Experian plc (EXPN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome, everyone, to the Experian FY '21 Preliminary Results call hosted by Brian Cassin. My name is Jo, and I'm your operator today. [Operator Instructions] Now I'd like to hand the call over to your host, Brian. Please go ahead, sir.

Well, thank you, operator, and good morning, and welcome, everybody. I'm joined today by Lloyd Pitchford and Kerry Williams will also join us for the Q&A session. So let's get started with the strategic and financial overview for the year. FY '21 was a challenging year, but the business performed really well. To finish the year with organic and total revenue growth as we did shows the business' capability and resilience even in the most difficult circumstances. Most importantly, we focus on looking after our people and our clients, the most critical components for our long-term success. We've now grown our way through 2 major downturns, and the macro environment is now strengthening significantly in our major markets. And by making the right strategic choices in previous years, we've put ourselves in a position to continue growing once the crisis abates. Of course, it hasn't all been plain sailing. Parts of the business did struggle, but overall, we're emerging from this period in really good shape. We see signs of recovery in some markets already and have the opportunity now to step up, and I'm confident that we're going to have a very good FY '22. But before we start, I want to say a huge thank you to my Experian colleagues who have shown enormous dedication and commitment during this time. So while we're proud of our financial performance in FY '21, we're also very proud of the work that we've done to give back. And this was a year that really demonstrated the power of data when correctly used and what we can do to help governments and societies. Right from the start, we moved quickly to make our data and our data insights available to governments, health providers, charities and many others. And we worked with lenders and governments to support families and businesses, reaching vulnerable populations and keeping economies moving. Alongside this, our United for Financial Health program used financial education and partnerships to empower those people hit hardest by COVID. During the year, we partnered with 11 new nonprofit organizations to improve financial health worldwide, including organizations such as Operation Hope, Back Girl Ventures, The Big Issue and many more. And we adopted a people-first agenda to provide support to our Experian colleagues, and as a way of saying thank you for their exceptional effort, we will be making a special one-off recognition award for helping Experian thrive during the pandemic. Turning to the financials. We finished the year well. Q4 was a good quarter at 5% organic revenue growth, was at the top of our guidance range. And we ended the year with full year organic growth of 4%. When you add in acquisitions, total growth was 7% at constant currency. So it was a high single-digit growth year overall. The start of the year was consistent throughout. North America and Latin America had very strong years, particularly in the context of the pandemic. And whilst we had challenges in some markets, we saw a recovery in almost all areas in H2 improving into Q4. Very pleased to say we made great progress on our transformation in the U.K., with the U.K. returning to growth in Q4. Consumer Services had an outstanding year. It delivered 17% growth and we now reached 110 million free members, up 28 million on last year. The B2B business held flat, which, considering the external pressure, was a resilient performance. Mortgage, Health, Ascend, other new products and countercyclical elements of the portfolio all helped us weather the decline in unsecured lending volumes, which is broad-based across all the regions. Main point, however, is that the work done in previous years to position the business strongly and strategic choices that we made served us very well. We made some key decisions at the start of the year to support our people and to invest in key strategic opportunities. This worked out really well. Innovation-led growth is a major driver of our performance. We continued to invest to retain our capacity to improve and expand, including investments in people, marketing, new products and our technology transformation, all of which continued in FY '21. This did have some impact on margin but positions us well for recovery. EBIT growth was 3% in the year, but we expect margin compression to largely reverse in FY '22, so we are set up for a strong year for EBIT growth. Our cash performance was outstanding. We converted over 106% of EBIT into operating cash flow, our strongest performance in our history as a public company. And we also held the dividend level with last year and now plan to restart the buyback. We deliberately balanced our approach to cost management. We continued with critical growth investments while holding discretionary costs tight. We also added inorganically to our position in key sectors. Now I've referenced the emphasis we placed on people, which is hugely important, as well as the concerted action we took to support marketing expenditure in Consumer Services. We continued to make progress on new product innovation through our Athena program. 158 projects from Athena went live across the globe, a further 266 were started with future go-live dates. So we have a strong portfolio of initiatives, which is supporting hundreds of millions of dollars of future revenue potential. And we also materially progressed our technology transformation as we migrate from mainframes into a distributed framework utilizing the cloud. We also moved forward with some important acquisitions. We added new bureaus in Germany and Spain. We strengthened our position in fraud and identity management with the acquisitions of Tapad and BrScan, a fraud management business in Brazil. We accelerated our entry into new verticals with 3 bolt-ons in verification services. And finally, we exited our investment in Finicity with a return of 6x equity capital we invested, realizing a gain of $120 million. Our addressable markets are sized over $130 billion and growing. In some cases, COVID has accelerated the underlying trends, and therefore, the opportunity. The faster-growth parts of these markets are focused on capabilities positioned higher up in the value chain. And this is at the heart of our strategy: marrying best-in-class data with sophisticated analytics and software products to create more and better solutions that address key client needs. Client needs are expanding all the time as digitization fundamentally changes markets. The need to respond with more effective solutions for their customers drives demand for better data, more data and better products to effectively serve their business needs. Consumer Services is a great example. We could be a data supplier to identity and lead generation players or we can capture additional value by providing these products ourselves and building direct relationships with consumers. And the scale of the opportunity that we have by choosing the latter is very clear from our results and also from platforms that we've built, which give us great future potential. Same is true in our core data business. Additional market opportunity comes from innovation around our data, products and platforms that provide better use and functionality and greater value. And increasingly, this comes from combinations of our capabilities across business lines and by extending these products to help clients' automation journeys. We're in a very good position to address a huge shift in fraud that comes with e-commerce. Experian can provide the relevant data for risk decisions and customer acquisition, onboarding, fraud and authentication as people shift more of their lives online. We've enhanced our technology estate, accelerating the rate of innovation. We're integrating more of our capabilities, making our platforms interoperable. And we have data differentiation, better products, network effect and the advantages that come with a large consumer motion base. And consumer engagement is now becoming a competitive advantage. We've enabled consumers to directly contribute additional data to improve their credit scores and access affordable credit whilst at the same time reinforcing our B2B propositions. We're addressing these markets through a set of well-defined strategic priorities across a number of areas. Consumer consent and open data will become a big driver of change in growth, and we're at the forefront of this. Our open data platform is best-in-class, and we plan to offer these globally. Traditionally, our global products were confined mostly to our DA products, particularly PowerCurve. However, Ascend has now reached total contract value of $374 million, still heavily weighted to North America, which, of course, is the largest market opportunity for it. But we have broadened use cases, and we've taken Ascend in many more countries with particular success in Brazil and now the U.K., which has tripled the size of its pipeline. And we have many more global opportunities for products like this, particularly in areas like advanced analytics. Ascend and PowerCurve provide us with platforms in which we can build with existing installations that we can leverage. We're also working on combining Ascend and PowerCurve, which is a complicated exercise, but one which will see us develop a true cradle-to-grave data final decision capability. And we'll aim to offer Ascend wherever we have PowerCurve, and we have over 370 PowerCurve clients worldwide, so that should give us a great platform and potentially unlock several hundred million dollars more of opportunity. And that's a focus for investment and effort right now. More and more of our propositions are cloud-enabled. Clients want cloud first and for an easy connection to analytics. Ascend Intelligence Services, one of our newer products, provides the ability to develop and deploy models into production seamlessly and quickly. The Experian One investment has been hugely important for us. Interest in cloud solutions was growing before COVID, but the pandemic has changed this entirely. Many of our products, even outside of DA, are built on Experian One. For example, the decision capability, which is embedded within our U.S. consumer business built on Experian One, which leverages our world-class decisioning capabilities to provide solutions to consumers. Of course, new verticals have played an important role in our growth. Health is one of our largest businesses now. Patients need help with the financial side of health care and better digital care coordination, and we're excited about the progress we're making in verification services. In Consumer Services, we now have really significant platforms in 3 geographies and we're going to build the memberships and expand use cases. We're becoming more and more relevant to consumers in financial services. We've also entered the insurance market in the U.S., and we're evaluating exciting new opportunities in payment services. And I think we've proven that there's real strategic benefit of having consumer bureau of services and consumer-facing platforms by driving deep integrations with our financial partners, taking friction out of the credit application process and providing quality offers. Region-specific opportunities like positive data and business diversification in Brazil still make up a huge portion of our growth potential and we're pursuing all of those aggressively. Turning now to the regional updates. North America's performance this year was very good. Organic revenue growth, 7%, respectable in any year, never mind a pandemic year. New products, strong innovation and great execution contributed to a year when core bureau volumes were down materially. We have started to see volume recovery from our top customers. Acquisition programs are reactivating. Much of the client's focus is shifting to digital. We had great support last year in mortgage, we do expect that to reverse this year. Credit quality is at an all-time high, and delinquencies are low. And as unemployment reduces, we do expect clients to focus on portfolio growth. Ascend continues to perform very well. We signed 15 new clients last year. We continued to expand the platform. We now have several modules. Since the initial sandbox offering, we've added data services, marketing, account management, CECL and Ascend Intelligence Services. Ascend marketing had a number of wins this year, and we've just launched Ascend for small- and medium-sized business lenders. So we're making good progress on our promise of rapid strategy development and deployment. We've had a very strong response, and we have a lot of innovation that's driving material differentiation. And this also comes as we shift our decisioning software from on-premise to a fully hosted model. Many of our applications have now been put in the cloud to Experian One, and this gives us a new way to address clients, which will ultimately deliver higher-quality recurring revenue. Health had a pretty solid year. We added new logos. New bookings were strong and deal sizes were bigger. Our clients were compelled by circumstances to upgrade their digital capabilities. And our investment in this space was actually really well-timed. Today, most providers offer registration before patients get to hospitals to avoid form filling. We bundled this capability with our payment capabilities, so we can now schedule appointments, register the paperwork, provide estimates to pay for care and check if the patient is all in, and it's all part of a push for a new digital experience. Consumer Services in North America delivered one of its strongest years ever and has now become a significant growth engine. Organic revenue growth was 16%. We made a conscious decision to increase investment as the downturn hit, and this has paid off. We added more than 10 million members to our free base, and it now stands at over 41 million members. Our market share of credit card applications has increased. And compared to the market leader, our share of traffic used to be around 1/3, it's now 62%. This year, we diversified into auto insurance with great success. We're now accelerating this vertical diversification strategy. We think the auto insurance opportunity is as big as our other market opportunities in financial services, lead gen and identity. And you can see here the progress we made on engagement, we're hitting all-time highs on customer log-ins and monthly engagements. And this is a really important piece of our go-forward plan. We're introducing a new breed of smart services to help people manage their financial health. And overall, I think we have great foundations for another very good year. Brazil also had a really good year. And already, we can see that this is continuing into Q1. COVID was and remains a huge challenge in Latin America and in particular in Brazil. So a huge credit to the team there for an outstanding job in FY '21. We passed another significant milestone last year by signing major new agreements with all of the large banks in Brazil, with very significant expansion in terms. Volume inquiries for positive data attributes are growing as client consumption grows, and Experian Ascend signed 12 new clients. And we've launched a dedicated vertical specifically to address the fintech community, which was already a key source of growth for us in Brazil. Positive data is enabling and driving demand for more precise credit risk assessment, and we're introducing a new generation of credit risk and risk analytics in the marketplace. We've also created a truly unique customer offer -- consumer offer. The business more than doubled in size in local currency terms. It now has 59 million free members, and you can see here that our audience share is actually comparable to some of the largest financial services brands in Brazil. We've built this business, funding it through P&L investments in its loss-making phase for the past few years. It's now breakeven, and we're pretty sure it's going to go on to be a material contributor to profit. We're also sure this is actually going to be one of our biggest businesses in Brazil and it certainly looks like it's going to be one of the highest returns on investment we've ever generated, all of which was done organically. We're creating an ecosystem that sits around the consumer. We already have the leading collection marketplace in Brazil, which helps people to pay their bills and become banked. Score Turbo is generating fantastic consumer engagement, and now we're adding meaningful new revenue streams. eCred, our comparison offer, saw a big leap this year in credit card deliveries and a significant ramp in revenue contribution. And we're launching new features to compare cards and ineligibility, expanding into personal loans and looking at some new concepts in payments. So we're incredibly well positioned in Brazil, pandemic notwithstanding. We made a lot of progress this year, and we're excited about the prospects as we move forward. We've seen good improvement in the U.K. It's now on a very good trajectory. It got back to growth in Q4. And we have made a lot of progress on our transformation journey there. The H2 margin also improved a lot sequentially. One of our core aims, obviously, is to return the business to its historic high levels of margins. So we've got encouraging progress. Just to give you a flavor of some of the accomplishments on the transformation. There's a lot of work done. Obviously, made some significant change to the leadership team. We simplified the operating model. We've done a lot of heavy lifting on our technology transformation. We made significant changes to our commercial approach. We've really ramped up our innovation approach in the U.K. as well. And we're seeing that come through in a lot better operational KPIs. Customer satisfaction significantly improved. We've got much better people engagement. And our win rate in the market is improving, really good now. We've secured a lot of new logos, and we're encouraged about the business pipeline. So the business is on a much stronger footing. That's translating into success in different areas of the market. So Ascend, for example, had some important success with some household names. And we got 1 major lender. In fact, he wants to roll it out to every part of their operations. And we had encouraging progress in platforms such as CrossCore and Experian One and in our affordability propositions. This, I think, comes to the time when the market in the U.K. is recovering. It's not fully open yet, but there are more and more offers coming to market and activity now looks set to pick up as the economy starts to reopen. Consumer Services had a significant rebound in H2. Boost has had a very good start with 370,000 net new connections, and it's been a real boost and help to our brand in the marketplace. So we feel good about the work we've done in the U.K. We think we're in a good position and we're well set to take advantage of that as we move into FY '22. Now EMEA/Asia Pacific had a tough year. This is the area where lockdowns impacted bureau volumes the most. And with a higher exposure to decision analytics, we were impacted by a reduction in spend on new software implementations as that scaled back. We do have some markets like India that are still suffering. So we still do have some headwinds in this region, which haven't yet quite abated. Now that said, the pandemic is creating a market shift and clients are adopting cloud-enabled technologies. It wasn't so much the case before COVID. We do see this particularly in the EMEA bureau markets. And our -- as previously referenced, our investments in Experian One set us up well to really play into this. The new bureaus that we acquired in Germany and Spain have got off to a very strong start, and we can see the synergies from those deals coming through. So Germany, like other markets, are seeing a very big shift to digital channels and a positive effect on e-commerce and e-payments from the pandemic. And so we've had a big uplift in volumes from that. All of our global platforms are now also available in Germany and usable, Ascend, PowerCurve and so on. And we started to sell these software products to the existing client base with a lot of new logos. This is part of the strategy to concentrate our market -- our efforts on markets where we have a power to drive real scale and to drive more profitable growth in this region. So we've made a lot of clear progress in EMEA, and we intend to make significant progress improving that in Asia Pacific in FY '22 and beyond. ESG is core to how we run the business. We help transform the lives of consumers every day by widening access to credit. I often think that companies sometimes struggle with this concept to come up with a purpose. We were actually created with a purpose in mind, which was to really widen the access of the general population to credit and make it more affordable. That's exactly what bureaus do. So the whole company is really bought into this. We contribute to 3 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. You see -- you can see this on the slide. We've reached 28 million people through our social innovation programs, and we're on track to meet the target that we've set ourselves of 100 million by 2025. United for Financial Health, our financial recovery program, reached 35 million people this year. It's fantastic progress considering we only launched it last year. We have set new targets for gender diversity with the goal to reach 40% women in our senior leadership team by 2024. And we continue to meet the recommendations of the Hampton-Alexander review on gender diversity and the Parker Review on ethnic diversity. And I'm really proud that our CDP rating is now A-, a significant improvement. And today, we've announced new environmental targets to cut our Scope 1 and 2 emissions as part of our plan to be carbon-neutral in our own operations by 2030. Much to come, of course, but I do feel like we've made a lot of progress in this last year. And with that, let me hand it over to Lloyd to take you through the financial update.

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you, albeit virtually, to present our annual results after one of the most tumultuous and challenging years in our lifetime, and a year when the strength of our business continued to shine through. So let's start with the results highlights. After a very tough first quarter, we recovered well through the rest of the year, reporting 4% organic revenue growth for the year with Q4 at the top end of our guidance range. Acquisitions added 3%, taking total growth for the year to 7% at constant currency. Exchange rates were a 3% revenue headwind, mainly due to weakness in the Brazilian real with total revenue at actual exchange rates up 4% on the prior year. Constant currency growth in benchmark EBIT was 3%, flat after including the FX headwind. Benchmark EPS grew 4% at constant rates and, again, flat after including FX. We delivered really strong operating cash flow conversion of 106% with operating cash flow up 22%. The Board's approved a second interim dividend of $0.325, taking the full year dividend to $0.47, in line with last year. And we ended the year in the lower half of our leverage range at 2.2x net debt-to-EBITDA with a very strong funding position. So touching briefly on the organic revenue trends. We delivered 5% organic revenue growth for the quarter compared to the 3% to 5% guidance range as we lapped the strong fourth quarter in FY '20. Acquisitions added 3% to growth for the full year, taking total growth to 7% at constant exchange rates. Now given the nature of the last year, I wanted to place this year's results in their historical context. Over the past 15 years, you can see just how resilient Experian has been through 2 global crisis, having grown organically through both the pandemic and the global financial crisis and every year in between, whilst maintaining a very strong record cash conversion throughout. And this places us in a small list of companies with such a long-run resilient growth. Back to last year and looking at our segmental trends and starting on the left with B2B, you can see this recovered since the decline in Q1 when we saw the greatest impact of the pandemic. Bureau volumes were hardly hit in Q1 but gradually improved through the year, although they remained below prior year levels throughout in some regions. Growth was supported by strategic initiatives such as positive data, the elevated contributions from U.S. Mortgage, Health and Ascend. Consumer Services, on the right, delivered great momentum, growing strongly and accelerating into half 2 on the back of our continued investment in membership growth and expansion of services in the U.S. and Brazil. And the U.K. also recovered as the year progressed, growing as we exited the year. Turning to our regional performance and starting with North America. On the left-hand side, you'll see a breakdown of the growth from North America B2B. The nonmortgage bureau revenue was flat for the year. Our Ascend platform continued to generate strong revenues, contributing 1% to group revenue growth over the year. And this was offset by declines in our core profiles business as the tightening of lending criteria restricted the supply of credit during the pandemic. As Brian mentioned, volumes for unsecured credit in North America have recovered and are now trending well above last year. Our U.S. Mortgage business grew from around $200 million to $300 million this year, off the back of strong refinancing volumes following the low interest rate environment. During Q4, we began to lap the start of this trend with a contribution to group revenue growth reducing to 1%. Our forecasting assumption is that mortgage will decline around 20% through the balance of FY '22 or about a 1% headwind on group revenue. Automotive was flat versus last year, which is a great achievement given the challenges the automotive industry has faced. Stimulus payments and tax refunds have helped support demand during the pandemic. Health delivered good growth of 5% for the year. Authentication volumes progressed through the year as patients increasingly needed to be authorized digitally. Targeting remained challenged, declining 13% organically, as advertising activity remained lower than pre-pandemic levels, especially in a number of challenged industry segments. On the right-hand side, you can see more detail on the North America consumer trends. As you can see, the great performance was broad-based. The subscription business continued to gain members throughout the year as strong free and Boost traffic converted to paid services. Lead generation revenues also grew in the credit vertical and as we added the new contribution from vertical expansion into auto insurance. Partner Solutions delivered good levels of growth, too, helped by new contract wins and data breach services. Overall, this shows the growing power of our Consumer Services business as we gain material scale of membership and increasingly spread our service offerings. On to Latin America and Brazil. Our Brazil business also had a great year, delivering organic revenue growth of 11% against the pandemic backdrop. The top chart shows our B2B revenue growth profile. And as you can see, we declined in Q1 as the impact of the pandemic was felt the hardest. And through the year, we've seen volumes steadily recover, and we expect this to continue. Our positive data scores and attributes products continue to drive revenue growth with Serasa positive data solutions now embedded within many of our largest clients. The B2B business is also becoming more diversified with growth coming from new verticals such as auto and ID and fraud. And the momentum in our scale in Consumer Business has continued. This chart shows how the local currency revenue has accelerated in Brazil. The business has scaled significantly with 59 million members and our growing product offerings driving increasing engagement and monetization. Limpa Nome had another successful year helping consumers renegotiate $7.8 billion worth of debt. Our lead generation product, eCred, also grew well as the switch to positive data continued to drive both interest and credit opportunities for consumers. With the business scaling successfully, it moved into profitability during the second half of the year and we're very excited about the rich opportunities to innovate and further scale this business in the years ahead. On to the U.K. and Ireland, where the business returned to growth of 1% in Q4, having delivered sequential improvements throughout the year. The top chart shows our B2B organic revenue growth profile. As you can see, the core bureau delivered growth in half 2, reflective of the progress we've made with innovative propositions, for example, in the affordability and capitalization space. U.K. Decisioning was on an improved trajectory into Q4, down 2% from the lows of being down 13% in Q1. And Consumer Services progressed well through the year, strengthening in Q4 to deliver 4% growth. Lead generation recovered well with growth in memberships and as credit supply resumed, adding to the strength in subscription services driven by upsells from our free and Boost acquisition programs. On these next 2 slides, we provide a more granular view of quarterly trends through the year, in line with the additional disclosure that we've been providing this past year. North America overall delivered 7% growth for Q4, taking revenue growth to 7% for the year. The Latin America region delivered 12% growth in Q4, representing double-digit growth for the third quarter in a row and against a strong prior year comparative despite the ongoing pandemic challenges there. As already mentioned, the U.K. was back into growth in the fourth quarter after good momentum and showing a clear pathway to recovery as we stabilized the business and the reorganization has progressed. EMEA/Asia Pacific declined 10% organically in Q4. EMEA has been on an improving trajectory as bureau volumes recovered from the lows, but Asia Pacific has continued to be impacted by volume reductions, particularly in India, and in Decisioning where clients delayed decision-making on new software contracts. Turning now to the EBIT margin. During the year, we exited some small businesses in the B2B segment across the U.K., EMEA and Asia. Adjusting for this increases the prior year margin by 10 basis points from 26.8% to 26.9%. Acquisitions were at a slightly lower margin, having a 10 basis points impact. Over on the right-hand side of the chart, you can see the impact of FX, a 20 basis points drag due to the weaker Brazilian real. And strong growth in Consumer Services meant that there was a negative mix effect on margin as the Consumer segment is a slightly lower margin than B2B. So if you exclude these items I've just talked through, you can see the trading margin impact in the blue box of around 50 basis points. The drop-through of revenue slowdowns in the U.K. and APAC B2B businesses contributed to this lower margin. And whilst revenue here dropped, we made a strategic choice to retain capacity investment to take advantage of specific growth opportunities and to position us well as we exit the pandemic. Elsewhere, we continued to invest in marketing during the year, which gave rise to membership growth and share gains in Consumer Services. And you can see these revenue impacts were partially offset by tight control of discretionary spending, leaving the core trading margin down 50 basis points. Two other comments I'd like to make on operating margin. Firstly, another way to look at the margin change during the year is that of the 80 basis points constant currency margin decline, around 60 basis points came from increases in depreciation and amortization from historic capital investment. So at the EBITDA level, margin was down about 20 basis points, reflecting the mix effects. Secondly, as you know, we're now well advanced into our technology and cloud transformation program. And these programs are executed over time, and there is an inherent increase in both CapEx and dual running OpEx costs while the transformation is underway. I want to scale the impact of these ongoing programs to help understand better our financial performance and our outlook. So starting with CapEx. Our current capital investment as a percentage of revenue was 8% this last year and will be 9% in the year ahead. Of this, between 1% and 2% is associated with investments around our technology transformation programs. And in the P&L, we have dual running expenditure related to this transformation program and this amounts to around 100 basis points headwind to margin in FY '21. So turning to benchmark EPS. Starting from FY '20, in which benchmark EPS was $1.03 per share, growth in benchmark EBIT from continuing operations was 3%. Interest expense decreased to $121 million as a result of lower average global interest rates. The tax rate was 25.9%, at the bottom of our guidance range. And we saw a higher weighted average number of shares at 910 million, which included shares delivered on the purchase of the German bureau. EPS was therefore up 4% on a constant FX basis and in line at actual FX rates at $1.031 cents. Now taking a look at our usual reconciliation to statutory results. Amortization of acquisition intangibles increased to $138 million, consistent with the increased acquisition activities last year. We took an impairment charge of $53 million against the goodwill of our Asia Pacific region. And as you know, our Asia Pacific region is currently in its investment phase. Whilst this is a long-term investment for us, the pandemic has pushed the growth profile back and triggered a requirement to partially write down the goodwill value. A gain on Finicity that you can see on the chart related to the divestment of one of the group's associates where we were an early investor in open data platform businesses. Our original investment of $24 million realized a post-tax gain of $120 million and demonstrates the value that can be created within our associate and investment -- and venture investment program. The transformation program charge announced at the half year mainly related to the U.K. has now concluded, and we're on track to deliver the $40 million of year-on-year annual savings. And other items include the acquisition-related expenses and some other small amounts. And finally, on this slide, noncash financing remeasurements were a gain of $5 million against $111 million loss in the prior year due to FX losses on Brazilian real intra-group funding. Turning now to cash flow. We saw a very strong cash flow generation with 106% conversion. We had a strong growth in our Consumer Service business, which has a shorter working capital cycle due to the cash profile of some of our subscription products. This, combined with a strong collections performance, with some catch-up from FY '20 when some clients delayed payments in March last year at the height of the pandemic. There was a reduction in capital expenditure due to FX and where we took a disciplined approach to prioritizing investments this last year. Net capital expenditure represents 8% full year revenue, slightly down on the 9% we saw in FY '20. And lastly, D&A has increased, driven by the investments in previous years, and this resulted in benchmark operating cash flow increasing 22% at actual rates. Now turning to our funding position and the capital framework. We increased funds from operations by 23% versus the prior year. We continued to invest organically through capital expenditure and maintained our dividend through the year. During the year, we continued to invest in a number of acquisitions, as you saw from Brian's presentation, and total acquisition spend in the year was $583 million in cash and $253 million in Experian shares for the German Bureau acquisition. Acquisitions contributed $140 million of inorganic revenue or 3% to group growth in FY '21. And even accounting for this spend, we reduced our net debt position. And after the end of the year, we concluded a further $302 million of acquisitions, which will contribute to growth in FY '22. We finished the year at leverage of 2.2x EBITDA, which is at the lower end of our 2 to 2.5x leverage range. And our funding position remains very strong with over $2.65 billion in undrawn banking facilities. Our bonds are long-dated, and excluding the 2022 bond, which has already been refinanced, our next bond isn't due until FY '25. And lastly, turning now to FY '22 modeling considerations. We expect organic revenue growth for FY '22 in the range of 7% to 9%. And we expect to start strong in Q1 in the range of 15% to 20% as we lap the deep impact of the pandemic last year. We expect acquisitions to add a further 3% to 4% to full year organic revenue growth. And we expect this growth to be [Audio Gap] We expect FX will be a neutral impact to EBIT growth in FY '22, assuming rates since the start of the new fiscal year continue. We expect net interest for FY '22 to be between $115 million and $120 million, reflecting lower average interest rates. The benchmark tax rate is expected to be around 26% to 27%. And taking into account the shares issued for the consideration of the German Bureau, the weighted average number of shares is expected to be in the region of 915 million for the year. We expect capital expenditure of 9% of revenue as we continue with our technology transformation investments. Our operating cash flow conversion is expected to remain strong at over 90%. And finally, we'll restart the share repurchase program, expecting to spend around $150 million in FY '22, which will mainly offset deliveries under employee share plans. And with that, I'll hand you back to Brian.

Thanks, Lloyd. So to summarize, FY '21 showed the strength of our model. We did really well, helped by portfolio diversity and also by some of our past investment decisions. We're very excited about the opportunities ahead. We're well invested. We've retained our capacity during the pandemic and it puts us into an incredibly strong position as we move forward. We're going to have a very strong Q1 and a very good FY '22. And now I'm going to hand back to the operator for your questions, for which we will be joined by Kerry Williams, our Chief Operating Officer.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from the line of Paul Sullivan from Barclays.

Just a few from me. Firstly, in terms of the organic revenue outlook, can you just talk through the main moving parts at the divisional level? And what assumptions are you building into the second half? And why the conservatism in light of the strong Q1? Then secondly, on margins. Are you signaling a change in margin progression beyond fiscal '22? So not this year, next year. And do we view the sort of commentary around margin and around tech transformation as pointing to a sort of a multiyear step-up from your previous guidance of modest margin expansion? And then just finally, in terms of income verification, employment verification, can you just talk about your ambitions there? And how big is that vertical post the deals that you've done? What's the pitch versus Equifax? And can you quantify the opportunity?

Thank you. So Lloyd, do you want to deal with 1 and 2, and then I'll come back on the verification.

Yes, sure. So organic outlook, Paul, I don't think you can draw a straight line through this first quarter into the rest of the year, given the very easy comps if you look back a year. I also think we're clearly enduring a period of very elevated consumer activity post the various lockdowns, and the question when we look into the second half of the year really is how long does that continue? We'll clearly move to a place where mortgage becomes a bit of a headwind and we've got much tougher comps in our direct-to-consumer business. So we're clearly a bit more cautious in the second half. Obviously, a bit more uncertainty. We hope that the consumer activity continues, and we'll be able to give you an update later in the year. But it's great to be off to such a strong start so early in the year. On margin, we clearly wanted to scale the impact of some of the technology transformation. And that's been ramping to this 100 basis work points headwind. That will sustain at about that level for the next 12 to 18 months as we continue with that program. But as you look out on the 4-to 5-year time period, we're clearly going to have more choices around our margin than we've had in the last few years with -- getting to the other side of the technology transformation; the recovery of margin in the U.K. business; the scaling of the Brazil Consumer business, which has been in its investment phase and will become more profitable; and the scaling of our Asia Pacific business. Now I think that just gives us a lot more options. The extent to which we invest that to accelerate growth versus dropping it to the bottom line, I think we'll guide to on an annual basis. But we certainly have more options over that time period.

All right. Thanks, Lloyd. Let me come back on verification. So just a bit of background. We first actually went into looking at verifications in about 2016 on the back of our investment in Finicity. We approached this as really kind of almost like an open banking proposition. One of the reasons we did that was also because the access to data sources at that time was very difficult. So we've been building the products organically for a few years. What's changed is that some of the large payroll providers are now providing access to data on a much more broader scale, and so we will have access to that. So that's one key component. But as we've evaluated the strategic position and opportunity, we really felt we needed 3 things: one, a very strong organic proposition, which we've got; secondly, access to payroll providers to build out data set; and three, some unique capabilities around data. And the third bit is where the acquisitions come in because it puts us into that space and it gives us access to unique records on which we can build a proposition. We've been in markets testing with our clients. The reception is very strong. We're pretty confident that we're going to make good progress. And I think in the next year, this will start to build out to be a meaningful contributor for us. I think the market is growing. Obviously, we can see that from results elsewhere. It's an attractive opportunity. I think there's space for new players. And it's changing because in the past it's been extremely difficult to enter this because of the data -- the inability to get access to data. So now we have an opportunity to really to build this out, and I think it could be an interesting one for us.

Can I just follow up on the sort of the 7% to 9% guidance? Any -- can you provide us any divisional guidance or building blocks to get there? And I'm sort of trying to get underneath the skin of the B2B. It feels like B2B was a little bit disappointing in the U.S. in the fourth quarter. Is that unfair?

I think you have to look back to the prior year, Paul. If you look at B2B growth in Q4 FY '20 was 14% in North America. So a very strong quarter comp. So you always have to look really on a couple of years basis. So we were -- bearing that in mind, we were pleased with where we exited. We're not going to give individual -- divisional piece. I think we'd expect North America and Brazil to continue strong. Clearly, Mortgage turns into about a 1% headwind, as I mentioned, for the year ahead. Consumer will stay strong, but will hit tougher comps as we go through the year. The U.K., I'd expect to start strong and continue to benefit from its transformation program. EMEA/Asia Pacific, Decisioning has been a bit slow there, so that might be a little slower to progress as we come through the year. That's probably where I'd leave it.

The next question is coming from Oscar Val Mas from JPMorgan.

I had two questions. The first one is a follow-up on the margin question from Paul. Could you give some context on what you mean by strong margin accretion? And maybe just how should we think about M&A mix and maybe other lines like central costs or marketing spend in full year '22? That's the first question. And then the second question is a more thematic question. We've had recent news flow in the U.S. that some banks are looking at issuing credit cards to customers who don't have credit scores. Is that an opportunity for Experian or is that a threat? And how is that related to the investments you've made into the income verification business?

Okay. Thank you. So Lloyd, do you want to deal with the margin question?

Yes. So as I mentioned in my remarks, so the core margin this last year was down about 50 basis points, 50 to 60 basis points. And we expect in the year ahead, when we talk about strong margin accretion, to be at least recovering that 50 to 60 basis points core margin decline. In terms of other areas, M&A, it's hard to say exactly. We'll see what M&A we do during the year. But often, M&A, in the year we make it, might be a very slight drag on margin, 5, 10 basis points, something like that. It really depends on the mix. Within that, we'll continue to invest in customer acquisition. We've got a lot of momentum behind the direct-to-consumer business. So we'll continue with that. And central costs, clearly, some of those costs will come back in this year. But we'll have some other offsets. The employee share award that we made was in central. The majority of that cost will be this year, which will drop away. But some of the travel and discretionary costs will come back into the portfolio next year. So central costs in the year ahead are more likely to be in line with what we had in FY '20 than FY '21.

Okay. And just let me come back on the second question in relation to the announcement of JPMorgan. So first of all, I think this is an opportunity. It's very much in sync with how we've been driving a lot of activities in our own business, and in particular, thing like Experian Boost. We're actually involved in this project, so we're part of the initiative. The initiative is aimed, obviously a recognition that financial empowerment is directly linked to positive socioeconomic outcomes. A lot of marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by lower access to credit and have a higher likelihood of having thin or no file or being credit invisible. So this is an effort really to try and help in that regard and one that we're heavily involved in and part of. So we're excited about this. And I think it syncs very nicely into not just what we're doing from a business perspective, but also what we -- what were our prime objective from an ESG perspective.

The next question is coming from the line of Rajesh Kumar from HSBC.

First question is on the margin side. Can you give us some color on how much headwind you're factoring in from the mortgage outlook for the margins. Clearly, you have done some structural cost savings in the U.K. So some would have hoped that you do more on margins than recover the core 50 to 60 bps decline last year. So there's some moving parts here. Just trying to get our heads around that one. The second one is on the growth opportunities in Germany, in South Africa. Just if you could give some further color on how do you see the growth from these 2 markets over the next 2 to 3 years. And also if the competitive position from existing players could be a threat, especially if they change ownership, as there have been some market news around that. Then on the Consumer business, credit repair-led CFPB complaints were quite high to -- for all the 3 bureaus last year. What was the impact on your Boost product demand from that as well as the margins in terms of addressing these concerns? And do you expect that to persist at that level?

Okay. Three questions there. So let me just deal with the last one pretty quickly. There's no impact on the Boost proposition from the level of complaints. The level of complaint industry has been driven by increased activity by credit repair organizations. It's not really reflective, I think, of true underlying complaints. It's actually a lot of activity where there are a lot of organizations in the U.S. which try both legitimately, and in some cases, illegitimately try and get credit reports changed. So you're seeing a lot of that activity. Lloyd, you can deal with the margin one. And if I can go to Kerry on the commentary on the Germany and South Africa questions when Lloyd's dealt with the margin.

Yes. Sure. So the way to think about the impact of profiles in North America is -- this last year is we had clearly a benefit from Mortgage, but that was offset by core profiles in the unsecured lending business. And those two, in terms of margin, those 2 broadly offset. So as we come into the year ahead, we'll have a recovery of core profiles and a headwind on Mortgage. So on a 2-year basis, we don't really see an impact.

And just to remind you, Rajesh, obviously, Mortgage is much smaller for us than some of our competitors. On the margin outlook. Clearly, we continue to have and we'll have at elevated levels this next 12 to 18 months the headwinds around the technology transformation that we've been dealing with before those start to abate. And we're pretty confident that we can recover at least that 50 to 60 basis point margin drop that we saw this year and the year ahead. So we'll obviously update as we go through this year.

Understood. So basically, when you say at least 50 to 60, at least is what we need to think about when we model?

Yes. It's at least 50 to 60. Okay. And then maybe we can move to Kerry to answer the Germany and South Africa.

Sure. Yes. Thanks, Brian. Good morning, everyone. So on Germany, Rajesh, we have been working heavily on bringing our global platforms into the German market and we've done that, platforms like Ascend and Experian One. So we're now in the process of rolling those out into the marketplace. We -- one of the interesting things about the German bureau is that it's been heavily involved in the e-commerce aspects. So a good portion of that bureau has been very strong during the pandemic because of e-commerce. And we look to grow into other areas as we move forward, leveraging the platforms that we're bringing into the market and leveraging other data sources that we intend to add into the bureau. So we're pretty optimistic about the overall growth prospects for Germany. In terms of South Africa, due to various commitments that we made when we did that acquisition, we've had a time frame that we've been working on in terms of integrating the assets between our legacy bureau and the one that was acquired. We're in that time frame now. And so we're busily working on integrating the assets, putting them all on to one platform and being able to leverage again more global platforms in the marketplace. We've already leveraged some of our BI platforms out of the U.S. into the South African market. And so one of the things that we see going forward over the next year or 2 is a great deal of operating efficiency in the market and the ability to, again, leverage our global platforms like we have with Germany. So withstanding the impacts of the pandemic in South Africa, we've got quite a lot of opportunities for growth in that market.

Understood. That's very helpful. Just on the margin question, you've not made any reference to the positive data or the bank's deal. So fair to assume that when you said that at least 50 bps of recovery, that assumes all the benefits you might get from a shift to positive data in Brazil or the price renegotiations?

Yes. Everything -- all the moving parts from the regions are included in that, Rajesh. And interestingly, as we've gone through this year, if you look back, we've made good progress actually with margin in both our B2B and B2C business in Brazil. But the negative mix effect of the strong Consumer growth obviously weighs on the aggregated Brazil margin.

The next question is coming from the line of George Gregory from Exane BNP Paribas.

I had a few questions on the Consumer business, please, in particular, the U.S. business. I wondered, firstly, if you could share some building blocks for U.S. Consumer growth in the coming year. And linked to that, I just wondered, did the U.S. lead generation business decelerate in the fourth quarter? And my final question, really around the competitive landscape, I suppose, for Boost. Looking at what some of your peers have done, you see Credit Karma with the integration with TurboTax into their Lightbox proposition are now able to integrate income and tax data. I guess we have LendingTree with the Plaid integration, I guess trying to tackle a sort of similar issue. Just wondering what the time line is for Boost in being able to access income data to sort of push that capability to the next step, please?

Okay. Do you want to tackle the building blocks? I mean I think on that part of the question about lead gen to accelerate in Q4, it didn't.

Yes. The -- we had a very strong Q4 last year. So sequentially, the quarters were progressing well. The growth rate was a bit lower in the fourth quarter versus the third quarter just because of the prior year. The building blocks this last year, I think you can see from the slide, George. So I think you can see all the individual bits were growing. Clearly, for the year ahead, we're entering the year with pretty strong momentum. We're going to hit very tough comps as we go into the second half of the year. We'll see really what happens with the consumer outlook when we go through that. But we -- I'll just leave it to say we're very optimistic about the Consumer business generally in all of the individual pieces.

Yes. And then coming back on Boost, George. I think when we launched this, obviously, it was first in marketplace. And it is a unique proposition, there's still nothing out there where you can actually boost your credit score. So I think we fully expected other people to try and emulate that, but I think we're far ahead of anybody else. I think there's some mixing and matching of different concepts in the question that you asked around access to different sources of data because, of course, not everything is going to be used to boost the credit score. Some things will be used to develop income and verification products. And if you refer back to the question when Paul asked me about the income verification market, I said actually, we've been working on developing income verification products for some time using kind of open banking-like propositions through our relationship with Finicity. So to a certain extent, you are seeing a lot of people in the market follow or mimic or copy some of the concepts that we've developed. We remain very confident of our propositions going forward, of the uniqueness of them and the uniqueness of our capability in the combination of the Consumer business with our B2B platform in being able to use not only the existing data that we have, but any new data that we can get from the consumer-contributed angle to develop propositions that can become very material for us. And I think you're already seeing that in the growth of our business. Last year was also a year where, frankly, everybody in the marketplace went backwards, and we didn't. So in terms of, as we assess our competitive position, we have strengthened materially in FY '21. And we are in, I think, a very strong position as we go forward.

I acknowledge there's clearly an opportunity on the B2B side in income verification. But what about sort of the B2C side? I mean is there a sort of -- a sort of structural impediment to being able to use Boost to sort of access or pull that data to enhance the predictability or otherwise of the credit match offering?

No. There isn't because what Boost already gives you is access to the DDA account. So we can see the data fields that are in there. Of course, we as we explained I think when we were launching Boost, we put an incredible amount of work into the Boost proposition. So we understand very well which data elements will make a difference to a consumer's credit score and how it might be used. So it -- there's lots of things that you can pull, but there's only a finite number of things that actually can and will be used. So I think there's a big difference there. There's definitely more data available, but what can you use in what circumstance. And of course, we do have access to other information that we get through that DDA connection and where that's a big part of our product road map as well. So I don't think you should be too concerned that we're not innovating aggressively on all of those fronts.

The next question is coming from Anvesh Agrawal from Morgan Stanley.

I just got a couple of questions and one just clarification. First, with the sort of Finicity going to Mastercard, does it in any way changes your relationship in -- or your ability to use the platform because I think it was used by the consumers to share the data for your Boost product. And do you still have some sort of an exclusive relationship there? And second, just within the U.S., it looks like the targeting has gone worse in Q4, which is sort of slightly contrary to what you -- what we are hearing in terms of the activity origination sort of picking up. So what's the reason for that? And finally, apologies if I missed this, but can you tell us the absolute number on the restructuring benefit you are expecting in the U.K. in FY '22.

Okay. So on the first question, we have secured a long-term agreement, which protects our ability to continue to use the Finicity connections going forward, and we've secured that position. Lloyd, do you want to touch on the targeting?

Yes. Targeting, there were some one-off bits of income in Q3 that improved the Q3 position. So the underlying trend is still in that kind of 10-plus percent down as we went through Q4. So clearly, there'll be very easy comps in Q1. So we expect that position to improve. But some segments that, that business relies on, hospitality, travel, tourism, et cetera, are still depressed. So we'll see how those recover in the year ahead.

And the restructuring benefit, yes, so $50 million charge this year for $40 million annualized run rate reduction in cost. And that's across both the U.K. and EMEA/Asia Pacific.

And the last question is coming from Caroline Conway from Autonomous AllianceBernstein.

So I wanted to ask in the new and target verticals that you're focusing on, the focus on moving up the value chain seems very clear. But do you anticipate any kind of price investment strategy in comparison to like-for-like products as a method to grow share in those new areas? And then my second question is on CapEx. Just given the expectations for strong acquisition activity and tech transformation, could organic new product CapEx investments decline? And does this mean product development is getting more efficient? Or is there a shift in focus to acquisitions there?

Thanks, Caroline. Can I just clarify your first question a little bit. I didn't quite catch it. Do you mind repeating that one?

Sure. So the -- you had mentioned the focus on moving up the value chain, which seems to imply getting into higher-margin products. But I was just curious, as you're getting into new product development, if you compare those 2 like-for-like products from other competitors, are you planning to take any pricing action to compete against those comparable products?

Okay. Yes. I think my comment was actually more towards the higher-growth elements. So I think what we see is, as we see the marrying of data with analytics and decision and capabilities, it enables you to provide a more comprehensive and sophisticated solution as opposed to just one individual component. It's not really a pricing strategy, it's a sort of it's -- a growth strategy really. And I think the data business already is a very high-margin activity, most of our products are. So I don't think we think about it from that perspective. I think when you take something like Ascend Marketing, which I referenced in my comments, that's a product which enables us to take share of spend in -- from other areas in a bank environment where they would be spending because the capability that we put together aggregates several different processes that we're doing in a disparate way across their systems. So there may well be kind of revenue loss from a different vendor somewhere else. But it's not a directly competing product, if that makes sense. And that's the whole point of the strategy, which is you actually create something which is somewhat different, enables them to change and therefore gain economic benefit from changing and there has to be a good motivation for them to do it. But actually, the value to us is accretive. And so if we get that right, it works very well. It's not really a price strategy. Does that make sense? You asked 2 questions.

It does. Yes.

And then on the CapEx one, Lloyd?

Yes. So if you look back over the last 4 years, we've pretty much tripled our investment in product development CapEx. And we've done that by offsetting some -- greater efficiencies, particularly in our data capital program. As I mentioned, current year ahead, 9% of revenue on CapEx. Somewhere approaching in the 1% to 2% range of that is transformational CapEx. So when those programs finish over the next 3 to 5 years, you'd expect to see that come out of our CapEx, all other things being equal. Within that, you're right, on new platforms, product development activity should get more productive. My guess is we will use that to increase our product development output for the same level of spend rather than reducing the level of product development spend. We've got a lot of innovative ideas on how we can use our data to enhance our proposition. So we'll continue to invest behind that.

Thank you. That was the last question. Thank you very much.

Okay. Well, that concludes today's session. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. And I wish you all a good day, and we look forward to speaking to you again in the near future.

Excellent. And thank you from me. That does conclude your conference call, and you may now disconnect. Thanks again for joining, and enjoy your rest of the day. .