Experian Aktie

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.

Good afternoon, and good morning. I'm James Rose from Barclays Business Services team. And for another year, I'm delighted to introduce today's session with Experian as part of our Global Credit Bureau Forum. Once again, Experian has an excellent series of speakers and presentations for us over the next few hours to showcase both their products and their senior business leaders. In this session, we also have some new faces presenting to us.

Our agenda for today, we first start off with an overview from Lloyd Pitchford, Group CFO; then Dacy Yee, President of ECS; and Rakesh Patel, EVP of ECS Marketplace will take us through North America Consumer Services. Edu Castro, MD of ECS, will present on U.K. Consumer Services; Pedro Lopes, VP of Brazil Consumer, will speak from Brazil consumer services. After a break, we then shift to the B2B business with Keith Little, President of Experian Software Solutions, taking us through the flagship integrated Ascend platform.

And then finally, we have a Q&A session with the senior leadership team. If you have questions as we go through, please enter them in the box on your screen, and I'll do my best to include them in that session at the end.

But enough for me. Let me introduce Lloyd, who will kickstart this session. Lloyd, welcome.

That's great. Thanks, James, and welcome, everyone. It's great to be here today. And as usual, we have a really interesting set of deep dives into the Experian business with a range of our leaders across the U.S., Brazil and U.K. businesses. And whilst I know these 2 days of meetings from Barclays are scheduled as a Credit Bureau Forum, I think that says much more about our heritage than where we are today as a company. Across our diverse ecosystems, we're truly a data-enabled technology business with access to huge and expanding addressable markets. Next slide, please.

With the backdrop that our heritage as a credit bureau, therefore, I think the Experian of today might surprise people looking at us for the first time. Over the last 10 years, the company has been redefined with access to vast and rapidly expanding pools of data globally. We've built a unique set of relationships at scale with more than 200 million consumers and hundreds of thousands of businesses as a platform for helping them across their financial lives.

We're embedded in the U.S. health care system supporting over $200 billion of health care claims annually. We prevent tens of billions of dollars of fraud across our ecosystems. And we do this with over 11,000 technologists involved in co-development and deployment using leading technology across the business. And we've reinvented the culture of the company, being certified this last year as #14 globally out of over 20,000 companies in the Great Place to Work survey.

We're rapidly exploring new areas of value creation with AI and unique connections between our B2B and B2C businesses that we'll explore later. And of course, this is delivering strong and consistent growth and consistently higher returns on capital. And that gives us a lot of optimism for the future as we deliver on the opportunities within our more than $150 billion of addressable markets. Next slide, please.

As you know, we've developed a unique strategy where the integration of our B2B and B2C business can unlock a unique value pools. In fact, the intersection of our B2B assets in our consumer business is what makes Experian truly unique. And it's summarized here in our strategy on the page that you've seen before. And we're leveraging our foundations to build world-class B2B businesses and become the preeminent platform that consumers can go to, to navigate their financial lives. Next slide, please.

As we outlined earlier this year, we changed our financial reporting to align to the 5 ecosystems where we serve, and these represent large and growing addressable markets, all underpinned by unleashing the hidden value in data. Over the last decade, we've seen all of these value pools expand as the deployment of data-enabled technology has allowed the automation and digitization of processes in these ecosystems. We now operate in a global addressable market of over $150 billion and growing. And with access to unique data sets, we're able to find hidden value and insights and deploy that to customers through increasingly integrated software platforms across these ecosystems.

In previous years, we've focused on some of our vertical ecosystems, but today, the team will deep dive into our largest addressable market in Consumer Services and Financial Services with a particular focus on Financial Services on the Ascend platform. Next slide, please.

Looking at our history through the lens of these 5 ecosystems, here you can see our long-term performance in scaling our business. We've been delivering significant and consistent growth across all of our ecosystems. Each of them is underpinned by unique and expanding data assets with value deployed to end consumers and customers in ever increasingly integrated software platforms. And each of them offers a very long runway of future scale potential. Next slide, please.

And as you've seen, the execution of our strategy across these ecosystems has delivered a very strong and consistent performance. Despite subdued environments across the last 5 years in some of our end markets, we delivered high single to low double-digit compound growth across all of our key financial metrics over the last 5 years that you can see on the slide here. Next slide, please.

And looking ahead, with the confidence in our strategies to scale the business, we introduced last May our medium-term framework. And this outlines the midterm framework of high single-digit organic growth, good margin progression, reducing organic CapEx and strong capital deployment and high returns on capital. And what you can see on the bottom of the slide, first 2 years of execution against our framework in FY '25, we delivered well. And our guidance for this year confirms the confidence in the execution against that framework. Next slide, please.

So turning to today's presentation, today's meeting. And as I mentioned, the focus of the deep dives is our Consumer Services business and our Financial Services business, and in particular, within that, our focus on the Ascend platform.

Firstly, in Consumer Services, where you'll hear from leaders across the U.S., Brazil and the U.K. how we've delivered a unique scaled audience of more than 200 million consumers. And we're rapidly expanding and diversifying the value we provide to those consumers. You'll see demos across the businesses and videos of just how we're transforming the value we can deliver to that scaled consumer base. And these platforms are scaling and diversifying rapidly and delivering very strong growth and the returns of scale contributing strongly to increasing margins.

Inside Financial Services, you'll hear from leaders in our software business how we have integrated our software propositions into unique category-defining integrated data analytics, fraud and decisioning platform. And the team will demo that platform to bring in to life some of the unique capabilities that we're able to deploy.

Across both of these ecosystems, what you'll see from the presentations is the integration of our propositions and capabilities across both our B2B and B2C businesses that provides a unique Experian advantage where we're uniquely able to unlock ever-increasing value pools.

So with that, I've probably talked enough. And so I'd like to start the session by introducing you to Dacy Yee, who's the President of our North America Consumer business, who will be joined by Rakesh Patel, the EVP of our North America Marketplace business. And so with that, I'll hand you over to Dacy. Over to you, Dacy.

Thank you so much, Lloyd. Thank you so much for having me. We really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today. As Lloyd said, my name is Dacy Yee. I lead the Consumer Business in North America. We can jump to the next slide.

So at Experian Consumer Services, our ambition has not changed. Our mission is to bring financial power to all. And to achieve this mission, our goal is to become the consumer's financial copilot. I have been with Experian for 16 years, and my entire tenure at Experian has been within the Consumer Services business in North America. And I'm so proud to have been here to help build and grow this business. And this expanded quite a bit from when I first started here. As Lloyd said, we have a strong history and foundation in credit, but we really intend to help consumers with their entire financial life. Let's go to the next slide.

We have scaled and driven momentum in our business. We have direct relationships with over 80 million consumers and we have achieved $1.7 billion in annual revenue. And when you combine this scale and reach, and you combine that with the full power of Experian and all of the unique data assets that we have across our B2B businesses, we can build innovative products that nobody else can build. We can use this to make really personalized recommendations for consumers and so that they can make very smart decisions around how they're spending, what they are protecting and when to upgrade and get new assets and new products. Let's move on to the next slide.

So as Lloyd said and as he described, we are in a very unique position. We sit at the heart of interactions between consumers and also the financial partners that we serve, and we can drive better outcomes for both of these parties. For consumers, we show them how credit and finances work, what steps that they should take to save time and money. And we really strive to put control back into consumers' hands.

And for businesses, we provide them access to the audiences that they are looking to connect with. This helps reduce friction and really improve efficiency. So that really means that every click becomes more effective. And every interaction is more meaningful because we can drive better ROI for the partners, and we can also create better outcomes for consumers.

And what's really interesting about us is because we're embedded in consumers' financial journey and as we said, not just really focused on one transaction, one credit transaction, but the consumer's entire financial life. It's not just a single touch point. We've become a trusted companion for both of these entities. We can deliver on value and have continuous value to consumers, and we can do the same for the businesses that we serve, and that becomes this flywheel of engagement and growth for us. Let's go to the next slide.

So our long-term ambition is really simple. We want to be -- as we described, being a copilot. We want to be the go-to partner for consumers and be the person, be the entity that they turn to for every step within their financial journey. We're really best positioned to do that because there's really 3 key things.

First of all, we're focused on a broader remit, and that's financial health and wellness. We're already really delivering on that impact. So consumers do come to us maybe to think about how their credit is viewed, but they also come to us to find the next best credit card that might not be in their wallet. We also can take a moment to say, "Well, hey, maybe a credit card isn't the best product for you. Perhaps it's a personal loan at this time." And we can understand that consumer and help them make the best decisions. And we also can help them perhaps get a better rate on auto insurance. So when you combine that, we already are building and delivering value that's much broader than just credit.

And then I also think about engagement as a really important pillar for us. And when you combine thinking about how you engage and educate consumers, when you combine that with AI, it really allows us to hyper-personalize to every consumer's situation, provides an individual life insight, give them different experiences for every situation, utilizing all of their data points and really, it allows us to create infinite journeys that are unique to each and every consumer that we engage with.

And lastly, I think about our marketing transformation. Our brand, it is one of our key strengths. We have earned the trust of consumers. And every year, as you can see, we are progressing as a brand that is very helpful to consumers in reaching their goals. They trust us. They trust us with their data, and they give us agency to act within their best interest and keeping their best interest in mind. And that is a role that not every financial brand can earn. And that's why we're well positioned to be their true financial copilot. Let's move to the next slide.

So our business. Our business has been built on diversified business lines, and they've always been a source of strength for us. Each one has been built with strong and independent foundations and they have this capability to scale individually. However, as Lloyd said, we are in our next phase of growth. And when we think about these business lines, they don't just co-exist anymore and grow independently. They have the capability to feed each other, in a unified experience within our platform, and that supports, again, this idea of a full financial journey.

When a consumer, for instance, comes in because they're fearful that their data has been compromised and they come in with an identity protection type of intent, we get to know that consumer, we can service that consumer, but we also may learn that because they're interested in protecting their assets that insurance may be something that they're interested in and making sure that they have the right coverage. And then also, we can help them find the best rates for what they may be paying.

So you can see that these interactions, while someone may come in for a membership product, can also end up reaching our marketplace and taking advantage of the features and products that we have there. And when we utilize and when we take a step back, when I think about the platform idea, we have our own platform within Consumer Services within these business lines, but we also have a platform with our B2B businesses.

And those intersections allow us to utilize the data that's available to us in the broader power of Experian and really bring unique value propositions to consumers. And that allows us to unlock step level revenue growth in our coming years. And we have great examples of this already happening. When we think about insurance services and being able to utilize automotive data, and we also have a slew of upcoming innovations that we can unlock. Let's go to the next slide.

The keys to our growth really remain consistent. And when we boil them down, we focus on 3 areas. We want to broaden our audience and we want to grow and scale that audience. We want to increase engagement and we want to increase monetization. So audience growth remains strong. We have been able to think about our brand and our offerings in a different way and expand that. And so when we think about expansion and transformation and financial health, it allows us to unlock new segments and new audiences and bring them into our platform.

In engagement, as I said before, combining the power of all of our experiences with AI and experience orchestration that allows us to anticipate the needs of individual consumers and really bring hyper personalized journeys to them and hyper personalized value to them. Every combination of what they may engage with it, each consumer can have a very different experience.

And then monetization. We have a full platform that we are operating. And that allows us to promote offerings across all of the business lines. And as we think about engaging those consumers and monetizing them, having them take on multiple products and adopt multiple features within our platform really allows us to grow in monetization. So we've had steady growth in each of these 3 areas for the last several years. Let's move to the next slide.

I have had the privilege to experience and drive our evolution firsthand within the Consumer Services business, and it has changed quite a bit as we've talked about. And from the beginning, I would describe what we did as providing passive insights to consumers. We would show consumers their credit report and their score, and that was valuable at the time. But what we've done over the years is really drive to active management for consumers.

You saw that when we included and introduced Boost in to the world. And what that allowed consumers to do is actively participate. They could contribute their data and see that their score and their credit profile could increase. And over the years, we've added more active types of features. Consumers can cancel subscription and they can negotiate bills, and they can allow us to do that on their behalf.

And now when we think about a financial copilot, we really think about how AI can help assist there. And that comes to life with our virtual assistant that we call EVA, Experian Virtual Assistant. EVA now allows natural conversational interaction that a consumer initiates. It's very simple. And they can input all of the questions that they may have into EVA, and it can be very individualized again to them and what they are looking to achieve. We've seen consumers insert questions like, what is the next best credit card for them? Can you help me freeze my credit? And they have all sorts of questions around maybe why their financial standing has changed or what they can do next.

We've had over 2 million engagements with EVA. And I think what's even more impressive in the volume and scale of interaction with EVA is that more than 70% of those who interact with EVA like EVA, which means that we have really created something with strong trust and a great product market fit. And EVA allows us the opportunity to accelerate our evolution to become a true financial copilot. You can imagine that EVA allows us to bring those very hyper personalized journey to life even faster. But I can talk about EVA and try to explain how consumers might engage with EVA and within our platform, but it's much better to show you and have it come to life.

And with that, I would love to introduce Rakesh Patel, who is our Head of our Marketplace business, and he will walk you through how we imagine consumers can interact with EVA.

Hi, everyone. Sorry about the technical difficulties there. I'm hoping everyone can hear me loud and clear now. As I was saying, I wanted to reinforce the message both Lloyd and Dacy delivered in their presentations with regards to some of the key components that we're really bringing to life for consumers.

Number one, EVA. EVA is now front and center in our product. It's really important to note, EVA is a consumer-facing capability, but it's also really important for us as Experian in the consumer business to utilize EVA to personalize the journey, the outcomes, to satisfy the needs and goals of the consumer. EVA will continue to play more of an active role as the consumer engages in our product.

Number two, Dacy talked about journey-based outcomes. That is the transformation that our product ecosystem is under. As we learn more about the goals, desires and needs of consumers, the journey and the outcomes adjust relative to those goals and needs and outcomes.

And number three, engagement. Engagement is a huge component of how we think about the consumer and continuing to meet them at the right point of time for capabilities, new products, new services and to really generally help them with their overall finances.

Lloyd talked a lot about the synergies and the intersections between B2B and B2C. This is really the foundation of what I'm going to highlight today in the demonstration. I've highlighted in past forums, talking about our auto insurance business and how we leverage our automotive data sets in B2B. We're now really expanding that across multiple parts of the portfolio, and that's what the demo is really going to bring.

So with that, I'm going to jump into the demo itself. So this is the beginning of the experience. First thing the consumer does is effectively interact and start with EVA. So in this case here, EVA is really the interface the consumer's looking at. In this case, EVA is saying, "Hi, what is your name?" So I'm going to represent the consumer at this point in time. "Hi, my name is Brett." Brett is acknowledging who I am and asking why are we here today. "Hi, I'm here, I'm really looking to remodel my property." EVA is now connecting my desire of remodel to what I would actually need in order to remodel.

So in this case, it's asking -- EVA is asking about the funds and how much potential budget am I looking to spend. I don't really know. I think about $20,000. So EVA is now reinforcing what I've said back and really saying, that's actually a great place to start in today's interest rate.

Now there's 2 options I've got as Brett here. Number one, EVA is saying, we can go directly and give you the loan that you're looking for. Or number two, let's take you down a journey based decision tree to give you more insight and value inside the product itself. In this case here, I'm saying absolutely, let's go for it. So now Brett has arrived at the new financial overview page. You will immediately see in this demo the value that we're bringing back to the consumer. So the bit I'm highlighting here is really indicating to Brett that as we look at Brett's savings over time, what we've actually noticed is that he's actually saved an additional $1,200 over the last 3 months than he typically -- would typically do. We're reinforcing that value of great work, Brett. Let's keep it up.

We're now also introducing the financial plan. The financial plan is really designed for us to get more information from Brett, so we can continue to tailor the experience as he navigates through the product ecosystem. So in this case here, the first part of the financial plan is how do you continue to better your credit score? And where are you relative to the goal and desire you've got?

The second part is taking the financial health survey. This is very quick survey-based outcomes for us to ask specific questions again to tailor their journey and the outcome for Brett.

The third area is directly getting the loan that Brett has come into the product for. I'm going to come back to this in a second.

Finally, turning on rate monitoring. This is a capability that we've launched through our auto insurance business, where we're really helping consumers understand and ensure that they have the best possible rate and mortgage in this case that is available in market itself. So the first thing we're going to do is really say to Brett, let's learn more about how I'm saving. So as we are now providing more value back to Brett around what he's been doing over the last 12 months, we're really showcasing that over the last 3, you have started to increase the amount of savings that you've got in your bank.

Secondly, we've got the home improvement options. Brett can go directly into satisfying his need of the $20,000 home remodel fund. The value that we're now bringing is this centralized hub inside the product itself. It's really focused on asset-based incoming and outgoings to really understand the overall financial picture of Brett itself.

So in this case here, what we're going to do is we're going to start with Brett's property. So Brett currently lives in 1234 Experian Way, and Brett is effectively now looking at his property, the value of the property. And as we talked about before, the value exchange that we're providing is we're actually saying to Brett, since last month, you've actually had an increase in value of your property.

What we're really doing is harnessing the B2B mortgage data sets that we have, and we're bringing them into B2C and attaching it to Brett. We're also then cross-pollinating our bureau information to be able to say to Brett, not only do we understand your individual property and the value of your property but also now, we can integrate the mortgage that you currently have with Wells Fargo in this case.

And then finally, bringing together the home insurance capability that we have within the consumer business. So Brett now has a destination where he can understand the value of his property, understand his payment obligations from a mortgage perspective through the bureau and finally, understand how this policy coverage relates to the property itself.

And as Dacy talked about in her presentation, we continue to provide more personalization and more education. In this case here, we're providing a lot more comparison-based information for Brett. So in this case, how does Brett's property look relative to other properties for around him.

So if we go back to the hub, the next area that we're really bringing together is the automotive capabilities for Brett, but also across our B2B business. So in this case here, Brett owns a Volkswagen Jetta. We're really indicating to him, here's the estimated value that we see for the Jetta, and how was it since last month. In this case here, it has declined by $163. The power of this is where the automotive B2B component comes into place. So in this case here, we're really saying to Brett, your auto check score is 94. But also equally as important, there's an open recall. So Brett, you've got a call to action to ensure that you satisfy that recall and go back to the manufacturer.

Bringing our insurance business together in this hub really gives Brett the opportunity to understand how is this policy relative to the vehicle that he's driving and again, leveraging our bureau, what we're really doing is bringing the financial commitment Brett has with a monthly payment of $374 for the Jetta. Similar to the home experience, we're now bringing in updates to understand how does the Jetta look relative to other types of models that Brett could potentially be interested in, and how does it look from a value perspective.

And then finally, as Dacy talked about, one of the things that we really want to continue to do is help consumers save money, and that can be done in multiple ways. So we're providing great multiple options to think through in terms of anchoring back to saving money.

Moving to our credit card hub. This is really the power of Experian Activate coming together. As you may recall, Experian Activate is built on the Ascend platform and the Ascend technology stack. What it does is it allows consumers to have transparency and confidence around the products that we're providing to consumers. And in this case here, Brett is preapproved for this offer here across the cashback category, but also we're now bringing together the capabilities of providing insights about Brett's current wallet.

So this here, what we're doing is we're showcasing standard categories across food and grocery, travel, transportation and really cross-pollinating, Brett, have you got the best product in each of these categories. In this case here, for example, for everyday spend, Brett already have the Discover it card, so we're congratulating him there. But we're also highlighting, maybe the Blue Cash Everyday maybe an appropriate product for Brett based on the food and groceries that category that we have. So really just providing a deeper insight here.

So I'm going to now go back to why Brett is here. Brett is looking for $20,000 of a loan to be able to push back into his property in order to be able to improve certain things in his house. So Brett is now looking at the home improvement options. One of the key thesis for us is providing optionality for consumers. So in this case here, we are providing multiple options for Brett to look at. He can go down the path of a cash out ReFi, and really look at other options that he could go through in this case here.

We're really providing insight at the front here saying, we don't really recommend this. This is not the best thing for you based on today's interest rates. We believe a personal loan is better for you. So in this case here, Brett is now engaged in our personal loan marketplace. Again, this is powered by Experian Activate and the Ascend platform and technology we've got within that technology suite.

In this case here, Brett is now available for an upgrade offer for $20,000 alone, but also he has new offers available to him that he can look at, including different types of loan options available to them. So in this case here, Brett is now going to apply for the upgrade loan that's available. Because of our hosted application capabilities, this now has actually eliminated the need for Brett to arrive at upgrade in this example and actually have the $20,000 of loan deposited into one of those connected accounts.

The continuation in the journey here is how does Brett use that $20,000. In this case here, we're really providing insight around. On average, we believe a kitchen remodel is $25,000, a bathroom is $15,000, and potentially deck and landscaping is $500. So we continue to provide Brett more information and education for him to continue to reengage in the product to use the $20,000 in the most efficient and effective way.

So with that, that does conclude the demo. And what I really wanted to do was talk about, how we think about where the next evolution of the marketplace is. The marketplace, you can see, has really been built and founded on some of the core credit capabilities that we've got. You will see through the demo and through the conversations that we've had thus far that the real power of Experian is leveraging B2B and B2C to create a value exchange for consumers that they can't get anywhere else.

So with that, as we think about consumers and their financial obligations, there are areas such as the home category that is really, really top of mind for us. It's the biggest expense on a monthly basis a consumer has, and we are really positioned strongly to fulfill that desire and that need to ensure consumers have the best mortgage possible, including ReFi and HELOC capabilities.

And then finally, our SMB area of focus. We're leveraging the B2B business, we can provide consumers that are small-to-medium business owners insight and information about how they could think about commercial loans, commercial credit, commercial insurance, all through our product ecosystem and really anchoring back to how do we devise a journey that is now designed for a commercial-minded consumer versus the consumer looking for everyday purchases.

So with that, Dacy, I will turn it back to you.

Thank you so much, Rakesh. Thanks for walking us through that demo and also talking about marketplace, which is one of the bright spots within our portfolio that we are extremely proud of. Let's go to the next slide.

I want to go back to a point that we -- that I had brought up earlier as one of our key growth drivers and key levers and assets, and that's our marketing transformation. To me, marketing is an area that's near and dear to my heart. Marketing is a promise. It's a promise that we make to consumers, and it's fulfilled by the value of the features and offerings and products that we deliver to them. And we are extremely proud of this moment within the transformation of our brand.

As you may have known or seen, we have recently launched a new campaign. And we lovingly call it our BFF campaign or our Big Financial Friend. And this campaign does multiple things for us that I think are important to tease out.

First of all, it connects and announces to the world that we are more than just credit. We are there for consumers across a broad range of financial offerings and we want to be there with them along the way. What I also said is that we are going to be there continuously for them over an extended period of time. As friends are, they are there and they form a relationship.

And also, the other thing that I would say that it does because it talks about being there for consumers is that we also communicate that people will be better off by having a relationship with us. This is a meaningful milestone for our brands. And as we build and continue to grow our brand and improve it, we intend to keep filling our promise and delivering more and more features to them that allow us to continue to engage with them and then also increase the value of our customer base because we'll continue to monetize them over a longer, extended period of time. Let's move to the last slide.

I want to close by saying that we are building so much more than a set of tools or a collection of verticals for our consumers. We are building trust, loyalty and better outcomes for them. We have the power to execute our vision because we will take advantage of the scale that we have built. We will also be combining and utilizing all of the unique data assets that we have across Experian, all of these things that make us unique. And we'll continue to build on our diverse product set.

As Rakesh said, we have ambitions to move into other spaces, continuing to offer value to consumers, but also continuing to increase the value that we see with each and every relationship that we have with them. And we will lean on a strong brand that we have invested in and built over time. This brand is known and trusted by millions, and we intend to take full advantage of that. With all of this combined, Experian Consumer Services is well positioned to lead in the future as financial empowerment.

Now in fact, I'm going to hand you off to my esteemed colleague, Edu Castro, who leads Consumer Services for UK&I.

Thank you very much, Dacy. Hi, everyone. My name is Edu Castro. I'm responsible for the Experian Consumer Services business in the U.K., and it's great to be here today. Let's move on to the next slide, please. I want to talk to you about the unique market position we have in the U.K. market today. I want to share how mature our business already is, but also why we believe we're entering a new chapter of growth. And this is the first time that we are presenting the U.K. Consumer Services business in this section. I'm planning to give you some context and talk about it first, but then I'll show some of the capabilities, and I'll do some demos to share some of the capabilities we have launched recently, and some of them that we have in our road map as well.

This is a snapshot, and I'll cover some of those items in more detail through the presentation. But we have already circa 15 million members in the U.K. Consumer Services business, which is a very significant position considering the size of the population in the U.K. We've been providing a lot of services to those customers already from our free proposition and freemium proposition as well as our marketplace services. And we've been proving that we can monetize that base by creating revenue streams that already accounts for around $180 million of annual revenue for Experian.

We also have a great percentage of lenders, about 80% of them that are in our marketplace panel, leveraging the Experian Activate capability that Rakesh mentioned, which makes us one of the leading money marketplaces in the U.K. market. And as Dacy mentioned, we have a super strong brand in this market as well that is perceived as a trusted brand by consumers and by lenders, which is a great asset for us to build on. Next slide, please.

The fundamentals for growth are very similar to the North America business, and they are grounded on the freemium proposition that will be offered today combined with our dual sided marketplace, which is growing faster than competitors and taking substantial market share for several quarters now. We've also been launching some innovative product features and capabilities to power our future growth, and I'll cover that in more detail soon.

So our plan is to leverage this scaled and engaged audience that we've already built to provide premium products for the ones that need, to provide free capabilities for the consumers that need, and also to drive volumes to our marketplace and provide better credit offers to those consumers whenever they need. Next slide, please.

We have a lot of growth potential, as I mentioned, and that will be through our existing capabilities and how we expand that, but also how we expand our member base that there still has space for us to do, but also through some new value pools and adjacencies that I'm going to talk about in a couple of minutes. That makes us very confident, we're going to be $0.5 billion business in the next 5 years in the U.K. So let's take a look at the U.K. specific consumer and market dynamics and how we're going to get there. Next slide, please.

Some of the consumer end market dynamics and jobs to be done in the U.K. are different from the other markets where we have Consumer Services businesses on like North America and Brazil. In the U.K., there is a very mature regulated market on financial guidance and financial advice with substantial changes in the landscape. And with a lot of players trying to build the brand trust to be the go-to platform for consumers when they think about their money.

From a consumer perspective, with the cost of living crisis we've been going through in the U.K. household cost pressures, there's an increasing focus on savings, purchasing and debt management. But there is also an increasing concern around fraud and identity protection with the rise of APP scams and fraudulent transaction, which is very material in the U.K. market and definitely top of mind for a lot of our consumers.

From a client and lender perspective, although economic landscape has been challenging, most lenders are now looking at growth options to unlock incremental lending, exploring new data sets to drive their decisions, and that is a great opportunity for us to connect those consumer needs and those lender objectives. So the jobs to be done for Experian are to create that connection between them, leveraging the insights that we have about both sides and create that synergy that will be a better outcome for both of them. If we can move to the next slide, please.

So with that in mind, what we've been building is a trusted, always-on financial platform that empower consumers with their financial lives. So as Dacy mentioned, it's much more than telling them about their credit score and their credit report and their credit data, it's about being a platform for them to make smart money moves when they decide that's the time to make them. That's based on our brand position, that's based on the current opportunities and jobs to be done in the market that I just talked about. But that's also based on the unparalleled position that we have and relationships that we have with lenders. Let's move on to look at how we are doing that.

So to give a bit more detail in the next slide, please. To give a bit more detail, though, on how we believe we can achieve that, by creating a richer product ecosystem, which we have already started to deliver and supporting consumers through those financial steps. This slide is just a summary of how our product and capability stack is evolving as well as our go-to-market plan.

So we are leveraging and we will continue to leverage our core business, our existing core business, which is our score, our marketplace, our premium proposition, and we will be expanding and we are already expanding to some of the other value pools I talked about before. So that consolidation, being a good example that I will go into more detail and show the demo in a couple of minutes.

From a go-to-market standpoint, we will build on our brand position to provide even more personalized journey to the existing and to the new customers to drive value to all of them regardless of their needs. So we're going to use some of the enablers you can see on that slide to provide all of the experiences back to those consumers and make sure we connect them with the right solution at the point in time and in whatever channel they want to connect with.

With that, we believe we were going to drive those metrics around our member base, the number of active users we have in the revenue per customer as we shift the mix of our business and evolve our business to be a platform rather than a credit score app that they use to be. If you move to the next slide, please.

We're also already leveraging Gen AI to deliver value at pace and at a much faster pace than what we use do And there is much more we're planning in terms of how we can use Gen AI as an enabler and a driver for this growth. You can see some examples here. But we think about Gen AI as an enabler of a better product and customer experience such as helping us to provide assistance to consumers through EVA, our Experian Virtual Assistant, becoming the financial copilot to guide consumers to make the right decisions and the right money use for them, but also using Gen AI to drive a better user interface and adapt that user interface to specific consumer needs.

We also see Gen AI helping us and supporting our plans around marketing effectiveness. Our campaign of creative generation already uses Gen AI to produce new ads and campaigns and creative. We're using Gen AI a lot in our CRM optimization processes, trying to be really personalized in our campaign to make sure we're delivering the right messages to the right consumers in the right channels at the right time. And also using that to make sure our content is more and more relevant on large language models and Gen AI searches.

The third pillar on how we are using Gen AI and continue to push on using even more is operational efficiency. So we have already adopted Gen AI in our engineering teams to drive engineering excellence and how we are building code and building solutions and integration with our partners. We've also been using Gen AI to integrate acquisitions and acquire capabilities faster. And we've been using Gen AI in our customer service team as well, supporting our consumers with our agents being that through the cellphone or digital channels. Next slide, please.

The other component, we believe, is key for our business success in the U.K. and globally is the ability to capture and unlock value from consumer permission data. Consumer permission data is a win-win. It drives better outcomes for consumers in terms of engagement, value and opportunities for them. As an example, we drive better offers in our marketplace for consumers based on the data that they connected to their platform, but also drives more value and differentiation to our B2B business.

So for lenders specifically, we can improve our risk assessment and eligibility criteria and analysis. We can also help them to launch new products and services and we can empower our B2B business to have more fresh data to support other lenders and other use cases as well. Next slide, please.

Finally, just before I show some demos, I'd like to highlight how we've been taking the best from other regions and accelerating that deployment in the U.K. So we're calling that, that is the Experian advantage or one of them. And we can take the best from North America and Brazil, and we can leverage -- learn, leverage and reuse that in the U.K. So although we are in different markets, there's a lot of commonalities, and we're committed to do that.

The quick demo that you're seeing on the right-hand side of the slide is just one example. That's EVA, the Experian Virtual Assistant that was mentioned a couple of times. And that was our first Gen AI assistant launched by North America earlier last year. And we managed to reuse most of that code to also launch in the U.K., of course, adapting and learning with the U.K. knowledge base and adapting to the U.K. regulation market. And we did that in 3 months. And we only managed to do that in 3 months because we were reusing the capabilities that were already built and the learnings that we had already in the North America business. So just cutting the development and learning phases by 1/3 in that case, just shows one example of how we can use the fact that we are a global consumer services business and the Experian advantage.

Let's look at some other examples now. So if you move to the next slide. As I've mentioned before, I wanted to show some demos of the existing capabilities that we offer in the U.K. and some of the new capabilities that we are bringing to the market as well. So the first one on the left-hand side that's our new Experian app. That's the app that was launched last fiscal year.

And on top of being completely redesigned with new dashboards and new features, including the first time, we've given the -- or we are giving the credit report for free on the app as well as much more insights about consumer credit scores, as you can see in the demo. What we've done is introduced personalized dashboard to consumers that will deliver insights about their current needs and will help them to improve their financial lives by engaging with those features.

This is also the first version of the app that was integrated with EVA, our Gen AI assistant that I talked about. And this demonstrates how much more we can give to consumers in terms of insights around their financial data that we have at Experian, but also how we can partner with them for whatever they're trying to achieve those objectives. This truly demonstrates the freemium offer. So as you can see, we've started with the free capabilities, but we have some features that consumers can decide to upgrade for if they are interested. So those additional features will drive additional value to consumers. And if they to upgrade the premium offer, being that a credit monitoring or identity monitoring offer, they will get access to those features. We've been already seeing great engagement results and metrics on the back of this new app release, and there is a further release we're planning for later this calendar year.

The second demo, the middle one. This is an identity protection feature. As I've mentioned before, concerns about fraud and identity are top of mind for consumers in the U.K., and we are here to help and we can help. We're actively working on this feature at the moment. It's in our road map. And this feature will leverage some data inside that we can take from the bureau such as hard and soft searches and address details to alert proactively consumers about suspicious credit applications.

More than that, and that's when it gets really interesting, given all the data facts that we also have in our Identity and fraud business, we will also be able to run an investigation for the consumer should they want to dispute those purchase and potentially remove that search from the report instantly, and that would lead to a credit score change. That's something that only Experian with the relationship with consumers, lenders and the identy and fraud business can do.

The third one is the debt consolidation capability that we've introduced to the market last year as well. So this is on the back of the acquisition we made of the ReFi capability. Based on the information we have about consumers and their bureau records, we can personalize suggestions about how much money they can save by consolidating their debt. And what that consolidation offers they would have available and potentially even preapproved in our marketplace. So as you can see through the journey, consumers can decide which stats they want to settle and we will then provide them the options for debt consolidation.

This is a market-changing capability, and it reviews the double affordability issue from the U.K. debt consolidation market.

So making sure that the money goes straight to pay the consolidated debt as well as providing a great seamless experience to the consumers because they will have all the accounts closed, only one new debt to pay per month and potentially driving savings from the previous commitments as well. This is another capability that is live to consumers, and it's been introduced last year.

Next slide, please. We're also delivering on the ambition to become the best place for consumers to borrow through our marketplace. We had several new capabilities launched in our marketplace, and we're seeing great market share progress, as I mentioned before. We're really driving personalized targeted campaigns like product switch alert campaigns, alerts in e-mail and push notifications for consumers when they are eligible or preapproved for offers. And we've been integrating those capabilities with our score and report insights from the app, as I've just shown you.

So we drive the right consumers at the right time to consider our marketplace offers we have market-leading exclusive offers in the panel through Experian Activate. And with that, we are driving conversion at levels we haven't done before. So consumers can understand better about their financial data. They can get personalized insights about it. They can get support through what they're trying to achieve, but we can also provide them the best panel in the market if they decide they want to take a credit card, a personal loan, a debt consolidation loan or mortgage.

Next slide, please. We are also delivering on our ambition to be the best place for lenders to lend and how they can launch new products and capture share. As Rakesh mentioned, the Experian Activate capability that is built on top of Ascend is the one capability I would like to call out here. It's another one we've leveraged from the North America business in terms of the initiative in the learnings and the code and our global capabilities, and it's now adopted by 88% of our panel in the U.K. This is leading already to exclusive offers that we only have in our marketplace and new products being created by lenders just because of the insights that we can provide through Activate.

You can see the impact of that in some of the offers we've been able to launch. As you can see also, that we've been able to increase our level of preapproved offers comparing to what we were able to do 4 or 5 years ago, and that has a direct influence of the insights and analytics that we can provide for Activate. We had also had recently prime lenders and near prime lenders in the U.K. launching exclusive pricing or offers in our marketplace, including one that launched the first ever exclusive offer through marketplaces with Experian and called out that the amount of analytics and insights we could offer them was the main reason for that.

Next slide, please. Back to the debt consolidation proposition I mentioned earlier. Our refi capability is already changing the market. It's a digital seamless journey to consumers and with some really great case studies already. OakbrookOne, as you can see on the right-hand side, is one of these case studies. This is a new product specifically designed and treated for refi by Oakbrook. This is unlocking incremental lending for them but also showing better payment performance when you compare that with traditional debt consolidation loans. And more than that, it's driving incredible outcome to consumers.

So we're going to see that on a quick video we're going to play now.

[Presentation]

It's great to see Experian capabilities enabling outcomes like that, consumers calling out experience capabilities as life changer for them and literally changing their lives for better, providing great outcomes to them.

So if you move to the final slide. To recap, we are executing on our strategy, We're leveraging the power of our global business. We're leveraging the relationship we have with millions of consumers and lenders in the U.K. We are improving our existing solutions and taking them to another level, but also we're launching a wider set of capabilities that will be really driving value to consumers when they need and to clients as well that are connected to our platform in the U.K. And that's why we are very confident we can achieve that ambition.

So in summary, U.K. Consumer Services business is in a unique position for growth, I am very excited about what's ahead and that new chapter. And with that, I'll hand over to Pedro that leads our Consumer Services business in Brazil. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Castro. So I have in part of ECS Brazil since 2016 and helped build our business unit from the ground up. Today, I would like to explain how ECS Brazil has become the leading nonbank financial platform in Brazil.

Please, next slide. To begin, I will provide some context regarding the Brazilian economy. Brazil faced significant inequality and an uneven distribution of wealth across its states. We have high interest rates and many consumers are in debt, often relying on credit to settle their obligations. Additionally, there is a notable lack of insurance coverage. For example, 70% of vehicles in Brazil are insured. Conversely, the country has relatively high banking penetration rates. In summary, these factors present numerous opportunities for us to assist Brazilians in addressing their financial challenges as we offer tools to address some of the most significant economic problems in Brazil. We are focused on generating prosperity among our consumers.

Please, next slide. But how have we become essential in our industry? Let me explain how our ecosystem works and the areas in which we operate. We developed an app that primarily engages users through their consumer credit scores. Furthermore, we have connected two transactional marketplaces, one, the focus on credit products such as credit cards and personal loans and another that specializes in collections, which has emerged as the leading digital debt negotiator in Brazil. Our platform also includes payment capabilities to manage transactions related to debt payments as well as providing access to direct debt authorization and current bills to promote daily payment behavior.

We have integrated financial education and protection into the credit and debt cycle to help prevent over indebtedness and fraud. After all these years, we are now leveraging the network effects of our achievements with a clear vision for growing our card products while connecting the ecosystem. We believe that the best is yet to come.

Move forward, please. And why am I saying that? Because we still have billions of dollars in potential to penetrate the market, regardless of whether we scale our current operations and products or merge our businesses into new solutions. To mention a few examples, in growing the card, we didn't reach our full capacity to reach consumers of debt offers. We are also taking baby steps in the payment space. Our premium memberships have the potential to increase penetration in our user database, and we have new opportunities for credit in Brazil.

Overall, I'm particularly excited to launch our insurance marketplace and increase the insurance coverage in Brazil. I'm thrilled to start merging our credit and collection marketplace, offering credit for paying debt This is a decisive move as we will likely to be the only platform globally with the ability to bring an indebted consumer back to a credit life in just a few clicks, and that's powerful. We are also launching the brand-new Serasa Pass, a tool designed to remove friction from borrowing flows and prevent fraud, benefiting both consumers and B2B partners. As you can see, we have strong reasons to keep believing in our strategic plan in Brazil.

Next slide, please. Our essential asset, even bigger than our ecosystem, is the power of our brand, especially in this new AI era when a strong brand is going to be critical. That is the main reason we believe the best is yet to come. Brazilian consumers view us as a player that can help them achieve a better financial life.

Our credibility places us as a top of mind brand in Brazilian financial sector, alongside the most preeminent players in Brazil. Our mission and aspiration are to be the primary financial intermediary area in Brazil protecting and helping millions of consumers across the country.

Next slide, please. These numbers can demonstrate the results of Brazilian consumers' trust in our brand. We are among the top 10 most downloaded apps in Brazil, the only nonbanking player in this ranking. By the end of the third quarter, we will have reached 100 million enrollments, demonstrating a clear pathway of relevance and potential for further growth in our strategic rationale. For me, it's the biggest proof that we are solving the consumers' problems in Brazil.

Next slide, please. Despite solid growth in revenue, margins and business KPIs, our belief in continuously scaling is rooted in our substantial investment in improving the user experience within our ecosystem over the past few years, which has led to increased engagement and transactions in more than one product.

Next slide, please. Now I'm going to walk through our verticals and product concepts. I'm starting with the financial education and protection pillars. The consumer's credit score is the feature that has been teaching Brazilians about financial education since April 2017 when Serasa pioneering launched the consumer credit score. In addition to the credit score, we offer a range of complementary free features to attract users. Once they are engaged and are consistent, we are developing a robust bundle of protection capabilities, including not just a credit monitoring membership but a stand-alone insurance offerings and a new insurance marketplace, which we will launch in the fourth quarter to capitalize on the tremendous potential of insurance in Brazil. These three pillars of financial education, monitoring and insurance are powerful levers that can help when consumers take their financial journey to the next level.

Let's move to the next slide, please. Our third vertical is our credit marketplace. As mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, the primary problems to be addressed in Brazil are related to the lack of credit and the substantial amount of delinquency in the country. To date, we have established the largest credit marketplace in Brazil, offering mainly credit cards and personal loans.

This fiscal year, we encountered a significant new opportunity to expand credit for high-risk audience. The Brazilian government has launched a new regulation on private payroll laws. Any formal employee can request credit from any bank using their monthly salary as collateral. Serasa Credit will offer a full integrated journey for private personal loans, which means a huge potential to scale credit to others in Brazil. This new credit is also particularly suitable for connecting with Serasa Limpa Nome and providing an additional option for consumers to pay their debts.

Next slide, please. If lack of credit is an issue for Brazilian consumers, it is directly related to the high volume of delinquency. It is a vicious cycle that we proposed to help solve. Our collection marketplace called Limpa Nome is the largest debt negotiator across the country, assisting nearly 30 million users and settling 14.5 billion in debt. It is a result of years of improving partners integration, enhancing user experience and finding ways to reduce acquisition costs, the only reason to our marketplace being successful in the market.

Next slide, please. To be more efficient in collections, the primary source is to control the way consumers pay their debts. When we added payments capabilities to our ecosystem in 2021, we began offering more options for payment methods but, more importantly, we started controlling transactions in real time. It allows us to remove debt from consumers' names instantly, boost credit scores in real time and be more precise in terms of acquisition costs. Moreover, providing the possibility to pay not only overdue debt but also current bills increased their recurring user rate on our platform.

It puts us on the right track to connect credit and debt. Remember, that we began this presentation by highlighting the two essential problems facing by Brazilian consumers. And now we can say that we are closer to solving these issues through a seamless journey. That's our main aspiration for the next years.

Let's move forward, please. To conclude this presentation, I emphasize that these direct connections with consumers are enhanced by B2B operations and, in turn, they also benefit B2B. To mention a few examples, our credit marketplace uses data from flight risk and legal entity stability to be more assertive in the new private payroll loan conversion. On the other hand, data from open finance and other permissioned and consumer data sources is enhancing B2B credit score models.

I'm going to run a short video that will summarize this presentation more effectively than my words. Please put the video up.

[Presentation]

Okay. So in summary, we have the right tools to scale our business in Brazil. Again, I would say, we have unique value proposal for our consumers. We are totally connected with the Brazilian financial problems. We have a strong brand and, as I mentioned before, it's going to be decisive in this new AI era because the questions over the search engine optimizations changes and the paid search changes. So it's going to be powerful to have a strong brand.

We are having two options to do that. We can scale the card, skip the card, we can connect our ecosystem. And also, we have a new value pools in front of us as the private payroll loans and the new Serasa Pass and the payments capabilities inside our acquisition. So we are very excited that the best is yet to come, and I can share that.

Now I will hand over to James, please.

Thank you, pedro, and thank you very much to our speakers so far. If you have any questions on the material so far, please send it through on the box on your screen will e-mail me directly, and we'll get to them later on.

We're now going to take a 10-minute break and then we'll come back to a presentation on the Ascend platform. So we'll be back in 10 minutes. See you shortly.

[Break]

Welcome back, everyone. We've had presentations across the consumer business now, but now it's time to move to B2B. I would like to introduce Keith Little, President of Experian Software Solutions, who's taking us through the Ascend platform.

Keith, over to you.

Great. Thanks, James. Hi, everyone, glad to be speaking to you today. As James mentioned, my name is Keith Little and I look after the global software teams in Experian and on the strategy. And what I want to talk to you today about is really how we're rethinking and transforming this whole data decisioning, fraud and analytics space as we see the market evolve.

So if you go to the next slide, please. So just a quick reminder of the strategy we've been on and the momentum that's sort of building around it. So our hypothesis way back was around how convergence is going to really resonate with the markets. And as you can see here, just going back to '23, where we started to bring our analytics and our decisioning capabilities together, right through to where we started to overlay our fraud solutions, bring marketing tools in here and now as we start to build into the world of AI assistance and all the new sort of tools that we've been looking at bringing on to the platform.

We've seen, as you can see, just in terms of the solution numbers really great momentum. So what was a hypothesis 5, 6 years ago as we sort of made that real, as we've been executing on this strategy, we're seeing that momentum start to build. And I'm going to talk more about how we see that going into the future.

If we go to the next slide, please. So clearly, what we've got to look at, we've always got to start with the clients and understand the market. It's clear we need to know where the puck is going effectively because we want to be there, not where we are today, and we want to make sure our strategies and our products are there to support what our clients need. And as you saw very eloquently from the consumer teams in the first half of the session, the nature of our clients' consumers is changing.

So when you look at the themes they're looking at, frictionless journeys, hyperpersonalization, transparency, this is all those digital experiences and really much more sophisticated digital experiences, faster applications much more real time, always on, but also much more in terms of transparency. This is what our customers' consumers in the B2B space are expecting. And this amplifies the issues that they have to deal with and all of their jobs to be done.

If you go to the next slide, please. So then let's focus really on those businesses and those structural market drivers that are changing that really bring an opportunities to us and the strategy that we're sort of driving through. So we've done a lot of research, spend a lot of time speaking to our own clients, wider surveys and there's some outputs of a couple here. You can see some of those big themes that come on, that real driver in terms of driving much more automation, much faster automation, what are the challenges that these sort of consumer sides are sort of bringing.

So when you look at the things that prevent that, things like data quality, access the data source -- access to wide areas of trusted data, being able to stitch together all the complexity of the systems that underpin this in their institutions, whether it's legacy, multiple vendors in-house, et cetera. We then look at the whole space around data management and integration. So how do you get the data sources, the range of data sources, so not necessarily just the traditional scores and attributes that the industries relied on to date, but how do you bring wider, more alternative data sets with trust, with quality and all of that and be able to integrate that into your solutions.

Improving customer journeys, so those challenges that these organizations face around building a very sophisticated digital journey. So think about not just building single loan journeys, but as you saw from the consumer teams and the demos, the fact that looking for cross-sell, how do you think about much more sophisticated personalization and all of the various data elements and decisioning that supports that.

The regulatory space, so compliance and regulation, organizations, that enterprise risk profile is obviously top of mind. Regulation changes, how to meet compliance, be compliant, how that can drive change into an organization. And that can impact how quickly you can adapt to that change. And again, depending on the complexity of the estate or the complexity of changes, what does that do?

And then lastly, of course, in terms of a big theme that comes out is that whole piece around reduced cost and drive efficiency right across all of these things. And if you think about the consumer trend, that much faster always on hyperpersonalization, that amplifies these sorts of issues. I was in the industry before I joined Experian. I was in a large global bank doing various roles, CIO/CTO type roles. Well, I had to look at all of these types of themes and how you bring those together, and what is that strategy and how Experian are placed. And what we see and what I see in Experian is that uniqueness in terms the capabilities what we can deliver.

Then looking forward, what are those big investment trends we're seeing from our clients as well? So AI everywhere, of course, lots of investments, lots of focus on investments in the AI space, lots of proof of values but also a huge amount of nervousness. They're looking for partners who can act with AI responsibly with trustworthy, transparency and it's hugely important. How can they bring together more data sources? So everything from that diversity right through things like synthetic, et cetera. And 2 out of 3 of over 700 people we spoke to are leveraging partnerships. They're seeing that these complex estates that they built up over many years and the solutions and the speed that they have to now operate at, looking for much more solution-based and much more work in terms of partners to drive that out.

So we see this as a huge opportunity because of that uniqueness we have. So let's go into that a little bit. So next slide, please. So we call this area enterprise decision intelligence. So this is really around how we bring that capability that is unique to Experian around AI, data analytics, fraud, marketing and credit services together but packaging it in a way that makes much more sense to our customers. So if you look at the top, you've got the typical consumer journey from finding customers, then being onboarded, whether it's at a product level or cross-sell level, right through to their entire sort of customer journey through to close accounts.

So we start to think of this more decision intelligence space, where we bring together AI, data and complex decisioning and then deliver that to clients in a way that makes much more sense to them as a set of solutions as opposed to a bunch of point solutions. So whether it's in the marketing space that we have some amazing solutions across the globe, whether it's in originations we're onboarding into new products, through to managing the customers' payments right through to collections and underpinning all of this with all our identity and fraud capabilities.

These are the sorts of solutions that you need to buy. And certainly, when I was in the industry, these are the solutions that you have to build in terms of making -- driving those outcomes for your consumers and everything you needed. And all of this delivered through our Ascend platform, and that's part of that convergence strategy and that building of the momentum that we've seen to date.

Next slide, please. What this also opens up is a way of thinking about the market and, as mentioned a couple of times, in terms of the new value pools that this can open up. So historically, we've typically looked at our competitor landscape and around the analytics space, decisioning space, identity and fraud.

Clearly, we play across all of those things. And when you look at what really our clients want in terms of whether it's in marketing originations, you have to stitch together all of these things to the one outcome. So think about it an onboarding journey, and you'll see a little bit about this later. You'll see the fact that you have to bring data and analytics, you have to bring decisioning capabilities and you have to bring identity and fraud capabilities together.

What we see in this sort of converged approach that we're talking about is not only do we start to address those markets, and obviously we'll continue, it starts to open up other value pools that we're seeing. And we've got a number in train. But one recent example we've talked about in the market is how we're entering into the regulatory technology market, so regtech for short, where what we realized is with the data that we hold on the platform, because we have data, because we have analytics, because we have the decisioning whether it's in fraud or credit, et cetera.

We've got a lot of the information that can help automate the sort of compliance regulatory reporting that I spoke about earlier and take away a lot of -- remove or reduce the headaches that our clients see, which takes up a lot of noise in the systems that they operate to hence drive efficiency.

And again, a real good example with our model risk, so this Gen AI, we're looking at sort of model governance as our first use case. So we can generate these doorsteps of compliance data, far more automated, and we announced that earlier this year. Again, a new value pool moving into regtech beyond the -- and there's sort of more to come.

Next slide, please. So let's just take a look at a real client example. So what I'm going to just go through first is just the outline of the platform at sort of 30,000 feet. So these are the sorts of capabilities we have in the platform. We have over 30, and we've got road maps to put more and more capabilities in it. But broadly, this is how we think about it. If you look at the left-hand side, this is all where we've got our access to all our data, our data sandboxes and more on that later and ability to build models, manage all your features and attributes and drive that real insight piece.

We then have the capability through our model deployment tooling and monitoring, where we can deploy those insights through machine learning models or whatever models you want. And those can be consumed then within our sort of core software stacks around whether it's marketing, whether it's fraud, whether it's credit, et cetera, and build those journeys, play the strategies and really drive the insights, bringing in third-party data sources, other data services through our data hub. And this outlines how we think about it and then, hence, drive the value conversation with the client because of that integrated converged approach, time to market and speed which drives growth, better risk managed, better risk decisions because you've got the fidelity between all the handoffs of the integrations work far better, much more operational efficiency, being able to build those digital journeys.

If you could just run the build, Richard? Thank you. So take this client. Long-term data partner for many, many years as one of our bureau data plus various other data sources. They were also used some of our legacy stuff where we had a bunch of in-house software and competitor software, now have the confidence of moving all of that onto the platform. They brought our aperture tool around data quality to start to, if they could see how that could improve their decisioning systems, recently taking on our sandbox, and now we look at all the insights and analytics around -- for the entire life cycle. And we're in progress of looking at how now to use the deployment models and the regtech solution we talked about around model governance and value pools. And the outcome of this is a 5x revenue growth over 18 months.

So a couple of key takeaways from this, which this example elaborates. This is a big global financial services provider. Firstly, time. Clearly, we don't -- we have our platform. We can't go into typically a greenfield site and expect them to take everything. This is a journey. The buying decisions of a majority of these components are measured in years, not in days and weeks. And therefore, we've got to earn -- well, a, we've got to earn the trust and value of what we do, but also in terms of being able to have that sort of longer-term conversation. We have many, many customers taking one or two products, direct products not on the platform.

But in this example, we took them on the journey from, look at the value of our data is where we started. Now look at the value of some of the software and the integration that brings on that data to the software that we had. So this is where we managed to show the value of bringing that software and those capabilities into one place. They saw the benefits of not managing other vendors or in-house systems and removes the legacy headache. They then started to see, okay, in the data space, this is the tool. And this conversation that went on and now looking at what the sandbox can bring them in terms of that cross-industry data insight that they can get from that.

And what that shows is that when we put the platform into any, whether you've got 1 product or 10 products, you see everything. And these are just modules you switch on, and it shows how real you can make each of the modules to be able to enable and how -- so you can enable them in a managed way for our clients and they become preintegrated, you can switch them on. So that converged strategy drives a much better conversation in terms of that route. And it's a great example of how that's happened. And obviously, we see the revenue growth, but obviously, the client, you have to earn the value in terms of how they do that.

So you see that sort of cross-selling action. And then the thing that it stems to lead to now is what we're seeing a much more longer-term partnership type arrangement, and so moving beyond the 3 to 5 years to start talking about 10-year type relationships. And this becomes -- then you think about how you can grow from that, what other value can we bring to the customers through our capabilities and shape our product road map.

Okay. Next slide, please. So that was one customer. We talked -- I briefly showed some of the solution growth that we've seen over the last couple of years at 4x growth. We're seeing really healthy metrics across the platform. This sort of -- obviously, I look at that in terms of how we see this resonating in the market, the conversation, the growth, whether it's the new logos, We also have obviously a legacy estate which we're migrating as well. So this helps with that conversation. You just saw an example of cross-sell. Well, if you've got one or two services, you bring them on to the platform. it enables upsell conversations. It enables us to sort of drive that conversation going forward.

And if you think about how the sales organizations can now adapt, so rather than the more tactical sort of data and analytics conversations, they can have a much more rounded strategic conversation about solving client solutions because effectively the presence of the capabilities are there and it's all about how we engage. And also in terms of it puts us in a stronger position when whether maybe one of our competitors are playing in a couple of areas. If we can earn the value, we can show the value of that, it can help and reduce that cost of change for them as well, which has been a barrier in the traditional approaches that we've seen in the past. And we've seen a few examples of that, which is great to see.

If you go to the next slide, please. And obviously, we need to make sure our clients are happy. So one thing we did, we commissioned Forrester to do an independent fully open book analysis with a number of our clients. We weren't involved. We stepped back to see what the findings were and there's -- and some of the various clients we let them speak to. We've seen really strong ROIs. And again, making sure that we prove the strategy that we're executing on, making sure that turns into reality for our customers and this isn't just sort of -- it's just our hypothesis. It's actually working for real. And then as you say -- as I said earlier, continuing to work out where is the puck going next, and that's where we sort of lead to.

Next slide, please. So here's a little bit about in terms of the awards and the recognition. So as we start to shape up this category and how we want to sort of make sure we extend our leadership, what's also important is see what do the analysts think and how are we thinking with the way they think about the areas we're operating across. And it's great to see that sort of growth in terms of reward, that industry recognition. And for me, what I'm looking for is the diversity of rewards across, again, that range of capabilities that we uniquely have and how that best plays into the market. So this is good to see.

But this brings to life a bit more with a demo. So if you could play the demo, that would be great.

So let's bring this to life with a real customer example. So somebody applying for a home improvement loan, one of the most popular use cases, bringing in basically an originations journey. So looking at an example of digital experience. This is Gary looking to make a personal home loan, so it goes on to the laptop, on to his iPhone, gets into -- goes through the digital experience fills out the various details for application, and if it's confirmed, to apply for the home loans to see what the result is. On the left-hand side, you're seeing Gary's experience on his phone. Application being referred, that's not good. And then you see what's going on at the bank side and all the checks and balances that are going on.

First thing to see here is on the right-hand side, when you see all of the various -- some of this is obviously a summary of the checks and balances that are going on in terms of the strategies and policies. It's a combination of all the credit and fraud checks that have to go on around Gary's application. And you can see here where the score is sort of roughly sort of ending up and what you're seeing in the referral reasons why this actual application was referred. So unverified ID, obviously, thin file, limited credit history, person couldn't verify address, et cetera, and various other elements.

But you can also see the other checks and balances. So the fraud checks around sort of device intelligence. So the device that we've seen before probably is okay actually. This is not something we've seen involved in fraud.

Behavioral biometrics, the person using this on this device seems to be the person, nothing strange going on. Bots often cut and paste information, all of that maybe left hand, right hand, all of these types of things that these can pick up. Actually, they pass. But overall, with the other checks, the other policies and strategies that this organization has to give its loans, it's not passing. So there's limit here.

Overall, the outcome for Gary, very bad referral. He probably goes somewhere else. Bank lose his business. He's not happy. On the bank side, it's a refer so it's going to go probably into their operations teams and it's going to go through a queuing system. And they may phone up Gary. Gary may be calling up the bank. Again, manual effort cost, not good for anyone.

So how does the Ascend platform help us address these sorts of issues? So let's put the persona in now. I'm Matt, this credit risk analyst who was actually logging on to the Ascend platform to look at what we can do. So before I get into that, when you get into the portal, this is bringing to life what you really see when you log into our platform.

And again, bringing together the range of capabilities that we got that are unique. So everything from data, which from left to right, so you've got all the analytic development areas, so the sandbox and all of the data-rich analytics and data elements you can look at across industry views right through to be able to get that data and insights into operation through into our software and decision marketing, identity and fraud and inter-reporting. All of these modules or these little tiles, we call them, but these modules are fully integrated. And this is the uniqueness of the Ascend pitch in the sense that we are the only organization that can bring all of these together.

This is very similar to the way that SAP in the '90s did the whole R3 thing where they brought together HR, finance, supply chain and all of those and brought those together in an integrated environment. The other thing to note here is you'll see some of the tiles, these modules are blue and some are grayed out. This is effectively showing what is available to you and which I've got access to. So I've got access to all the various bits in blue.

Now back to the case study we just went through. This is where the cross-sell piece can come because if you take -- if a client one or two takes services capabilities from us, they'll see those tiles as blue. And they'll see all these other risk capabilities as gray. And so obviously, it helps then have the cross-sell conversation with clients. So we can say, look, the cycle times of people changing some of these software can be over periods of years. But once we're with an organization, we've got some services in there, whether it's 1, whether it's 2 or 3, puts ourselves in a really good position to be able to see when these other services look to go through changes or the capabilities, puts us in a really strong position to be able to pitch for that work because we would have built up the trust and showing the value of the services they do take from us.

Anyway, back to Matt. So Matt looks in, he sees where I've got a notification here. My credit referral levels seem higher than optimal, right? I need to take a look at that. So I'm going to go into my insight space so I can look at what's going on. So here, you can get a rich dashboard of data across all the sort of aspects and KPIs that I'm looking to manage as a credit risk analyst. In here, you can see your accept, reject/decline areas, fraud detection rates and all of these things. Another unique point, again, emphasizing that convergence point, credit and fraud very much interlinked, particularly in this sort of classic product journey of a home loan origination. And so really important that all of the teams, the fraud teams, the credit teams are looking at the same data so that they can make the best decisions to improve their business.

So in this example, my credit referral aspects obviously are looking high, so I'm going to look into a little bit more of that. So Matt can have a look, the top reasons for doing that. So ID, credit histories, unverified addressed, thin file, affordability, things like that. Okay, I need to think about what I can do about that. But also, can also look at using the sandbox data, which gives you that cross-industry view to actually see where am I for this type of product across my peer banks. And what you can see here is the benchmarking data that you can bring in to this to see where we are, again, the value of the sandbox and data that, again, unique to the way that we can apply these propositions. And you can see that for our clients to be able to improve their businesses.

And in this example, with the benchmarking, you can see our fraud detection rates are nowhere near where they need to be, except rates I know where near what they do and our referrers particularly are very high. So obviously, I need to sort of intervene. And I can look at this with my fraud colleagues and we can make assessments and work together in a collaborative space.

So from that, I'm going to say, right, okay, look, let's think about what other data sources I can use to validate a bit more around ID, address, et cetera, and are there any available. So I'm going to use the data hub, which is effectively a catalog of data sources that we have in the platform across many, many different types of areas, so whether it's automotive, fraud, insurance, health care, public data, et cetera. And these are catalogs of data that either Experian data products or partner data products we'll bring in to help drive value for our customers. And in this example, I've got stuff around ID checks, I've got to improve -- there's a product here called Experian CrossCore, looks to improve ID reduction and things like that. So okay, let's have a take a look at that. So I can click on that. I can look at lots of information, all those usual sort of marketing stuff, but also I can speak to Experian and find out a little bit more.

But once I'm happy and I think this is something I want to utilize, I can self-serve, adding this to a data source that I can access and use in my strategies. And then you simply go back, look for more. So here, address verification, again, something I need to improve. So I'm going to add that into my data sources, something of interest to me. Property ownership data, so public availability of data here. So you've got the HM Land Registry in the U.K., PubRec in the U.S.A. Okay, look at that. This looks interesting. Okay, I'm going to bring that into my data sources that I can use.

But also, we talk about AI; AI innovation. One of the areas in the data hub we want to sort of bring that more is the application of assistant here. So using that sort of Gen AI natural language points as well. So I can just use natural language to find stuff as well. So I would like to reduce my referral rates with customers with limited credit history. Can you suggest anything? It comes back and says, yes, look at this product here called affordability data. And this is another Experian product called affordability IQ. It brings in various attributes around income estimation, income verification, et cetera. Okay, this is a good one as well.

So again, reducing the friction, the discoverability of data of reducing the friction to be able to bring that into my policies and strategies and get that in, again, all self-service, no needing for all the integration, multiple systems, et cetera.

So from here, I'm going to go over into my strategy. This is a strategy workflow of simplified originations journey. So think about where Gary applied for his role -- the application that he applied for, flows into the decision tree and goes through here. And I can simply bring across the various data sources I've just got from the data hub and drag those into my strategy here.

And then I can start to take what the information Gary is used and then fire out to these new data sources, find out the responses and then adjust rules, policies, go through a whole or range of testing. Again, you can do all the interactive testing on this, which I won't do for the purpose of the demo. And once you're happy, you can deploy this into production. So once that's deployed, again, all in the same system, all being run through the same platform.

Paul, similar character to Gary, bringing in an application, a new application coming through. Goes through the various checks, hence, through approval because we've got much richer information that we can take, much better risk decisions on. And similarly, going back to Matt then, in terms of his insights, he starts to see the improvement of adding those data sources.

Accept rates are now where they need to be, referral rates have dropped dramatically. And of course, you can start to then continue to measure that against where his peers are. And now he's either surpassing or broadly in line where it needs to be and start to then continue to tune, cost per personal loan going down, loan book increasing, all the KPIs that he needs to do.

And really, what we're trying to show is how we can improve that decision-making, reducing fraud and optimizing credit strategies, but also bringing to life that importance of convergence where traditionally, you'd have to have all of these things in separate systems, your credit systems, decisioning systems, your fraud systems, data and data warehouses, all comes together in one place. and all fully integrated end-to-end. And that drives the uniqueness of our Ascend proposition.

Great. So hopefully, that brought a lot more to life in terms of the themes I've been talking about sort of the first half of the session.

So one of the areas I just wanted to look at and focus on a bit more is the Ascend sandbox. And I touched on it earlier, but this is one of those real anchor products for the platform and for Experian. It's a fantastic product that really born out of North America a number of years ago, and you can see the sort of penetration it's had there. And now we're in the process of rolling out it across the globe, across the other platform areas given its sort of terms of uniqueness in terms of the data it can sort of bring to our clients. Just so you know, the sandbox, think of it as a sort of a depersonalized version of the bureau plus much, much, much more data.

So it effectively, very deep coverage across the population base in the places we operate. It's cross industry. And as you saw in the demo, you can do peer benchmarking. You can see where you are in terms of where you are versus your competitors. It helps you to tune a huge amount of sort of use cases that we've seen grow up over the years of operating it. So whether it's around benchmarking, whether it's around credit and fraud strategy insights, model development, model deployment and building really rich areas. We see about sort of 20-plus use cases of examples where all of those automations that we're seeing.

And we bring together -- as we add more data, as you heard from the consumer teams, how we're trying to how we've got that linkage between the consumer side and the B2B side, we can bring in the data, and this is how that consumer data is presented to the clients. And then you get into that optimization loop in terms of getting all the feedback data and enabling you to tune and growing your business. And as you can see, as we started now to roll this out across the globe, getting great penetration, whether it's through sales, lots of engagement with customers. And we see that this really growing in terms of driving that use of the platform. And it becomes very ingrained in the workflows and processes of the clients that we're working on.

If you go to the next slide, please. So just a little bit about where we are today in the future. Obviously, I've talked about the convergence story, how we brought together the sort of our traditional capabilities as it were, now as we grow into to bringing the sandbox and that growth now globally. And as we think about the future, how do we drive that -- continue to drive that convergent story? It's definitely resonating in the market. It's where organizations are going driven by the sort of consumer behavior, being much more embedded in those overall financial services workflows and processes. But of course, there's the AI wave that's hitting us.

Now the one thing I'm really proud to say about Experian is we don't just talk about AI. We've been using AI for many, many years. Clearly, the recent wave through driven by the Gen AI phenomenon, and we're always looking for where we can drive value. And I think the important thing is we're not just putting AI into PowerPoints or into logos and things. We're actually putting out real product.

So our first product we launched into market being used, getting around the assistance space. So this is the Experian system for model building. And this is a companion to the sandbox. So ability to really drive insights into the richness of data the sandbox, got to aid the data scientists in terms of how they build and look at their models. It can give everything from descriptions of the data sets that you've got access to, how they work, all the scores and attributes that apply, make recommendations, do code, nit bits. It's always with a human in the loop, the data scientists there, but again, to make them more productive.

And you see a great example here of a quote from one of our users of this area. And that was in '24. This year, already, we've launched two other sort of Gen AI related services, the Experian system for model risk management, I talked about that earlier with where we started to, again, new value pool into regtech, could see the benefits for our customers and now got to get a product into market. So a real sort of fast local time on making this real. And from in that space, we learn and recently launched our fraud investigator service where we start to use the power of sort of Gen AI capabilities in terms of looking at fraud landscape, so the multitude of signals that fraud, as you know, will generate and how we sort of make that much more usable to the fraud investigators and case workers.

One of the questions we often get is, don't you see AI as a threat? It's going to be something that will impact your business. We see it as opportunity. Obviously, certainly in the fraud space, AI is driving fraud, but also we can see that how we can counter that with some really unique positions. Again. two products in market so far, and we've got a lot more to come, which we'll be announcing at our big conference coming up in a month's time.

And then as we look forward, clearly, identification is a big thing. And again, playing to the point of we're always looking where the puck is going, where are the areas we can do here. We've got lots of interesting ideas about how we do that. And the fact, given this wider decision intelligence category we're looking in, how do we think about other new value pools that we can also bring into this? So really exciting times building on that momentum we've built to date.

Next slide, please. So in terms of summary, this is how we're thinking -- hopefully brought together how we're thinking about redefining this whole integrated space around data analytics, fraud, credit, marketing, et cetera. And we see ourselves as uniquely able to deliver and better serve those client needs through this strategy that we're executing on.

We feel that we're setting the standard and shaping the sort of enterprise decision intelligence space we're operating in because of -- enabled by the capabilities that we've got. And we see that leadership in this space is gathering momentum through the state stats you're seeing, and we see that being fueled by our sort of constant focus on innovation and driving that growth and particularly with the responsible use of AI supporting that and enabling it.

So with that, that's the end of my presentation. I'll hand it back to James.

Thank you, Keith, and thank you to all the presenters we've had from Experian so far. It's now time to move to our Q&A section. And for this, we're bringing back some familiar faces from Experian's senior leadership team. So in addition to our presenters so far, I'd like to welcome Alex Lintner, CEO of Technology, Software Solutions and Innovation; Jeff Softley, CEO of North America; Malin Holmberg, CEO of UK&I; Valdemir Bertolo, President of Latin America; and of course, Lloyd Pitchford, Group CFO. Hello, everyone, and welcome back.

We've got a number of pretty specific questions, and I think I'll address them in the order the slides have been presented. So if we start off with Rakesh, I think. And specifically on the demo you gave with EVA for Brett. So Brett, was Brett a premium subscriber? Or what sort of relationship did he need to have with Experian to be able to get all of the range of services, which were shown in that demo?

James, maybe I can start here and fill in some blanks and then let Rakesh fill in with any other areas of focus. I think it's important to note that in the U.S. and across the globe, all of our consumer products start with a free proposition. So the demo that you saw with Brett and the example that was showcased there, we think it's important, critical to our business model, but also to the consumers that we serve that we offer capabilities and services at no cost.

So consumers today can interact with EVA. There's no cost to do that. And of course, we think that, that's incredibly important. And it highlights the growth and the drivers around the associated elements of our business that can significantly increase the business. So Dacy highlighted the need to grow audience, to grow engagement and to grow monetization. And again, the important thing about our business model, which I think you'll hear repeated several times, and you certainly saw within the demos is that it's self-reinforcing.

We've spent over 10 years building this unique platform, this unique position. We have more than 80 million consumers in the U.S., more than 200 million globally. Engagement is the fuel of the business. And so offering and providing new ways for consumers to interact with us across dormant need states that may not exist in our platform today, but that we're building out are a huge driver of growth for us. That's how we access new value pools.

So you can see both in the demo and also imagine, based on where some of our areas of interest are, that EVA and other engagement capabilities allow us to become really relevant to consumers across entirely new need states. I think Rakesh highlighted some of the interactions we have around home and property. That's a really interesting focal point for us. We think EVA and that capability is critically valuable to help consumers improve their wealth.

And of course, a home is one of the consumers' largest financial assets. In fact, we've just launched our home hub, which allows consumers to claim their house to understand unique value elements around their house, the price the value that they have embedded in the equity in their house. And we are interacting with consumers to help them understand when it might be the best time to refinance. Also, when might be the best time to purchase a home?

And of course, linking back to some of the themes we talked about, all of these capabilities are built on the broader data estate that we have at Experian, all of the rich information that we have across our housing business unit in the U.S. and of course, the consumer capabilities that Rakesh and Dacy and others spoke about.

In terms of how we monetize this and this interaction and how it plays into the business model, well, again, it drives engagement. Engagement is valuable to us because it opens up opportunities for consumers to interact with us and solve problems on our platform. Of course, our marketplace business is a transaction-based model. It's linked to the long-term relationships that we have with consumers.

So when a consumer needs to take an action, find the right financial product or instrument for them, we're there, we're present, and we've got good engagement mechanisms to ensure that they find those solutions inside our platform. And maybe just to close on that question, zooming out again to the big picture here, big installed member base, 200 million globally, 80 million in the U.S., large untapped value pools. You've seen us demonstrate over the past years how we've been able to lean into those value pools.

Obviously, insurance has been an interesting and increased focal point for us over the past few years. That business quickly scaled to over $100 million run rate for us. And of course, we see many other places where we can tap into those new needs from consumers that are synergistic and strategic to Experian overall.

There's a question a bit asking a bit more around monetization as well, I think specifically in the marketplace. So for example, when Experian finds and recommends a preapproved insurance products, loan credit products, how do you monetize that with the banks or brokerage firms?

Sure. Well, it works similar to other businesses in this space who operate in the space. So we get paid on an approval from a consumer. And we think, of course, that's an important place for us to position ourselves because it's reinforcing to both the consumer constituent as well as our B2B clients.

And one thing that I would highlight, which I think is unique and important and critical to consider for Experian and our broader strategy, back to Lloyd's comment about our strategy on a page and kind of this unique position we have in operating a consumer platform and then also serving B2B clients, as you saw with the demo on Ascend, increasingly through a connected and unified platform.

When you become part of a client's customer acquisition channel, when you become critical to them on originations, it simply reinforces the value that you provide to the B2B client. So now you're interacting with a financial institution and a partner. And not only are you enabling the decisioning and some of the credit information into their portfolio and helping them with traditional B2B capabilities, but now you're also a key component of how they find and acquire customers.

And we've been really intentional in how we've built this unified platform across both consumer and B2B. You saw Rakesh highlight it. You heard about this from Keith. Experian Activate works off the Ascend platform. It leverages the capabilities enabled through that platform. And again, that simply gets our client base more integrated into our capabilities. They become higher-value users of our platform. And that makes us much stickier in terms of value that we provide to the B2B client.

There's another question specifically on EVA as well. Did she give Brett financial advice and is she licensed to do so from a regulatory standpoint?

Yes, that's a really good question. I think first and foremost, it's important to say that EVA is not a financial adviser. It's an assistant that provides guidance in education to help consumers make informed decisions. So we're not providing the type of advice that would require a license. And of course, we have guardrails that keep EVA from doing that should ever be asked those sorts of questions.

Okay. There's a question on the consumer revenue growth ambitions you have in North America. And I think it's just asking for a different way to frame it. So I mean if you were to break it down into more simple economics of like number of premium subscribers, ARPU, pricing sort of integrated within that and the number of transactions going through marketplace. One of the sort of most important levers within that you would hope to use to get to your sort of 5-year goals?

Sure. Well, I think it links back to many of the points and elements that both Dacy and Rakesh highlighted that you also saw persistent across the global consumer business. The size of the audience, the engagement that we have with that audience and then the monetization. But maybe let me kind of frame it in a few bigger picture ways for you. I think first and foremost, as Dacy highlighted, $1.6 billion business in a space that has a total addressable market of over $50 billion.

So there's significant headroom and that additional market that we can access is adjacent or available to us. And again, I think that links back again to the strategic positioning of the business. More than 80 million consumers who come to us increasingly on a frequent basis to get help in saving time and saving money across more need states. Maybe another way to frame it, James, that helps kind of add some context to the potential.

When we look at those 80 million-plus members and we see what they're doing across the B2B capabilities and the visibility that we have there, it's clear that there's hundreds of millions of financial events that are occurring every single year across the customers who we already have a relationship with.

Now some of that's realized in the verticals in which we already have a presence. So our credit card business, our personal loan business and of course, our insurance business. But some of that value is not yet tapped because those 80 million-plus members are buying homes. They're looking at refinancing. And again, so that drives much of our road map and our focus going forward.

Again, maybe another big picture point just to highlight. The amazing thing about our business model is that each vertical that we release into the platform, each new capability that comes online and the more effective that we get in personalizing and really hyper-personalizing the recommendations to our customer base, our customer lifetime value grows.

So it's challenging to establish a customer base of this size. You have to be relevant. You have to have invested money in marketing to acquire that customer base. And so now we're at this really exciting point in our journey where there's immense untapped value that will be realized through our product road map and additional capabilities that we'll be bringing to market.

Thanks, Jeff. Moving to the U.K. next, and it's great to have Malin on the team here with us. First question is U.K. growth levels in consumer have been behind the U.S. for some time. With the new launches and the product launches, which Edu talked about, can U.K. consumer grow as fast as the U.S. consumer businesses?

Thank you, James, for the question. I think we are very confident around the products that Edu talked to that we have launched and our quite unique position in the market, where we're now able to blend what we're doing for our consumers and a clear positioning with our lender panel.

And as you've seen, our growth is now much stronger than over the previous years. So we have good confidence that we can continue this growth, and it's one of the key drivers for the future for the U.K.

And I think a fairly regular topic of discussion for investors is on U.K. margins. It'd be great to hear your views. Maybe if we start off with how margins have sort of got to where they are now, having fallen over quite a long period of time. And then how they recover, do they recover to their prior levels? And from what we've just heard on the consumer side as well, how big a role does the B2C business play as part of that recovery?

Yes. I think as you've seen, margins have also started to improve now in the U.K., and we're looking to continue this gradual improvement over the coming period, coming years. Firstly, though, we're going through a technology transformation, and that will continue to put some pressure on the margin for a few years.

So we're upgrading our infrastructure to cloud, and we're modernizing the entire estate. That will give some benefits starting in a couple of years already. So gradually during this period, we'll see benefits, but it also requires some investments. But on top of that, we're driving margin improvement through a variety of areas. So yes, firstly, with the ECS momentum, the direct-to-consumer momentum that Edu talked through and scaling our unique market position there.

We're really trying to drive our unique differentiation here towards the consumers and lenders and increasing our market share as we are currently doing as well as expanding into new areas like debt management and fraud protection. The second area more back to Lloyd's point in the introduction. We are thoroughly leveraging gen AI and new technologies to improve productivity throughout the organization. You heard about it also in Edu's speech and in Keith, what we're doing with our product assistance, what we're doing in marketing with campaigns targeting, content generation and also through the engineering excellence and customer service. So leveraging AI is a clear component of margin improvement over the coming years.

Thirdly, I would also mention further growth through scaling of our new products that we've invested to. So we just talked about Sandbox here with Keith. And although we're just at the start of the journey here with the Sandbox in the U.K. market, we are seeing solid progress in rolling this out, and we're expecting an acceleration across our client base in the coming years. So new products like this will contribute to our clear margin improvement over the coming years.

We're now shifting to Brazil, and there's quite a few questions on the consumer segment there. Pedro, can you first give us a bit more color on what is within the Serasa Pass products you mentioned?

Serasa Pass is the perfect combination -- sorry. Okay. Serasa Pass is the perfect combination between ECS business unit and our ID and fraud business unit. This product is related with 3 verticals. The first vertical is an authentication provider for our users. So any user of ECS Brazil is going to be able to log in, in other digital properties using their Serasa onboarding.

The second vertical is related to a credential provider. So we're going to help the B2B with credentials to avoid fraud. So they can use both solutions or they can choose which solution they can adapt to their digital properties. And the third vertical is related to payments.

So it's not only to be used on digital properties, but also in the physical spaces when I talk about payments. So it's a 3-site business. First one, totally focused on consumers, the second part, totally focused on the B2B and on the payments side, merging B2B, B2C and all our user database and all our anti-fraud capabilities.

Is it part of the premium offering? Or do you monetize it in a different way?

No, it's totally -- sorry. Hold a second -- okay. No, it's just -- it's a freemium feature. So our users, they can use the Serasa Pass totally free and the B2B commissions with a fee and the credential provider is the same. When a user is logging in some digital property, we receive a commission fee from the B2B side, not from the consumer.

Okay. There's a question on the broader subscription business or the sort of premium business within Brazil as well. I think the business at the moment, it's a bit more transactional than what the U.S. or U.K. looks like?

Subscription business.

How do you see that subscription base?

I'm not hearing you. Okay. [indiscernible] sort of subscription. Hello. Okay. I'm back.

The question is just broadly how you expect the subscription business...

Actually, our main focus is going to be always the marketplaces. Why? Because as I mentioned in my presentation, the biggest problems in Brazil are related to credit and debt. So we have 2 powerful marketplaces. But we have 600,000 premium memberships. We are investing a lot in this product. In the last quarter-over-quarter, we grew 60% in new subscribers. We have a stable churn of around 7%.

And I'm optimistic that by the end of the next fiscal year, we're going to be reaching something around 1 million subscribers. But we have to understand that in Brazil, protection is not necessarily a priority for consumers because, as I mentioned, we have bigger problems to solve. And we depend that the Brazilian average income improve to scale this product. Today, we are bundling the monitoring features with stand-alone insurance coverage, creating new offers and this strategy is working well. So we are really confident that we can increase this subscribers database, but our main focus is going to keep on the marketplace.

James, maybe I'll add here. I think one of the great strengths of the consumer business is its breadth of different things we can do to help consumers. And if you look back in the history, clearly, the U.S. and the U.K. business, its anchor, its entry point was a subscription business around the credit score.

Brazil was in a very different place. It didn't really have a concept of a credit score, but it did have the concept of being negativated in the market. So the anchor product for consumers from which we then broaden out was Limpa Nome, Clear Name. So that's really the strength and depth of the relationship that we developed in the consumer business in Brazil, that we're now spreading out into all of these other verticals. And it's a really strong base, but it's a different base than we have in our other businesses.

That's very clear. There was a stat in the slides as well, which said that 70% of vehicles aren't insured in Brazil. And I think you're rolling out the insurance marketplace in 2026. Could you -- I think just try to help us understand the scale of that market? I mean we've seen insurance marketplace in the U.S. grow very, very rapidly. Is this a business in Brazil, which could also scale very quickly, do you think?

Yes. First and foremost, it's important to clarify that in Brazil, the consumer, they are not obligated to have an auto loan insurance coverage, for example. And they have some -- the B2B faced some hard time to price correctly insurance. We had also cultural issues that we had that low coverage, low penetration in insurance coverage.

Our goal is on one side, help the B2B insurance carriers to price correctly the insurance coverage using our data. And at the same time, using our database of consumers, 100 million consumers, to spread out the concept and the insurance coverage in a very seamless journey to acquire insurance.

So the strategy is pretty the same of the U.S. put the insurance into our -- together with our 2 marketplaces, disrupt the sector in Brazil in terms of scaling, in terms of sales -- but at the same time, offer microinsurance and small assistance to the low-income consumers in that. That's the strategy, and we're going to launch in the fourth quarter in the insurance marketplace. And we are really, really eager to launch that because we are optimistic to offer a new good solution for the market.

Valdemir, if I can ask you a question as well, more on the B2B side, and I think this is more of a macro question as well. The LatAm business in the past, it's grown at double digits, I think, over a variety of economic conditions and clearly, now that's slowed down.

So across the different B2B businesses you have in Brazil, I mean that's the range of your products, agriculture, SME, IDF, et cetera. Which parts of those would you say are still growing pretty nicely sort of on plan and which ones have slowed down? And what's your take on the overall sort of macro situation in Brazil at the moment?

Sure, James. Of course, the economic and political landscape is not helping right now. But if you take a broader view of what we are doing here, and you can see the flywheel working perfectly here with the B2B benefiting from the ecosystem created with the B2C, which give us unique and contributed data for our total B2B.

So if you look at also the recent acquisitions, for instance, ClearSale is bringing unique and exclusive data for us. And that allows us to create this flywheel where we have a differentiation in assets, you have the analytics superiority and we have the platform. All of that allows us to put a very strong value proposition in the market. When you look at what is working right now and what is a little bit behind what we plan, of course, the core credit solution is a little bit behind, but our SMBs is growing nicely, double digit.

Now fraud is also growing double-digit. Now we recovered from a slow start in the last fiscal year, but now we are growing double-digit. All the rest of the portfolio is growing either high single digit or double digit. And we see a way to recover in the core credit solution in the coming quarters.

Then we move on to Ascend and the presentation there. Alex and/or Keith, 4x provisioned client solutions growth in 2 years, I think. Can you give us some indication of how that would translate into revenue growth?

Maybe I'll start and address it as follows. What's exciting about Ascend is watching the number of clients grow and then within the clients, watching the number of users grow. And yes, we do charge for additional users over sort of the base thresholds that they initially contract with.

So we have this sort of flywheel effect of we're adding clients and in existing clients, we're adding to the number of users that are actually utilizing the product. I know that our competition talks a lot about building competitive products. And what delights me most is when I hear that clients who pay high millions of dollars and fees for the combination of what they use on Ascend, the number of users they have, sometimes it's multinational clients and our competition coming and offering their product for free instead. And our clients say, no, thank you. We're going to stick and continue to pay Experian what they're charging because your product is inferior. So I really like it.

On the cost side, maybe just to state the obvious, this is a software product. So after the initial platform development cost, onboarding additional users or increasing the number of transactions, which is another phenomenon that benefits our revenue growth is relatively inexpensive. We don't have large incremental cost for new users or additional transactions. So that gives us high operating leverage.

Revenue grows much faster than costs, leading to, I would say, attractive margins at scale. So the revenue model specifically, we have transaction fees. It's -- let me start with, it's a subscription model. So they first have to pay a subscription. And then on top of that, we have per-user fees and transaction fees that add to that. Yes. Maybe I'll leave it there. The more complementary products we add, the higher the switching cost for the client.

So I don't recall in the last 12 months, any client leaving. I don't see any such risk. I don't see our sales team saying that because it's actually the opposite. The more we add in functionality like Keith described, the stickier it becomes. Users sort of become locked in because of the reputation of what they can do with this system being part of how they're viewed internally and the integration and the cumulative history in the platform makes it very, very sticky.

Across the range of modules and sort of capabilities within Ascend, what would you say are experienced most sort of established positions where you've got the highest market share already? And then which sort of modules or which areas across the chain would you have the lowest market share and sort of most potential to expand into incrementally?

Okay. I'm not sure I understand the question. I'll try to answer it and Keith and Lloyd can chime in. Let me start with geography. We have the strongest market share with the large household name pedigree type of banks in the United States. And we have -- before, we have published sort of the statistics of how many of the top 20, how many of the top 25, how many of the top 50 financial institutions in the U.S. use Ascend, and we have a very, very high market share there.

So that would answer the geographic question. As Malin has said, in the U.K., we are on the same path. In that path, not as far progressed, but virtually any large bank in the U.K. is now discussing Ascend with us if they haven't already signed up. Maybe that's a good way to state it.

So it is a solution that resonates with top-tier banks. Keith and his team now have -- are testing concepts of bringing some of the benefits of Ascend to, I'm going to call it, the market below those household name banks. And that's where we would currently have not as strong of a position and it is some of our growth potential.

If I try to answer the question in terms of functionality, initially, Ascend started out, and we've demonstrated that at this event a couple of times with this idea of the users being able to access multiple data sources. That certainly includes the data they buy from Experian, and it can be our traditional bureau data, it can be alternative finance data, it can be our consumer permission data. It doesn't matter what they buy. It also includes their own accounts data, and it also includes third-party data.

And what we have perfected maybe better than the competition is to be able to pin that data so they can run analysis across their various data sets, which previously the banks had to solve themselves. And we have automated that makes it very convenient, makes it very low cost, makes it very quick for them once they load the data into Sandbox. We have also then put an analytics layer over that, that makes the analytics less tedious, less time-consuming, less costly to run.

And that is really the bread and butter of Ascend until this day. Now after that, we added those functionalities that Keith talked about. Maybe the most important step a couple of years ago was we added this thing called Ascend Ops, which allows the analytics that were run to be put into production at the client seamlessly. Seamlessly, meaning the analytics that were developed in the -- by the data scientists in the financial institution, they were usually developed in a language that mathematicians usually use.

That happens to not be the same language that the IT department means that needs to put the models into production so that clients can apply or the loan officers in a bank branch can use their system. So it required a handover, translation, errors occurred. It was time-consuming, et cetera, et cetera, and we have automated that step.

That, I think, was the biggest leap forward a couple of years ago. And now as Keith has described really well, we have a full integration across these 4 functions of running the analytics, applying it for decisioning, so credit approvals or not, applying it for fraud and applying it for all regulatory needs and so the automatic generation of the regulatory documentation. Those are the fast-growing revenue parts of Ascend, but they're coming from a smaller base. So the percentages look great, but it's a smaller base than what we've always had, which is this analytics core of Ascend. I hope that answers the question. if it didn't, Keith or Lloyd...

Yes, Alex, maybe I'll add in. I think -- I guess you framed the question, James, on market share. I think we think of it in terms of penetration. So Ascend is a new category of platform. If you think about the journey, and Keith had it in one of his slides, the journey of a consumer from a nascent opportunity in the environment to being found through a marketing campaign, onboarded, assessed, decisioned, assessed for fraud, et cetera, all the way through to closing.

All of those jobs to be done historically have been independent value pools, often using bespoke in-house systems within a financial institution. There has been no integrated end-to-end platform across fraud, data decisioning and analytics that has helped the journey of that consumer through a bank. That's what Ascend is doing. So what we're thinking about is what's our penetration of each of those steps of the journey with each of our clients.

And over time, and you saw it clearly in Keith's example with one big financial institution, hey, you start with one product and all of a sudden, you cross-sell into other areas. And then what really happens as it does with all platforms is the value case starts to shift. It shifts from the value case of the Ascend Sandbox or Ascend Ops or fraud to the integration between them.

And that's where really then you deploy the power. And you also know at that point, you become very, very embedded in servicing your clients. And the key signal that we're seeing from clients that tells us we're making progress here is the shift in our most mature, most embedded clients to long-term strategic partnerships, where they're shifting from 3 years to 5 years to 10 years in their partnership agreements with us.

That says they understand that journey of an enterprise platform and they're partnering with us to implement it. So that's really how we think, but it's a unique category-defining new category of platform that we're delivering.

The next sort of set of questions we have are a bit more general in nature. I think Lloyd, the first one is for you, and it's more risk-oriented. It's how do you monitor the increasing risk of data leakage? I think that's referencing how do you talk about protection you have from a potential cyber-attack?

Yes. I think, look, we have huge data assets, and we take the responsibility of that really seriously. It's the thing that Brian and I and most of the leaders on this call spend more time on than any other single thing in our day-to-day jobs. And that means you have to really quite deeply understand the technology assets that we deploy and how they interact with the products and the data that we have in the business.

And we have a lot of defense in depth. We deploy a lot of the best talent in the world inside the company on our defense. And it takes a lot of our time. And I think as you see the deployment of artificial intelligence in our tools for our clients, that's also being deployed, we know as an attack vector into companies. So investment, talent and attention, those are the 3 things that I think have always served us well and will continue to.

Jeff, I think a question for you here as well. I'd be interested in your thoughts on how employment data or if employment data can enhance the core credit file. I think Equifax is looking to this with TWN, but appreciate your views on that topic.

Sure. Well, of course, I think it's helpful to frame back to what do we think about when we consider our core credit file and the enhancements that we can make. First and foremost, I'd say this continues to be a focal area for us. And we prioritize what our clients ask for. They ask for data usability. They ask for coverage increase, and they ask for signal strength.

And I think if you look at our history of innovation in and around the space, you'd see a lot of rich and important tactics. Products like Experian Boost have added millions of incremental trade lines that simply don't exist anywhere else in the credit ecosystem. So we see significant potential to add additional value to our core profiles. And there are several areas of focus in development against that.

Now back to the Equifax point, I think first and foremost, I'd say employment alone isn't enough to change the market dynamic. And we've heard directly from our clients that they have limited interest in this offering. I think it's also important to highlight, we do operate an employment and verification services business from a challenger perspective. And so that allows us to evaluate more disruptive approaches to cover the core need should it arise across our clients in a unique way.

Lloyd, this is on the topic of AI, but it's, I think, a more common investor question that crops up. And it's around the data you have -- the data Experian has across the organization and to what extent it's proprietary versus obtainable by third parties or just behind paywalls or available on the Internet?

Yes. Look, I think you can see, if you look across the history of our business, we've been investing materially in building new and unique data sources and the vast majority of our data is unique. And a good example of that would be the deployment of Experian Boost. We were first to market with an opportunity for consumers to be able to contribute data directly from their checking accounts from their bank current accounts and to use that to help them in their financial lives.

So an absolutely unique way of contributing that into the core credit file. That's one example, but there are many others. If you look in our fraud business, Valdemir talked about the acquisition of ClearSale, ClearSale has unique access to 70% of the digital transactions in Brazil that we're able to leverage along with all of our other unique data assets to identify fraud.

If you think about AI and its potential and if you think about what we do as a company, clearly, acquiring data and finding value, hidden value in that data and then distributing that through software products and platforms to our clients is our value proposition. What AI should do is be able to speed up the ability to find that hidden value and to productize it.

So we're very optimistic about the potential for artificial intelligence in our business. We're also very mindful that we have to protect our data and make sure that we're -- it's only us that's able to find that value on our bespoke data sets. And we're also really thoughtful around the regulatory restrictions around how AI is used. But we've been using machine learning for more than a decade. So this is just a natural extension for us.

Maybe to build on what Lloyd said, in addition to proprietary data, we do build our own large language models and small language models. Of course, we'll leverage what's available publicly, but we do build our own models.

And I mean, Lloyd, coming back on that AI point as well. I mean the word payback is often questioned when it comes to AI because it can be very costly as well. From the applications you've got within the business so far, be it aimed towards revenue generation or even cost savings, I think Malin touched on as well, do these innovations look like pretty high payback opportunities for you?

I think you've got multiple opportunities for the deployment of artificial intelligence. And remember that we've been deploying machine learning for more than a decade. But I think if you think of the internal use cases, clearly, the ability to make internal tasks much more productive and efficient is a real near-term opportunity.

Where 2 big value pools that we're attacking. One is customer support and the ability to use generative AI to be able to support the customer inquiry process. And the second is in code development and code deployment is a very rapid pace of tooling that's enabling code development and deployment to be automated through generative AI. And we've been deploying all of those tools inside the company.

If you then think about product, I think you've got a few different generations and types of use case, increasing engagement with clients, increasing value and retention with clients in where value is indirect rather than direct is where the majority of our focus is today. So EVA is a free tool, for example. Inside Ascend, we've deployed an assistant to be able to improve analytics. That's a free tool inside the Ascend license fee.

So the majority of our deployment today is indirect revenue generation. Clearly, there may be opportunities for direct generation. But if you tie all of that together and you look at our returns on capital, you can see we've been delivering consistently very strong returns on capital, 16% to 17% post-tax, consistently high over the last 5 to 6 years. And that shows you that we're able to generate cash and redeploy it and still generate very high returns.

That's very clear. I think -- I mean, in many of these forms in prior years, we've touched on the integration between B2C and B2B. But I think one of my takeaways from the presentations we've had so far is it's perhaps quite a bit clearer how B2B can help B2C and vice versa.

So I mean I'll sort of open the floor just on that topic to Lloyds and Jeff and to anyone else, just invite you to give your thoughts of more examples across the business of how B2B plus B2C together is driving incremental value and Experian.

Look, I think I'll kind of lead off here. I think if you think about the uniqueness of our strategy from a number of years ago where we really talked about the access to the consumer and the value that we can provide and how that was reinforcing of our positioning with our B2B clients.

I think what you're seeing across these sorts of presentations is the execution momentum against that strategy is really now accelerating. You're seeing the breadth of individual use cases that we're able to bring that strategy to bear is increasing.

Insurance, I think, is a great example, and maybe I'll pass on to Dacy to be able to talk about the insurance value pool that we've opened up uniquely because we have a B2B auto business and direct access to 80 million consumers. But you've also heard from Brazil that we've now taken that opportunity from North America and applying it into Brazil. But Dacy, maybe kick that off.

Yes. It is one of the interesting and bright spots within our marketplace. And going back to what we were talking about of expanding what we stand for consumers, insurance was a really great way to meet a need for consumers. I think you heard Jeff and Lloyd talk about how do we address the various needs, states and expansion within our possibilities of what we do for consumers.

We saw that as an opportunity. As we take a look at the auto data within our auto B2B business unit, we can take that data and understand the vehicle for every consumer. And that allows us to engage with consumers in a really great way. And then I also love how we've been able to really innovate in this area and introduce something called rate monitoring.

And so again, these value pools of bringing really great innovation into consumers' lives and then being able to unlock that opportunity within our ecosystem, it's been extremely valuable. And it's a great example of how we expand the value pools, engage with our data and then provide value.

If a similar example in Brazil. So maybe Valdemir, if you think about why would a consumer pay a debt, whether it be utility debt or some other debt on our platform, Well, the integration with the bureau so that, that debt payment is instantly updated on the credit file is a great example of something unique to us. And Valdemir, maybe touch on that.

You touched on right. By paying a debt in the Limpa Nome, we can upgrade the credit score immediately and not only put that in the consumer hands, but also distribute that to our B2B system, putting those consumers back to credit. And also that same consumer can get credit to our marketplace with the eCred solution that we have in there.

So it's the combination that make us so unique here in Brazil. Another thing that is quite relevant, we are close to 100 million consumers connected to our platform right now. And as you imagine, consented data can really bring us the uniqueness of the assets and the data assets that we have. So having that connection also strength our capability in the credit arena with unique and consented data that only us can have in the market. So it's the perfect flywheel and it's working really good here in Brazil.

And maybe to complete the TRIAD, you saw the example of ReFi in the U.K., a unique example where because of the integration between a consumer access and all the understanding of the consumer and the bureau, we are able to integrate a refinancing proposition where the original debts are -- we coordinate the paydown of those debts, and we can consolidate the debt and provide something, again, totally unique in the market. Maybe, Edu, you could touch on that.

Yes, sure. So as you mentioned, Lloyd, the -- I think the richness of the bureau data in the U.K. really allows us to do much more for consumers. We have a very good granularity in terms of current accounts, credit card, debit cards, et cetera, in the bureau.

When you leverage that to be proactive on recommending that consumers can have a better deal and you still have -- and you also have the capability to execute that. I think that's where the power is. So the ReFi capability you mentioned is exactly that. We leverage the insights from the bureau about current existing debt lines for consumers.

We also leverage the data and insights we have about those consumers, including their eligibility, so things they could be approved for. And when you connect those things, I think the piece that potentially would be missing is the convenience and the seamless journey. And now we are also doing that.

So we allow the consumer to digitally do that journey, have peace of mind that the accounts will be closed. But also as you saw in that video, you allow them to have one unique payment and reduce the risk for the lender. So that's what the ReFi capability allows us to do.

And I think the final question, which is, I think, probably appropriate to close it all off as well. Just to pull it back to group organic growth. The business is doing 8% as it stands at the moment. Is the business capable of far more than that?

Look, I think what you've seen from the business over recent years is we really have reinvented Experian, where I started the discussion is we have an ambition for this business to deliver ever stronger rates of growth.

And if you look back at where this last 5 years where we've been growing despite not the best external environment, you see we've been able to grow high single, low double digit across all of the financial metrics, delivered very strong returns on capital without any material macro help. The value pools that we're opening up, you can see the momentum in execution across the presentations today.

So we absolutely do have an ambition for higher growth. Hopefully, you can see it and feel it in the presentations from all of the team today. We laid out our midterm framework 18 months ago. You saw that we delivered or exceeded on that in the first year, delivering or exceeding on it in the second-year guidance, and we have a very confident outlook across the business, actually. And I think some of the presentations today really start to bring home the expanding potential of the business, hopefully.

That concludes our Q&A session today and brings us to the end of the overall sessions we've had with Experian. I want to extend a huge thank you to the Experian team. It's obvious a lot of work goes into the presentations and the material, and it's also a lot of collective hours given from senior leadership to us. Thank you to you also for attending today's session, but I'll hand over to Lloyd to close this out.

Super thanks. Thanks, James. And I pass my thanks also to my colleagues for all their help and support in pulling this together. This session is a really important opportunity for us to shine a light on some of our propositions and how they've been developed and how -- and the increasing momentum with which they're developing in the market.

I think hopefully, what you can continue to see is the pace of execution and the breadth of execution and opportunity is increasing. And I look forward to being back again next year and telling the story again, hopefully, with the same colleagues around that we can shine a light on the success of the business. So I appreciate your attention today, and thanks for attending.

So good afternoon to those in Europe, and good morning to those in the States. I'm Ryan Flight. I'm an analyst here at Jefferies covering Experian. And I'm really pleased to be joined by Lloyd Pitchford, today's CFO of Experian.

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Okay. So with that done, Lloyd, will be focusing very much on the kind of longer-term structural growth of Experian here today. But given the timing of this call before we get kicked off, I wondered if you could give us an intro and a brief overview of Q1 results.

Yes, sure. Thanks, Ryan, and good morning, afternoon, everyone. I appreciate the time today. We reported first quarter results earlier this week against the backdrop of the guide for the year of 6% to 8% organic growth. 3% inorganic growth on top and 30 to 50 basis points margin progression. That was the guide for the year. And the first quarter, we started well with 8% organic growth and 4% inorganic growth on top, so 12% revenue growth in total. So a good start to the year. No change to our full year guidance, but a bit above where we expected to be in the first quarter, particularly on strength in 2 areas. One is North America B2B Financial Services. And the second is Consumer Services across the globe, actually. I'll touch on both.

So North America Financial Services has been on an improving trend. I think what we saw in Q1 was a couple of things, a very strong mortgage results on the back of strong price. We saw some improvement in underlying activity levels, modest improvement, but it was noticeable. And I think that really reflects what you've seen in sentiment from the big U.S. banks when they've reported their results this week. And we also saw a really strong set of one-off software and analytics sales in the quarter that doesn't necessarily repeat, but that gets us off to a good start.

And then our consumer business everywhere, particularly our direct-to-consumer marketplace businesses grew very well. So we saw very strong growth in our Brazil direct-to-consumer business. That was up over 20% -- in the U.K., our direct-to-consumer business was double digits. And excluding our data breach business, which is a bit lumpy, we saw double-digit growth in the North America consumer business. So I think that really -- particularly the strength of marketplace shows, I think, some good underlying signs around the robustness of consumer credit despite some of the uncertainty in the backdrop. So good start to the year and particularly delivering high single-digit organic growth in a backdrop of uncertainty, I think, shows the resilience and the strength of the portfolio that we've put together.

Super. So I guess zooming out a little bit here to more of the structural -- thinking more structurally and long term. It's very clear that Experian has kind of evolved far beyond the credit bureau and we think analytics, autos, health, B2C. But I think that to me, the common theme across all of them is this data-enabled platform strategy that you employ across all of the different areas. So I think that's a good way to start this conversation, if you could paint a picture of this strategy, where we are in the story, how you built the platforms and what that enables you to do going forward?

Yes. So looking back to look forward a little bit, just picking up on your point. If you think at our core, what is it that we do? We acquire data sets and we mine and find value in those data sets. Now the heritage of that was the credit bureau. So what did we have? We had all of aggregated credit data and the insight and value we found was an ability to assess risk on lending. That's at heart what the credit score is. What we've done over the last 20 years is we built a portfolio of businesses that essentially do the same thing, but in lots of different ecosystems. And increasingly, those products and those insights that provide value are being delivered through connected platforms. And I'll talk maybe a little bit more about that. But the theme across them all really is that one of aggregating data and mining value through the delivery of product.

Today, we do that principally in 5 ecosystems. Financial services, which is our heritage, but it's much broader than just credit of all that includes things like fraud and decisioning and customer acquisition, using our data to help our financial services clients. We have quite a big health care business that supports hospitals and physician practices in assuring who should pay for treatment. In the U.S.A., it's a very big ecosystem, health ecosystem, a multi-payer, multi-provider market. It's very difficult to understand who pays for a treatment with lots of different coverage models.

We do it in the auto business, again, globally here where we support the auto dealer network in all aspects of managing their business from acquiring customers to providing credit to understanding the value of a car, et cetera. In the ad tech world, where you've seen as we've moved from linear TV to connected TV and digital marketing, you've seen data used to ever enrich data sets that can help connect content to audiences. So much more segmented audiences using data connected to much more segmented content. And obviously, we have a lot of data that we can enrich through that.

And then lastly, in the direct-to-consumer business, where, as you've seen, we've built one of the world's largest direct-to-consumer businesses in the financial arena with over 200 million members. And as those ecosystems have grown, what you're seeing is the connection of products in integrated propositions. So in financial services, for example, not just the provision of a credit score, but the creation of a credit model that can help determine who you should and shouldn't trust for credit. The creation of a fraud model to understand is an applicant, a fraudulent applicant or not.

The monitoring systems that can monitor the efficacy of those models and the successfulness of them going forward, the decisioning systems that deploy them in an application process. All of these are being connected into integrated workflows, and that's really the strategy of the company. And as we press out into the white space, most of our growth comes from doing new things for clients that automate manual tasks inside the company or that help them do things better, so spot fraud in a more successful way by using data and analytics. So that's really how we create value as a company.

That's super. And that leads into what I wanted to touch on next. So when we think about the white space, new products, new verticals, so forth and kind of using that platform to do new things for clients, it's clear that, I guess, innovation is absolutely key for this business. So I wondered if you could touch on before we dive into the 3 different business areas, at a group level, how do you -- how do you manage this? How do you put people in place, the culture, the systems to support this kind of innovation going forward?

So at a leadership level, we focus on 4 big enablers in the company. So the first is data. So you have to have access to the raw material to be able to do this. So acquiring the largest, most bespoke data sets possible. And in the long run, we think the deepest, richest source of data is controlled by the consumer themselves. So why do we have a direct-to-consumer business? Ultimately, because it gives us the case through a relationship with the consumer for them to consent the data that for us to use to provide value back to them. That's a really important differentiator for us. So gain access to the largest, most bespoke data sets, put it on the best technology. So we've been -- had a program of shifting to the cloud and deploying generative AI and other machine learning on top of that data. That's a really important piece of how we create value.

To do that well, you have to have the best talent. So -- and to do that, you have to have a culture of innovation, which is the fourth one. And these last 2 are really important to our proposition. So we've been working really hard for more than a decade to create an innovative technology culture in the company, and we were thrilled this last year to be ranked #14 out of over 20,000 companies globally in the Great Place to Work survey, top 25 global company ranked by all of our employees. And that's a testament to the culture that we're creating.

And when you put all of that together, what you're asking people to do is to be able to mine that hidden value in the data sets we have and to deploy it in a way for clients that quickly adds value and proves itself. As I say, mostly when we're innovating into new areas, what we're doing is saving the client money. We're either avoiding fraud, avoiding risk or we're displacing internal labor through automation.

Super. So if we now dive into kind of the 3 different business areas, business activities, starting with financial services, as you say, it's evolved quite a lot. I wondered if you could really give us some background on the platform there, the different products you've got at the moment, the product pipeline, competitive edge and how it all integrates together.

Yes. So we think about the flow of the consumer through financial services. So first of all, you have to try and find somebody in the environment. So we have a lot of origination type products that try and help our clients understand consumers and pitch offers to them and find them in the digital ecosystem. Obviously, we match that to our direct-to-consumer business. We have a lot of data that can help assess risk. So if you think of what a credit report and credit history and the analytics around it does, it tries to price risk. Is this somebody I should give money to with the trust to get it back. That's where we came from as a business.

But if you think about to deploy that in a credit decision, you need lots of other things. You need a credit policy. So what level of risk optimizes my profit. And to do that, you get to run lots of analytics and back testing. And this is where the Ascend platform in the company was born. And it started with what we call an Ascend Sandbox.

Traditionally, the way the banks will try and decide what their credit policy was and credit policy as in at what level of risk will I grant credit is to use sample data -- historic sample data to try and test -- back test what the right level of profit is. With Ascend, what we did was, we deployed the capability for every credit item and transaction for everybody in the U.S. for more than 20 years and all of the analytics and predictability around that to be deployed for clients.

What that enabled us to do was to do things like show a client the prospective customers that they had acquired and then reject it because their credit score wasn't high enough, but showing them exactly where those customers went for credit when they rejected them and exactly how profitable or risky those clients turned out to be. And that allows clients to back test and make a much more effective credit score. That was our Ascend platform.

We quickly deployed that in over 20 of the top 25 financial institutions. We then extended it into new areas. If you have a credit policy, you need to deploy it and monitor it, and we have a product called Ascend Ops that deploys that credit policy and monitors it. You then get to do the same with fraud, different data sets, but you're trying to assess fraud risk. We have a Fraud Sandbox, Ascend Fraud Sandbox does the same.

So if you think about what we're doing is there are lots of different analytics and data pools in managing a consumer as they're acquired all the way through a relationship with a bank. Those are becoming modules on the Ascend platform that are integrated in a way that supports our clients to optimize their performance. And we're really at the early stages of that. And think of the journey that it is very similar to a CRM system for a financial services organization, and you build it module by module over time.

Great. And, I guess, you've become increasingly embedded in your kind of partner relationships with these financial institutions. Could you -- I remember speaking to you before when we spoke about the breadth of products you're currently selling and then maybe touch on where the runway is and the growth prospects there.

Yes. So we are obviously one of the leading data providers as a historic credit bureau. If you looked at decisioning systems that make the credit decision, our main competitor there would be somebody like FICO, not a credit bureau, FICO. If you look at fraud systems, our main competitor would probably be somebody like LexisNexus inside RELX. So our strategy actually is to be the only company that can provide that connected breadth across the workflow of a consumer. And the other thing that really matters here is then how you embed that in the human capital of a bank?

We all know you get used to using platforms and you get used to knowing how to use them because you've used them a lot. And once you're embedded in the human capital as well as the financial capital of a customer, you become very sticky. And that's what we're trying to do with the development of our platform strategy. And of course, for clients that don't have a product, we're trying to sell them our first product. If they've got one, we're trying to sell them the second and over time, cross-sell into this connected platform.

That's brilliant on financial services. And now moving on to the kind of second big business area, that's B2B, the new verticals. So we think in autos, health, digital marketing, et cetera. Could you maybe talk about how you've built these businesses, where you have a competitive edge and maybe why you entered those markets and what would make you enter another market going forward?

Yes. So when we look at new areas, what we're looking for is a dynamic of an area that's complex and underpenetrated with data. So if I take health care, I think we all know as consumers, we live our normal digital life where you can do things digitally. And then all of a sudden, you meet the health care system, and it feels like you're stepping back 100 years. You have to fill in a form. You have to do things manually. You have to speak to somebody. So the health care system is inefficient and underpenetrated with data. And it's very complex in the U.S. where you have multipayer multi-providers. So the question of who pays is a really complex task.

So we obviously have a lot of data that's relevant through the credit bureau, particularly around identity. If you think about one of the core things you try and do when somebody comes into a hospital is identify them and to prove that they are who they say they are. Well, that's the same as the start of a financial journey. So we have something that we can start from. In the health care business, we made a couple of small acquisitions to prove our way, and then we made a large acquisition more than a decade ago. And we've been growing that business very, very well. It grows very consistently, high single digit, low double digit organically plus acquisitions. It's a very high 40s EBITDA margin and has a lot of runway for growth.

And probably the best closest separately listed competitor is Waystar. That's now a separately listed company in that area. But the dynamics are exactly the same, managing huge data sets to try and find value in a complex ecosystem that's digitizing. In ad tech -- maybe I'll do auto first. In auto, we again lent on our credit heritage to be able to support the provision of credit at the point of sale for a car. What we've now done is really spread out a whole series of analytics that can help value cars, it can help find customers for the cars.

In North America, you have a very local dealer network. What we can provide them with rather than very manual history of understanding what their market is, we can tell them if you're a Mercedes dealer in Michigan, North Michigan maybe, we can tell you there are exactly 6,240 Mercedes in your area. And 450 of them come up for finance renewal in the next month.

Actually, there are also 6,200 BMW owners and the propensity of a BMW owner to switch to a Mercedes owner is exactly this in your area. So you can see how you can use data to really help them find new customers. And that's auto. And the new auto business, if you look at new car sales in North America, they've been flat for 20 years. Our auto business has grown double digit for 20 years. So the secular growth of ever more uses of data is what drives that business, not volume.

Our ad tech business, we all know 30 years ago, we all watch the same adverts. And what you're seeing as things have moved ever more digital is the segmenting of audiences and matching it to segmented content. And you do that through leveraging data. And we obviously have a lot of data that can help content to find audience. And if you can do that with certainty rather than having to try and sell a new lawnmower to the whole of the U.K., maybe only people with gardens would be interesting or maybe only people with gardens who didn't just buy a lawnmower in the last 3 months, for example.

That is much more valuable than the audience of the entire U.K. And as you're seeing those audience segment, our ad tech business has grown. We help connected TV in making the ads you see on your connected TV different to mine as an example. If you're looking on The Economist or [indiscernible] the ads you see are different and they'll be different because we've helped create the match of content to audience there. So what you can see actually is a really burgeoning business that takes data sets in different ecosystems and finds new value through product creation on top.

That's super. It's proof of that leveraging of your data assets in these new value pools is really interesting. I guess, moving on at this point to the third business area, which is B2C, really interesting area of the business and obviously pretty unique to Experian having it in-house with the rest of the B2B business. Could you give us some context there about the platform that you've built, your competitive edge, the scale, product offering. And I think what's really interesting here is this future runway of products that you have, I guess, lots of ability to roll out new products going forward.

Yes. So we've built a very sizable audience in our direct-to-consumer business now. So 5 years ago, we had very few members. We've now got over 200 million relationships members on our platforms in our largest markets. And that gives us an audience that we can now curate value for, sell product to and find different value in their data. And so the job of work to do is now shifting from build audience. We're still doing that, but to increase the number of SKUs, the things that we can do for those consumers.

So historically, you would have said understanding your credit position, your credit report and score would have been the core of our legacy offering. What we're migrating to is finding value for every consumer. They all have different need states. So if you think about people in your life, so for me, I have a young daughter, no credit. So she has to build credit capacity. So we're relevant to her in building credit capacity, and we have products that can help do that. My parents, my parents read all the wrong newspapers. They're mostly terrified all the time. They're not interested in credit, but they are interested in identity protection. So we have products and services that can help for that.

For me, services that can find the product and apply quickly by filling forms in and finding a way through the ecosystem. Those are really interesting for me. And finding different products for different consumers is where we're heading. And we now have a whole swath of products that can help people save money, can protect their identity, can manage credit and identity risk, et cetera. And that's the breadth. And if you develop a valuable consumer platform with high engagement, what happens as you grow is the cost of acquisition reduces because you're engaging a membership base and the lifetime value increases because your swath of content products increases. And that's the journey we're on.

And if you look at our direct-to-consumer business, over the last 5 years, as we've started to scale, you've seen a lot of growth. It's accretive to growth, but it's also very accretive to margin in terms of the growth. We've been adding about 100 basis points of margin each year in our direct-to-consumer business as it's reached this nice point of scaling. And we're using it to find some very unique new sources of value. And maybe I'll bring that to life with an example around car insurance in the U.S.

The U.S. car insurance market is mostly a broker and direct sell market. And what that means is the insurance carriers spend something like $12 billion a year acquiring new customers, top of funnel, filling the airwaves with brand advertising that they then seek to convert. And the reason they do that is they don't know who's shopping for car insurance. So you have to have quite a high funnel spend. What we did in our B2B business, we have the data on every car in the U.S., who owns it, when they bought it, all of that data set. There are only 2 of those data sets, and we've got one.

In our B2C business, we went out to consumers and gave them the chance to boost their credit score by finding in their bank account and insurance transaction. Insurance transactions are credit transactions. And if you can find them, they can boost your credit score. And millions of consumers gave us access to the bank account to find that transaction. So when we combine that, what that means is we know who you are, what car you drive, who your insurance provider is, how much you pay and when your renewal date is because we can see it in your transaction history.

And if you combine that together, the data assets, the insight you have is who's shopping for car insurance now and what might be a relevant offer? And you can see how that data asset when you go to the insurance providers can help quite radically improve the efficiency and conversion of that $12 billion of customer origination costs. That's an example of how we can find new value in the data sets we have and change the value creation of some of our clients. And we have lots of examples of that in our history.

That's brilliant. And I guess there's a long runway of new products you can now onboard now you've got the kind of platform in place and the scale in the audience. I guess, having touched on the 3 different business areas, if we can maybe zoom out a little bit and look geographically, Brazil has obviously been a fantastic market for you. Could you talk -- remind us of the kind of structural story there, a bit of a growth engine, what the kind of runway is going forward?

Yes. So a bit like my health care example, we look for businesses and countries and models that are underpenetrated with data. So when we entered Brazil about 12 years ago, a bit longer than that, actually, Brazil was what's known as a negative data market. So credit was assessed just by looking at who had failed to pay a debt. Most other countries are what's called a positive data market, which isn't you assess risk not just by have you failed, but what type of credit and what's your frequency of interacting. And obviously, there are more data points. The richness of data and positive data is an order of magnitude higher.

And what that meant for Brazil is it had high credit spreads. It was underpenetrated with data and credit. So if we could enter, then the direction of travel was more credit penetration and more data penetration and that secular growth would drive us forward. And so that's why we entered and that's what we've seen. Brazil has now shifted to a positive data market. We've used the richness of that data to enter new verticals around the credit bureau, so direct-to-consumer, fraud, agri payments, et cetera. And you've seen, in particular, we've built a very material direct-to-consumer business with very strong organic growth. It grew 24% in the first quarter. So that's really the dynamic of Brazil. There's some macro weakness in the B2B business just now that's holding back some of the cyclical growth. But overall, we think the medium to long-term growth in Brazil is very strong double digit.

Could you maybe -- you kind of touched on it there a little bit anyway, but I know in your most recent update, you mentioned India and some of the Southern European countries. Could you maybe talk about -- I know there's still a big runway in Brazil itself, but how you kind of manage these other geographies and keep an eye on them? And if at any point, you take a decision to kind of step up your efforts there?

Yes. So big 3 geographies are North America, U.K. and Brazil. We have a Spanish Latin America business, which is in Colombia, Peru, Chile and Panama. And then we have an EMEA/Asia Pacific business, which has core businesses in clusters of the ones you mentioned, so India, Australia, South Africa, Southern Europe, Northern Europe and Germany. And we actually withdrew from a number of subscale countries over the last 5 years to focus on the countries that we think we can scale.

So I think as we look forward, I think we're in the countries that we want to be in. So the journey from here is actually scaling in those countries and building out the full distribution channel for our products rather than geographic expansion. If a dual asset becomes available in another country, maybe we'd look at it. But I think it's more likely that we scale in the geographies that we're in. Some of those EMEA, Asia Pacific assets are very large long-term potential. India is the obvious example there where we've got a -- one of a small number of credit bureaus, and we have a fraud business there as well, which we think in the long term could be material. Today, it's relatively small.

That's super on geographies. So moving on to kind of the next topic area that I really wanted to talk about, which is M&A. So you seem to have kind of stepped up your kind of number of deals recently. So I wonder if you could talk about your strategy, what you look for, how they fit into the business and what they -- kind of what they bring to you?

Yes. So obviously, we're in a technology and high innovation area. So constantly scanning the environment for new technology, new business models that we can bring into the company is really, really important. Our first filter is strategy. So looking for things that complement our business and help us develop and distribute propositions. And then we look for some of the things I've been talking about. A business that has a data asset is really interesting to us because we feel we can mine value and create value on top of that data asset better than anyone.

So in this last year, 2 examples of that. We bought a business called ClearSale in Brazil. And what ClearSale has is a data asset of about 70% of every digital transaction in Brazil. So when you have that data asset, you're able to screen out fraudulent transactions much more effectively. You can find trends, you can see digital archetypes that are fraudulent. So that's a really interesting asset in Brazil.

In Australia and New Zealand, we bought a credit bureau where we have a credit bureau, and we can combine them and take a lot of cost synergies. And those are examples of data assets. The other example is where we've got distribution, where we have platforms and positions with clients, if we can buy an early-stage software company with product that we can tag on to our sales, obviously, we can add a lot of value through distribution to that IP. So 2 examples of businesses where we've done that -- this. The last year, we bought a business called NeuroID, which is a behavioral biometrics business that prevents fraud, tries to identify if you're a human or a bot. And we also bought a business called Audigent, which is in the digital ad tech space.

So those are some examples of what we look for. In terms of our screening strategy first, and we do 3 financial tests; post-tax, IRR, economic test. And we have hurdles based on business maturity risk and country risk. We screen on accounting return. So return on capital we try and target double-digit years 3 to 5. And then we screen on a benchmark to a share buyback. So those are our metrics. And if you look back, what we've seen, we don't set targets for M&A. What we do is we try to create value. So in the period shortly after COVID, what we saw was valuations were getting very peaky. So we pulled back from M&A a bit. They've moderated over the last 18 months. So last year, we deployed, including the first day of this financial year, about $1.6 billion of capital in areas where we've been watching for some time, and we thought we could create value.

That's brilliant. And I know that the M&A provides kind of growth runway fits into the group nicely, does have an EBIT margin headwind to the group, which leads nicely into the next topic because that is -- we now -- which we didn't really have historically with Experian, but we've now got this really nice structural EBIT margin expansion story even with the M&A kind of dilution. So I wonder if you could talk about how you're delivering that and the kind of story where we are and what we have going forward.

Yes. So if you go back over the last -- before last year, we were adding about 20 basis points of margin per year. So quite modest. One of the reasons for that was we were investing in our cloud program. And for anybody who's dealt with the cloud transition program, you build up dual run costs because you have 2 sets of infrastructure. So we've been progressing our margin modestly despite overcoming that growth in dual run costs. The progress we've made with the cloud transition means this time next year, those dual run costs start to abate. So last year, we changed our framework to be able to grow margin 30 to 50 basis points a year. And in the first year, we beat that.

So we grew organic margin by 90 basis points. That was offset by a bit of FX and a bit of acquisition dilution that you mentioned. This year, we've guided to 30 to 50 basis points. But acquisitions are dilutive by about 30. So organic margin is 60 to 90 -- sorry, 60 to 80 in that frame. So I think what you're seeing is the benefit of scale and the benefit of some of those technology program costs abating. And I think -- we think that gives us enough -- that framework gives us enough flexibility to make sure we're continuing to invest and innovate. But you see we've started very well in our -- against our medium-term framework.

Could you touch on a very hot topic, of course, AI, how you're using it in the business, how it may affect the business going forward and so forth?

Yes. So AI is really interesting for us. It's an extension of a trend we've had for some time, which is machine learning. And to bring it to life, we have something like 11,000 employees that are involved either in data science or technology or product development and product management. So people who are coding and building a product. So we have a really large talent base that are very involved in and interested in new technology and coding and the like. And so this is clearly super important for us. If you think about what AI can do in our business is this value creation of finding insights and data.

Well, AI can accelerate. It can find new insights in our huge data set. So it can accelerate the product development funnel. What it can also do is accelerate how product is developed. So it used to be if you were coding for a product, you had to code it line by line. Then you could get code repositories to reuse code or Copilot to draft code. With Vibe coding, you can now build whole products with artificial intelligence.

So the productivity in the product development life cycle is increasing markedly. Of course, what we are also offsetting that with is investment in AI in building our own LLMs that we can leverage on our bespoke data set. So there's a constant tension between those 2, between are we investing too much given productivity? And are we investing enough given technology change? And we have a very, very deep conversation about that regularly given the scale of technology change. But overall, AI is an accelerant for us.

Brilliant. And I think it's really interesting how it's been used in the B2C platform as kind of tailoring it to the individual. Lloyd, we've got a couple of minutes left. The last topic that I wanted to talk on just because it is quite lumpy and quite volatile is, what you do in the data breach area. So structurally, we're clearly seeing more and more data breaches. What exactly does Experian do in that business?

Yes. So this is our North America data breach business inside our Consumer Services business. And essentially, what it does is if you're a brand with a big consumer base and you suffer a data breach or a ransomware attack, one of the things you may choose to do is to provide the Experian identity protection service to all of your consumers to help them cope with the risk that they've seen. And what you find is it's lumpy. It's also bifurcating. You see some brands, high-value brands want to attach themselves to a high-value service like Experian.

So that's our target market. Lower-value brands perhaps just want to tick the box, and that tends to be a lower margin business. So we don't tend to play in that bit of the business. So it can be a bit lumpy. Last year, there were a lot of breaches. We had quite a lot of revenue, but it tends to be lumpy and one-off. So what we've seen since then is as we've grown over the comp, it's been about a 1% headwind to growth. that headwind ends with Q1 that we've just reported. So you see that drop away as we go into Q2.

That's super. That's really, really helpful to understand that and everything else you've mentioned. So once again, thank you very much for joining it. We've come to the end of our time. Thank you to everybody else that's joined the call as well. Please do reach out if there's any follow-up questions. I'll hand back to Lloyd for closing remarks. But again, thank you all.

Thanks, Ryan, and thanks for everybody in the U.K. for joining us at 3:30 on a sunny afternoon on Friday. We really appreciate the time. And hopefully, you can see actually a really interesting data-enabled technology story in Experian that's moved now well beyond its heritage in the credit bureau. And you can see that in the financial results that we're delivering. So I wish everybody a good weekend, and thanks for your time.

Thank you. Have a good weekend.

Thanks.

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 today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn 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 Q1 trading update call. And here, as usual, Lloyd, will take you through the trading performance after my opening remarks.

We've had a strong start to FY '26. Q1 organic revenue growth was 8%, continuing our positive trend from Q4. Recent acquisitions have added to this to take the total group revenue growth to 12% at both constant and actual rates. The acquisitions we completed last year have all performed well in the quarter, and we're on track with their integrations. Organic revenue growth was 9% in North America, 5% in Latin America, 1% in the UK&I, and 7% in EMEA/Asia Pacific.

By segment, B2B organic revenue growth was 8% with good contributions from both Financial Services and Verticals. Globally, Consumer Services delivered 6% growth, rising to 13%, excluding the one-off impact of prior year data breach services contribution.

Turning to the Q1 regional highlights, starting with North America, where we had a really good first quarter and made a lot of strategic progress. Regional organic revenue growth was 9%, which included a strong B2B performance, up 12%. Across Financial Services, we saw 15% organic revenue growth. This is broad-based across business lines and included client wins and modest improvement in the underlying market. Clarity Services, analytics growth and further Ascend expansion all contributed positively, as did mortgage. And we expect new products such as cash flow analytics and new modules in Ascend platform to support sustained growth.

Verticals growth was 8%. This was led by Automotive, which signed a new milestone, new strategic partnership in the quarter, which broadens our AutoCheck vehicle history presence across dealer ecosystem; and by Health, in part driven by strong market adoption of Patient Access Curator, and our strong new business bookings performance last year. We're also encouraged by underlying performance in Marketing Services. Audigent has made an excellent start and is expanding the use of Experian audiences across digital marketing channels.

We had a strong underlying quarter in Consumer Services, where the 3% headline organic growth number was 11%, excluding data breach. Membership, Marketplace, and Partner Solutions, excluding breach, all contributed favorably. Membership has benefited from our increased focus on financial health, and we saw particular strength in Marketplace, supported by broader lender engagement and expanded partnerships with more lenders onboarded and major lenders now launching custom models on our Activate platform. And our EVA AI chatbot has also helped to serve stronger customer demand with more personalized credit card offers.

In Latin America, we delivered mid-single-digit organic revenue growth of 5%. Rising rates and high levels of consumer indebtedness have dampened the operating environment for B2B in Brazil and year-on-year revenues are flat at constant FX. Q1 saw further progress across fraud prevention, analytics and B2B software, where we continue to broaden our proposition for clients. We've acted quickly to integrate ClearSale, and we're excited by the prospects to broaden our propositions as we integrate the ClearSale fraud suites and our SME business also performed very well. Our new product execution road map also continues to be strong, including new payroll loan applications to take advantage of this emerging market opportunity.

Consumer Services delivered another strong quarter with 24% organic revenue growth on expanded membership and increased revenue diversification. We onboarded new lending partners into our credit marketplace and have introduced new features to support debt consolidation within our Limpa Nome platform. In an environment where consumer defaults have reached record levels, Limpa Nome helps us to support consumer financial health, which we'll continue to focus on through our fairs and with new feature introductions.

UK&I delivered organic growth of 1%, B2B was down 2%, but Consumer Services delivered another strong performance, up 11%. The trend in Financial Services is still subdued against a soft macroeconomic backdrop, but we continue to make good new business and strategic progress with a number of clients now live on the Ascend platform. U.K. Consumer Services made excellent progress with Q1 growth of 11%. We've made very good progress overall with new feature introductions around Membership, Marketplace where our panel continues to grow well with increased preapproved and exclusive offers on our panel, leading us to outperform the overall lending market.

In EMEA/Asia Pacific, we had another good quarter with organic revenue growth of 7%, and we're making good progress to expand revenue from new product introductions and the integration of the acquisition of illion continues to perform well and is on track.

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

Thanks, Brian. Good morning, everyone. As you've seen, we started the year well and in line with the trends we saw at the end of last year with organic revenue growth of 8% or 9%, excluding data breach services revenue. North America continued its recent momentum, driven by strong double-digit growth in Financial Services. Excluding the expected headwind from lower data breach services activity, North America Consumer Services also grew double digits, driven by strong Marketplace performance.

Both the U.K. and Ireland and Latin America delivered resilient growth against challenging macro conditions with each showing notable strength in Consumer Services and in particular, in Marketplace Services. For the group, B2B globally grew by 8%, whilst B2C grew very well at 6%, or 13% excluding the data breach services. And recent acquisitions contributed 4% to inorganic growth, while exchange rates were neutral in the quarter, leading to total growth at constant and actual exchange rates of 12% for the quarter.

Turning to the performance by region, beginning with North America, where we delivered strong organic revenue growth of 9% with 12% in B2B and 3% growth in Consumer Services, or 11% ex data breach. Within B2B, overall, North America Financial Services grew very strongly, up 15%. And Financial Services, excluding mortgage profiles, grew 10% in the quarter, predominantly driven by Clarity, our Ascend analytics solutions, positive revenue phasing in the quarter and some improvement in underlying client activity. Mortgage profile revenue, which represents about 3% of group revenue, grew 46% on a modest volume decline in the quarter.

Elsewhere, Verticals grew 8%; Automotive had another strong quarter, growing 13%, driven by credit and our value recovery products; health continued to grow well, up 8% with our patient access and claims products progressing well. In Consumer Services, Premium Membership grew mid-single digits and our Marketplace continued recent momentum with very strong growth across both credit cards and personal loans. Partner Solutions, excluding the expected breach slowdown, also grew well.

Moving on to Latin America, where total revenue was up 17% at constant currency with a strong contribution from our new acquisitions. Organically, as expected, LatAm improved sequentially to grow 5% organically due to great progress in Consumer Services, which grew 24%, whilst B2B revenue was in line with the prior year. In B2B, growth was consistent with last quarter. We saw good growth in high-priority areas such as SME and our software solutions, though persistently high interest rates continue to impact client activity. Consumer Services had another strong quarter supported by new partners, while Limpa Nome also continued its trend of double-digit growth.

Turning to the U.K. and Ireland, which grew modestly at 1% organically. B2B was 2% lower, with Financial Services in line with the prior year and a decline in Verticals revenue. The flat Financial Services revenue reflected this ongoing subdued macroeconomic environment. Consumer Services delivered a strong 11% revenue growth, driven by strength in our Marketplace. And continued new feature enhancements and strength in our lender panel drove acceleration compared to the prior quarter.

And finally in EMEA/Asia Pacific, which grew 36% in constant currency, thanks to a strong contribution from illion acquisition, which is progressing very well. Organically, growth was consistent with recent trends of 7% with good progress across most markets through a combination of strong performance across Australia, New Zealand, India and the Southern Europe markets.

And turning to our full year expectations, which are unchanged from those we discussed just a few weeks ago in May.

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

Great. Thanks, Lloyd. So in summary, we're very pleased with our Q1 performance with lots of progress across the business. Still a long way to go in FY '26, but we're very encouraged by a strong start.

Now with that, let me open up the line for questions. And if I can ask just to give everybody a fair chance to ask the questions, could you please limit yourself to 2 questions each. Operator, over to you.

[Operator Instructions] We are now going to proceed with our first question. The first question comes from the line of Ryan Flight from Jefferies.

Ryan Flight from Jefferies here and 2 from me, if I may. The first one, seemingly you've got Marketplace strength across the board. I wondered if you can comment on current lending appetite, what's new and the current mood of lenders. And then number two, just on new Verticals, Health and then particularly Autos. Historically, I thought about these businesses kind of mid- to high single-digit organic revenue growth, pretty steady businesses, but the past 2 quarters have obviously been particularly strong. So I mean, a pretty difficult question, but is this a new normal of growth in those businesses?

Right. Thank you. Just to comment on Marketplace. I think it's not that long since we spoke to you about the full year results. I think at that time we said we haven't really seen very much of a difference in the Marketplace. People, I think, felt that they were pretty well positioned and in a strong position. Obviously, looking and waiting to see what may happen economically as we go through FY '26. I think with passage of time, I think the U.S. economy continues to be strong. We still see very good metrics across that economy in particular.

And I think what we started to see is people getting a bit more confidence in that market. None of the sort of worst-case scenarios seem to have materialized from a GDP perspective. There's still quite a lot of caution around, but people getting slightly more on the front foot. I wouldn't characterize that as a very significant change, but we do call it a modest improvement, but it is an improvement, and you can see that in the numbers.

And then on the Health and Auto, yes, I mean, I think the Health business has actually been performing at that level for quite some time. We've had some very strong growth for many years now. So I think there's a lot of things driving that, new product introductions. Patient Access Curator, we referenced in the script, has been a really great product addition to us. So we continue to see very good dynamics in that market. Auto is a sort of similar position. I think that the growth rate can bob around a little bit. We've had a few very strong quarters. But really, we've got a very strong track record of very, very good growth in that business for a very long time.

The last few quarters, you've seen in particular, good volume growth, some good client wins. We referenced a new strategic partnership that we've just signed. That isn't in the Auto numbers yet. It's just been signed, but that's going to underpin growth as we get into the back half of this year. So I think the outlook is good. We feel pretty confident about it. Not entirely sure if we'll sort of do very mid-teens growth rates in those verticals every quarter, but I think that they're well positioned and they're strong growers.

The next question comes from the line of Simona Sarli from Bank of America.

Yes. I also have 2. So first of all, for Latin America, organic revenue growth sequentially improved in Q1, but what makes you confident that you can continue improving sequentially considering still muted growth in lending volumes and also higher comps in Q2 and Q3, and therefore, what you are guiding effectively for the rest of the fiscal year?

Also, secondly, if we look at the recent news flow around the use of VantageScore 4.0 for U.S. mortgages, so what are the implications for Experian and the overall trade bureau sector? And could that also potentially impact other segments you operate in?

Great. Thanks, Simona. Lloyd, do you want to take the Latin America one?

Yes. Well, Simona, we said at the full year, I think LatAm, we expected for the full year to be somewhere between mid- and high-single digit. Obviously, we started Q1 in that range. I think whilst we're not expecting a very starkly different economic environment, we're making good progress with a lot of our new product introductions. And the acquisitions that we've been making there, I think, will contribute really positively to growth. So I think we expect to be in that mid- to high-single digit range, probably a little bit firmer through the rest of the year than where we started. So that's probably the backdrop. And as you can see, Consumer Services continues to go there from strength to strength, which is really positive.

And then coming back to your second question on mortgage. And obviously, there have been some public pronouncements recently. And I think they're referencing some changes which may take place. And if we look at those recent announcements of periods, there's kind of 2 elements to it. First, it does appear that we're moving to a regime where lenders may have a choice to use of credit scores. And secondly, it also appears there's going to be no changes to the 3B requirement in mortgage. .

Now we haven't seen any policy changes yet. But if those 2 elements are confirmed, it does have the potential to be positive for Experian given our JV ownership at Vantage. I would say also, however, this is a longer-term question because ultimately, it does depend on the pace of market adoption. And as we know, there's a lot of work that would need to be done to facilitate any market change. So we're assimilating all of that and working through what the implications may be.

We are now going to proceed with our next question. And the questions come from the line of Suhasini Varanasi from Goldman Sachs.

Just 1 main one, to be honest. Growth in the quarter has been 9%, excluding data breach. Can you discuss your expectations for the next quarter and the key moving parts that will get you there? And given the strong start to the year, that upside risks to your guidance effectively.

Yes, so 8% organic growth in Q1. I think as we look out to Q2, the big moving parts are, first of all, we think mortgage is slightly weaker. So we did 46% revenue growth in Q1. We think that's probably mid-20s in the second quarter. And that's -- we started to get into the period in the prior year where we started to see expectations of rate recovery and a slightly higher volume. So mortgage will be a little bit weaker.

We've got a very strong, in this first quarter, Financial Services growth. Some of that is underlying, as Brian mentioned. Some of that's a bit positive revenue phasing, some one-off income, which doesn't sustain into Q2. So those together knock about a 1% lower growth into Q2, but we obviously -- and the lapping of the strong data breach services, which add 1%. So you take all of that together, Q2 looks a lot like Q1. I think clearly, as we move into the second half, different economic scenarios come into play. So I think we'll see how that progresses, and then review our guidance when we talk to you at the half year. But clearly, we've had a good start to the year.

We are now going to proceed with our next question, and the questions come from the line of Annelies Vermeulen from Morgan Stanley.

Two questions from me as well, please. So firstly, in U.S. Financial Services, you talked about a modest improvement in underlying client activity or sentiment. Was that driven by any particular category of customers or lender? Was that more among larger lenders, for example? Or was it relatively broad-based?

And then secondly, just coming back to Autos. I think at the full year, you spoke about a bit of pull forward of demand for Autos in Q4. It sounds like Autos has remained relatively robust. But could you perhaps talk about Autos in Q1 versus Q4? And whether you've seen any reversal of that?

Yes. Annelies, so Auto in Q4, just to remind everybody, we had very strong growth at 16%. That softened a little bit to 13%. So I think that reflects some of that activity that was around some of the announcements that we had at that time, but still a strong growth into Q1. And we think we're going to have a good year in Auto this year. As you know, we've been broadening out the Auto business as we've really diversified our revenue streams across that sector beyond credit. So I think our expectations for Auto are pretty good. .

And then on Financial Services, I think as Brian mentioned earlier, I think over the last 6 months, we've seen stable to modestly improving conditions. I think as we come into this year, conditions have been a little bit better than we thought. I think it's obviously on a modest trend, but unemployment remains low. I think you're seeing some of the economic scenarios that have been laid out not necessarily coming to pass in the near term and some lenders being a bit more front-footed. That's not necessarily across the board. You see, I think, some of that in fintech, some in some of our larger clients as well. So it's, I think, hopeful as we go into the rest of the year.

We are now going to proceed with our next question, and the questions come from the line of Andrew Ripper from Panmure Liberum.

Well done on such a good first quarter. A couple of questions from me on the U.S. In terms of the growth drivers, you mentioned sort of generic comments on new products. Just wondering what you're referring to there. And then on Clarity, you've called it out a few times actually, in the last sort of couple of years. Can you give us a sense of the order of magnitude of Clarity now? How big is it relative to the North American business?

And then finally, I just wanted to ask in terms of the comment about the modestly improved underlying client activity, I don't know whether you could reference that as against the consumer credit data numbers we've seen coming out of the Fed, which seem a little bit choppy. It seems to be quite strong in April, but then May particularly revolving credit data seem to drop back again. Do you see something similar in terms of sort of the monthly evolution of sort of trading in North America? Or should we just look at the quarter in its entirety, just thinking about the go forward in terms of the underlying activity point?

Yes. Andrew, just on -- I think it's sort of a similar question on the underlying outlook. I mean we are -- as we said, we've seen some modest improvements. I think you've got to look at the quarter in its entirety. As Lloyd said, it's not every category, but we have seen that come through a little bit on the volumes in the bureau. So again, it's modest improvements, but it's slightly better than when we reported to you 6 or 7 weeks ago.

And to be honest, I think it kind of reflects, as we said, just the absence of anything really bad happening in the economy. And at the time that we reported, we were only a few weeks from the introduction of the tariffs, and there was a lot of uncertainty around, and I don't think that people really understood how that was all going to work out. I think there's a bit more confidence about that now. But there also still remains quite a lot of uncertainty. So I think that's why it's difficult to look much beyond sort of a quarter out on that. But we sit here today in a slightly better position than we did back in May, and I think that's a good position to be in. And we don't break out the Clarity numbers.

Yes, we don't. And I mean just as a reminder, Clarity is our short-term lending bureau. And we found a lot of demand for the data and the insights and attributes around that data across our largest and most complex clients. So we've increasingly developed new scores, new attributes, new products around that data set that are very interesting to some of our larger clients. So we're calling that out. It's been a driver of underlying growth, as you say, for the last few quarters actually. But we don't disclose the size separately.

Sure. And just the sort of generic comment on new products, which you led with in terms of the key contributors in North American growth. Was there anything in particular you're referring to there?

Yes. I think the continued strength in Ascend. We've had very, very strong engagement from clients across all of the new areas of the development of that platform and continue to make great strides with it. So that's probably the one I would call out. But the innovation that we have is very broad. So there's lots of products in the pipe that are driving that.

We are now going to proceed with our next question and the questions come from the line of Andy Grobler from BNP Paribas Exane.

Two from me as well, if I may. Firstly, just on VantageScore. You talked about it a little earlier. Could you just help us with the kind of the scale of that existing business, how it feeds through the P&L, and also kind of pricing on that relative to FICO scores? And then secondly, just in terms of competition, one of your larger competitors is adding employment and income data to their scores. Have you seen any impact from that in terms of market share and demand, and what are your expectations through the next few quarters from that?

Yes, Andy. I think we've had that question on adding the flag. We haven't seen any impact from that. That's a relatively new product. I think we need to see how that plays out. We've also highlighted that there are lots of things that go on to credit reports and people compete in different ways. So we'll just see how that evolves over time. We don't break out the VantageScore numbers. But as you know, mortgage market is essentially, well is all FICO. VantageScore has some revenues in the other segments of the market in places like auto, unsecured loans and so on and so forth. But its market share is low. Obviously, FICO is the big player there. In terms of pricing, I think Lloyd, do you want to comment on that?

Yes, we don't comment on relative pricing. I mean, clearly, we'll see how the guidance around the regulations change, and then we'll determine our go-to-market pricing accordingly.

We are now going to proceed with our next question and the questions come from the line of James Rose from Barclays.

One left for me. I think it's coming back to Clarity actually, because you have called that out for a number of quarters. Sort of hypothetically, if lending were to carry on recovering and there was a bit less of a focus on subprime perhaps. Are Clarity revenues sticky? Or would they come down? I mean is this somewhat of a countercyclical revenue stream? Or how would you think about that going forward?

Well, look, I think one of the things you're seeing with Clarity is there's just a large population which is underserved from mainstream credit providers. And yes, that may change a little bit if credit policies get relaxed. But if you look back over a decade or so, that population has actually become relatively larger. So I don't think that we see any fundamental change. I think actually one of the big perhaps surprises is how strong Clarity has performed over the last few years. And I think that reflects the continued kind of underlying market conditions and actually the ability of those lenders in that segment to continue to access good customers. So I think we feel pretty good overall about that segment.

I think also, James, what I'd add is the way you referenced the question was really in relation to volume. There's a wealth of value in the data inside the Clarity Bureau. And of course, we've been innovating on top of that with attributes with trended data, with analytics, packaging that up and bundling with other products. So the value that we're extracting from that rich data is increasing. So it's not just a volume plan. Of course, that's what we do across the rest of our business. So we're seeing a lot of good growth there, which I think over the long run will be sticky.

We are now going to proceed with our next question and the questions come from the line of Arthur Truslove from Citi.

So a couple of questions for me on market actually. So in Q1, you obviously grew mortgage revenue by 46% on a modest volume decline. That obviously follows 66% in the fourth quarter, again, a more modest volume decline. I guess FICO does its pricing on the first of January. So I was just wondering why that gap has closed and why you're expecting it to close further between revenue and volume given that FICO pricing comes in on the first day. And I guess kind of whether that's to do with the comps or something else?

The second question around mortgage volume. So as I understand it, the Mortgage Bankers Association is showing reasonable data year-over-year on volumes as we speak today. If I understand correctly, you're expecting volumes to be down in the second quarter. So I just wondered why that was really?

Yes. Arthur, if you go back to calendar Q1, our Q4, we said that we obviously had the strong increase in pricing from FICO that we passed through. We also had some grandfathered contracts that over time some of those come through in quite a lumpy way, so price contributed more in Q1. So some of that grandfathering contribution reduced as we moved into our Q1. When you go to Q2, we expect volume to be down year-on-year. So we've got a modest volume decline in Q1. We think it will be double-digit declines in Q2.

If you go back to last year, over the summer, as we started to get some of the rate reducing cycle, you saw a bit of increase in activity in mortgage. So as we lap that, I think volumes will be down. I think when you look at commentary on volumes for the year, I think there's a lot of commonality. I think the Mortgage Bank Association is probably an outlier there versus commentary from some of our peers, which I think also say that volumes will be down in the second quarter. So that's really the difference.

[Operator Instructions] We are now going to proceed with our next question and the questions come from the line of Simon Clinch from Redburn Atlantic.

So a couple of questions. First of all, similar to the question around Clarity earlier on. When we look at the growth in Consumer Services in Latin America driven by Limpa Nome, clearly that seems to be benefiting from the high indebtedness, the struggling, I guess, the challenges in that market. And I was just wondering, if we were to see the economic tailwinds return for the B2B portion of that business, should we anticipate that consumer services growth starts to slow as the environment sort of normalizes? Or is there a much stronger structural element there?

And then my second question is just wanted to get some update on your thoughts around the M&A environment, your pipeline and how, I guess, given the sort of uncertain macro environment ahead of us, if there's any changes going on in the context of the recent sort of improvement in comp.

Great. Well, on Limpa Nome, we don't see any potential drop off in the growth of that product. You have structurally high indebtedness in Brazil, you have an enormous number of people who have debts on their file who will look to get them resolved. You also have a structural play, which is really a lot of the kind of debt collection activities in Brazil are digitizing. And so there's still a tremendous amount of that activity which is off-line. We are the largest digital platform. We're becoming an incredibly powerful network effect there. So we continue to see just structural growth, signing new partners to actually partner with them to resolve their debt collection capabilities on the platform.

So we don't really see that. I think not in terms of the number of people who are in delinquency. That would take a long time to get resolved. And alongside that, you have a structural shift into how that market operates. And we're by far and away the best positioned -- organization is best positioned to benefit from that going forward.

You also have strong growth coming from other parts of the Consumer Services business. We saw very good growth in our Marketplace business, which we built. We've been operational now for quite a few years, but obviously, it hasn't been a material contributor as we sort of went into a tougher economic environment in Brazil, and there was kind of less credit being extended certainly into sort of below prime segment. But if you have more of a recovery in Brazil and therefore, an extension of credit across that spectrum, we're going to be one of the biggest beneficiaries, because there aren't that many places you can go where you can access large audiences. It's tried and test. It's kind of we've done both in the U.S. and the U.K. We know what we're doing. We've built a platform. We've got a fantastic brand reputation, a large audience. So we would expect that to be a material growth driver for us in the future as well. So I don't see any change to that.

And then on your question on the M&A, nothing has really changed from when we spoke to you 7, 8 weeks ago. It's still the same environment. We continue to have a lot of opportunities to look at, but whether any of those will sort of meet their criteria or be able to be executed remains to be seen as we progress through the year.

And Simon, just one for me to add on Consumer Services in LatAm. Of course, the long-term trend in Brazil and LatAm is increased credit penetration. It's underpenetrated in the consumer segment with credit. It's increasing. That's the secular growth driver that will help us monetize the audiences that we've created. And we think if you take kind of individual months and quarters out of the agenda, this will be a very positive business for us to have in an economy that is increasing its credit penetration.

We are now going to take our final question. And the questions come from the line of Simona Sarli from Bank of America.

Just a couple of follow-ups. First of all, on Auto, you mentioned you have signed new strategic partnerships that are not in numbers yet. When should we expect to feed through numbers? And if you can quantify the potential revenue impact. And then going back to Health, you mentioned that it was growing 8% in Q1, which is a little bit softer compared to Q4. Is there any impact from cuts in Medicare , DOGE, and what is sustainable for the rest of 2026?

Yes. I think on the Health one, the answer is no.

Those changes that were announced won't actually take -- there won't be any impact from that actually for a couple of years out yet. So we wouldn't see any impact from that. I think the Health number is just a quarter-on-quarter movement. It sustained at a high single-digit growth rate for quite some time. So we don't see any change there. On the Auto, as you referenced, there's no impact from that contract. Lloyd, any further detail you want to give?

No. I think it's important to call that contract out because it's a new strategic partnership. And it's kind of a demonstration of how we continue to broaden and strengthen the network in Auto. As we highlighted in some of the slides that we had at the full year, this is a business that's grown double digit for 20 years. The strength of our Verticals is something that you'll increasingly see us talk about and they're very broad-based businesses. On Health, I think you've seen us win some market share there from competitors over the last 18 months, very strong finish to last year, but high single digits, a better guide for the year ahead.

We have no further questions showing. I will now hand back to Mr. Cassin for closing remarks. Thank you.

Great. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining today, and thank you 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 very much.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.