Okay. I think we're ready to go. So welcome, everybody, to our results. Pleased to say it's been a very good year for Experian, one of our best in our history. In fact, So we exceeded growth expectations that we had when we're going into the year.
And what's really pleasing is that we've delivered strong growth across all of our businesses, both B2B and B2B see. Our core businesses are performing really well, and it's a lot of the new products that we've over the last couple of years, which has really driven our growth higher. That's really in every region, and our strategy of combining ever more of our capabilities together to create innovative solutions for our clients really is starting to gain a lot of traction. The pace of innovation, if anything has quickened, and then we expect that to continue, most recent example being the introduction of Experian Boost, which we believe will further transform the strategic position of our consumer businesses in North America going forward. So very good growth across the business, but more importantly, the nature of that growth, a good part of it is coming from product offerings.
That either take us into new areas of client spend or new markets and areas that we can scale globally, and this provides us with a lot of opportunities as we go forward. Lloyd will go through the financial details shortly, but I'll pick out a few highlights. So we had 9% organic revenue growth for the year. With, outstanding 10% organic revenue growth in Q4. Momentum in B2B is very strong.
It's continued the trend we've had in the last few years. Globally, we grew by 9% and we had a good year in Consumer Services, up by 6% organically. North America B2B was the outstanding performer, up 11% organically. U. K.
Also had a very strong year. It was up by 7% in B2B. Brazil had a fantastic fourth quarter. And we had another really great year in EMEA Asia Pacific both in terms of results and strategic progress that we've made in those regions. In Consumer, we're not even back to growth, but we now have significant scale audiences for our consumer products.
Across the three territories, we have over 55,000,000 members in total. So we're really building a substantial presence globally there. And then finally, margins were up 20 basis points at constant currencies as we continue to embed basis points at constant currencies as we continue to invest back in the business holders. And we've now returned over $4,500,000,000 through dividends and buybacks over the last 6 years. And today, we've announced a further 4% increase in the dividend another $400,000,000 buyback.
Okay. This slide helps to give some context about the opportunities, the markets that we operate in. We aim to grow by focusing on a few things. 1st, the expanded use cases for our data secondly, by developing increasingly sophisticated solutions in our core markets that combine data, analytics and software. You've heard us talk about that a lot over the last few years, then finally, by entering new high growth markets where real time uses of data are changing the way businesses are performed.
And you can see a lot of the segments that we're in today in most of these segments We have significant growth opportunities, and we have relatively low market shares with, a fantastic roster of products to, address those opportunities. As we as we look at, all of these end markets, they're all actually really been driven by a number of factors. Some of these I've mentioned before, First of all, there's an increasing need to improve productivity and reduce costs. That's true across all of our client base. There's a strategic imperative to deliver better, frictionless customer experiences in a much more competitive world.
We're also seeing that transactions are becoming increasingly complex, with need for more and more data, and that needs to be turned into instant accurate and fair decision making. And increasingly, we're seeing customers and consumers demand instant decisions great digital experiences and control. And all of that relies on sophisticated solutions that use large data sets new technologies that can process this into actionable insights and drive better outcomes for businesses and consumers. So a strong backdrop to our growth prospects checks. And these really tie into our strategic focus areas.
Credit remains the biggest vertical across the business. And we want to make all parts of the credit lending process better, simpler, faster for both businesses and consumers And we want to improve the experience, but also reduce costs for our clients. And some of the biggest opportunities seeing in the market today are really to address that, and we see that growing in the future. We also have a big role in helping our clients find, understand and connect with their customers. All businesses want to do this better.
They want faster interactions, and they want more intelligent interactions. And our products and services helped and address that. A big focus for us is to empower consumers in their financial lives, something we're uniquely positioned to do. And we see identity verification as a large and growing market opportunity As more transactions are conducted digitally, the scope for fraud increases and the need for robust B2B and B2C solutions also rises. Now some of these points, I think, are immediately obvious when you think of our traditional financial services, marketplaces, but actually they apply far beyond that.
All industries need to use data and solutions to remove complexity and cost. A good example of this would be our health care vertical. Where our core capabilities in verification and risk assessment are giving us great opportunities, and there are many more like that. Okay. Experian, we have thousands of products across our regions and business units, and we've driven great success in the business by commercially bundling these products.
But increasingly, what we're seeing is by combining these products, not just in a commercial bundle, but in a technological bundle, which creates a platform that not only addresses, key business needs, but also helps our clients automate processes. And importantly, forms that can scale globally, we think a lot of our growth opportunities are going to come from these areas. Slide in front of you gives you a snapshot of that. The first one of these platforms is really one you're probably very familiar with, which is our decisioning platforms, decision analytics as it was now Probably most of you know, at PowerCurve Suite. PowerCurve had a fantastic year.
That suite of products was actually up by 60% during the year. And Power Curve itself, has actually a lot of growth opportunities in its own right across the different modules that clients use it for, across originations, strategy management, customer management and collections, and we're investing behind all of those. But it also serves as a core component for a lot of our other decisioning forms like crosscore, Experian 1, which we're inducing to the market this year and others that we have in the pipeline. We see a similar are adding to the momentum that we see in the U S and validate that this is a platform which is applicable in all markets, including markets where we don't actually have a Bureau. OpenData is our newest proposition, and we have one of the leading open data platforms in the UK.
The UK is the most advanced market. With respect to open banking, and will improve the concept in several countries, including Spain, South Africa and Italy with our Truso categorization engine, with several clients due to come, to answer that product in the next year. So it's in its infancy. We have a great set of proposition We believe that there's going to be a lot of growth in this in the years to come, and we're very well positioned for that. On the consumer side, you want to be an undisputed champion.
We're going to help to build more direct relationships in more geographies and help consumers in all aspects of their financial lives. And we are actually already unique amongst our competitors set in this regard. We're the only one who has large scale direct consumer relationships. And we see more opportunity for this, in the future. Now one of the key planks of our strategy we set out a few years ago, was create a culture of continuous innovation from the way that we work to the solutions that we create.
And I think you can see the results of that coming through in the last few years. We're going to continue to press that agenda forward. Equally, if not more importantly, is the belief that because of the unique position that we held as an organization, we also have a responsibility to directly engage consumers in all markets to help provide assistance and products that help them improve their financial lives. And the aim of that is to foster financial inclusion through all our efforts across B2B and B2C. And increasingly, this is what the societies that we operate in, the politicians, regulators and consumers expect from an organization like Experian.
It's a very powerful mission. It's one that everybody in Experian passionately believes in and one that we are pushing through very hard. Our first step was to put consumers at the heart of what we do And that really starts by using our capabilities to develop products and services that give them the ability to control their lives not just to control their lives, but also to get better outcomes in their financial lives. And that's through direct relationships and free propositions to consumers. We have almost 1,700,000,000 people globally that are unbanked, not just in places that you'd expect like Asia and Africa.
We have about 100,000,000 consumers in the U. S. You don't have a chance at fair credit fair chance at access to credit today. And products like Experianced in the U. S, rental data in the U.
K. And marketplace as in Asia Pacific, just a few of the initiatives that we're pursuing to undertake to address this global issue. The good news is that it's a really worthy goal. And as is so often, the case it's the right thing to do, but it's also a big opportunity for us as an organization. I'm extremely proud of the hard work and dedication of everybody at Experian and we remain committed to, enabling more opportunities to drive financial inclusion economies around the world.
So turning to the regions, North America had an outstanding year, 10% organic revenue growth and 11% total growth. We previously talked to you about one Experian. Good example of this, what this means in practice, vast majority of our large clients, in North America, now use significantly more than one experienced product in every contract that we launch or we sign. Innovation was a big part of the B2B agenda in North America this year. B2B grew by 11% and it was new products like Ascend, trended data, clarity and power curve, which had a big contribution to that.
Consumer Services made huge progress, up 9% organically, very strong growth in identity protection and lead generation. And we now have nearly 19,000,000 free members in the U. S. Through experian.com. And that provides us with a big, big, big audience for our products.
Now we launched our, as I mentioned, our latest innovation experience boost in March, And we're very confident that it's going to scale quickly. Now the significance of this shouldn't be overlooked. We're now the 2nd largest free membership platform in the U. S. And that's going to provide us with a whole range of business opportunities going forward.
We've had great success with many of our top clients who are now using the Ascend Analytical Sandbox. That's been a great year, but we're really just getting started, and we have many more modules to come. SandBox was the first module on the Ascend platform. It's actually now in most of the largest financial institutions in the U S, and we're going to expand from that base. We've added new capabilities, which incorporate different datasets, for example, clarity data, automotive data and business credit data and we're winning new deals in these verticals with the Ascend platform.
And we expect also that growth will come from the rollout of this platform to mid market clients, which should begin in the middle of this year. Importantly, by bundling Ascend with Powercare for Customer Management, We're expanding the use case of the XN big data platform, and we're already in market, with a solution for account reviews. So decisions like credit limit increases are being made using near real time data from the Ascent platform, incorporating AI and machine learning techniques to improve decision making. And we have already got our 1st Tier 1 client wins, and the pipeline for these solutions is growing. In fact, we had our major client conference in San Antonio last week, and one of the first users of this proposition spoke at the conference and acknowledged that the combination of Ascend and Power Curve was actually transformational for his business and produced an in year payback by significantly improving the quality of decision making.
So we're very excited about that. So we're expanding the functionality of the Ascent platform adding Experian marketing data. Now this is going to also potentially bring significant changes to the way our clients perform credit marketing. And opens up a new area of client spend to us. So in summary, it's been a great start for the ASCEND platform.
Important contributor to revenue this year. Pipeline is strong, and we see very good prospects for the year ahead. Just a quick spotlight on health, performed really strongly In fact, we've had an 8 year record now double digit growth. We expect that to continue. A reminder, the main products in Health are decisioning and workflows to workforce tools that really enabled process automation across the breadth of revenue cycle management for healthcare providers.
The focus is on our on authentication and risk, which are our core Experian capabilities and we delivered really good growth across all areas in eligibility, claims, and collections. And we see significant further growth in health. 60% of U. S. Hospitals have at least one experienced solution, and we see very large white space opportunity.
We're introducing new services to expand our position, particularly in areas like identity resolution, and we're also now developing services to help improve the consumer experience as consumers also wants new digital ways to manage their health care costs. Launch Consumer Services, a really great story here. Back on a very good growth track, on the back of our successful launch of the identity product. Think we're now at a similar stage, with Experian Boost, a significant strategic initiative for us. It's an industry for us, it has had an exceptionally strong start.
We're just over 1 month in, and we have, over 600,000 consumers have connected to Experian which gives you a sense of how this room is resonating in the marketplace. The strategy is centered around the theme of control. Consumers want to have greater control. Experian boost provides that that we help them get better outcomes by gaining the consumer's permission for access to additional datasets So that in turn turns into a differentiated B2B data asset. And we're going to continue to innovate where the only credit bureau in North America, as I said, which direct relationships and scale.
And as more countries seek to put consumers in control through legislation like GDPR And Open Banking, So this is going to become increasingly important. So it works by, allowing consumers to add additional data to their credit file. The types of payments they can add include electricity, water, phone bills, TV and internet. Comprehensive data is added in real time. And we then recalculate the score.
It's free to everybody. All you have to do is sign up for a membership through experian.com. I'm going to roll a couple of the commercials that we're using, the company that launched in the U. S. A short while ago.
Are you getting a score due to serve? No. You're not. Experian is changing that. For the first time, you can raise your credit scores instantly.
Boost your credit scores now free with Experianboost only at experian.com/boost.
Hey. So do you have any last minute advice?
Well, you're gonna be spending money on more than diapers.
So you should raise your credit score as instant with Experian Boost. Instantly? Yeah. That's free too. You finally get credit for paying all those utility bills.
Okay.
But don't you already?
Not so now and only with Experian Boost.
We can get better credit cards. Boost your credit score instantly. It's free and only at experian.com/boost.
Right. And actually, the screens that you see around the room, are live representations of consumers in the U. S. Are actually boosting their scores. So this is, and considering that actually, it's quite early particularly on the West Coast.
When you see that flash up, you gotta wonder what those people are actually doing this time of the night, but they are actually up boosting their credit score. So that's great. I think you can see the impact this is having. If you pay attention to some of the things that flash up, to give you an idea, 10 point movement makes a really significant difference for the cost of credit to somebody. And then you'll see a different color flash up when people actually change their score band, and that's a really big deal.
So, you can see the impact is happening in real time. Hopefully, it'll start there. You can go a bit faster as we get through it. So, what does Experian boost do? It generates an audience.
It triggers an ongoing engagement between the consumer and Experian. That audience usually has credit and cents. They're often seeking new credit offers. In fact, they're often eligible for new credit offers because their score has changed. So once the data is added and rescored, we match the consumer to the appropriate financial offer through credit match and the volumes through that proposition are scaling pretty rapidly now.
So it's an industry first, and it's a first step in what we think is a long roadmap of future innovations around this theme. Okay. Turning now to Latin America. Organic revenue growth was 6% for the year overall. We had a very strong quarter 4th quarter, up 13%.
I think Brazil, we made steady progress in what was a tough year of political and economic uncertainty. It rebounded heavily in Q4 as we signed a lot of deals that were pent up from prior quarters. And we also signed the first Senn deal in Brazil, in Q4. Spanish LatAm performed extremely well, especially in Colombia. We had big market share gains.
And our overall view is that the economy in Brazil is now slowly recovering. Of course, the exciting news is that, after a short interval of about 12 years, positive data has actually finally been signed into law, and it covers all Brazilians, unless they opt out of the process. So that's a significant milestone. We're going to spend the next several months, receiving positive data and building out the database Under the new law, it will be available in scores and analytical products beginning in October following a 90 day period of formal communication to all consumers. So positive data, I think, as a lot of you know, enables us to build out a lot of additional products, but also a lot of additional services to consumers.
And we're doing incredibly well with our consumer business, in Brazil. We've now enrolled 2,000,000 free members. That's up from 22,000,000 this time last year. We are generating revenue across a number of areas like debt settlement. Credit comparison, fraud protection and B2B2C offers.
And so with the inclusion of positive data, we expect that growth to accelerate. So our platforms to enable a receipt of positive data and the use of it have been developed and tested. Products have been rebuilt. And we're ready to really, to roll out, our propositions, when it becomes low in the second half. We do think that growth will accelerate over time.
It will take time, even when we start to receive positive data for, history to be established and for that to drive incremental value in scores and all the products, but it's long awaited and it's great news. Now turning to the UK, we made good progress particularly on the B2B side, overall organic revenue growth was up 7%. We had overall revenue growth for the year, 4% B2B 7%. Consumer Services made steady progress on a path back to growth. So just in B2B, we had some very important strategic client wins.
And just a little context, so we most of you will know we have, a very large installed base in the UK for our DA products. And some of them, in particular, some legacy products like, Transact Pro, Taliman, names you probably haven't heard, as mentioned, for quite some time, over the last few years, we've been on a very careful migration path for those products to the new PowerCurve suite. We have now converted 50% of the legacy client base to Power Curve. We have a migration path set for the next 35% over the next twelve 2 24 months, and then we will deal with the tail. This is actually a really significant achievement for us and provides great future visibility about the business.
Client upgrades and migrations are always an opportunity, for clients to look at, different propositions. And I think it's a significant indication strength of our business that we're seeing such a strong conversion rate. In addition, ASCEND has launched It's had an excellent start. Momentum is very encouraging. We actually closed 5 contracts in FY 'nineteen, We have a pipeline of over 40 potential deals.
Now one of the large, major banks wants to put their entire underwriting platform across our lending infrastructure. And of course, what's going to be really interesting about Sandd in the UK is that per my point about the power curve conversions, we're going to be able to actually sell it into the power curve installs. And that really is, as we've got such a strong base in the UK. That gives us a really powerful opportunity as we go forward. Innovation pipeline, not just the UK but elsewhere, it goes way beyond the Send.
ExperianOne, our software as a service proposition, has made its debut in the UK and we've actually signed our first two clients, and we have a very big pipeline. And, I'll just tell you a little bit about our first client because it's kind of interesting. It's actually a very small company, which offers training courses for adults and career advice. And this company, not only does that, but actually started to offer funding for a clients with manual underwriting. So these are people in this small business who actually know very little about credit, making credit decisions.
And so they were looking for a way to digitize that, and hence, our out of the box cloud based scalable, ExperianOne proposition, combines Bureau data, identity, authentication, fraud detection and flexible decisioning. So in broader terms, think that I think is a great example of a small company would never have been able to consume or afford, the type of advanced solutions that we provide into credit space. If it wasn't for this Experian 1 proposition. And I think it shows that in broader terms, that we have a very large market opportunity for small firms offering these kinds of products online and helping them to scale credit in a way they just couldn't do And particularly, that opens up a lot of opportunities in, in SME. The UK Open Data is a reality.
We've signed agreements we're in discussions with another 14 clients for our new affordability check. The Truso categorization engine is gaining a lot of traction. And so far, we have 1 major U. K. Bank using our Verdesk platform to power their open banking effort.
We were obviously very disappointed moving over to consumer side. The CNA process didn't go to plan. We abandoned that ClearScore acquisition. But we've dusted ourselves off, and we're going to focus our efforts, with renewed vigor on organic development of the business. And actually, although sometimes it's easy to miss this given the overall profile the business for us could be is we're actually making a lot of progress.
Credit Matcher is already, the 3rd largest financial aggregation marketplace in the UK. It grew by 56% last year, and we're making a lot of progress. And we have a really robust product road map as we introduce a lot of new offers this year. As is, is the case in the U S, we're going to position offers around unique to experience propositions, and that's going to be focused on helping people manage their money better. By exchanging data for improved outcomes.
So across our UK business, the market position has strengthened. We're addressing new opportunities, and we see good prospects ahead. Turning now to EMEA Asia Pacific, who's actually our strongest growing region, up 14% and it was another year of double digit growth. In EMEA, just to give you an example, we closed more deals in H2 FY 'nineteen than we did in the entire year just a few years ago, And it's really been driven by, Banks and EMEA, just like other markets, adopting cloud technologies, and we're really well positioned with products like Ascend, ExperianOne, open data platforms, which we are marketing heavily in those regions. As I mentioned, at the start, we closed the acquisition of CompuScan.
It's another step for us in EMEA. It's going to accelerate our strategic ambitions in South Africa and give us a gateway into Sub Saharan Africa. And in Asia Pacific, another really great story, the opportunities I think we talked to you before about that for the expansion of credit. By definition, given the low penetration, they're extremely strong. We've seen that in the penetration of our power curve suite in particular.
But for example, Indonesia as a market we've been very successful in the last couple of years, less than half the adult population have a bank account. And yet, it will soon have the 3rd largest middle class of any emerging economy. A lot of consumers still get rejected for credit due to the lack of data. But we know that a vast majority of consumers in Southeast Asia connect to the internet via smartphones. And so by partnering with major mobile service, providers, we can directly engage and access data.
And so we're partnering, as we've mentioned before, to create something we call data marketplaces to bridge that gap. This year, we signed 2 major new deals with C-eighty eight in Genexu in Indonesia at the Philippines and Malaysia. And these marketplaces allow us score more people using non traditional data. And the the result of that is that we have increased acceptance rate for credit offers, for unsecured loans, credit cards, insurance, and millions and millions of people are now getting more access to affordable credit. So steps like these are new and innovative and helping us spend on top of the additional initiatives that we have across Asia Pacific.
Okay. So sum up, it's been a great year, and we think there's much more to come. We do set, I think, in a very interesting spot with a lot of opportunities in a very dynamic industry. We have core capabilities, which we believe puts us in a unique positioned to take advantage of those growth opportunities. We are now deploying new solutions at pace and scale across multiple markets.
And we're also putting consumers evermore at the heart of our strategy accessing large audiences, while at the same time expanding competitive advantage through consumer contributive data. Our focus now is on executing this plan across our geographic footprint and sustain our growth into the future. So with that, I'm going to hand you over to Ward.
Hey, thanks, Brian. Good morning, everyone. I'll start as usual with a recap of our key financial metrics. As Brian outlined, we've made some great strategic operational and financial progress in the last year, sustaining the high level of rates growth and finishing the year very strongly. Our B2B portfolio delivered another strong year with excellent progress.
Across a range of new product introductions, benefiting from the innovation investments that we've talked to you about in recent years. Consumer Services also progressed well with strong momentum behind our new consumer products and also in our partner solutions business. In line with the guidance, we outlined a year ago, we progressed our margin by, 20 basis points at constant currency, with another strong year of, cash conversion. We ended the year in a strong financial position at the bottom of our leverage guidance range, and with our facilities extended. Turning to the highlights, we had a great end to the year, with organic growth in the fourth quarter of 10% which bought both total and organic growth for the year as a whole to 9%.
And as expected, we saw a 3% drag from foreign exchange at a revenue level. Benchmark EBIT grew double digit at 10% and margin was up 20 basis points at constant currency as the benefits of the productivity program more than offset the increased investments, in new products and technology. Benchmark EPS grew 9% at constant currency and 4% at actual rates in line with the FX guidance we gave earlier in the year. And cash generation was strong with 97 percent operating cash conversion, and the board, as Brian outlined, has approved a 4% increase in the full year dividend. On this chart, you can see some of the revenue trends in a little more detail between B2B and B2C.
On the left, the organic growth for our B2B business, where growth across the portfolio has been consistently strong and reflects the momentum behind the innovation investments that, you heard Brian outline. We saw a great finish to the year with 11% growth in the 4th quarter, bringing organic revenue growth to 9% for the year as a whole. And within that, we saw strength in B2B across all of the regions, but particularly strong in North America and EMEA Asia Pacific. In the fourth quarter, in particular, we saw double digit growth in both the UK and Latin America B2B businesses. And for the year as a whole, our global decisioning businesses, which represent well over $1,000,000,000 in revenue grew 14 percent organically as we saw some really strong momentum in decision analytics across all regions.
And as you heard from Brian, another year of double digit growth in our health business. On the right hand chart, you can see our Consumer business, which is growing consistently through FY2019 with organic revenue growth of 9 sorry, of 6 percent for the year overall. And the U. S. Consumer business progressed well with growth of 8% in the 4th quarter.
In the UK, we've made steady progress. We were down just 1% in the 4th quarter and, stable at the turn of the year. And our strategy across the businesses of diversification is going well with very strong growth from those new products in lead generation and identity protection. Looking at the quarterly growth by region. Our North America, as you can see, was consistently strong, and we maintained the high single digit growth rate in Q4, even after lapping the end of the annualization of the Fannie Mae contract for trended data.
And Financial Services revenue grew double digit in the 4th quarter. Latin America delivered double digit growth in Q4, with a very strong quarter in Brazil, and continued strength across the Spanish Latin America region. The Brazil performance for this year was heavily Q4 weighted. When we landed quite a number of contracts, which had been pending discussion earlier in the year and really pending the outcome. Of the political and economic uncertainty.
So it was great to get that growth landed in the fourth quarter. For the year ahead, we'd probably expect to start more in line with the average, for the year as a whole in Latin America given that phasing in this last year. In UK and Ireland, B2B was the main driver of growth, ending the year strongly, with a number of decisioning deliveries finalized in that fourth quarter. In the UK, the consumer recovery really masks the B2B trends a little, and we had a very strong Q1 this last year in B2B decisioning when we won a number of large contracts and a similarly strong exit in the fourth quarter. So as we lap that, strong Q1 in decision analytics will fully expect to start the year in Q1 in the UK and low single digits.
And as we see consistently growth, strong growth rates across EMEA And Asia Pacific, really driven from the marketplace developments and also decision analytics wins. Looking at North America, to the regional results, I'll comment on performance at constant rates, And in North America, you see organic revenue growth was 10%. In data, there was strong growth from consumer information market, driven by growth in core profiles, trended data and mortgage, and, the great momentum that you've heard, from Brian in Ascend. Auto also performed strongly, growing double digit as it benefited from new product introductions across the dealer network. And there was also significant growth in our decisioning business, and decision analytics performed very strongly, growing double digit as we secured multiple wins in software analytics as well as fraud and identity management and health delivered that 8th successive year of double digit growth.
In Consumer Services, we saw a great progress with considerable momentum in IdentityWorks, and the rapidly growing contribution from Credit Match, the lead generation product. For the year as a whole, these 2 new products generated over 1,000,000 in revenue and exited the year on an annual run rate of over 1,000,000. So you can see a strong growth and momentum from those 2 new products. And we also saw good growth in partner solutions, our B2B2C business, And at the end of the year, we concluded the acquisition of All ClearID, which provides breach and pre breach preparedness support to customers. So tying all the financials together in North America into very strong EBIT progression, and we reported 90 basis points margin progression benefiting from our productivity program, and the strong growth in the consumer business, while we continue to invest behind the scaling of our new products inside B2B.
Over to Latin America, for the full year, the region grew 6% with Brazil growing at mid single digits and FX. Really here landed with a 15% headwind to Latin America revenue overall. There was good growth in data across both consumer and business information in Brazil as we secured multiple wins across several large clients, and that helped offset our weakness in our mid market mid market vertical. Spanish Latin America had another strong year where we secured new and expanded mandates for our B2B platforms. In our Consumer business in Brazil, we invested strongly behind the expansion of the consumer base in advance of the move to positive data.
We currently report the Consumer business within data, and it performed very well as we monetize our free membership base with particular strength in the Limpanoi and ecaret product lines. And the diversification strategy we have in Brazil, what we talked about a few years ago, continues decisioning progressed very well, up 23% across Latin America, reflecting the strong demand for software analytics and scoring in Brazil and across the border Latin America region. And margin reflected the mix of growth, the FX headwind and the investment behind our consumer business. Moving to the UK and Ireland, where organic B2B growth was 7% and the consumer business declined by 4% for the year overall. There was good growth in data driven by the strength in our prequalification service and growing contribution from affordability services.
Through our open data platforms as well as solid progress in core credit volumes. Decisioning performed strongly, particularly in the 1st and quarters, as I mentioned, where we had a number of large software wins and renewals, and we also saw strength in analytics. Consumer Services improved through the year and exited the year in a stable position. The rate of decline in membership revenues continues to moderate while Credit Matcha delivered very strong rates of growth, as you saw in Brian's presentation. And for the year ahead, we have a great pipeline also of new products to bring to the market.
From our U. S. Business. Onto EMEA and Asia Pacific performed very strongly, up 14% with double digit growth in both EMEA and the Asia subregions. We saw great strength across both EMEA and Asia Pacific and especially in our high potential markets in Asia and Africa.
Individually, there were some very strong country performances, including India, where we grew 60%. Southeast Asia was up 40%. Turkey and the Middle East, up 52% and South Africa up 26%. So some very strong scaling performances from some of our emerging countries. And data was up 4% in total with strength in our bureaus in Southeast Asia, offset by some softness in our European bureaus.
Decitioning was very strong, up 21% overall, driven by multiple business wins for software and analytics, as well as the great progress we've made in marketplaces this year as we onboarded the new partnerships, with C88 and Genexu in Southeast Asia. Looking at the EBIT margin, overall, our operating margin progressed in line with the expectations we set out at the start of the year. With constant currency margins up 20 us more of our growth back into organic investments. And as part of that, during the year, Abby's productivity initiatives meant that our full time equivalent headcount increased by just 1% compared to our organic revenue growth of 9%. So on the chart, starting the year from our rebased prior year margin of 27.1 percent, you can see progress in North America reflected a good operating leverage as well as the increased investment behind the significant new products of Ascend identity works across score and Experian boost.
Latin American margins increased modestly as underlying margins offset higher investment in the development of our Consumer business ahead of the move to positive data. We made good progress in EMEA Asia Pacific as these regions continue to benefit from improving scale. And the UK the revenue decline in consumer services, but also a higher net investment, including, preparedness to introduce our new platforms into the UK region. Other on this chart reflects the central investment into our global scaling teams. And also a negative contribution from our associate interest in Cross Shaw Marketing where we disclosed the majority stake a couple of years ago.
That business contributed a loss of $4,000,000 in FY2019 versus a $3,000,000 gain in FY2018. As the current majority owners, investor restructure that business. And we expect a similar result from that, associate in FY 'twenty. Just as a reminder, our principal route to monetizing that investment is via a future disposal. So you're taking all that together.
EBIT margin is up 20 basis points at constant currency, and down 20 basis points after a 40 basis points headwind. Turning to EPS, on the left, you can see the rebase IFRS 15, EPS of $0.94.4. Our growth at benchmark EBIT from ongoing activities was 10% reflecting the strong organic revenue growth, and the operating leverage. Interest expense increased to 113,000,000 with the rises in market interest rates. The tax rate was 25.5 percent, in line with the prior year.
This year, non controlling interest, reflected the strong growth that we've seen in micro analytics. You saw some statistics on that in Brian's presentation. And we own a majority stake in that. So you see the minority stake, for that growth in the income statement. And we saw a benefit from the share repurchase program with weighted average number of shares at 904,000,000.
And EPS was therefore up 9% on a constant currency basis, continuing the EPS progress we made from the prior year. And after the FX headwind, our reported, our APS was up 4%. Looking at our statutory results and comparison of our benchmark to statutory, things really to call out on the slide, I'll be other acquisition related items, mainly the step up in fair value acquisition, consideration, which is where some of our acquisitions are headed by case, which we, put through the P and L. Exceptional items reduced substantially, from the prior year when we incurred some one off legal expenses. And the noncash financing remeasurements, if you're familiar with, are really around the noncash foreign exchange reevaluations on our Brazilian Rei funding.
So turning on to cash, we had another, a strong year, cash generation strengthened in the second half of the year to give another strong year of cash conversion, at 97% with growth of benchmark operating cash flow of 11 percent at constant FX and free cash flow of 907,000,000 was 102% conversion of benchmark earnings to cash. Looking at our capital framework, we continue to invest organically across a broad range of the activities, including technology transformation and innovation, new product developments and the growth initiatives that heard us talk about. And organic capital investment, for the year was 9% of revenue. We completed the acquisition of All ClearID, near the end of the year, made a number of other minority venture investments. And we also announced the acquisition of Compugen, which completed at the end of April in FY 'twenty.
We raised the full year dividend by 4 percent to $0.465 per share, reflecting the momentum we've seen in the business and a strong outlook for the year ahead. And we completed $215,000,000 of share repurchase by year end at an average price of 18.22. And we took advantage of market volatility during the year to exercise the program. And in the year ahead, including the carryover from last year's program, we expect to complete around $400,000,000 of purchases, of which we'd expect around $250,000,000 to be accretive. And we continue to report strong return on capital employed, with, which was 15.9% or up 40 basis points during the year.
So turning to CapEx, I wanted to give you a little bit more of understanding of the makeup of our organic investment. Historically, a significant portion of our CapEx has been on our data assets, representing over half of our FY 'sixteen capital investment. Over the last 4 years, you can see on the slide, we've been investing significantly behind our technology and innovation program. And you can see the proportionate increase of our investment we've been making in infrastructure and new product development. And these two categories now make up over 60% of our overall capital investment program.
And on the right hand side, you can see this investment has delivered significant growth from a broad range of new products. I've highlighted here some of the major platforms we talked to, But the other category also includes a broad range of new innovation. And the chart includes, the growth from products introduced, in the prior 2 years. So with a significant potential for growth as our markets expand and technology creates addressable markets around us, you'll see us continue to prioritize organic investment to generate growth and value. On further on the balance sheet, we ended the year with net debt of $3,300,000,000, down $100,000,000 since the start of the financial year.
And our net debt to EBITDA at the end of the year was 2x. If you adjust for the Compuiscan acquisition, It would have been 2.1x, which is well within our 2x to 2.5x guidance range. And during the year, we issued bonds maturing in 20242029 and extended the average duration of our debt and our bank facilities. To 2023. Updating this slide, and our minority investment program that I talked to you about at the half year.
In the first half, we invested in C88 at the parent of chikaja.com. One of Southeast Asia's fastest growing, comparison sites in Indonesia and the Philippines. And we also made a smaller investment in the year in early stage health decisioning our business, our Medicaid. In the second half, we also took stakes in Genexu, Malaysia's leading, comparison site for our financial products. Air Labs operates an online platform enabling users to create personalized credit scores and get access to financial products.
And TruData provides a mobile data platform that helps digital advertisers generate user insights and data for mobile advertising. And our investments that you can see on this page are already generating significant value, through the commercial relationships we have with the businesses And you can see that really through our partnership with Finicity to launch Experian Boost and also the marketplace collaborations across Asia. Looking ahead into some modeling considerations for FY2020, as you've seen, we continue to expect momentum next year with organic revenue growth in the 6% to 8% range, starting in the lower half of the range as Brazil reverts to trainers, we lap the strong decision in comparable in the UK in the first quarter. The acquisitions of All ClearID And Compuiscan will add about 1% of revenue to the year as a whole. And we expect EBIT to grow at or above revenue growth with another year of modest margin progression as we continue to invest strongly behind scaling our new products and increasing consumer offerings and consumer engagement across the business.
Next year we'll be transitioning to IFRS 16, the new standard for leases. There isn't expected to be a material impact to the group. And based on our current operating lease, portfolio. The impact is an increase of about GBP 10,000,000 on net interest, offset by a reduction in operating costs of about 10,000,000, so no impact on the overall bottom line. And at recent rates, we expect only a moderate FX headwind of a little under 1% to EBIT.
We expect net interest to be around $135,000,000, and that reflects increase in market interest rates and the $10,000,000 impact from IFRS 16. Benchmark tax rate around 26 percent and cash tax to be in the low 20% range. And when we take into account the share repurchase program, We announced today the weighted average number of shares is expected to be in the region of 1,000,000 for the year ahead. And we expect CapEx to be around 9% to 10% of revenue as we continue to invest behind the innovation and technology program. So to summarize, we've delivered really good financial and strategic progress in FY19 with a strong finish, strong growth in revenue, constant currency EBIT margin progression and strong earnings per share growth.
As we move into FY 'twenty with strong fundamentals for the business, and good momentum, we expect another year of our revenue growth, EBIT growth, at or above revenue growth and further strong progress in benchmark earnings per share. All accounts in currency. And we'll continue to apply our capital framework investing in innovation and strategic initiatives to drive long term shareholder value given the expanding markets that you've seen that we're operating in. And with that, I'll hand you back to Brian.
Well, thank you, Lloyd. So to sum up, FY 'nineteen was a great year. Our addressable markets, we've made great progress, and we think we've got expanding opportunities. A lot of growth opportunities coming from the trend, the major trends we talked to you about. And we have the solutions, technologies, the data and the tools to really play into that.
We operate a wide geographic footprint that gives us, I think, tremendous opportunities to scale propositions globally. We're very focused on that. And we look forward to the next year with some excitement and confidence as we head forward. So, one final note before we move to Q And A, is to just mark that this is the last set of results that we will have the pleasure of the company of Peg Smith, who is retiring from Experian after 42 years of outstanding service, I think that all of you in the investment community know PEG, and I'm pretty sure that none of you would really understand what Experian does without PEG. She's been a fantastic servant to the company, been a great servant and help to all of us in the management team.
We just want to express our deep gratitude for everything that she's done and recognize her achievement. So with that, I'm going to invite Carrie up to the stage, and we'll move into Q And A. Okay. We could just wait for the mic to get to you. So it's Fran here, Paul.
Great. Thank you. I'd like to echo those comments. Thank you, Peg, for everything. Just a couple for me.
Firstly, on, the U. S. B2B growth in the fourth quarter. It slowed a little bit more. I think than we expected.
Could you just talk about sort of market conditions behind that? And the 6% to 8% group organic growth, for the year ahead, the lower end of that given the exit rate, we've seen very So any color on the moving parts there? And then secondly on Brazil, how meaningful do you think positive data could be? I mean, how excited should we get about the opportunity there and over what timeframe? And can you help us to quantify or frame the opportunity anyway?
Okay. Lloyd, do you want to take the for us too? And we'll
Yes. So I think, the majority of the Q3 to Q4 in the U. S. Is really the end of the lapping of the 20 day contract. We said, when we talked to our Q3 results that we expected the U.
S. Overall to be 7% to 8% in Q4, and we came at the top end of that range. So it's really, a very consistent, if you take the trend of data out, very consistent, high single digit growth. And as we look out across the year ahead, we expect North America again to be very consistent and strong in that high single digit range. For the region as a whole.
On the 6% to 8% range, if you you look at our 9% this last year, you take out the trended data in the 1 off breach. You're in the 7% to 8% range. Clearly going into the year, we have a range of our forecast, I think, just as we did going into this year. So that's where we're where we're starting the year, and we'll see how we progress.
And just coming back to the Brazil question. If I think the answer is I've been excited about positive data for about 12 years. But I think the time has finally arrived when the law has passed. And, we do think this is going to give tremendous opportunities to our business, and we think we're well positioned. And it plays into a lot of the things that we've been doing.
The consumer services push that we put in the last couple of years. We now have 32,000,000 members on that platform, the strength of relationships that we have, the data, superior that we have and negative data, which is going to be a big advantage for us going forward as well. So I think there's just a ton of opportunity there. I think the question is always going to be timing. It's always been a question of timing in Brazil, but I think more nuanced in, first of all, September before it really becomes operational.
The data then, we then have to build up a history of data because it's from that point on, not looking back. So it will take time for the data sets to build. What we do know is that we have collected, significant degree of positive data off our own back, roughly about 12,000,000 consumers So we've already developed proposition on the back of that. We know exactly what kind of solutions we'll go to our clients with, and we know that we'll be able to generate new revenue streams after that. And just ask Kerry to add
a bit more color to that?
I think that's right. I think that we're going to see, near term opportunities in our consumer propositions because the positive data obviously will make it more attractive for the consumers to access our free offerings and then the things that we have planned to leverage off of that. And then as Brian said, the historical, build up of the data to incorporate into the models for the financial institutions. We'll just take a little bit of time. And so that'll progress over the next couple of years.
As we go behind there, Andy? We'll work our way across the side.
Hi. Andy Grover from Credit Suisse. Just a couple from me, if I may. On slide 3, you showed your addressable markets. How much of that of those markets are you currently engaged with?
How much in any scale and how much is kind of a new opportunity over the next 2 to 3 years? And then secondly, in the UK, what have you seen in terms of competitive response from some of from the likes of money supermarkets, which a bit more active that is potentially impacting your business.
Okay. On the UK, is that business overall or specific
particularly in kind of the Match of products and the B2C products?
Adjustable markets. So give you one example. I think the number we have in the slide was 10,000,000,000 for decisioning. The actual potential market for decisioning products is actually much bigger than that. We think that 10,000,000,000 directly addresses markets that we can attack with the product set that we have or are about to introduce into market.
So I mentioned the PowerCo suite grew by 60% last year. It's been fantastic growth. We are, I think, by far, the number one provider of large scale decision systems to Tier 1, tier 2 institutions globally. Experian 1 really is the 1st chance that we've had to turn that incredible capability into a broader set of customers that frankly just couldn't afford. The time or the money to engage in something as comprehensive as a power curve.
And that's why I gave you the example of the small sort of from a training company, that's, there's no way that they would even have been able to entertain anything like a power curve proposition, just wouldn't make sense. But the SaaS based solution really opens up that opportunity for that's where we see that market opportunity expanding quite significantly. 1,000,000,000 is a market opportunity for decisioning across many verticals. We're really counting financial services, telco utilities. So the places where we traditionally sell to that I think is absolutely realistic.
Of course, it's down to us how well we do within that, but I think we're doing pretty well so far. Answer that question?
Of the 1,000,000,000
for decisioning?
1,000,000,000 for decisioning. Mean, how much of that are you if you can quantify, are you active in right now? And how much is new, I mean, you've talked about decisioning, but across the broader space.
I don't at the top of my head, I don't have the split of that between what we call Tier 1 and Tier 2 counter decisioning, but I'm going to say Tier 1, Tier 2 is probably of the order of $2,000,000,000 to $3,000,000,000 in market opportunity overall. We have a significant share of that today. And the rest really is start as we start to penetrate further down into broader applications.
Thank you.
Okay. And then I'll come back to, the question on the UK. In terms of increased competition, I think we've had discussion before. The U. K.
Is a very competitive marketplace in the consumer space. We have some, existing incumbents there. But we shouldn't overlook the fact that from nothing a few years ago, we've built almost 6,000,000 free consumer relationships and credit match of products, which is now 3rd largest in the UK. We see, frankly, no less open the momentum behind that. And as we start to at some of the propositions that we have in the U.
S. And elsewhere and leverage that into the UK. The strength the brand and the relationship that we have and the position that we sit in gives us huge amount of opportunity. And you can't take anything for granted. There's going to be very competitive.
There's going to be a lot of people looking at this, but we expect that we're going to be able to hold our own just fine. Okay. We'll go over here. Very patient.
Thanks. Good morning. It's Alex Spies from JP Morgan. 2, please. Just firstly headcount up by just 1% in FTEs.
I wonder, do you see this as sustainable? And if so, what it means for margins? And secondly, how the headcount trends varied by region within the year? Secondly, on ClearScore, clearly disappointing outcome, I wonder what are the lessons learned? And do you see the UK as less for market for M and A now?
Okay. Well, then, Carrie, do you want to take that, the headcount?
Yes. So, so we the headcount is going to vary on in any given year depending on where our opportunities are, but it it is part of our plans to have the trend maintained where it's come from in FY 'nineteen. Going forward. We think that the productivity measures that we've put in the company, the technology that we've leveraged in the company and the capabilities that we have to take to market position us very well to be able to, sustain good productivity numbers in the headcount area.
And on the ClearScore question, I actually also sat on the board of Sainsbury's, as those of you now, so I've had a lot of experience in CNA over the last 18 months. There's no doubt that there's a tougher stance being taken by the CMA. I think you only have to read Andrew Tyre's letter to Greg Clark to show that they're going to take a much more stringent view of consolidation, in the UK marketplace. I think we didn't agree with the CMA's approach to this. We still don't think they're right.
They took a view that somehow the combination, we would have a disincentive to innovate in what is one of the most competitive marketplaces that you can think of. But, as I said, it would have been nice to have completed the ClearScore acquisition. We will any with our own initiatives and continue to build the business organically. Okay. Let's go back over here and then we'll go back over there.
Daryl back on the.
Good morning. It's George Gregory from Exane BNP Paribas. A couple on Boost and one on kind of your broader EM strategy please, Brian, firstly, just on boost, You talked about the 600,000, consumers who've seen their score boosted Could you talk a little bit about how that sort of converting and what you've experienced in terms of being able to upsell those consumers into, profitable products? And secondly, on Boost, Obviously, you've got utility and telco data now. What are the hurdles to adding more data.
Is that self imposed by Experian or is it an FCRA kind of regulatory issue that is preventing perhaps income data being, being scraped by, ethnicity? And a final strategic question, just what is your strategy for for emerging markets where we're seeing kind of online payment companies, internalize transactions, how does, how do you see Experian playing potentially in those markets in the long term, please?
Okay. Luka, do you want to deal with the conversion rate that I've experienced boost?
Yes. So I think the way to think of our consumer business is, is how do we generate traffic? And then how do we within the ecosystem cross sell into various different things? Boost is a great way of engaging with the consumer by bringing them in, showing them how that they can increase their score, but also to keep them engaged ongoing basis. That traffic then and management converts, and, it'll convert into, product introductions for credit match, but also cross sell into the identity products.
And you saw a bit of an uptick in our identity onboarding, memberships during the first quarter. So specifically to say, but anything really that generates traffic drives engagement will drive options for us to monetize.
And then Carrie, do
you want to talk about the FcRA points and the Jaguans?
Yes. So One of the things to remember, with the, with, white boost or the emerging markets? Okay. With boost is that So we started with the ones that were, the most straightforward for us. We have a whole roadmap of additional items that we will expand and introduce to the to the product going forward.
So we're in the early days of what we're going to do with our consumer engagement, not only in the North American market, but in other markets, and it'll continue to expand over what we have introduced in this 1st phase.
And the final question on Asia Pacific, I think this is really interesting strategically because a lot of those organizations that you're talking about and we'll name them are actually coming to us to power those opportunities. And a lot of that is because they're seeing what we are doing with things like marketplaces and seeing that as a significant business opportunity for if you think about some of the platforms, commerce platforms in Asia Pacific, none of these people who are members of those commerce platforms have back but they have a need for credit, and they're often getting credit through informal mechanisms. So runway of growth for that is very significant. And by the way, it's not, it's not sort of mutually exclusive. It isn't that the payment guys and we're going to win, as the commerce guys are going to win, so actually the incumbent banks are going to see a lot of growth as well.
So this is why initiatives like that being able to score people using alternative forms of data is a really key development for us, and we're in a great position. So I think that will drive additional growth for us.
And Brian, if I could add to that, it's it's very good for us from a long term perspective to see online payment companies.
Our commerce
companies develop the lending capabilities because these are emerging markets. And so in the early days, that's perfectly acceptable for them to be able to lend to a consumer. But as that market develops, you're going to need visibility into all the lending that's going on in that market. The regulators are going to need to be able to see it. The banks are going to need to be able to see it.
And as that continues to develop and there are multiple points of lending that are going on in that emerging market, that creates the opportunities for our business model too. And so we're participating at the very beginning. But as it develops, it creates a lot of more opportunities for us in the future. So when we see those things developing, that's a good thing from our perspective.
Okay. So we'll go over here, and then we'll go to a question online, then we'll come back to you in a moment.
Many thanks. Morning Tom Sykes from Deutsche Bank. Just well, three questions, please. First is on the consumer margin. It looked like it was up less in H2 on a bigger increase in revenue.
So I was just wondering why the drop through was a bit lower in Consumer in H2. To the question on FTEs, I think your labor costs were up by 6% on an FTE increase of 1. And I assume some of that is the incentives that maybe you've spoken about, but what is your sort of wage increase level and the investment in higher, that's higher paid people? And then thank you very much for putting the slide up on CapEx. But just obviously your internally generated software number has gone up quite considerably the last couple of years.
So I just wondered what proportion of that is actually personnel costs I presume the larger percentage. And what can you say what proportion of your software development costs you're actually capitalizing, please?
So let's say consumer margin, clearly, for the year as a whole, we had quite a lot of new products to launch in the second half. So we saw more marketing in the second half to be more in the final month or so of the year. And so that was really driving the consumer margin position. On FTE, the 1% all you've seen is we've had quite a broad productivity drive in the company. We've trained cluster and certified cluster 1000 people on Lean Six Sigma.
We've had a robotic process automation program. Which is developing through the business, which is really helping us to scale without the need to, to add total heads And you're seeing that really in the benefit that we're able to invest more back in the business. Salary growth includes incentives. And obviously, what you're seeing is you automate perhaps some of the more routine roles, the average cost per employee increases a little bit faster than me. Overall cost.
But those programs we're putting in place, we think are sustainable to be able to drive growth on more through technology. Rather than through headcount growth. On CapEx, I know there's been some comment around how our CapEx and depreciation has changed over the last few years. I think if you were to look back to FY 'eleven, what you're seeing is our CapEx as a percentage of revenue has varied from 8% up to 10%, down to 7% up to 9%. And if you did the same trend line on depreciation, you'll have seen it follows a similar trend but with about a 3 to 4 year delay.
So it should be a very normal in that range, and What you've seen in this last few years is a is much more of our focus has been on infrastructure. But particularly product development. And you've seen the benefit that we're seeing there through our growth rates. You'll see, again, continued focus on that in the year ahead internally capitalized software will be a big part of that and a portion of that clearly is our people costs.
Could you say approximately what proportion of your software costs you're actually capitalizing? Because there's obviously differences within software companies about whether they capitalize all of it, expense it through the P and L. So just trying to get a feel for what the total software development costs for you as a group would be and what proportion you're capitalizing?
So it there's no rule of thumb there, Tom. You look at each individual product and, you're seeing, are you, is it more like maintenance CapEx that would be through the P and L? Are you significantly enhancing the value of the asset, then we would capitalize that. And in a world of agile development, you're doing both big platform product development and also agile, a feature enhancement. And it's it varies at any individual product in every individual I won't give any individual guidance on that.
If you want, I think. Perhaps you can pick this up afterwards. We can go to a question on the line.
And we have a question from Brett Huff from Stephens. Please go ahead. Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. My first question is on decisioning, a $1,300,000,000 business growing and I think a remarkable 14% I'm curious what the key drivers or I guess another word would be use cases are for the success of Ascend and also for the 50% fairly quick upgrade from old systems to the new power curve systems in the U. K.
And I guess just power curve success in general. Is there a killer app or a vertical that is really driving that uptake that we should launch?
Thanks for the question. Well, I think the figure that I referenced for power curve of 6 percent growth gives you a good indication of we have talked to you a number, a number of over a number of years about the power of that platform. I mean, if there's one killer app in the whole suite, it's called strategy manager, which is, by far and away, probably the most flexible best platform for large scale decisioning that, is in use across Tier 1, Tier 2 clients. And we have that as a core component of pretty much every module that we have. So when we introduce things like collections, We have that embedded as part of it, and people are very familiar with it.
One of the great things about our products is, is that, if you are sitting in a risk department, and you're using them, they are configurable by the user. So by the risk professionals, they can actually design their strategies and they can make changes without actually having to involve internal IT department. And that's a big, big difference It's always been one of the advantages that we have. And of course, you know, it works. It's robust at large scale, very a huge number of the risk community worldwide is very familiar with this platform and it has tremendous reputation.
So I think that's that's part of the reason there. And, you know, we're doing we're doing really well in every charity visit.
Brett, I think I think I'd add the power of the integration of our tools as well is really starting to land. So you saw us talk about the cross sell in the North America market where we have a lower install base on power curve, the cross sell from ascend into power curve. And as Brian talked about, the cross sell of our big install base on power curve into ascend So we've always talked about one experience as being the integration of our products. None of our competitors have the breadth of capability in the different markets that we have, they have to partner with other companies to do that. We can bring the power within our single company to bear and increasingly, we're seeing that that's, that's what clients want.
I think the final point I would add is that one thing that goes across all of our products like PowerCurve, crosscore, Ascend, is just a deep, deep understanding across the organization of not just how credit risk and authentication, customer management works, but really a deep, deep understanding of how people within those parts of the organization use products what they do on a day to day basis. So they're designed really closely with that user in mind. That's why they're so successful.
Carrie, you
want to add anything to that?
No, that's good. Okay.
So to answer the question, Brett?
You mentioned, we think lead gen was $50,000,000 business, which sounds like a great success so far. And then you talked to $110,000,000 run rate for IdentityWorks And Credit Match. And I kind of put all those similarly together if we were to look at that $160,000,000 or $160,000,000 or so, does that come out of the consumer TAM that you articulated in one of your earlier slides or is it a mix of consumer information and identity. I'm just trying to figure out kind of where we are from a share point of view, trying to see what their $160,000,000 is out of what TAM?
So I guess I would put it in 2 categories. So the, if you think about the identity protection market in North America. We've said we think the total market is about 2,000,000,000. So clearly, we've got a little under 5% of that market. The lead gen market, we sized that a year or so ago at 3,000,000,000.
We thought it would go to 7. Again, we've got a very small part of that market today. It's a rapidly growing market. So we see a long runway, and a lot of brand resonance with our clients in both those 2 markets, Brett.
Great. Thank you. Appreciate the time.
Thank you. Okay. I'll just go back to the floor and just the back. Good morning. Rajesh Kumar from
HSBC. 3, if I can just on the power curve, power curve piece, you very helpfully gave a 60% growth figure. But you also mentioned that some of the legacy platforms you're retiring at the moment. So when you think of your overall growth in B2B space. There's a component of selling into new customers, new products.
There's a retirement rate And then, on top of that, you are adding more modules in existing contracts. So if we were to look at your growth run rate, how would you split between the three? Don't need exact figures, just an order of magnitude to help us think about the growth equation going forward.
Is the actual growth number for the year because power curve is one product within our decisioning suite. That's growing strongly. We have legacy products, which, as we said, we are retiring like Transact probe, Taniman. We don't sell Taniman anymore. We actually sell power curve collections.
We still have installations, Italianan. People love it. It's a bit old. But, so some of those legacy products are declining. But it's being massively outstripped by the growth that we're seeing in the replacement modules.
And a lot of the time, it's actually people who are upgrading from Tali Min 2 power curve collections from, what was strategy manager into power curve strategy manager, power curve originations. So, we're seeing, in some ways, the continuation in growth has been, but product by product, you see big variations. Overall, the growth is really on?
I think the and probably the easiest way to do it, Rajesh, is just to look at decision analytics, within decisioning, So we had a great year on decision analytics this year. It grew 19% globally. And for a business that close to 3 quarters of a $1,000,000,000 to grow at that level. You can see there's a lot of new client wins, in our product portfolio there.
And finally, the only two markets that really are, of any scale replacement upgrading someone from Transact or Taliman to our new suite. It's really the UK and Europe, EMEA. It's not North America. It's not Latin America and it's not Asia Pacific. So you can think a little bit in terms of our opportunities and what's going on you look at those other markets, you get a good flavor of new sales versus just upgrades.
So if you think of the growth then, inferring from what you've just said, if I say a third of the growth is coming from upgrades, a third of the growth is coming from new customers coming on the platform and a third from upselling. Would that be a fair characterization or is it largely due to more contracts and upselling more modules into
At that level of growth, the majority of the growth is coming from new penetration into new clients or new modules into new clients. And I think But what you're seeing is think of, the power of our data just has a lot of option value for clients if they can get the technology to use it better. What our products are really doing is unlocking that option value for clients. And as technology is enabling that, the demand is stronger. And then getting back
just to close the point on FTE that we had from over here, in terms of implementing these products and the new technology, architectures that we're using. We've taken the number of mandates to implement these products and we've cut them in half. We've cut them by 75%. So our ability to do throughput on these implementations is drastically increased with our new technology architectures and our productivity measures that we've been putting in place. And that's helped with our velocity to be able to put more sales on the board with essentially the same amount of FTE.
Were to launch more modules, you can add on top of the customers you've sold, I. E. Get future growth out of it by adding additional modules to the existing ascent plan. Okay. And on the boost, product.
What does it do to your competitive positioning of the quality of data you have in the sense, are there any B2B applications apart from upselling cross selling or lead generation? Are there any B2B applications of getting more data in the system when you do a booth contract?
It gives us, a better, higher quality of data, a higher breadth of data, and it gives us a competitive advantage.
That you would explore in Brazil while collecting positive data?
I'm sorry. Say that again.
Is that can that strategy be applied in Brazil when you're going to collect positive data?
Yes. It can be applied everywhere, and that will be our intention.
Understood. And
we've got I just want to over here if you can. Ed, we'll be if you're quick, if you can just limit to one question, then I'll get Ed in as well. Thank you.
Hi. No pressure. It's Jazana Salati from Macquarie. Well, first of all, congratulations. Gamifying credit ratings with Boost is an amazing result.
I find myself attached to the screen and cheering when somebody gets a better score. Now, without the excitement of new products and 9% organic growth out of last year, I feel though a little bit like on the guidance, let's take the midpoint of 7% organic for this year. Are you being conservative? Is there some phasing of product launches Maybe the impossible question to answer, if you were giving us guidance for 2021, would it be 7, midpoint, 8 or 9? Not even sure I expect an answer, a direct answer, but you see where I'm going.
I think
we'll reconvene back here in a year time to, to talk about that. I think, going into this year with our range of outcomes as there are in every year, and we guided to 6 to 8, and we saw strength on a tough, comparator in the fourth quarter, and we've outperformed that guidance range. Going into this year, there are a range of views from from you all in the room, depending on your different views of the economic position. We feel confident with the new products we have and we think 6% to 8% is a good range to start the year. I think you've seen, the breadth of new product innovation that we've put in and the contribution that's making towards our revenue growth.
And that means we're, facing the new year with confidence.
If I can, can I just get that last question in from the back?
It's Ed Steele from Citi. Just one question for me, please. Could you give us a flavor for the discussions that you're having with banks in Brazil in anticipation of spreads could come to pressure and are the entrepreneurs, small businesses, new market entrants eagerly knocking at your door to get that data
Gary? Yeah. So the the different industry players have a have different perspectives on positive data. The retailers, which is a very large portion of our business in, in Brazil, are very excited about in the retail sector of Brazil to allow consumers to purchase goods. So the retailers are quite excited about smaller and midsize financial institutions are also, very excited about it.
And I think the larger financial institutions would be split internally that some areas of their business would be excited about having access to the data. And I think other other areas would, would, be a little bit like, okay, what's this going to do? Because we have such a large, strong position in the marketplace, and they'd have a little bit of concern around that. So when you go outside of those 4 or 5 very large financial institutions, you typically have lots of very positive conversations and, excitement going on in the marketplace. Today.
And again, to remind you, those, 4 or 5 large financial institutions are 14%, 15% of our total book of business. So, the vast majority of our book of business is excited about positive data coming into the
market. Okay. Well, thank you all for your questions and your attention today, and we look forward to seeing you later in the year.