EXPGY (EXPGY) Q4 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

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.