Finance

Equifax tumbles 8% as investors keep bailing after data breach

Key Points
  • The CFO had been scheduled to present at a financial services conference hosted by Barclays in New York on Monday as well as to meet with investors in NY and Boston this week.
  • The data breach concerns personal information for 143 million individuals.
Credit reporting company Equifax Inc. corporate offices are pictured in Atlanta, Georgia.
Tami Chappell | Reuters

Equifax shares fell 8 percent on Monday on top of a 13 percent tumble on Friday after the credit reporting company disclosed a data breach affecting the personal information of 143 million people.

John Gamble, Equifax's chief financial officer, had been scheduled to speak at the Barclays Global Financial Services conference in New York at 9:45 a.m. but no longer appeared on the agenda as of Monday.

During his own presentation Monday afternoon at the same conference, Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank said the data breach had likely affected a number of its customers "and it's going to be costly to them and to us."

"We have not been through the equivalent of this one," Fairbank said. "A lot of people are going to have to live the pain of this."

The company announced the data breach, which it discovered in late July, on Thursday. On Friday afternoon, as criticism of the company and the data breach mounted, Equifax released a statement saying Gamble and members of the investor relations staff would meet with investors at the Barclays conference on Monday, again with investors in New York on Tuesday, and with investors in Boston on Wednesday.

Similar meetings have been hosted in various other U.S. cities this year, according to older Equifax press releases. The meetings would be to discuss second-quarter results and the strategic outlook for the rest of the year, Friday's statement said.

Regulatory filings from early in August showed that Gamble and two other executives sold a collective $1.8 million in Equifax stock, but the company said in a statement last week that the executives "had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time they sold their shares."

A spokeswoman for Equifax didn't return a message on Monday seeking comment on the conference appearance or the plans to meet investors.