Okay, I think we're ready to go. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our full year results presentation. Pleased to say it's been a great year for Experian, and we've made a lot of progress on many fronts. I think when I stood up here in November, we sort of more or less said two things. We expected our growth to accelerate in the second half, and we expected North American Consumer Services to get back into growth in Q4. Really pleased to say, we delivered on both of those. We had a really strong finish to the year. More importantly, I think we feel very confident about the momentum that we have going into FY 2019. A lot of that is based on the investments that we've made in the business over the last few years.
Things like investment technology, product, brand, culture, and really strengthening the competitive position of the business through One Experian. That's really starting to reflect itself in the performance of the business. I'm going to start today with an overview of the trends and the progress that we're making, then I'm going to hand you over to Lloyd as usual, to take us through the financials. Okay. Let's start with the highlights. Total revenue growth was 8% organic, or 8%, 5% organic for the year. We delivered 8% organic revenue growth in Q4. Incidentally, that is the strongest organic revenue growth we've had since 2012. EBIT was up by 8% and benchmark EPS was up by 11%. We have great momentum in the B2B business. As you can see, performance in that has been strengthening for many quarters now.
In fact, we ended the year at 8% organic for B2B and 10% in Q4. That's now the longest, most consistent highest growth rate we've had in B2B since Experian's IPO in 2006, so very happy with that. I think most importantly, Consumer Services North America in Q4 got back into growth. We've made substantial progress really across all of our consumer services business, and I'll talk you through some of that as we go through the slides. Good year for capital as well. We've returned $950 million in dividends and buybacks, and that takes us to more than $3 billion returned to shareholders in the last three and a half years. The dividend has gone up by 8%, and we've announced a new share buyback program for up to $400 million today. Okay, as I said, we have confidence in the momentum of the business.
Background to that really are some long-term structural forces which are driving and shaping our industry. First one, very familiar to you, the data and analytics explosion is really driving a lot of opportunities. More and more businesses and industries are turning to the use of data and technology to transform their businesses. Data's becoming cheaper to store, manage, and analyze. We're really seeing a lot of interest from clients who are expressing the need to make sense of all of that across vast data sets and the requirements of working into their business processes. That's where Experian comes in, the ability to use large data sets to use our products to drive sophisticated analysis from that and help people make better decisions. As we look forward, next thing we see is really a huge drive towards automation.
We're seeing that people have to really rework their processes. Speed of disruption and scale of new technologies have never been faster. Cost to serve is going to become a really key battleground. This is being reflected in all the conversations that we have with our clients. Again, this is where our products come in because not only can we actually improve people's capabilities, we can help them change their business processes and take costs out of their business. We're developing our products to really drive that forward and adding capabilities like artificial intelligence, machine learning, really going to play into that trend. Next big trend, consumer digital norms really changing very significantly. We're all aware of this. Consumers have more and more choices. They're more demanding. Concept of brand loyalty is less than it once was.
At the same time, they actually need a lot of help to help them make sense of the increased number of choices that they have. What this means for businesses is that it's going to be harder for them to identify, attract, retain profitable customers. They need great products to do that, and that's exactly where Experian comes in to help. Finally, the other big trend we see is regulation. It's creating new opportunities for us. We've seen it in many different territories. Brazil with Positive Data Law, Europe with GDPR and open banking. A lot of what this is doing is really actually trying to put more control over the use of data and put more of that control back into the hands of the consumers. Again, these trends play into all the capabilities that we have as an organization.
We're really responding to all these trends from a strategic perspective. You've seen some of us do this. First point's obvious. The most important thing is the data, scale, breadth, quality of data are paramount importance, and our prime objective is to continue to broaden the data sets, and we're going to do that organically. We do that through partnerships, minority investments, and you've seen us start to do that with some acquisitions as well. As I said, the need for more sophisticated solutions is actually the key point here. More insights from the data. That's really where Experian solutions really have a competitive advantage. Within the portfolio, we have a tremendous amount of products that can actually drive insights from data. Our value is going to come from leveraging those products across our portfolio to develop end-to-end solutions for our clients.
You can see this playing out actually in some of the products that we've talked to you about. We've talked to you a lot about PowerCurve, recently about Ascend and CrossCore prior to that. These are very sophisticated platforms that incorporate a lot of Experian's products into one solution for our clients. We've seen that in the results coming through in FY 2018. These three products alone added about $60 million of incremental revenue, and we're seeing a lot of client adoption for these in the marketplace, strong pipelines, and great opportunities to continue to grow these businesses as we go forward. Investments in technology has been a key enabler for that, and this really is crucial. Our technology investment the last few years has been designed really to make us faster, quicker, more agile, and get products to market in a much more timely fashion.
This is going to continue to be crucial for us going forward. It's given really broad capabilities across the business about data ingestion, working across different parts of our portfolio, and building more consistent standardizations into our products to reduce costs. We continue to see this as an area where we'll push our investment going forward. Of course, we have, I think, not just big growth opportunities in the markets that you're very familiar with, which Experian operates in, things like financial services, telco, but even within that, we have some strong adjacencies where there are some really good growth opportunities longer term, like identity, mortgage, and a lot of close adjacencies to where we operate today.
We're putting all this strategy into action, and I think it's visible in the strong performance we've seen in the latter part of this year and in our confidence as we go forward. Let's turn to some of the regional performance. We'll start with North America B2B. We had a very strong year. It was up 9% for the year overall and 12% in Q4. Standout performer in the portfolio was credit services, up 11% overall, and an outstanding performance in Q4, up by 14%. That is the strongest quarterly growth that we've had in North America credit services in our history. Actually, the biggest business within that, which is North America CIS, was the strongest grower, so really strong. We talked to you a little bit about Ascend platform when we were here in November. This is the new analytics platform.
The market reception to this has been fantastic. We've signed 11 material contracts since the September launch, and we expect this to be another year where we broaden that out to our client set and another strong year for Ascend. The acquisition of Clarity Services has been also very strong. We spoke to you about that acquisition in October, already exceeding our expectations, and a good example of how we're adding new data sets, in this case, thin file in North America, to enhance our propositions. Other strong performance in the region were business information, another good year of double-digit growth. This business unit, great example of where we're using the technology investments we've made in the Experian portfolio to drive additional market share gains. We've had strong performances in healthcare and Decision Analytics. Decision Analytics was double digits.
Drivers of performance there are really One Experian propositions around PowerCurve, custom analytics, incorporating data from lots of our business units, and deliver that in end-to-end solutions to our clients. We have a really strong and growing pipeline of opportunities for FY 2019. I talked about Ascend, and we're very excited about the market reception to that, but we're also going to continue to develop that platform as we go forward. One of the ones that we're more excited about is Ascend and PowerCurve. Linking these two products together, it's going to be, I think, incredibly powerful. The chart behind you is not a concept. It's actually something that we've done for one of our clients, so it's already in market, and we'll be investing to try and replicate this in FY 2019 and beyond.
What we're doing really is really quite complex and difficult to achieve, but it's also an incredibly powerful capability and one that's very difficult to replicate, really brings a lot of the capabilities of Experian together. I'll spend a minute to talk you through the slide. On the left is the Ascend sandbox. You're familiar with that, hopefully. A 16-year file access full bureau. Combines our data with the client's data and data from many other sources. It has built into the platform a lot of the tools that the analysts will use, big data tools, SAS, Python, visualization tools like Tableau. This allows them to analyze their portfolio and design their strategies. The key points about this are that it builds speed, agility, and reduced costs into the process on a significant scale.
To give you an idea, they can now conduct planning and testing in much more rapid time than previously, and they can see the results from that in minutes compared to days or weeks previously. The big differentiator you can see on this chart is the integration with PowerCurve, and that's the center box. PowerCurve is a world-class decision engine. We've had massive success with this worldwide since it was introduced some years ago. What it does is it acts as a bridge between the offline analysis done in Ascend and the actual implementation in the client's environment. Clients can code, test, manage, and execute strategies through PowerCurve, and what that does is takes away some significant additional steps between strategy design and implementation without the need to touch the IT organization of the clients involved.
It takes out huge steps out of the process, massive cost, much more seamless. Really what the combination does, it means that clients can move from an analysis and design to coding and strategy to implementation in one platform with one set of tools. That is really significant. Perhaps this is probably the best example that we can put up to show you what we mean by One Experian in action because this capability really is very powerful. Clarity I touched upon for a moment. It's proving to be a great acquisition for us. You recall, this is the acquisition we did towards the latter part of last year. It focuses on the non-prime segment in the U.S. It adds about 60 million consumers in the U.S. who are largely invisible to our traditional lenders. Clarity is the leader in this segment.
It's over 3 times the size of its nearest competitor. It has greater positive and negative data than any other provider. The acquisition has been really successful so far. We realized synergies quickly. We've already rolled out some of Clarity's products to our traditional bureau clients, and we've launched new products on the back of Clarity data, including enhanced fraud and risk scores. Clarity is already expanding the addressable market for us and giving us an edge in data superiority. Really, really happy with that acquisition so far. Overall, North America B2B has tremendous momentum and delivered great growth, and we see that momentum building into FY 2019. Moving to consumer services. We return to growth in organic revenue growth in Q4. I think the key difference is that we expect this growth to be sustainable.
In fact, we expect it to improve from here into the first half of this year, somewhere in the mid-single-digit rates. You will recall a year ago, when we stood up here and talked about our new product introductions, our first priority was identity, and we have had great success with identity so far. Just over a year since launch, we have had over 200,000 paying members now sign up for the service, and the pace of acquisition has continued to improve. The product is best in class. We continue to add new features, and we think we are going to be able to sustain that growth. In addition, a product we launched last year was Lending Works, and that really is now starting to grow, and we have got great momentum as we go into FY 2019.
Most of the progress we have made on Lending Works has been on the back of organically generated traffic through CRM, leveraging the extensive base of past and current Experian members. We are going to continue to develop that product as we go through FY 2019. We are also enhancing consumer engagement, one of the things that we have talked to you a lot about, by leveraging the portfolio to introduce products that are really difficult for anything other than a bureau to do. Some of these products do not actually generate immediate revenue, but what they do is enhance our standing and our relationship with consumers. A great example of this is our recently launched automated disputes proposition. A simple-to-use, completely digital experience, provides consumers with self-service, more control, better customer satisfaction, and higher engagement in actually one of the biggest pain points in the credit services industry.
We set ourselves up for a great FY 2019. More growth to come in identity, better prospects in regeneration, good proposition overall. Turning to Latin America. We delivered another good year of growth. Organic revenue growth of 6%. We saw growth across all of our business lines, credit services, decision analytics, marketing services. Pleasingly, we signed a number of major long-term deals with larger clients, which combine a lot of our capabilities across data, software, scoring, consultancy. One of the key enablers of this has been our data labs. Actually, we have a lot of instances now where we have major clients working with us in the data lab, actually putting their staff into data labs to work alongside our people at co-create products. This is helping us really to be viewed differently in the marketplace.
We are now seeing Serasa Experian as much more of a strategic partner, whereas several years ago, we were really just viewed as a data supplier. We are landing also deals for new capabilities, some of which are coming from around the globe. For example, Text for Credit product that we talked to you about, cannot recall whether it was last year, but some time ago. We have done very well in Brazil with Text for Credit in the retail sector. Mobile pre-qualification, which is a strong product in North America, we have introduced into Brazil. Of course, last week it was announced that Positive Data Law in Brazil took another step forward and draft legislation was passed by the House.
There are a couple more steps to go, but we're really getting close to the finish line of Positive Data, and it's very good news for our business. We talk a lot about big clients in Brazil, but actually they're just 40% of our revenue. We have a very big business focus on SME, and we see big growth opportunities in SME and in the consumer segment. Let me just talk about both of those for a second. Our free consumer proposition, Serasa Consumidor, was launched actually just over a year ago. It really hasn't been in the market very long. In that time, we have created a mass-market audience, attracting 22 million customers to our free proposition. One of the immediate benefits of that is that we are actually capturing additional consumer-contributed data.
In exchange for access to these free services, consumers are actually giving us data to complete the file. It's strengthening the B2B asset. That's one immediate benefit we're getting. Our focus now is on how do we develop commercial propositions to start to monetize. Now we are already monetizing it. We think that we can scale that as we go into FY 2019 and beyond. We do have a broad range of consumer services propositions. One of them that we've talked to you about before is called Limpa Nome. It's already a big commercial success for us. What this does is allow consumers to clear their debts by negotiating with banks and other lenders. It's now a digital service, allowing consumers to do that completely in a mobile environment.
We have over 10 million Limpa Nome customers today, and we see an addressable market several times that size. One area we haven't talked to you a lot about before is SMEs and micro business, and we think there are huge growth opportunities for us in this segment. We already have a large presence in this market, but we see the opportunity to expand that by repurposing our products to make them more digitally orientated and access further parts of the marketplace. As an example of that, is that we're actually creating versions of Limpa Nome and credit matching services to address the needs of small businesses. This is all part of our strategic roadmap to build out the capability of our business in Brazil and across Latin America, and drive our growth forward. Turning to the U.K.
We've got great momentum in B2B, and we had a very strong finish to the year. We secured a lot of new contracts for unique technologies like X-Spin, PowerCurve, CrossCore. Interestingly, we also secured a large joint deal with CrossCore and PowerCurve in the telecom sector. Really pleased about that. We're also going to leverage global innovations and bring them into the U.K. market. We had our first win for Text for Credit in the U.K., and this year we plan to launch the Ascend Platform in the U.K. as well. Of course, new regulations are impacting most of Europe, particularly open banking and GDPR. When you look at the capabilities that we have as Experian across HD Decisions, Runpath, and our core decision analytics capabilities, we're really in the sweet spot to help clients improve consumer engagement, demonstrate responsible lending, and reduce costs.
This is opening up new opportunities for us in the U.K. We're already today in a pilot with a customer that takes the mortgage process, looks at the mortgage process, trying to make it faster, easier, and simpler for consumers and lenders. The breadth of our capabilities in the U.K. really puts us in a very strong position to drive growth in the coming years. U.K. consumer services, we're making very good progress. CreditMatcher is performing very strongly, and the rate of decline in the membership product has moderated significantly. Of course, we announced a few months back our proposed acquisition of ClearScore. We think this will help us reach our goals faster and drive a lot of synergies between the two businesses. CreditMatcher and ClearScore are complementary brands addressing two different market segments.
CreditMatcher has nearly four million consumers. In its own right, it's been a hugely successful product introduction. ClearScore, which came to market a bit sooner, has six million combined audiences, give us access to a large part of the population, and gives us the ability to add the Experian capabilities to address that population, and really build our products and services. ClearScore is very strong in consumer marketing. They have a very strong acquisition machine. The brand resonates with a younger demographic, and their membership base is highly engaged. On the Experian side, I think we're excited about the capabilities that we have in the portfolio that we can bring to enhance the proposition by embedding data decisioning into credit comparison. That's going to improve the results for consumers, lenders, and be a good outcome for Experian and everybody else. Okay. Turning to EMEA, Asia Pacific.
I'm pleased to say that we delivered double-digit growth in the region, and also very pleased to say we delivered double-digit growth in EMEA, which is the fastest growth we've seen in this region for a decade. Asia Pacific continued its track record of very good performance with a double-digit growth rate in the year. It's really been driven on the back of a lot of the global products that we've talked to you about, where we're seeing really strong client interest and actually seeing deals and transactions and opportunities of a magnitude which we haven't seen before, multimillion-dollar deals with a lot of new logos. We're also investing in our capabilities in the region to drive organic growth even further. We're shifting from being really a provider of some point solutions to a breadth of capabilities across the needs of our clients.
In fact, I was in India just three weeks ago. We had a chance to see how the local innovation investments we're making are actually helping us access and tailor our products in a unique way. I'll give you one example. There's an organization called Indiabulls. It's a conglomerate, has a financial services arm, and they came to us because they wanted to create a completely paperless mobile application and reduce their current loan process from about eight days, and their objective was three minutes. They wanted that to be operational in four months. We did it. We took our existing PowerCurve product. We worked with the client, and we created a product which achieved that objective. We combined the bureau data, fraud data.
We also combined non-traditional data which we're capturing through mobile phone, permission-based mobile phone data contributed, and we're using that to score them, all done in the PowerCurve suite and delivered to the client. So four months, we were up and operational and very happy with the proposition. We're seeing lots of these type of opportunities that are using global capabilities but are actually uniquely tailored for those markets. We're excited about the prospects in the region. We've got a lot more to go for, and very optimistic about the outlook as we go into FY 2019. Just at the end, a final reminder of the importance of the operation execution has been married to good capital allocation framework.
We've improved the efficiency of the organization over the last few years, and we've used those cost savings to reinvest back in our business, and you're seeing that through a lot of the new products that we're introducing. We will pursue acquisitions. We've been very successful with the ones we've made so far. They're closely aligned to our strategic ambitions, Clarity, CSID, Runpath, all adding really core capabilities to the core of our business. What we've also done in the last few years is actually slightly different. We've also started to look at businesses and buying minority stakes with a path to control. We did that with Runpath, where we have a period of time where we've work with the organization, test out the products, see what the market perception is, and then get confidence, and then move to full control.
We're also increasingly taking minority stakes in fintech companies, which are closely aligned in areas that we work in, and that gives us a great opportunity to learn about the marketplace, learn about that company, and help us in our innovation pipeline as well. Just to summarize, I think we've made huge progress across the portfolio. We have a lot of excitement in the business about what we're doing and the opportunities that we have. The B2B business is performing really well, and we expect this to continue. All regions are seeing the benefits of investments that we've made in the business over the last few years. All these factors, as well as the One Experian approach, new sources of data, really driving strong levels of growth with good margins across our business. I think we've reached the inflection point in our consumer services business.
We're building audiences at scale, diversifying our propositions, addressing large and growing markets. More importantly, we're back in growth in North America and on the path back to growth overall. I think we're in a very good position to make further progress in FY 2019. With that, I'm going to hand you over to Lloyd to take you through the financials.
Thanks, Brian. Morning, everyone. I'll start as usual with a recap of our financial metrics and then go on to the results in a bit more detail. As you can see, we've made some great strategic operation and financial progress this last year and saw momentum improving as the year progressed. Performance across our B2B business was very strong, and with an improving outlook in consumer services business, where we're making good progress in both identity protection and credit comparison services, and rapid growth in our free membership base. We had another strong year of cash conversion and return on capital alongside it. Within our capital allocation, we continued our organic investment in innovation and new product innovation. We made a number of inorganic investments, including the agreed acquisition of ClearScore, as well as returning some significant capital to shareholders.
As you've heard from Brian, organic growth accelerated to 8% in Q4, bringing total revenue growth for the year to 8% and organic revenue growth to 5%. Benchmark EBIT margin was 27.7%, in line with the prior year at constant rates and up 10 basis points at actual rates. Benchmark EPS growth was double digit, up 10% at constant currency and 11% at actual rates. As we highlighted at the half year, cash generation improved in the second half, giving an overall cash conversion of 93% for the year as a whole. Finally, following the really strong momentum we've seen through the year and the progress we've made and the positive outlook, the board's approved an 8% increase in the full-year dividend. Turning to look at the organic revenue growth trends in a little more detail that we've seen through the year.
On the left, you can see the organic growth progression in our B2B business. As you can see, B2B growth was consistently strong through the year and a great finish to the year, up 10% in the fourth quarter. This reflects the strength we're seeing across really all of our B2B businesses as the growth comes through from some of the investment in innovation and new product development that we've been making these last few years. Now, on the right-hand chart, you can see the consumer services progression which we're seeing improve markedly during the year, really reflecting the success of the new product launches and that rapidly scaling free consumer base. As Brian mentioned, the North American consumer business returned to growth in the fourth quarter, and the overall consumer services business was stable in the fourth quarter on the prior year.
Turning to the contribution revenue by region. In North America, B2B was a strong contributor, up 9% for the year and 12% in Q4, reflecting that new product investment and also an improving Decision Analytics improvement performance across the year as a whole. We sustained good levels of growth in Latin America, despite some weakness in countercyclical revenue, starting to moderate a little in Brazil. In the U.K. B2B, we secured some major One Experian client wins and had a strong second half to the year with 5% organic revenue growth for the year as a whole. EMEA Asia Pacific, as Brian said, had a great year delivering double-digit top-line organic growth, and both sub-regions there were in double digit for the full year.
While consumer services declined for the year overall, it was stable in the fourth quarter, reflecting that improving trajectory and particularly growth in North America. Acquisitions contributed 2% overall, and that was largely to the CSID contribution in the first half and Clarity in the second. We had a modest FX tailwind of 1%. You can see overall bringing the group's total revenue growth to 8%. Looking at the EBIT margin, starting the year with our prior year margin. You can see we delivered strong progress across the B2B business with total B2B margins up 110 basis points, contributing 90 basis points to the group margin. Margins in North America and the U.K. reflected that new product growth, and EMEA and Asia Pacific continued to benefit from improving scale.
We continue to invest in diversification across Latin America, where you can see improving margin in the business, offset with a little bit of a weakness in Spanish Latin America that we saw in the middle of the year. Margins in consumer services reflect the support we've been putting behind the new product launches over the last period, as well as the revenue contraction we saw when you take the year as a whole. Acquisitions provided slight uplift to margin 10 basis points, and after the 10 basis points FX benefit, you can see the overall position was 27.7% up 10 basis points overall for the year as a whole, in line at constant currency, which is in line with our guidance we provided at the start of the year.
Turning to the regional results, I'll comment as usual on the performance at constant exchange rates, starting with North America, where total revenue growth was 8% and organic growth was 6%, the acquisition impact came through principally from Clarity and CSID. Credit Services grew strongly, up 11% overall, with organic revenue growth of 9%. Fourth quarter organic revenue growth was 14%. Consumer Information saw good growth in credit pre-qualification, origination, and account management. Mortgage performed strongly following the startup of the new Fannie Mae trended data contract, and there was a first-time contribution from the Experian Ascend Platform. Both Business Information and Health also performed well with strong double-digit growth during the year. Clarity Services had a very strong start, exceeding our buy plan and provided a great platform for alternative data for our clients.
Decision Analytics is now consistently delivering strong levels of growth up 10% for the year, with great progress in software, fraud, and analytics, including some major One Experian wins. In Marketing Services, we had another strong year, largely driven by our growth in targeting. Combined across these three segments, we had 9% organic growth across the North America B2B operations. Looking at Consumer Services, we saw sequential improvement in North America. While organically revenue declined 2% for the year, it was up 2% in Q4. This return to growth was mostly driven by the growth in subscription products, particularly the IdentityWorks product, which contributed just short of $20 million from the year from a base of around 200,000 paying members at the year-end. There was also a growing contribution from credit comparison services from a relatively low base in the prior year.
Also from partner solutions as we expand our position with existing clients. Given this progress, as Brian said, we now expect Consumer Services to continue to improve, and for the first half of FY 2019, we would expect our growth to be in the mid-single-digit range. Overall, EBIT for North America was up 7% to $833 million, and the margin of 31.5% reflected strong B2B progress and the investment behind the new consumer products. Over to Latin America, we had another good performance with growth of 6% across the region and 7% in Brazil. Growth in Credit Services overall was 4%, with Brazil up 5% as countercyclical products began to moderate and the economy continues to improve. Decision Analytics growth was 25%, reflecting strong demand across the region for decisioning software, analytics, and also for scoring.
Marketing Services revenue increased 29% as we made good progress in growing our client base and also introduced some new products and services. Overall benchmark EBIT for the region increased by 5%. Over to the U.K. and Ireland, where our total growth was 1%, including the Runpath acquisition and organic revenue was flat overall, and the year finished well with Q4 organic growth of 4%. Credit Services total revenue increased 7%, and organic revenue growth was 4%, with good growth in credit reference, background checking, and credit pre-qualification volumes. Decision Analytics had a good year, up 6% organically and double digit in Q4 as we secured some major new agreements across the One Experian proposition, particularly in software and fraud prevention. Marketing Services grew by 4%, principally across digital marketing, and that takes the U.K.'s total B2B growth for the year to 5% and 9% in Q4.
In Consumer Services, we saw overall decline by 16%, as we had signaled moderating sequentially as we went through the year, with the fourth quarter down 12%. We expect that improving trend of about 3% improvement each quarter to continue through FY 2019. CreditMatcher continues to deliver very strong growth in referral rates, and we are obviously very excited about the opportunities for the combination of Experian with ClearScore. At the EBIT level, the U.K. grew by 2% with a margin up 80 basis points to 31.3%, really reflecting margin leverage across B2B, more than offset the consumer services transition costs. EMEA and Asia Pacific was up strongly, up 11% for the year. As I said, that was double digits in both sub-regions. Credit Services was up 3% with good growth, particularly across Southeast Asia and a solid performance in EMEA.
We had multiple new agreements for PowerCurve Decisioning Software, helping to drive Decision Analytics growth, where we had another great year up 18%. Marketing Services also performed very well, up 12% with strong growth across both data quality and targeting in this region. As expected, the growing scale across EMEA and Asia Pacific brought the region into profitability overall for the year. Turning now to EPS. FY 2017 benchmark EPS was $0.884 per share. A growth in benchmark EBIT from ongoing activities was 7%, reflecting the strong organic revenue growth performance. Interest expense increased to $85 million as interest rates started to increase during the year. We saw a benefit from share repurchase program with weighted average number of shares now at 917 million for FY 2017. A strong performance with 11% growth in reported benchmark EPS.
Taking a look at our usual reconciliation from benchmark to statutory results. You can see amortization of acquisition intangibles increased slightly to $112 million. Following the change in the U.S. tax legislation partly through the year, there was a large tax credit as our deferred tax liabilities were revalued down. We have $57 million of one-off legal charges in the year. These relate to a settlement of a 10-year-old legal dispute in a disposed business in Canada, and also an increase in a provision relating to a historic U.S. legal dispute. Taking all these into account, before non-cash financing remeasurements, statutory profit increased 17% to $869 million. Non-cash financing remeasurements moved from a $67 million credit last year to a $24 million charge. That movement is principally due to FX rates in our Brazilian business in the prior year.
Statutory profit from continuing operations was therefore $845 million, up 4% on FY 2017. Turning to cash performance. As we expected, cash generation strengthened in the second half to give another good year. Conversion rate to benchmark EBIT into operating cash was 93%, well ahead of our 90% target. Operating cash flow was $196 million, free cash flow $916 million. That represented 102% conversion of benchmark earnings to cash. On to our capital framework. Continues to reflect the capital framework that we outlined about three years ago. We've invested organically across a broad range of activities, including the innovation and growth initiatives that you saw in Brian's presentation. We completed the Clarity and Runpath transactions during the year, and made a number of minority and venture investments.
We raised the dividend by 8% to $0.4475 per share, reflecting the great momentum you've seen during the year. Also the strong outlook we've got for the year ahead. We completed $566 million of share repurchases by year-end. Today announced another $400 million program, of which around $300 million will be accretive. We'll continue to report strong returns on capital. During the year, the return on capital employed was 15.7%. On to net debt and the balance sheet. We ended the year with net debt of $3.4 billion, up $200 million on the prior year. After generating free cash flow of $1.2 billion, taking account of acquisitions, net share repurchases, and dividends, net debt to EBITDA at the year-end was 2.1, towards the lower end of our 2-2.5 range.
If we include ClearScore in that and adjust, you'll see we would have been over about 2.3, so well within our guidance range. You see from the announcement, we've announced a new segmental structure today. I think probably as expected, given how we were talking about our results this last year. Really reflecting the way that we've been managing the business under the One Experian banner. We'll report on this basis from Q1. There's a reconciliation in the back of the presentation for this and the change to IFRS 15. We're making no changes to our regional structure, which is our primary reporting structure. As we've discussed, we're increasingly managing our B2B business on a One Experian basis. Following the disposal of CCM, now it feels an appropriate time to bring our businesses together and report them as a B2B business.
Within B2B, we will share revenue disclosures formally as a split between data and decisioning, and you can see the table on the right. Fairly simple to follow, really just Health moving and also allocating out the old Marketing Services segment between data and decisioning. As I say, we have provided a detailed reconciliation in the back of the presentation. I can spend some time with you offline talking through that and the IFRS 15 adjustments. On to some modeling considerations for FY 2019. We now expect total revenue contributions pro forma for the acquisitions completed in FY 2018 to be around $75 million on a pro forma basis. Remember I said that was about $65 a few months ago, real strengthening performance from Clarity in particular. Of which about $30 million is reflected in FY 2019. Obviously, this excludes the acquisition of ClearScore, which remains subject to CMA approval.
FX rates have been quite volatile in the last month, but if you take the month as a whole, use the average rates, there will be about a 1% headwind to the year ahead and something to keep an eye on as we get through the year. On to IFRS 15. As expected, the impact is fairly immaterial. On average, across the group, revenue will be recognized slightly later than it is under current accounting standards. The FY 2018 adjustments, around $78 million to annual revenue and $31 million to profit after tax. There is no impact on cash. Accordingly, our FY 2018 cash conversion would have been about 3% higher when you restate it for the new standard. That solidifies our cash conversion very well in that mid 90% range.
It is important to say the majority of the revenue deferred relates to contracts where we receive the cash up front. When you see the restated balance sheet, you will see an increase in deferred income. That tells you it is cash that is already received, but the revenue will be recognized a little bit later under the new accounting standard. We expect net interest for FY 2019 to be around $110 million, that is inclusive of the share buyback that we have announced today, and it really reflects the increase in interest rates that we have seen over the last year. The benchmark tax rate is now expected to be in line with FY 2018, in the range of 25%-26%. The cash tax rate, we would expect to be in the high teens.
Taking into account the share repurchase program that we have announced today, the weighted average number of shares are expected to be in the region of 901 million for the year ahead. We expect CapEx to continue around 9% of revenue as we continue to invest in the innovation and technology agenda to drive our growth. To summarize, it has been a good year. We have delivered good financial and strategic progress in FY 2018 with a strong finish, strong growth in revenue, EBIT, and earnings per share. We have been disciplined in our capital allocation, focusing on investment in high return growth initiatives, and also capital returns to shareholders. As we move into FY 2019, you can see the fundamentals of the business are really strong, and we have got good momentum.
We therefore expect another strong year of revenue growth, EBIT growth at or above revenue growth, and further strong progress in benchmark earnings per share. We'll continue to apply our capital framework with a strong focus on investing for growth and creating long-term shareholder value. With that, I'll hand you back to Brian.
All right. Thank you, Lloyd. We built the foundations for a stronger business. We've got best-in-class data quality. You can see a lot of the products that we have are moving more and more towards sophisticated analytics and software, really driving towards those new opportunities. Investments that we've made in our business, including technology products, brand, culture, really driving and making a big difference to the performance of the business, and we think we've got a lot more to come. We have a lot of confidence as we look forward. We're excited about what we can do. With that, I'm going to ask Kerry to join us on stage for questions. Thank you. Okay. We'll take one from the front here. We have
Yeah. Good morning. It's Paul Sullivan from Barclays. Given you're sort of lifting the lid on margin improvement, how should we think about that going forward? You did 110 or 100 basis points in B2B.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question on the telephone, please just key star and then one. Thank you.
At worst, flat seems very, very conservative, how should we think about the moving parts there this year? Yeah.
I'll let Lloyd jump in on this as well. The first comment I'd make is that we faced this question on margin for several years now, and we've reinvested back in the business quite heavily, and you're seeing the results of that coming through in higher growth. We have a huge range of opportunities to invest ahead of us. I can reel off at least 10 big opportunities that we have next year. We're lifting Ascend into every country that we think we can sell it in. We have opportunities in places like collections through the PowerCurve suite. We just have a huge range of things that we can put capital behind. Now, having said that, we are in a position where higher growth rates, there are really two stages to this question. One, can your business produce operating leverage? Absolutely, yes, it can, and it is.
It is a choice as to, is it better to let that leverage drop through to the bottom line, or is it better to continue to invest in your business to drive your growth in years two, three, and four thereafter? We think that this year, we are able to do a bit of both. We're able to, hopefully, the performance will be strong enough to allow us to, as you say, benchmark flat, hopefully a bit better than that. The rest will really be about exactly how fast and where we continue to put capital in the P&L to work. That, to us, is a very important factor as we look at the long-term growth of the business. Lloyd?
Yeah. The only thing to add is, clearly at these growth rates, it creates significant optionality for us. We're in a dynamic environment. You see that across all of our markets. Great opportunities to invest. That'll be our priority. It gives us opportunity to progress margin this year. What would that look like? I would say 10 to 30 basis points this year, given the opportunities we've got to invest. Clearly, we've got optionality.
One quick follow-up. The 14% growth you saw in U.S. Credit Services. As the focus shifts to the sustainability of that growth, how does that 14% break down in your view between stuff that you do yourselves in terms of new product development relative to the cycle?
Well, I'll ask Gary to jump in on this, but a large part of it is actually the products that we've introduced, and we can point to specific contract values that we got for Ascend, for example, which just didn't exist six months ago. That's very strong. Yeah, the environment is good, so there's no doubt that there's a bit of benefit from that. The super science growth you're seeing on top of that is really the stuff we're doing. I guess, probably the litmus test on that is, as we said, this is the strongest growth that we have had in credit services since any of us can remember. Gary, you probably have a longer memory than most of us in there. I think really a lot of it is what we're doing in the context of a good environment. Gary?
Yeah. That's all well said. The only thing that I would point out is that the trended data is a bit of a boost that we're getting this year. Besides that, it's all within the normal operations of the business. It's driving growth. No other big one-timers or anything like that.
I think it's important to look at Decision Analytics trends as well. If you look this year, we've been fairly flat on that in North America over the recent years. That's really stepped up, and that shows the strength of that product offering alongside our credit service sale in North America. That's a sticky sell when you combine them. It's a pretty unique sell for us.
Okay. We have a question at the front there. Go on.
Yes. Hello. Mattia Garbari from Goldman Sachs. A couple of questions on my side. Firstly, on the Brazilian consumer opportunity, right? We can say hinted there is quite a lot of it. We do not yet see the divisional breakdown, the Brazilian consumers. I think we'll be quite curious to see that will it happen going forward, or you will report separately? With all this consumer that you have, do you think that could become a business, say, the size of the U.K., for example, which is $200 million of, let's say, revenues within, say, a reasonable couple of years timeframe? A bit of color on that would be interesting.
Well, I think the first thing to say is actually, hopefully it came across on the slides, but the build-out of the business has been spectacular there. Scaling to 22 million free customers is frankly just about the best performance you can get for a business of its type anywhere. That's great. I think the second point is that we have this view we've talked to you about before, which is that relationships with the consumer is really important. They increasingly are and will be an important source of data going forward. That's actually happening in Brazil today with the relationships we've got. I think that the opportunity really starts to come when Positive Data comes in because primarily in that 22 million, you have a lot of people who are looking to find out about their credit score. They might have had credit issues.
They're not prime customers, right? What, of course, Positive Data is going to do, it's going to allow us to actually have much richer information set, and we'll expand the credit market. That's where that customer base really comes into play. Of course, we are monetizing it today. Actually, if you think about it globally, we really weren't in this product set 18 months ago. Globally, we've built roughly what will this year be a $50 million business across the U.S., U.K., and Brazil, which is not bad from a standing start. I think that can Brazil be numbers you mentioned, $50 million-$100 million revenue in consumer services over, say, three to five years? Yeah, that's actually the outlook and the plan that we have. We think it can get there. We have to continue to scale, build that audience even further.
We've got to introduce new products, we're building those out. I think we will see some acceleration in revenue in consumer in Brazil this year. I think it will be FY 2020 and 2021 where the rubber really hits the road on that. We're excited about it, and I think it's a fantastic achievement. Gary, you want to add anything there?
Yeah. I think the only thing I would add is that it is a primary focus of us at this point to capture the heart and mind of the consumer. Scaling out with as many consumers as possible is priority number one. We already know that some other competitors have turned away from the market simply because of the great progress that we've already made in Brazil. Creating that difficulty to enter the market and capture the consumers now will allow us to do the things that Brian has talked about over time and will stand us well with the plans we have with the consumers.
One more question, if I may. Turning to the U.S. consumer. You sounded a little bit, say, more positive about, say, the business evolution with Affinity Partners. I think in the last, say, couple of, say, sessions, maybe that was a stable to slightly decline the business on the educational contract. This time, it seemed that you sounded a little bit more, say, positive with new offers. Are you seeing growth returning there, or?
I didn't catch which area you're talking about.
With the partners in the consumer services in the U.S.
No, we are positive about that. We have a very large partner business in the U.S., I think. We've got great capabilities through the CSID acquisition. We're introducing a lot of new products into that channel. I think we feel very good about the outlook for that business going forward.
I think the acquisition of CSID has really changed
The nature of the conversation with potential clients, because it's a cross-border, a credit, and an identity form. That's really improved our outlook.
I think we've got two questions maximum, please. Thank you. Go over there.
Morning. Tom Sykes from Deutsche Bank. Just on your margin improvement and the different moving parts in that. If you're 10-30 basis points this year and consumer's going to be presumably less of a drag, should we be thinking of B2B being slightly less of a contributor in operational leverage terms if you're getting 10-30 basis points to the group? Also if you look at the cost base breakdown, it looks like your data and IT costs went up about 100 basis points, which might have been a bit of a surprise, I don't know. When you're thinking about where the different cost elements land contributing to the margin performance, should we be thinking that data and IT continue to go up? Did marketing costs go up? Can you actually get any leverage on your labor costs?
A few things in there. I think if you look at our B2B progress this last year, very strong. If you look at marketing services, the progress was particularly strong. We took the opportunity of the disposal of the CCM business to really take quite a bit of cost out of that business. That's perhaps more of a one-off contribution. You wouldn't expect marketing services to step forward so strongly in a normal year. Overall, as we said, you've got significant optionality. I think in the year ahead, we'd expect consumer services, think about the launches that we've got to do and the investing behind scaling there, probably to come down a little bit more, maybe from around 21%-20%. More of the B2B margin leverage will flow through.
On your data and IT cost question, within our consumer business, one of the big things we've done in the last year is enhance the proposition. From a 1B product to a 3B product. Obviously, we pay for data contributions there, and obviously, we're enhancing our data assets whenever we can. Yes, that's an increase in cost, but you see it very much flowing through to the top line of our full business.
Okay. Thank you. If I can call that one question on margin, just on the consumer services growth in North America. CSID is now in the organic growth and has annualized some of the losses of the major customer that business had. Are you able to say, A, what the contribution of CSID, the U.S. consumer services growth is, and perhaps just to comment on what's happening to the base level of subscriptions in that business as well, please?
Sure. Moving parts are on consumer. The split between direct and affinity is still about 60-40. In that affinity, that's broad partner solutions. You've got a growing CSID business. As you say, it is annualized. The old pure credit affinity business is declining. Those two offset, we've got a growing partner solutions business, maybe a low single digit in the year ahead. On the direct to consumer credit subscription, the traditional credit education product, it continues to decline. When you take subscriptions, credit, and identity together, our subscription basis is now growing. If you take the new products across both identity and lead generation, if you look out over the year ahead, there's a pretty significant step up in contribution from that. Strong growth in identity and lead generation offsetting declining credit education, partner solutions growing moderately overall.
That's the algorithm that gets you back to that mid-single digit growth in the year ahead.
Thanks very much.
Yeah. Let's go over there.
Morning. It's George Gregory from Exane BNP Paribas. Two please. Just one perhaps following up on that last question, Lloyd. Just thinking about the evolution of IDWorks and Lending Works, obviously this year will benefit from the significant growth in IDWorks over the year. Just wondering how you see IDWorks evolving over the coming few years. Similarly, how should we think about Lending Works evolving over the medium term, please?
Well, they're both going to grow. Just in terms of evolution, the IdentityWorks product has scaled really rapidly. We're not seeing any tail off in that. We're not seeing any change in market conditions. We still think that we have a long runway of growth for that business. I think we've been consistent. That is a business that can be a very large revenue stream for us. The extent to which it sort of builds in any one year is a bit hard to predict. You've seen the pace at which we've gone in FY 2018. We expect it to continue at a similarly fast pace in FY 2019. Lending Works is building from a much smaller base. When we talked to you last year, we said we were focusing on IdentityWorks first and Lending Works second.
Large part of that was because we had to build out the product offers on the base and get complete market coverage. The second thing we talked to you about was we need to ensure
We maximize the traffic for the intent which the traffic is actually coming for. That's why I reference the fact that we're leveraging CRM and the previous customer bases, the current and past Experian members and driving profitable growth. It's easy to drive growth in a business like Lending Works. Driving profitable growth is the key, and that's what we're focused on building out. I think we're taking it at what we think is the appropriate pace. It'll grow rapidly this year, and we'll take decisions during the year as to whether we think that can scale more than planned or otherwise.
I think as we said when we talked about the plans in the consumer business, the identity and lead generation markets are two very significant markets that are available to us. We've got a right way, we've got the products. When you look at the now close to 40 million free members we've got across our three core geographies, we've got a real opportunity there to really progress and scale that business.
Thanks. Just one quick question on the IFRS 15 change. I just wondered if that has any impact on the evolution of margin going forward, given the deferral of that revenue being recognized.
It shouldn't be. When you restate, the new margin comes down slightly, that means your revenue in future years is more underpinned because it comes back. No change on growth to the rates. No change on margin progression. It's just a technically different way that you record the revenue.
Thanks.
I haven't personally got this far without an IFRS question. Please.
Andrew Greville from Credit Suisse. No IFRS question. Just one, a slightly broader one. You talked a lot about automation and digital as a way to reduce your costs and also to enter new markets. How do you balance that opportunity with the potential impact on price, not just for the newer businesses but for your existing services? Are you seeing some price pressure as that comes through?
I'll let Kerry jump in on this. There's two aspects of this. One is how it impacts our clients' business, and the second is how it impacts our business. We've actually made massive progress in the application of automation and robotics in our own business. That's quite exciting. The answer is no, because what you're doing is developing propositions for your clients, which enable them to take cost out. That means the proposition has significant value. Let's take Ascend. Where are we taking cost out there? If you look at the job of an analyst who's creating models in a bank, a massive amount of time is actually spent in something called data prep. Data prep means taking big data sets and putting them into an environment where you can actually do the analysis.
Takes a massive amount of time, takes up a huge proportion of that analyst's time. The Ascend platform completely eliminates that because the data's preloaded and the models are ready to work, and it can take the ingested data from different sources. You have massive efficiency being delivered through the platform. That saves them a hell of a lot of money. It's a value equation. How much are we saving them with this solution? In fact, what you can see is actually increased spend because we're able to take more and more core functionality out of their cost base and into the platform. Yeah, reduced costs overall, but more spend geared towards the solution that's actually helping that happen. Then Kerry on our own business.
Yeah. That's right, Brian, and it's a good question. I've got 15 years of watching the prices, cost efficiencies, the automation in this industry, and what's been occurring. It's no longer about selling data and a credit score. It's about all of the value that Brian was just articulating and our capabilities across the spectrum, from our decisioning capabilities, our fraud capabilities, the sandbox, you name it, the Text for Credit. All of those things now are driving so much value with the customers that we have seen a marked decrease in pressure on prices and more of a focus on help us run our business better. It's different now than it has ever been in the 15 years that I've been here. We certainly have lots of opportunities to help the clients take cost out. We take cost out of our business.
We like to take cost out of our business to become more efficient and allow us to invest it back into other opportunities. We've been very focused on that with all of the work that we've been doing across the board for the last several years. Two parts to the answer. Lots of opportunities internally, which we've been doing and will continue to do, but we have seen less pressure on price because of the capabilities that we have in the marketplace, the sophistication of them, and the fact that it's no longer about selling data, a credit report and a credit score. That's not what it's about anymore.
Just on a related topic, you talked a lot about Ascend and all its capabilities. When you're going to see prospective clients, when they say no, why do they say no, given the cost savings that it can provide?
Well, a lot of the time they say no because they don't have the budget or they don't have the time to actually look at the solution. They're not ready. There are very few capabilities that we go to a client, and they don't say, "That looks great, we like that." Sometimes you go and they sort of say, "Well, we can't focus on that because this is our problem here," blah, blah, or for whatever reason. I don't think that we ever go to market with solutions that people don't think are really, really good. Sometimes they can be a bit skeptical about ROI. We have to prove that.
What I will say is that for most of the products that you're looking at, and we talk about a lot, PowerCurve, CrossCore, Ascend, these products take a long time to sell into a B2B environment because of the complexity of that B2B environment. It does take a bit of time for market perception to start to happen. This is why Ascend has so rapidly been accepted in the marketplace. It's a real measure of its success. Once you get there, it really quickly becomes widespread that this is a product that people have to have. I don't know. You have more.
Yeah. A few more examples on that. In the software space, we might not win a deal when they already have part of a competitor already embedded in their enterprise, and they don't want to have to upgrade that piece at the same time that they're trying to put in a different piece, right? You might not be successful there because they already have an embedded estate with a competitor. The same thing applies on the credit side. If someone they're already buying data and analytics and the account management programs from one of our competitors, then they want to start doing triggers, or they want to start doing something along those lines, there's a lot of benefit to going with their existing provider. You might not be successful in that instance.
When it comes to competing for new software, new analytics, someone looking for new data sources, in the deals that we're competing in, we're winning the majority of those deals bar none.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
We go to the back there.
Morning. Ed Steele from Citi. Two areas I'd like to ask about, please. First of all, obviously, you've won this large trended data contract. To what extent is trended data already looked at by your core financial services clients in your U.S. credit bureau? Why wouldn't, over time, all of your clients use it? Please talk about that, please. The second area I'd like to talk about is in the North American Consumer Services division. You talked about the fairly obvious trends within that. If you look at the core subscribers within the credit part of that division, which is probably about half of the revenue last year, perhaps, just feeling the qualitative comments you're making about the visibility for growth improvement in the next few quarters, it seems like you sense that the resilience within that consumer base or subscriber base is getting better.
Is that because you're down to a rump of sticky subscribers that you think will stick around irrespective of marketing spend being removed in that space, Lloyd?
Okay. Kerry, do you want to take it?
Yeah, sure. On trended data, we launched trended data 10 plus years ago. We focus primarily in the credit card market and have many customers in that space today. We've recently then moved it into the mortgage market, which is the trended data opportunity that we're referencing. It's sophisticated analytics, and so your medium to larger clients are the ones that are likely to utilize it. It's not something that a smaller credit union or a small bank might take advantage of unless they're just very progressive because there is an additional cost with it and they have to work it into their analytic capabilities. I think we are going to be moving into other verticals, so we do have opportunities there.
It's been something that we've already had for an extended period of time, and the new piece with mortgages is what we're referencing now in the opportunity, and we'll continue to expand that.
Lloyd, do you want to take the function one?
Yeah, I think we've seen this for a little while, Ed, as you see some of the newer clients roll off the credit education product. You enter more of a rump that's more resilient. The other thing is we're obviously increasing the functionality that targets those consumers. Think of this as an ecosystem. A customer comes in one place, and we give them the opportunity to meet the need in one. As their needs change, we give them the opportunity to move across, and that just naturally makes it more resilient. Also, the access is pretty unique for us to call center agents to help people across our businesses is something that really differentiates us. Those three things together, I think you're right. We're seeing more resilience. Obviously, it's still an area that's declining a bit.
The growth is really coming overall in the revenue base from the new product streams.
Okay, I'm just going to check if we have any questions on the line.
We do have a question on the line. The first question comes from Brett Huff. Brett, your line is now live. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I just have two. On the first one, Lloyd, thanks for giving us the specificity around the 10-30 basis points of margin expansion we should look for this year. You guys have been talking about a little bit higher revenue growth. I didn't catch any specific ranges. Did you articulate those and I missed them, or do you have ranges that you can share with us in terms of revenue growth this year?
Brett, we're clearly going into the year with some really strong momentum. We've said next year, our official guidance next year will be another strong year of growth. What does that mean? I would guess the year as a whole, something in that 6%-8% range. We're clearly going to start very strongly, probably more in the top end of that range as we go through the first half, and we'll see how some of the new products develop in the second half.
That's really helpful. Can you guys talk a little bit about bigger picture as you divide into these two new categories? I know they're businesses you've had for a long time, consumer and then B2B. As you think about the incremental dollar that you're spending from the higher revenue growth that you're seeing, where are you looking to put that incremental dollar? I guess maybe it's more of a long-term ROIC question. Where do you see the incremental dollar being most useful or most productive over a medium-term period? Thank you.
I think, Brett, if you look back at the progression of our decisioning business, the combination of decisioning with data is really our play. That's a real value play, not a cost-plus play. It's very sticky with our clients because it's really adding value. As you see the explosion of different data across different verticals and industries, our decisioning software can play in multiple verticals and multiple markets. Brian talked about the combination of Ascend and PowerCurve. PowerCurve is a decisioning tool you can apply to any real-time decisioning, and we see a lot of opportunity for that.
Thank you.
Thank you. Okay. Rajesh.
Morning. Rajesh Kumar from HSBC. Appreciate that a lot of organic growth with new products. In terms of the traditional drivers like mortgage, cards, could we get some color on how those different parts are progressing and how do you see the outlook for that through the year? The second one is on the competitive landscape both in the U.S. and in Brazil. How do you see that shaping up, especially the divergence in the organic growth you and one of your peers had with the third major player seems to be quite significant.
Okay.
Do you want to deal with the first one live and, Kerry, do you want to pick up on the second, I'm sure?
Obviously, you call it the traditional growth, it varies by market. Take the U.S. first. We said health growing really strongly, double-digit. Our BI business there, again, really strong double-digit growth. Auto was flat for the year as a whole, marginally up in Q4, which given the backdrop there, we thought was good performance. Core credit are doing very well, really strong and robust volumes in the core credit market. Mortgage, obviously if you strip out the trended data contract, mortgage was positive, bit of price, volume down a little bit. You take all of that together in North America, really strong. In Brazil, obviously the economy is improving. Some of our metrics lag that, obviously employments are a good metric that still continue to go up a little bit.
We're seeing a drop-off in some countercyclical revenue, which is usually a good early signal. Into the U.K., I think we're seeing solid performance there across our core market. A lot of our growth you saw in the fourth quarter was really the bundling of decisioning with products. Obviously we're keeping a close eye on the U.K. economy as some of the uncertainties get resolved in the year ahead.
The divergence of the growth rates that you referenced, it's simply what the other competitor said in their earnings release, which is they haven't had the opportunity to compete for new business given what's occurred to them. That's had an impact on them. It's at the margin for us, so it's not the big driver of our growth. In totality for them, it's probably significant, at least that's their statements to the effect.
The question was over the next 2 to 3 years, do you expect some reshuffling of that market share within the market with
I think that we will continue to win our share of the business because of our capabilities and what we bring to the market. That's how we think about it. I don't think that we're going to prosper simply because the competitors had a problem last year.
I think the really exciting thing for us, Rajesh, is the opportunity to make new market. It's not a market share play. I think our competitors would say the same. The skills we have in particular across data and decisioning, we can apply to completely new use cases. New market growth, that's really what we're very excited about.
Thank you.
I'll just check. We don't seem to have any more questions on the line, do we?
We do have one more question from William Brown from Investec. William, your line is now live. Please go ahead.
Yes, please. I'm coming back to revenue growth. Can you help us understanding how much of that comes from pricing and new products? I appreciate if you're delivering bigger cost savings, maybe there is a big pricing element alongside new products. The second question, can you clear the decks after Cambridge Analytica and company that you have no exposure to any big contracts with Facebook or else which might be cut in the near term or ever?
Okay. Do you want to deal with the price volume, and I'll come back to the Facebook question?
Yeah. It's almost impossible to break out price and volume when you think about the bundled nature of our business. I think overall, you would say core data sales over time to some of our bigger clients tends to be price compression, but all the value goes back in through the decisioning where we see ever-increasing value. We're winning more share of wallets, and the size of the overall wallet is increasing. That's probably the best way I would deal with that.
The one thing I would point out is that traditionally, revenue is helped in Brazil because of price increases. Because inflation is so low, the performance of the business is purely around what we're generating in terms of new products, new sales, market share gains, and not because inflation is allowing us to increase prices because inflation is down around 4% in Brazil right now. It's less of a factor in terms of powering our growth than maybe historically you might have seen.
On your Facebook question, we do have a relationship with Facebook. They've been a global partner for us for the last few years. Of course, as you know, Facebook have closed down all their product categories. What do we do? We actually allowed people to build audience segments according to the Experian data sets on the Facebook platform. What it means is that those audience creation, that will continue, but actually, it'll be done by the clients themselves, and they'll still use the data and the platform. It'll just be delivered in a different way. I think there will be some temporary lumpiness as we move through that, but I don't think long term it has any impact. No, we don't have any exposure of the type that I think would impact with them over the last few months.
Any movement, any lumpiness is included in your guidance on the organic revenue. Thank you.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, it doesn't look like we've got any more questions, thank you all for coming today, and we'll speak to you later in the year.