Experian plc (EXPN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. And welcome, everyone, to the Experian preliminary presentation. My name is Greg, the operator on the session. [Operator Instructions] And now I would like to hand the call over to Brian Cassin. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you. And good morning, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to our full year results presentation. I hope you and your families have stayed safe and well throughout these unprecedented times. We are now some months into the crisis, so you don't need to tell me that COVID-19 -- you don't need me to tell you that COVID-19 have caused significant disruption and suffering on a very large scale. So we would like to take this opportunity to extend our appreciation to all the people on the frontline dealing with this pandemic: doctors, nurses, other care workers, other key workers. We all know there are many, many of them. Amidst all of this experience, FY '20 seems a bit like ancient history now, but it was still a year of many accomplishments, new products, significant technology investments and millions of new customer engagements. That said, we've moved quickly on to FY '20 and we are adapting rapidly to the new environment we now find ourselves in, pivoting to areas where we can best help, focusing on costs and continuing to push our business forward. Now normally, I would start with some performance statistics for the year just passed, but I first want to share with you some perspectives on our response to the COVID-19 crisis. We acted very quickly as soon as it became clear this was going to cause widespread disruption. And very early on, we adopted several principles to navigate through this crisis. These were: to protect our people, to ensure the protection of our business and uninterrupted provision of services to all of our clients, to help our business clients and consumers navigate the crisis, to provide assistance to governments as they manage through it and to position ourselves strongly for the future. Our business is functioning incredibly smoothly. We rapidly moved nearly all of our people to remote working, including our colleagues in call centers. Morale is high, client service is uninterrupted, and our technology, infrastructure and security systems are all working well. We have taken the lead in providing help to governments and consumers at this time, using data and analytical models to help governments in many geographies to protect the vulnerable and direct resources to where they are most needed. And we're helping consumers deal with financial distress, avoid negative impacts to their scores and assisting them with access to affordable credit. Our people have rallied hugely to this cry, and I'm incredibly proud of how they have responded. And we are fortunate to rank amongst a set of companies which sit at the center of secular drivers. These are not going away. The shift to the digital economy, if anything, will intensify in the wake of the crisis, and we want to be very well positioned for that. Now as I said at the outset, FY '20 feels like a long time ago now, but please bear with me for a few minutes as we go through some of the highlights, and we'll come to FY '21 shortly. FY '20 was a really good year for Experian. And despite COVID-19, we closed the year on a high note. Organic revenue growth was 10% in Q4. We did say that COVID-19 impact was limited in Q4, and that is true given the timing, but there's no doubt that things did get tougher at the close. So our double-digit organic revenue growth in Q4 was very good performance, bringing us to 8% for the year, which is at the top end of our FY '20 guidance, especially in the year where we underperformed in a couple of areas. Total revenue growth was 9% with the acquisition contributions. We made a lot of progress in B2B, up 7% for the year. Data was the real driver of that with a lot of momentum from newer products. And Consumer Services had an outstanding year, delivering double-digit growth and up 10% overall. And for those of you on the call who've covered us for a while, you will know how far we come in that business, and we're really seeing the benefits now of decisions we made regarding this business several years back. Margins were flat. Largely, this reflects 2 things: continued investment in the business and some underperformance in the U.K. and Asia Pacific. And benchmark EPS progressed 5% after a 3% FX headwind. We only have one month's full trading for FY '21 so far. But in April, organic revenue growth was -- organic revenue was down 5% globally. Considering the scale of the shutdown, this was a better result than we expected, and I will share with you more on that in a moment. Just a brief word on our balance sheet. It is very strong. Leverage is within our target range, and we have significant funding headroom and liquidity. We will pay our final dividend which has been held at the same level as last year. We're obviously taking a prudent approach to acquisition activity and have suspended the buyback. Let's quickly summarize some of the FY '20 highlights by region. North America had a very strong year, including a very strong Q4. B2B performed well with contributions from new products, and Consumer Services had an outstanding year with a big success for Experian Boost. Latin America performed also extremely well, especially in Brazil. We made huge progress during the year in preparing for positive data, and growth was helped by new products, particularly in the automotive sector. Progressing towards CI and BI businesses were very good, and for the first time, we are breaking out our Consumer Services in Brazil, and I'll talk about that in a moment. EMEA/Asia Pacific ended on a high note, returning to growth in Q4 despite the COVID situation. This was a weak year for Asia Pacific. COVID-19 aside, we don't expect a repeat of that going forward. And after the year-end, we signed an agreement to acquire a 60% stake in the second largest credit bureau in Germany. This is the Risk Management division of our Arvato Financial Solutions, which itself is a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. Entering the German market had long been an ambition of ours, and this is going to give us a very significant position in this market going forward. The U.K. had a challenging year even before COVID. We are seeing good progress in our core CI business. We also faced a number of internal challenges, which particularly affected the Decisioning business and impacted profitability for the region as a whole. We've appointed a new management team and we are undertaking a significant business transformation, and we're very confident that we will get this back on track. Now for the last few years, new product innovations have been adding significantly to our growth rates, and that continued into FY '20, adding over $0.5 billion to our revenue. And that has doubled -- more than doubled over the last 2 years. Our Data businesses continued to power the group's growth. We've gained considerable share in U.S. mortgage. We've introduced new scoring and analytical products. We're seeing increasing opportunities as a result of the trend towards open data solutions like affordability, categorization of transactions, and consumer-contributed data are all going to be long-term drivers of growth. And more and more of our data products are sold as integrated components of higher value-added platforms. Ascend is now embedded in over 45 institutions. Total contract value reached over $300 million, and it's currently live in 6 countries. It's also emerging as a critical platform for our COVID-19 response due to its ability to rapidly integrate new data sets. And at the moment, we're integrating economic data, which is an area of urgent need for lenders. I'm very pleased with our progress in Brazil in positive data. We now have comprehensive positive and negative data assets and a significant range of new products well ahead of the rest of the industry, which we will roll out now and over the next 18 months. CrossCore, our fraud and identity platform, is now installed in over 250 clients. And we've just launched our newest version, CrossCore 2.0, with enhanced capabilities, which will position us very well. We're moving forward with decisioning in the cloud with Experian One now available in 9 countries, and we do expect one of the trends that will be accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 situation is the shift to cloud-based decisioning systems, and our investment in Experian One platform is really well timed. And in health, we have successfully executed our strategy on the patient relationship from the beginning of the healthcare journey through to collections, and we've secured a lot of new logos. We have become a leading consumer brand with 80 million -- 82 million free consumer memberships globally, and that makes us one of the biggest consumer-focused financial services platforms in the world. You've seen over the past few years how we have continually added capabilities to our Consumer Services business, entering new markets like identity protection and lead generation and adding unique propositions like Experian Boost. We think one of the lasting consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic will be an even faster acceleration of the existing trends towards digitization in all of our markets. Consumer Services will be a long-term structural beneficiary of this, and we're extremely well positioned. We've also been quietly investing in our Latin American Consumer Services business over the past few years. In FY '20, this business generated revenues of $40 million, growth of over 100% year-on-year. So as you can see, we have made massive progress. I should mention this is also one of the reasons why our margin progress has not been stronger in Brazil as we've been investing in this business. But we're very, very pleased with the results. It's hard to overstate how important the platform we have built is going to become. Limpa Nome, the debt settlement service, is now the #1 portal for debt settlement. And we are now, by far, the largest consumer service -- financial services platform in Brazil with over 45 million members, and this at a time when financial services in Brazil is going to undergo a huge change. Positive data will be the catalyst to that and to greater competition and more choice, and the importance of digital platforms for customer acquisition is only going to grow, and we are incredibly well positioned. The U.K. delivered a lot of progress in Consumer Services in FY '20 and crossed into growth for the year. The pandemic has had more of an impact on consumer in the U.K. than in our other markets, but we're placing a big emphasis on new products, and we see an opportunity to enhance our position over the coming year. As I mentioned overall, our Consumer Services business continued to grow. Subscriptions in the U.S. is showing great stability, but we're also doing well in lead generation. Engagements with consumers are strong, and we're able to deliver some of the best quality leads in the marketplace. And as a result, our lender panel continues to have offers in the market and is trading relatively well. And we think there's an opportunity to enhance our position in the market, so we're continuing to invest in marketing. Okay. So now turning to current trading and what we're seeing and what we expect to see going forward. April was relatively resilient, down 5% globally with North America flat, Latin America down 5%, with the U.K. and EMEA/Asia Pacific weaker. Credit inquiries in support of new lending applications are down everywhere, although there is considerable variation across markets, with big variations in volume trends and week-to-week volatility. In some markets like the U.S., volumes are down in single digits. Other markets like India, a much more manual economy, are harder hit. Our best view right now is that Q1 revenue will be down in the range of 5% to 10%. If we just turn to North America, where we can drill into the details. You can also see that there is significant volatility by category. Mortgage volumes have been strong as consumers have refinanced to lock in lower rates, while cards and loans volumes were hit initially and have recovered somewhat from the lows. Auto was hit quite hard initially, car dealerships unable to open and no new car production in the U.S., but having said that, trends have improved more than we expected as lockdowns have started to lift. In Consumer Services, as you can see here, Experian's share of voice in the U.S. has grown, as has awareness for Experian Boost. Recent search traffic also shows very significant growth for other Experian-related terms, and we see similar trends in nonbranded search related to the word credit, both of which say the consumer appetite for credit is currently quite high and our brand profile is rising. We are, in fact, seeing the highest level of demand for our brand since 2014, which is as far as data goes back. Our brand recognition is growing, and all of this is positive. But the current crisis also gives rise to several challenges across our client base, which, in turn, will require solutions to meet those challenges. We have very broad capabilities, many of you saw this in the global financial crisis, and this provides us with the ability to find new revenue opportunities even in this climate. While the global financial crisis was very different to COVID-19, the capabilities that we have today are much more sophisticated, and our ability to help is much greater. Some of the main focus areas will be in ability to pay, debt management, downturn analytics, and there are opportunities across all verticals and business segments. More specifically, financial institutions need to accurately evaluate the risk within their portfolio of existing customer relationships, and these are giving rise to opportunities in account management. They also need to analyze real-time trends across their credit portfolios, and we've already launched new real-time triggers to address this. There is, of course, a huge focus on loan modifications and forbearance as lenders work through economic hardship relief programs. Portfolio models need to be updated to predict better -- losses better and ensure proper reserves, and also ease of implementation becomes really critical. Rapid deployment -- rapid developments and deployments are the new norm in credit analytics, and we're well positioned here with Experian One and Ascend, which are going to be crucial to this. In places like healthcare, we're seeing some really interesting opportunities. With much of the U.S. healthcare closed for anything other than emergency care, U.S. patients are looking to access healthcare digitally, online portals, video, telephone physician appointments, and with this shift, we're seeing increased demand for authentication and identity products, such as Precise ID and Universal Identity Manager in both private and government sectors. And of course, governments want to help to restart the economies, and our consumer data actually helps that. It helps them authenticate and process underwriting of small business loans, getting credit to those that desperately need it. And as I mentioned before, consumers are interested in their credit. Many, many more will monitor it more closely, particularly those that have been most heavily impacted and maybe in forbearance with their lenders. Across all areas, we see increased demand for better tools to improve fraud prevention. I think that's only going to become more pronounced. We're seeing an uptick in 2 particular types of fraud: account takeover fraud and increases in synthetic ID fraud. And we have compelling offers to combat these and other forms of fraud, and including a new product, which we're launching this week called Sure Profile. We are introducing new propositions to maximize on emerging opportunities. We use a consistent, systematic process for driving innovation across Experian, which we call Athena, an agile framework aligned to our strategic focus areas, and we've used this framework to focus quickly on initiatives that are relevant for the current environment. And from that, we've identified over 160 product opportunities, many of which draw on existing products and capabilities. Ascend is a priority. It gives us a significant advantage in many ways. It gives a fresh view of what's happening in the market. It's easy to implement, and it can be adapted for customer management and other use cases. And we're prioritizing a couple of modules. One -- account review is an obvious one as this plays squarely into new client needs. We've also introduced a new module called Ascend portfolio loss forecaster to help with stress testing. And this helps clients understand future losses based on different economic situations. No surprise that analytics is a big focus recession and downturn triggers. We've also launched state of the market dashboards, credit and economic reports that clients could can track in real time. We've developed new segmentations suited to current requirements. And as I mentioned just a moment ago, we're launching a new product, an important one called Sure Profile. This is addressing synthetic ID fraud, and it's a predictor for use in underwriting. Synthetic ID is a growing problem. It's going to get worse as digitization accelerates. This solution dramatically reduces the probability that lending institutions will be subjected to synthetic identity fraud, and thus leads to substantially lower losses. We're as certain as ever we can be that there's going to be a strong demand for this product, and it's launching just at the right time. In Consumer Services, we're diversifying into new verticals, targeting the auto insurance and home refi segments and generally looking to where we can help consumers to save money. And these are just a few of the examples that we're putting significant effort into the biggest of these opportunities as we go forward. We've acted quickly to reduce costs while protecting our capacity and continuing to invest for the long term. We aim to preserve the health of the Experian franchise and position ourselves strongly -- to emerge as strongly as we can from this crisis. And a proportion of our cost is directly variable to revenue, for example, royalties. And we quickly stopped all discretionary spend, such as new hires, professional fees, travel, corporate events. We haven't availed ourselves of any government furlough schemes or made significant headcount reductions. We have continued to invest in our people, in our products and our technology platforms. We've also taken a conscious decision to continue to invest in customer acquisition and marketing expenditure in support of our consumer platforms. As others cut back, we think this is giving us a significant advantage. We put noncritical capital expenditure on hold, but crucially, we will continue to invest in our ongoing technology transformation programs. We believe all these actions are incredibly important. They will protect our business and our franchise and position Experian strongly for what comes next. So to summarize this section. After a strong FY '20, we're responding rapidly to the new reality. And while it is going to be a tough few months, the strength of our business and of our innovation capabilities give us a huge amount of confidence in our ability to weather this downturn. And with that, I'll hand you over to Lloyd to take you through the financial review.

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. I hope you and your families are all safe and well. Starting with the highlights. As you've heard from Brian, we finished the year well with 8% organic revenue growth, which was at the top end of our guidance range. Total growth including acquisitions was 9% at constant rates. We delivered good conversion to benchmark EBIT, up 9% in constant currency; and also with cash with 88% operating cash conversion. And we finished the year in a strong financial position, which I'll cover in more detail during my remarks. Looking at organic revenue trends. As you can see, despite some of the challenges emerging during the last quarter, we had a very strong finish to the year. Against strong comparatives, we again delivered double-digit fourth quarter growth, bringing the second half and full year growth to 8%. The impacts of COVID-19 were felt most in our Asia Pacific and EMEA regions with the effects in our larger regions only in the latter days of the quarter. The overall impact of the emerging crisis was therefore limited in the quarter at a group level. Overall, without the crisis, we estimate the revenue would have been around $15 million higher in the quarter, and operating cash conversion would also have been higher. In addition to organic revenue, we added 1% from acquisitions made during the year, including Compuscan in South Africa, MyHealthDirect and Auto I.D. in North America and a number of other acquisitions across the group. Looking at the regions. As you can see on the left here, we delivered a very strong performance across North America and Latin America, which, together, represent nearly 80% of group revenue. North America had an excellent year, up 11% overall. Some highlights included our Ascend offerings, which grew around 80% during the year; and our Clarity alternative data business, which grew 30%. We also had a very strong finish to the year in mortgage, together, meaning our overall core consumer bureau grew 13% in North America for the full year. We've been very pleased with the growing breadth of our consumer offerings, including the great response to the Experian Boost launch. And this all helped us achieve tremendous growth in customer traffic and engagement, underpinning Consumer Services organic revenue growth of 11%. Latin America was driven by strong momentum across our Brazil business. We delivered 14% organic growth for the year as a whole in Brazil and 18% in the second half of the year. We saw a strong growth in volumes across the business and a growing contribution from new products, such as Ascend and our new automotive debt registry business. We've mentioned previously our investments to grow our material Consumer Services business in Latin America, and we've been making great progress. For the full year, across Latin America, our consumer business contributed $40 million of revenue, growing at 129%. And given the increasing scale and our strong outlook for these businesses, we'll break them out from our Data business in our reporting from FY '21. As Brian referenced, the U.K. performance this year was considerably weaker than we expected. We're pleased with the progress in our consumer and digital businesses, but the combination of our legacy technology environment and the effects of economic uncertainty meant we didn't execute as anticipated. And lastly, we were pleased to see a good performance in EMEA and Asia Pacific in the fourth quarter. And this was a strong finish to the year, particularly given this region was the focus of COVID-related effects in the quarter. Looking to EBIT margin progression and on a geographic basis. If we start with our reported prior year margin of 26.9%. We had a $10 million EBIT benefit from IFRS 16, taking us to 27.1%. And as you'll recall from my comments earlier in the year, this IFRS 16 benefit is offset by an additional charge in interest. North America grew EBIT by 16% in the year, contributing 90 basis points to group margin. We saw strong operating leverage in B2B and also an improved Consumer Services margin, where strong revenue growth more than offset the launch investments we made in Experian Boost. In EMEA and Asia Pacific, we benefited from the addition of Compuscan this year and good operating leverage in EMEA, which offset the flow-through of lower revenue on tough comparatives in Asia Pacific. In Latin America, you can see the impact of our investment in the new positive data bureau in Brazil and a growing consumer business, which is still in its investment phase but scaling rapidly. The challenges in the U.K. business were reflected in its margin, which was a 90 basis points drag on group margin. And within other, we saw increased bad debt provisions at the end of the year, reflecting the current COVID-related uncertainty. Turning now to EPS. Starting from FY '19, the benchmark EPS was $0.98 per share. Growth in benchmark EBIT from continuing operations was 9%, reflecting the strong organic revenue growth performance. Interest expense increased to $132 million as a result of higher average debt and the IFRS 16 interest charge, offsetting the benefit at the EBIT level. The tax rate was 25.8%, and we saw a small benefit from the share repurchase program with weighted average number of shares at 902 million. So EPS was therefore 8% up on a constant FX basis and 5% at actual FX, reflecting the weaker Brazilian real. Looking at our usual reconciliation to statutory results. Amortization of acquisition intangibles increased to $124 million, consistent with the increased acquisition activities during the year. Other acquisition-related items reduced slightly to $35 million and other exceptional items, including movements on legal provisions that we reported in the first half of the year. And noncash finance remeasurements increased from $95 million to $125 million, and this includes the FX losses on Brazilian real intra-group funding. Turning now to our capital framework. During the year, we invested $487 million in organic innovation investments, which I'll discuss in more detail on the next slide. We invested $795 million on acquisitions and minority investments. In the first half, we completed the acquisition of Compuscan, which is now fully integrated within our South Africa business. We also completed the acquisition of Auto I.D., which expanded our capability in automotive fraud; bought out a minority stake in our MicroAnalytics business; and expanded our healthcare capabilities with the acquisition of MyHealthDirect. In FY '20, we made shareholder returns of $613 million, including $424 million of dividends and $188 million from our $400 million share repurchase program. Our return on capital employed was 16.1%, up from 15.9% in the prior year. And after the end of the year, we were pleased to enter the German bureau market with an agreement to acquire 60% of the Risk Management division of our Arvato Financial Solutions. Given the environment, on completion, the consideration will be satisfied by issuing 7.2 million Experian shares, and this is expected to close in the second quarter. As Brian mentioned, we continue to invest organically in technology and innovation to drive the future growth of the business. On the left-hand chart here, you can see, we again invested 9% of sales in CapEx in line with the 9% to 10% guidance we gave. And within that, you can see that over the last 4 years, the proportion of our CapEx that we've invested in product development, shown in light blue at the top of the chart, has continued to increase and is now close to double the proportion it was in FY '16. This increasing focus on product development has been a significant driver of growth, and you can see this on the right-hand chart, which shows the growing revenue from new and key scaling products. This includes new consumer products such as ID works, lead generation and the consumer business in Brazil as well as some of our key scaling B2B products like Ascend and CrossCore. If I turn now to -- a moment to the balance sheet. Given the external environment, this has been an area of particular focus, and we've recently extended a number of our facilities and also raised additional bond funding. As you know, our target net debt-to-EBITDA range is 2 to 2.5, and we've consistently been in the lower half of this range in recent years. And we finished FY '20 at 2.2x, so again, well within our range. We've continued to hold strong investment-grade ratings, and these have been stable since 2011. Looking at our funding, we've recently extended our facilities and raised the bonds, so I'll comment on our positions at the end of April. So at 30th of April, we held -- 2020, we held $2.4 billion of undrawn bank facilities, which have an average remaining tenor of 4 years. Our bond and drawn bank loans totaling $4 billion have an average remaining tenor of 6 years. We have no bank repayments until July 2021 and no bond repayments until October 2021. We have just one covenant on our banking facilities, which is to maintain benchmark EBIT cover of 3x net interest. And as of the 31st of March this year, on that ratio, we had 11x coverage. So as you can see, we're in a strong financial position with no near-term bank or bond repayments and have very significant headroom on our one financial covenant. As we look ahead, given the uncertainties in the external environment, it's right we continue to take a prudent stance on our capital allocation. We have a strongly cash-generative business model, which is globally diversified and resilient, and we'll continue to provide significant flexibility across our priorities, capital allocation. Our first priority continues to be investing in the organic development of the business, protecting and enhancing our fantastic franchise and securing our future growth opportunities. Reflecting our capital priorities and given the progress of the business in FY '20, our strong financial position and our confidence in our business model, the Board has recommended a final dividend of $0.325 per share, unchanged from last year. This brings the total dividend for the year to $0.47 per share. Beyond our prioritization of capital on organic investments and our dividends, we've chosen to suspend the current buyback program and to reduce our near-term focus on acquisition activity. We feel this is -- that this prioritization of capital marks an appropriate and prudent near-term response to the current uncertainties in our markets. As we start to see the external uncertainty reduce, we'll keep our capital allocation closely under review to ensure that it strikes the right balance between financial prudence and delivering on our growth opportunities. As we can all see, the external environment is uncertain with a broad range of forecast on the depth and length of the current health crisis and its potential economic implications. Like most other companies, this means we're unable to give formal guidance and modeling considerations for the full year ahead. However, given this uncertainty, we want to provide an understanding of current trading trends in the business. On these next 2 slides, I'll show a breakdown of our business, with North America and LatAm on this slide and U.K. and Ireland and Asia Pacific/EMEA on the next. We've shown what proportion of group revenue each segments of our business comprises, and then we've given the organic revenue growth in April, and I'll comment on some trends. Our North America business performed very well in April given the circumstances, flat on an organic basis. Our core bureau was very resilient with revenue down 2% for the month as a whole. On the volume side, we saw total credit report volumes reach about a 30% decline in early April, then improved to around a 10% decline as the month progressed. Mortgage volume growth continued to be strong in April, whilst card and banking volumes were consistently down around 20% throughout April. And we saw strength in Ascend and related analytical services. Our auto business had revenue down 12%, where we saw volume declines of around 50% in early April, moderating at the end of the month to low double-digit decline. And in targeting, we saw ongoing reductions in client demand from retailers and others for marketing and targeting services with revenue down 19%. Our Decisioning business was very resilient, with health stable as good growth in new products was offset by reduced transaction volumes as non-COVID related health services were deferred. And we saw positive markets in analytics and fraud as clients focused on services to respond to the current environmental challenges. Our Consumer Services business was up 7%, driven by very strong double-digit growth in direct-to-consumer, as we grow our membership base of both our credit education and identity protection business. We also saw a good year-on-year growth in lead generation as Experian Boost continued to increase traffic to our site and drive higher engagement levels. Latin America declined 5% in April. In Spanish Latin America, a number of the countries went into robust lockdowns, with significant drops in volumes in Colombia and Peru. In Brazil, where the effects of the virus hit a little later than our other core markets, organic revenue was 3% lower in the month as continued strength in our growing Consumer Services business as well as some support from more countercyclical parts of our consumer bureau offset credit volume declines. So overall, across North and Latin America businesses, which account for almost 80% of our revenue, organic revenue was down 1% in April. Our U.K. and Ireland business were down 15% overall. Our core bureau saw volume declines of just over 40%, and these have remained fairly consistent throughout April and into early May. We've seen strong growth in consumer searching for credit with credit eligibility searches continuing to increase by over 30%. However, we've seen a significant withdrawal of lenders from the market with around half of lenders withdrawing products and a further 1/4 restricting lending criteria. And this leads to a reduction of transactions for both our bureau digital services and also our CreditMatcher platform within Consumer Services. Decisioning was down 9% as we saw some of our fraud products performed well, partially offsetting declines in decisioning software business. And Consumer Services was down 17%, driven by that reductions in the supply of credit offers in the market. And our EMEA/Asia Pacific business was down 22%, with EMEA down 30%, driven by declines across our markets, especially in those with more stringent population lockdown policies. And Asia Pacific was down 10%. So as I mentioned, group revenue was down 5% in April, and whilst this gives us some information on how Q1 as a whole performed, there are a number of factors to consider when thinking about the outlook for the first quarter. Clearly, there's uncertainty. And therefore, I'm not going to provide guidance, but we'll give some factors which are likely to determine the outcome, depending on the course of the health crisis, and of course, the public policy response in each market. One of the key revenue dependencies is the length of the lockdowns. It's hard to predict how long these will last in different regions and the rate at which they will be lifted and how economic activity will respond and recover. Brazil was later in seeing the rise of COVID cases and felt the economic impact later than other regions. As some restrictions ease, we may see improvements in volume trends, but the impact on the pipeline development in our software business and more structured sales businesses is hard to predict, and we expect elongated sales cycles here as the quarter progresses. We've also continued to see swings in volumes from week-to-week, so it's hard to extrapolate demand for the rest of the quarter. We've seen strength in mortgage in March and April, but it's unknown how long that will remain at that level. And we've also seen tightening of criteria in the supply of credit products, again, uncertain how this would develop. So I think you can see there we have a range of scenarios. For Q1 organic revenue growth, that might see organic revenue decline in the range of 5% to 10%. And clearly, April was at the low end of that range. So turning now to our approach to managing our cost base. Our comments here reflect our approach in the first quarter as we see how the crisis develops and as we await some greater clarity around the market outlook for the rest of the year. At the top, we have volume variable costs, including data royalties, variable cloud and postage costs. Together, these make up around 15% of our cost base and consist of items that flex, in the near term, broadly in line with revenue. Next, we have some -- our near-term discretionary costs, which make up around another 15% of our cost base. Within here, you have items like travel and marketing. About 2/3 of this category is marketing, and given the strength of our U.S. and Brazilian consumer businesses, we're maintaining our levels of investment in marketing. Of the remainder, we've sharply reduced travel and other discretionary costs so that overall costs across this category are down around 20%. We don't have our people costs, which make up around 45% of our cost base. As Brian mentioned earlier, we want to be in a position for a strong recovery as the crisis abates. Holding employment flat compared with March means that we see low to mid-single-digit increases in costs due to annual pay rises from last June annualizing. And lastly, we have 25% of our costs that are fixed in the near term. These are made up of depreciation and amortization as well as contractual agreements with technology services and facilities. In the near term, these costs will continue to rise in line with recent trends, with depreciation on our recent investments and also our growing spend on technology and innovation. Overall then, you can see our near-term response is to protect our capacity, innovation and technology spend to ensure we're ready to recover strongly. And the reductions we made in discretionary and variable spend will offset those increased investments for the first quarter, meaning our costs will be flat overall. As we see the longer-term impacts of the crisis clarify, we'll clearly keep all our cost options under close review. Whilst we're not giving any broad trading guidance for the year, I wanted to briefly touch on foreign exchange given the volatility we're seeing in global FX markets. Looking at the range of FX rates we've seen recently, the biggest impact we've seen is the devaluation of the Brazilian real. But overall, we expect the Q1 revenue and EBIT headwind of around 5% at these levels. And with that, I'll hand you back to Brian.

Okay. Thanks, Lloyd. So to summarize, FY '20 was a strong year, both financially and strategically. We've taken swift action in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our business is running smoothly to protect our people and then help governments and societies through the crisis. We have a strong balance sheet with significant funding headroom and liquidity. And while we have short-term headwinds which will affect performance, our business has resilient qualities. We're pivoting to new areas of demand, and we're going to be looking to position our business strongly for the future. And now we're going to open up the call for your questions, for which we'll be joined by our Chief Operating Officer, Kerry Williams. Operator, back to you.

[Operator Instructions] And we do have our first incoming question, and it's coming from the line of Paul Sullivan.

Hope you can hear me. Hope you're all well. A few questions for me. Firstly, I'm just trying to get to the bottom the sort of the working capital movement, receivables spike, bad debt write-offs that you talked about and a sort of sense of what's really going on. And I wouldn't have imagined that there was a receivable issue with Experian. So a little bit more color there would be useful. Secondly, just on the sort of the margin and how we should think about sort of drop-through. With revenues down sort of 5% and costs flat, we're looking at sort of mid-single-digit sort of margin pressure in the first quarter. Is that the sort of scale of the degradation that you're willing to tolerate as you sort of focus on holding strategic investments? And then finally, just putting volumes to one side. How would you characterize conversations with customers at the moment and their appetite to engage on some of the new solutions that you're talking about? And is that the key offset to volume decline? So Brian, a bit of color there will be helpful.

Sure. Well why don't I cover the last one first. We can come back to Lloyd on the working capital movements and the question around margin. I think that the key conversations really are around how do they pivot to coping with the new environment. There's a lot changing. There is going to be a lot -- some of the stuff I outlined, a real need for different kind of analytics, I think, in time, probably a real need for a different approach to risk management and how they look at their underwriting. But in the short term, there's just a need for fresher data to understand what's happening, all the things that I highlighted around trying to sort of second-guess what the economic impact is going to have on their client bases and so on and so forth. So I think that just gives rise to those opportunities. Some of the bigger ones, I think, are related to things like account management. It does give us an opportunity with products like Ascend and it does give us an opportunity really across the board in a number of areas there. So I think it's those areas that -- I would characterize that there is a difference, I think, between the type of engagement we're having now versus 2008 and '09, and that's related to the position of the institutions themselves. So we think back and contrast between the 2 types of downturn. The first one was a financial crisis, and it really impacted the banking sector first. And actually, the big question was the survival of the banking sector themselves. And so it was -- we were dealing with a really difficult environment where they were cutting headcount. You would be engaged with some people one week, and next week, they'd be gone. And there was an element of real turmoil across the sector. That's not the case today because the banks are in a much stronger financial position and they themselves have actually made some really strong commitments to how they are going to try and help companies, consumers and governments through this crisis. They've obviously received huge injections of, well, availability of liquidity to help them through it. And they've actually made a lot of commitments themselves to protect their own people. Witness HSBC's decision to postpone what was a pretty massive restructuring. So all of that is helpful in having a much more productive dialogue this time versus last time. The second difference is that if you look at our product set today versus 12 years ago, it's much more comprehensive. It's much more sophisticated. And we're engaging at a different level. So all of that is, I think, very helpful, very positive. In the short term, of course, what drives the volumes is going to be acquisition-related activity and credit, and you've seen that impacted. But we've never said that we're completely immune. What we've said is that there's countercyclical elements in the portfolio, and I think you're seeing that come through. So hopefully I've addressed that question. And then, Lloyd, do you want to pick up the other 2?

Yes. So Paul, on your first question on working capital and margin in the year just gone, starting with margin. So 2 real things to call out. Certainly, the U.K. was weaker than we expected and particularly in the second half of the year. So that obviously weighed a little bit on margin. And then on bad debt provisions, as our accounting close came at the end of March, there were a number of different requirements from accounting regulators to consider the risk of credit and bad debt losses in relation to the COVID crisis. We haven't seen any increase in actual bad debts. The area that the assessment really focuses on for us is our SME businesses across the world. So we've taken a fairly prudent position there. That had a drag on margin of about 20 basis points a noncash provision at the end of the quarter. And we'll see, obviously, how that progresses. On to working capital. You remember at the half year, I guided to around 90% for our full year cash conversion. We came in at 88%. We saw weakness really in March around cash collection. So DBO at our close position was about 4 days higher than the prior year, and that was just really some greater challenges as the world, both us and our clients, migrated to working from home in getting the cash collections that we'd expected. So you add that 4 days back, you'd have seen cash conversion in the low 90s, which I think is a reasonable place where we'd normally expect. On to margin for this year, I think -- the way to think about it probably isn't as drop-through. We're talking about Q1. We are almost 2/3 of the way through Q1. So our cost base is fairly fixed. And you see in the slide I talked through how we're managing each piece of that. We're clearly continuing to invest in marketing given the strength in consumer and also protecting our capacity and our people in this near-term crisis. So clearly, as we go through into the rest of the year, we'll be seeing how things will recover. We're obviously encouraged by how some of the volumes have moved as we've come through the last 6 weeks, but it's still uncertain. So I think we'll keep that under review and take the action that we think is right based on the outlook for the business.

Great. And just to clarify on that working capital. You haven't seen any further deterioration as you've gone through April presumably?

No, no.

And we have our next question, and it is coming from the line of -- apologies. It's coming from Alexander Mees.

Three, please. So firstly, in Brazil, you're a few months now into positive data. I wonder how you see the competitive landscape evolving there and how we should think about the opportunity to drive growth in Brazil through new product suites despite perhaps slower economic growth. Secondly, the strength in Consumer Services in North America in April, I just wonder what your expectation is given perhaps your experience in previous downturns? And will this be a short-lived spike that falls away quickly? Or is it possible it could be a little bit more sustained than that? And finally, you alluded a couple of times to internal challenges in the U.K. I wonder if you could give us just a bit more color as to what those challenges are and how you intend to address them.

Sure. Okay. So I will tackle these and invite others to join in. Let's deal with Brazil first. There were 3 parts to your question, positive data, the landscape and how the new products contribute to opportunities going forward. I think let's just talk about pre-COVID situation because I think that was the most relevant. We've been gearing up for this for, as I joked in the last time around, about 20 years, but realistically, over the last few years, we've made the investments to build out our brand-new positive data bureau. More importantly, we know that we are the most advanced in the marketplace at introducing a whole suite of products around positive data. That's strong feedback that we're getting from interactions with clients on a regular basis. So we are actually already generating small amounts of revenue from positive data. So we're in market with products. And we have a very strong -- a new product introduction schedule over the next 18 months where we're going to be hitting essentially new features pretty much every quarter. So we're in a great position, and I think we're in a much stronger position than anybody else. Now I think there's a question as to how quickly we see take-up of positive data products in the current environment because I think while we're in lockdown and while we're in a bit of a high ache as we've seen, obviously, that stall because we've seen -- like every other market that we're in, we've seen the provision of new credit really come to grow into a bit of a halt. So I think that will cause us to have a longer runway on this than we'd hoped for, not the first time we've said that, but I think it's pretty unusual circumstances that had hit us right now. Overall though, we remain really, really positive about our position. And I think compared to sort of as time progresses, and we talked to you 6 months ago, 12 months ago, as time goes on, we get more confident about that. So I think that the answer is we're in a really good position. Let's talk about consumer in April. One of our big questions that we had coming into this crisis was how would the consumer behave. We know that they -- we know how they behaved in the global financial crisis. You can look back and see, actually at that time, our Consumer Services business grew really strongly. But the market has changed since then. We didn't really have proliferation of free credit reports and so on and so forth. So we weren't entirely sure that, that would repeat. But what has happened is exactly the same thing, which is that we see a huge rush by consumers to get their finances in order to become very focused on improving their credit and getting their score to be the best as possible, interested in how it impacts them. And that's coming through just as it did last time. So if we continue on that basis, then we would expect that part of the business to continue to be resilient. We're also seeing the same thing in identity protection as well, which I think is also -- all goes well. I think for -- where the market has really been impacted is in the lead generation space, where you've seen some fairly significant drops in the availability of offers in the marketplace. Our lead generation business is still performing really well. That is down to the quality of the leads that we provide. So we still have lenders providing product on our panel. That's not the case for everybody. That, I think, we have to wait and see. If products are still available in the marketplace, then we continue to expect to do well. As I highlighted in my presentation, demand for credit is still extremely strong so we don't expect any shortage of demand. We think the issue is going to be on the supply side. So we have to see how that evolves. But I think we're in a pretty good position there. And then let's come to U.K. We said internal challenges. I think when you dissect the U.K. business, we look at the bureau, the bureau is doing pretty well, particularly seeing really well in new digital services things like open banking, businesses like Runpath and eligibility all performing really well. The problem has actually come in our Decisioning business, and there's a couple of elements to that. First was 2019 was actually a really strong year. We had a lot of client migrations into new platforms. And we felt that going into 2020, we could grow over that because we had a lineup of new products that we felt could get enough traction with. So essentially, we set our business up to do that. As the new products didn't come through, that obviously gave us a bit of an EBIT issue to deal with. At the same time, I have said before, our U.K. business is our most complex technology environment. We have a lot of very old legacy products in there, and we have run into some service issues there, which have given rise to additional costs. So those are the 3 things hit, and that meant that from an EBIT perspective, the impact at the region was fairly significant. I think the big question, I'm sure you're all wondering, is this a market issue or is this just a temporary issue? I mean our judgment is it's not a market issue. Our business is still -- has a fantastic position. We still believe we have great growth opportunities there. We've got certain things to fix. And as I referenced on the call, we've replaced the management team, and we're going through a fairly significant reorganization which will address, we think, not just market opportunities but also some of the legacy technology issues that are holding us back.

And we have our next incoming question. It's coming from the line Brett Huff.

Glad to hear you're all safe. The first one, the follow-up on the consumer question that was asked a minute ago. More specifically, I think you said in particular regions that the supply of credit in the consumer side was the half -- maybe half of the credit may be dried up, I think was the stat you gave. Is the -- is credit supply varying differently or reduction in credit supply varying substantially across the different regions? Does that explain why North America is plus 7, LatAm is plus 110, and for example, U.K. is minus 17? Is that the main driver of the variability? Or is it maybe other things?

Okay. Thanks, Brett. Lloyd, do you want to take that one up?

Yes. Sure. So I think a couple of things there, Brett. The first one is the business mix is a bit different. We clearly have a rapidly growing subscription identity business in North America. And we've seen some of the response on our credit subscription business over the last quarter has been stronger in North America than in other regions. In Brazil, again, it's different mix. We have the Limpa Nome business, which is around debt resolution. That, as we've grown our free membership base, is growing very well. And obviously, that's a very new business. The piece on credit supply, we're seeing a bit of it in each market, but it's been stronger in the U.K. And my comments to about half of offers being withdrawn and about another 25% seeing criteria tightened, that was in relation to the U.K. We've seen in the U.S. some tightening of criteria across a number of lenders, but not at the same scale of withdrawal of product that we've seen in the U.K. So obviously, we're watching that carefully. Clearly, in the U.S., we have the ability -- we have a broader product set, and we've been prioritizing and shifting our cross-sell based on what the demand that we're seeing from clients, and that clearly is helping the business there. And we also have Boost in market in the U.S. which obviously helps our traffic and engagement levels.

Great. And just my follow-up is on some of the minority investments in small business -- small company investments that you've made over the past couple of years, I'm guessing that some of those are not particularly well capitalized. Will those need more funding? Or are they in general doing well so far? Can you just kind of give us an update on that in this new environment?

Yes. Sure. We're obviously closely engaged with the management of those companies. The vast majority are well capitalized and can trade through the next year or so. And they're in some fairly exciting places. So some interesting pieces to that. Other areas, I'm sure we'll have to trade through some softer demand, but right now they're well capitalized and we feel confident in their portfolio.

Rory, your line is now live.

Hope you can hear me. I was hammering away at star 1, so glad I got through in the end. Just 2 from me. Firstly, I wanted to ask again on consumer. In the past, you've given us some detail about the kind of breakdown between subscribers, partner solutions and the new products. Could you give that again or just update on what the relative trends are? Interested about the traditional subscriber base in particular and whether consumers are seeing more uptake of that as they worry about drawing the finances in the U.S. or whether they see it as kind of a noncore cost to be cut. And so maybe just a bit more on the consumer first, please.

Okay. Yes. Happy to talk to that. So we've seen actually some really interesting trends in consumer. We saw quite a strong response as we've come through March and into April on memberships in our core credit offering. So we're seeing memberships there. And knock on to revenue, that grew in both Q3 and Q4 in the credit education business. Identity subscriptions continue to grow and we've seen those trends continue. And obviously, lead gen was up very strongly. So if you look at the fourth quarter as an exit rate, overall consumer services revenue in North America, you have about $240 million. About $55 million was the identity and lead generation business. A little under $120 million was the credit education business. So I think that gives you a good breakdown. It also shows the strong trajectory we had in those identity and lead gen products as we've come through the last couple of years.

Yes. Great. And can you just talk about the consumer margin itself? Obviously, there's a big step-up in marketing costs in the past year. And I appreciate the current environment is hard to kind of think about, but maybe if you look out into the medium term, you always talked about a kind of 20% to 25% margin range for that business. As the mix shifts, is that thinking evolving at all?

Yes. I think we were really pleased with the progress this year. I think we put a lot of investment into the launch in Boost. Then as you've seen, in North America, our margin has progressed in consumer notwithstanding that investment. The other thing to remember is that there is a royalty that's paid from consumer business to our Data business. So when you add that together, the combination of this means that this business is accretive to group margin. I think in terms of outlook for where the margin might go, we're -- there's been no change in there, really. Our focus is really on driving the breadth of different consumer offers and the revenue growth. And we're pretty confident in our ability once we have that membership base to be able to cross-sell across different products and engaging different needs at different times. That's really where the power of that platform will come as it grows and progresses.

Great. Then just one on Germany, if I can, given that exciting move. Can you talk about how developed that bureau you bought is in terms of kind of product offering or breadth? And your first thoughts, I guess, as you look into what you'll try and change there first.

Yes. Well, just as I said in my remarks we've been looking to go into Germany for quite some time. So we're delighted to be able to do this. We've been looking at this opportunity for at least 18 months. And it's important to emphasize that Bertelsmann is going to remain a shareholder -- a minority shareholder going forward. That's a really positive sign from our perspective. It's the #2 bureau in Germany. It is focused on e-commerce. And actually, as a result of which, its current trading is going really, really well. So we couldn't be more pleased. We do see the opportunity to really use this as a springboard to launch the full set of Experian products into the German market in a way it's been difficult for us to do before. A lot of client relationships and a lot of existing sales channels. And the business itself is a good business but a pretty straightforward one in terms of the product set that it's got. So we see a big opportunity to really enhance that with the full Experian range of products. So we're excited about it and really looking forward to getting that under our wing.

And the next question is going to be coming from the line of Kumar Rajesh. [Operator Instructions]

Just following up on the German opportunity. In the medium term, do you see the German market as big as the U.K. market? Or the medium-term potential is not as large but still significant? Just a scale of opportunity would be interesting to understand. The second one is on the consumer subscription in the U.S. What proportion of your business comes from near prime or sub-prime customers? And what's the level or the risk of churn in the coming quarters in such a customer base? And finally, could you give us some color on how the competitive landscape have been progressing, especially with the launch of new products in the U.S. and in Brazil with the positive data?

Rajesh, just to clarify that last question, the competitive landscape in Brazil or the U.S.? I thought I heard you say both.

Both.

Okay. All right. Well, we'll do our best to tackle that. That's quite a broad-ranging question. Well, let's go back to the German opportunity in the medium term. Germany, our view is Germany is much less developed in terms of the sort of sophistication of products that we see in places like the U.S. and the U.K. So I think if you think about it from a pure bureau perspective, if you just think about credit application volumes and so on, then I don't know if that's a super growth area. I think it will grow. But I don't think that's where we see the big opportunities to come from. I think we see opportunities come all of the additional value-added products that we provide, which make up a very significant proportion of our revenue in most of our bureau markets worldwide. And I think that those are pretty much undeveloped in Germany so we think there's quite a big opportunity. There's obviously a lot of selling to do, and that doesn't happen by itself, but I think that's where we see the real growth coming from. On the competitive landscape in Brazil, first of all, it hasn't changed. We've -- if anything, I think, probably competitors of -- the current environment will probably hold them back more than not. So I think no real further comment to add on that. We haven't seen any activity from anybody. We do know that our lineup of positive data products is substantially ahead of anything else which is out in the marketplace. So we feel pretty good about that. The U.S., I mean, we don't really see any significant change in the competitive landscape in the U.S. It's quite a broad-ranging question so -- but I don't think there's anything really significant to note on that. And then on the consumer, Lloyd, do you want to take that up?

Yes. I'll take that. So you have to think about the different markets in our consumer business, Rajesh. The growth in identity subscriptions has continued to grow really well. So we ended this year at just 540,000 subscribers to our paid membership in identity. And we've given those -- some of those numbers pretty frequently over the last couple of years so you can see the progression there. And credit subscribers, generally the last the few years, as you know, had been modestly declining, and they've over the last couple of quarters stabilized and increased. And particularly, that's been a focus of acquisition in the last, I would say, last 8 weeks. You have to, though, focus back on our strategy on consumer, which is to have a breadth of membership, a breadth of engagement and lots of different products that we can sell to people as their needs change. And that, as I said, that's the power rather than looking at the individual revenue streams, I think.

On the U.S. the question was to -- with Equifax coming back with a few new product launches. Are you seeing a bit more competitive -- in terms of the sales process, are you seeing a bit more competition on a like-for-like basis?

No. I think actually -- I think Equifax themselves pointed that they're still trailing behind really in their USIS business. So we haven't seen anything really. And I'd just highlight that we've probably been -- well, not probably, we have been, I think, the most innovative player in that marketplace with new products being introduced every year. So I think I don't -- we don't see any fundamental change there.

And we have our next incoming question, and it's coming from the line of Tom Sykes.

Tom Sykes. Just first of all, on the comments about the Q1 growth rate versus the April growth rate, where is the slight deviation? And is that just in the sales cycle of software? And would you say that it's going to be disproportionately U.K. because of the issues you've got there? Or are there other areas that you'd you pick out a different kind of cadence or maybe elongated sales cycle at all there, please? Then just a quick question. I guess how much is fraud and fraud-related activity for you at the moment? And maybe how much would be sort of covered by sort of existing contracts? If there's a volume increase, does that directly relate to increased revenue for you, please? And then finally, just on -- again, on this consumer margin. I guess you look at it, obviously, a big change in business mix, but you're making the same EBIT as you did 5 years ago on a much higher -- or a 20% higher revenue in H2. And you've got a big change in mix of business. To what extent -- you obviously got differences in gross margins. When you look at where the sort of flexibility you might have on the marketing side of that business to hold the margins going forward, are you seeing a greater proportion of your spend now on marketing? And so therefore, are you going to get a marketing or advertising rates benefit if those advertising rates -- or have they come down for you? And maybe they've come down with a lag because of contracts you've got there, please.

Okay. I'll maybe take a few of those. So Q1 versus April. Look, clearly there's a fair amount of uncertainty in the market. Volumes are varying week to week, and you would expect us to be providing an outlook cautious. I think when we look at transaction volumes, I think we feel reasonably positive that a number of the declines have peaked on a slow improving trend as we've seen it going through the last few weeks. Some of the uncertainties I referenced in my remarks, mortgage has been booming during March and April. Will that continue throughout the quarter? We've seen good progress, as we mentioned, across consumer. What will be the development of some of the availability of supply of products in there? And obviously, we're talking here about months within a quarter, and the comps from the prior year are slightly different. We had a strong June in the prior year. So I think given the uncertainty in the environment, you would expect us to be a little thoughtful about the range that we would give you, but we're encouraged by how April has started and the trends we're seeing in volumes. On consumer margin, I don't think it's really that relevant. If you're going to look back 4 or 5 years, we've got a completely different business in consumer now. Really strongly growing our identity and protection business; the lead generation business, completely brand-new, growing very rapidly; and all of those engagements with the consumers. So if you look at how we're managing the business near term, that strength and the strength of our brand and how it's playing that Brian referenced, we're going to continue to market in to that whilst we see the opportunity to increase acquisition and increase revenue. Near term, we -- across the business, we've seen marketing rates fall a bit. But again, how long that will sustain, we just don't know. So I think good -- it's delivering good margin, overall accretive to group. And we're going to continue to pursue that while we see the market opportunities. And then fraud, our overall decision analytics business, if you think for the year as a whole, is something like $700 million, and 1/3 is fraud and identity. And we've got a range of different types of contracts that you would see in there, but clearly, the trends -- the near-term trends in that business have been positive as more transactions have moved digital. And there's been a greater desire to have both the analytical and identity solutions to prevent it.

And the run rate of the fraud-related work sort of now pre-COVID, how would you characterize? What kind of growth rates are we seeing there? And then how can we -- so if we can just see what the uplift in fraud-related activity going forward would be?

Yes. So for the year as a whole, fraud and identity was a range between, and this is globally, between mid-single to high single-digit growth across the year. So -- and we've seen that strengthen as we've come through March and into April.

And the next question is coming from the line of George Gregory.

I had 3 questions, please. Firstly, I wanted to go back to that April trend in your core U.S. bureau, down 2% despite total credit volumes. I think, Lloyd, you mentioned down about 20% over the month. I wondered if you could perhaps expand a little on what drove the significant offset in growth and enabled you to demonstrate a rate of growth that is visibly above your peer set through April? Secondly, just going back to that discussion around the development of availability of supply in the consumer lead gen space. Is there typically some lag or latency between credit volumes and offers? I just sort of would have thought that as the volume, the underlying volume trend picks up, we would see supply of kind of loans sort of broadly follow that. But maybe there's a lag there. And the final question. I suppose more strategically, Brian, you mentioned -- you talked around an acceleration in the transition to cloud-based applications in the context of your Decisioning suite. I just wondered if you might look to accelerate any of your own migrations, perhaps your databases given the backdrop and the admittedly near-term headwinds that you're facing?

Okay. Thanks, George, for the questions. So I want just to ask Lloyd to deal with the April trend one. And then I'm going to invite Kerry to address your question on the development of supply and lead space -- lead gen space. I think it be quite interesting just to sort of contrast what happens in the global financial crisis. Kerry will have that perspective. And then I'll come back on the strategic question.

Yes. So just picking up the bureau numbers. Obviously, you see overall trends in overall profile pools. But when you then convert that to revenue, clearly, there are different price points for different subsegments. We've clearly had a lot of strength in mortgage as we've gone -- and that sustained through April and into early May, and we've also had strength in Ascend. So this is -- so you have quite a mix of benefit in there as you think about how it all adds up. And the relationship between data and the Ascend services that we're providing is a pretty strong addition year-over-year given the progress that we've been making in that business.

And so Kerry, can we move over to you for the question on the development of the supply in line lead gen space?

Sure, Brian. Thanks. So if you take the 3 major markets of Brazil, the U.S. and the U.K., you have to look at them a little bit differently. The Brazil consumer market is very much in a state where the Brazil core credit bureau was during the last financial crisis. If you will recall, the Brazil credit bureau was one of the bright spots of Experian, continued to grow, had great growth through the global financial crisis. And the consumer business there looks to be in the same position because the consumers in Brazil are continuing to move towards acquiring credit to wanting to understand their credit report, their scores. And so we just see that as having a tailwind in the Brazil market. If you move to the U.S., what you have is you have plenty of supply for prime, super prime consumers, which is a large portion of our customer base. But you have a diminishing supply, as you would expect, in the subprime consumer base because of the tightening of the credit policies. And so that's where we've primarily seen a change in supply in the U.S. market. It is noticeable, but it is not -- I wouldn't we put it at a severe rate in terms of supply. What we have seen is that there's been a recognition by the lenders that we clearly have the quality leads in this space. The fact that we are a bureau, that we do have capabilities like Experian Boost, the brand recognition that was already talked about earlier today, the consumers have migrated to us fairly strongly. You see it in the results and the lenders recognize that. So we've been able to keep supply in the U.S. market where others have lost their supply, and we expect that to continue for the indefinite future with this crisis. In the U.K. market, the lockdown was quite severe. There's definitely been a pullback in the supply. Again, we feel like we have a high-quality of leads in the market, and we're viewed that way so we've been able to keep a good portion of the supply. But to give you an example of what has occurred in the U.K. market, typically, consumers coming to us and looking for products prior to the crisis, maybe around 80% to 85% of those consumers would have seen some type of offer because of their creditworthiness, their credit background. During the pandemic lockdown in the U.K. business, that has moved up closer to 50%, and that's purely a reflection of the tightening of the credit policies and the tightening of supply in the U.K. market. And that lack of supply is what you're seeing the big difference in the U.K. business versus Brazil or the U.S. We expect that supply to come back. We're already starting to see financial institutions starting to come back a bit and starting to test some new opportunities in the market. It will evolve at the pace that the market in the U.K. continues to move. So the supply in the U.K. has been noticeably different and was directly cut back due to the more severe lockdown that was in the U.K. business and the tightening by the U.K. lenders. Brian, I'll stop there.

Okay. Thanks, Kerry. And then, George, just coming back to your question on acceleration. I think just some context, we talked to you a lot over the last few years about our own technology transformation. It's not one big program, it's obviously several programs that we have running in tandem, and you've actually already seen the results of quite a lot of that in the new products that we brought to market. And just to list them off, for example: Ascend, Experian One, CrossCore, new consumer services platforms, new positive data bureau in Brazil, new bureau architecture in Colombia. We've actually already built all of the underlying components that we need from a technology perspective to really reengineer the Health business. And what we have done, we've over the last few years engaged in quite extensive strategic view to map out how we do that, particularly around things like some of the migration of the legacy pieces of technology. And it cuts across a lot of different businesses from Health to CIS to BIS and others. So that's a big management job. It's something that we're approaching extremely carefully, not just from a cost perspective but from a risk perspective. But we feel like we have really a lot of the components that we need. Could we accelerate? Yes. We're sort of sometime into this now. We're learning a lot. Those -- most of those projects are going really well. Not obviously right now in the middle of a pandemic when the first thing we have to do is move 17,000 people to working from home. And of course, as we think through over the next sort of few months about what are the long-term implications for our business arising out of the changes that COVID is bringing, be they temporary or some of them may be permanent, that's when we'll look to sort of reevaluate any of that. So that may be something that we'll come back to at a later point in time.

And we have our one last incoming question, and it is coming from the line of Anvesh Agrawal.

I just got one last query and that's on the Health business, wherein, again, the revenue trends that you've given for April seems to be much more resilient than what your peers were indicating. Can you just probably give a bit more detail on the nature of your business? Is it more software, less transactional for you? Or what are the drivers that is driving better performance for Experian?

Yes. I'm going to ask Kerry to address that one. Kerry, you okay take that one?

Yes. Happy to, Brian. Thank you. So yes, our Health business is instrumental to the healthcare providers. It's as simple as that. They cannot conduct their business unless our products and our platforms are up every day to allow them to manage their business. And so we don't see the type of volume drop-offs that you might have if all that you have in that business is a collections offering or some fraud authentication offerings. Those can clearly fall short in a situation where the hospitals are swamped with the pandemic because they turn their attention to managing their customers and dealing with the pandemic. They use our systems to do that. So our software systems are embedded. Our ability to help them understand their customer base, the demographics of their customer base, which demographics in their area that they provide care might they have different groups of consumers that are more at risk. Our ability to help them with the telehealth that is now exploding because consumers do not want to go into a hospital for their normal medical needs like they used to because the hospitals are dealing with the pandemic. And so our ability to help them schedule, this has gone from -- telehealth might have been 5 or 10 instances per week for a hospital with consumers prior to the pandemic to over 1,000 per week now. And our ability to help schedule that, to help manage that workflow, to get them taken care of is a big part of our capabilities in the healthcare space. So there is a noticeable difference in the type of offerings that we do in healthcare. We're an integral part of what the hospitals need to run their business, and so we don't tend to see the large fluctuations that are purely economic-driven that you might see with some other providers. Brian, back to you.

Okay. Thanks. Okay? Operator, I will -- back to you. Are we -- any more questions on the line?

No. There are no more questions on the line, sir.

Okay. Well, no more questions on the line. Thanks, everyone, for joining the call today. Nice to speak to you all. I hope everybody keep safe and well, and we look forward to speaking to you again in a few months' time. Maybe we might all be back in the offices by then. You never know. Anyway, good luck, everybody.

Thank you so much, sir. So everyone, that concludes the call for today. You may now disconnect. Thank you so much for joining.