Experian Plc Ord

Hello, everybody, and welcome to our FY24 results presentation. I'm joined, as usual, by Lloyd. He'll run through the financials after my initial overview. And also on the call today is Craig Boundy, our Chief Operating Officer. And Craig will join us for the Q&A segment of the call. We're very pleased with how we performed in FY24. The strength and diversity of our portfolio, as well as contributions from newer products, allowed us to navigate difficult underlying conditions and end the year with impressive organic growth and a strong finish in Q4. We've also made good strategic progress with further expansion into new verticals, some important acquisitions, excellent progress in client NPS and employee engagement scores, and material progress in our technology transformation. The progress we've made in FY24 builds on work done over many years to create new paths for growth. It's allowed us to deliver strong results whilst investing for growth and in transforming our technology estate. Looking ahead to FY25 and beyond, we expect to continue to drive strong top line growth while gradually benefiting from a normalizing credit environment. We also expect to improve our margin trajectories through a combination of technology efficiencies, productivity efficiencies, and operating leverage, and Lloyd will provide additional details on our financial assumptions later on. So overall, our performance in recent years demonstrates our strategies working well, and FY24 was further evidence of good progress. Now going into a bit more detail, FY24 was at the top end of our guidance range at 6% organic growth, and in this macro environment, that's a very good result, and it demonstrates the resilience of our business and how well we've executed strategically. Q4 organic growth was 8% to take us to 6% for the year, At all regions and segments delivered organic revenue growth for the year with both North America and the UK strengthening as the year closed. By business segment, consumer services led the way with organic revenue growth of 7% despite a very difficult backdrop for marketplaces. Acquisitions and FX took total revenue growth to 8%. Underlying EBIT margins progressed by 10 basis points to constant currency and we delivered an 8% uplift in benchmark EPS. Cash conversion was 97%, also very good, and so our financial position remains very strong. So very good progress all around. Now let me briefly comment on some of the more significant developments during the year as we've made some great progress in many areas. The insurance marketplace in North America consumer services progressed really well. We're very confident this is on track to be a very large vertical for us. Sticking with consumer services, we grew free consumer memberships to over 180 million globally, exceeding the targets we set ourselves a few years ago. And it's been a good year for new client wins and retention, with competitive wins in all major geographies, solid performance across all business lines, and very good growth in some of our larger verticals, such as health and automotive, and some newer ones, such as verifications. We continue to invest heavily in our products. This year, we made material progress developing our unified platform and further expanding the Ascend suite of products. Over the last few years, we've invested heavily also to build out a comprehensive product portfolio in Brazil, and we've seen continuing great success in FY24, with strong growth in particular in fraud and ID, agribusiness, SME, and consumer. We also completed a number of acquisitions, recently signing an agreement to acquire Ilion in Australia, as well as infills in health, data quality, and also in Brazil. And we've done more to strengthen our foundations, We progressed our NPS with clients for a fifth year in a row, and we're again ranked as a top employer and certified as a great place to work in 24 countries. And we've made great progress with cloud-native technology infrastructure and new generative AI investments. It is also a year where we again demonstrated the strength and breadth of our business. We continue to grow despite major credit downturns, including this period in which rates rose rapidly, and our track record demonstrates that the business can deliver good growth even in difficult circumstances. In fact, in each successive down cycle, we've bottomed out at a higher level of organic growth, which reflects the shift of the business over time with better products positioned in higher growth areas. Today, we're a broad-based data, analytics, and software company operating across many industries. That's changed the drivers of our growth, and our compound growth rates since FY19 illustrate the point. So while the environment remains a slight headwind, we expect to deliver another good year of growth in FY25 and for the medium term as we're outlining today. Our strategy should by now be very familiar to you. We have leading B2B and B2C businesses which increasingly drive synergies between them. And let me highlight a few of the key developments in FY24. We've added to our data assets. It's a big factor in competitive wins, particularly in the UK. and the predictive uplift we deliver from superior data is very material. Apple is now furnishing us with buy now, pay later data, and will be first to market with this in the US. And we expanded the data coverage in North America verifications, client count has also grown, and we also have the largest verifications database in the UK with coverage of 82% of the population. We continue to invest across a broad portfolio of best-in-class B2B products, As I mentioned earlier, this year we made great progress in Unified Platform, which allows customers to integrate more of our products quickly and cost-effectively. This is having an impact on the size and duration of contracts we win with clients. A good example is a strategic partnership we closed this year with a UK lender, which is the largest deal we've ever closed in the UK. And the Ascend platform is just one of our products, but it continues to drive growth with expanded use cases and functionality. and we started to embed Gen-I natural language interfaces into our analytical software, as well as in the unified platform. We have several large verticals where we continue to see very good long-term growth opportunities. Many of these opportunities are created by taking core experience capabilities and applying them to under-penetrated use cases in these verticals, and automotive and health being very good examples of this over many years. In healthcare, the way of HD acquisition has further strengthened our product suite, leveraging AI machine learning to find eligible insurance coverage, and it's another step in our strategy to simplify the healthcare experience. We've consistently demonstrated the ability to leverage large consumer membership bases to enter new categories and achieve scale quickly, and this remains a significant growth opportunity for us. The most important development this year is the progress we've made in insurance. The revenue contribution has grown rapidly. We've improved the consumer experience and widened the choice of providers on the platform, and this will be a substantial revenue stream for us going forward. We also expect to unlock new revenue opportunities and drive higher engagement using generative AI, and in February we launched our GenAI Natural Language Assistant to help our members get more personalized interactions and credit offers. There remain significant growth opportunities available to us by addressing more client jobs to be done, We have deep client relationships, but despite the breadth and strength of our portfolio, there are still many areas of client lifecycle where we're under-penetrated. This chart shows all the things clients need to do to onboard, manage, and provide value to their customers, and all of these are areas where clients spend significant amounts of money, and many represent opportunities for us to either sell new products or sell more products across the lifecycle. Best-in-class data is crucial at every stage, but alone it's not enough to meet all client needs. Better analytics to drive more accurate insights, cost-effective software solutions to improve workflow efficiency are all needed to enhance productivity, improve customer service, and run businesses efficiently. You often hear companies discussing singular customer view as their ultimate objective. This has been very difficult for many to achieve, largely because most of these systems they use to do all these processes outlined here are disjointed, and that's why we believe we have a significant opportunity. Ultimately, with Experian, they can consolidate their business with a single supplier, taking out a lot of costs and risk and displacing inefficient spend. And we're already seeing this play out in the UK example I cited earlier is a good example of this. Another previously referenced example is Ascend Marketing, where we secured a major win with a top five card issuer, which was actually a competitive takeaway from a direct mail company. We've had more wins of this nature, and it's the same concept. Financial services marketing is crucially dependent on credit data. By adding relevant analytics and workflow products on top of our data, we expand into an area of client spend previously inaccessible to Experian. With the best products and the broadest product set increasingly unified, we have a lot of white space for us to move deeper into areas like decisioning, analytics, fraud, and new data sets, and as well as to provide new services to consumers, which opens up new areas of customer spend and contributes to the TAM highlighted of $150 billion. Now, we have been executing against all of this. We've seen membership expansion, new business wins, many new products, and deeper penetration of higher growth verticals. For example, revenue from recently introduced products of around 1.5 billion, a growing percentage of B2B clients that take multiple solutions across software analytics and fraud, a huge installed base of consumer members with a growing number of those highly engaged, with many now contributing data to Experian, and a portfolio that is much more diversified with growth opportunities across an expanding number of vertical segments. Over the medium term, we expect to continue to deliver strong organic growth from the combination of economic recovery, continued expansion of our business through product and vertical opportunities, plus elevated consumer growth. Our commitment to investment in new products and solutions is unchanged, and it's a key component of our strategy, as is our commitment to drive deeper engagement around a widening range of membership offers. In fact, we would expect investment to increase the percentage of the overall total. However, the cloud transformation and enhanced productivity will allow us to achieve that while also improving margin delivery and reducing our overall CapEx sales ratio. And we're at this point because several of our strategic initiatives have been successful and are now contributing to enhanced operating leverage, and we expect enhanced benefits from technology transformation and other productivity initiatives to play a part going forward. On top of this, we've started to see better opportunities to put inorganic capital to work at more attractive valuations in targets which fit our strategy and provided they meet our strict financial criteria. And Lloyd will run through all of this in more detail shortly. So let's now turn to our FY24 regional performance, starting with North America, where we delivered organic revenue growth of 5%, a good outcome in a tough macro environment, which was driven by a number of factors. Portfolio diversity helped with good contributions from consumer services, health, also, and verifications. And while like-for-like volumes in credit services have been weak, we've been able to grow through the combination of new client wins and expansion into new market segments. For example, core CIBI grew 4% when mortgages excluded. This was driven by ascend, clarity, and verifications. Ascend contributed strongly again. An important example of the types of opportunities we are seeing is a top 10 neobank, where we cross-sell Ascend, core bureau services, and marketplace, providing this client with the ability to consume data, build models on Ascend, and deploy seamlessly into our marketplace. And we have a strong roadmap of new product introductions in FY25, which add to our growth. It was also a good year for employer service and verifications, which onboarded over 400 new client logos across the two businesses, including a number of the top five US mortgage lenders. We didn't see a lot of change in the credit environment currently. Supply of unsecured credit is still tight, although the pace of tightening has slowed, with delinquencies expected to rise modestly, and client sentiment is still variable across the sectors. Our other verticals performed well. Auto had a very good year, up 8%. There's an inventory buildup in the U.S. car industry, and dealers are working to incentivize and stimulate the market. We've been beneficiaries of this. We have a range of products to address these needs, using experienced marketing data and solutions to help build audiences and target customers. Targeting delivered growth of 5%, primarily driven by our digital advertising and buying-selling platforms, and new client integrations for our digital identity graph. And this helped offset some overall softness in the market. Health had a great year with a record year for bookings. We again achieved the best in class ranking, which we're very proud of. New products like AI Advantage, which predicts which claims will be denied by insurance companies and helps to reduce denials, have extended our product suite and given us new ways to address client needs. And I'm very pleased to say that our Wave HD acquisition is going very well and has already driven a lot of new client wins. North American consumer services grew 6% organically, a good result and market leading in our industry peer group. Premium revenue was a good source of stability for us this year. We've enhanced the value of our premium packages with new features like bill negotiation and subscription cancellation, helping members to identify potential savings and stay financially healthy. Growth in premium also helped us to fuel investment across the portfolio. In the credit marketplace, while the overall market was tough in FY24, we continued to onboard new clients to experience Activate, an important differentiator which leverages our Ascend technology, and has helped us to outperform on a relative basis. There are active conversations with clients for reentry into the market, and as this market recovers, we expect to be very strongly positioned and we should see strong growth. The insurance marketplace had a very good year and has reached an inflection point Revenue in Q4 more than doubled year on year. We've added the top three national carrier to offerings in 47 states, and we expect more carriers to list products in the marketplace as market conditions improve. As a result, policies sold have increased substantially. Part of solutions had good client wins this year, particularly for data breach services. And taken together, the investments we've made in North America have more than offset the subdued credit conditions, We're very well positioned to sustain our current performance and would expect the future rebounds and current credit conditions to add to this. Moving to Latin America, we had a great year, up 13% organically. Growth was 16% at constant rates when acquisition contributions are included. Margins progressed strongly, helped by increased scale in consumer services. We've successfully added revenue in new business areas and we've outperformed the market substantially. We extended our lead in credit and risk through the successful implementation of our positive data analytics scores and software products. Our fraud solutions performed very well, helped by a series of infill acquisitions, which have helped build our capabilities in areas such as biometrics and device intelligence. Our strategy is to fully integrate positive data analytics with fraud, decisioning, and new alternative data assets, as well as consumer permission data. And our breadth of capabilities in these areas is unsurpassed in Brazil, with growth opportunities across both large client categories and small and medium-sized enterprises. This year, we did, in fact, see strong growth in both strategic clients, and we delivered a strong performance in SME, the agribusiness, and the agribusiness more than doubled in size. It's been a great year, too, for consumer services, which delivered organic revenue growth of 26%. and now has revenue in excess of $200 million. Today, we have Brazil's third most downloaded app, and we're creating a comprehensive offering where we provide consumers financial information, help them better understand their credit scores, compare prices, apply for credit, offer identity monitoring, and renegotiate their debts, all with an increasingly personalized journey. We've also steadily built up a new payments capability, which consolidates consumer debt overdue, utility bills, and current bills in one place. And the result is a diversifying revenue model with very strong growth in total payment volume. Of our large geographies, the UK has probably faced the weakest macro environment and yet delivered 2% organic revenue growth overall. B2B organic revenue growth was 3% and was sustained by a strong run of new business wins, with the strongest performance coming in Core Consumer Bureau, which significantly outperformed a weak credit issuance market. This continued throughout the year and culminated in Q4 with the largest deal we ever secured in the UK. Growth was enabled through superior data and end-to-end solutions involving multiple products, including consumer services. Some customers have started to test the market in areas like credit card lending, but overall B2B credit volumes are still muted. But with products like Ascend and Verifications now live in market and strong new business win rates, we feel good about the UK B2B position. Consumer Services was one of our fastest growing UK business in Q4 and ended the year on a much stronger trajectory to deliver 1% growth overall for the year. We've introduced improvements to the consumer experience, we've added to our marketplace lender panel, and this has resulted in stabilization for the premium service and recovery laterally in marketplace. We were the most downloaded app in our category in Q4, and this positions as well as we enter FY25. EMEA and Asia-Pacific organic revenue growth sense really good outcome. Margins also progressed, although we still have much room for further expansion here. Key geographies like Australia, India, and Italy contributed strongly, helped by our many initiatives and new product introductions. The quality of growth has also improved with stronger performances in our bureaus, lower dependency on one-off software contracts, and more progress towards a higher level of recurring revenue. After the year-end, we signed an agreement to acquire Illion, a very complementary bureau asset which will boost our presence in Australia and New Zealand. It's a great fit for us. The combination gives us practically the full portfolio of Experian B2B assets and will create a stronger entity. And once this acquisition completes, Australia will become our fourth largest geography, in keeping with our strategy to focus on markets where we have a clear path to scale. So overall, a good year of progress in EMEA and Asia Pacific. So with that, I'm gonna hand over to Lloyd to take you through the financials. Great, thanks Brian, and good morning everyone.

As you've seen, we delivered strong financial results in FY24, finishing the year at the top of our guidance range. For the full year, organic revenue was up 6%, With acquisitions and FX each adding 1%, total revenue growth at actual rates was 8%. We grew EBIT margins by 10 basis points, with benchmark EBIT up by 7% at constant rates and 8% at actual rates. EBIT growth converted well into EPS growth, up 7% at constant rates and 8% at actual rates. Operating cash flow was $1.9 billion with 97% cash conversion. And we continue to deliver our growth with high returns on capital employed, increasing this year to 17%. And we've announced a full year dividend of 58.5 cents, up 7% on the prior year. And finally, we ended the year very strongly financed, with our net debt to EBITDA leveraged at 1.7 times, with 2.4 billion of undrawn committed facilities. As you've heard from Brian, despite soft lending markets, the strength of our portfolio innovation delivery then we delivered at the top end of our range, and with growth firming as the year progressed, despite little improvement in lending volumes in the market. Organic growth in Q4 improved to 8%, supported by double-digit growth in Latin America, and in the UK, consumer services and strengthening in North America B2B. Turning now to the FY24 Q4 regional growth trends, North America organic revenue growth strengthened to 7% in Q4. The Bureau excluding mortgage profiles grew 8% in a quarter. Ascend growth accelerated to 25% as our integrated propositions continued to gain traction. Continued demand for our alternative lending proposition helped Clarity Services deliver double-digit growth in Q4 as the employment market in the U.S. remained resilient. and lending trends continue to be subdued with similar patterns to previous quarters. U.S. mortgage profile revenue grew 11% on volume declines of 21%, with a difference principally coming from the pass-through of the most recent FICO price increase. Automotive grew well at 6% as the business delivers growth in areas like marketing and value recovery. As a reminder, our auto businesses diversified well with the core auto credit less than half of the overall North America auto revenue. Growth in targeting strengthened to 6% as demand for our digital solutions continued to outweigh headwinds from lower retail activity and legacy product retirements. Platform growth and new integrations doubled the size of our agency and social clients across the year. Health growth was consistent at 7%. following good growth across our patient access claims and coverage discovery propositions. Across the year, innovation and new product revenue continue to contribute well. Decision analytics improved to 4% growth due to strength across software and fraud and ID, as there were a number of multi-year renewals with key financial services partners. North America consumer grew well at 6% for the quarter, Our partner solutions business grew double digits following a number of data breach deals. Membership grew 3% as more consumers made use of recently launched financial health features, in particular supporting account subscription management. In Q4, our insurance marketplace more than doubled compared to last year, and we ended the year with very strong policy growth. Credit marketplace declined with volumes lower due to lenders' tighter criteria. Latin America delivered 13% growth, and we continue to bundle our products and services into one combined B2B proposition as we become an embedded technology partner for our clients with an ever more integrated platform. Organic B2B growth in Latin America was 12% for Q4, up from 10% growth in Q3. Our strategy of growing into adjacent verticals like identity and fraud is starting to contribute more meaningfully. Consumer services. remained strong with growth of 19% in the quarter and for the year delivered revenue of $225 million. Limpinomi grew over 20% in the quarter and has more than doubled in three years. Consumers in Brazil resolved more than $14.5 billion in debt through Limpinomi during the year. Our payments proposition delivered strong growth in the quarter also as we continue to increase the volume of transactions on our digital platform. The UK&I delivered good growth of 5% up from 3% in Q3. Within the Bureau, we continued to grow well in Q4, with strong growth in Ascend as we made key deliveries during the quarter. Across the year, lending volumes for the whole of the market were down around 2% to 3%, compared to our 3% growth in total B2B. The outperformance coming from innovation and key client wins. Decisioning grew 3% in Q4, following strong software growth from key deals for power curve originations and collections. Consumer services delivered double-digit growth at 11%. Marketplace grew over 20% due to a number of factors, including more targeted advertising campaigns, greater personalization, more pre-approved offers from lenders, and a softer comparator due to the mini-budget impacts in the prior year. Membership also grew mid-single digits. EMEA and Asia Pacific delivered 6% growth in Q4. Data growth increased to 8% across Southern Europe and South Africa, which was partially offset by a one-off software deal last year in South Africa. Turning now to EBIT margin, where we delivered 10 basis points of margin expansion. The North America margin was 20 basis points lower than last year. Softness in B2B lending volumes weighed on B2B margin, which was partially offset by consumer services margin expansion, as we continued to benefit from the scale and diversity of the consumer businesses, despite the tighter lending environment. Margins were stable or improved across our other geographies at constant currency, in particular benefiting in Brazil from the scaling of our consumer platform. Looking at B2B and consumer services segments, we saw good margin expansion in the consumer businesses. as the increasing scale and diversity of our membership engagements continue to benefit margin. All regions grew margins, with Latin American margin growing strongly as scale continues to drive profitability. And this continues the trend of consumer services margin developing with scale that we have seen over the last five years, when consumer services margin have expanded around 400 basis points. On the B2B side, as we mentioned earlier, lower volumes in are lending volume products were a headwind during this year. Turning now to EPS, where we delivered growth of 8% at actual rates and 7% at constant FX. EBIT grew 7%, following good revenue growth and margin expansion. This translated to EPS growth as a modest headwind on interest from acquisitions made during the year was offset by a lower tax rate. Our average interest rate during the year was 3.2%, as we continue to benefit from the long-forward fixing program we initiated when global interest rates were low. FX was a 1% tailwind to EPS. And looking across the last two years, when lending volumes in our markets have been weak, we've grown our EPS by 17%. Taking a look at our usual reconciliation to statutory results, our benchmark profit before tax grew 7% at actual FX rates, driven by the strong revenue performance and margin expansion. Acquisition-related expenses decreased slightly to $41 million. There was a 4 million increase in the fair value of contingent consideration on prior acquisitions. We made a profit of $5 million on the disposal of some small EMEA and Asia-Pacific businesses. Statutory PBT before non-cash items was therefore up 16%. Amortization of acquisition intangibles was broadly flat at $193 million. And with non-cash refinancing remeasurements broadly neutral, statute of profit before tax was $1551 million, up 32%. So now taking a look at cash flow and return on capital employed, where FY24 was a record year. We delivered $1.9 billion of operating cash flow. at a conversion of 97 percent and continue to generate very strong financial returns, with return on capital employed increasing to 17 percent. Now, moving on to our FY25 modeling considerations, which relate to our ongoing activities and does not include any acquisitions that have not yet completed and where timing is uncertain. And we'll update our guidance as appropriate as we complete an acquisition. We expect 6% to 8% organic revenue growth for the full year. We expect less than 1% contribution from completed acquisitions on revenue. We expect to deliver good margin progression of 30 to 50 basis points at constant currency. Based on current FX rates, we expect FX to be between neutral and a 1% headwind to both revenue and EBIT growth. We expect net interest for the year be between $135 and $140 million. The benchmark tax rate is expected to be between 26 and 27%. The weighted average number of shares is expected to be in the region of $914 million for the year. CapEx is expected to be around 9% of revenue. We expect cash flow conversion to be over 90% for the year ahead. And we've announced a share buyback program of up to $150 million to be completed by June 2025. Over the past five years, despite some challenging global backdrops, we've strengthened and diversified the business. We've delivered over $2 billion of additional revenue, growing at a compound average growth rate of 8%. And this has been delivered at increasing group margins, achieving our 10 to 30 basis points range on average over the period. Strong capital discipline and fixing our debt has allowed us to convert this EBIT growth into earnings at an 8% CAGR, generating strong returns on capital. And as mentioned earlier, we've been very cash-generative, growing 8% compound to $1.9 billion in FY24. So with that backdrop, as you've heard from Brian, we're updating our medium-term outlook as the strength of our strategic execution at breadth continues to enhance our opportunities for scaled value creation. So turning to our margin outlook. Over recent years, we've delivered our margin guidance of 10 to 30 basis points per year. Over that time, we've delivered margin progression within our framework, despite a number of headwinds, thanks to our strong execution in delivering underlying operating leverage. As we progressed our broad mainframe and cloud migration program, P&L technology and dual running costs have increased over the last few years. The current softness in core lending markets has also been a temporary headwind to group margin during this period through the mix of revenue growth. We've also been investing in scaling growth initiatives, such as our verifications in both North America and the UK and I, as well as many consumer innovations, such as payments in Brazil and the insurance marketplace and enhanced subscription services in North America. As we look ahead over the medium term, we expect our disciplined operational execution to continue to generate underlying operating leverage. We'll also continue to invest broadly in our innovation engine. And we now expect some of the headwinds of the last few years to reverse, as technology and cloud migration costs in the US and Brazil materially completes by the end of FY26. And we start to see margin benefits from cloud productivity and improved scaling. Lending volumes will return over the medium term, having a positive mix impact for the group, and our consumer platforms will continue to generate scaling returns as we leverage our powerful relationships with over 180 million consumers. With this backdrop, we're increasing our medium-term outlook for margin to 30 to 50 basic points per annum of EBIT margin progression. We continue to invest strongly behind innovation and growth, and we'll continue to guide annually our modeling considerations, depending on the particular profile of investment opportunities, returns, and acquisitions we see in the business. Turning now to capital investment. As we've discussed in recent years, we've been progressing our technology transformation, and we've now reached an important stage of the program. In the US and Brazil, we've made significant progress. We're in the final stages of mainframe transitions And we're now accelerating the migration of our hosted servers into the cloud. We expect to be materially complete on our transition to cloud in the US and Brazil by the end of FY26, with 85% to 95% of our non-health processing in the cloud by then. And in the UK and EMEA and Asia Pacific, we also expect to be in the 45% to 50% range for cloud processing in the next two years. So as we approach being materially complete in our cloud migration, we'll see a number of financial benefits, including a reduction in our CapEx to sales ratio. As our migration spend and infrastructure CapEx trends down, we expect our overall CapEx to sales ratio to reduce by around 2% over the medium term. And we'll, of course, continue to invest strongly behind value creation and innovation opportunities. So bringing all this together, here's our medium-term financial outlook. As you've heard, we've delivered robust growth despite significant external headwinds, and we expect this to continue. As economic markets improve, we expect to deliver high single-digit organic growth, and our long-term ambition remains to generate scaled opportunities to ultimately enhance the group's growth potential into double-digit organic growth. As I mentioned, we now expect to deliver growth at good margin progression for the group as a whole, sustainably 30 to 50 basis points per annum. And our capital investment will trend down over the medium term to a cash spend of around 7% of revenue. And finally, with our strong financial position in cash flow, we have the opportunity to grow the contribution from reinvesting our cash generation in value-adding acquisitions, generating high returns on capital, and retaining a highly disciplined approach. With that, I'll hand you back to Brian. Great. Thanks, Lloyd.

So in closing, FY24 was a good year. We made a lot of strategic progress. We delivered well financially, and again showed resilience of our business. And we expect another good year in FY25. Our prime focus remains on driving growth, and we continue to invest successfully behind a range of initiatives. As Lloyd has outlined, we've completed a lot of transformation work in recent years, and now to the point where the majority of our technology transformation will complete over the next two-year period. and that will give us the opportunity to enhance productivity, reduce dual run costs, and lower capital intensity. So coupled with this, we do expect credit cycle headwinds eventually to turn into tailwinds, and taking together these factors will drive strong performance over the medium term. So with that, I'm now going to hand you back to the operator for your questions, for which we will be joined by Craig Boundy. Operator, over to you.

Thank you, dear participants. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone keypad. and wait for a name to be announced. To withdraw a question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by, we'll compile the Q&A and all studies. We'll take a few moments. And now we're going to take our first question, and it comes from the line of Simona Sarli from Bank of America. Your line is open. Please ask a question.

Yes, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I have three. If you don't mind, I will take one by one. So first of all, you talked about the improving margin progression in the medium term. Could you please remind us the headwind to margin from the cloud transformation? And as you approach its completion, how we should think about the annual contribution from that and will it be linear over the next three to four years? And similarly, if you could please comment also on the trajectory of CAPEX normalization from 9% in fiscal year 2025 to 7%. That's the first one, thanks.

Okay, thanks, Simona. So if you look at the dual run costs that we have inside the P&L for the technology transformation, it's about 100 basis points. We think that will sustain over the next two years as we complete the majority of the server migration programs. And then it will trend out of the P&L over the medium term. On CapEx, we've guided to 9% for the year ahead, in line with the previous year, again, as we progress those server migrations. And then it will trend down to 7%. So straight line from there down to 7% in FY29 is a good guide.

Thank you. And second question is regarding your free cash flow. So if you look at, so clearly you have better operating leverage, lower capex as a percentage of revenue. So your free cash flow will be quite strong in the medium term. And considering you're already below the targeted leverage, that leaves you quite some balance sheet optionality. So how should we think about your capital allocation and potentially returning extra cash? Thanks.

Simone, I think as we've said, we sit in a market with a lot of opportunities. So our bias is to continue to invest, to create value significantly in excess of our cost of capital. And we think we have a lot of opportunity to do that given the breadth of the markets that we're in. If over time we find that we can't deploy that capital, of course, we'll consider and enhanced buyback to return it to shareholders. But the priority really is to reinvest it in strong returns for growth.

Thank you. And lastly, just a quick follow-up on consumer services. So clearly margins are up quite a bit, so currently close to roughly 25%. Can you quantify more or less, even high level, what is the medium-term margin ambition for consumer services? Thanks.

Yeah, I think we won't put a number out there. We've really developed over the last number of years direct relationships with 180 million or more consumers. That's obviously been a big investment from us over that period, and we now are coming into a stage where we get to broaden our the things that we can do for those consumers. So that comes also with investment as we grow out other verticals. But I think you can see the trajectory of the last five years in the consumer business. And we're pretty confident that the future of that consumer business is a high growth, a high return business. And we'll share it as we progress.

Thank you. Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes, Lan, of Suhasini Varanasi from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please ask the question. Hi, good morning.

Thank you for taking my questions. Just a few from me, please. You've obviously had a very strong finish to the fiscal year 24. Can you maybe discuss your expectations for 1Q and first half FY25 and how current trading has been so far in April and May? The second question is on the mortgage business, which has benefited from pricing in Q4. Is it fair to expect that this benefit will continue through the next three quarters as the effect annualizes? And just to clarify, on slide 27, where you're talking about the medium-term outlook for high single-digit organic growth, did I hear you right that you would expect it to trend towards double-digit organic growth profile potentially beyond that in the medium term? Thank you.

So I'll take that one. Sadly, what I said on the growth guidance, our outlook is for high single-digit. And if you look, we're already with soft lending volumes. We're already at the top end of mid-single-digit. So our guidance is high single-digit. We've always said our ambition as we grow the business is to get the business into double-digit organic growth. But that's not our guidance for this time. On the Q4 finish, yeah, we were pleased with how we finished the year. You can see a number of different areas of that. We clearly, the last quarter of any year is always a time when people are pushing for the line to deliver, so you always get a bit of one-off income as part of that. We didn't see any broad-based improvement in lending, and we haven't assumed that for the year ahead. six to eight for the year as a whole overall. We'd probably expect to start the year in that range, probably around 7%, and nothing really to add on beyond that. And yes, we'll continue to benefit from mortgage pricing through the year, but obviously it's really small for us.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And the next question comes to the line of Andrew Ripper from Liberum. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Hi, morning, everybody. It's Andrew Ripper from Liberum. Well done on the results today. I've got three as well, if I'm allowed. First one, I just wanted to... look at a couple of numbers in Q4 and get a little bit more color in terms of what's behind them so in North America in particular the 8% growth in Bureau X mortgage Lloyd I think you mentioned in the commentary or Brian Ascend did particularly well with some new business wins I just wonder if you give us a sense of how significant that was or what Ascend revenue was for the full year 24, in fact, both of those. And then on North American consumer, I understand you still had some benefit from short-term breach revenue. Can you give us a sense of how significant that was in terms of driving the 6% growth in North American consumer? That's question one.

Okay. So the... The Bureau X mortgage number, there's a few things in there. You're right, the SEND strength was good. And SEND revenue for the full year is over $180 million now. It grew well to the year. There's also in there a whole host of products and things that we sell, archives, retrospective reviews, et cetera, et cetera, in there. I wouldn't draw a straight line through the fourth quarter, but we were obviously fairly pleased with how we finished. In terms of consumer, the breach business is obviously lumpy. We had a good Q3 with that, and it's difficult to forecast, but we continued in Q4 at a similar sort of level, which was positive. Clearly, in the year ahead, there's a range of outcomes for breach which are all factored into our range.

Okay, thanks, Lloyd. And then second question was just drilling down a little bit on consumer. Historically, you've given us a sense of the mix between subscriptions, affinity and marketplace. I wonder if you can just do that again, please, for the North American business for FY24. What was the mix? And how much was insurance please within marketplace in FY24? And then when you look forward on consumer, maybe give us a sense of the outlook across the different categories for FY25. Thanks.

Okay. So roughly 50% subscription, 30% affinity, given the strong growth we've had in the data breach business and around 20% marketplace. Really good progress on insurance, particularly in the second half of the year. And insurance is about a fifth of that marketplace business now. So really interesting progress, strategic progress we've made this year, and we're looking forward to the progress of that in the year ahead. I think you can see similar sort of trends that we've seen this year. So I think growth in subscription, I think financial marketplace will continue to be soft on volumes, and we're not assuming any broad-based recovery in that. And insurance, we think, will continue to grow well.

Okay, thanks, Lloyd. And then the final one, I think, is also for you, Lloyd. Just in terms of the margin guidance for FY25, It sounded as though from your comments to an earlier question in relation to tech and dual running costs, that wasn't a material factor in terms of the uplift in margins. Correct me if I'm wrong, but maybe you could give us a little bit of color in terms of the regional profile of where you expect profitability to go this year, and then beyond this year, can you just remind us of where you are in terms of the UK performance, where margin, I think, was pretty much flat last year, and your ambition there in the medium term, and also for EMEA Asia PAC. Thanks.

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've said that over the The medium term, our ambition is to get the UK to 30% operating margins and for EMEA Asia Pacific to get to 20. Clearly, this last year, the mix of growth between core lending volumes and other growth is embedded in the margin performance we've had, but still confident on those long-term trajectories. For the year ahead, I think operating leverage across the business will contribute well. In the next couple of years, we won't have a positive impact on the dropout of dual run costs. That comes in years three to five of the medium-term framework. Depreciation is a bit of a headwind in the next few years, and then it turns into a tailwind. Typically, depreciation lags levels of capex by about three years. So it's principally the scaling of the various businesses that we have in this next year that supports the confidence in the 30 to 50 basis points margin progression.

Thanks for your answers.

Thanks, Andrew.

Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes to the line of Ryan Flight from Jefferies. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Yeah, good morning, all, and thanks for taking my questions. A lot of them have been answered. But I wonder if I could kind of build on that last question, and if you could really give us some insight into where you see the counter-cyclicality in the business today. I know in particular you spoke about the subscriptions in B2C, but is that kind of completely offset by marketplace and insurance, and if there's any other counter-cyclicality that we should be aware of? And then on Q4 as well, if you could also kind of help us break down LATAM B2C, which looks slightly softer in Q4. Just some context there. And then lastly, just a comment on UK B2C as well, which look particularly strong. Should we expect that growth to continue in marketplace business there?

Okay, I'll take those in turn. So cyclicality, as we talked about, I think... extensively over the last couple of years, you can see our business, we're very resilient to the cycles. So we outlined, I think, a year ago that we saw a bit over a billion dollars of business that was variable with short-term lending volumes. So lending volumes have been down this year, this last year. We don't expect them to go down further, but we don't expect them to broadly recover in the year ahead. Clearly, when you go into the medium-term framework, if you assume volume growth and volume recovery and decent growth across those lending volumes, of course, you can see how we very clearly get well into the high single-digit organic growth with that recovery. LATAM B2C, that's getting a big business now. It's $225 million in the year. So I think you can't necessarily draw straight lines from month to month. March is the month that we do one of our big Lumpinome fairs. We do two a year, one in November, one in March, and continue to grow really well. And I think it's important to look into the Brazilian economy. It's not a particularly strong economy. economic backdrop at the moment, and we're really outperforming the lending market environment in both our B2B and B2C business and the competitors. And then the UK B2C marketplace recovery, as I mentioned, Q4, so calendar Q1, is always a traditionally strong time for clients to be in the market with lending offers. And it wasn't a year ago because you saw no no sequential pickup in that quarter because of the impacts of the mini budget through the lending market. So I think we've seen good recovery there, 11% growth. I don't think we'll see that at that sort of level into the first half of the coming year, but I still expect that to be growing.

Excuse me, Ryan, any further questions?

No, that's all. Thank you for answering those.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes from the line of James Rose from Barclays. Your line is open. Please ask a question.

Hi there and good morning. I've got two, please, if I may. The first is on insurance marketplace again. Can you give us an idea of the size of the addressable market you're accessing there, perhaps compared to the cards and loan business? And what do you think has triggered the big step up in revenue you've seen in the second half? And then secondly, within fraud and identity, can you give us an idea of how that's scaled from, say, FY19 to this year currently? And if you think about the medium-term outlook for that business, what are your growth ambitions there? Thank you.

Great. Well, maybe I will take the first question on the size of the insurance marketplace. So I think most of you are familiar with the UK insurance marketplace, which has been significantly advanced in terms of providing comparison marketplace and digitalization to consumers for quite some time. It's completely undeveloped in the US, and obviously that market is huge. So while it's hard to give an exact kind of precise number in terms of comparing to cards and loans, it's going to be in the longer term at least. that size, I would have thought. So it's a several billion dollar term that we're playing into there. So, you know, I think the key question has always been is what are the catalysts to actually make this develop in the way that it hasn't done before? And we've covered that on previous calls. You know, COVID was a factor, increasing demand for consumers for better experiences, the willingness of carriers to put product on the marketplace is all starting, well, not starting, all has now shifted. And so we're really starting to see this move in a way that hasn't happened before. So that's why we think that this is going to be very significant. We embarked on insurance build-out several years ago. So this is something which has been a strategic ambition for us for quite some time. Obviously, in anticipation of where we thought the market would go to, it is moving in that direction. We're seeing it. The growth in the second half was incredibly strong because we had, I think we referenced in at least the last call, if not the half-year call, that we have been successful in securing major carriers onto the platform. And that makes a huge difference because of the network effect that drives with the quality of the offers are there and the ability to track more consumers and provide better propositions to them. So really significant year, actually, for the insurance marketplace strategic development, and very, very pleased with how that's evolved. I think your second question was on fraud and IT. Sorry, could you just remind me of that?

Yeah, it's just an idea of how it's scaled over time, from FY19 to 24, and again, the size of ambitions for what that business could be in the medium term.

Yeah, I don't have the FY19-24 numbers in hand. Maybe Lloyd will kind of look at them as I'm answering the overall question. We are a very substantial player in fraud and ID already. Alongside our credit origination business, we do a huge amount of fraud really at the point of account origination. We're not really present in transaction fraud business. although we have ambitions to see if we can evolve into that area. And really what you've seen in the last few years, in Brazil in particular, is how we built out a more comprehensive suite of fraud products which address more of the needs around fraud origination. And secondly, a step to actually integrate that more alongside the credit propositions and some of the decisioning and orchestration platforms that we have. That's grown really strongly, and we've seen growth in fraud more broadly across the business, but I think it's probably an area where we've highlighted that we want to do more work. You've seen what we've done in Brazil. We think that that will also happen in other jurisdictions, and so we think this is a market that has very significant growth, and we think it will be a big growth contributor to us.

On the numbers. James, I think it depends a little how you define it. So for example, in one definition, you could argue that the data breach support we're doing as part of the consumer business is part of fraud response offerings into our clients. So I would guess it's a very consistent high single digit. And we're entering a really interesting phase with the build out and integration of fraud propositions into the unified platform, a really new set of propositions where we integrate all of this together for our clients, which I think will be a really important strategic step for us.

Very clear. Thank you.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And the next question comes from Autonomous. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I also have three questions, if that's okay. My first question is a follow-up on North America consumer services. For insurance marketplace, obviously, you've seen really strong growth. I was wondering if you can give us a little bit more colors on how the general demand environment is shaping up. One of your competitors have talked about kind of recovery or first signs of recovery and insurance marketing after this market being pretty depressed over the last year. I was wondering if you're seeing similar trajectories or commentaries from your customers.

Yeah, I mean, I think the simple answer to that is yes. I think that's maybe a little hard to decipher a little bit when you I don't think you can pick apart our growth numbers and sort of say which is related to demand and which is related to increased supply on the platform. Obviously, our business is relatively new, but I think overall the market is recovering, and I think we see an opportunity there. But I think the real big opportunity comes actually more from the long tail of the market, which really isn't digitized. the increasing availability of much better consumer propositions on the platform, which will drive, I think, a shift of how insurance is consumed in the U.S. today more towards digital platforms. And I think that has a long, long runway of growth. Anything you'd add to that, Lloyd?

No, I think we're pretty excited. If you go back over the last 10 years and you see how origination of Credit products has shifted digital. I think consumers are now very used to interacting with financial products digitally, and I think we've got a very special product in market. We've been able to get to an insurance position essentially with three clicks, and we're excited about what we can do in partnership with the providers in that market.

Got it. Thanks. And my second question is on Brazil. There are some recent articles from Bloomberg and other outlets kind of highlighting potential pullbacks in FinTech lending in Brazil as default risks are rising. I think in some of our previous conversations we've talked about in Brazil, majority of their revenues do come from FinTech lenders. So I was wondering if you're seeing any impacts there.

Well, so I don't think that's correct. The majority of our revenue doesn't come from fintech lenders. We have a large number of fintech clients, but we're very broadly based. Basically, we cover the whole market in Brazil, and most of the large strategics are our clients as well as pretty much everybody else. The Bloomberg article is kind of, I haven't seen it, but the timing is kind of interesting because actually that's been playing out in Brazil for the last 12 months. you look at our performance and Lloyd referenced it, you know, we've been performing extremely well, but the market hasn't. So credit volumes have been declining or tight. Credit policies have been kept tight and the delinquencies have been rising for about 18 months now. So it's not like Brazil in the last 18 months has booked the trend of other markets. It hasn't. I think actually, you know, We see a similar position as we see in places like the UK and the US. The banks, the financial sector generally has been well prepared for that, are in good financial condition, good shape. And so as we look ahead, we sort of think that's all taken account of. Difficult to sort of say when that turns, but we don't think it gets materially worse. Some of the headline numbers in terms of delinquencies might get a bit worse. but I think that doesn't reflect the underlying position of the, how the industry is prepared for that. And I think the industry feels very, very prepared in terms of where their businesses are at. So, um, you know, I think we do expect continued softness in the underlying market in Brazil in, uh, FY 25. Um, but we, you know, we don't think that that's much different from other places and we continue to expect to see good growth in our business. And, you know, Frankly, we've just been growing well ahead of the market in Brazil for some time now.

Got it. Super helpful. And my last question is on SEM and PowerCurve. And just broadly speaking for decision-making engines, I think one of your competitors kind of talked about deceleration in their software business and commenting on the fact that they're seeing longer sales cycles. And obviously, we have seen strong growth in the power curve. I was just wondering, are you hearing similar comments from your customers on reduced demand for some of these products and services in this current macro environment? Or, you know, it's more a market shift story?

No, I mean, I think that in a market like this, you're always going to get longer sales cycles. So that's commenters in. entirely rational and logical. But notwithstanding that, we've been able to grow very strongly in Ascend and PowerCurve globally, actually. So I think it's just the strength of the product offering that we have and the existing kind of sales dialogues that's taken us through. I think you could conclude from that in a slightly easier sales environment that maybe we would actually see growth accelerate from the levels that we achieve. But I think Ascend was double-digit. in FY24, and PowerCorp was also double-digit in FY24. So, you know, really strong performance, again, against weak backdrops. And remember, I mean, you know, taking that, budgets are constrained. There's no doubt about that. People have been battening down hatches a little bit. As you mentioned, you know, getting themselves into a good position. But I think it just gives you, you know, a good indication of the strength of our performance in the current environment that we're able to grow at those rates, notwithstanding that.

Got it. Super helpful.

Thanks a lot. Thanks, Kelsey.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. Just give us a moment. And the next question comes from Rory McKenzie from UBS. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Good morning. It's Rory here. Just two questions, please. One follow-up on the consumer services insurance marketplace. Can you just talk about where you are in terms of state-by-state coverage or the number of your 60 odd million users that can see the offering? And how is the pipeline looking for adding more insurance carriers? And then secondly, can you talk about within the world of GenAI, what contracts have you signed with OpenAI or other providers? How much work are you doing with your in-house development teams? and how are you finding the clients, I guess, requests more than actual contracts at the moment about new tools and how that fits in with the security of your data and what else is out there? Thank you.

Great, thanks, Rory. I'm going to actually turn those questions over to Craig. Craig, do you want to address those two?

Yeah, of course. So let me take them in turn, Rory. I mean, our... Our offerings that we make to consumers are countrywide, so everybody's able to see the various offerings. Obviously, it can depend a little bit by the insurer, but we're able to get very good coverage of the consumers to whom we offer insurance, so that's really good. And we continue, as you see, more and more success of people finding us a great channel to find ways to deploy their policies, more success in the growth of insurers coming. So I think more to come over the coming quarters, but a very positive story in our consumer marketplace for insurance there. I think you asked a pretty broad question on generative AI. So let me try and answer it in the round and obviously we can follow up as necessary. I think we think about generative AI really in two ways one is giving consumers and businesses a natural language way to interact with our products so natural language way to interact with our analytical environments in places like ascend or for consumers to interact with their credit report that's a really interesting tool for people to use because it's their own way of gaining productivity improvement and efficiency improvement and we have a lot of good dialogue there and And we have generative AI assistant for our consumer reports in the marketplace and then starting to perform really well. So a lot of good engagement, a lot of good dialogue there going on, I think was the first part of your question. Then we also look at it as ways to deploy and achieve internal productivity, anything from You know, the way that our engineers work and create foundational code right through to the way that we give our customer services agents tools to do their jobs more efficiently and a whole range of opportunities between. There we're finding very good deployment, very good take-up, and already starting to see some good results come through. We have a range of technical solutions to do that that are designed absolutely to use the best of external technology where we can, but also to make sure that we never place any Experian data at risk there. And so very confident that we're able to scale those as quickly as we can with economics we're very happy with.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And the next question comes from Arthur Truslove from Citi. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much. Arthur Truslove from Citi. First question for me. So in terms of organic growth in the Bureau, excluding mortgage, it obviously accelerated from three to eight in Q4. So just wondering, you know, how much of that is sort of somewhat one-off in nature and how do you think about that element of the business as we progress into Q1 and then more broadly through FY25? Second question, a bit broader. Obviously you have talked about how your margins are going to expand as you scale up significant parts of the business. So I just wondered if you might be able to give us a bit of insight into the incremental margins in areas such as Ascend, Powercurve, Verifications, and indeed the consumer marketplaces. So any help you can provide on that would be really helpful. And then the final question for me is around the Verifications business. So I was just wondering how that progressed this year. How much revenue is it now? And indeed, if you could give us an idea of how much the revenue is from verifications and how much from the employer services. And then I guess on that also, how much of that revenue is driven by going into white space and how much from taking share of competitors. Thank you.

Right. Well, there's a number of financial questions there. Thank you, Arthur. And also, I think more of a sort of business question around verifications. So I might ask Craig to comment on the verifications in a moment. And maybe, Lloyd, you want to deal with the organic growth question in Q4 first and how that feeds into Q1?

Yeah, I think if you look more broadly for a second, we delivered 6% growth for the year as a whole, just gone. We're guiding at 6 to 8 for the year ahead. So I don't think in any aspects in our business, really, you can draw straight lines through individual quarters. I think you look at the year as a whole, I think we'll get in the year ahead. continued good broad growth that we've had this last year. I think we might not get the same level of data breach income that we've had. We'll get a bit of benefit from mortgage price in the year ahead. So some puts and takes across that. But no broad-based recovery in lending is assumed in that year. In the 8% in the quarter, as I mentioned earlier, good growth in Ascend, good growth in clarity services. Some of those businesses can be a little lumpy. And some one-off income from things like archives and batch, which again, can be a little lumpy and often comes when people are pushing for the line at the end of the year. So I wouldn't necessarily draw a straight line through that. In terms of margins, incremental margins on any of our products are very high. But of course, we're developing ecosystems where we're looking to continue to grow out the functionality and continue to grow and innovate. And you see that as a really good example in consumer, where we've been growing the number of things we can do for clients. We've rolled out a digital wallet this last year across North America. We have one across Brazil, experienced smart money in North America. We've been growing and investing behind the insurance marketplace. So there's always innovation around the ecosystems that we're developing. So individual moving parts are clearly difficult to outline, but they're all embedded in that 30 to 50 basis points margin progression where we have a lot of confidence, and particularly in the years three to five when we start to see the tapering off of the one-off costs and the drop-off of depreciation, we clearly have a lot of capacity to continue to invest to grow.

And then maybe on the verifications, Craig, we can hand it over to you on that one.

Yeah, thanks. So, I mean, first of all, we're really pleased with the progress we've made overall in verifications over a number of years. I think it's important to try and think about how that fits into the overall jigsaw. So when our customers are looking to underwrite risk, sometimes they want to verify things about an individual, whether it's you know, income or employment or particularly those two things alongside and in conjunction with the traditional credit reporting and some of the analytical environments we provide. So it's an overall sale that we make to them and we've made really good progress and traction in growing the record count that we're able to have there and really getting more and more of those conversations going and entering into contracts. So overall, we're very pleased with the progress we've made in verifications and I a long way of potential still to go for us. That's backed up and supported by the employer services business, where we're able to provide employer services and gain access to that information as part of that overall engagement and fuel the verification business. So continued good progress there in a number of geographies throughout the world.

Excuse me, Arthur, any further questions?

Just following up on the final point there, how much revenue is the verifications business now and how much did it grow last year, roughly speaking? Thank you.

So it grew well for the year as a whole and it grew in every quarter. So we were in the 180 to 190 million range for the year as a whole. And as Craig mentioned, really good progress. We don't disclose the split between employer services and verifications. Verifications was the strongest growing piece. I think, as you know, there were some tax regulation changes during the year, which would have weighed a little bit on the employer services segment. But overall, really good progress, a business we didn't have three years ago, and we're making good traction.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes to the line of Andy Grobler from BNP Paribas Exxon. Your line is open. Please ask a question.

Hi. Good morning. Just two from me, if I may, as well. Firstly, on Illium, the acquisition, which is, I think, the largest deal you've made for a number of years, can you just talk through your expectations for for that business and kind of the broader experience offering down Australia. And I guess the extent to which you can compete with or challenge the market leader down there. And then just a quick follow up on verification. You talked earlier about winning contracts with the top five U.S. mortgage brokers. Historically, mortgage wasn't such a big part of your verification offering. Now, how big is it now? What are your thoughts about growing that offering over the next two years. Thank you very much.

Great. Thanks, Sandy. Sandy, Leon, so first thing I'll say, obviously, the acquisition has yet to go through. It's going through a competition review at this stage, so we'll find out where that ends toward the second half of this year. It really is a very complementary asset for us. In Australia, we've done extremely well over the last decade or so. building out, you know, the largest sort of position amongst tier one banks with Powerco suite of products. So, you know, we have a range of what we call experienced businesses there across decisioning, analytics, data quality. Our bureau was an organic build, you know, from scratch, so that's still relatively small. We have a good open banking position. When you look at Illion's business, it's actually stronger on the bureau side, both BI and CI. We don't have BI. Experian doesn't have BI in Australia. So the fit is really, really good, very complementary, and just creates a much stronger business down there. So I think we feel very excited about that. I think it will bring a really good combined offering for customers in that market. And so we're very confident that will be continued great opportunity for us in that market going forward. Then on the verifications, on the number of the mortgage side.

Yeah, I think as part of the verifications business, Andy, mortgage is the most developed bit of that market. So that's clearly the area that we've entered. Outside of verifications, we're very small in mortgage. Inside of the verifications business, it's more focused on mortgage. And obviously, as we grow that business, spread out into other end markets. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. And now we're going to take our last question for today. And it comes from the line of Silvia Barker from JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Thank you. Hi, Sylvia Barker from JP Morgan. Two questions for me, please, as well. Just to go back to the Q4 credit bureau growth, but could you comment if you have won any share within that business? Obviously, your offering has evolved quite a lot with the combination of data, Ascend, and decisioning. Have you seen any market share gains in there, or is that mainly driven by new products, as you said, And then secondly, on Ascend Ops, how successful have you been in monetizing it so far and how does that actually look? And then more widely maybe from that, the way that you run the business now, obviously the lines are blurring a little bit between data and decision analytics. How do you think about that business and that division? Does it make sense to actually have that separate decision analytics business now? Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Sylvia, for the question. I'll do the last one first. You're absolutely right. The lines are blurring. And the way we disclose the revenue today takes a very historical lens in the business. So I think we don't run the business internally exactly along those lines because you have most of our contracts, a lot of them, are integrated propositions across a number of different products. And that will include integrated solutions where, frankly, sometimes it's quite difficult to actually attribute the revenue to one business unit or another. So it's a good point that you've called out and something we'll have to look at. In terms of the Ascend Ops, I'll ask maybe Craig to comment on that. Ascend Ops has been really well received in the marketplace, but it's a capability that builds into Ascend. So you need to think about it like that. So Craig, do you want to comment on what the market reception has been?

Yeah, it's a really great question, actually. So the way to think about it is this. Ascend is an analytical environment and a modeling environment. You create your scorecards, you create your models in there, and more recently, your marketing models. PowerCurve is the decision engine that lets you then put those into production. And MLOps through AscendOps is really the connection that lets you take those models and put them into production in an automated way. We call that connection of all of that together our integrated platform, as you heard Lloyd and Brian talk about earlier. Both the reception and indeed the deployment of that in the marketplaces has been really very strong. We start to see many clients taking it up. in a number of geographies here in the US, in the UK, in Brazil, and as we grow that offering throughout the world. So you're absolutely right. There is a blurring of the products. In fact, to send ops is the thing that lets us connect all of the products together and lets us deploy the models into production. So it's a great productivity tool, a great efficiency tool, and something that's seeing very, very strong take up in all of our geographies.

And just coming back to your comment on the last, the Q4, I mean, you know, I think Q4 is a continuation actually of our performance that we've had in the business for quite some time now. If you look at it quarter by quarter, you know, we've previously explained, you know, what the makeup of that is. There's certainly some benefit we get from, you know, exposure to tier one clients have been less impacted by some of the other segments. We've seen strong growth in clarity and Ascend continues to give us really good growth. So when you look at growth in financial services and overall I mean we you know we are seeing significant outperformance of the underlying credit market so you know I think you can draw some conclusions from that okay well great thanks for all the questions so that concludes today's session thank you all for joining us hope you all have a good day we look forward to speaking to you again in July for our key one trading update thank you