Thank you. 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, you don't need me to tell you that COVID-19 has caused significant disruption and suffering on a very large scale. We would like to take this opportunity to extend our appreciation to all the people on the front line dealing with this pandemic, doctors, nurses, other care workers, other key workers. We all know there are many of them. Amidst all of this, Experian FY 2020 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 from FY 2020. 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. Normally, I would start with some performance statistics for the year just passed, 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. 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.
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. 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, FY20 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 FY21 shortly. FY20 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 the COVID-19 impact was limited in Q4. That is true given the timing. There's no doubt that things did get tougher at the close. Still, double-digit organic revenue growth in Q4 is very good performance, bringing us to 8% for the year, which is at the top end of our FY 2020 guidance, especially in a 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. Consumer services had an outstanding year delivering double-digit growth and up 10% overall.
For those of you on the call who've covered us for a while, you will know how far we've 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 two things, continued investments in the business and some underperformance in the U.K. and Asia Pacific. Benchmark EPS progressed 5% after a 3% FX headwind. We only have one month's full trading for FY 2021 so far, but in April, 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 2020 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. Progress in core CI and BI businesses were very good. 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-19 situation. This was a weak year for Asia Pacific. COVID-19 aside, we don't expect a repeat of that going forward. 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 Arvato Financial Solutions, which itself is a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. Entering the German market has long been an ambition of ours. 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-19. We are seeing good progress in our core CI business. We also face 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. We are undertaking a significant business transformation. We're very confident that we will get this back on track. For the last few years, new product innovations have been adding significantly to our growth rates. That continued into FY20, adding over half a billion dollars to our revenue. That has more than doubled over the last two years. Our data business has 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 banking. Solutions like affordability, categorization of transactions, and consumer-contributed data are all going to be long-term drivers of growth. 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. It's currently live in six countries. It's also emerging as a critical platform for our COVID-19 response due to its ability to rapidly integrate new data sets. 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 and 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. 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 nine countries. 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. Our investment in Experian One platform is really well-timed. In health, we have successfully executed our strategy to own 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 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 trend 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 2020, this business generated revenues of $40 million, growth of over 100% year-on-year. 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. 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 number one portal for debt settlement, and we are now by far the largest financial services platform in Brazil, with over 45 million members. This at a time when financial services in Brazil is going to undergo huge change. Positive Data will be the catalyst for 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. delivers a lot of progress in consumer services in FY 2020 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 product, 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. are 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. As a result, our lender panel continues to have offers in the market and is trading relatively well. We think there's an opportunity to enhance our position in the market, so we're continuing to invest in marketing. Okay, now turning to current trading and what are we seeing and what do 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%-10%. 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.
Having said that, trends have improved more than we expected as lockdowns are starting to lift. In consumer services, as you can see here, Experian 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 unbranded 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 the data goes back. Our brand recognition is growing, and all of this is positive. 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. 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 losses better and ensure proper reserves. Also ease of implementation becomes really critical. Rapid development and deployment are the new norm in credit analytics. 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. With this shift, we're seeing increased demand for authentication and identity products such as Precise ID and Universal Identity Manager in both the private and government sectors. Of course, governments want to help to restart the economies, and our consumer data actually helps that. It helps them authenticate and process underwriting small business loans, getting credit to those that desperately need it.
As I mentioned before, consumers are interested in their credit. Many more will monitor it more closely, particularly those that have been most heavily impacted and may be 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. We have compelling offers to combat these and other forms of fraud, including a new product which we are launching this week called SureProfile. 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.
We've used this framework to focus quickly on initiatives that are relevant for the current environment. 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. We're prioritizing a couple of modules. One of them, 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. 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 can track in real time. We've developed new segmentation suited to current requirements. As I mentioned just a moment ago, we're launching a new product, an important one called SureProfile. 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 certain that it'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.
These are just a few of the examples, so 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 healthy Experian franchise and position ourselves to emerge as strongly as we can from this crisis. A proportion of our cost is directly variable to revenue, for example, royalties. We quickly stopped all discretionary spends, 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, in 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 non-critical 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. To summarize this section, after a strong FY 2020, we are responding rapidly to the new reality. While it is going to be a tough few months, the strength of our business and of our innovation capabilities gives us a huge amount of confidence in our ability to weather this downturn. With that, I'll hand you over to Lloyd to take you through the financial review.
Thanks, Brian. 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 of 9% in constant currency and also to cash with 88% operating cash conversion. We finished the year in a strong financial position, which I'll cover in more detail during my remarks. Looking at the 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, My Health Direct and Auto ID 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. 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 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%. 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 2021. 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 a combination of our legacy technology environment and the effects of economic uncertainty meant we didn't execute as anticipated.
Lastly, we were pleased to see a good performance in EMEA and Asia-Pacific in the fourth quarter. 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 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%. 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/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 the 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. Within other, we saw increased bad debt provisions at the end of the year, reflecting the current COVID-19 related uncertainty. Turning now to EPS. Starting from FY 2019, 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 of 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. EPS was therefore 8% up on a constant FX basis and 5% with 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. Other exceptional items, including movements on legal provisions that we reported in the first half of the year, and non-cash financial remeasurements increased from $95 million to $125 million, and this includes the FX losses on Brazilian real intragroup 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 my next slide. We invested $795 million on acquisitions of 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 ID, which expanded our capability in automotive fraud, bought out the minority stake in our microanalytics business, and expanded our healthcare capabilities with the acquisition of MyHealthDirect. In FY 2020, 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.
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 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%-10% guidance we gave.
Within that, you can see that over the last four 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 2016. This increase in 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 IdentityWorks, 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 a moment to the balance sheet. Given the external environment, this has been our 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, we've consistently been in the lower half of this range in recent years. We finished FY 2020 at 2.2 times. Again, well within our range. We continue 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. I'll comment on our positions at the end of April. At 30th of April 2020, we held $2.4 billion of undrawn bank facilities, which have an average remaining tenor of four years. Our bonds and drawn bank loans totaling $4 billion have an average remaining tenor of six 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 three times net interest. As at the 31st of March this year, on that ratio, we had 11 times coverage. 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 is 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 will continue to provide significant flexibility across our priorities for 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 2020, our strong financial position, and our confidence in our business model, the board has recommended a final dividend of $0.325 per share, unchanged on last year. This brings the total dividend for the year to $0.47 per share. Beyond our prioritization of capital on organic investment and our dividends, we've chosen to suspend the current buyback program and to reduce our near-term focus on acquisition activity. We feel 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's uncertain, with a broad range of forecasts 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. Given this uncertainty, we want to provide an understanding of current trading trends in the business. On these next two 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 segment 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 improve 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. 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. 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. 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 grew our membership base of both our credit education and identity protection business. We also saw good year-over-year growth in lead generation as Experian Boost continued to increase traffic to our site then 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 counter-cyclical parts of our consumer bureau, offset credit volume declines. 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 was down 15% overall. Our core bureaus 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 consumers 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 product and a further quarter restricting lending criteria.
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 perform well, partially offsetting declines in decisioning software business. Consumer services was down 17%, driven by that reduction in the supply of credit offers in the market. 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. Asia Pacific was down 10%. As I mentioned, group revenue was down 5% in April.
Whilst this gives us some information on how Q1 as a whole will perform, 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-19 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 are developing 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. We've also seen tightening of criteria in the supply of credit products. Again, uncertain how this will develop. 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%-10%. Clearly April was at the low end of that range.
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 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 two-thirds 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 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. 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 for 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, you can see our near-term response is to protect our capacity, innovation, and technology spend to ensure we're ready to recover strongly. The reductions we've 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. While 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. Overall, we expect a Q1 revenue and EBIT headwind of around 5% at these levels. With that, I'll hand you back to Brian.
Okay. Thanks, Lloyd. To summarize, FY 2020 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 help governments and societies through the crisis. We have a strong balance sheet with significant funding headroom and liquidity. 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. 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.
Thank you, sir. Before I announce the first question, let me just quickly remind everyone, if you would like to ask a question on the call, please press star and one on your device. You can also withdraw the question by pressing star and two. Thank you. We do have our first incoming question, and it's coming from line of Paul. Paul, you are now live in the call. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everybody. Hope you can hear me. Hope you're all well. A few questions from me. Firstly, I'm just trying to get to the bottom of the working capital movement, receivables spike, bad debt write-offs that you talk about and a sort of sense of what's really going on. 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 margin and how we should think about drop through. With revenues down 5%, costs flat, we're looking at mid-single digit margin pressure in the first quarter. Is that the scale of the degradation that you're willing to tolerate as you focus on holding strategic investments?
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? Is that the key offset to volume decline? Brian, a bit of color there would be helpful. Thank you.
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. 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 our client bases and so on and so forth. 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. It does give us an opportunity really across the board in a number of areas there. I think it's those areas. I would characterize that there is a difference, I think, between the type of engagement we're having now versus 2008 and 2009, and that's related to the position of the institutions themselves. We think back and contrast between the two types of downturn. The first one was a financial crisis, and it really impacted the banking sector first. Actually, the big question was the survival of the banking sector themselves. We were dealing with a really difficult environment where they were cutting headcounts. You would be engaged with some people one week, and next week they'd be gone.
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. They themselves have actually made some really strong commitments to how they're 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. 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. 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. 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. You've seen that impacted. 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. I hope we have addressed that question. Lloyd, do you want to pick up the other two?
Paul, on your first question on working capital and margin in the year just gone. Starting with margin. Two real things to call out. Certainly the U.K. was weaker than we expected and particularly in the second half of the year. That obviously weighed a little bit on margin. 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. We've taken a fairly prudent position there. That had a drag on margin of about 20 basis points and a non-cash provision at the end of the quarter.
We'll see obviously how that progresses. On to working capital. You remember at the half year, I guided to around 90% for full year cash conversion. We came into the 88. We saw weakness really in March around cash collection. DSO at our close position was about four days higher than the prior year. 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. You add that four 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're almost two-thirds of the way through Q1, our cost base is fairly fixed.
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. 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 six weeks, but it's still uncertain. 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. Thank you. Just to clarify on that working capital, you haven't seen any further deterioration as you've gone through April, presumably?
No.
No.
Great. Okay. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Paul.
Thank you so much. We have our next question, and it is coming from the line of Apologies. It is coming from Alexandre Mas. Sir, please go ahead.
Thanks very much. Good morning, Brian, Lloyd, Kerry. Three, please. 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 of previous downturns. 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? Finally, you alluded a couple of times to internal challenges in the U.K. I wonder if you'd give us just a bit more color as to what those challenges are and how you intend to address them. Thank you.
Sure. Okay. I'll tackle these and invite others to join in. Let's deal with Brazil first. There were three parts to your question. Positive Data, competitive landscape, and how the new products contribute to opportunities going forward. Let's just talk about the 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. Realistically, over the last few years, we've made the investment to build out a 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. We are actually already generating small amounts of revenue from Positive Data.
We're in market with products, and we have a very strong new product introduction schedule over the next 18 months where we're going to be hitting essentially new features pretty much every quarter. We're in a great position. 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 hiatus, we've seen obviously that stall because we've seen, like every other market that we're in, we're seeing the provision of new credit really come to grind to a bit of a halt. 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 it hits right now. Overall, though, we remain really, really positive about our position. I think compared to as time progresses, and we talked to you 6 months ago, 12 months ago, as time goes on, we get more confident about that. 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 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. The market has changed since then. We didn't really have proliferation of free credit reports and so on and so forth.
We weren't entirely sure that that would repeat. 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. That's coming through just as it did last time. If we continue on that basis, 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 augurs well. I think 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. 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. We have to see how that evolves. I think we're in a pretty good position there. 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 doing 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. 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 we could get enough traction with it. 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.
We have run into some service issues there which have given rise to additional costs. Those sort of three things hit, and that meant that from an EBIT perspective, the impact of 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? Our judgment is it's not a market issue. Our business still has a fantastic position. We still believe we have great growth opportunities there. We've got certain things to fix. 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. Excellent. Thank you very much, and best of luck for the year ahead. Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you so much. We have our next incoming question, and it is coming from the line with Brett Berhoff. Brett, you are now live on the call. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everybody, and glad to hear you're all safe. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one to 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 maybe half of the credit maybe dried up, I think was the stat you gave. Is credit supply varying differently or reduction in credit supply varying substantially across the different regions? Does that explain why North America is +7, LATAM's +110, and for example, U.K. is -17? Is that the main driver of the variability or is it maybe other things?
Okay. Thanks, Brett. Lloyd, do you want to pick that one up?
Yeah, sure. 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. 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 a 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. Obviously that's a very new business. The piece on credit supply, we've seen a bit of it in each market, but it's been stronger in the U.K.
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. 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. That clearly is helping the business there. We also have Boost in market in the U.S., which obviously helps our traffic and engagement levels.
Great. 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? Are they, in general, doing well so far? Can you just give us an update on that in this new environment? Thanks.
Yeah, 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. They're in some fairly exciting places. Some interesting pieces to that. Other areas, I'm sure will have to trade through some softer demand. Right now they're well capitalized, and we feel pretty confident in that portfolio.
Okay. Thanks for your time.
Thanks, Brett. Appreciate you getting up early to join.
Thank you so much, Brett.
No problem.
Rory, your line is now live. Please go ahead.
Hello. Hope you can hear me. I was hammering away at star one, so glad I got through in the end. Just two from me. Firstly, 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? I'm interested about the traditional subscriber base in particular and whether consumers are seeing more uptake of that as they worry about their own finances in the U.S. or whether they see it as kind of a non-core cost to be cut. Maybe just a bit more on consumer first, please.
Okay. Yeah, happy to talk to that. We're seeing actually some really interesting trends in consumer. We saw quite a strong response as we come through March and into April on memberships in our core credit offering. We're seeing memberships there and a knock-on to revenue that grew in both Q3 and Q4 in the credit education business. Identity subscriptions continue to grow. We've seen those trends continue, and obviously lead gen was up very strongly. 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.
I think that gives you a good breakdown and also shows the strong trajectory we've had in those identity and lead gen products as we've come through the last couple of years.
Yeah. Great. Thank you. Could you just talk about the consumer margin itself? Obviously, there was a big step up in marketing costs in the past year. I appreciate the current environment is hard to think about, but maybe if you look out into the medium term, you always thought about a kind of 20%-25% margin range for that business. As the mix shifts, is that thinking evolving at all?
Yeah, I think we're really pleased with the progress this year. I think we put a lot of investment into the launch in Boost, and 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 our consumer business to our data business. 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, there's been no change there really. Our focus is on really driving the breadth of different consumer offers and the revenue growth in it. 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. Thank you. Just one on Germany, if I can, given that exciting move. Can you talk about how developed that bureau you've 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?
Yeah. Well, as I said in my we've been looking to get into Germany for quite some time, we're delighted to be able to do this. We've been looking at this opportunity for at least 18 months. It's important to emphasize that Bertelsmann will remain a shareholder, a minority shareholder, going forward. That's a really positive sign from our perspective. It's the number 2 bureau in Germany. It is focused on e-commerce. Actually, as a result of which, its current trading is going really, really well. 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 that's been difficult for us to do before. A lot of client relationships and a lot of existing sales channels.
The business itself is a good business, but pretty straightforward one in terms of the product set that it's got. We see a big opportunity to really enhance that with the full Experian range of products. We're excited about it, and really looking forward to getting that under our wing.
Brilliant. I'll leave it there. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Rory.
Thank you so much. The next question is going to be coming from the line of Rajesh Kumar. Before I announce you, sir, if you would like to ask a question, anyone, just press star and one on your device. Thank you. Rajesh, you are now live on the call. Please go ahead.
Morning. Thanks for taking the question. 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 subprime customers, and what's the level or the risk of churn in the coming quarters in such a customer base? 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. Let's go back to the German opportunity in the medium term. 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. I think if you think about it from a pure bureau perspective, 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 come from. I think we see the opportunities come from 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.
I think that those are pretty much undeveloped in Germany. We think there's quite a big opportunity. There's obviously a lot of selling to do, and that doesn't happen by itself. 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. If anything, I think probably competitors of the current environment will probably hold them back more than us. 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., we don't really see any significant change in the competitive landscape in the U.S. It's quite a broad-ranging question.
I don't think there's anything really significant to note on that. Then on the consumer, Lloyd, do you want to pick that up?
Yeah, I'll take that. You have to think about the different markets in our consumer business. The growth in identity subscriptions has continued to grow really well. We ended this year at just over 540,000 subscribers to a paid membership in Identity, and we've given some of those numbers pretty frequently over the last couple of years so you can see the progression there. Credit subscribers, generally the last few years, as you know, had been modestly declining, and they've over the last couple of quarters stabilized and increased. Particularly that's been a focus of acquisition in the last, I would say, last eight weeks. You have to then though focus back on our strategy in 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.
That, as I say, that's the power rather than looking at the individual revenue streams, I think.
Understood. On the U.S., the question was specific 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-to-like basis?
No. I think Equifax themselves pointed out they're still trailing behind really in their USIS business, so we haven't seen anything really. 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. I think we don't see any fundamental change there.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you so much. We have our next incoming question. It's coming from line of Tom Skies. Tom, you are live in the call. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Tom Skies, thank you very much. Morning, everybody. 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? Would you say that it's going to be disproportionately U.K. because of the issues you've got there? Are there other areas that you'd pick out a different kind of cadence or maybe elongated sales cycle at all there, please? Just a quick question, I guess. How much is fraud and fraud-related activity for you at the moment? Maybe how much would be sort of covered by existing contracts, and if there's a volume increase, does that directly relate to increased revenue for you, please? Finally, just again on this consumer margin.
I guess you look at it, obviously a big change in business mix there. You're making the same EBIT as you did five years ago on a 20% higher revenue in H2. 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? Therefore, are you going to get a marketing or advertising rates benefit if those advertising rates, or have they come down for you? Maybe they come down with a lag because of contracts you've got there, please.
Okay. I'll maybe take a few of those. Q1 versus April. Clearly there's a fair amount of uncertainty in the market. Volumes are varying week to week. You would expect us to be providing an outlook cautious. I think when we look at our transaction volumes, I think we feel reasonably positive that a number of the declines have peaked and are on a slow improving trend as we've seen it going through the last few weeks. Some of the uncertainties I referenced in my net 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. 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. 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. 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, Tom, to look back four or five years. We've got a completely different business in consumer now. A really strongly growing identity protection business. The Lead Generation business, completely brand new, growing very rapidly, and all of those engagements with consumers. 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 into there, whilst we see the opportunity to increase acquisitioning and increase revenue.
Near term, across the business, we've seen marketing rates fall a bit. Again, how long that will sustain, we just don't know. I think it's delivering good margin, overall accretive to the group, and we're going to continue to pursue that while we see the market opportunities. Then fraud. Our overall decision analytics business, if you think for the year as a whole, is something like $700 million. About a third is fraud and identity. We've got a range of different types of contracts that you would see in there. Clearly, 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 analytical and identity solutions to prevent it.
Okay. The run rate of that fraud-related work now pre-COVID, how would you characterize what kind of growth rates are we seeing there? We can just see what the uplift in fraud-related activity going forward would be.
Yeah. For the year as a whole, our fraud and identity ranged between, and this is globally, between mid-single to high single-digit growth across the year. We've seen that strengthen as we've come through March and into April.
Okay. Perfect. Thanks very much.
Thank you so much, sir. The next question is coming from the line of George Crary. George, you are now live on the call. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Lloyd. Kerry. I had three 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 offsetting 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've thought that as the volume, the underlying volume trend picks up, we would see supply of loans sort of broadly follow that. Maybe there's a lag there.
A final question, I suppose more strategically. Brian, 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. Thanks.
Okay. Thanks, George, for the questions. 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 gen space. I think it'd be quite interesting just to sort of contrast what happened in the global financial crisis. Kerry will have that perspective, and then I'll come back on the strategic question.
Yeah. Just picking up the bureau numbers. Obviously, you see overall trends in overall profile pulls. When you then convert that to revenue, clearly there are different price points for different subsegments. We've clearly.
A lot of strength in mortgage and that sustained through April and into early May. We've also had strength in Ascend services. You have quite a mix of benefit in there as you think about how it all adds up. The relationship between data and the Ascend services that we're providing is a pretty strong addition year-over-year given the progress we've been making in that business. Kerry, can we move over to you for the question on the development of supply and lead gen space?
Sure, Brian, thanks. Good morning or good afternoon, everyone. If you take the three 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'll recall, the Brazil credit bureau was one of the bright spots at Experian, continued to grow, had great growth through the global financial crisis. 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, 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. You have a diminishing supply, as you would expect in the subprime consumer base because of the tightening of the credit policies. That's where we've primarily seen a change in supply in the U.S. market. It is noticeable, but I wouldn't 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, and the consumers have migrated to us fairly strongly.
You see it in the results. The lenders recognize that. 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. 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%-85% of those consumers would have seen some type of offer because of their creditworthiness, their credit background.
During the COVID-19 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'll evolve at the pace that the market in the U.K. continues to move. 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. 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. You actually already seen the results of quite a lot of that in the new products that we've brought to market. 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 re-engineer the whole business.
What we have done, we've, over the last few years, engaged in quite extensive strategic review to map out how we do that, particularly around things like some of the migration of the legacy pieces of technology. It cuts across a lot of different businesses from Health to CIS to BIS and others. 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. We feel like we have really a lot of the components that we need. Could we accelerate? Yeah, we're sort of some time into this now. We're learning a lot. 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.
Of course, as we think through over the next 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 reevaluate any of that. That may be something that we come back to at a later point in time.
Super. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much. We have our one last incoming question, and it is coming from the line of Anvesh Agrawal. You are now live on the call. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for the detailed presentation. I just got one left, really, and that's on the health business, wherein, again, the revenue trends that you have 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? Thank you.
Yeah. I'm going to ask Kerry to address that one. Kerry, you okay to take that one?
Yep, happy to, Brian. Thank you. Yeah, 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. 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 a pandemic because they turn their attention to managing their customers and dealing with the pandemic. They use our systems to do that. 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. Our ability to help them schedule. This has gone from telehealth might have been five or 10 instances per week for a hospital with consumers prior to the pandemic to over 1,000 per week now. 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.
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. 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.
Well, good. Thanks.
Thanks.
That's fine. Thank you.
Okay, operator, back to you. 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. Hope everybody keeps safe and well, and we look forward to speaking to you again in a few months' time. Maybe we might all be back in offices by then. You never know. Good luck, everybody.