Experian Aktie

Hello, everyone, and welcome back. I'm James Rose from Barclays Business Services team, and it's great to welcome back Experian to this forum. In these sessions throughout the years, Experian has showcased the evolution of its products and innovations across financial services, verticals and consumer. And this year, continue that, and we have some familiar faces presenting to us.

Our agenda for today, we start off with Jeff Softley, North American CEO, to give an overview of strategy in North America; then Keith Little, President in Software Solutions; and Vijay Mehta, Chief AI Officer, will update us on Ascend and other product developments. We then finish with a Q&A session with the team and also Lloyd Pitchford, Group CFO, will be joining us for that. [Operator Instructions].

But let's kick off. I'll hand over to Jeff Softley.

Well, thank you, James. We really appreciate being in the forum. Good morning, good afternoon. I'm excited today because today, we're going to talk about how we're well positioned to usher AI into the end markets that we serve and use it as a growth accelerant, not only for the North America business, but for the enterprise at large, particularly during a moment of significant technological transformation. I'm also going to offer some tangible examples of the progress that we're making today against those key strategic initiatives. Rich, let's move to the next slide.

So in North America, we have a strong track record of growth. And I think what's important to call out is that growth has been consistent through up cycles, through down cycles, through broader technological transformation. And where we sit today, we see a clear path to a $10 billion business, given our portfolio, the assets we have and also the market expanding opportunities that we see present with AI. And I want to be really clear about this. We see AI as an accelerant. We believe we have structural advantages. Some of those advantages include the unique and proprietary data set that we have, our platforms, which are ubiquitous in their end market positions. Of course, we're cloud native, which sets us up well to be positioned for an AI environment. And of course, nobody has a stronger track record of innovation in our space. And again, we'll be continuing in that theme by showcasing some demos of that today. Let's go to the next slide.

Now to achieve $10 billion in growth, you have to have large accessible markets and headroom for that growth. And put very directly, we see AI as expanding our TAM. We've got the proprietary data, which I mentioned, as well as and critically important, a trust layer that enables our clients, our partners and the consumers that we serve to take advantage of this technology at scale. But we do see some tangible examples of how AI expands our total addressable market. And we've highlighted a few here that we've spoken about. And again, we'll be giving updates related to the progress of each of these initiatives going forward.

First and foremost, we're using AI to disrupt existing spaces. Our health product, a Patient Access Curator is probably our best example of that. It's infused into our product in our end market. It's our largest scaled AI product in market across the health care system. We've also talked a lot about Agentic Commerce and creating new markets with AI. Of course, we've launched our Agent Trust coalition. This allows us to connect agents to humans so that Agentic Commerce can take flight. We're driving new use cases with our data and our capabilities and Agent Trust is a great example of that.

It's also a moment where we're leveraging new distribution. And of course, a great example of this will be our consumer marketplaces. We see AI as creating accretive opportunities and use cases for consumers to find and explore financial products. And we intend to be in those spaces where consumers explore the financial products that are available for them, and we see the distribution is an accretive opportunity for us.

I think it's also important to say that the secular trends behind these markets play to our advantage. We know AI creates more demand for compliant, explainable data and outcomes. Of course, we're well through the digital transition and transformation. Again, we're well placed in that. It's also important to highlight that there's more consumer empowerment. Consumers have more options, more choices and smarter ways to find products, which we intend to fuel. And AI is also a moment where there's completely new sets of data that we can lean into.

So in summary, we see billions of dollars of accessible further TAM in emerging AI use cases. And our job and what we'll showcase to you today is to not only explore those opportunities to be a frontrunner and built into the foundation of those markets as they develop. Let's go to the next slide.

Now we have a long history of innovation across our business. As we've said, we operate in 5 key ecosystems from financial services, marketing, consumer services, health and auto. And in each of these 5 ecosystems that we serve, we have billions of dollars of potential to be realized through this new product innovation. Now in financial services, Vijay and Keith will speak about some of the enhancements and demo some of the capabilities that we've built specifically in financial services. But I also want to highlight one of the other items here, which is cash flow. Lenders are looking for more data to make better lending decisions. Put bluntly, they're looking for a competitive advantage. We're uniquely positioned to provide cash flow data and new scores, which incorporate cash flow, and we're doing exactly that.

And how are we doing it? Well, we're leaning into the totality of the portfolio that we have to build capabilities that we're uniquely positioned to build. And our cash flow offering, it's fundamentally trained and built off of the data that we've collected through our Experian Boost proposition in our consumer business. It's one great example of how the broad portfolio in key foundational assets that we have can be used and combined to create innovation and game-changing offerings. We have more than 60 clients in our pipeline for cash flow. It's a key bet that we are making and a growth vector for us going forward.

I also want to talk about verification. We've long talked about our focus on the verification end market and offering. And I want to tell you today, we are very confident in delivering strong record count growth this year. As we've consistently said, it's a question of when, not if a large payroll provider goes nonexclusive. I'm more confident than I've ever been that we will see substantial record growth this year.

Further, we're confident in our ability to find alternative means to get to even richer and broader data sets that will accelerate our verification business. In our Consumer Services business, we've expanded into mortgage. 1/3 of all house purchases in North America originate from our consumer member base. That gives us a great vantage point and position to create and tap into that value pool as we extend our product. In our Automotive business, we've made significant traction in our online marketplaces and our vehicle history products. We've shared and we'll share again that we've covered more than 90% of the online marketplaces within the U.S. They have shifted from a competitor into our vehicle history product. This includes all the providers that you would think about the brand names such as [ Amazon Auto, Kelly Blue Book, Autotradercars.com ]. That gives us a fantastic position to go after new value pools, specifically around marketing as well as some other interesting ideas that we have to pursue now that we've got this broad market coverage.

And in all of these cases, our innovation is bolstered by the totality of capabilities that we can bring together across the enterprise. Again, we're unique in that we've got a position in B2C as well as a position in B2B. Let's move to the next slide.

We've got one of the most proprietary and scaled data estates globally. And AI requires data. It's a key ingredient needed to unlock the potential of this technology. And put simply, our data is becoming more important. Again, one of the largest global proprietary data sources in the world is very hard to replicate. It is most certainly a moat for us. And critically, it's diverse, it's broad and it's reinforcing. And underneath, identity underlies all of our data sets, enabling the most comprehensive view of a consumer possible.

In our Financial Services business, we have more than 250 million consumers covered in our core credit database. Now that data is secured from 12,000 furnishers, 3.1 billion trade lines. We have 1 billion updates monthly to that data set. We have 24 years of history. It's bolstered by 67 million unique consumers in our Clarity business, our alternative finance business. Further, we have direct relationships with 18 million consumers who are directly contributing daily transaction level data through our consumer business and consumer permissioning. That gives us fantastic view and scope of view around consumers. But we also have longitudinal depth. We've got a time series of information. We've got regulatory lineage, cross-domain linkages that allow us to bring credit, fraud, identity and commercial data sets together.

I also want to highlight that we've continued to build on this data estate. We recently announced the acquisition of [indiscernible] Data. This brings 20 years plus of e-mail intelligence into our ecosystem. It's got 10 billion e-mail addresses. It covers 98% of North America. And critically, we get 125 billion e-mail activity signals monthly from this data set. That is fantastic in terms of our ability to create innovation, both in credit, fraud, but really across the whole portfolio, including marketing services and even the consumer business. Data is and will continue to be a key strength of the business. It's also a moat that we will continue to build upon. Let's go to the next slide.

And I want to dive a little bit deeper in financial services. Obviously, it's the roots of our business. And I want to highlight some of the key progress as well as some of the key developments that have occurred recently. First and foremost, we have to talk about Ascend. Again, we'll be demoing elements of our risk operating system later today. Importantly, AI makes Ascend even more critical for our consumers and more critical in our portfolio. Our customers are seeking new capabilities from us. They want to co-create with us, and they're choosing us to fuel their long-term strategies and also to serve as the foundation for the AI capabilities that they build across the credit life cycle and across their teams.

We've also highlighted that we've recently launched [ RiskOS ]. This is an agentic way for our clients to pull the value out of the Ascend data that we have and the capabilities that we brought together. We're getting really positive early-stage client feedback. And then we're also beta testing with some key clients. We're also expanding these agentic capabilities with Ascend into operations such as marketing. We shipped our first Alpha client with an agentic marketing suite. This allows our customers to use agents to optimize their marketing campaigns and to create a closed-loop ecosystem that allows them to push new models in the market at speeds that they have not achieved through any other platform. So we've got a great installed base with Ascend, and we're building great innovation on top of it, which will power it forward.

I also want to highlight our recent renewal cycle. So I know often the questions we get is how are clients engaging with you? What questions are you getting from them? Do you see them buying more from you? And I can adamantly say, not only are they buying more with us, but they're also extending their duration of their terms. We just had a very large renewal cycle in North America. We had 100% renewal success in that cycle. And not only did we renew at 100% success rate, but we did extend the contract duration by about 10% and over 4 years. So it's leading to a double-digit lift for us across contract value. And we're also cross-selling. So it's a land-and-expand strategy. We've got a great footprint in Ascend, and we're using the product innovation and the capabilities that we're rolling out across the platform to expand across more parts of the credit life cycle and functions within our clients.

And lastly, I want to highlight, we recently had a landmark win within our Partner Solutions business. So this is a business that extends our white label capabilities from our consumer business directly to our clients' customers. And in this new deal, it's one of the largest and most important financial institutions in the U.S. It was a 5-year agreement. It was very strategic in nature. It opens up tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue for us, and it's a unique bundle. And I think it really demonstrates our clients in this moment where they need to accelerate their business and maximize the value that they're pulling from this AI technology, they're choosing to lean in with us. And the proof is in the contracts that we have with our clients and our customers, longer, more capabilities, and we're really seeing growth, which I think is the best positive sign we could ask for. Let's move to the next slide.

Okay. So we've talked about AI offering an unprecedented opportunity for us to go after new value pools. I want to share some of our biggest opportunities that we see AI enabling. Importantly, these opportunities are real, and we are making progress at pace. Within our consumer business, we view AI as proliferating new use cases into new ecosystems. We will be the marketplace that powers many of those new capabilities in new ecosystems. We've got an announcement later today, which I'll share as we get into a few more slides.

We want to be where consumers are, exploring their financial health as well as exploring the financial products that would be a good fit for them. And we see embedding our marketplace capability into these new ecosystems as a key way to advance not only our growth, but to access accretive growth for the overall enterprise. There's been new value pools that we're getting in on the ground floor. So within Agentic Commerce, we have launched a coalition around Agent Trust. Fundamentally, what this does is it allows Agentic Commerce to take off and solve some of the key fundamental problems that underlie a capability like Agent Commerce taking off. Fundamentally, you need to know that there's a good human behind a bot. You need an ecosystem and a payment chain, which allows those good bots to get through. And you also have to have a protocol that addresses first-party fraud as well as third-party fraud. We've solved all those problems in the coalition that we've built with Agent Trust, and I'll give you a bit of an update on the progress that we're making with the coalition in a few minutes.

And of course, within our health business, we see many of the blueprints and capabilities that we've used to build our patient access curator offering, which is an AI-native product. We believe we can bring that blueprint into the appeals space with an automated appeals offering. We're going to use AI to identify and maintain payer policies to triage denied claims and to assemble supporting claims. This is a use case which is very bespoke, but also very solvable with AI. What this does is it creates an appeal package for revenue cycle management staff, and it allows our clients to remove millions of dollars of costs in significant time across the hospital staff. We see many of the signals in the development of this product that means that it can be as broad scale and as growth-oriented as our Patient Access Curator product, which again is driving accretive growth across the health business. Let's go to the next slide.

Now today, what we also want to do is demonstrate some of the real momentum that we're making with tangible evidence of the potential of our role and our growth potential within AI ecosystems. And make no mistake, the largest players across these new developing markets are choosing us. They're putting our capabilities into their ecosystem where financial services needs are being expressed. And we're engaging in these platforms and these ecosystems in a way that secures our position. And I want to talk through some of the tangible examples that demonstrate the real progress that we're making.

First and foremost, in the Consumer business, we've said our strategy is to meet consumers where they are. Now in earlier stages of our partnership with the LLMs, we and others launched our apps within the LLM ecosystems. That was great. That was a way to engage consumers, but the fundamental challenge with that approach is that many of these ecosystems are still working through how discovery works and how apps are accessed. But what those app integrations have done is they've provided good signals of value to us as well as value to the LLMs. We are now moving into a step change in the level of partnership that we have with these platforms. Our consumer offerings are going to be natively embedded in 2 of the top 3 LLMs imminently. We have some announcements that are coming. Those will be announced very shortly. We view this as a big step forward in our strategy to meet consumers everywhere. And it is a step change from how the rest of the market is engaging via app plug-ins that were previously announced.

Additionally, it establishes our role. It builds us into a significant position in these ecosystems from which we can grow. And it protects our position while also establishing a very clear growth plan for us going forward. As I said, we will be making some announcements imminently, but you can see through the stats, 2 of the 3 largest LLMs will be embedding our financial services, our financial health capabilities from our consumer business within their platform.

But we're not just stopping at consumer. In our Marketing Services business, we're also working with the LLMs to become part of their ad ecosystem. We're enabling elements of our marketing services business to be built into the core of their ecosystem so that they can connect consumers to brands. We're in advanced conversations to bring experience solutions to enable some LLM marketing use cases, particularly for an LLM that is building out their ad business as we speak.

Agent Trust. I mentioned this is a big growth priority for us. We view this as a significant share of e-commerce in the future. But for that to take place, it needs to have a safe set of protocols that enable Agentic Commerce to occur. We have made great progress in the coalition that we've built so far. Through the CDNs that we've got into the coalition, we have more than 90% of the Internet covered. That's important because it allows us to enable good bots, good agents to move through the ecosystem uninhibited. We've made great continued progress in the key payment rails providers and the companies in the coalition to help bring Agent Trust to market. And today, I'm really pleased to announce that JPMorgan Payments, Merchant Services and Experian are launching an Agentic Commerce pilot with select merchants of theirs later this year, and we're going to be using Agent Trust.

Now why is that important? Well, it's important because JPMorgan Payments enables 50% of the e-commerce market within the U.S. We are taking on real scale through the coalition that we're building, and we will be in pilot with our offering later this year. Now Patient Access Curator. We've updated you on some of the stats and some of the progress. We've had 100% revenue growth to date this fiscal year. We've got a strong pipeline with Patient Access Curator representing roughly 1/3 of our opportunity funnel. So it's making significant inroads in our health business, and we see no signs of the growth slowing. In fact, we see much more opportunity to scale this even further.

I highlighted a big part of our consumer strategy is to be everywhere that consumers are. Today, I'm really excited to announce that we signed deals to embed the Experian consumer marketplace into 2 top neobanks within the U.S. as well as a top 10 media corporation within the U.S. What this means is that we will be fueling some of the largest publishers as they seek to monetize their platforms with marketplace offers. We will be meeting consumers where they are across the broader Internet ecosystem, and we're really proud to be fueling that expansion with our partners. And last but not least, I did signal this at the beginning of the presentation, huge progress we've made in our Auto business, 90% of vehicle marketplace ecosystems are running off of our vehicle history report. That is an incredibly strong position to expand into new value pools from this point forward.

So in all, you can see not only are we declaring where we're focused, but we're also making significant progress against each of these initiatives. More news to come, but we're really pleased with the progress that we've seen so far. Let's move to the next slide.

I want to go a little bit deeper in Patient Access Curator. It is our largest scaled AI solution in revenue cycle management in health care. We just closed one of our largest quarters of implementation in our health business, and this product was a big part of it. So what does it do? Well, the health care industry in the U.S. is complex. You know that if you live in the U.S. It's filled with human processes. It's full of errors. It requires insurance and eligibility experts to navigate the assignment of the right insurance to the right consumer for services to be rendered. And what Patient Access Curator does is it makes that process simple. It uses AI to analyze previously successful eligibility and then it uses those chains to take what is today a sequential process, which is prone to error and also very drawn out and it allows it to be front-loaded into a single call that takes less than 30 seconds to go back to a health care provider.

We've seen tremendous results with this product. It's decreased denials by as much as 30%, and it's also eliminated many of the contingency fees from third parties on the back end. That is significant to our health care clients. It matters. It makes a big impact, and we continue to see tons of headroom ahead of us for this product offering. Let's go to the next slide.

All right. So I want to go a little bit deeper on the consumer business and talk about where we're headed and why we're headed there. So our consumer business has been both a large part of our strategy, a unique part of our strategy, but also a huge growth enabler for us in North America and enterprise-wide. And what we're doing is we're using a technological transformation to scale from a smaller and narrower business 5 years ago to a more diverse platform that we have today. And if you were to look at our business 10 years ago, it was a very narrow business. It was defined by one product. We had limited distribution. We had a few million paying customers. Our revenue was subscaled. And we were monetizing one single event, credit education. That kept us contained within a narrow total addressable market.

The way that we've defined the business today, we've truly scaled that product offering. We've got more than 35 products that we offer to our consumers, but we also offer those products through a variety of different distribution means. Certainly, our direct business, where a customer can become a member of our offerings that we offer through experian.com and our own channel. But we've also scaled our partner services business. We've embedded financial health and identity services in the top 10 financial services providers in North America. That was a considered decision for us strategically. We knew that scaling the distribution into our Partner Solutions business and our clients would aid in the growth of this business overall.

And we've been able to scale our revenue from under $800 million to its current state today at $1.7 billion while we expanded distribution. That was a key strategic choice for us. And it's been an enabler for growth for us up to this point. We're going to continue to lean into that. Our strategy is to be everywhere that consumers are. You can certainly tell that from the announcements around our embedding financial health capabilities into the LLMs going forward. We want to put our broad capabilities, particularly around regulated use cases in all the ecosystems in which consumers are exploring their financial health. We've got a strong brand, and this powerful distribution enables us to further extend our footprint. It also, we believe, grows our total addressable market as consumers engage in more spaces and are engaging directly with our offerings.

So we're well on our way to embedding our unique capabilities in some of these high-growth channels. We also believe this creates synergistic product opportunities where consumers will want to port their financial profile into more ecosystems. They want to get the results that they seek in those ecosystems and then they'll look to control, enhance and improve their financial profiles directly with us. Let's go to the next slide.

Now I'm really proud of the position that we've built in the consumer business. In the last 10 years, Experian has built one of the most comprehensive and unique set of products to help as many consumers as possible. And many of these products exist nowhere else, but they've been used by millions of consumers through us. Obviously, Experian Boost is a great example of that. 10 years post the launch of that product, it is the most scaled offering, and there's nothing like it in market. We've done similar things with insurance. We've innovated within our credit card marketplace with things like [indiscernible] decline. We've created an AI virtual assistant. We've also helped consumers in financial inclusion through products like [ Experian Go ]. Each of these products that we've built now give us optionality in terms of distribution and scaling this business going forward, given that we'll be engaging consumers in broader ecosystems.

What has this created? Well, it's created a business that has really -- has had really strong growth, but it's also created an awareness of our leadership position around the consumer business. Brands want to offer the identity and financial health capabilities that we offer directly to our customers, and they choose us. Let's move to the next slide.

All right. So obviously, we view AI as an accretive expansion opportunity that expands our market. Further, we think it's synergistic and is accelerated with broad distribution. And I want to show kind of how some of this comes together. We made a concerted decision several years ago that the Ascend capabilities and our matching offer, Activate would be running both under our consumer business, but also accessible and enabled in our B2B business. What are we creating? Well, we're creating a foundation that has a common platform in which our financial services partners and other partners can access audience through any engagement point through the Ascend capabilities, which is leading in class because we feel like that's a flywheel that enables this business to become more important to our clients, but also to offer more value to consumers.

I have to highlight we've got deep integration of Ascend across our partners. 15 out of the top 15 strategic accounts for us in North America have Ascend installed inside their platform. Those customers can activate audiences across our consumer business with a click of a mouse. This is the strategy we've been building to. Distribution simply amplifies this strategy and this capability going forward. makes us more important to our partners and clients, but also it makes us more ubiquitous with the consumers that we serve.

So we're making great progress in this strategy. It's also highly synergistic in terms of the signals that we will pick up from this ecosystem. That will offer key insights that we can pipe back to our clients to enable a better understanding of customer intent but also future steps and actions that our customers will be taking, particularly as our clients go after prospecting and growing their customer base. All right. Let's move to the next slide.

So I hope what you've taken from today is that we've got clear examples of progress happening across the business. We have had material advancement in our strategy. We've declared where we want to go. We are making progress against the areas we want to go. Fundamentally, if I leave you with one thing, we view AI as expanding the capabilities, the need for our capabilities across more ecosystems that's happening in practice today. Our differentiated data enables us to play to our strength. We form a critical role in these new ecosystems as they're built out. We've got a great platform footprint across the end markets that we serve. We're cloud native. We've made that transition, which sets us up to play offense in this current market environment. And of course, we're going to continue piping world-class innovation through the capabilities and offerings that we bring to market. Truly, I believe there's significant headroom ahead of this business, and we view AI as an enabler for us to achieve our $10 billion ambition.

And with that, I will pass over to Keith and Vijay, who can walk us through some of the specific examples.

Great. Thanks, Jeff, and hi, everyone. Thanks for the time today. As I said, myself and Vijay will try to bring the platform AI story to life for everyone on the call. So if you go to the next slide, please, Richard.

So firstly, Ascend, a little bit of a look back, but just to show about the journey. Ascend is our core platform strategy, bringing together many of our capabilities initially focused in the B2B markets. But as you just heard from Jeff, now obviously looking at that flywheel across the organization with our direct-to-consumer and that sort of flywheel effect of the exhaust data from one feeding the other to get better outcomes for everyone across the customer base that we have.

As you can see, we've been on a journey over the last sort of 4 years. And a lot of this journey is driven by 2 things: the innovation we see about where we see the market going and also very closely listening to our clients. So if you look back where we start, we had a number of capabilities across analytics, decisioning, and we brought those together with fraud as well and converge that platform because what we saw in the market was a change in the way that people are integrating data, particularly in financial services and how to make the best decisions to have all the capabilities of bringing in the various data sources and the richness of the data sources we have to make better decisions when bringing people together. Making sure those capabilities are fully integrated, this drove simplicity and took a lot of complexity away from our clients and Experian being in a unique position to be able to do that. We've been on a scaling journey. So that's both migrations and winning new business.

So as we brought that convergence story, that integration story to market, that's helped drive that scale, prove the adoption, as I say, cloud native and globally available in all the markets we operate. And of course, now we're in this sort of fourth generation, that GenAI transformation that we see huge opportunity built on the foundation that we had.

I think it's just worth based on that, look at the time that we've built this capability and the growth of it, as you can see through the momentum in client solutions, the transactions, the activity around this. You also see that the -- we formed a strategy. We had the ability to execute on this strategy in what is a very complex space. We listened to clients' needs. We innovated and we've been recognized as leading in a number of areas. We've heard products. Jeff mentioned the Ascend Sandbox, a big anchor product to one of the things we do. Just one of those industry firsts that we sort of lead the market, and we continue with that. And hopefully, what we'll show you today is how we think we can lead in the market around some of the GenAI capabilities that we're seeing and the traction that we're now beginning to see with our customers.

So with that, if you could pop to the next slide. So where are we going? So we're very focused on clients' jobs to be done. Ultimately, how do we show them the value of what we can do and really drive those unique assets that we have. So we talk about it in terms of data and decision intelligence through the Ascend platform. What you can see here are the typical customer journeys, our institutions that we work have from finding clients, managing through onboarding them, managing through the life cycle, right the way through their entire sort of journey within a financial service provider.

Now what's unique about Experian, we have capabilities that align completely across that customer journey. So our marketing prospecting and ways of engaging those customers. our ability to obviously originate affordability, eligibility, et cetera, to bring those clients on board into the ecosystem, manage those customers throughout their life cycle, to help and support our financial service to cross-sell and how they grow and maintain that portfolio right through to payments and collections. And of course, have a huge range of identity and verification services and fraud services that underpin all of this with the rapidly changing world of that.

All of that powered by Ascend and all of that driven by the proprietary data and the breadth of data Jeff mentioned, obviously focused on North America, but all of our data sources wherever we are in the organizations we bring. And that's really important. This foundational level that we've built, the way that we're integrated with our customer workflows, the unique view that we see in terms of the data that we can bring together to help drive productivity and performance for our customers becomes critical. But this is what sets us up really well for this AI world that we're in the middle of and what we're going to show you today. Next slide, please.

So focusing on the AI opportunity. This is a study we did recently of over 800 financial services businesses across the regions we operate in to really understand what our clients are thinking to get underneath it. And what we see, the highlights effectively, they see over 70% looking at faster, better decisions, more real time, faster, more throughput, drive automation. Almost half the operational benefits, operational cost reduction. And 1/3 see improved risk management, being able to do more pricing precision to be able to optimize more and more in terms of their operation. And so they're seeing the benefits that they see that they can get from AI, but that's got to come together with that data and software. So it's great to have that ambition.

But what you then see is where are they on that journey. As you can see here, very much sort of stuck, almost 70% stuck in that sort of experimentation, proof of concept, early adoption phases. So we need to see what is driving them in terms of what's stopping them get into production and making those real benefits real for them. Next slide, Richard.

So we don't see the lack of ambition. So when you look into the data and speak to our clients and see what's going on, what's really going on here? Well, particularly in a regulatory world where obviously we operate, it's -- those regulatory constraints and the lack of trust where their experiments and how do they make those real to get those benefits. And it's a formation of a number of areas, the complexity of data integration, all the regulatory and compliance side of how do we make this real and make this safe for our customers that they can be auditable compliant for their regulators and be able to pass back those compliance checks. And this builds to that lack of trust.

So where they are playing with, say, agents and automation, driven by AI. If they are using it, it's in those very low-risk decisions. But as you can see, it's a very -- that's where the majority of people are spending their time. The majority is in that very low space in terms of making -- allowing that autonomy of our agents to make decisions. And this is the piece that is the step that we think we can unlock. Why do we think we can do that? We have data. We have data that we can build that knowledge. We understand control. We understand regulation and we understand data, and we have some of the best data so that we can start to bring that auditability, the repeatability and start to build and maintain and allow our customers to be able to trust what they're doing, their experimentation with agents and AI, and we're going to bring that to life shortly in a demo. So next slide, please, Richard.

So what this has led to is our strategy, something we launched a few months back called the agent operating system. What this is about is evolving the Ascend platform from the journey we've been on into enabling the AI agentic world for our customers. What you can see here at the heart of the picture are all is the core of the AI control plane that we call it. So all the security, all the identity, all of the guardrails, all the compliance guardrails, immutable logging, so logging that is there, can be assured and can be safely analyzed by security, compliance to be assure our clients, and we use this ourselves for our own use cases to make sure we're safe and we maintain that compliance view when we run these systems.

We then have the layer, the semantic layer, the trust layer, we call it. This is where that we're looking at using that proprietary data to really power our agents to create knowledge graphs, identity graphs and that understanding of our data in ways that agents and AI can really consume that data in a safe way, but also in a really performant way. So whatever we allow our agents to do and all the control planes that you have at the core, we make the best decisions for our customers and really make them perform. And those are at the heart, which we'll bring together within a spend, and we see that now evolving and growing since we sort of started this about 18 months ago.

And on that journey from sort of right to left, we can see some of the things that we've been doing. We've obviously been in market with Experian Assistant. So using this to drive value for customers to help them find and understand our data to drive insights and very much what many organizations have done. This has really been built on our -- within this core platform and enables us to learn and understand that trust layer and we've got these in market. We've had them for significant periods of time. So we've learned a lot to make sure we're safe.

We're starting to adapt our tooling. Clearly, in an AI world, the way that we've got to think about our software and that tooling has got to adapt and change to that world. So looking at how we build the tools for the next-gen views about how we design workflows, we bring in big data integration, how we build agents, how we map that against where organizations are currently on their maturity journey with AI in that operation model and how we bring our data to them in a way through MCPs and all the registries that you typically have.

Then things get really interesting in terms of how we look in terms of new markets, either expanding existing markets or new TAMs. In this case, in governance and control, we recently launched a product around model risk management, so compliance and how we think about going -- helping our customers easily and more effectively and much more productively get their AI models into production and model their compliance processes. And now we see -- building on that, we see regulatory horizon scanning capability and drive that change management across what is a really complex area for our customers to evolve around that sort of GRC, that governance of control space. And AI is really opening that up for us.

We're then looking at that expansion further with partner services and agents. You heard Jeff talk about the agent trust models. These are new TAMs built within the platform that can enable us to get into markets we've never been before. The platform, the flexibility of what AI can enable and MCPs and agents start to talk about distribution and partnerships in different ways that we've never been able to do before at a much more rapid rate because we have that platform space, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that later.

And then one of the really interesting areas that we're now building and we're going to bring to life around client agents. So where can we really bring that intelligence for our customers to really drive that productivity and performance for them, drive real automation, and we're going to bring this to life. Richard, if you just go to the next slide, please? Next.

So building on that, and before I hand over to Vijay to bring it to life, this is -- we see this as transformational for our market. We've traditionally had years of working with our data, with our tooling and our software, but we've never been had that capability of really getting to that real intelligence level. Agents can allow us to enable that. So here's examples of some areas that we're working with customers and in the early phases of that client adoption around the types of agents that we can build that can help our customers drive through and search for that performance, drive productivity and really optimize their solutions. You can see here governance agents to help drive those compliance and governance processes people have.

Fraud and ID agents, Vijay will bring that one to life. Marketing agents, not just offering insights, but starting to really think much smarter in terms of how target customers, manage customers, cross-sell to customers, drive insights and then credit risk agents in terms of how we look at operationalizing if you -- many of our financial institutions, the financial -- the operations teams, quite large, complex, looking at all sorts of different information and how you can synthesize this. We see huge opportunity in this space and something our clients are really excited about as we look into it.

Now to bring that to life, I'm going to hand over to Vijay to take you through fraud example. Over to you, Vijay.

Thank you, Keith. Now before we roll the demonstration and take you through the actual solution, I want you to just keep 3 things in mind. So first, fraud is moving faster than human teams can respond. The moment a bank lender launches a new product, a new credit card, personal loan, fraudsters are testing it within hours. By the time a human can analyze and review the different patterns, update controls, the attack is already scaled. The bank is losing money and losing genuine customers.

Next, Experian sits at the center of the data that exposes these attacks. We have identity, device, address, financial behavior, data on hundreds of millions of consumers across the globe. It's not a single data set, and it's not anything that a single lender can really have the exposure to. So it's really about us being able to monitor and detect patterns and fraud rings forming across institutions simultaneously before anyone else can see them.

Well, and then third, what we're going to show you here is the agent operating system. But the agent operating system in this example is about the use case, the fraud agentic use case and fraud prevention. The operating system, as Keith mentioned, has a lot of components to it, but we wanted to demonstrate that how we're turning our proprietary data assets into Advantage in real time and not just an automated response, but a true pattern detection and really solving a real-world problem. So with that, let's -- Richard, let's go ahead and start the demo.

[Presentation]

What you've just seen in that short demo was a real-world problem that lenders across the world face. They launched new products and almost immediately, there is a fraud ring that is attacking. What we've designed is the Experian Agent Operating System to help ensure that, that doesn't happen because we've unified our data assets and created a mesh or a knowledge base that allows for that linkage and real-time responses. The bank was able to approve more genuine customers. They were able to reduce their loss, and they were able to do this all without adding additional headcount. And finally, we've done this now with multiple customers. And what we see is that automation and that simplicity allows for a lot of benefits across their organization. And this is just one example because we're also doing it across other areas.

So 3 things really made this possible. First is speed and the patterns we were able to detect, making it evidence-based so we can explain it. Second is precision. This is where our advanced AI techniques come in, and our ability to process data, look at clusters across different areas and different types of workloads. And then third, it's trust. Because we have that regulated proprietary data set that is validated and high quality, we're able to validate and test things that others aren't able to do.

So the same platform can extend across multiple areas. It's not just account opening. The Ascend platform can look at account takeover, transaction fraud, really the full customer life cycle. So that's really what brings this to life. It's not just the data, not just the technology, but the ability to connect it all together in a way that a regulated lender can actually deploy it. Let's move to the next slide.

Now building on that theme of agentics and how we're leading the charge in the space, Jeff talked a bit about our Agent Trust solution. And I'm going to take you through a bit of the details and then show you a brief demonstration of how it actually looks.

So starting with some stats, and this is a recent stat from Gartner that the prediction is 25% of customer service interactions and banking will be handled by machine customers by 2029. Now my belief is that it's going to be much higher. And if we took the same survey next month, it would increase pretty rapidly. We do know that agent transactions are increasing and consumers and businesses are becoming more and more comfortable with the exchange of information and the exchange of money. What we have with our Agent Trust solution is an environment that is supporting that. So consumers are able to safely delegate shopping, payments, renewals and financial decisions because we are providing the trust layer. Next slide, please.

Without getting too technical, it's a 5-layer system. At the bottom, we have our trust registry. This is a log of agents, AI agents that have meta data and other behavioral aspects and attributes that we keep track of. The next layer is our partner ecosystem. Jeff mentioned this, but we're building a vast partner network that includes everything from Visa to [ Bose ]. So it's on all sides of the entire process.

The third area is our Agent Trust token and our tokenization process. So this is where we really get into some of the advanced algorithmic aspects of the solution. This allows us to create a tokenization scheme and bind that into various control sets. The next layer above that is our trust score. We are experts in building scores. And it's very important that we provide this measurement or score within the process to ensure that both sides of the equation are validated and equal. And then the top is where we find to a human. So this is where it gets really pretty interesting because we're able to take the tokenization, combination of the trust score, the advanced tech in our partner ecosystem and then delegate authority back into an agent. Next slide, please.

Now we're going to show you the demo, but I wanted to show you this slide because it demonstrates just the simplicity. So the goal here and what we are building on is seamless integration for the consumer and simplicity across the entire process. And behind the scenes, when we show you the demo, you'll see a lot of the telemetry and some of the details that are happening. Do know that the handshakes and all the security posturing is handled behind the scenes to ensure that we are providing that layer of trust. So let's take a look at the demo.

[Presentation]

So as you can see in that demo, our goal is to build on top of our platform capabilities, be fully agentic and provide that trust layer. So with our agent operating system, we have those capabilities, and we're translating that into solutions like Agent Trust. And there's a lot more to come on that front.

Keith, over to you.

Thanks, Vijay, and I hope those 2 examples brought the breadth of the innovation that we're doing in Experian, obviously, leveraging Ascend and those foundations, but that innovation that we can spin off in that sort of the opportunity that AI gives us. If you go to the next slide, please.

So in terms of metrics, in terms of the platform, what's important here, we have obviously ranges of metrics we spend a lot of time analyzing, finding out what our customers are doing. But these are really around those core areas about the activity, are we seeing the activity growth. We're seeing that momentum that I talked about on the sort of first slide and that activity, whether that's the transaction volumes increasing, number of capabilities and the time spent. The other is the engagement. So when people are using the platform, our clients using the platform, we see becoming intrinsic and embedded as a tool that they use day-to-day. On average, almost 1/3 of their time is using this platform in their day-to-day world. So we get very embedded and very deep into the workflows of our customers, which is extremely important for us strategically. And also shows that we're giving -- we're showing them that value, the value of the tooling and especially the value of our data. that they can drive their business forward. And next slide, please.

And of course, listening to our clients as well. You see some quotes here from some of our customers about the approach, what we're looking at. We asked Forrester to do an independent survey with a number of our customers to make sure to see what the benefits they were getting, which are tangible. That means that the value is there. Customers are seeing the value, sort of proving out the sort of the thesis that we started with in terms of this strategy. So obviously, really gratifying to see, but we think there's more -- with AI, particularly, we think we can fuel that and give more productivity and performance for our customers. Next slide.

Obviously, we spend a lot of time with analysts, and it's an extremely important area for us. We've sort of been engaging with the analysts across the breadth of what we're doing. So what's really great to see is where is that analyst feedback. Obviously, a whole range of logos on here. But the important thing is, firstly, the breadth back to the uniqueness that we have in Experian, that breadth of software capabilities for our customers and the amazing data that we have, the breadth of that proprietary data plus the software to help engage. And remember, these analysts spend time with all of the competitors. They spend time with clients. And so it's great to see where we're positioned as leaders in innovation on all those awards that come through, and they're just getting more and more in the market.

So having that client feedback, proof points of the benefits we're seeing and then in terms of the analyst feedback in terms of that direct comparison, their own views with their clients who obviously, they -- is their business model is gratifying to see. And then next slide, please.

So one thing I hinted on the part when I was talking about the agent operating system sort of strategy was the partnering part and how the platform and particularly with AI enables a really interesting platform partner strategy for us. So here, we recently announced ServiceNow at the end of April, where the puzzle we're looking at is we feel that many companies in the world, particularly regulated, but even beyond regulated, big industries, all require services that Experian has. Think of identity verification, hiring processes, think of KYD, third-party risk management. There's a huge market out there that we're not even touching and we're never likely to touch, obviously, with our focus on financial services. So who can best help us reach those areas we were never going to go after.

ServiceNow is the first example. We're well done with conversations with other partners as well. But we're really excited about this partnership with ServiceNow, where we plug a number of use cases into their platform, and we call it sort of agent-to-agent platform integration, first of its kind. But we're also energizing their go-to-market motions as well. So their sales teams are motivated to sell our services. For them, they see the benefits of the enterprise workflows they're typically putting in around those sorts of use cases, having the ability to bring our intelligence adapters into those across those sort of identity verification, third-party risk management, solves problems for their clients, helps them in terms of how they grow their business and helps us get that distribution to the over 10,000 customers they have globally in those sort of big enterprise areas they play across industries from pharmaceuticals, retail, telco, energy, utilities, areas that we would never get to.

So really strong value exchange between us and them and also making -- and making sure client outcomes are great. So we're super excited about ServiceNow, but we see this as the first of a number of partnerships that we want to do. And each of these platforms, these sort of big players in these spaces have different subtle in terms of the way they -- the use cases and the workflows they work in and really enables us then to tune the services we have into their market. So really excited about what Ascend and the agent operating system can open up for us in this area. So next slide, please.

So lastly, just to finish off, a couple of key messages. Ascend isn't just a technology solution. This is a growth story. we believe that we can unlock trusted AI at scale for our clients and customers for our financial institutions. Ascend is evolving into an AI-native foundational product to innovate from, as you've seen today with the agent operating system and what our teams are building on it. So we feel that, that market leadership, we really feel that we can redefine that financial institution through a trusted Agentic world, and we can go beyond the boundaries that we've typically been operating in.

So with that, James, let's end the presentation and I hand back to you.

Thanks so much, Keith and Jeff and there's quite a lot to unpick there. I think relative to last year, we don't really talk about AI that much and now it's embedded in almost every slide almost. Now we move to our Q&A section, and it's great to welcome Lloyd Pitchford, Group CFO, for this part of the session as well.

We've got a few questions in, but Lloyd, start for you. I think just to pull together we've heard so far, quite clear in saying that AI is an accelerant. But if you put us in a historical framework, so to say, experience been through innovation cycles in consumer when you first pushed out Ascend through Sandbox, et cetera, et cetera, it seems like we're very much in another innovation cycle now. How you frame where we are relative to the medium-term guidance, which is out there at the moment.

Well, thanks, James, and afternoon, everyone, and morning guys. It's great to be here again for another of these annual sessions. And I think if I view your question through the lens of the many years that we've been doing at this presentation, what you can see is a long history of enhancing our data assets, really mining actionable insights inside those data assets and distributing those enhanced insights to ever greater embedded ecosystems. And you can see each year, we're pressing forward with enhancements across each of those bits of our value chain.

What we've seen with technology when technology change has come, it's allowed us to generate more data, to see more data, but also to accelerate the ability to identify actionable insights. And we think AI is no different from that. You can see how quickly we've moved to be able to deploy this tooling on top of our platforms. And each one of our businesses, as you know, is on a journey from a capability to a product to a platform and enhancing the platforms that we're developing with the Agentic and AI capability enables us to add more value to clients and to ultimately be able to provide more of our data into their processes.

The value cases, I think, to our clients are getting clearer. You saw that last year with our renewals across our largest clients. I think Jeff's slide that he presented shows you that across all of these areas, the largest, most footforward innovating companies are choosing us to partner with. So all this gives us a lot of confidence into the future. We clearly have very large and expanding TAMs that we're looking to grow into and a lot of confidence that we'll continue to deliver over the next 2 and a bit years on the second half of our midterm framework and a lot of upside opportunity to deliver on beyond that.

But for now at least, it looks like we should be still sticking to high single-digit organic, but with optionality at least everything which has been discussed so far could push us to the upper end of that.

No change to our midterm guidance. You wouldn't expect me to say anything different. But I think against the background of questions about is this a risk or -- is this technology change a risk or an opportunity? What you can see is we're very foot forward and particularly some of the most innovative companies are choosing us to partner with. And I think Jeff said it well. Our goal is to meet all of our clients and all of consumers wherever they are. And those distribution channels are really expanding at the moment, and we plan to be in all of them.

Great. Jeff, if I can go to you, and we'll talk through the consumer. I appreciate the announcement that there's going to be a native offering within 2 of the 3 [ LLMs ]. Can you talk through how you think that changes or evolves the revenue model of the consumer business overall? We're used to it going direct through the Experian App, but it sounds like that's going to change in the future.

Yes. Well, I think, James, it's important to highlight our strategy and what our strategy has been really over the midterm with the consumer business. We took a key decision that we wanted to embed our capabilities within our financial services partners. We view that as reinforcing to our consumer offering at scale. It's critical to say that our brand shows up adjacent and within some of the largest financial services brands and the offerings that they provide to their customers-- and there's real value in that.

So we have a few different models, and those models are tried and tested. One of the models in which we have integrated with partners is to enable our membership to be accessible within broader ecosystems. We've got a great example of that through the partnership we did with [ Chime ], which is one of the largest neobanks within the North America market. Within that partnership, consumers can access their credit information within the [ Chime ] experience. They can also permission data for Boost. All of that is on the table as we explore these new high-growth channels for us. And in that instance, the monetization is quite direct in that it creates a relationship directly for us in our direct-to-consumer business as consumers interact with membership capabilities in broader ecosystems. And that's produced some of the lowest cost to acquire customers historically across our business as well as a clear view of what the lifetime value is of the customers acquired through that model.

We also have other models that exist in the business, and that's been tried and tested, and that looks more like our partner solutions offering where clients pay us to enable core capabilities within their ecosystem. We've been very clear that to interact with certain product features with us, you'll need to create an account directly with Experian.

Critically, I would say the LLMs do not want to get into regulated spaces. They understand our role and the value that we deliver within regulated spaces. And so I think through the conversations and the announcements that are forthcoming, you'll see that it's a symbiotic relationship that we've established that we think is a growth enabler for the business as we meet consumers in new and accretive spaces where they're exploring their financial health.

Sounds great. And recently, consumer margins have been scaling pretty rapidly. But are we still on that trajectory?

Yes. I think none of our guidance has changed with respect to the consumer business. Again, we've got a diverse set of business models within the consumer business, whether it's partner, subscription, marketplace, et cetera. We've got real flex, real optionality. And really, I think the biggest enabler for us has been building the customer base that we've built and expanded and scaled. And that provides optionality for us. It provides optionality around investments we want to make. But we would expect and anticipate that these new channels that we're exploring have very attractive cost to acquire customers embedded within them. And we believe we got significant lifetime value creation enabled through the partnerships that can really help continue to scale the business into its next and continued growth cycle.

We get quite a few questions on the broadening competitive environment perhaps in consumer, which sort of AI enabled. If we look at the current growth rate in consumer sort of across marketplace and premium, notwithstanding data breaches, is perhaps a little lower than what we've come to expect. Do you see any signs of that being linked to a changing competitive environment or market share in originations, for example? What's your take on that?

No. I think when you unpack the growth in the consumer business, you mentioned, James, we got a challenging comp in the breach component of the business. The trends that we see within consumer, when we look at monthly active users, et cetera, globally, we've been consistent in our monthly active users. So we see consistent pacing and trending. We have had some specific lender exposure elements and/or specific verticals within marketplace where we've seen lower activity. Again, we think that, that's been backed up by what we see from lenders and in particular, the lenders within our panel. I think those are the signals that we've picked up and that we see across the business, consistent with kind of onetime irregularities, particularly around the panel.

If we can move to Ascend. I think I'll start with what I hope at least is a basic question first. The way you have -- the way the demo is framed and the way you framed Ascend being an AI native actually, that means from a customer's perspective, it's going to be a human at your customer who is using agents which are built in and control within Ascend as opposed to the agents of the bank as such, be they created through copilots or cowork being connected to a sense? Is there a distinction there?

Maybe I'll take that, James. So yes, we'll look at various patterns. But effectively, the platform, that ecosystem, the agent operating system allows you to build your own agents within that environment, so allows customers to build agents within that customer, doing whatever they want those agents to do, consuming resources and data from ourselves. And obviously, the examples we're bringing to life, you saw those various personas and you saw the demo that Vijay talked is really to bring it to life for our customers because this is very new. People are talking about the agent human interaction. We will -- obviously, you saw the human in the loop controls within place. But effectively, the platform ultimately is capable of those integration patterns so people can build their agents, which is what we want our customers to build their agents on our platform. And we see that as something popular because we've got where we've got to so fast and ahead of the market. None of the competitors have got this capability today.

And so that's what we're seeing in customers at the moment. They want to engage. They want to see, they want to build agents, test out agents and see how they do. And obviously, compliance and that trust layer is so super important and obviously going to test that perspective. And what they really like and resonate with is we build for our direct-to-consumer business, it's regulated. There's production agents that we've drunk our own champagne as it were. And so they like that. That gives them confidence and again, helps that engagement.

Okay. Could you give us some guidance as to when you would expect this product to be rolled out a bit more broadly across the bank financial services?

Firstly, it's available at the core part of the platform. So it's available where the platform is. Obviously, it's in early stages. And what we want to do is to make sure we have solutions out there. We're in an early adoption phase with many large organizations who -- that's probably all I can really say, we're starting to look to build agents with. But there are some, I guess, low-hanging fruit agents for want of a better word. I mentioned the operations agent, which is if you think about case workers within fraud or within credit teams within our customers, there's a huge amount of that synthesizing of data where somebody is referred for a credit check or a fraud referral goes to using agents to synthesize all of that data to come up with recommendations for that agent, we see as -- we are seeing a huge, huge productivity benefit.

And we have real agents live in production in some -- in 1 or 2 of our regions, looking at both credit and fraud use cases around those operations agents. And yes, that's real. So the intention, of course, is that we'll be rolling out and scaling that over the coming year.

I think I'd add, James, if you look back and draw a line from where we've been to where we're going. What you're seeing here is waves of innovation on top of the Ascend platform. So some of the demos you see are things that we've been working on and we've had client engagement with now for a little while. The things that we're working on that we'll demo to clients at our conferences, client conferences in the U.S. and the U.K. in October and November are the next stage beyond this. And the early client reaction is the opportunity for very significant improvements in operating efficiency and productivity for them.

If you think about the promise of what AI can do in terms of productivity, every CFO out there is being asked how it will improve productivity. We're a route to that productivity gain for our largest, most complex clients. And the promise of agentic workflow in these heavily people-intensive areas offers a very material value creation opportunity for our clients that we're racing to deliver.

When it comes to capturing that value and trying to monetize this product and innovation you've got, how are you going to do that through the contract structures you currently have? Keith?

Yes. So I guess we see the value increasingly to our customers, how we think about that. Ultimately, we're going to have consumption is going to be a part of that as we move to more consumption-based models, and we're working through how we want to do that. But it's really about that the value that we -- that our customers see and driving that intelligence from that sort of intelligence that we're bringing. And again, we see significant opportunity for the value for our clients, which we feel we can obviously monetize in a couple of ways, but obviously, consumption driven.

You saw Vijay and the example he gave the way that the fraud agent consumes data and the way it acts in terms of synthesizing that data to drive that productivity at speed. So we see huge value to our customers. And therefore, we feel that there's -- monetizing that gives us some good opportunities.

From a cost or potential cost standpoint, it's perfectly plausible that once you unleash agents at least, then you could get quite a lot more volumes coming to the system. With agents within Ascend, does that come with a high incremental cost in terms of your tokenization usage? The broad question is, do you expect this to be a high return on investment product for you?

So I'll take that. We expect it to be a very high return on investment. Exactly how clients use it and engage with it and exactly how that use scales different factors of production, including tokens and cloud usage is still to be proven out, but you would imagine that we're well adapt at learning into new products on top of variable costs. And we've got a lot of telemetry in the system to make sure that we can hone that. The potential value creation for our clients of using some of these is really very material. So obviously, we'll make sure that we get a fair share of that value creation.

And just to carry on the theme of this conversation, but come at it from a different angle. I think it's fair to say there's still quite a bit of concern in the broader market around AI as well as potential opportunities. AI lowers the barrier to entry for coding and software. But are there any signs that your customers are less interested than they were before in the analytical tools that they would just prefer to have data from you that they can push it through their own systems?

I'll maybe kick that off and then pass to Jeff. I mean the proof of the pudding you saw last year was our largest, most complex clients are buying more and contracting for longer. So everybody, as I just mentioned, is pressing for productivity improvements in their business, and we are a route to those productivity improvements. A lot of the value case for the things we do includes labor takeout, but also enhancing the top line.

So the fraud case that you heard about, fraud is ramping rapidly on the back of AI-enabled attack vectors. So being able to defend against AI-driven fraud with AI is a key driver of conversion and loss protection for the banks. And again, we're a route to enable them to do that. So all of the engagement we're having with clients is really heavily in the acceleration of adoption. But Jeff?

Yes. I think the most critical data point is we see clients leaning in, in their contracts with us. So again, longer terms, more comprehensive in nature, that's the strongest signal that we're picking up from the market. And I think if you think about the key folks we're interacting with across these organizations, they've got pressure to adapt AI into their capability set to realize the benefit associated with it. And we think we can make a strong case that we are the fastest path to enable that, particularly when you see the capabilities and interoperability we can bring together with the demo that Vijay offered.

And so if a route for a client is build elements on my own and hope that they're compliant and take on the burden of explainability and build out within their own ecosystem versus take an installed platform that already exists inside their organization and is used and adopted at scale across many functions across the credit life cycle, they're gearing that direction because they want speed. And they also want to know that elements of enabling AI inside their organization are going to be enabled by Trust. And that's the sort of relationship we have with clients.

I think that I'd just add, if you think of what software is for us, it's a delivery mechanism of actionable insights. So if you think about the thousands of users who sit on the Ascend platform, we're harvesting the signals of all of the use of the platform across that ever-increasing set of clients. Those signals are available essentially to enhance the product for everybody. We get a much broader view than anybody with the soft product could ever have. So software really isn't the product. The product is the actionable insights that sit that we've delivered on the product.

If we can move to Agent Trust now. Great to see that there's announcements coming out soon about JPMorgan being involved. What stage is this offering currently at? And what's sort of left to happen? What are the major hurdles that still need to be overcome before it can potentially scale quite rapidly?

Sure. Well, I think the backdrop for us, James, is we believe Agentic Commerce will be a significant share of e-commerce in the future. As we've demoed, that was a demo, but we have bought those headphones through Agent Trust. So we've run payments and the tokenization through the full payment ecosystem end-to-end. We have some extra headphones around if you would like to buy one or if you want one.

But I think the key for us in the JPM Merchant Services pilot is that this is an organization that has 50% of e-commerce businesses enabled through their platform. We will be doing a pilot with them. We expect that pilot to launch this holiday season. I think that gives you a sense of some of the immediate traction that we think we can secure with Agent Trust in market. Now of course, with any new capability like Agentic Commerce, there will be different adoption curves. Some of that's going to play out over time. But again, I think the signal to pick up through the inclusion of JPMorgan Merchant Services in the coalition and in the pilot is that, again, the organization that provides merchant services for 50% of e-commerce in the U.S. believes that this capability is relevant, needed for their customers and also pilot worthy in a really important season, the retail season this year.

It sounds like you've got a big focus on it and you're very excited about it from an analyst modeling perspective, how excited should we be about it?

Well, obviously, we need growth to occur in adoption of Agentic Commerce. I think it's critical for us to get embedded and enabled. We do have multiple monetization opportunities across the offering. There's elements that we highlighted such as the trust score, which we think is a highly valuable part of the coalition. It's essentially the flag that determines the risk around an Agentic Commerce coming through the full payment chain.

We also know that it's a key loss point for many retailers is fraud. And so we think we'll take a commensurate position relative to the role that we're going to play in enabling Agentic Commerce. But again, we think we need the behavior to grow, the usage to grow. The good news is I think we've got clear line of sight to landing with some live examples, again, in this calendar year through the pilot, which I think will be a fantastic position for us to hold. I think it's very unlikely that one standard drives the entirety of Agentic Commerce, but we think that this is a key standard that has the backing of some really important brands across the full ecosystem chain in payments. And again, we think this will be one of the scaled ways in which Agentic Commerce will be enabled in the future.

I was just going to ask about what else could potentially coexist with this offering. Mastercard seem to have their own version of this to a certain extent. What's your view on the competitive environment for this product?

Yes. I think it's -- I think we'll end up with a Venn diagram, James, of overlapping capabilities that have different concentration focal points across different parts of the ecosystem. I think -- I know there's been a lot of news around Mastercard. There's ongoing discussions with them as well. They're interested in integrating elements into Agent Trust. So I think everybody is placing a few bets. There's very few people who are kind of placing a single-threaded bet around how agents like commerce scales. And I think most people recognize that there's going to be different solutions for different ecosystems at play.

If I could jump back to Keith and the distribution partnerships you mentioned. We know about the ServiceNow. It sounds like there's -- it sounds like there's more to come. Again, the question on sort of degree of monetization, how that would work with a partner as opposed to if you had a direct contract. And to what degree could it expand your customer base, your addressable market versus what the sort of core base you have access to yourselves?

Yes. Obviously, we're not disclosing any numbers, but we see a material growth. When you look at the numbers, you look at the products, you look at the way that they're structuring their go-to-market mechanism, the way they're being energized and motivated to sell our products as part of their suite as part of their services. We're very excited about the sort of materiality there.

You can look at the customers they have. I mentioned whatever it is about 10,000 customers. What's interesting about ServiceNow is they're very much focused on those big enterprise players. So they don't go to necessarily the long tail type customers like some of their competitors. But -- so -- and the way that they operate their sales motion is very impressive. And we're just really pleased to be aligned to them. So looking for some material success, but we will see.

Sounds good. On a completely different topic, there's been quite a few tweets recently in regards to the mortgage market, and there's been some today. And the one from [indiscernible] today says that he's having meetings with the bureaus this week to discuss try-merge, by merge if go to single reports. And he wants to get the cost of mortgage down for consumers. What's your response to those comments so far?

So I'll maybe kick off and pass on to Jeff. Clearly, what you've seen over the last year or so is a desire by the regulator to introduce more competition in the school market, and we welcome that. And as you've seen with the announcement that we and our direct competitors have made in terms of pricing for Vantage adoption, we're really supportive. We think that's the best route to lower the cost for consumers in North America in the housing mortgage origination market. So we've been very supportive. We don't comment on individual interactions with the regulators as you might expect, but we continue to be in active dialogue.

I think if you look back over the last number of years, there have been a number of studies that have been done across lots of different agencies on different models. And the conclusion that's been reached to date is that the benefits of consumers in the round are best served with the [ Tribunal ] model, giving the best chance for as many consumers as possible to participate in the housing market. And we think that's right. There are clearly other models that have been discussed and we'll be in active dialogue with the agencies as discussions continue.

I think as you know, it's a relatively modest bit of our business overall. When you started to see some of the price escalations what 4 years ago, it was about 3% of our overall revenue. There's some mortgage profiles in the U.S. Given some of the price rises, it's about 5%. About half of that 5% is just a pass-through of the [ SCOR ] royalty. So a fairly modest overall piece of our business, but clearly, an important one and an important one to end consumers who are looking to purchase a house. So we take it very seriously, interact with regulators in good faith. And I'm sure that we'll be an active participant in the progress to score competition with Vantage.

Jeff, anything you want to add?

No, I think you covered it, Lloyd.

That's great. Thank you very much. And that's all we've got time for in terms of Q&A, which brings us to the end of today's session. I want to say a huge thank you to the Experian team and all the work that goes into their presentations. And I'll hand back over to Lloyd to close this out.

Thanks, James, and thanks to the Experian team for the demos and the presentations. For investors on the call, hopefully, you can see another wave of innovation and strategic progress and the pace that we are executing on some of the strategic opportunities that we have, the embedding of AI into our tool sets, the expansion of the partnership and distribution opportunities across some of the new platform providers and across it all that some of the largest and most complex and most innovative companies are choosing us to partner with in some of these areas, which I think is a really good signal.

So we look forward to updating everyone on current trading. This is more a strategy and product session, but we'll update on current trading at our half year results in November. And given the waves of innovation we have, we're already working on the things that we might be able to show this time next year. So the innovation engine continues. So I appreciate everybody's time and attention.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Experian's First Quarter Trading Update Webcast and Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first for today, Mr. Brian Cassin, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Hello, everybody, and welcome to our Q1 trading update call. I'm here, as usual, with Lloyd, who will take you through the financial performance after my opening remarks. We've had a good start to the year with continued new business strength and accelerating potential across a range of AI-enabled opportunities, Q1 total revenue growth was 10% at actual rates, 8% at constant currency and organic revenue growth was 7%. Organic revenue growth was 7% in North America. In Latin America, we've continued to see strong momentum, which was up 12%. U.K. & I delivered 5% growth and EMEA Asia Pacific was up 1%. The Globally, B2B organic revenue growth was 9% and Consumer Services growth of 3% was impacted by the wind-down of 2 North America breach contracts that we've previously discussed.

Turning to the regional highlights, starting with North America. Financial Services delivered another strong quarter, up 13%, building on our excellent FY '26 for client renewals. Growth was broad-based across credit, fraud, verifications and mortgage. And while clients continue to monitor credit quality and the like of inflation risks, the lending environment remains relatively stable with solid growth in bank lending and originations and stable to modestly improving delinquencies, supporting growth in unsecured credit volumes. Client momentum also remains strong.

Pipelines are healthy, and we reached an important milestone with all 10 of our largest strategic clients now live on Ascend, further strengthening our leadership and platform and analytics. We're now building on that foundation by moving new agentic AI applications into pilot and expanding adoption of mobile Risk Manager, our GenA-enabled compliance monitoring solution. We continue to see focus by our financial services clients on strong AI governance and explainability to meet regulatory requirements as well as on strengthening fraud capabilities in response to the rise in fraud attacks, both are creating growth opportunities for Experian.

In mortgage, 11 of the top 15 mortgage lenders are now accessing VantaCore 4.0. These lenders collectively make up nearly 30% of the total mortgage market demonstrating strong interest in Vantage score amongst these large lenders. Performance across the verticals was also strong, was up 8%, led by Health & Automotive. In health, growth was driven by continued adoption of patient Accurate, which is our AI-powered registration platform and a record level of implementations. In automotive, we continue to strengthen our competitive position through new client wins led by AutoCheck.

In Consumer Services, we continue to execute our strategy of reaching consumers across every channel, leveraging our trusted financial health brand, organic revenue growth was 2% lower, which reflects the end of the 2 data bridge products. Excluding data bridge growth was consistent with last quarter across the product verticals and with good growth in insurance and personal loans and some softness in credit cards. We are focused on extending the Experian brand beyond our own channels, and we're making good progress with a growing pipeline of partnerships to expand access to our products either, for example, is now live on Snapchat supporting consumer credit education and we have established a steady cadence of app launches in at EPG while advancing partnerships with other leading LLM to deliver compelling compliant consumer experiences.

At the same time, we continue to deepen our existing panels and enhance membership benefits, most recently in mortgage, where the integration of [indiscernible] is progressing well. In Latin America, organic revenue growth was 12%, with strong performances in both Brazil and Spanish Latin America. B2B delivered a strong quarter, which is up 9%. In Brazil, we have enhanced our market position in fraud following last year's Clear sale integration. And more recently, we added ID Well, which further strengthens our identity assets.

Our expanded capabilities are driving higher adoption across our strategic clients with expansions across major Brazilian banks and telecommunications providers while also helping us capture new opportunities in new client segments. We're also continuing to expand our proposition for SMEs, where performance has also been very strong. Consumer Services delivered another very strong quarter with organic revenue growth of 22%. Growth was broad-based, driven by continued audience expansion and a growing product portfolio. Our credit marketplace performed very strongly, supported by the expansion of private payroll lending, while we continue to grow premium subscriptions and delivered another strong quarter for Lymphonome, helping consumers renegotiate debt and consolidate loans.

In the U.K. and Ireland, organic revenue growth was 5%, with B2B also up 5%. We continue to make good progress through competitive wins and client upsell driving further penetration of the Ascend Sandbox with new use cases, expanded fraud use cases and some growth and verifications. This resulted in broad-based growth across credit, fraud and data quality despite a relatively subdued lending environment. Consumer Services delivered 7% organic revenue growth, supported by strong audience engagement and good growth in premium subscriptions, driven by continued product enhancements as well as further progress in marketplace. In EMEA and Asia Pacific, organic revenue growth is 1%, primarily reflecting the timing of deliveries against the prior year comparator, we expect Q2 to be at a more normalized level of growth.

We continue to make good strategic progress with new products and traction across the region, supporting future growth opportunities.

And with that, I will now hand it over to Lloyd.

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As seen, we made a good start to FY '27, with Q1 organic revenue growth of 7% in the middle of our 6% to 8% guidance range for the year. in line with our expectations. And excluding data breach, organic revenue growth in the first quarter was 8%. Total revenue growth was 8% at constant exchange rates and 10% at actual exchange rates. Acquisitions contributed around 1 percentage point to growth and foreign exchange was a tailwind of around 2 percentage points. By segment, Group B2B organic revenue growth was 9% with Financial Services up 9% and verticals up 7%. Group Consumer Services grew 2%, reflecting the roll-off of the 2 North American breach contracts we mentioned at our full year results. And overall, underlying traded trends were stable and in line with our expectations.

Turning to the regions. In North America, organic revenue growth was 7% with total revenue growth of 8%, B2B growth was 11%. And as you'll recall, in the first quarter last year, we had some one-off revenue in North America Financial Services, which we lapped in the quarter. Excluding that, all of the trading trends were stable in line with those that we reported in May. Financial Services grew 13%, supported by Ascend analytics solutions, broad prevention products, mortgage profiles and stable underlying client activity. Mortgage trends were in line with the fourth quarter with volumes slightly higher and revenue up in the 45% to 50% range.

Within Verticals, revenue grew 8%, in line with the second half of last year, with continued strength in Health and Automotive. Consumer Services was 2% lower, reflecting the completion of the roll-off in the 2 long-term data bridge contracts that we reported last quarter. Excluding data breach, Consume Service trends were in line with last quarter, with strong growth in personal loans and insurance and softness in credit cards. In Latin America, as expected, we saw a good quarter of organic growth and total constant currency revenue growth up 12% at actual exchange rates, revenue grew 25%. B2B reported good growth, up 9% with Financial Services also up 9%, supported by commercial momentum across our strategic clients in Brazil. including identity and fraud as well as strong progress in our SME channel and agri finance.

Pipelines continue to be strong. and that really underpins our expectations for the full year of double-digit organic revenue growth in Latin America. Consumer Services delivered another very strong quarter, up 22%, driven by [indiscernible], premium and marketplace, including the ongoing expansion of payroll lending. And we also completed the acquisition of ID War on July 1, which further strengthens our fraud and digital identity capabilities in Brazil. In the U.K. and Ireland, organic revenue growth was 5%, with total constant currency growth of 7%, including the contribution from KYC360. B2B grew 5%, supported by good progress with new business wins and continued excellent progress with our Ascend platform.

Consumer Service grew 7% and with marketplace growth supported by higher engagement following the launch of the new 1250 credit score and continued subscription product enhancements. As Brian mentioned, EMEA Asia Pacific, organic revenue growth was 1%. And mainly reflecting our prior year comparatives, and we expect growth to be higher through the rest of the year. And turning finally to the outlook. Our full year expectations and modeling considerations are changed. For FY '27, we continue to expect organic revenue growth in the range of 6% to 8%, with an inorganic contribution of around 1%. And based on current rates, we expect foreign exchange to be a tailwind of 1% to 2% for both revenue and benchmark EBIT, and we continue to expect the progression of around 50 basis points in organic potent currency margin production.

With that, I'll hand you back to Brian.

Great. Thanks, Lloyd. In summary, we started the year well, delivering a good performance in Q1. We're executing strongly against our strategy and are encouraged by the opportunities ahead. We continue to see favorable trends driving great assumption of proprietary data, expanded distribution channels, new addressable markets and enhanced productivity. Together, these drivers strengthen our confidence in the growth opportunity ahead and we continue to expect strong growth in FY '27 consistent with our previous guidance.

With that, we'll now open the line for questions. We will be grateful that you could limit yourselves to 2 questions each so that we can get to as many people as possible. Operator, over to you.

[Operator Instructions]

and now we're going to take the first question. And it comes line of Andy Grobler from BNP Paribas.

Just a couple from me, if that's okay. Firstly, on the B2C market in the U.S. Can you just talk about the underlying conditions from a macro perspective and how those are evolving? And with that, any change in the competitive dynamics in that market? And then secondly, for mortgage, I know it's not huge, but it's a decent driver of growth. What are you seeing in terms of Vantage and FICO Direct? Is there any conversion? And what do you expect through the remainder of this calendar year, please?

Thanks, Andy. Just on the mortgage, I don't think that we're seeing anything different to what we talked to you just a few weeks ago. in May, nothing fundamentally new on the direct channel. The only thing I think that we pointed out last time was the trial that's ongoing. We continue to see activity through that. but nothing fundamentally changed from just a few weeks ago. And then on the underlying conditions from a macro perspective, as it applies to, I think, your question was in relation to B2C, but I think it applies across the board, B2C and B2B. We're not really seeing any significant change in the macro positions. We call them stable. I think that continues. The underlying conditions are good -- okay to good. And it's only 8 weeks since we spoke to back in May, and nothing really has fundamentally changed. Lloyd, would you add anything to that?

No, I think very stable. If you -- I mentioned in the remarks, if you look inside our marketplace business, loans growth continues to be very strong. Insurance had a good start to the year. And in credit cards, that was a bit softer, but that's really isolated to 1 or 2 clients that we talked about a few weeks ago and in May. Overall marketplace in North America was very slightly stronger, up from 1% growth in Q4 to 2% in Q2. I mean that -- we see that as stable. Membership was very slightly better at 2% growth versus 1% in Q4. Again, that really underpins our stable our sale commentary.

And in terms of competitive dynamics, has anything changed or is expected to change in the near term in that market?

No, I think it's a straight answer to that, Andy, nothing's changed. Yes, market remains structured as well. Again, no real difference to what we talked to you 8 weeks ago about. Obviously, haven't seen any results from competitors yet. So -- but as far as we can see, it's pretty much the same as it was.

Now we're going to take our next question and the question comes line of Suhasini Varanasi from Goldman Sachs.

My first question is on the comment you made that all of your 10 largest clients are on the asset platform today. I just wanted to get some color on what they've been using before, whether you think competitors products, where the in-sourcing and therefore, they shifted to Ascend. Some color there would be great. And then second 1 on the U.S. B2C business. Sorry, just to go back to the previous question. What would it take to get to high single-digit growth underlying, just a force? Is it maybe a small rebound on cyclical activity auto insurance, et cetera, has been doing well, but overall growth is still low single digits. So I'm just trying to understand the moving parts to get you to high single-digit growth there.

On Ascend, I think we've talked a lot about as we expand into the different things that Ascend do, the biggest thing that we're displacing is internal labor. Often, these are isolated bits of analytics inside the bank. As we've moved into model risk measure, that's compliance activity, et cetera. So these are Ascend is really a groundbreaking product that replaces lots of individual pieces of analytics and spreadsheets and other things inside the bank. That's really why actually the penetration has been so rapid. It's a very strong, both productivity and effectiveness business case that we provide for our clients.

On B2C, I think as we've talked to you in the past, you have -- if you think about membership, membership is often countercyclical. So that's often been 1 of the things that's helped us be very resilient in consumer business at times when credit availability is low. So I think it really depends on what we see for the outlook for the overall lending environment. the build-out of our insurance vertical last year was, I think, more of a stabilizing year after some strong growth, but we started the year really well. And I think the membership product, we've got some interesting new product releases that are coming out through this year.

So we're feeling positive about how that develops. But I think we'll obviously report as we go through the strong progress.

Now we're going to take our next question. And it comes from Andrew Ripper from Panmure Liberum.

Two questions from me. First of all, LATAM, you mentioned you got a good pipeline and B2B growth accelerated. Do you think we're sort of through that slightly sticky period you had the last couple of years where market growth seems to have been constrained by the tightening of the rate cycle and is your expectation over the medium term a double-digit growth sustainable in the region? And then second question, I appreciate, Brian, probably things have moved on a lot in the last 6 or 7 weeks. But I just wonder if you could go back to the gene development initiatives you've got going on in relation to the Ascend platform and [indiscernible] commerce. I think you launched your agent earlier on this year. Can you give us a sort of sense of what benefit you're expecting from those over the course of the year, what client interest and takeup has been like?

Great. Thanks, Andrew. On the LatAm growth, I think we do expect that growth to be sustainable. I think the market conditions have not really changed that much. I think what you're seeing is I know there's sort of a wave of new business opportunities for us, partly coming out of the clear sale integration, which is going very well. So I think we're just executing well against a similar environment, I think, is will be the answer. So we feel pretty confident about that. On the Agentic side, we continue to make progress on Agent Trust, and that is further engagement with the ecosystem of partners that are needed to really embed this as part of the truly operating sort of system in the market.

Those conversations continue. They're gaining traction. We are close to signing up additional participants in that. So I would say progress is good. Further tests continue. We have prototypes of the product and we're demonstrating that in lots of different places. So progress is good. And I think we'll hear more of that as we go through the rest of the year. On Ascend, we launched what we call the Send Agentic operating system at Money2020 just a few weeks ago. That's an operating system that sits on the Ascend platform, which allows agents to interact with that platform in a really powerful way. The reception to that has been really fantastic. There's lots of engagement on it. So we're excited about that property.

We did talk about that in May. We knew we were ready -- we haven't got it launched at the time that we announced our results in May, we knew that was coming up. So again, we continue to make really good progress on building out the Agentic capabilities across all of our portfolio. This is a really great example. And as we've reported, you can see that the engagement in the same platform is -- continues to be incredibly strong and, in many cases, actually accelerating.

We're going to take our next question. And the question comes line of Simon Clinch from Rothschild & Co Redburn.

So just a couple of questions here. First of all, I was wondering if you could just help us think about the cadence of growth in the U.S. consumer business through the rest of this year. The puts and takes we need to think about going forward. So we know the contracts from those 2 data breaches are rolling off. But I think that other sort of onetime impacts that we might need to consider when thinking about the overall growth relative to the underlying core, which I believe is -- which was 3% last quarter. So if we can start with that, please, that would be great. And then as a follow-up, I'd be interested to hear just in terms of the mortgage market and the FICO revenues you have, could you help us break out sort of what the mortgage revenue growth is if you excluded the FICO revenues from that and get a sense of what that growth is as well?

Great. Thanks, turn them over to Lloyd.

Yes. So on the mortgage market, as I mentioned, the revenue growth from mortgage profiles was high 40s in the quarter, which is very similar to where we finished in the fourth quarter, and we expect something broadly similar to the rest of this calendar year. On volumes that were up very slightly. So similar sort of pricing benefit that we've seen before. So I think that given the price rises that were announced earlier this year, that will sustain through this calendar year as we roll into next year, I think we'll see what the pricing environment is on the cadence of growth.

So if you remember the data breach contracts were about $20 million a quarter. We lost about half of that in the fourth quarter. and the other half in the first quarter. So when we -- just on that item, we'll have another $20 million to get the same $20 million loss in Q3, and then that reduces to $10 million for and it's out of the system by Q1 next year. And then in addition, in the second quarter, we had that last year, we had the one-off catch up on the insurance vertical, which was about $20 million. So in the second quarter, we'll have both of those items that we're lapping and then that improves in the third quarter.

In terms of what that means for the outlook for the group, as you've seen, 7% in Q1, we think the first half is about 7%. Q2 gets clearly a bit more difficult in terms of comp. So Q2 could run to a 6% or 7%, but I think it's 7% for the half. And if you add all of that back and look at the underlying trends, they're all very, very stable. So the 7% that we've done in Q1 is really 8% if you exclude that data breach, which is really in line with what we were trading out through the whole of last year. So really good underlying trading across the portfolio.

Now we're going to take our next question and the question comes line of Arthur Truslove from Citi.

A couple of questions for me, please. So just on the -- going back to the marketplace piece, are you able to split the revenue growth between the insurance and the lending-related piece? Because it sounds like if growth was kind of 1% to 2%, if I understand correctly, in that marketplace business, then at least 1 of those must have been a bit soggy. And if you could just explain kind of if it was the lending that was soft, then why, please? The second bit on the mortgage. So obviously, there's been a change of -- FICO obviously put the pricing up a huge amount. Are you able to just remind us this year, are you basically putting your prices up to maintain gross margin as I understand you were previously? Or what are you -- how are you handling that?

So I'll take the mortgage question first and then go back to Lloyd on the marketplace. Are the mortgage, we are not marking the FICO score up, that was a change that was made during the course of last year, we have published our prices for our credit reports, which were publicized some months ago. So those prices are in the marketplace. And as we said, when that change took place that we believe that the value is in the data, and we've reflected that in our approach to the marketplace. So that's all reflected really in mortgage revenues that go forward.

Just to add, Arthur, so when we gave our margin guidance for the group as a whole, that included soaking up a bit of margin drag from the pass-through of the FICO royalty. So that was all embedded in our 50 basis points margin progression guidance. On marketplace, as I mentioned, so just to go through the numbers. So in this is North America marketplace in Q4, membership -- sorry, marketplace was up at 1%, and that increased to 2% in Q1. Within that, you have good growth in lending and in terms of personal loans, you have good growth in insurance and you have a modest decline in credit cards, which was really around those 1 or 2 clients that we mentioned, and that's very, very stable through Q4 into Q1.

Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes from line of Tim [indiscernible] from Bank of America.

My 2, first up, just in terms of EMEA and APAC. I think you sort of called out an expectation of an improvement in growth trends through the balance of the year, maybe just some context as to what underpins that confidence, please? And then secondly, as regards kind of pipeline of innovation and the Ascend platform, just interested in your sort of overall view as to how much more is to come through the course of this year in terms of incremental product capability and also the extent to which the cloud migration work has helped your sort of speed to market that?

Right. Okay. On the EMEA APAC question, really, that's a comparator issue from last year. We had a very strong pipeline of deliveries, which happened in Q1. So that actually just falls out in Q2 and beyond. So really, the underlying growth rate in EMEA APAC is not going to change very much. think it's just understated by that comparator. And then on the pipeline innovation, very strong. We have a ton of stuff going on across the company. Many, many things that are actually coming to market now, and we expect that cadence to continue. I think the metrics around that really are kind of encapsulates give it the year-end with the contributions that we get on the new products.

So difficult to kind of look at that on a quarterly basis. But overall activity across the company and opportunities that we see are strong. Our sales pipelines are very strong, and they're up substantially year-on-year. So very good signals within the business. And I think your question about the migrations to the new technology platforms in the cloud. We -- yes, they do -- of course, they help -- they actually help us in terms of freeing up capability to focus more on product development then on transformation, most of our -- all of our new products have been built in the cloud for quite some time.

We've talked a lot about the Ascend platform as a great driver of innovation and growth been on the cloud for -- well, it's not native. So I think helpful -- I think helpful in terms of focus of work, time and effort inside the company. So we feel good about that.

And maybe just a super quick follow-up just on that point around the sales pipeline. Is that strength of pipeline likely to play out in FY '27 or is it -- could it come after that?

Well, it's not just a sand. It's a was referencing the pipeline really across the company. So sales pipelines across the company are looking very healthy. And that's the best signal that you can get. Of course, execution against that pipeline has to happen during the course of the year. Sales cycles are in our B2B business are lengthy, but I think that's a very strong signal as we go into FY '27.

And now we're going to take our last question for today. It comes from Ben Wild from Deutsche Bank.

Two questions for me, again, on the Consumer business. Firstly, on cards in the marketplace. I think it's fair to say that the market is very sensitive to growth in consumer at the moment, and I suppose, particularly in marketplace. Can you just talk to the specific situations in cards that are driving softness against the bank's reporting cycle in the last week that has looked broadly pretty upbeat on consumer credit? And then a second question on the issue of engagement and active usership in consumer, I think you used to talk to a target engagement level of 30% of monthly active users as a percentage of total consumer membership. If that specific target looks like it's kind of receded in investor communications over the last couple of years, -- how do you think about engagement on the consumer platform relative to some of your peers? And is your view of how you monetize the audience evolving at all?

Well, maybe touch on marketplace. So if you look at marketplace in the U.K., double-digit growth across the categories, if you look at marketplace in Brazil, double-digit growth. again, across the lending categories. In North America, as I mentioned, you've got a slightly broader product set that we have, where personal loans is growing well. Insurance is growing well, and you have credit cards on our platform, that's kind of a modest decline. And I think if you look back in Q4 across the competitor set. Credit cards were slightly soft. And we saw that as some really quite specific client activity, but have a slightly more outsized share of credit card originations on our marketplace platform.

So we're clearly seeing that stable through the last 3 months. We saw some of the effects after the start of the war in February. But since then, it's been very stable. In terms of engagement, I'll let Brian commented, engagement is absolutely a core metric of ours. We've seen some very strong uplift in engagement around new product deliveries. You're seeing the effect of that for example, in the U.K., where we launched the 1,250 core, very strong growth last year. marketplace in the U.K. grew over 30%. And as I said, double-digit growth on top of that very strong comp as we've entered this year, similar very strong growth on product releases in Brazil. And we've got a good pipeline of additional functionality that we're launching in North America this coming year as well, which we expect to help.

I think the final quick part of that question really is and how do we feel about competitive position. I think we feel very strong, very strong brands, great performance over a number of years, puts us into a really good position. If you look at all of the metrics that we look at, yes, 1 part of the marketplace is a bit soft right now, still seeing great traction in many other vehicles. We're just starting on the mortgage vertical. And we think that, that's got really substantial growth opportunities. I think we see tremendous engagement and traction across the market with us as proposition. So I think we fared strategically in a great position here, and we remain confident the future of business.

Thank you.

Great. Okay. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining, and thanks for your questions. I hope you all have a good day, and we look forward to speaking to you again in November for our half year results. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Experian Preliminary Results for the Year Ended 31st March 2026 Webcast and Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions]

Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Mr. Brian Cassin, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Hello, everybody, and welcome to our FY '26 results presentation. I'm joined by Lloyd, who will run through the financials after my initial overview, and then we'll open up for Q&A. FY '26 was a strong year for Experian, a record year, in fact, where we delivered on our Medium-Term Framework.

We have many important client wins and renewals and we made really good strategic progress whilst remaining disciplined on capital. And that leaves us well positioned as we move into the new financial year. Financially, it was an excellent year. Organic revenue came in at the top of our range of expectations with margins ahead. And just as importantly, this is our second year of delivery against the Medium-Term Framework demonstrating consistent execution against our objectives.

Organic revenue growth for the year was 8%, rising to 9% in Q4. Margins expanded by 60 basis points at constant currency, ahead of our 30 to 50 basis points guidance. Enhanced productivity was part of that alongside the growing scale of our product platforms. We also made substantial progress in our cloud migration, achieving the targets we set out for North America and Brazil.

We now have a more agile organization, fully cloud native with more room to invest now that these dual run costs are largely behind us. All of this led to a 15% Benchmark EPS growth, which is a really strong result. We also delivered another year of really good cash generation with consistently high cash conversion. ROCE of 17.2% was up on last year on a larger capital base, illustrating the quality of returns in the business. And we're successfully combining investment in the business with shareholder returns. This is reflected in further dividend progress, and in today's announcement of an additional $1 billion share buyback, adding to the $1 billion buyback we announced in January. We continue to invest in new products, and that is fueling our growth, while our investments in verticals have supported some very strong share gains there. New products added $2 billion to revenue.

This includes enhanced insights such as cash flow-based scores and broader adoption of the Ascend platform. Our Consumer Services membership expanded to now stand at over 215 million globally. This is a significant asset for us in a more fragmented landscape, the power of our brands and large installed high-intent audiences provide Experian with a very strong platform for growth. It was an important year in B2B for renewals and new wins with good sales momentum across the business.

In North America, we secured 100% of the large strategic accounts that were up for renewal with higher contract value and longer terms. That picture was similar in Brazil and the U.K., and it really brings home the critical value of our data and solutions to our largest clients with the Ascend platform playing a key role in all of that. M&A continues to play a key supporting role.

Our focus has been on transactions that enhance our data assets and extend our positions in key areas. In Brazil, the integration of ClearSale is going very well and has already enhanced our very strong position in that market. AtData strengthens our position in identity fraud and marketing with the addition of over 10 billion e-mail addresses to enhance our insights while the acquisition of Own Up will deepen the presence of our North American marketplace in the mortgage and home category.

We're using generative AI to accelerate our strategy, strengthen the way we operate, build products and serve to clients. Already, we're seeing productivity gains driving clear reduction in labor costs as a percentage of revenue Cumulatively organic FTE growth across the business has been broadly flat for FY '25 and '26. We expect these gains to support faster product development cycles, and improve how we build, deploy and scale products.

Beyond efficiency, AI is expanding opportunities, both deepening our existing markets and expanding new use ones.

We've identified over $15 billion of incremental TAM, which we're positioned to address and in which, in some cases, are already delivering tangible revenue. Health care is a good example. We were first to market with PAC, which is helping clients reduce costs and claims denials and improving the quality and consistency of how eligibility decisions are made. And we have a strong pipeline of new health care applications. Additional examples include Experian Agent Trust and new Ascend modules, and we're also expanding our distribution into LLM platforms.

And we've just signed a new partnership with ServiceNow to embed and deliver our fraud capabilities using modeleverage context protocol. Our venture program helps us to stay close to early stage opportunities that support and accelerate the delivery of our AI strategy. Our strategy is consistent. It's working. We're executing well and our position continues to strengthen. Central to this are standardized platforms, which allow us to scale quickly into new opportunities.

These opportunities are not unfamiliar territory to us. We're building on what we already do well and applying it to -- into extensions of capabilities that we already have and also to new and often higher-value use cases. Over the past few years, we've used our data and technology to enter new areas of growth, and this is driving a steady expansion in innovation-led revenue. We've now reached a peak in our cloud program, combined with improved productivity and increased financial flexibility. We're well placed to build on this and move into the next phase of growth with confidence.

We have a strong position in consumer services with large engaged audiences on our platform. At the same time, by linking our B2B and B2C capabilities, we're creating highly differentiated propositions that are difficult to replicate. This is attracting more members and deepening engagement.

Our brand and role as a valuable partner to consumers and to businesses looking to connect those consumers is a key asset, which will increase in value as audiences fragment. The critical nature of our data plays a key role in this. Large organizations, financial institutions, in particular, want to make our products available to their own customers. This is behind the multiyear contract we've just signed in Partner Solutions, and we expect more of this to come, both with traditional clients and as emerging LLM platform seeks to embed compelling and compliant consumer experiences.

In B2B, we're becoming more embedded in our clients' operations. Our platforms are deepening our position in client workflows, allowing us to do more with them and opening new areas of growth. We now have over 2,300 client solutions and 37 products on Ascend with engagement continuing to grow. And as clients use more of the platform across credit, fraud, identity and model governance, the value increases for both sides. And we're also seeing increasing interest from clients in new agentic use cases.

This strategy is clearly coming to fruition. Platforms are strengthening client relationships, extending contract duration and increasing value. By integrating new capabilities and data, we'll build further on this by expanding into new use cases. Now the success of our strategy lies not just in the data that we hold, it's also about data analytics, decisioning and AI, all of which come together to deliver value.

AI increases demand for data and drives higher decision volumes. It raises the bar for accuracy, explainability and compliance. These are not new requirements. These are areas where we're already strong. And solutions built on our proprietary data underpin more than 90% of our revenue. But what really matters is how we combine and apply it. By bringing together credit, identity, behavioral, transactional and asset level data we help clients make better decisions, improving underwriting accuracy, strengthening fraud detection and optimizing areas like health care reimbursement.

Crucially, this all sits within regulated auditable systems at the core of client workflows. That allows real-time decisions at scale with the transparency and control that they require. And over time, the links between our B2B and B2C businesses are creating better and more connected data assets, which, combined with our distribution are difficult to replicate.

The result of this is a set of durable advantages, deep integrations, high switching costs, data-driven network effects and regulatory barriers. And as AI adoption grows, these advantages become more valuable. What we're seeing, based on early adoption and client behavior is that AI is expanding our market opportunity, and we've identified an additional $15 billion of addressable market from what we've seen to date.

At a simple level, decisioning is happening more frequently and in a more continuous way. Each new environment, whether it's a workflow platform, Copilot agents, creates additional demand for trusted governed data. And we see this translating into 3 clear drivers: first, more activity with existing markets; second, changes to existing markets and entirely new use cases. AI, for example, is changing fraud and it's creating a new category of agentic commerce, changing and expanding the role of cluster data and decisioning.

And third, new ways to reach customers as AI accelerates new distribution channels. Taken together, these dynamics expand both the scale of our opportunity, and we're investing in AI-led initiatives to capture this growth. Let me give you a few examples.

Starting with Know Your Agents, which we recently announced with Visa, Skyfire and Cloudflare, as commerce becomes increasingly agent-driven, the key challenge is trust. How do you link transactions back to a verified human. Today, there is a lack of trust, which creates fraud risk and liability and acts as a constraint on adoption. And this plays directly to our strength, trusted data that can verify identity and enable secure accountable transactions.

Second example is the expansion of Ascend. We've already introduced model risk manager automating governance processes such as documentation and monitoring for compliance. We're extending this into adjacent workflows, including fraud case management and operational reviews.

Our partnership with ServiceNow is another important step, embedding our capabilities directly into their workflows via MCP delivering identity, fraud and compliance outcomes at the point of use, which significantly extends our distribution to their enterprise sales channel.

In health care, our scale across providers and payers gives us a uniquely deep data asset. This underpins Patient Access Curator, which replaces sequential processes with more intelligent data-led decision. We're now extending that capability into claims and appeals automating high-cost workflows and improving outcomes in a market, which is under pressure to reduce denials.

And in Consumer Services, we're expanding into AI-driven distribution channels while deepening engagement on our own platforms. Through partnerships such as OpenAI, we're embedding our marketplace capabilities directly into these environments.

Customers can express intent, and we can match underwriting fulfill within that flow. So overall, we've made significant strategic progress scaling our platforms, deepening client relationships and expanding into higher-value areas, all of which positions us well for the next phase of growth. Let's look in detail now on at FY '26 performance, starting with North America. We delivered organic revenue growth of 10%, which was led by B2B with a standout performance in financial services. As I mentioned earlier, we had an excellent year for client renewals.

We renewed over half of our top 20 clients in this financial year and several more in our -- in our top 20. We retained all of those clients, which is 100% renewal rate. And we also retained them with higher contract value and longer durations. This reflects the breadth and depth of those relationships the critical nature of our solutions and the success of our strategy of cross and upsell with really helping us to capture more value. Growth is also supported by increasing demand for differentiated data, particularly in areas such as cash flow, where we provide solutions clients can't really source anywhere else.

AtData further strengthens our position, adding a large proprietary e-mail intelligence asset to our identity capabilities. Verification Services also made good progress, expanding both data and adoption. And following the recent FHFA announcement, we've begun delivering VantageScore 4.0 to lenders participating in the initial FHFA pilot. Across our verticals, performance was strong. Automotive was a standout.

AutoCheck is now the exclusive provider across nearly every major U.S. auto online shopping site. And health care momentum was also strong led by Patient Access Curator, which we mentioned earlier, with strong demand for automation as providers look to reduce costs and improve reimbursement outcomes.

Our strategy in Consumer Services is consistent and clear, grow our audience, enhance the experience and drive growth. We have a large installed audience scaled asset that is increasingly valuable to clients and our membership base expanded again this year. We also continue to improve the member experience. AI-led capabilities like EVA move customers from insight to action. Own Up is another important step, extending us into the mortgage and -- mortgage space and enhancing Home Hub.

And as with Gabi in insurance, it gives us a great entry point into a very large marketplace. What sets us apart here is our ability to connect these products with our B2B assets, which include housing data to create customer experiences that are very difficult to replicate and open new revenue streams. In Partner Solutions, the underlying performance of the business is very strong, masked by the volatility of the data breach business.

This year, we are managing the roll-off of 2 large long-term data breach contracts. At the same time, we have signed a significant new 5-year agreement with a leading U.S. lender, extending a long-standing relationship. This is a different type of contract. It's a multiyear recurring and expected to build over time as the client launches a new identity protection program alongside premium credit services during FY '27 and beyond.

It reflects the ongoing shift. We're seeing towards more high-quality recurring revenue based on long-term agreements with leading industry brands. Turning to Latin America. Growth of 8% reflects a much improved B2B trajectory into the fourth quarter and Consumer Services continues to be an important growth engine. In Brazil, B2B, we had a strong close to the year driven by new business wins.

Post acquisition of ClearSale, we have a wider set of capabilities across credit, fraud and identity allowing us to meet more of our clients' needs and expand our footprint across major accounts. The integration of this acquisition has gone really well with several large Brazilian banks buying our combined identity and fraud products.

And we're seeing potential to address new industry segments in emerging areas like agentic commerce, where trusted identity and decisioning will be increasingly important. In Consumer Services, we're seeing good momentum across the business, driven by membership growth higher engagement and the expansion of products. Limpa Nome continues to scale well alongside our credit marketplace and premium offerings. And there are a number of expansion initiatives underway, most immediate being insurance, where early progress has been encouraging.

Overall, it's been a year of significant strategic progress, materially expanding our addressable opportunity and positioning us strongly for the next phase of growth. In the U.K. and Ireland, we delivered a solid performance alongside good strategic progress across B2B and consumer services. In B2B, despite a subdued market backdrop, we secured a number of important competitive wins and new logos, and are seeing increasing traction wit clients.

We've seen a clear shift towards higher value, longer-term contracts supported by our differentiated data and solutions Ascend is a key driver here, and we are building on initial sandbox deployments with further to come. Consumer Services was a highlight. The introduction of the 1250 score has been significant driving audience expansion and strong engagement. And Activate continues to expand the range of car and loan exclusives, supporting strong marketplace momentum.

Across EMEA and Asia Pacific, we also delivered a solid performance with 5% growth and total revenue up 17% and more than doubling of EBIT supported by the successful integration of illion and delivering of synergies.

Innovation remains a key focus area with strong contributions from scores and attributes and fraud and identity. And we've also established a strong foundation for Ascend, which we expect to become a more meaningful contributor in this region in FY '27. So with that, let me turn it to Lloyd for the financial overview.

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As you've seen, we delivered another strong year with performance at the upper end of our expectations and strong strategic momentum you just heard from Brian. Revenue from ongoing activities increased by 13% at actual rates and 11% at constant rates with organic revenue growth of 8%.

And that reflected another year of broad-based strength across the portfolio and continued execution against our Medium-Term Framework. Benchmark EBIT from ongoing activities also grew strongly, up 15% at actual rates and 13% at constant rates to over $2.4 billion.

Benchmark EBIT margin increased to 28.6%, with organic constant currency margin expansion of 90 basis points, again beating our Med-Term Framework. Reported total margin was up 50 basis points at actual rates. This translates into strong earnings growth with Benchmark EPS up 15% at actual rates and 13% at constant rates. Cash generation was good with Benchmark operating cash flow of over $2.2 billion. We delivered another year of very strong returns on capital employed at 17.2% on an expanding capital base.

We remain strongly financed with significant financial flexibility, and we ended the year with net debt to Benchmark EBITDA of 1.7x. And given the strong performance and outlook, the Board has approved an increase in the full year dividend of 11% and a further $1 billion share buyback program. And FY '26 continues our track record of delivering strong growth. Looking back at our performance since FY '20, we've delivered significant growth across all key financial metrics.

During this time, we've added $3.2 billion to our annual revenue and added over $1 billion to both annual operating profit and cash flow. And over this extended period, this represents 8% compound growth in revenue and double-digit growth in profit, cash flow and earnings per share, reflecting the significant strategic progress and momentum we have as a company. And this performance has been delivered across a period that's included the pandemic, rapid interest rate rises, weaker lending conditions in several markets and significant technology transformation.

Turning back to FY '26 and starting with the revenue growth trends. The chart here shows the consistency of our growth delivery over the last 3 years as we've continued to strengthen and broaden our business with investments in new products, data assets. platforms and consumer propositions. In FY '24, organic revenue growth was 6%. In FY '25, this increased to 7%. And in FY '26, we delivered 8%.

We've also continued to deploy capital into value-adding acquisitions and strong returns on capital, which has added to our revenue growth. Looking at FY '26 in more detail. This has been a record year of growth.

We delivered nearly $1 billion of incremental revenue during the year, with growth across all regions and verticals with particular success in our new and scaling products as you saw earlier. North America had a very strong year, growing revenue by over $0.5 billion to $5.6 billion. Total revenue grew 11%, with broad-based organic growth of 10% across our diversified business. North America Financial Services grew 14% for the year. Excluding mortgage, our core Financial Services business grew consistently well at 9% in each half and improved slightly to 10% in the final quarter as we made strong progress with our Ascend's propositions.

As you've heard from Brian, our largest clients continue to deepen and extend their relationships with us given the unique depth and strength of our innovative propositions. Mortgage revenue grew 45% for the year on a slight volume decline.

Our North America verticals business grew well and now represents a revenue base of over $1.5 billion. with a long record of delivering strong and consistent growth. We saw continued strength in our health business, powered by our AI-native solution, Patient Access Curator which helped drive another year of high single-digit organic growth of 9%. Automotive had another excellent year of double-digit organic growth at 13% and continued and with continued strategic success in AutoCheck credit and value recovery solutions.

Our North America Consumer Services business grew well to over $1.7 billion in revenue, an organic increase of 6% for the year. Just over half of the Consumer Services business is paid membership, which grew 2% for the year as a whole and followed its normal pattern of more moderate growth at times of expanding credit supply. During Q4, we saw an increase in new sign-ups and expect to sustain moderate growth in FY '27. Our North American marketplace business is around 1/4 of the North America Consumer Services business, and this grew strongly, up over 20% for the year as a whole and reflecting the expanding credit supply.

In the fourth quarter and against a very strong comparative marketreplace grew modestly, and we saw some credit card clients adopt a more cautious approach as the quarter progressed, reflecting events in the external environment. whilst personal loans continued to grow well. Trends over the last few weeks have been stable, and we expect to start the year with stable marketplace revenues year-over-year. Partner Solutions, which represents the remaining quarter of the Consumer Services business was down modestly in the year and in the fourth quarter.

In the fourth quarter, we began the wind down of the 2 long-term data breach services contracts, associated with 2 large-scale historic data breaches. These represented quarterly revenue of around $20 million, about half of which dropped out in the fourth quarter and the rest reducing in early FY '27.

And as Brian referenced, we've also signed a major new partnership with a leading global financial institution, which we expect to contribute meaningfully from FY '28. Our Latin America business added $231 million of revenue in the year with 8% organic growth and a strong contribution from the acquisition of ClearSale. The business ended the year very strongly with organic revenue growth of 17% in the fourth quarter.

B2B growth across the year of 3% reflected macro conditions, but improved meaningfully to 12% in Q4 supported by fraud, identity, telco wins, biometrics and new product momentum. Consumer Services continued to perform very strongly with growth of 33% in Q4 and 23% for the full year. and grew to over $300 million of annual revenue. With the improvement in B2B performance and with a strong pipeline and our scale in consumer business, we expect Latin America to be back to around double-digit growth in the quarters ahead.

The U.K. and Ireland grew 2% for the year. Consumer Services delivered double-digit growth in all 4 quarters reflecting strong marketplace performance, higher engagement and product enhancements. B2B also improved modestly through the year, reflecting subdued overall economic conditions. EMEA and Asia Pacific grew 5% for the year, with the region benefiting from new product innovation and the integration of illion. Turning now to our EBIT margin. This is the second year of our Medium-Term Framework and each year, we've outperformed our organic constant currency framework, delivering 90 basis points of organic constant currency margin expansion. And that reflects the strong operating leverage we're generating as the business scales and we gain productivity benefits from deploying AI tools across the group.

Across the 2 years, acquisitions have represented around 50 basis points of temporary headwind to margin, whilst FX represented an effect of 30 basis points. After these effects, reported margins increased by 100 basis points across the 2 years, 50 basis points in each year. And a key driver of our margin progression has been significant improvements in the labor productivity. As we scale the business, we continue to generate strong operating leverage. When this is combined with the benefits of technology from our cloud transition and automation through the deployment of AI tools across the group, we continue to deliver strong growth without needing to scale our employee base.

Over the past 2 years, revenue has grown at a 9% compound rate, while organic headcount has been stable and labor costs have grown at a compound rate of around 4%. As a result, labor costs as a percentage of revenue have reduced by over 300 basis points. And this progress has been delivered whilst dual run costs associated with our cloud migration have increased during that period.

With cloud transformation in North America and Brazil, excluding health, now substantially complete, dual run costs peaked in FY '26 and will trend down from FY '27. This gives us increased flexibility to continue investing in innovation while sustaining good margin progression.

Looking at margin by segment over a longer period, both of our parts of our business have been performing well. B2B margins have remained consistently strong at around 31% despite the impact of technology dual run costs, recent acquisitions and the effects of the FICO mortgage royalty. And this reflects the quality of our data analytics and software business and the operating leverage we can generate and scale platforms such as Ascend.

As a reminder, new acquisitions are generally margin dilutive, but typically scale to group average margins over around 3 years post acquisition. Consumer Services margins expanded significantly over this period from around 22% in FY '20 to 30% in FY '26 and is now broadly in line with our B2B margin. And that reflects the scaling of our global membership base, now over 215 million free members and the expansion of higher value propositions across marketplaces, premium services and partner solutions.

Turning now to earnings per share. Benchmark EPS increased by 15% at actual rates and 13% at constant rates. Benchmark EBIT from continuing operations was the largest driver, reflecting strong revenue growth and margin expansion. Interest expense of $185 million increased as expected and continue to benefit from our rate hedging program with the average interest rate of 3.6%. And -- the Benchmark tax rate was 25.5%, and our weighted average number of shares was 913 million.

Since our January announcement, we've been executing on the $1 billion share repurchase program. By 31st of March, we spent roughly half of that program with the FY '26 closing share count down to 899 million shares. Overall, the result demonstrates the strong conversion from revenue growth into EBIT and then EPS growth. Looking at the reconciliation of our Benchmark to statutory profit before tax. Benchmark profit before tax increased 15% at actual rates to $2.2 billion.

Acquisition and disposal expenses were reflecting the acquisitions recently completed and the associated integration activity. Amortization of acquired intangibles was $271 million, up from $211 million last year, reflecting recent M&A.

Restructuring costs were $28 million lower than the prior year. And noncash financing measurements were favorable by $87 million compared with an adverse movement last year, principally relating to Brazilian intragroup funding and other financing fair value movements. And as a result, statutory profit before tax increased 26% to $1.95 billion. Looking now at the contribution from M&A. We continue to deploy capital selectively into strategic acquisitions. During FY '26, we completed 4 acquisitions, ClearSale, Compensit, KYC360 and AtData.

Post year-end, we completed Own Up and Konfir. Own Up gives us an AI-driven mortgage platform in North America, expanding our consumer access to affordable lending options. Konfir adds further digital verification capability through open banking, payroll and tax integrations. And together, these acquisitions strengthen our data assets, extend our fraud identity and verification capabilities and expand our consumer marketplace opportunities.

And we expect completed acquisitions to date to contribute around 1 percentage point growth in FY '27. We continue to generate significant cash flow as a business with a sustained level of Benchmark EBIT to cash flow conversion above 90%. We've added more than $1 billion of annual operating cash flow since FY '20, enabling significant flexibility to invest for growth, return capital and maintain balance sheet flexibility. Whilst we've continued to invest in the business and in acquisitions, we finished the year with a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 1.7x, below the bottom of our guidance range.

Given the strong financial position and flexibility, we announced a $1 billion share repurchase program in January and today have announced a further $1 billion program. Adjusting our year-end leverage on a pro forma basis, for the uncompleted part of that $2 billion in share repurchases and our announced acquisitions, our year-end FY '26 leverage would have been 2.3x net debt-to-EBITDA on a pro forma basis.

And we've announced a second interim dividend of $0.48, taking the total FY '26 dividend to $0.6925, up 11%. On to our cash generation and return on capital. As you've seen, in FY '26, we generated $2.8 billion of funding capacity, including $2.3 billion of funds from operations and around $0.5 billion increase in net debt. The use of these funds was balanced across our key capital allocation priorities. We invested $0.7 billion organically through capital expenditure and product development, and this represented a CapEx to sales ratio of 8.6%, reducing in line with our long-term guidance, and we expect this trend to accelerate given our cloud migration progress.

We've also deployed capital into disciplined and value-creating acquisitions, with $0.8 billion invested in acquisitions and minority investments that strengthen our data, fraud, identity and verification capabilities. At the same time, we returned cash to shareholders with $0.6 billion paid in dividends and $0.7 billion through the share repurchase program.

And importantly, we continue to deploy capital in a disciplined manner so that we continue to deliver very strong returns on capital on a growing capital base. On the right-hand chart, you can see that we've grown the capital base significantly since FY '20, whilst maintaining very strong post-tax returns of around 17%. Turning now to our FY '27 modeling considerations. As you've seen in our announcement, we expect to deliver another year of double-digit Benchmark EPS growth with strong revenue growth and margin expansion. We expect total reported revenue growth of 8% to 11% at actual rates. We expect organic revenue growth of 6% to 8%, which is in line with the initial guidance we gave for FY '26.

And we expect to start the year around the middle of this range. At the central point of that guidance, it takes account of the lapping of the onetime volume true-up in North America Consumer in Q2 as well as the wind down of the 2 mega breach contracts in North America Consumer Services. And the 6% to 8% range reflects a prudent approach to the potential macroeconomic scenarios associated with the ongoing situation in the Middle East.

Acquisitions already completed are expected to contribute around 1 percentage point to revenue growth. And as usual, this only includes completed acquisitions, and we'll update if further acquisitions complete. We expect Benchmark EBIT margin progression of 50 basis points at constant exchange rates, which is at the top end of our medium-term guidance range. This is supported by operating leverage productivity benefits, scaling of consumer services and the reduction in technology dual run costs and includes the headwind from FICO mortgage royalties and the breach contract wind down.

Based on rates over the last month, we expect foreign exchange to be a 1% to 2% benefit to revenue and Benchmark EBIT. We expect net interest of $250 million to $260 million, reflecting an increase in average net debt and the average cost of debt. We expect the Benchmark tax rate to be around 26%, and capital expenditure is expected to be around 8% of revenue, in line with the trajectory in our Med-Term Framework.

We continue to expect Benchmark operating cash flow conversion above 90%. As we previously said, we've announced a new $1 billion share repurchase program. and therefore, expect WANOS to be in the range of 880 million to 885 million shares. And we expect the resulting closing share count at the end of FY '27 to be around 870 million shares. And with the performance and guidance we've reported today, we have continued to deliver strongly against our midterm financial framework. Organic revenue continues to grow at high single-digit rates as we scale our diversified product range and invest in new data sets and product innovation. We've outperformed our medium-term guidance on margin having delivered 90 basis points of organic constant margin progression in both FY '25 and FY '26. Combined with our guidance of 50 basis points in FY '27, we expect to have cumulatively achieve 230 basis points of organic constant currency margin progression.

This represents delivery at the top end of our 5-year Medium-Term Framework in 3 years. and we continue to drive sustained good margin progression as the business scales. We benefit from our cloud migration and as we deliver AI-enabled productivity improvements across the group.

CapEx as a percentage of revenue continues to trend down towards our goal of 7%, and we expect to achieve 8% in FY '27 now that the cloud transformation is substantially complete. And finally, we continue to deploy capital, maintaining discipline across our organic and inorganic investments, achieving consistent strong returns on capital, with consistently strong cash generation, we expect this to continue into FY '27 alongside the completion of our buyback programs.

And with that, let me hand you back to Brian.

Great. Thanks, Lloyd. So in closing, this has been a record year for Experian with the performance of the top end of our guidance, strong EPS growth, margin expansion ahead of expectations, robust returns and continue the trends in the past 6 years. .

We delivered consistently against the Medium-Term Framework, supported by strong renewals, new client wins and continued strategic progress.

Our platforms are increasing at the center of our growth, deepening client relationships and expanding our addressable markets. In Consumer Services, we saw strong momentum with over 215 million members deeper engagement and a more diversified higher quality earnings profile. At the same time, we're seeing AI accelerate our strategy, expand our addressable market with over $15 billion of incremental TAM across new use cases and distribution channels. And all of this is underpinned by a durable competitive position built on trusted data, embedded decisioning, scaled ecosystems, which gives great confidence in the next phase of growth.

And with that, I'm now going to hand you back to the operator for your questions. Operator, over to you.

[Operator Instructions]

We're going to take our first question, and it comes from the line of Scott Wurtzel from Wolfe Research.

I guess I wanted to ask a couple on the LatAm side of the business in the context of some of the news we hear on the macro environment there and just talk a little bit more about some of the, I guess, what's embedded in your assumptions for FY '27 on the B2B side. And also I want to understand a little bit more about the sustainability of the elevated growth that you're seeing on the consumer services side, which has been very strong. So maybe get a little bit more detail on the drivers of the sustainability there.

Yes, sure. Look, I think on the macro, I think we're seeing a broadly similar environment to what we described in January, and conditions still remain pretty stable. And you stand back from our growth actually accelerated overall into Q4, which might have surprised people sort of looking in the start of the year. We don't see any material improvements. We don't see any material deterioration, either way. At the same time, in the last month, we've certainly seen a change in expectation around rates.

And so I would say the volatility around that has increased. And I think there's a bit of caution around certainly some pockets of the market. Overall, we've seen a strong performance in our credit services market and our credit services business. But you have seen some different performances in some parts of the portfolio. Take Marketplace North America, for example, personal loan is very strong. Credit cards was softer. You see maybe a little bit more a tickup in delinquencies and some of the subprime still seeing strong performance across the major banks. We go from 1 month to the next with different employment numbers. So I think there's a lot of different signals out there. But as we see it today, conditions remain broadly stable. I think in terms of the assumption going into next year, we're not expecting a significant deterioration.

I don't think we try and forecast that. I think the consumer in the U.S. and actually ranging up in the U.K. have been remarkably resilient through quite a lot of things that have been thrown at them over the last few years. So I think we're expecting a continuation more or less the conditions that we see today. Lloyd?

Yes. So drilling further down into LatAm, Scott, I think I'd start with consumer. So you've seen a very consistent high growth rate in that business. You look back FY '25 that business grew 23%, FY '26, 23%, and we expect it to continue at about that 20% level into this year ahead. We've built a really strong franchise there. It's now over $300 million of revenue. It's a really broad business and has a really strong footprint in consumer and brand with consumers equivalent to the strongest retail banks.

So we're very confident in the outlook for that business. On the B2B side, you look back this year, you -- for the first part of the year, Brazil was in a rate tightening cycle. So you saw some uncertainty from that and elongated buying cycles, which I think weighed a bit on our B2B business. In Q4, and I said in January that the pipeline was very strong. So we saw some catch-up of that as you started to see the rate cycle turn. So I don't expect that we see that 17% growth in LatAm continue.

But as I said, I think, around double digit for the combined B2B, B2C business, which is a step-up from the levels that we've had this last year. It's an election year.

So obviously, we're watching it closely. But I think around the double-digit range for the year ahead with particularly a lot of strength and scaling benefit in the consumer business.

And the question come from the line of Andy Grobler from BNP Paribas.

Few for me, but if I can just stick to 2, if possible, please. Just in terms of AI, much of the focus that we hear in equity markets has been in kind of potential disruption to the software side of your business in both B2B and B2C. What are you seeing? And what are your expectations for that through the next 2, 3, or longer years would be really helpful to hear. And then secondly, maybe 1 for Lloyd, just in terms of the margin expectations for this year, that plus 50 basis points. There's a number of moving parts within that around productivity gains, M&A, FICO and so forth. Could you just talk through the moving -- how those moving parts shape up, please?

Yes, great. Andy, thanks. Look, I think as we laid out in the presentation, we think that overall, it's an opportunity for us, and we're busy embracing this in every part of our organization. We've identified significant additional TAM for us to go after. We've got a strong track record of executing against those new revenue pools. If you look back at the history of what we've achieved.

I think the simple answer to the immediate question is if you look at the point that we've made on renewals, most of those renewals have come up this year have all been with our largest strategic clients. Without naming names, I think probably that will give you a fair idea of who they are. And we're seeing not only extend -- not only extension of renewal of contracts actually extension of the value of those contracts and extension of the length of those contracts. .

Every single one of those contracts will encompass pretty much the portfolio of products that we have across Ascend data, analytics, decisioning, fraud. So we're not seeing any let up in the demand for those capabilities. And in fact, what we're seeing is an extension of the use cases within those environments, and we expect that to continue. That's why we're very confident in the ability of all of these changes to drive additional opportunities for us as an organization. We're seeing it in the dialogue. And I think it's evidenced in those renewals. So I think we're very confident about that, and we expect that to continue to drive our growth going forward.

And then on margin, Andy, as you saw the 50 basis points, that includes a lot of different moving parts on the positive side, the things that you called out, accretion from the integration of acquisitions, the dual run costs are dropping off, which is about 20 basis points a year for the next 4 or 5 years. and the operating leverage that we're generating as a business.

Clearly, we're investing strongly behind AI-related propositions within that. And then 2 headwinds, I guess, I would call out. One is the pass on of the FICO royalty, and that's all within our margin guidance range. And then the wind down of those breach contracts has a small margin headwind as well. So I think that gives us a lot of confidence in our ability to continue to deliver strong margin progression as the business scales.

And I think particularly if you look back over the segmental margin, we've been able to maintain the B2B margin despite some of those headwinds and significant expansion in our consumer margin over the last 5 years. And I think that shows the operating leverage of the business and look forward to reporting that out in the year ahead.

And the question comes from the line of Suhasini Varanasi from Goldman Sachs.

Just one on FICO, VantageScore landscape, please in the U.S. There's obviously been quite a lot of news flow in the last 6, 9 months. Can you help us understand what has changed generally in the landscape? Are, let's say, your customers buying directly from FICO, some of the scores or going by other resellers? Have you seen increased adoption of VantageScore apart from the pilot from FHFA, for example?

Just trying to understand what your expectations are for FY '27 and what has changed in FY '26? And maybe just a quick question on 4Q. It feels like maybe mortgages accounted for did deliver similar growth of around 45% in the fourth quarter. Is that fair?

Maybe I'll start on that one, Suhasini. So yes, that's right. In the fourth quarter, we saw a slight volume increase. Overall revenue growth was kind of mid-40s. I think as we look ahead to the year ahead, probably volume will be a slight downtick, given the movements in interest rates as something in the -- around the 40% from revenue growth for the year ahead. And in that, in terms of structure, we're not assuming in our guide any structural changes to the market in FY '27, which I think in line with how others have guided.

And just coming back on the Vantage point, I mean, the only real significant change, I think, has been and is significant is the announcement of the trial, which is sponsored by the FHFA. So I think that sort of completes some of the work that's necessary to get Vantage to be accepted in mortgage underwriting. In terms of people sort of interest in this, it is quite significant. We don't know exactly who's in that pilot, but what we do know is that roughly about half of the top 15 lenders in the mortgage market are accessing VantageScore 4 through our Score Choice Bundle. So what that tells you is there's a significant amount of people testing this, some maybe as part of that pilot some not.

So those are really the significant developments. Apart from that, nothing major in addition to report that hasn't already been reported.

The question comes from the line of Annelies Judith Vermeulen from Morgan Stanley.

I have 2 questions, please. So just going back to the slide where you've identified an additional $15 billion market in some of those AI-enabled value pools. And how much do you think that, that can contribute to your medium-term organic growth assumptions? Or rather, how much of that additional market do you think could be captured by Experian. I realize you have a strong track record there, but given some of these are quite new markets, I'd love to hear how you think about it. And then secondly, regarding the partnerships with the LLMs, what traction have you seen there in the consumer business? And are there any other LLM relationships, you're looking to build out over the coming years?

Great. Thanks, Annelies. Well, I think, look, as you rightly identified, some of them are new areas and some of them are extensions to existing areas. We're running hard at that. We've got several -- not just some of the ones that we've announced like Know Your Agent, we've got several other initiatives which are in development. We would expect this to underpin our organic revenue growth over the next few years. Obviously, if some of them turn out to be fairly significant, then they could actually accelerate it. I mean it's hard to -- sometimes hard to judge it. Know Your Agent is quite a seismic kind of opportunity.

But of course, still in its infancy. I think we've done -- made great progress on that and forming a consortium with some major players in that, but, of course, that needs adoption across the industry for it to scale. If it did get a broad adoption across the industry, you then have to figure out how much of Agentic Commerce is actually going to happen.

But I think most people think that's actually going to be fairly significant. So I think it's a very innovative solution, and I think it's got some really significant promise, but still a long way to go. So overall, we see a portfolio of different things. Some of them are much more tangible. You take a Patient Access Curator is already generating quite significant revenue today. We expect some more immediate kind of additional AI-led kind of product improvements across our health suite to actually happen during the course of FY '27.

So that will actually help underpin and probably accelerate growth there. So I think that they range in sort of scope from immediate and incremental to quite significant, but probably longer term in terms of impact. So sorry, I can't be a hell of a lot more precise than that. But I think the main thing to take away really is that the breadth of capability that we have across the organization and the level of work that's going on in the business really is giving us a tremendous number of options to look at and to invest behind going forward. And the second question...

Progress on partnerships with LLM.

Yes. So I think we highlighted a few of those on the slides. I think we are making good progress. We've integrated the first score display on ChatGPT in U.K. We've got our loans are now available in the U.S. and OpenAI. We signed a partnership with Snap. And actually today, also -- yesterday, Google announced that we will be part of their pilot program for app integration going forward, and where they announced about 20, I think, 20 partners that they have integrated with. So we -- I think we see significant potential. So that will actually be as part of the Gemini program. So really significant development there that has actually just broke in the last 24 hours. So good progress, more to come.

Now we're going to take our next question and it comes from the line Rory McKenzie from UBS.

Two questions, please. Firstly, within consumer, can you talk about how your marketplace revenue growth trended over the year? And I appreciate maybe some recent volume headwinds in some existing areas like cards. But as you've expanded your kind of channel and distribution arrangements, can you talk about the structural growth penetration outlook how you're seeing the kind of competition evolve for that kind of consumer attention piece?

And then secondly, on the operating leverage, thanks for the slide on Benchmark labor costs. I guess that implies that the other Benchmark costs have all expanded as a percentage of revenues. Could you break that down in terms of the kind of dual running costs that might fall away? And any thoughts on how the cost of technology are kind of accelerating at the moment for you?

Yes, I'll maybe take that one first, Rory. Clearly, what you're seeing is an ability for us to scale more on technology and less on labor. So naturally, what you see there is a shift within the cost base from labor to technology and data-related costs. Clearly in there, you have the dual run costs that we talked about, which we scale at about 100 basis points that have built up over the last few years. Those will drop out over about 5 years. Some of it's CapEx.

So it takes a little while to wind down through the P&L. And you've also got, obviously, in there is also the scaling of data royalty costs, including to FICO. So when you kind of take all of that together, I think what it shows is a strong capacity for us to continue to develop -- to deliver improved margins and operating leverage as we scale increasingly on technology and less on labor. And some of the deployment of AI tooling is really exciting. Brian gave a couple of numbers there. Average coder productivity improvements of 10% to 15%. But in isolated cases, we're seeing 30% plus. And obviously, our drive there is to expand those isolated cases to be more of the average across the group -- marketplace.

Yes. Well, come back on the trends. So maybe I'll just address the distribution point. I think that there's no real change, I think, is the answer to that. I think our performance has been in line with external Benchmarks that have reported. So I think that there's consistency there. We're also seeing consistent performance in the marketplace and the bureau. So we know that there's no shift going on there.

So I think we see -- we're seeing sort of similar performance really across the channels. There's nothing really coming from new distribution channels yet. Although there's a lot of interest in LLMs and certainly our customers seeing a lot of search on it. There is no -- not much traffic still coming from those. So that's not had an impact on the market as we see it just yet.

So -- and just -- you asked about the kind of the evolution of it, Rory. About a year, 15 months ago, we started to see credit supply expand, and we gave that commentary through the year. That led to a very strong expansion in the credit marketplace of the business across both loans and cards. We're starting to annualize that now, and we saw a couple of clients have a little bit more caution as the quarter progressed.

I mentioned in my remarks on credit cards, which is about half of the financial marketplace. On loans, that continues to grow well, and we continued to make good strategic progress on insurance. So -- and with the acquisition of Own Up, you'll see us press into home vertical and home mortgage. So some interesting strategic developments for the year ahead.

The question comes from the line of Arthur Truslove from Citi.

A couple if I may, please. So the first one was, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your expectations for trends in North American B2B over the next couple of quarters. Are you expecting trends to be comparable to what we've seen in FY '26?

And obviously, I appreciate mortgage is a bit messy. So it would be appreciated if you could sort of talk about it. kind of separate outside of what's going on in mortgage. Second question, again, on mortgage. I just wondered sort of what are you doing to get onto the sort of right side of Mr. Pulte in terms of the sort of mortgage regulation and how do you think about kind of worst-case scenario there? And then final question. Are you able to just talk about the proportion of your revenue that is linked to data that is proprietary to you?

So I'd start -- I'll lead off with -- on the North America B2B. So if I start with mortgage. I think I've covered this last year, it was kind of mid-40s growth in revenue on a slight volume decline. Q4, it was that mid-40s on a slight volume increase. I think as we go into the new year, given what's happened to rates, I think volumes will be down a little bit. And I think that's our core assumption for the year ahead.

In Financial Services, excluding mortgage, we have a pretty broad portfolio there across the Ascend profiles, Clarity, our cash flow proposition, et cetera. There, we saw organic growth of 9% in Q3, strengthened to 10% in Q4. During Q1, you'll remember we called out some one-off there in the prior year and Q1 in the prior year. So I think Q1 will probably reflect that, so a little bit lower maybe around 7% or so. But let's see. There's no real change in sentiment, I think, which is the key thing in that broad client set, which as Brian outlined.

And the second point on the mortgage market more broadly, I think the point I would make is we continue to engage very strongly across -- particularly with FHFA, really on all the changes that are happening in the mortgage market and making the strong points that we believe that Yes, the position in terms of the 3 bureau structure, we believe it's the right structure for the marketplace.

So -- and we think that, that's gained broad traction across key participants across Washington. So I think we feel pretty good about that. And I think that engagement will continue.

And then on data, Arthur, we put in the slides that over 90% of our revenue is associated with essentially data that is proprietary or contractual in one form or another -- and I think that is very much in line also with what some of our peers have quoted. So we feel we have a lot of strength and depth in unique data sets that are embedded in highly regulated workflows as we've talked to you about over the last year. So very confident that with that the demand for that data in an AI and increasingly agentic-driven environment will increase.

I'm not sure if I missed it, but did you comment on the verticals element within North American B2B as well in terms of what you think for that one? I'm not sure if I might have missed it.

Yes. I think we don't normally give individual guidance. But you can see that the health and automotive businesses have continued to grow very strongly around the double-digit range. The marketing services is a bit softer than that. But verticals continues to grow very well. And that is a sizable $1.5 billion business, very high margin, very consistent growth for more than a decade. So we don't expect that to change.

Now we are going to take our next question. And the question comes from the line of Andrew Ripper from Panmure Liberum.

Well done on the results. A couple for me. First of all, one for Lloyd. Lloyd, can you talk to the outlook for profitability in the U.K. and EMEA, Asia Pac? And maybe in the U.K., you could remind us of where you are in tech transformation and how that ties into where margins may go over the next sort of 3 to 4 years? And addendum to that, just in terms of restructuring costs, I think you spent another $28 million last year, $50 million the year before. Are we sort of done now on the sort of tidying up exercise of the tails in EMEA, APAC? And then one for Brian. Brian, I just wonder if you could go back to Ascend and just help us understand the aspiration from here in terms of what you think is addressable by value or client solutions? And you referenced some aspects of platform expansion. Annelies asked a question earlier on about AI, just wondering how meaningful they are in terms of you mentioned fraud, and I didn't really get the tie-up with ServiceNow and what that might mean in terms of economics.

Sure. Thanks, Andrew. Lloyd, do you want to deal with the outlook?

Yes. So first of all, on restructuring costs, so this is primarily associated with the cloud migration program in North America. As you see, we're really substantially complete on that, and that requires staff and some data center changes. So that's really done. I think we'll always look to restructure the business if we can add value, but I don't -- we don't see any other pieces of that just now. On the profitability in the U.K. and Asia Pacific, you can see we've been pushing the margin up. We'll continue to do that. I think the pace of that, it will be continue in EMEA and Asia Pacific as post the illion integration, we continue to scale that. And similarly in the U.K., the U.K. will be a slower uptick as we progress on the cloud transformation, which is going to take another probably 3 or 4 years there. But our long-term ambition of the U.K. margins at 30% and the EMEA/Asia Pacific margins around 20%, that's what we're driving towards.

And then coming back to the second part of the question, a few bits to that, Andrew, I'll try and take them in turn. So Ascend ambition overall is not only growth in the platform which we've seen very significantly starting, I suppose when you go back to the original introduction of Sandbox some years ago, then moving into different Ascend modules like Ascend marketing and [ Ascend ops ] have been individual growth drivers in themselves.

But more importantly is the strategic position of that platform that gives us with particularly our largest clients. And what you're seeing now is we have actually over 10% of the overall revenue of the group running on Ascend.

And that means the more products we put on to it, the more efficient that gets both for us and for our clients. So it gives us a benefit from there in terms of performance and cost, but it also gives us the ability to actually cross-sell and upsell. And we're seeing that happening.

You're seeing that happening in the renewals that we've got. And of course, it gives us that ability to actually add different products and services much more easily on that. And I think it's also really a perfect platform for the introduction of AI capabilities because you can add AI capabilities to that platform alongside adjacent to existing functions and make it work in a seamless way.

So we're excited about that. I think it is going to be continue to be a great growth driver for us. It's going to be a much more important kind of platform for the business overall. ServiceNow is -- we haven't sized that contract, but really, this is a way of us extending our distribution, particularly into verticals where we might have a presence, but we don't have very extensive presence and by integrating our products into the ServiceNow platform, you can really automate the delivery of some key products and services into their clients, particularly around things like compliance and fraud and identity resolution, which are all key functions that need to be resolved as part of the ServiceNow platform.

I think there's a variety of different kind of estimates where that could lead us to. I think we're excited about it. It's too early to sort of say what that delivers. But they have thousands and thousands and thousands of clients. So you don't have to do much in terms of an assumption on penetration there for that to become quite meaningful for us. So interesting and I think watch this space. And I think you're probably going to see a few more of these type of deals from us going forward.

Yes. Any verticals you'd call out, Brian, outside of FS that you think ServiceNow will particularly help with?

Well, that's the point really. It's so broad that we have strength in some verticals. They really have strength across a large swath of companies that we would find quite difficult to reach or time consuming to reach in a conventional way with Salesforce and so on. So this is just a really kind of efficient way of scaling that. So it's every vertical, and it's thousands of companies. And there I think this is a pretty -- I think they view it as a pretty exciting integration as well. and they're fired up about it. So we'll see where we get to.

Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes from the line of Ben Wild from Deutsche Bank .

Two questions for me also on the North America consumer business, please. We've had a few questions already this morning on the LLMs partnership and potential disruption. Notwithstanding your comments that you're not seeing any real market changes yet. OpenAI have just launched their consumer finance product suite in partnership with the data aggregator, Plaid. At H1, you suggested that the AI platforms were driving some traffic growth towards your environment.

But interested on whether you continue to see out into the future, these tools as on balance partners and net drivers of traffic as potential competitors and traffic cannibalizers? And then second question on the biggest part of the consumer platform membership. You've continued to drive growth in membership on pretty tough comparables and it sounds like you expect membership enrollments to continue to grow in FY '27. What are the incremental drivers of membership growth here? Is this product expansion, wider audience monetization. I'd be interested to understand the growth strategy.

Sure. I think we see the evolution of LLMs as a net beneficiary. We think that they're going to give us another platform to engage with drive traffic to our sites, put our capabilities there. Obviously, that's going to evolve very significantly over the next sort of period of time. And we're sort of actively engaged with them and moving forward with our strategy.

Traffic from LLMs has grown quite significantly, but it's still a fairly small proportion of the overall mix. So it hasn't had a fundamental change on where traffic is what traffic is producing what. But we have seen that grow very significantly overall year-on-year as has everybody else, I think, in the marketplace.

But on the membership, our strategy on the membership has been to continually improve that proposition to customers to add more features and functionality to make it a richer experience for them. And that's working, and we're seeing continued upticks in growth in that, and that's been pretty consistent for quite a while now. So Lloyd, anything to add?

No. I think the breadth of product capabilities on the member side, as you know, it's been broadening lots of interest and expansion there, particularly on things like identity. This is a time when everybody is particularly worried about identity protection.

We're seeing a lot of engagement, particularly from prime-related customers on different identity bands and price points. We just launched a new product bundle that includes in partnerships, some earned wage access, which really helps with the subprime category in North America. So a number of different pricing bundles that I think will help us penetrate. And I think just as a reminder, as you said, this is the largest bit of the Consumer Services business. It's typically been, and we think continues to be countercyclical. So it's been a bit more modest growth as credit suppliers has enhanced, but of course, is still continuing to grow. .

Just maybe as a follow-up to the traffic capability discussion with respect to the LLMs. Strategically, how important is it for Experian to continue to own the direct to consumer traffic and when you're thinking about the partnerships with the LLM, are the capabilities that you're introducing into their environments really structurally about encouraging consumers to switch on to your app?

I think traffic is not going to be exclusively one channel in the future. Traffic changes all the time. There's never going to be a world where we don't generate significant traffic onto our website directly given the importance of the role we play in consumers.

And in fact, organic traffic to the Experian brand website remains very strong and will remain a critical feature of that going forward. Our view strategically is that we put our capabilities wherever we can either on our platform or other platforms to drive maximum brand exposure and engagement with our products and services. You have to look at this, I think, in the round because in a way through Partner Port Solutions business, you're already seeing this play out.

We not only have a direct relationship with consumers. We have an indirect relationship with consumers. through the provision of those products and service in the Partner Solutions business. It's essentially a very similar product set, but it's sort of white labels and powered by Experian on to major brands, which have major consumer relationships. And I think you're going to see that evolve. We're happy to play in all of those areas. Indeed, that is our strategy and will be going forward.

So I think it's not one or the other. I think it's going to be all of it together. But I don't see a world where there's -- the traffic is just exclusive to one channel or another. I've always said this, even if you didn't want to have a consumer business experience, you'd have one because we get millions and millions of consumer interactions every year, and they come to us direct and they will continue to do that.

Dear speakers, as there are no further questions for today. I would now like to hand the conference over to Brian Cassin for any closing remarks.

Great. Thank you very much. Well, that concludes today's session. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Hope you have a good day, and we look forward to speaking to you again in July for our Q1 trading update. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Experian's Third Quarter Trading Update Webcast and Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I'd now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Mr. Brian Cassin, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Hello, everybody, and welcome to our Q3 trading update call. I'm here as usual with Lloyd, who will take you through the financial performance after my opening remarks.

We've delivered another strong performance in Q3, reflecting continued execution against our strategy. Total Q3 revenue growth was 12% at actual rates and 10% in constant currencies with organic revenue growth of 8%. And this continues the momentum that we saw in the first half and puts us on track against the FY '26 guidance that we set out just a few weeks ago.

The overall picture is consistent with when we spoke in November. North America continues to perform strongly. And in Brazil, we saw a modest improvement in the quarterly trajectory as we had expected.

Organic revenue growth was 10% in North America, 6% in Latin America, 3% in the UK&I and 3% in EMEA/Asia Pacific. And by segment, B2B organic revenue growth was 7% with good contributions from both Financial Services and verticals. Globally, Consumer Services delivered 10% growth.

Turning to the regional highlights, starting with North America. Momentum remains very strong, driven by client expansions, consistently improving lender activity and continued growth in Consumer Services. Regional organic revenue growth was 10%, including a strong B2B performance, which was up 11%.

In Financial Services, excluding mortgage, we delivered a strong organic revenue growth, reflecting key client wins and increasing adoption of new products across our client base. Client activity levels continue to improve, feeding through to higher volumes for unsecured credit and providing a supportive backdrop for new product adoption. And Clarity was also a very positive contributor in the quarter.

We're very encouraged by client response to newer products such as cash flow scores and analytics, and we see emerging opportunities for the Ascend Fraud Sandbox in 2026.

Alongside this, we are progressing our plans to embed AI more deeply across our platforms, including through the introduction of new Experian Assistant within the Ascend platform and enhanced model risk management features. And we have a strong pipeline of new product development underway with further introductions planned this quarter, and we expect innovation activity to remain high as we move into next year.

In mortgage, our focus remains on making homeownership more accessible and affordable to the American people. The introduction of VantageScore into the performing mortgage market is an important step in expanding credit access to bring millions more consumers into the scorable population. Our approach is to provide both VantageScore and FICO on every mortgage transaction so that lenders can choose which score suits their needs. VantageScore is also available in our Ascend analytical sandbox for testing purposes, and we expect appetite to build over time, particularly given the cost savings available to lenders and ultimately, consumers.

Across verticals, we delivered another strong quarter led by automotive, supported by widening distribution for our AutoCheck vehicle history reports and by health, which continues to benefit from client expansions and strong market adoption of our AI-led Patient Access Curator proposition. In Marketing Services, our Audigent acquisition continues to perform well.

Consumer Services also delivered a strong performance, up 8%, and our focus remains on delivering ever more personalized experiences by leveraging the depth of our data assets, increasingly supported by EVA, our agentic AI assistant.

Marketplace was the primary driver of growth in the quarter, reflecting continued expansion in credit and insurance alongside the ongoing growth of our free membership base.

In Latin America, organic revenue growth was 6%. While B2B revenues were flat on an organic basis, we've made good progress across key areas of strategic focus. Economic conditions in Brazil remain similar to those when we discussed in November with interest rates now peaking at around 15% and with elevated levels of consumer indebtedness, which do continue to weigh on core lending activity.

The integration of ClearSale has progressed smoothly. We are combining our capabilities across the portfolio. This has been well received by clients, supporting new business opportunities. And progress in the SME segment has also been very good.

Consumer Services delivered a very strong quarter with 23% organic revenue growth. Growth was broad-based, reflecting our strategy to diversify and expand the range of services available on the platform. We added new credit products to the marketplace, including private payroll loans, driving increased contributions from the credit marketplace and the contribution from premium services also continues to expand. This, combined with another strong quarter for Limpa Nome following a highly successful Q3 credit fair and as we continue to support consumers to renegotiate debts and consolidate loans.

In the UK&I, organic revenue growth was 3%, with B2B flat on an organic basis and strong Consumer Services momentum, which grew 14%. While the overall economic environment remains soft, we have made steady progress in B2B. More clients are going live on the Ascend platform, and we've seen a somewhat improved backdrop for credit acquisition and origination, supported by increased adoption of the Ascend Sandbox. There remains more work to do across the broader B2B portfolio, but the trajectory is gradually improving.

Consumer Services performance in the U.K. was very strong. Growth was led by the credit marketplace with premium services also contributing positively. We introduced a new 1250 score in December, which has been well received with members engaging more actively as it explores enhanced features.

In EMEA/Asia Pacific, organic revenue growth was 3%, which was against a strong prior year comparative. Our focus on new product introductions is paying off. We have a strong pipeline and some very encouraging performances across the region.

And with that, I'll now hand it over to Lloyd.

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As you've seen, we delivered good growth in Q3, in line with our expectations and in line with Q2 when adjusting for the onetime volume catch-up in the North American Consumer Services business that we had in Q2.

Total revenue growth was a very strong 12%, with constant currency revenue growth of 10% and acquisitions adding 2% to growth. Organic revenue growth was 8%, led by North America business growing at 10%. Organically, B2B globally grew at 7%, while Consumer Services globally delivered 10% growth.

Turning to the performance by region and beginning with North America, where we delivered strong organic revenue growth of 10%, with 11% in B2B and 8% in Consumer Services. Within B2B, Financial Services, excluding mortgage, grew 9% in the quarter, up from 8% in Q2.

As Brian mentioned, credit conditions continue to improve with good underlying client activity, Clarity had another strong quarter, and we see strong commercial momentum and cash flow. Mortgage revenue grew 45% on flattish volume, and this takes total financial services growth to 13%.

Verticals in North America grew 8%, with auto and health continuing to grow mid-teens and double digit, respectively, and Marketing Services growing modestly. Auto grew well across our credit vehicle history and value recovery products, while health was supported by our claims management products and ongoing adoption of Patient Access Curator, our AI-powered registration solution.

Consumer Services grew 8% for the quarter. And as a reminder, Q2 was boosted by the onetime volume catch-up in insurance marketplace. Marketplace grew strongly double digit in Q3, reflecting broad growth across credit cards, personal loans and insurance. Subscription membership revenue grew modestly, reflecting the strong prior year growth comparative.

Moving on to Latin America, which grew 6% organically. B2B was flat, while Consumer Services delivered very strong growth at 23%. In B2B, we saw good performance in our fraud and ID offerings. But as expected, the macroeconomic climate continue to weigh on credit activity, although we did see an uptick in the build of pipeline.

Consumer Services grew very strongly with growth of 23%. And we saw growth across all products, with a very strong performance in Premium and Limpa Nome, which hosted its fair in December.

Turning to the UK&I, which grew 3% organically. B2B was in line with the prior year, but only improving trend across the quarters this year. Consumer Services delivered another double-digit organic revenue growth of 14%, with strong growth in our Marketplace business. And we drove strong growth across both credit cards and personal loans, supported by higher customer engagement and expanding lender supply from the product launches that Brian mentioned.

And on to EMEA/Asia Pacific, which grew 3% despite the lapping of large one-off license recognition in Australia in the prior year and good progress across most of the other markets. And finally, as you've seen, all of our guidance for the full year remains unchanged from the upgraded guidance that we gave at the half year in November.

So with that, I'll hand you back to Brian.

Great. Thanks, Lloyd. And so in summary, Q3 has been another strong quarter of growth, and we're on track to deliver on our full year guidance.

So with that, we're going to open up the line for questions. So operator, back to you.

[Operator Instructions] We will now proceed to take our first question from the line of Scott Wurtzel from Wolfe Research.

I guess just a few from me. First one would just be if you can quantify the impact of the insurance catch-up in 2Q and how that sort of is distorting the comps a little bit on the 3Q Consumer Services revenue. And I would also love to hear about maybe -- you talked about some wins on the U.S. Financial Services side ex mortgage, if you can characterize the nature of those wins as well as any updates on conversations you've had with lenders around the adoption of VantageScore.

Sure. Lloyd, do you want to do the impact?

Yes. So during Q2, we mentioned we had a catch-up in our insurance marketplace vertical inside our Consumer Services in North America. It was about $19 million. So that added 1% organic growth rate for the group. So Q2 was 8% if you exclude that, and we said at the time that we would maintain that through the second half. As you've seen, we have done today, and we expect Q4 to be in line with Q3 overall. And you see Consumer Services in North America was also in line if you adjust for that.

Yes. And on the FS side, we continue to see very good progress. I think we're pleased with the uptake that we've seen on the cash flow analytics and scores products. We've seen some good new wins on that. So that's encouraging. We're also just gone through a fairly significant renewal cycle on big contracts, and we've come through that extremely well. So we're very happy with the position that we've got there.

And I think on the VantageScore, I think it was a third question. There isn't really much of an update. We only spoke to you, I think, back in November. Not a whole lot has changed. And I think we continue to see engagement from really all vendors to evaluate the proposition. Remember, VantageScore not actually yet technically available for use, although all the work that we're doing to ensure that it is up and running as soon as that's approved is ready. And I think there is broad-based interest across the lending environment. I mean everybody, I think, is going to have a look at this. So that's encouraging.

We take our next question from the line of Simona Sarli from Bank of America.

So first of all, can you please comment a little bit on the potential news from Trump that the credit card fees might be cut to 10%? What are the potential implications more broadly for the industry, but also specifically implications for Experian and if you have any solutions that you might potentially help you to hedge that?

And secondly, it's on Latin America. If I look at the organic growth in Financial Services clearly remained flattish in Q3. Can you comment on lending conditions and also on the potential pipeline going into fiscal year 2027?

Thank you. I think on the first question on the proposed cap in interest rates, I think we've just gone through bank reporting season. And probably most of the institutions that a lot of you work for have commented quite extensively on this. I think the first question you have to ask is the likelihood that this would be pushed through. And I think there's a significant challenge to that. No doubt -- I mean, I think you've seen comments from JPMorgan and others saying that if you were to go through it, and they obviously have quite a significant impact on the credit card market. That said, the bigger impact is probably going to more likely to be on U.S. consumers because it will have, we believe, a more damaging impact on the availability of credit more broadly and will push consumers into more expensive forms of credit.

And then the final point I'd say on that is demand for credit doesn't just disappear. Where something like this to go forward, we would expect that the market would adopt and there will be other products that would actually take their place. They may not necessarily be even more affordable products, but we would see that. Typically, in -- certainly in post-GFC, what we saw when regulation was tightened and access to more prime credit was restricted, we saw significant growth in subprime and other forms of lending. So I think the market will fulfill whatever need is out there. And because we serve the whole market, we will expect that to find its way into other kinds of products. So I think it's a long way to go on that, but I think there's not much -- a whole lot more we can add to the extensive copy, I think, that's been put out there on this topic.

And then I think on Lat Am, Lloyd, do you want to take?

Yes, sure. So 2 bits to your question, Simona. I think if you look at overall lending conditions, you've got what we think is probably peak interest rates in Brazil. And I think that's what the markets are looking as you look forward. So I think that's weighing on activity this year, and that's in line with what we said in November.

But looking forward, I think we're seeing something that may be a little bit more hopeful into next year. Our pipeline has improved, which tells you quite a lot about the engagement of clients as they look forward. So I think we're hopeful that we'll see over the next few quarters really into next year, the conversion of that pipeline into contracts and then into revenue. So I think B2B, I think, trends better from here through next year. But clearly, still, it's a high interest rate environment. So we need to see some time for that to recover.

And can I ask just please a very quick follow-up? Is there a way that you could elaborate even high level on your exposure to credit cards, both in B2B and B2C as well as to other forms of credit?

Yes, we don't break down the individual channels, Simona. And as Brian mentioned, we serve all channels. So as credit demand moves around -- or sorry, as credit supply changes in individual channels, you see credit demand shift. We obviously have a very fast-growing business in short-term lending in Clarity. We are probably the largest provider in our sector into buy now, pay later. So there are lots of other avenues and channels for credit that we think would soak up the excess demand if you did see some supply restriction in credit cards, and we'd expect that to help us offset it.

We will now take our next question from the line of Suhasini Varanasi from Goldman Sachs.

Just a couple for me, please. Verticals business, it looks like health and automotive are doing well, but growth slowed a little bit in this quarter. Just wanted to understand what has changed at the back end? And what are your expectations for the next few quarters? And maybe just a similar question on Lat Am B2C, which has seen a very nice pickup actually. Is that a trend that can be maintained over the next few quarters?

So Lat Am B2C, we said that we would be back to over 20% growth in the second half, and you've seen that. We've reached a really nice scale. We covered it in the release. We passed a major milestone in the Consumer Business in Brazil of over 100 million free members in Brazil now, a very significant consumer platform. And across Latin America, including Brazil, we're approaching $300 million run rate revenue annualized for that business now, which is a very significant business growing very strongly. So it is a great story for us of expanding that vertical and lots of runway still to go. So as we look ahead to Q4, we expect another really good quarter of growth in that Consumer Services business.

As you go to the Verticals in North America, so just to remind everybody, what have we seen this year? Verticals in Q1 grew 8%, in Q2 grew 10%; in Q3 grew 8%. So pretty consistent high single-digit growth. Within that, very consistent double-digit growth in health and mid-teen growth in automotive. The Marketing Services segment has been softer this year, which I think anybody watching the segments with industry specialists has seen, and that was low single digit in Q1, mid-single digit in Q2 and low single digit in Q3. So overall, a very strong performance and very consistent, very strong growth actually in health and automotive.

We will now take the next question from the line of Simon Clinch from Rothschild & Co Redburn.

I was wondering if you could just expand on the U.S. credit environment, and just give us a sense of the growth that you're seeing across the different verticals of banking, auto and personal loans and credit card. And then following that, I was wondering if you could just update us on your thoughts around the timing of things like the launch -- the release of the LLPAs for VantageScore in the U.S. if you've had any updates or any engagement with the FHFA, particularly since some of the tweaks that we've seen earlier this year from the organization.

Sure. Well, I think on the U.S. credit environment, as we spoke in November, we said back then that we saw some modest improvement coming through. And I think that's continued. And again, I think we come out with our results usually around the same time as the major U.S. banks produce their results, and they're all really strong. And I think you've seen from them the outlook that they think that they're set up for a pretty good year in 2026, notwithstanding usual caveats around some caution here and there.

Credit quality continues to remain very strong across the piece. I think that's anybody's guess really on the direction of interest rates, but it certainly seems like direction of interest rates is down. So I think that's a pretty good setup for -- as we go into calendar year 2026. And we're seeing it across the piece really. It's not -- I think in the last couple of years, we've had pockets of strong performance, but we're now sort of -- we're seeing that as sort of fairly broad-based really across all of the categories of lending. So that's a good backdrop. And I think that's reflected in the numbers, quite frankly.

And then the second point on VantageScore, that -- we don't have the exact date on that. And obviously, that will be something that the FHFA announced, but we know that they're working through that, and that should actually be fairly imminent. But we don't have the exact date. And of course, we are in constant touch with FHFA on that and many other matters as well.

[Operator Instructions] We will now proceed with our next question from Arthur Truslove from Citi.

Two for me, please. The first one, at the half year, you talked quite a lot about productivity. And I think if I remember correctly, you said that organic employee growth in the first half was roughly flat. I wondered if you could just comment on how that's continuing and how that's impacting or how that shows you on the productivity.

Second question, you mentioned in your release and indeed your comments that the cash flow analytics business is going extremely well. Are you able to just tell us where you're getting the data from for that? And could you comment on the barriers to entry and why you're positioned to sustainably win in that vertical?

Do you want to answer the productivity?

Yes, sure. As you know, Arthur, the quarters we give a revenue update, and we'll update on all the aspects of profitability at the full year. But we've reconfirmed the guidance for 30 to 50 basis points margin progression. Within that, there's about a 30 basis points drag from acquisitions. So you can see we're expecting another strong year of organic margin progression on the back of a very strong year of organic margin progression last year also. And that's coming from all the things that we talked about at the half year, including labor productivity.

And just to remind everybody, we've got something like 11,000 employees involved in technology. And we're becoming more productive as we're able to use better tooling, including AI tooling in the product development life cycle. And we're very much on track in the next few weeks to complete the technology transformation in the shift to cloud in North America and Brazil. So we expect that to be very favorable as we go from this year to next year in terms of the freeing up of activity that's been involved in client migrations and the cloud program. So all very positive and in line with what we've said before.

On the cash flow analytics, I think that the product has been really well received because we built it trained on our own data from the access to -- that we have through our Consumer Services business as well as other test data that we've got. So I think when you look at that in terms of the benefits of having consumer contributed data, that's a very visible example of a product that's working very well in market that's been built on that. You need very large data sets to train it. It's not only analytics, it's also things like the categorization engines that are included within that, which need to be trained on very large data sets.

Of course, that's matched up with the existing products. So it's not just a sort of single product, cash flow analytics, cash flow scores work best alongside existing bureau data. Generally, a new applicant to how it will work is that the data will come both from bureau and from client. So it's a merger of the 2 data sets that produce the real-time scores, real-time analytics. That's how it typically works. So we're very pleased with it. And I think we're in a very strong position because of the build of the product, the data sets that we've trained it on, the reception in the market, the position alongside the bureau, I mean that's a pretty strong position.

Yes. Just sort of following up on that in terms of are you sort of getting most of the data from your own interaction with consumers? Or is it coming from sort of third parties that other people can interact with? And just one to sneak one more in. I think in response to a previous question, you mentioned you've done some big contract renewals, and there's been some questions in the market about pricing. I just wondered how that was progressing as well.

So that's a different question. So Lloyd, do you want to...

Yes, I think we've talked pretty extensively, Arthur, about how our consumer platform gives us the opportunity to interact with consumers in a way that they can permission data to be used for their own benefit. And as a reminder, the U.S. Consumer Business, we've got 19 million connected bank accounts now where we're able and consented to use that data to help consumers in very specific ways. So we've got quite a number of years with huge data sets that we've been able to train our understanding of cash flow analytics on, which is unique in the market. And we're expecting to continue to grow that and to be able to bring that to a broader population.

And then on the renewals, yes, we mentioned that we're seeing really good traction with that. Our objective with all these renewals is to expand our contract value with existing clients. That's going well. So I think we're pleased with the progress there.

We will now take our last question from the line of Ben Wild from Deutsche Bank.

Two questions from me, please. Firstly, on the FICO direct distribution model. Your guidance obviously implies Q4 organic growth of close to 8% and thereby implying no significant effect at the start of calendar '26 from any FICO distribution changes. Do you have a view on how you would expect potential changes to U.S. mortgage scoring to affect the top line and profit growth through the rest of calendar '26?

And then secondly, it looks like H2 and probably FY '27 are going to be periods in the North America Consumer Business where Marketplace significantly outgrows membership. Are there significant differences in the unit economics between membership and marketplace revenue you would call out? And should we expect higher growth in marketplace to have an impact on the operating leverage and margin expansion you've been delivering in that Consumer Business?

Just on the first point, we don't expect anybody to change in the first quarter of '26 with the direct model with FICO because nobody is ready yet. Whilst we said in November that we expected some of the larger resellers to be able to code and get operationally ready for this model quicker than others. Some agreements have been signed, but nobody has yet actually ready to do this. So it won't happen in the first quarter. And I think it's still uncertain exactly if and when that will progress during the course of calendar year '26. On the numbers...

Yes. I'll -- as I mentioned earlier, we've been seeing pricing benefit of something like mid-40s percent through this year. As we go from calendar '25 to calendar '26, we don't see much difference in the pricing benefit that we -- the contribution of the pricing benefit to growth in the mortgage vertical. Clearly, volumes have got a little bit better as we got through this year. So it's early in the year. We'll see what happens to volumes. But the aggregated difference, we're not seeing much difference. Obviously, we'll have a bit more information as we see the things progress and when we guide for the fiscal year in May. So we'll update you then.

And then on marketplace, we think that marketplace and membership as a single ecosystem. As we've talked to you in the past, often what you find is that they work a little bit countercyclical to each other. So in times when credit supply is restricted, demand for membership increases. People try to get credit fit if they can't find supply. So you see these 2 bits of the business complement each other. So I think you're seeing that last year and the year before when credit supply was limited. You saw good growth in membership. That's moderating this year as marketplace picks up. But we expect to continue to grow the profit contribution pretty well from the combined business. And as I say, we think of it as a combined ecosystem.

That's helpful. Just if I could sneak a quick third question, if you don't mind, notwithstanding your previous comment, Lloyd, about the Q3 revenue update and not profit update. I just wanted to check the progression on the cloud migration. And I know previously, you talked about 100 bps of dual running cost as that transition finalizes. How quickly do those costs fall away? And I suppose, conceptually, how do you think about the opportunity to deploy that dual run cost into other areas of investment versus taking the margin expansion?

So I think I said at the half year, when you think about the investment in the cloud program, it comes back through cash operating costs, but also through lower CapEx that feeds through into depreciation over time. So probably the best guide is 20 basis points a year coming out due to -- as those costs run off. And we're clearly getting good operating leverage from the growth in the business, good progression of margin that you just mentioned from the scaling of the Consumer Business.

We have a lot to invest in. And when you stand back and look at the combination of that, the best guide I can give is our long-term margin framework where we think that gives us the capacity to grow our margins well in the 30 to 50 basis points range and to invest into all of the opportunities we have, including the investments that we're making in AI enablement, both for clients and also internally.

We have come to the end of the question-and-answer session. Thank you all very much for your questions. I'll now turn the conference back to Mr. Brian Cassin for his closing comments.

Well, thank you, everybody, for joining today, and thanks for your questions. We hope you all have a good day, and we look forward to speaking to you again in May for our full year results. Thank you.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your lines.

Okay. Thanks, everyone. Welcome. My name is Jane Sparrow. I recently joined the JPM Research team in London, and it's my pleasure to introduce Lloyd Pitchford, CFO of Experian, to you today. It's great to have you here fresh from obviously, last week's very strong first half numbers. So I'm sure some of the themes we'll pick up on in today's session was certainly evident in that strong first half performance and your very positive outlook for the second half.

So let's get into some questions. Perhaps we can start in Financial Services. You delivered very strong organic growth there, particularly in North America. And specifically, perhaps we can talk about the Ascend platform, which obviously has been a big investment program for you, clearly helping to drive that growth. So can you perhaps talk a bit about the penetration you're seeing with customers on Ascend, particularly the big Tier 1 customers, how much full adoption you're seeing and how you monetize that expanded functionality of that system?

Sure. Yes. I think the performance in Financial Services is really going very well. I think before I talk about Ascend, I think you're clearly seeing a continued sequential good momentum in the lending environment. I think with the benefit of hindsight, you look back over now 3 quarters, I think you've seen improvements in the core lending across categories across those 3 quarters, which I think has been helpful to the growth rates.

Ascend, as you know, is our long-term plan to essentially create the workflow end-to-end of a consumer through the banking ecosystem into a platform. We launched it originally on the Ascend Sandbox, which is really how you determine and build a credit model. But since then, we've been building that out into lots of individual modules and connectivity and workflow between them. So great penetration.

So over 20 of the top 25 financial institutions in the U.S. touch Ascend in one form or another. We've got about 2/3 of lending in the U.K. either in production or in trial, touching an Ascend module. And obviously, we're rolling out elsewhere. I think the penetration that you mentioned, it's shifting as the distribution platform for all of our products in Financial Services. So where we used to have, say, a fraud platform called CrossCore, it's now a center for fraud and all of the distribution of our fraud products is through Ascend, and you can connect to all of the other products.

And importantly, optimize across products. That's the benefit of the platform. You're not just selling an individual use case, you're able to integrate data and workflow across lots of different use cases. So the job is to drive penetration and adoption. That's really where we're heading. This next year, one of the things we'll launch with Ascend is we obviously have quite a lot of customers who usually in Tier 2, Tier 3 who are data-only customers.

Up until now, they've seen none of the functionality of Ascend. We'll reveal to them a very thin layer of Ascend functionality and the power of it on top of the data that we already provide to them. And we think that in trials, that's been a really important lead generator for us into the adoption of Ascend. So that's really the plan. We'll start in the U.S., and then we'll go to the other geographies over the next year. But lots of traction with this product across ecosystems.

And I think versus competitor products, there isn't really a similar competitor for Ascend. There are competitors who provide individual services, whether it be decisioning or fraud, but the breadth, there isn't really a similar competitor. When we first launched Ascend, you may remember, given that strategy, Equifax and FICO launched a partnership to try and partner on capability. That didn't really gain traction. So it's at least a couple of generations ahead of the nearest competitor.

And I think you've talked previously about it's actually quite hard to gain share from the other big players in the market on certain things, the banks -- Equifax had their breach and customers stay with them and so on. So is this about deepening the offering you have with your existing partners? Or is it a market share argument? Just to understand that a bit more.

Yes. I think when people look at us, and I think the same is true for our competitors, they think that the majority of the way we try and grow is by taking share of existing wallet. Actually, that's not how we think. We operate in ecosystems with enormous value around the signals and data. The biggest way we grow is by finding new values in those signals, innovating around them, turning them into products and creating value for our clients.

That value can be finding a loan that would otherwise not be originated in finding a fraudulent origination that would otherwise not have been found or helping them automate and reduce their labor. That's the biggest way that we grow. Clients are sticky in our ecosystem. You've seen it across every geography. It takes quite a lot to shift the client to move from one player to another player. I think when you have a unique capability and with Ascend, we have unique capability, you have a better shot than average, but it's still not easy.

Perhaps now a question that I feel like I have to ask, but you're maybe a little tired of answering it today. Just can we touch on FICO given recent market developments. Perhaps you could talk about how you think it might impact the opportunity for VantageScore and also specifically how it potentially impacts your supplier customer relationship that you obviously have with FICO.

So I think if you think about secured credits and mortgage, their historic position is clearly it's been essentially a regulated monopoly for FICO and their score. And that's now changed. You clearly are going to see a period of transition to score competition. We're clearly incentivized to provide pricing and product into the market to help clients make the choice for Vantage.

So we'll clearly be working on that in the coming period. I think naturally, the time for people to shift is slower than you would think. It takes a little while for people to assess it. But the pricing models that we put into the market clearly provide a very clear economic incentive, particularly when compared with the forward signaling that FICO have put in around what their future pricing policy will be.

Outside of that, our ecosystem is full of frenemy kind of relationships with customers, partners, suppliers, with many people in the ecosystem. And I don't expect that to change actually. I think we'll see how it develops. But our position, for example, in the consumer business is a strong partner with FICO. So we'll see how that develops.

Yes. And we just had Equifax in this room. They talked about their pricing responses on VantageScore. Could you just expand on -- you said you're going with the competitive pricing? Could you just talk about that?

Sure. Again, this is in secured credit. So we've said that we'll provide the VantageScore free inside our choice bundle as we've called it. So anybody taking a FICO score, we will get a VantageScore as part of the existing price that we have for that. And we're doing that to help people test a model. At the point that somebody wants to take just a VantageScore, we've said that for the foreseeable future, we'll price at least a 50% discount to whatever FICO's price is in the market. And of course, in those conversations with lenders, what we're essentially doing is putting a price point in privately agreeing to that price point for a sufficient period of time to underpin their economics in switching.

So it will be clear, I think, that there is now competition. That's what the regulator has asked for and is encouraged, and we'll take part in that and make sure that Vantage earns its share in the market. I should say also, of course, we're providing all of our data and all of our processing of the data, and there isn't a score without data. So we'll also make sure that the data and the processing earns its fair rent.

Okay. And then moving from one hot topic to another, so from FICO to AI, the debate seems to sort of range about what AI means for various information services companies with the primary focus seeming to often be on the threat, but perhaps you could share with us some of your thoughts about how you feel you're protected from that threat, but also how you use it as both a growth driver and a productivity saver yourselves?

Yes. So I think if you think about our value chain, we have the raw material, which is the data, and we have huge proprietary data assets. We then have the value creation layer, which is how you find value in that data and monetize it essentially through a piece of software usually or a data point that you distribute. Then you have scale distribution. So if you think about those 3 bits, clearly, the ability to produce code to produce a software product, the barriers to entry there have reduced. So the ability to produce something that somebody could use. But without data and without distribution, it's meaningless.

Think about our data assets. They're huge and they're proprietary. So we have, in the U.S., as an example, over 12,000 individual contributors, over 1.1 billion new data points every month and decades of history of understanding the signals in that data. And that's a really important point, understanding how the propensity to repay and all other signals that are embedded in that data add value to our customers.

So we won't make that data available to other people to train their models on. We have a really defensible position. And the same is true across our other businesses outside of core Financial Services. I think at the other end of the spectrum, building scale distribution that's defensible is also another part of our strategy. Ascend, embedding Ascend in workflow inside big financial institutions that are regulated. We know those things are sticky.

So I think what AI will enable us to do is it will enable us to find valuable signals in vast data sets more quickly. At heart, that is the company we are. If you think about what a credit score is, it's a signal embedded in credit history that tells about a propensity to repay. But it's a signal in data. And there are just enormous signals embedded in our vast data sets and AI will help us find propensity in those signals.

And then we'll be able to turn them into product more quickly because the whole shift from individual coding to vibe coding, you're able to build software products much more easily. So the pace of product development will be quicker. And then inside the company, clearly, like everybody, we're becoming more productive through the use of AI. We've got about 11,000 people out of our 23,000 employees who are technologists, about 7,000 of them have hands on keyboard as product developers, coders deploying code. The productivity of those individuals is changing quite rapidly.

If you go back 4 years, they were coding keystrokes. Back 3 years, they were using code repositories to reuse coding strings. 1.5 years, 2 years ago, they were using Copilot to generate code. They're now using vibe coding. That's a really big share of our employee base that you're seeing quite material advances in productivity. And we can see it at an individual product developer level. We have telemetry that we can see the productivity and the use of AI so we can optimize that in training and deployment.

And that was a pretty core part of your first half margin development, right? It was up organically very strongly, slightly offset by the acquisitions, but some of that is about that AI fueled productivity.

Yes. I think we're coming to a really interesting point in the company's history. So you're seeing scaling of some of the things that we started to deploy 7, 8 years ago, Ascend, the consumer platform, et cetera. So they're hitting a really interesting point in scaling. We also turn off our mainframe in North America. So we start to see the dual run costs that we've had build up, start to move from a headwind to margin to a tailwind to margin.

We also -- some of the dilution from the acquisitions that we made, that's just temporary, that flows back. So I think we have a really interesting time to generate scale returns. The question is what do we do with them? Our forward guidance is to grow margin by 30 to 50 basis points. The bottom end of that range is really underpinned by the flowback of the dual run costs and the acquisition rescaling. So we have flexibility to make other acquisitions that are dilutive and still hit the margin target to accelerate our AI investment and still hit the margin target. So we have a lot more flexibility, I think, in this period than we've had previously.

Okay. And you talked about the consumer business scaling there. It's obviously a big differentiator for Experian versus some of your other listed peers on the data side and also as a business in its own right. That business has changed a lot in the last 5 years. Can you perhaps talk about the differences in that B2C business across the U.S., U.K. and Brazil? What the differences are in terms of marketplace development, membership penetration and app usage and so on?

Sure. So maybe just talk about the strategy. We took a very unique position, as you mentioned, versus some of our competitors. We always believe that technology would enable consumers to share data. And if you had a trusted relationship with consumers that they would share their data for value. And the value embedded in the transactions that a consumer enter into is enormous in comparison to the very large data sets we have today. But it needed to be curated in a trusted relationship.

So that's what we've been building. We've been growing audience. We now have 208 million direct relationships across our main geographies, nearly 90 million here in the U.S. And what you've seen is that's enabled us to develop some very unique relationships that have given us data assets that have helped us generate new streams of revenue. We have 18 million connected bank accounts. So this is where consumers have seen value in sharing their transaction data in order to get a credit score that they deserve. And that's given us opportunities to talk to them about lots of other things, including things like car insurance.

If you look across the geographies, we're on a journey to the same place. And that place is to have a product that meets every consumer in their need state. Some need state is credit building. So it might be somebody who is younger. Some need state is identity protection, usually somebody older with assets. But there are lots of other need states around saving money, around gaining reward, around do it for me, around giving time back. There are lots of those other need states.

So now that we've built the audience, you'll see us build out more SKUs in distribution terms, which means that we can increase the lifetime value of a consumer relationship across an ever broader bit of products. Where we started from in each geography was slightly different. So in the U.S. and U.K., we started from a subscription business. So there, about half of our consumer business is still the subscription business. Very resilient. It grows. It's countercyclical. So it gives us a nice hedge to marketplace business, which tends to be procyclical.

In Brazil, we started with a debt resolution service called Limpa Nome, which allows people to clear their name by settling old debts and negotiating them. That's about half the business in Brazil. So the legacy businesses, if you like, are about half in each geography. But the place we're heading to is a very diverse set of products. In Brazil, for example, we've got a payments platform where we process about $1.5 billion of debt -- of payments on our payments platform. We obviously have all of the signals data around those payments.

We also have car insurance business in Brazil that we just bought, et cetera. So really positive diverse platform that we're looking to build. And of course, you see the benefit of that in the margin, where we've grown over the last 6 years. The margin of the business has gone from about 20% to about 30% as we've scaled the number of relationships.

And then can we just move on to the verticals that you've broken out. So you've obviously built very successful businesses in auto and health through a combination of leveraging existing data and supplementing that with additional data and technology. As you look forward over the next decade, obviously, 10 years ago, those businesses were a lot smaller. Are there other verticals? Or is it that those are the verticals and there's so much opportunity in them that you feel that's where the focus is?

There's a lot of opportunity in the verticals that we're in. And to bring it to life, if you take the auto business, the number of new cars sold in the U.S. has been static for about 15 years. That business has grown double-digit compound for 20 years. Less than half of it is credit. So how have we grown? Exactly the way that we've grown our other businesses by finding value in the data sets and curating product and selling it to people in the ecosystem.

The health business is about a $650 million business, very high EBIT margins, about 40% EBIT margins. And that's grown consistently high single digit, low double digit for more than a decade. And the opportunity there is just enormous. If you think as consumers, you move from buying a financial product where you might be very digital and then all of a sudden, you're a patient, and it feels like you've gone back 200 years. That's the opportunity for us is to smooth with data, consumers' journey through the health care system.

There, Waystar is probably our most relevant stand-alone listed competitor. And we just see huge opportunity in those ecosystems. If you stand back and say, okay, so why are we in these ecosystems? Just think of it from a consumer's point of view, the house we live in, the transport we have, gaining access to health care, the revolving credit that we need to finance our lives and the ad hoc purchases that we make in our lives, which is our marketing services business. These are some of the biggest industries and needs that you touch as a consumer, and we've got assets across all of them.

And then just on auto, obviously, S&P are splitting out their mobility business. Do you think that has any impact on the competitive landscape in your auto business?

Usually, it's a positive for us when you see a business carved out from a larger parent or when it comes out of private equity into the listed environment because you see usually a more stand-alone disciplined competitor that's focusing on that industry vertical.

So in terms of our auto business, about half of it doesn't really compete with S&P because it's focused on the credit side of the business. The Equifax is probably our main competitor. The other 50%, we do. So there are only 2 car assets of all the car ownership data in North America. We've got one, S&P Mobility have the other. So we compete head-to-head on all the different products around that.

I'll just pause if there's any audience questions. No, in which case, I'll carry on. So can we just talk about Brazil? Obviously, the environment there from a macro perspective has been a bit challenging. So can you talk a bit about how you see things playing out there, some of the challenges that you're seeing and also sort of any changes in the competitive landscape Equifax -- since Equifax acquired Boa Vista?

So we see Brazil as a really great asset for us. The strength of the brand that we have there is second to none in any of our businesses. So it's a household name in Brazil. Said another way, if you think about different competitors here in the U.S., you might think about Experian, you might think about Equifax, you might think about FICO or RELX or Dun & Bradstreet or LiveRamp. In Brazil, we're all of them, all added together. It's a really strong position that we have.

So what you have at the minute is a continued strong consumer business. So I think this year, we'll grow a bit over 20% in that consumer business. It's about 30% of the overall business now, growing really well with a really significant footprint in consumers' lives, similar to a major retail bank.

The B2B business is clearly reflective of the macro environment, where you've got still a rate-tightening cycle in Brazil. Coming to next year, some of our acquisitions in Brazil go organic. So I think you'll see an improvement in the B2B growth rate, but I think it will take a macro recovery really to see it come back to some of the high growth rates that we've seen in the past.

Combined B2C, B2B, I think we can still grow mid- to high single digit despite the cyclical downturn. And then obviously, it will recover strongly whenever lending comes back.

And I suppose we've talked about North America and Brazil. So we might not want to talk about the U.K. given we both live there, but perhaps you can give us some thoughts on the U.K. market and the challenges that you're seeing there as well.

I might have to ask everybody to remove their shoelaces and belts. It's a difficult economic backdrop. And clearly, a lot of speculation, which is harming the business environment about the upcoming budget. Despite that, we're continuing to make good progress. The penetration of Ascend in the B2B market is growing really well. We have really strong market share and brand recognition in the U.K. market.

The consumer business continues to grow well. That's growing double digits just now. But clearly, if you stand back and say, given the economic position, I think it's difficult to see the U.K. posting a very strong recovery from there in the near term. And of course, we allocate capital accordingly.

Yes. And on the subject of capital allocation, you sort of touched a bit earlier about the sort of acquisitions that you've done and you're perhaps looking to do more of. Can you talk a bit about the pipeline, the criteria that you look for in those deals? What -- is it strategic criteria? Is it returns criteria? What do you think about when you're building that pipeline?

So what are the sort of things that are of interest to us? Firstly, data assets. In a world where you can find new value in signals in data, any proprietary data asset is really of interest to us in our space. So that could be a bureau. We acquired a bureau in Australia this last year. It could be a fraud data asset. We acquired one in Brazil this last year. So anywhere that we think we can add value on top of the proprietary data asset, we're interested.

Then if you go into software, software, you have to be quite discerning at the moment is the thing that's been created defensible. And I think there, one of the good things is private equity is really stepping away from some of those acquisitions. So the demand for those assets is actually lower. If we have conviction, it's actually a pretty good place to acquire because we can plug those assets in and very quickly monetize on our distribution.

So if we can find something that adds value, say, in fraud, on Ascend, it can add value very, very quickly. So we're interested. I think in terms of distribution, clearly, anything in the consumer business that can enhance the franchise, we're interested in. In terms of how we look, we filter through strategy first, those things I just mentioned. We assess everything on a range of metrics. So we have an economic test, which is post-tax IRR.

We look at the period to getting to a hurdle rate around that, and it's different by country and by maturity of business. We'll look at accounting return, so post-tax return on capital, try to get to double digit between years 3 and 5. And then we do a benchmark against the share buyback. I think if you look back over the last 6 or 7 years, what you can see despite deploying quite a lot of capital, we've maintained very high returns on capital employed.

So industry-leading, I would argue, amongst the bureaus. So about 17% post-tax return on capital. And what that means inside the business is just because we've got capital, we don't deploy it. Nobody has a target for M&A. We want to create value. And if we can't, we'll give money back through a share buyback.

And acquisitions are typically dilutive to margins. So is that -- when you talk about your medium-term framework of 30 to 50 basis points, does that assume any acquisition activity in that?

It doesn't. Obviously, you can't model generic acquisitions. They come as they come. I think what you've seen is the last 2 years is we've been able to offset the near-term dilution. And typically, not every acquisition is the same. But typically, if it's a bolt-on acquisition, you can get it up to group average margins over, say, 3 years. So the dilution that we had these last 2 years comes back, as I mentioned earlier. So that may not be true of every acquisition, but certainly, we'll try to use the organic development to offset the drag.

And you're below your target leverage range at the moment. And if the acquisition pipeline didn't convert into a certain number of deals, is buybacks your preferred alternative?

Yes. I think we've always said if it's good to have flexibility. You don't know -- acquisitions don't come along in a straight line. But if we're very cash generative, if we were ever inefficiently financed, we use the share buyback to return it. Sitting here today, we finished the half at $1.8 billion. Our guidance is $2 billion to $2.5 billion. If we buy nothing else for the rest of the year, we'll finish the rest of this year at a little below $1.5 billion.

What's the difference between $1.5 billion and $2 billion? It's about $1.5 billion of capital, just to give everybody the frame of reference. But our preference, if we can find them, is to invest in accretive growth acquisitions to enhance the franchise.

And then in your medium-term framework, you also targeted the high single-digit organic in the first half, there's a balance of that evenly between your B2B and your consumer. Is that how you see it playing out going forward that those -- I mean, on average, obviously, different years, different businesses often perform better than others. But on a 10-year view, would you see those things still being in balance with each other?

I think the opportunity and the pace to deploy the opportunity in consumer is stronger. I think given the audience we have, we can deploy that more quickly. So probably over time, you see a slightly stronger growth rate in consumer than you would in B2B. That doesn't mean in individual periods, that wouldn't be the case. And we've got a very broad portfolio.

Again, just to remind the history, we've never reported a negative organic growth year. So GFC, COVID, credit downturn. And if you look more recently, we've generally, in difficult times, reported mid-single-digit organic growth. So we've got a very resilient portfolio. Some of our businesses just aren't cyclical, the health businesses being an example, some are countercyclical.

Okay. That is time. Thank you very much.

Great. Thank you.

Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. For those of you who haven't met, my name is Annelies Vermeulen. I'm the Head of Business Services Equity Research for Morgan Stanley in London. I'm delighted today to be joined by Brian Cassin, CEO of Experian.

Brian has been CEO since 2014, so over a decade, was CFO prior to that. Hopefully, Experian needs no introduction, but in one line, this is a global data and technology company that uses data, analytics, software to help businesses manage their credit risk, prevent fraud and enable individuals to access credit. And over the last decade, Brian has been instrumental in Experian's transformation from a credit bureau to a truly data-enabled technology business, an area that we're going to delve into today. So Brian, welcome.

Great. Thanks for having me. It's nice to be here.

So let's start straight in with the strategy. I think most people, the majority of this audience, likely included, would think of Experian predominantly as a credit bureau. So could you talk a little bit about how the company has evolved over the last decade, your strategy to converge data analytics, decisioning, fraud, marketing into integrated platforms like Ascend and moving beyond those traditional point solutions?

Sure. Okay. So the history of the business, obviously, I think people think about bureau think about data. Data is at the heart of what we do. Some of the largest proprietary data sets in the world, hundreds of millions of businesses, well over 1 billion consumers worldwide, some of the most sensitive data on those entities. So it's a very, very distinct and very powerful proprietary non-replicable data set. So that's the first point.

Of course, data is used for something. People needed to either make decisions, do analytics, create business processes around it. So we've always viewed our strategy has been to build the best data sets, but also to leverage those data sets to do more for our customers with that data. That started off in simple things like developing scores, analytics. It morphed into decisioning systems for credit originations, for account management collections and things like that.

And you just sort of gradually expand into a whole ecosphere of products and services that actually need data at the core, but do something value-added on top of that data to deliver a function to our customer. And that continues to be the way we expand our addressable market. You referenced one of our products called Ascend, which is, for once, of old money language, big data platform. We introduced it quite some time ago. It's essentially a Workbench product, which allows people to do modeling and analytics.

And as we were sort of developing that module, we realized that the customers were coming back and sort of saying, can you use it for this? So we were co-creating with them. And they were actually helping us identify where else this could have applicability, and what other revenue opportunities there are. And that's how we've continued to expand the business.

Today, we are a business which has got 20-odd thousand people, 11,000 technologists, 7,000 software engineers. We're actually one of the biggest technology companies in our space. And that's -- we've used that very aggressively for more than a decade to expand the business.

And when you think about those new market opportunities, whether it's insurance, marketplaces, fraud business, reg tech, beyond the traditional credit bureaus, what are you most excited about?

Well, I think really, it depends which vertical you're looking at. We cover -- I should have said we cover a number of different verticals. We cover financial services, obviously the biggest one. We also have a very big presence in health. We're in marketing services. We're in automotive and so on, quite a few others.

So when we look at the broad opportunity that we have, we see specific growth areas in each of those verticals. If we take financial services, I think the Ascend platform is -- has been a fantastic growth opportunity -- growth driver for us, and actually gives us a really strong strategic footprint as we think about how the industry evolves going forward and all the capabilities we can continue to add on top of that. So that's one.

I think if we flip over to our consumer business, we have a huge platform there, 200-odd million consumers worldwide. We only really started to scratch the surface of the products and services that we can provide to those, and move that business more towards a sort of financial copilot for consumers. Those are very exciting opportunities. We flip across the health. It's an amazing business, amazing opportunity. Also with a technology landscape that's way far behind most of the industries that we operate in. Their use of data is from the stone age. We have so many opportunities there. That's really exciting. So those are just some examples.

And putting all that together, how do you see your competitive position evolving relative to the other traditional credit bureaus?

Well, so I think we're always put in that bracket for obvious reasons. We are substantially larger than our other 2 players. I think we are regarded as the most tech forward, most innovative. We are the ones that actually sort of break out new concepts. Obviously, our competitors wouldn't admit that, but they sort of do in private.

And I think we have moved so far beyond just that sort of certainly transactional bureau reference point, and we are much more of a broad-based technology data and analytics company, continue to push that way. I think we see the competitive set being, frankly, much bigger than that as we look across the landscape.

Very clear. We've made it 7 minutes, so it's probably time to talk about AI. So you've always been very clear that AI, poses a very minimal disintermediation risk for the business due to the confidential nature of the data that you hold. So how would you respond to those who are concerned about the potential competitive threat from AI? And specifically, can you see any scenario where AI could allow for better scores to be generated with less data?

No, simply. I mean there is not -- in my lifetime that I don't think that's going to happen. And the simple fact is that you need access to data. AI needs data. You can have -- in fact, we -- if you think back 10 years or so ago, we've always had this question about can the data sets get disrupted? The first one, some people in the audience were asking me these questions 10 years ago. Social media data, Facebook, Google, surely, they have more data than you, they can do. That's -- people simply don't understand how credit scoring is done. You cannot do it without bureau data. Why?

Because we have 7 years of history of every financial interaction a person has ever done, every credit card, every loan, every delinquency, every bankruptcy, right? And only we have that data. That is not freely available because it's obviously sensitive private information. Even that's no good to you when somebody shows up looking for a loan today because they might have defaulted in the last 24 hours. So it's both the history and the freshness. We have over 15,000 institutions that contribute data to us. We have to compile all that.

I think everybody thinks this data just comes into us in a nicely sort of formatted way. Not true. We have to resolve identities. We have to match all of that data. We have to ensure it's accurate. It's hugely complex. It's highly regulated. It's an incredibly large network of contributed data, and it's not replicable. So the answer is no.

And by the way, I think scores have used AI for quite some time. But this is math. It's not language, right? So the algorithms you always use the most advanced mathematical techniques available. That continues, and we continue to experiment with that. But it's not a large language model application. That's actually no good to you in a credit score.

Yes, exactly. Good. I'm glad we've cleared that up because there continues to be some, I think, misinformation around that. So perhaps moving from -- and you referenced there the complexity of the data. So moving from the perceived risk to the potential opportunity.

You spoke a lot yesterday about the internal productivity benefits you could see from utilizing AI. So is that more on the cost savings side? Or do you think actually also improved commercial momentum, new product launches, et cetera?

I think it's both. I think every company has, in the last couple of years, talked about productivity as an opportunity using AI. I think that's going to become table stakes. I think if you're not using AI to advance productivity in your business, you're behind. So we do see that, and that's coming through. I think we gave some stat there about how our headcount is relatively static, notwithstanding consistent high organic revenue growth.

So -- but we see it's twofold. We see that productivity benefit gives us flexibility to continue to invest in new products. And increasingly, we are turning to our existing product teams, scaling them up from an AI perspective and making sure that AI is an integral part of all of our product road maps.

That doesn't mean that every product is going to be an AI product. I mean I'll give you an example of that, which is today, we deliver a lot of our data in API pulls straight into production environments. These things perform at an unbelievable scale, like they -- millions and millions, billions of transactions. They're all instantaneous and they have to be 100% accurate. It's actually hard to see how a different solution would, one, improve that to at lower cost, and it's difficult to see what the benefit of changing that particular product would be.

But I think the opportunity comes really around all the processes that go around those functions. And we gave an example yesterday of -- take Ascend Sandbox. This is a sandbox environment that we've built for people to build their models in. So you have experimentation, you have scorecard build, that then goes to determine how people put products in market. When you put a new -- when you build a new model, before you put it into production, you have to make sure that it's regulatory compliant, it's risk compliant and it gets approved internally.

The regulations for model governance depending on jurisdiction are enormous. Folders like that big, thousands of pages. So what we've done is we've taken a small language model, ingested all that, trained the AI on that data. Now we have a product that sits on the platform, that actually builds all of the regulatory cases as you are building the model, so that you can actually sort of at the end of it, simply say, prepare the documentation, it prepares the documentation. You obviously still have to have a human reviewing that because today, even still, there's still -- it's not 100% accurate. But the time saving in that is enormous. We're talking months and lots of manual efforts.

So there's a really good example of how we can use those capabilities to supercharge process improvement around our products. And actually, we have several of those already in market. So it's not like we're just talking about these things. We've got real products in market now.

Yes. And on that point, when you think back to when you set your medium-term framework, this is probably before all this -- the pace of the technology has accelerated. So actually, when you think about those opportunities, is there some upside risk do you think to that margin progression, which you've already delivered well ahead of?

Yes. So well, we're not changing that today. I think when we set that medium-term framework out, we said growth objective where it was, 30 to 50 basis points improvement over the medium term, that's 3 to 5 years. If you actually look at the organic margin improvement that we've delivered in the times that we've done that, we've already exceeded the entirety of the margin guidance for the medium-term framework. So we're not changing that today.

But what we are seeing is increased confidence that we can deliver against that, not just because of productivity, but because we've had dual running of costs in our P&L, because at the same time we've been transitioning a lot of our technology to the cloud. That will start to drop out. And the ability to continue to do what we've always done, which is actually invest back in new product, to drive new opportunities and growth as well as deliver really great financial metrics.

Absolutely. And then thinking about the opportunity, but also the risk because clearly, implementation of AI, we've seen this in other examples, there's a risk of cyber threats, data breaches, hacks also goes up. So how do you think about balancing the investment there between AI-driven product innovation and also security initiatives to protect data?

So one of the first things that we did, and this is not -- this is actually several years old now. The first thing we did was actually to set up our internal processes around how we use AI, how we govern it, what technologies we're going to use and how and how they connect? And so that is -- there's a lot of proprietary technology in there. And we've given tools to all of our developers, which are within that wall, and which are governed and have security as built in a standard. That was the first thing that we did because that is so crucially important to us. So we can build with confidence now. And we're 100% confident of that, that risk is covered.

Yes. Front-footed as always. So then thinking about on the customer side, you've perhaps worth talking about your virtual assistant EVA here as well, which you're rolling out further AI capabilities for. So what are you doing again to persuade, I suppose, customer concerns around how their data is used and what the AI assistant will do in that regard?

So that's a big concern for our B2B customers. But whenever we have a product, a new product, or an existing product and an improvement, because of the type of nature of our customers, we go through very extensive testing with them. They're incredibly rigorous. There's all sorts of security audits around it. So that's just part of the normal procurement process, and it fits into that.

Flipping over to the consumer side, to be honest, it's sort of -- it's an interesting question because we do lots of customer surveys and we have a lot of feedback. And if you ask 2 questions of a consumer, which is the first one, are you concerned about your data privacy? They go, yes, 100% of people do. And then they go, would you give up all of your data for a free coffee in Starbucks? 100% say yes as well. So there's a little bit of schizophrenia on this.

What we do know, when we started this probably more than a decade ago, there was a view that take, for example, open banking, or access to consumer permission data. Some people said consumers would never give more data to bureaus because they're worried about how they would use that in the credit scoring. I mean it's proved to be 100% inaccurate because what we found is that consumers are more than willing to actually contribute data to us as long, as they perceive some value in that exchange.

And in fact, it actually goes a bit further than that. They sort of expected. And the weird thing is that we get more comments back from consumers saying, I got this thing. And that's not relevant to me. And I thought your experience, you should have known that. Why did you send that thing to me? They think we know more about them than we actually do, which is kind of interesting. So I don't think there's any issue about that. And we've been -- we've proved very successfully that, that's a huge opportunity, and it's an asset that's actually working for us. In fact, you may ask about cash flow attributes, product we introduced last week. That is a good example of how we built a B2B product using training on consumer contributed data in our consumer business.

And then continuing on the theme of huge opportunities. When you think about your Ascend platform? And could you perhaps update the audience on the rollout there, the progression? I know it's been a phenomenal story so far. And how is it creating new markets for you? And I suppose what would also be interesting within that is if you're seeing any of your competitors trying to replicate what you're doing?

So take the competition one first. We introduced the Ascend platform probably 6, 7 years ago. And every year since then, I've been asked that question. We -- for this particular product, we are the only people who have any market penetration whatsoever. So we created this category. And it's been very difficult for anybody else to actually displace us anywhere. So a large majority of Tier 1 banks in North America were the first adopters, which will tell you how powerful the solution is because these organizations have thousands and thousands of technologists themselves.

We are in the middle of actually rolling that out in the U.K. I think that by next year, we will have virtually 80%, 90% of all lenders in the U.K. using the Ascend platform. So it just gives you an idea of the strategic position that gives us. And of course, as we proved with the originally just the sandbox, now much more. Ascend Ops, Ascend Marketing, Fraud Sandbox. The ability to just continue to add more capability onto that platform, more modules, it's really, really powerful.

Yesterday, in the results announcement, I gave an example of a Tier 1 client who has been a long-time customer for our data. And if you look at the customer journey of that, we went from selling data to selling them point software solutions, particularly decisioning. They also use other competitors for software and internal solutions. And then we have now migrated them on to Ascend platform. And within that, we've not only replaced other software vendors, we've actually added capabilities like a product that we have called Aperture, which really helps customers ensure that their data is ready for use in the platform like this. It eliminates some of the problems with siloed data because it's got incredible matching and pinning capability. So that actually helps the data be used in that environment. We then actually now talking about model risk governance. So it just goes to show how that can really build a completely different relationship with clients.

And on that, then you obviously you're bundling all these services and then pricing for that. And as you become more integrated with those clients, your sort of replacement risk also goes down?

So replacement -- that's obviously the objective, like everybody wants to be irreplaceable in their clients' environments. And most clients try and avoid that from happening because they don't want vendor lock. So there's always a bit of a tension around that.

I would say we have always been an organization that had many, many products. I use this example. We have one Tier 1 bank in the U.K. that takes 80 different Experian products. So bundling of products is not a new thing for us. But because those products legacy, many of them legacy, they're all sort of individual point solutions. And when you think about it, there's a commercial opportunity for you where you can actually give additional value. But maybe from the client's perspective, they have to integrate with 80 different products. So why is that different from integrating with 80 different vendors?

You start to move towards a platform strategy where these products are actually connected to each other. You don't need 80 different integrations. You only need one. And so that's a huge operational saving. What we are seeing across the piece, particularly in areas like fraud, increasing demand from our clients for solutions that help them manage the complexity of dealing with different solutions. So orchestration layers, built on capabilities. That's where things like Ascend, CrossCore, PowerCurve, they've always been really great at that, and we see that as a long-term trend.

Very exciting. So switching now perhaps to Brazil. Again, something you've spoken for a long time about around the opportunity from positive data and so on. So what's the latest there on positive take-up of data and progress?

Yes. So I think we don't really talk about positive data separate anymore because it's sort of everywhere. We actually don't really sell negative data and positive data separately. We did at the outset, but now it's really all integrated. So what has it done?

It's massively expanded the addressable market because more consumers are now credit visible. Previously, I don't know how many people in the audience understand the difference between positive and negative data. I'll just explain it. If you have a negative data market, it means that you can only see people who have defaulted, which in Brazil is a lot of people actually. When you have a positive data market, it means you can see everything, which is that your performance against payment against loans and blah, blah, blah. So it's a much richer view. It's a much bigger data set. And of course, it means that you can see more consumers.

So that market has expanded quite significantly. All the scores and analytics have to change. It's driven quite a big significant growth for us since that introduction. You can see our business is now much larger. We're really still only in the foothills of that. It's sort of got a bit interrupted by the economic backdrop in Brazil because once you get a contraction in lending, yes, it's fine. You got more positive data. But if you're pulling back and you don't want to lend anyway, it doesn't matter. So we've seen that interest rates have moved up very high. We've seen that softness in the market. But ultimately, when we get a bit more of a positive economic backdrop, I think that growth rate starts to accelerate again.

So perhaps, again, for the benefit of the audience, how far along would you say Brazil is in terms of replicating what you have in the U.S.? And what else would you like to add? Clearly, you've added fraud, you've really expanded that footprint, but what's next?

So a long way to go. And I think -- if you look at our business there, we're now the #1 fraud player in Brazil. We are the #1 player in business information, the #1 player in consumer information. We have a strong decisioning business, probably #1 in analytics as well. So it's an amazing footprint.

But actually, if you look at the revenue contributed from those different verticals, still much smaller than places like the U.K. and North America. So for example, the U.K., if you look at our business across data, decisioning, software platforms, analytics, scores, it's very balanced like 20/20/20 fraud as well. Brazil is still more skewed towards data. So the opportunity for those growth areas is still really significant.

Perfect. Then I just wanted to come back on the margin opportunity, which we obviously touched on when we're talking about AI. So specifically on the transition to cloud-based decisioning solutions. So how do you think that will, A, benefit your competitive position, and also drive that margin expansion?

Yes. From a competitive position, I think it's important to just clarify what we mean by transition to cloud. All of our new products are built in the cloud. There's nothing built not on cloud. All we have left, not on cloud, are really some data centers, some legacy systems, the actual repository of the ingestion procedure for some of the bureaus. So we'll move that across. In fact, we're migrating -- we'll be finished migrating all of our U.S. clients by the end of this year.

In some cases, they won't actually see any difference. I mean that's the objective, right? We don't want them to see any difference in terms of performance and so on. The benefit for that will be for us because the benefit of building new products in the cloud, we're already doing that. So from a competitive position, it gives us -- eliminates dual running costs, gives us more financial flexibility, you can turn more of our resources back on to product creation. So that's going to accelerate that. In the marketplace, we've already been taking advantage of that technology to build new stuff.

Absolutely. Great. We'll come to audience questions in a moment. So if you have any burning questions, do get them ready. But before that, we need to cover U.S. mortgage as well, which again has been a big topic of discussion for the last couple of months. So perhaps, again, remind everybody, how are you responding to what FICO are doing in terms of the direct license program? And what is your strategic response to mitigate revenue and margin impact?

So I'm just going to take as read that people understand what actually happened here. But -- so I think, as we look at the U.S. mortgage, I think there's a couple of debates that have been knocking around. First of all, FICO traditionally distributed its scores through the bureaus alongside the data. There's a good reason for that because it's actually operationally the much simplest thing to do. And then you have the bureaus calculating the score, you have limited room for differentials between outcomes and so on and so forth.

So they have a few weeks ago, made it available as an option that you can get the score direct from them. So what that means is the resellers, so the people who sit in the middle between bureaus and the people who write the mortgages have to now calculate the score. If they want to use that model, they don't have to. So they're going to take on the operational risk, complexity of doing that. And there's lots of things they have to do, such as actually setting up a technology environment to calculate the score, actually getting a different feed from us to do that, which requires security, compliance, blah, blah, blah. There's billing issues. So there's a lot to do. So it's not going to happen just like that.

I don't know when that will be ready. I think some of the big resellers will be ready sooner than others, but not all the resellers will move, because I think people don't appreciate that. When you calculate a score in the U.S., you are liable for if that score is right or if that is wrong. We as bureaus have been doing that for a long time. No reseller has yet done that. So it will be interesting to see how that evolves once they meet all the wonderful lawyers that we have to deal with all the time.

So look, I think -- so that's going to happen. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter to us because the key point here is the debate about where is the value? Is the value in the data, or is the value in the score? And I think here's the fact which I think proves where the value resides irrefutably. The GSEs in the U.S. underwrite 50% of all mortgages. If you look on the GSE website, they're quite explicit. When they do that, they use data from all 3 bureaus. They can't do it without data from all 3 bureaus. They do not use the FICO score. So they do that underwriting without any reference to score whatsoever.

The score is attached as part of the sort of package to sell on the loan. So it's embedded in the system. But we know that the value resides in the data. So this change just means that actually our economic value from that process will be concentrated in the data and score processing fees. So we put together a package called the Experience Score bundle, which incorporates price for our data, the processing fees plus the FICO score should they choose to sort of continue to consume it from us, plus the Vantage Score alongside that for free. And we're going to be actively helping people test the Vantage Score against FICO in the market in real time. And we'll see how that evolves over time.

Exactly. And obviously, I mean, Vantage Score is something you've been -- has been in the business for a long time. But do you think -- what's your view around those who would say that FICO will remain the industry standard? And how quickly do you think actually Vantage Score could get adopted?

So there's clearly one narrative which says nothing is going to change. That narrative was several years ago was that the GSEs are never going to approve Vantage Score for approval in mortgage. So that wasn't correct. Now the narrative is it doesn't matter because people are still going to use the FICO score, maybe. But let's look at non-mortgage where FICO didn't have a monopoly. And this is before we never pushed it, right?

So Vantage Score has about a 30% share of unsecured lending. About a 50% share in fintech, more than 50% in card, lower amounts of some of those other verticals. And that, to be honest, that's without really, and the bureaus trying, because we weren't really economically incentivized one way or the other because all the scores are coming through us. So that's changed. And Vantage Score is now available for free for testing, and we're going to encourage people to put it in the sandbox. The other bureaus are also doing that as well.

So it's a pretty heroic assumption to assume no market share is going to shift. Then what's the feedback that we've got, feedback, people are looking at this and they're looking at it seriously. And there are some pretty big people looking at this. So where that gets to, we'll find out. I think it's true to say it will take time, but I would also say that we have been a bit surprised that some people are more ready than people realize.

Absolutely. And look, I think it's fair to say that it was a bit of a surprise when that hit the tape. So if you think about any other examples in the business where you could see a situation like that, whether it's a regulatory change, whether it's some -- change in regulation that perhaps we weren't expecting or change in policy.

Well, yes, I'm not going to sit here and predict what politicians might come up with. But what I would say is that if you actually look at a lot of the kind of surprises like that have happened over the years. So for example, when the Biden administration came in, there was a lot of talk about a public bureau, and there was a lot of people concerned about that. We were never concerned about that. We know how difficult these things are. The concept that they would actually get their act together and produce something which was useful in the marketplace was a little bit fantastic to believe in. And that's kind of gone.

And I think you look at -- I think that was -- it was a surprise when it happened. But when you actually look through the dynamics of what happened, you realize that it actually really doesn't make that much difference to us longer term. And in some senses, our economics could even be improved by it, particularly if you start to get some shift of share towards Vantage Score. So always -- they're always capable, but I think the resilience and strength and position of our business always shines through.

Absolutely. And I guess it hasn't changed your view on mortgage. Your mortgage has always been lower than your competitors deliberately.

Yes. Although -- yes, that's right. Although we -- lots of things happen in the mortgage market. There has been a lot of change, and we've actually been leading quite a lot of innovation around change. Some of the stuff that scores that's changed is to do with cost to consumer. We've been very proactive in helping improve and change the process so that we reduce the cost to our clients for non-closed loans, for example. So we expect that to continue.

Yes, absolutely. And then sort of related on capital allocation, I suppose, what -- could you talk a little bit about your M&A strategy? And I think this is an interesting point here, especially also around the margins. So some of your recent acquisitions, whether it's ClearSale or NeuroID, how those integrate with your platform? What is it you're looking for with deals and how you see that progressing?

So the acquisitions sort of fit into a few categories. We like to buy bureaus wherever we can. And we'd like to consolidate bureaus wherever we can. That's the Australian acquisition did last year. Take the #2, #3 position, much stronger competitor to -- it's Equifax as the leading player in that market. That's just -- that's a pretty logical -- a lot of synergies. So that's one type.

We then look at ClearSale, which is a fraud acquisition in Brazil. We've been building up our fraud business in Brazil for quite some time. ClearSale is focused on transaction fraud. That's not an area we're in. We see synergy between transaction and origination fraud. That now makes us the leading player in fraud in Brazil, so very logical add-on. Also, that comes not just with a fraud capability, but also with a quite significant data asset. And that also strengthens our data business and back into credit, and we think that we can improve our scores in there. That's another example of a good product with -- it's got a product capability plus data, which is enhancing to an existing position.

And then you slip down into something like NeuroID, which is behavioral biometrics for originations fraud. It's kind of a fundamental kind of add-on feature that we need to add to our solution set. We have a product in the U.S. called Precise ID, which is one of the leading authentication products for originations fraud. And increasingly, you need to add more capabilities to that to cover things like biometric behavior at the point of application and so on and so forth. So they all fit into that kind of narrative. Same. We've just done a small acquisition in the U.K. And again, another fraud business takes us into a slightly different vertical, quite synergistic from a product and from a cost perspective. That's kind of the things we're looking for.

We also do it in the other verticals as well. You've seen us buying health. And you've seen us some time ago buying marketing services to really help build out things like our identity products and so on.

And so when you think about some of those acquisitions that you've done, you typically talk about them taking 3, 4 years to become margin accretive. So could you talk a little bit of what you do with those? And are there any examples of where actually been positively surprised by either the quality of the data, or the pace of integration, or anything like that?

Yes. So I think we -- what we usually find with acquisitions is that we build a case for the acquisition, and we typically always outperform on the EBIT side. So we build a margin assumption in and the synergies tend to come probably a bit quicker than we had modeled.

I think we try and sort of sell them as part of our overall solution. So NeuroID will be on the Ascend platform. It will be matched up to Precise ID, is an integral part of that. We look for the product synergies, and we look for the cost synergies. ClearSale is an example of a business that we bought. ClearSale was a public company. Normally, we're able to do extensive diligence on the data assets because we tend to buy private companies. Obviously, public company a little more difficult to do that.

Actually, post acquisition, we have found that the data asset for ClearSale is even stronger than we anticipated. So that's really a pleasant surprise. So I think getting up to sort of group average margin can take that amount of time, can be quicker. It just depends on the business. Group average margins are pretty high. We tend to buy businesses that have not got the same level of scale as us, so therefore, don't have the same margins, but we think that's the opportunity where we add value.

Yes, absolutely. And when you think about timing, I'm sure there's assets that you have your eye on, but sometimes the timing or the valuation doesn't quite stack up. So when you think about capital allocation over the coming months, what for you are the priorities either in terms of -- if you can't do the M&A, is it returning cash to shareholders? Is it investing more in the business based on the opportunities that you see?

Yes. So we've got a very kind of clear capital allocation framework. We believe that we can do all of them. And if you look at where we are from a debt-to-EBITDA ratio, we're pretty low. So one is not sort of exclusive to the other. We always set out our capital allocation framework at our annual results. So we'll give an update on that then.

Perfect. We have 5 or so minutes to go. Are there any questions from the audience? Nope.

I have time for another question.

Yes, absolutely. So I wanted to also ask, I think it's a really interesting question around consumer services because, again, this is something that has also come up quite a bit. So how you position the business against sort of fintechs, challenger apps? And are you seeing improved usage metrics, specifically in consumer, for consumers using some of those Gen AI features?

Yes. So I'll unpick that a little bit. So all the metrics in our business are trending positively. That's traffic. particularly organic traffic, traffic from LLMs, that's increasing quite rapidly. So, so far, that's really proven to be quite positive.

We have a very strong brand. I'd kind of characterize and say, even if we decided not to have a consumer business, we would have one anyway because we can't stop people from coming to Experian to either dispute, or ask questions, or find out about their credit reports and scores. That is millions of people every year. Pretty much everybody in the U.S. knows who Experian is and what it means to them. So we have a tremendously powerful brand and a lot of organic traffic. I think our brand resonance is right up there with any financial asset you can.

In fact, in Brazil, the Serasa brand, which is the brand we operate on the Serasa, is actually only second to Itau, and maybe Nubank, in terms of customer acquisition. It outranks pretty much every other financial property. So that's very powerful. People understand what role we play in their lives, and I don't think they think that's going to stop. We have really successfully built on that, not just through a membership product, but also through building out a marketplace. And that's all about making that as convenient as possible for consumers to gain products that are relevant to them.

What do you need for that? You need data. You need our data. You need the analytics, you need the scores. You need to understand how financial institutions will score them. And we actually have all the financial institution scorecards because we built many of them, and they're all on our Activate platform, our consumers. So we can match up consumer need, demand to the right product. We help the institutions actually start to recalibrate their scores to attract different audiences. It's just tremendously powerful network, and it's not just about sort of putting a few offers in front of them and telling them to get a credit card. It's deeply personal to them, and it's deeply relevant to our clients. So that's a very powerful thing, and I think it's going to continue to be very powerful in the future.

I think there's a real opportunity actually as we think about the strength of our brand and how that could work maybe in partnership with some of those properties, lots of discussions going on. So we see that as a way of enhancing our distribution actually. But the most important thing here is the brand is really what drives this. And you're seeing a lot of properties that have weak brands suffer, but you're seeing properties that have strong brands actually get stronger.

And another great example, I think, is marketplace and what you're doing there. So you're adding home from auto and insurance and so on. So what's the progress there? I think that's been...

Really good. I think you've been covering us for a while, and you've actually seen some of these things from inception through to now getting to scale, particularly insurance, I think, started that a few years ago, now pretty big. Insurance is sort of a bit lumpier than we thought because the insurance, they tend to sort of turn on and turn off at different times of the year. But if you look at the trajectory over a multiyear period, you can see it's very strong growth.

We still have loads of verticals that we're not in, or not in a very big way. A great example is mortgage. We will be launching a mortgage proposition on the platform pretty soon. We're very excited about that. We are in a brilliant position to bring relevant mortgage offers to customers. By the way, this is a perfect Experian opportunity because mortgages are really messy and complicated. It's not like credit cards where you can have 5 different -- you don't have 5 different mortgage offers. So complexity of process, deep information on the consumer, also information on the asset, which we have, housing information, we're able to actually create these propositions that are going to be, I think, really a really great experience for consumer and a really great experience for the FI customers.

Absolutely. So we've covered an awful lot of ground today across all the different businesses. What for you and for the audience, do you think is the one key takeaway that you'd like people to take away from about Experian today?

Well, I think the strength of the business, the track record of growth that we have, I think the number of areas that we believe that are white space to us that we can continue to expand to defensibility of our data assets, actually, it can't be replicated, the ability and strength of strategic position that gives us. And I think the opportunity that we see from advances in technology, particularly AI, in opening up more of those opportunities to us. We see all of those as really white space for us and actually more accessible now than ever.

Yes. Perfect. A very strong note to end on. So thank you very much, Brian.

Thank you. Thank you.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Experian's Half Year Results for the 6 months ended 30th September 2025 Webcast and Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Mr. Brian Cassin, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Well, thank you very much, and hello, everybody, and welcome to our first half results presentation. I'm joined today by Lloyd, who will run through the financials after my initial overview, and then we'll open it up for Q&A.

So we delivered very good first half results at the top end of our FY '26 guidance range, and we are on course to meet our medium-term framework objectives. Revenue, margin and cash performance were all strong, supported by significant strategic progress.

Just turning to some of the financial highlights. Organic revenue growth accelerated from 8% in Q1 to 9% in Q2, averaging 8% for the first half. Including acquisitions, total constant currency revenue growth reached 12% with all acquisitions performing well.

North America performance was strong and broad-based, accelerating to 12% organically in Q2, driven by client wins, client expansions, consistently improving lender activity in B2B and good results in Consumer Services. Fiscal conditions in Latin America, particularly Brazil, remain constrained by high interest rates and consumer indebtedness. The growth in H1 reflects continued excellent Consumer Services progress. And while the UK&I delivered low single-digit growth overall, Ascend Sandbox adoption among B2B clients has been excellent with U.K. Consumer Services driving growth through new products and market expansion. And EMEA and Asia Pacific delivered a solid mid-single-digit growth, supported by innovation initiatives and our stronger positioning in key markets.

Revenue growth translated into EBIT margin delivery at the upper end of our expectations, up 50 basis points at constant currency and 30 basis points at actual rates. Margin expansion in North America, UK&I and EMEA and Asia Pacific offset lower LatAm margins, which was primarily driven by acquisition mix. EBIT strength flowed through to double-digit benchmark EPS growth, and we've raised the interim dividend by 10%. Cash flow growth was very strong with our leverage ratio now standing at 1.8x.

I'll just touch on some of the strategic highlights in the half. The Ascend platform adoption continues to accelerate. In addition, earlier this year, we introduced new cash flow attributes and analytics in North America, and we're seeing very good client demand and B2B achieved organic revenue growth in the half of 8%. Consumer Services delivered 9% growth, reaching over 208 million free members. We continue to add more breadth and depth to our products and all of our key metrics, organic traffic, engagement continue to trend positively, reflecting the successful positioning of this business as a financial partner for our members.

Our recent acquisitions are on track, delivering cost synergies and new product opportunities. We also recently completed a small fraud acquisition in the U.K., which further enhances our product portfolio and strengthens our position in nonfinancial services verticals. And finally, cloud migrations in North America and Brazil, excluding North America Health, are on track, and we expect dual run costs to peak this financial year.

Our strategic progress reflects our consistent commitment to our dual-sided strategy across B2B and consumer, which is unique and which has expanded our growth potential and created new value opportunities across our priority ecosystems. We're now entering a new and exciting era driven by AI, and we're strongly positioned to take advantage of the opportunity this brings to our business.

The starting point for this is our data. These data sets are vast, complex. They're constantly being refreshed. They are subject to expansive and stringent regulation, and they need to be accurate all the time. The job of creating these data assets is a huge and complex operational exercise, which relies not just on process, but also on proprietary intellectual property and significant industry expertise. They simply cannot be replicated and they cannot be accessed unless permissioned by us.

Our strategy has always been not only to sell data, but to build solutions on top of our data that provide action and insight to improve client outcomes and reduce cost. Almost all these solutions require our data as a foundational input, and this is a source of huge competitive advantage to us that will grow over time. And we have a long and successful track record of doing this. The evidence is everywhere in our current solutions and our history of innovation and business expansion, PowerCurve, Ascend, the expansion of our verticals and the huge growth in our consumer businesses are all examples.

Broadly, this expansion of our opportunity set have been driven by the increasing use of data to automate critical business processes to make better decisions, create better client outcomes and to lower operational costs. AI will accelerate this trend, and it is and will continue to expand our opportunities. Despite decades of investment, many client processes remain siloed, inefficient and costly. And this is particularly true when it comes to leveraging data, which, of course, has to be solved to leverage AI at scale, and this is where Experian excels.

The opportunity for us remains huge, and the excitement for us is that the AI will accelerate the speed with which we can bring disruptive new products to market. Our data, our products, our platforms, our product development capability and our industry footprint gives us a strategic position that most companies will kill for, and we intend to leverage that to accelerate our growth.

Now we've built strong foundations over many years to put ourselves into this position as this slide demonstrates. And just over the past few years alone, we've been proactive across the entirety of our B2B and consumer businesses in leveraging AI use cases to enhance our product sets and also to penetrate new growth areas. And we haven't just been talking about it. We already have AI products in the market. A good example of this is the Patient Access Curator product, which is driving our growth in health and redefining the process of insurance discovery.

Platforms like Ascend and Activate have been specifically developed to be modular and to bring all of our data and capabilities together in one place. This, of course, is a perfect setup to allow our clients to take the maximum advantage of data at scale, both our data and their data and for us to easily introduce new functionality, both AI and conventional for our clients to test and learn and quickly implement and then put into production. Very good example of this is Model Governance, an AI-first solution, which virtually eliminates vast amounts of work related to comply with regulatory and internal improvement requirements for credit model evaluation and approval.

Clients building models in Ascend can now access this module, which saves huge amounts of time and expense in what are time-consuming operationally complex but mission-critical functions. And there are many more products in development. For Ascend alone, we expect to have agentic solutions covering 5 major categories of activity this year, each category representing an agglomeration of many different capabilities or activities bundled together. And we have more than doubled that number of categories in production for '26 and beyond.

I want to bring this to life for you with a Tier 1 client example. The client here is a long-term data partner of Experian, a very large global financial services provider. And we've taken them on a journey, which started with really our data and the value of our data. It then migrated into the integration of our data and our software. They used to be just a client that consume bureau data and other data sources. They also use legacy Experian software as well as competitor software and in-house systems. And these are all now moving on to the platform.

Initially, they acquired our data quality tools, which helped them to actually enhance the decisioning systems by ensuring consistency and usability of their own data as well as ours. They then took the Sandbox to help them actually accelerate the insights and analytics that they can derive from that data across the entire product life cycle. And now they're looking at how to deploy models like AI Model Risk Manager. And this strategy really gives us the ability to enable more modules for clients in a managed way. It's a convergence strategy, which creates incredible performance and value for clients. And of course, it opens up new value pools for us.

We showed them the value of bringing all of these capabilities into one place. They saw the benefits of this in not only just reducing the number of vendors or in-house systems, but the power of data in one place can bring to them. And this led naturally into a much longer partnership type arrangement with increased tenure, in this case, from 3 to 5 years and a substantial revenue uplift over the term of the contract period. And we can continue to grow from here by bringing new value to the table using the platform in situations like this.

So AI is already helping our revenue growth and margin today. It's driving productivity improvements. It's speeding up and reducing the cost of new product development, and it is the fuel for our future investment. As we look at our addressable markets, the constraint we historically face was the time it took to develop new products to market and the time for these products to gain acceptance and adoption. And it often needs a catalyst to create conditions for change. And we believe that AI is that catalyst and that we have a huge amount of white space that is now more accessible to us than ever before.

So we see continued opportunities both internally through improving productivity and many new product opportunities. In short, we're very excited about the opportunities this brings, and we're positioning our business to capitalize and we intend to take full advantage of the opportunity this presents to us.

Now many of the new products that I've referenced contributed towards our successful H1. As just illustrated, Ascend platform momentum continues. The range of capabilities in the platform will continue to expand, and it now encompasses AI, data, analytics, marketing and credit services together with complex decisioning. And our progress with clients has been strong. And as the chart here shows, we've seen rapid adoption.

We recently introduced new Cashflow Scores and Analytics. These combine credit data with AI-powered real-time cash flow data and categorization. This innovation strengthens predictive power scores and results in higher approvals with enhanced model accuracy. Client demand is strong here, too, and our pipeline is expanding rapidly. And we've also integrated ClearSale in Brazil, and we're commencing the launch of new products with the ClearSale acquisition, but also new propositions like Serasa+. This introduces reusable identities and has applications across both B2B and B2C.

In Consumer Services, we're focused on delivering deeply personalized experiences by leveraging experience data assets. At the center of this strategy is EVA, which is already is an agentic assistant providing not only guidance, but also taking actions on behalf of consumers. Confirm Your Home uses Experian North America property data to provide home value and mortgage insights. It forms the hub for our new home vertical and leverages data from our B2B housing business. Over 2 million interactions have been initiated with EVA on our consumer services platform.

And just 2 other quick examples to highlight are the Serasa+ in Brazil I just mentioned, which has consumer applications and will provide secure log-ins to third-party digital properties using Serasa credentials and the enhanced UK&I refi feature, which supports debt consolidation for consumers. And these are all small examples of the extensive product innovation road map, which is designed to drive higher consumer engagement, greater efficiency for our clients and extend us into new monetizable value pools.

So let's now turn to our H1 regional performance. North America delivered strong momentum with Q2 strength driving 10% H1 organic revenue growth. Financial Services, excluding mortgage, was fueled by new client wins and client expansions amid a steady and consistently improving lending environment.

In Financial Services, clients can now access credit, clarity and cash flow data through a single integration, which unlocks new potential with significant wins in a growing list of prospects. The Ascend analytical platform saw continued progress with new clients for Ascend Marketing, further Sandbox adoption and rising interest in the fraud sandbox. The Experian AI assistant has also driven cross-sell opportunities with deepened client relationships.

Verticals delivered strong growth. In Health, Patient Access Curator is transforming how the industry understands a patient's insurance picture to reduce claims denials and accelerate payments. It's positioned Experian as the market leader with a first-to-market AI solution performing substantially ahead of existing products. The milestone partnership we previously discussed in Auto has expanded availability of our vehicle history reports across dealer networks, strengthening earnings quality through a long-term agreement and reinforcing our track record for innovation-led wins. And in targeting, Audigent is off to an excellent start, driving momentum in audience targeting and activation.

So now I'd like to provide some comments on the recent changes to the U.S. mortgage market. The FHFA's recent decision to introduce Score Choice into the conforming mortgage market has introduced new competition and a market opportunity for VantageScore. Like many -- like in any of our markets, we believe the primary value lies here with the data as the score cannot be generated without the data. And there has been much debate on this issue of where value resides score or data, but I'll summarize it with an important data point.

Roughly 50% of all mortgages in the U.S. are acquired by the GSEs. In determining whether to buy a loan, the GSEs are reliant on the data that we and the other bureaus provide. By contrast, the GAs do not rely on the FICO Score in their buying decision. They don't need it. In fact, just last week, Fannie Mae removed the minimum 620 FICO Score requirement from its desktop underwriting system and official selling guide. And just to quote Fannie Mae's selling guide, credit scores are not an integral part of that risk assessment because they perform their own analysis of the credit report data. While scores are used to help the borrower communication, pricing adjustments on the secondary markets, it's clear that VantageScore can also easily enable these use cases.

Now up to now, VantageScore has not been approved for use in mortgage, largely due to inertia more than anything else as VantageScore outperforms the FICO Score currently used in the mortgage market. Where VantageScore has been used in unsecured lending and in card, auto and other nonmortgage categories, it's actually already captured substantial share, and we estimate this to be around 30% for lending originations based on our internal data.

Now that it is approved for mortgage, we expect that VantageScore will gain share in the same way that it's done in unsecured lending. And we will be facilitating lender and consumer choice through the Experian Score Choice bundle and by making VantageScore available in the Ascend Sandbox. We expect this to be a long-term opportunity for Experian with a shift to VantageScore driving millions more scorable consumers and ultimately greater mortgage origination activity. As this happens, we expect our profitability to be further enhanced. But to be clear, we do not need a shift to VantageScore to protect our position in the value chain. That resides in our data and the GSEs and every industry participant knows that it is the data that matters.

Now turning now to Consumer Services. Organic revenue growth for the half was 8% or 12% excluding data breach. Membership, Marketplace and Partner Solutions all contributed favorably in the half. In Membership, we're delivering new value to deepen engagement and drive upsell from across our ecosystem. We saw particular strength in marketplace as lenders compete for prospects with clients leveraging Activate to deliver credit and personal loan offers, improving their efficiency. Activate was robust across both cards and personal loans, supported by our popular No Ding Decline card feature and expanded panel. And insurance too has continued to make good progress.

Turning now to Latin America. Over the past few years, we've built a superior product portfolio in Brazil, and we continue to make good strategic progress. While high interest rates and consumer indebtedness have tampered B2B growth, progress in Consumer Services has been strong. We're particularly excited by the prospects arising from the integration of ClearSale with our credit risk B2B platform. We've built a healthy pipeline for new blended fraud and credit risk products. Prospects for Ascend Analytics are also strong, alongside an encouraging outlook for our SME segment driven by client growth and upsell into advanced solutions. Despite high interest rates and election uncertainty, we're well positioned to strengthen market leadership in H2 and beyond.

18% growth in Latin American Consumer Services is a strong result, driven by our expanded opportunity and diversification around financial empowerment and leveraging our strong brand presence in Brazil. Limpa Nome performed well as consumers manage rising indebtedness. Our Q3 credit fair will further support Brazilian consumers to manage their finances. And our credit marketplace is scaling rapidly and contributed meaningfully in this half. New payroll loan offers will deepen our marketplace further to serve the 40 million-plus Brazilian eligible -- Brazilian consumers. Progress also continues in Insurance as we continue to add new large insurance -- insurers to our panel.

UK&I delivered 1% organic revenue growth, which was led by Consumer Services. While not yet fully reflected in revenue performance, B2B new business achievement was good. Ascend Sandbox proof-of-value is converted into major wins and uplift renewals with leading financial institutions, including a Tier 1 enterprise partnership. More proof-of-concepts are pending and new module introductions are planned.

COVID aside, U.K. Consumer Services grew at its fastest rate in a decade. We've transformed this business with an enhanced consumer experience, new features like refi for debt consolidation and by leveraging EVA. The enhanced analytics we deliver through the Activate platform has led to exclusive credit offers on our platform, and this drove strong marketplace performance.

Turning now to EMEA and Asia Pacific. Organic revenue growth delivered 6% and another -- which was another solid year of progress with total revenue up 35%, including the acquisition of illion. The illion acquisition integration is on track. It drove the 480 basis points regional margin uplift. And our combined bureaus in Australia now offer a strong and differentiated consumer data asset. We've introduced the Ascend Data Hub and Ascend Ops to Australia to leverage our pre-acquisition leadership in decisioning. And with the combined bureau data now available, we have really good interest in the Ascend Sandbox. We've also advanced our technology and back-office integration while streamlining legacy and noncore portfolio elements.

Regionally, organic H1 progress spanned our geographies, supported by new product introductions and leveraging our global solutions.

So with that overview, I'm going to hand over to Lloyd for the financials.

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As you've seen, we delivered another very strong performance in the first half with total revenue growth of 12% at constant rates and 13% at actual rates. This was driven by organic revenue growth of 8% at the top end of our guidance and a further 4 percentage points from acquisitions. Benchmark EBIT margin from ongoing activities progressed well, up 50 basis points at constant rates and 30 basis points at actual rates. EBIT growth was 14% at both constant and actual rates. And this converted well into EPS growth with 13% at constant rates and 12% at actual rates.

Operating cash flow grew 25%, reflecting a 77% conversion in the half. And our growing capital base continues to generate very high post-tax returns on capital employed of around 16.5% for the half year. As Brian mentioned, we announced an interim dividend of $0.2125, which is up 10% on the prior year. And finally, we continue to be very strongly financed with our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio at 1.8x.

Turning to our medium-term framework. We're in the second year of delivery against this medium-term framework and continue to execute confidently and well on our strategic plans. And financially, we continued last year's momentum with high single-digit organic growth, strong organic margin progression and the benefits of capital discipline and deployment all being delivered in this half year.

And if you look back over a longer time horizon and our performance here over the last 6 years, you can see we've delivered consistently strong financial results across all of our key financial metrics. Since FY '20, we've grown half 1 revenue at an 8% compound annual growth rate. Benchmark EBIT has grown 9% compound; benchmark EPS, 10% compound; and operating cash flow at 17% compound. And this highlights the quality and consistency of the strategic execution over this period as our business scales.

Looking at more current trends, organic revenue growth was at the upper end of the expected performance range for the first half. All our regions contributed to half 1 growth with North America at 10%, 4% in LatAm, 1% in the U.K. and Ireland and 6% in EMEA and Asia Pacific. By quarter, organic revenue growth strengthened from 8% in Q1 to 9% in Q2, supported by a onetime volume true-up in the North America Consumer Services business, which added 1% to group growth in the second quarter.

Looking at organic revenue growth across our segments. Here on the left-hand chart, you can see B2B organic revenue growth was 7% in Q2 with good growth across both financial services and verticals and was underpinned by client wins, cross-sell and new product innovations. North America was the key driver, growing at 11% for Q2 with 12% growth in Financial Services, 15% in Automotive and 10% in Health. Financial Services growth, excluding mortgage, was 12% with mortgage growth of 41% on modestly lower volumes.

On the left-hand side is the Consumer Services trend in total and excluding -- sorry, on the right-hand side, Consumer Services trend in total and excluding our Data Breach business. As the elevated Data Breach comparable fell away in Q2, consumer growth rebounded to 12% globally in Q2 and 13% in North America. And in the yellow diamonds, you can see the strength and consistency of the underlying consumer growth, excluding Data Breach.

Turning now to EBIT margin. And last year, in the first half, we added 70 basis points to margin. And this year, we delivered 100 basis points of organic constant currency margin expansion, primarily due to broad strength across the North America business. Organic margin progression has been driven by broad-scale productivity improvements as our businesses scale. We're also seeing tangible benefits from AI deployment across our business. Organic headcount is broadly flat this year, thanks to these productivity programs, whilst organic revenue grew by 8%. And we see many exciting applications of AI in our business, which can continue to drive productivity.

Including acquisitions, total EBIT margin from ongoing activities increased 50 basis points at constant rates and 30 basis points at actual rates to 28.3%. On a regional level, North America's EBIT margin added 90 basis points from broad expansion across the portfolio. U.K. and Ireland added 60 basis points and EMEA and Asia Pacific expanded 480 basis points due to the addition of illion. Latin America margin contracted by 240 basis points, largely due to the temporary effect of the integration of acquisitions.

And when considering our segmental margins over a longer-term time frame, here you can see that the B2B margins have been relatively consistent at around 30% since FY '20 despite the temporary dilution from recent acquisitions and cloud transformation dual run costs. As previously indicated, the dual run costs peak this year and will trend down from FY '27. And the margin from our recent acquisitions will trend to group average margin over around 3 years.

Consumer segment margins have expanded from 21% in half 1 2020, reaching 30% in the first half this year, which has resulted from scaling our audience to over 208 million members and the growing breadth of our consumer propositions.

Turning now to EPS, where last year, we delivered 8% growth in half 1. And this year, we've delivered double-digit growth of 12% at actual rates. Benchmark continuing EBIT grew 15% at constant currency due to strong revenue growth and 50 basis points of margin expansion at constant rates. The combination of interest expense reflecting acquisition funding and a slightly higher tax rate resulted in 13% EPS growth at constant currency and 12% at actual rates. So over a 2-year period since we began our medium-term framework, the increase in first half EPS is over 20%.

Taking a look now at our usual reconciliation to statutory results. Our benchmark profit before tax grew 13% at actual rates, driven by revenue performance and good margin progression. Acquisition-related expenses increased to $32 million due to the acquisitions of ClearSale, illion and Audigent, and there was little change in the fair value of consideration on prior acquisitions and restructuring-related costs were $3 million for the half. The above items resulted in a statutory profit before tax and noncash items of just over $1 billion, representing a 12% growth at the half, which is broadly in line with the growth in benchmark PBT.

Noncash items included an increase in amortization of acquisition intangibles and financing remeasurements were $92 million favorable versus a $93 million adverse in the prior year. And this swing was principally driven by remeasurements on Brazil intragroup funding, resulting in a statutory profit before tax of $975 million or 36% growth on last year.

So now turning to cash flow and return on capital. On the left-hand chart shows our long-term operating cash flow and conversion metrics. As you can see from the slide, we delivered strong growth on half 1 operating cash flow, growing at 17% compound rate since FY '20. This half year, we generated around $900 million of operating cash flow at a 77% conversion rate. A key part of our framework is to continue to use our cash generation to invest in high return on capital growth opportunities. And on the right, you can see our disciplined use of capital, where we've significantly grown our capital base to around $10 billion whilst delivering consistently high post-tax returns, this year at 16.5%.

Turning to capital investment. We are significantly progressed with our cloud transformation program and well on the way to our expected position of over 85% of processing in the cloud in our U.S. and Brazil businesses outside of health by this year-end. As we approach the latter stages of the program, we expect to benefit from the reduced dual run costs and lower change-related capital investment. And this will allow us to expand our innovation and AI investment activities to drive future growth, all within the financial envelope of our medium-term framework.

And as we materially complete our cloud technology program, we're very strongly financed. Our key leverage measure of net debt to EBITDA was 1.8x at the half year. Our fixed debt level stands at around 60% at the half year, and we have an average tenure of 5 years remaining. And our average interest rate is 3.5% in the half. Our benchmark net interest expense guidance for the full year remains at around USD 190 million.

So turning now to our full year modeling considerations, which relate to ongoing activities. Based on the strength of our half 1 performance, we now expect organic revenue growth for the full year to be around 8% at the top end of our previous guidance range. And we continue to expect a 3% inorganic contribution from completed acquisitions. Based on recent FX rates, we now expect FX to be a 1% tailwind to both revenue and EBIT growth. And beyond these points, we don't expect any other changes to our guidance.

So with that, I'll hand you back to Brian.

Great. Thanks, Lloyd. So in closing, we've started the year with good momentum with strong H1 financial progress across revenue, margins and cash flow generation, and we now expect to deliver at the top end of our FY '26 guidance range. We've advanced strongly across B2B and B2C, scaling key initiatives and future growth investments. Our recent acquisitions have performed well and have integrated well, and they've strengthened our market position and give us the opportunity to unlock new avenues of growth.

We're driving AI initiatives across the business with a clear ambition to lead the next wave of data-driven intelligence solutions, and our cloud transformation is on track to peak this financial year. All of this puts us on track to deliver on our medium-term financial framework. We're very well positioned to sustain our growth and to continue to generate high returns.

So with that, I'm going to hand it over to the operator for your questions. [Operator Instructions] Operator, over to you.

[Operator Instructions]

And now we're going to take our first question, and it comes from the line of Scott Wurtzel from Wolfe Research.

I guess maybe first one, just on the guidance and great to see you guys raise to the top end of the revenue guide. But with margins staying flat, can you just maybe talk a little bit about where you're maybe investing a little bit more in the business with that incremental revenue growth? And then I guess as a follow-up to that, maybe your view on sort of the structural margins within the B2B business as we kind of get through these dual running costs and lap the impact of the recent acquisitions?

Lloyd?

Yes. So I think you said with flat margins. Margins are up 30 basis points.

I meant reiterating the guide, yes.

Okay. Sorry, I understand. So look, I think we're really confident in the margin outlook for the business. You've seen -- when we put our medium-term framework together, obviously, we didn't have acquisitions to forecast at that time. Organic margin last year was up 90 basis points. First half this year is up 100 basis points. So that tells you that we have a lot of capacity to be able to reinvest and to be able to deliver on the margin commitments that we've got.

You look out for the full year, we've reiterated the 30 to 50 basis points, again, very confident in that. As you look out beyond this year, the dual run costs move from a headwind to a tailwind. So that 100 basis points will come back over about 4 or 5 years. We also get back the dilution that we've had from the recent acquisitions. So last year, that was 20 basis points, this year, 30 basis points. So what you can see is that the margin outlook embedded in our medium-term framework is very well underpinned. And that gives us a lot of flexibility, and we said this at the time we outlined our medium-term framework to ensure that we're continuing to invest and innovate.

And as Brian said, we see an exciting future as AI really fuels the opportunity of the value embedded in the proprietary data that we have, and we're going to be investing strongly behind that. And we can do that whilst confidently delivering our framework.

And the question comes from the line of Andy Grobler from BNP Paribas.

Just a couple, if I may. The first one on productivity. Lloyd, you mentioned that you could see tangible benefits from AI from a productivity perspective. Could you kind of quantify what you're seeing now and how you expect that to move over the next 2 to 3 years as that develops? And then secondly, on mortgage, there's clearly a lot going on in that market at this time. What do you think is the time frame for the market, i.e., the resellers to move to the new system? And also, what are your expectations in terms of how long it takes VantageScore to be kind of fully utilized within that market?

Yes. Andy, so on productivity, I mean, like everybody, we're just seeing an acceleration of the availability of tooling that can really drive productivity across the group. We have a lot of people in producing product and the ability to be able to increase capacity without adding people in that because of the use of coding deployment, auto coding generation.

But looking more broadly across administrative functions, support functions, customer support functions, all of them are showing the benefit of the deployment of new tooling. And that's -- as I mentioned in my remarks, we grew 8% organically in the first half and headcount -- organic headcount was broadly stable. So that kind of shows you the potential in the group. We clearly have a lot of capability in the company is what we do to be able to deploy AI tooling, and that benefits our clients, but also benefits inside the company.

So I expect that to continue, and that's going to give us a lot of flexibility, as I said, to be able to deliver on our financial framework, but also to increasingly invest in product innovation and in AI deployment for our customers.

And Andy, just coming back on to the mortgage market. Yes, there is a lot going on. On the reseller point, I think there's no kind of one answer because I think the reseller market consists of quite a lot of different players, some big ones, some small ones. Probably the big ones are able to cope with the operational changes quicker than the smaller ones. But even that's going to take a bit of time. It's difficult to be precise. I think it will differ based on reseller to reseller.

But they will have to change operational processes. Obviously, in a new structure, they'd be calculating the score. They've never done that before. There's lots of requirements around that, which is ensuring that you actually have completely synced up between the actual data and the score. You have audit requirements around that for the GSEs and for their clients. You have billing that you have to set up. You have to set up processes around ensuring that you can answer any consumer disputes that come because today, those consumer disputes around the score data will come to the bureaus. If you split between the actual data and the score between bureau and resellers, you probably have a lot of customer confusion about where that liability relies.

So there's quite a lot to do. And I suspect that there will be different time scales for different resellers, but we don't expect this to be very quick. I think sometime in '26 and I say, some will be quicker than others. So hopefully, that answers that question.

The second part was VantageScore adoption. I think just reiterate points, I think, that have been made ad nauseam. FICO Score has been the only score available for use for 30 years. So it is embedded in the system in the way that I described when I referenced the GSEs. So it's used across the system. But I think people can move. We've seen that -- we've seen some people move from FICO to VantageScore pretty quickly in other areas. Some will take longer.

So I think over the next few years, you are going to see people move. Obviously, those will be individual decisions made by lenders and so on and so forth. But I think over the next few years, you're going to start to see some of that shift.

Now we're going to take our next question, and it comes from the line of Annelies Vermeulen from Morgan Stanley.

So 2 questions as well. Just coming back to AI. I just wanted to understand a bit better on how that develops into pricing of your products to customers? As you make -- as you embed more AI in these products, is that something you can price for? You mentioned that it's also reducing the cost of developing new products. So equally, is any of that being passed on to customers? I'm just wondering if there's any risk of pricing pressure as a result of AI and how you think about that?

And then secondly, just on marketplace in North America, it sounded like growth was pretty broad-based across credit and insurance marketplaces. Is there anything particular to call out in terms of the driver of that in H1, audience expansion, adding more lenders? And perhaps as part of that, could you update on your expansion into home insurance and how that's progressing?

Just on the first question, I think we see AI as -- the new products that we've introduced have actually all been new functionality. So if you look at Patient Access Curator and Health, that's a new process, which really improves the insurance discovery solution for our clients. And because of the performance of that product, we're able to actually to get premium prices for that.

I referenced Model Governance, which would be embedded in the Ascend platform. Again, when you look at the value equation, Model Governance is a hugely complex exercise, a lot of people involved in that, very important from a risk and compliance perspective, very costly. The extent that we automate that and take out significant costs for our clients, that also represents revenue upside opportunities. So we're in the sort of early stages of that, but actually, the evidence that we've seen so far is that this is revenue additive.

In terms of the productivity benefits, we have seen those. I think what that means is that 2 really important things. One, we can build more stuff. And secondly, we can actually build more stuff, which gets to market quicker. And I think -- but there's 2 aspects to that. One is actually building the product to a point which people can pilot and test and two, making it operational. And overall, we just see that cadence of new product introduction and the ability to get them to market quicker, leveraging these capabilities is what we're focused on.

Clearly, all clients will do an economic assessment of the value that's provided by any solution. That's not going to go away. People don't just accept solutions because they've got AI labeled on them. They will evaluate whether it's better, faster, cheaper or enables them to take -- bring -- take cost out of their own system or give them a better outcome. So that evaluation continues, and we expect that to be no different in the new world. But we're excited about what that does for us given the big footprint of developers we have across the business. We introduced a huge number of products every year. I think that cadence is going to improve, and I think that's really a positive.

And I'll touch on marketplace. So just lending more generally in the U.S., I think we're in our third quarter of sequentially improving lending position. And you can see that in the performance of the Core Financial Services business outside of mortgage. The place that first showed up was very strong growth in Financial Marketplace inside the Consumer business, and that continues to grow very strongly. And Insurance continues to grow well even outside of the one-off catch-up that we had, which I think was helpful in the quarter, but it also reflects that the Insurance business was actually a bit better than we thought it was with the volumes that we reported last year.

Brian referenced in his remarks the launch of HomeHub. So just like we launched the AutoHub where people can claim their car and then we use all of our data assets to help consumers around their car owning journey, the principle is the same around the HomeHub, including home insurance. So we'll be bringing all of the assets that Experian has around home, to bear in the direct-to-consumer market. And we'll tell you a bit more about that as that product launches analytics.

Now we'll take our next question, and it comes from the line of Simon Clinch from Rothschild & Co Redburn.

I just got 2 questions here. The first one, I just wonder if you could just clarify your assessment of the 30% market share that VantageScore has in certain parts of the market. I just want to make sure I understand exactly what you're referencing to there? And then my second question to follow up would just be on -- it's very interesting that the launch of the Cashflow Score recently. And I'm just kind of curious as to where we are in terms of the -- I guess, the bundling or even integration of consumer permission data sets with Core Credit and how that's going to really feed the innovation pipeline going forward? Because to me, that seems to be one of the more unique opportunities for Experian.

Great. Okay. Well, look, on the 30% market share actually comes from our assessment of our internal data. Obviously, we don't cover whole market, but we have a very big market share, and we expect actually that, that will be replicated across the other bureaus. So that's across all unsecured lending, across auto, across card, personal loans and so on and so forth. The biggest penetration is actually in card, which obviously is the biggest category and also in fintech.

So for example, in fintech, VantageScore has over 50% market share across all fintech categories. So I think you can see that where there has been competition available, people have adopted alternative scores. And so I think you turn back then to the mortgage market where VantageScore has not been available for 30 years and now is. So I think it'd be a pretty reasonable assumption to say that VantageScore will gain market share.

I think on the cash flow score point, we're very excited about this product. And I think this is kind of following what we've seen really across other territories when open banking was introduced, which is, one, consumer permission data has a role to play. The role is really an enhancement in addition to core bureau data is not a replacement. So the really powerful solutions combine the 2. And therefore, we are in a fantastic position to develop this market and to be the leading player. And frankly, we've got the best solution in the marketplace.

And I think we're going to win in this category, and we're going to win very big. And the reason is because only we can really do that combination and the attributes and scores we've developed have been really leveraging consumer data that we've had access to at scale. That has a lot of resonance in the marketplace, and we're seeing a lot of client interest in this.

And we take our next question, and it comes from the line of James Rose from Barclays.

Two, please. The first one is how you think AI could affect your medium-term model. I think on one side, you've got productivity evident now, which could push you above the 30 to 50 bps or if you kept the margin profile the same, presumably revenue growth could go up if you've got faster product development or more products coming to market. So I just wonder how you think it could sort of move the needle in sort of longer term? And then secondly, I notice your -- the point you just made that you're now enhancing credit data with your Cashflow Analytics. Equifax have made some comments around offering TWN in credit reports. Just wondering whether you think there's a need to counter that and to start building your own sort of employment and verification data a bit more rapidly?

Okay. Lloyd, do you want to answer the first one in terms of...

The medium-term model. Yes. I think, James, clearly, AI is a rapidly developing area. I think on the one hand, it's almost impossible to forecast all the different avenues. What you can see in the way that we've been performing is we have a lot of flexibility. And I think that's going to be important. We can't forecast out exactly how it will develop over the next 3 or 4 years, but we have financially a lot of flexibility to be able to continue to deliver good margin progression as our business scales and continue investment to make sure that we win in this new field. We have just huge embedded value in our proprietary data sets that AI will accelerate the monetization of, and we plan to invest to make sure that we can do that, and we can do that while still adding margin.

Yes. And on the -- just on the sort of employment data, I mean, as you know, we have been building our employment verification business over the last few years. And we've gotten to some significant scale in that. But I think that the main point really is just that people continue to innovate. All bureaus continue to innovate and offer solutions to their clients that they think might add additional value. The Work Number flag is one example of that. There are many others.

So I think -- but I think when we look at the cash flow and the uptake on the cash flow, the interest that we've seen on that, I think that's very significant. It's obviously really significant for people at the lower end of the borrowing spectrum, more thin file and less prime customers. But nonetheless, we think it's a very significant new innovation, and we're excited about it.

[Operator Instructions]

And now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes from the line of Ben Wild from Deutsche Bank.

Two for me as well, please. There's obviously a huge range of discussion on AI and its potential impact on your business. But specifically on the Consumer Services platform, you talked consistently over many years about building a platform that's focused on supporting consumers and enhancing their financial lives. I know that you talked about your own internal AI assistant, EVA. But how do you think about protecting your consumer audience as consumers increasingly adopt competing AI tools? And how do you think about integrating your offer with some of these tools such as ChatGPT? And as an adjunct to the question, are you seeing any impact on active user intensity as ChatGPT penetration grows, for example?

Second question is on -- again, on the consumer platform, sorry. If you look at consumer reviews for the Experian app, many consumers flag that access to FICO Scores is an important differentiator versus some of your other very large platform competitors. How important is it to retain the FICO Score offering consumer services? And is your thinking on that point evolving in light of recent events?

Okay. Well, thanks for the question. So I'll deal with them one by one. So first of all, I think on the -- first point to make, I think, on the metrics that we're seeing across our consumer business continue to trend very positively. That includes organic search traffic, which has actually increased this year, and that's really in contrast to a lot of other properties. And the reason is because of the strength of the brand. We generate a lot of traffic from our brand. That continues. That's been enhanced by the investment that we put in our brand over many years. And we think that, that is a very important point as we think about how channel distribution is going to change over time.

What we've seen is a really significant increase in traffic from the AI platforms in excess of 1,000% growth over the last year. But the traffic coming from there is still very small, but it is obviously going to be a very important channel going forward. And we'll be focusing a lot of our efforts on making sure that we have the same level of visibility and profile there, which we do actually. And that's really down again to the strength of brand plus also the content and so on and so forth. So I think that's a future opportunity for us as we think ahead.

On the EVA capability, I think this where this really sort of makes a big difference because that capability is able to do things which other AI agents will not be able to do. And specifically because it will be built around capabilities that will have deep access to our data and also enable them to take actions, for example, like freezing your credit report or retrieving your score or so on and so forth. So we've seen really significant engagement on that, over 2 million interactions so far. So I think we're pleased with that, and I think we'll continue to build out those propositions.

So all in all, I think as we look forward, we're excited about where that goes because we think the strength of our brands, the capability on the platform continues to position us as a winner in the longer term.

On the FICO Score thing, yes, that is a part of our offer. We've had that for a long time. It was introduced over 10 years ago. I think since we introduced that, there's many, many more -- much more value that we provide on that platform. So the reliance on that as a value proposition, it's still important, but it's not as important as it was, and we'll continue to evaluate all those propositions as we go forward.

Ben, any further questions?

No. Not for me.

[Operator Instructions]

And now we have another question, and it comes from the line of Simon Clinch from Rothschild & Co Redburn.

Sorry for sneaking just one final one in. Just a very quick one, Lloyd. Just on share repurchase, you basically -- as far as I can see, you pretty much completed your guide for the year. Just how do we think about capital allocation in the back half of the year?

Yes. So we obviously update on capital allocation really once a year in May. You've seen the strength of cash generation. We finished the half at 1.8x. If we don't do any further acquisitions for the rest of the year, we'd finish the year at about 1.5x. We expect to do some other acquisitions. We've got a good pipeline. But you can see with this level of cash generation, we have a lot of financial flexibility for capital allocation. So we look forward to updating you in May.

Dear speakers, there are no further questions for today. And I'd like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Brian Cassin, for any closing remarks.

Great. Well, thank you. So that concludes today's session. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Hope you all have a good day, and we look forward to speaking to you again in January for our Q3 update.

Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day.