-powered custom policy engine, covering over $800 billion in U.S. AUM. The firm is also expanding its “Voting Choice” capability, which now supports over 900 funds and $8 trillion in AUM.
Regulatory Catalyst: The SEC’s E-Delivery rule proposal is viewed as a significant long-term opportunity. While it may reduce pass-through distribution revenues, management expects it to catalyze demand for digital-first communication solutions such as the Wealth InFocus platform.
CPRT (Sep 3, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
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Key Takeaways
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V (July 28, 2026):
Key Financial Highlights
Net Revenue: $11.6 billion, up 14% year-over-year.
EPS Growth: 11% year-over-year.
Payments Volume: 10% growth in constant $.
Processed Transactions: 10% growth to $72 billion.
Value-Added Services Revenue: 34% growth in constant dollars.
Commercial and Money Movement Revenue: 17% growth year-over-year.
Key Takeaways
Agentic AI Transformation: Visa is aggressively shifting its product development lifecycle by deploying “agentic squads” of two to four people, resulting in 65% faster feature development. The company has integrated AI into over 150 applications.
Stablecoin Strategy: Visa launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform to facilitate minting and management, and joined the Open Standard to support the issuance of OpenUSD for global money movement.
Strategic Partnerships: The company extended its global partnership with FIFA and formed a new partnership with OpenAI to secure Visa payments within agentic commerce.
Operational Efficiency: Visa announced workforce reductions, primarily within technology and product teams, to reallocate resources toward high-growth opportunities.
Client Engagement: Visa maintained a Net Promoter Score of 76 for the third consecutive year, reflecting strong trust and brand reliability among fintechs and sellers.
Thanks for reading!
Stiliyan Loukanov - Founder and CIO, Feather Fund
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