Okay. I think we're ready to go. So good morning, everybody. Welcome to our full year results presentation. Please 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, it's sort of more or less had 2 things. 1, We expected our growth to accelerate in the second half, and we expect that North America Consumer Services 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.
And, more importantly, I think we feel very confident that the momentum that we have going into FY 2019. Now 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, you've strengthened the competitive position, the business through one experience, and that's really starting to reflect itself in the performance of the business. So I'm going to start today with an overview of the trends and the progress that we're making. And then I'm going to hand you over to Lloyd as usual to take you through the financials.
Okay. So 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 had since 2012.
Our EBIT was up by 8% and benchmark EPS is 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. And that's now the longest most consistent highest growth rate we've had in B2B since Experience IPO in 2006, so very happy with that.
I think most importantly, consumer services in North America in Q4 got back into growth, and we've made substantial progress really across all of our consumer services business. And I'll talk you through some of that to go through the slides. Good year for capital as well. We've returned 809150,000,000 in dividends and buybacks. And that takes us to more than 3,000,000,000 return 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 up to $400,000,000 today. Okay. So 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, data and analytics explosions 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 is becoming cheaper to store, manage and analyze. And 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. And that's where Experian comes in, the ability to use, large datasets to drive, use our products to drive sophisticated analysis from that.
And help people make better decisions. And so as we as we look forward, next thing we see is really, huge drive towards automation. We're seeing that people have to really rework their processes, speed of disruption, and scale of new technologies has never been faster. And cost to serve is going to become a really key battleground and this is being reflected in all the conversations that we have with our clients. And 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 our business.
And we're developing our products to really drive that forward and adding capabilities like artificial intelligence, machine learning really gonna 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.
And what this means for businesses is that it's going to be harder for them to identify, attract, retain profitable customers and they need great products to do that. And that's exactly where experience, comes into health. And then finally, the other big trend we see is regulation straining new opportunities for us. We've seen it in many different territories, Brazil, with positive data, Europe, the GDPR and open banking, And 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. And again, these trends play into all of the capabilities that we have in organizations.
So we're really responding to all these trends strategic perspective. You've seen some of us do this. First point is obvious. The most important thing is the data, scale, breadth, quality of data, paramount importance, and our prime objectives continue to broaden the datasets. And we're going to do that organically and do that through partnerships, margin investments, 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. And that's really where experience solutions really have a competitive advantage. And within the portfolio, we have a tremendous amount of products that can actually drive insights from data. And our value is going to be come from leveraging those products across our portfolio to develop end to end solutions for our clients.
And you can see this playing out actually in some of the products that we talked to you about. So we talked to you a lot about power curves, about, recently about Sandd and Crosscor prior to that. And these are very sophisticated platforms that incorporate a lot of experienced products into one solution for our clients. We've seen that in the results coming through in FY 2018. These three products alone out of that $60,000,000 of incremental revenue.
And we're seeing a lot of, client adoption for these in the marketplace, strong pipelines, and great opportunity to continue to grow these businesses as we go forward. Now investments in technology has been a key enabler for that, and this really is crucial. Our technology investment last few years has been designed really to make us faster, quicker, and more agile and get products to market, you know, in a much more in a much more timely fashion. And this is going to continue to be crucial for us going forward. It's given really broad capabilities across the business about date ingestion, working across different parts of our portfolio and, building more consistent standardizations of our products to reduce costs And we continue to see this as an area where we'll push our investment going forward.
And 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. So we're putting all this strategy into action. I think it's visible and the strong performance we've seen in latter part of this year and in our confidence as we go forward. So let's turn to some of the regional performance.
We'll start with North America B2B. We had a very strong year, so it was up 9% for the year overall. And 12% in Q4. Stand out 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.
And 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 SEMs platform we were here in November. This is the new analytics platform. The market reception has been fantastic. We signed 11 material contracts in September launch, and we expect this to be another year where we, broaden that out to our client set.
And another strong year for the same. Services, has been also very, 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 datasets, in this case, in file in North America to enhance our propositions. Mother strong performance in the region of business information, another good year of double digit growth.
This business unit, great example of where we're using technology investments we've made in the Experian affiliate to drive additional market share gains. We've had strong performances in health care and decision analytics, Decision analytics was double digit, and drivers of performance there were really 1 experienced propositions around power curve, custom analytics, incorporating data from lots of our business units and deliver that in Engine solutions to our clients. And 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 for that, but we're also going to continue to develop that on as we go forward. And one of the ones that we're more excited about is the Senz and Power curve 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 'nineteen and beyond.
So 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, very difficult to replicate really brings a lot of the capabilities have experienced yellow. So I'll spend a minute to talk you through the slide. On the left of 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 of the sources.
It has built into the platform. A lot of the tools that the analysts will use, Big Data Tools, SaaS Python, visualization tools like Tableau, and this allows them to analyze their portfolio and design their strategies. And the key points about this are that it builds speed, agility, and reduce costs into the process on a significant scale. So to give you an idea, you know, they can now conduct planning and testing, in much, much more rapid time than previously, and they can see the results from that in minutes compared to days or weeks previously. Now the big differentiator you can see on this chart is the integration with PowerCurve, and that's the center box.
Power Curve is a World class decision engine. We've had massive success with this worldwide since it was introduced some years ago. And what it does is it acts is a bridge between the offline analysis done in this end and the actual implementation in the client's environment. So clients can code, test, manage, and execute strategies through power curves. 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, take steps, huge steps out of the process, massive costs, much more seamless.
And 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 172. And that is really, really significant. And perhaps this is probably the best example that, we can put up to show you what we mean by one experience in action because this capability really is, really very powerful. Okay. Clarity, I'll touch upon, for a moment.
It's proving to be a great acquisition for us. If you recall, This is the acquisition which was the latter part of last year. It focuses on the non prime segment in the U. S. It adds about 60,000,000 consumers in the U.
Who are largely invisible to our traditional lenders. Clarity is the leader in this segment. It's over three times the size of its nearest competitor. It has greater positive and negative data than annualized provider. And, the acquisition has been really successful so far.
We've realized synergies quickly. We've already rolled out some of Clarity's products to our traditional Bureau clients. And we've launched new products in the back of clarity data, including enhanced fraud and list scores. Clarity is already expanding the addressable market for us and giving us an edge in data superiority. So really, really happy with our acquisition so far.
And overall, North America B2B has tremendous momentum. And delivered great growth and we see, A, that momentum building into FY 2019. Okay. Moving to Consumer Services, and we returned to growth in organic revenue growth in Q4. I think the key difference 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 sort of mid single digit rates You'll recall a year ago, when we still appeared and talked about our new product introductions, our first priority was identity, and we've had great success with identity so far. Just over a year since launch, we've had, over 200,000 paying members now sign up for the service. And the pace of acquisitions continue to improve. The product is best in class. We continue to add new features, and we think we're going to be able to sustain that growth.
In addition, a product we launched last year with Lending Works, and that really is now starting grow, and we've got great momentum as we go into FY 'nineteen. The most of the progress we made on lending works is in the back of organically generated traffic, through CRM, leveraging the extensive base of, past and current, Experian members. And we're going to continue to develop that product as we go through FY2019. And then we're also enhancing consumer engagement. One of the things that we 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.
And some of these products don't to generate immediate revenue, but what they do is enhance our spending and our relationship with consumers. And a great example of this is our recently launched automated dispute proposition, a simple to use, completely digital experience, provides consumers with self-service, more control, better customer satisfaction and higher engagements, and actually one of the biggest pain points in the credit services industry. So we set ourselves up for a great FY 'nineteen, more growth to time and identity, better prospects and lead generation, good proposition overall. Okay. 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. And pleasingly, we signed a number of major long term deals with larger clients, which combine a lot of our capabilities across data and software scoring consultancy. And one of the key enablers of this has been our data labs, and actually we have a lot of instances now where we have major clients working with us in the beta lab, actually putting their staff into data labs to work alongside our people, our co create products. And this is helping us really to be viewed differently in the marketplace and now seeing experienced harassment as much more of a strategic partner, whereas several years ago, we were really just viewed, as a data supplier. So we're landing also deals for new capabilities, some of which are coming from around the globe.
For example, text the credit product that we talked to you about, capital call, it was last year, but some some time ago. We've done very well in Brazil to text the credit in the retail sector. Mobile prequalification, which is a strong product in North America. We've introduced them to Brazil. So really good prospects and a good pipeline starting to build.
And of course, last week, he was announced that positive data in Brazil took another step forward and draft legislation was passed by the house. There are a couple of more steps to go, but we're really getting close to finish line deposit 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. So our free consumer propositions throughout the consumer door was launched, actually just over a year ago. So it really hasn't been in the market very long, but in that time, we have created a mass market ordinance, attracting 22,000,000 customers to our free proposition. And 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 strengthening the B2B asset.
That's one immediate benefit we're getting. And our focus now is on how do we develop our commercial propositions to start to monetize. But we are already monetizing it. We think that we can scale that as we go into FY 'nineteen and beyond. We do have a broad range of consumer services proposition.
One of them that we talked to you about before is called Lincoln 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 with now digital service allowing consumers to do that completely in a mobile environment. And we have over 10,000,000 lymphonomic customers today, we see an addressable market several times on 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. And as an example of that, is that we're actually creating versions of lymphomnomi and credit matching services to address the needs of small businesses. And 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. Okay. Turning to the UK, we've got great momentum in B2B and had a very strong finish to the year.
We secured a lot of new contracts for, unique technologies like Xpin, power curves, cross core. Interestingly, we also secured a large joint deal across core power curve in the telecom sector. We're really pleased about that. And we're also going to leverage global innovations and bring them into the UK market. We have a first win for tax for credit in UK.
And this year, we plan to launch the ASCEND platform in the UK as well. And of course, new regulations are impacting most of Europe. Particularly open banking and GDPR. And when you look at the capabilities that we have with Experian across HD decisions, nonpath 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, and this is opening up new opportunities for us in the second in the UK.
We're already today in a pilot with a customer that takes the mortgage process and looks at mortgage process trying to make it faster, easier and simpler for consumers and lenders. And the breadth of our capabilities in the UK really puts us in a very strong position to drive growth in the coming years. UK Consumer Services were making very good progress. Our credit match is performing very strongly and the rate of decline in the membership product has moderated significantly. And of course, we announced a few months back of those acquisition of ClearScore.
We think this will help us reach our goals faster and drive a lot of synergies between two businesses. Credit Matcher and ClearScore are complementary brands addressing 2 different market segments. Credit Matcher has nearly 4,000,000 sooner. So in its own right, it's been a hugely successful product introduction. ClearScores came to market a bit sooner, has 6,000,000 combined audiences give us some access to a large part of the population and gives us the ability to add the experience 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. Brand resonates with a younger demographic and their membership base is highly engaged. And on the variance 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, intra credit comparison, and that's going to improve the results for consumers, lenders, and, 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. 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 growth rate in the year. And it's really been driven on the back of a lot of the global products that we talked to you about where we're seeing really strong client interest and actually seeing deals and transactions and opportunities of the magnitudes, which we haven't seen before, multimillion dollar deals with a lot of new logos. And we're also investing in our capabilities in the region to drive, organic growth even further, shifting from being a really a provider of some point solutions to aggressive capabilities across the needs of our clients. In fact, I was in India, just 3 weeks ago, and we had a chance to see how the local innovation investment we're making actually helping us access, and tailor our products in a unique way. Give you one example.
There's an organization called India Bose, it's been commerce, has a financial services arm. They came to us because they wanted to create a completely paperless mobile application and reduce their current loan process from about 8 days and their objective was 3 minutes. And they wanted that to be operational in 4 months. And so we did it. We took our existing PowerCo product.
We worked client and created, a product which achieved that objective. So we combined the BRAD data, fraud data, We also combined a 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 Power Cove Suite and delivered to the client. So 4 months, we're up and operational and very happy with the proposition, and we're seeing lots of these type of opportunities that are using global capabilities but actually unique and tailored for those markets. So we're excited about the prospects in the region. We've got a lot more to go for, and very, very optimistic about the outlook as we go into FY 2019.
And then just at the end, a final reminder of, the importance of the operational 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 we're seeing that through a lot of the new products that we're introducing. We will pursue acquisitions. We've been very successful. The ones we've made so far, they're closely aligned to our strategic ambitions, clarity, CSID, ramp up, 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 control. And we did that with nonpath, where we have a period of time where we work with the organization, test out the products, see what the market perception is and get confidence and then move to full control. And we're also, increasingly taking minority stakes and 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. So 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 1 Experian approach, new sources of data, really driving strong levels of growth with good margins across our business.
And 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. So I think we're in a very good position to make further progress in FY 2019. And with that, I'm going to hand you over to Lloyd to take you through the financials.
Thanks, Brian. Good 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 operations and financial progresses last year and saw momentum improving as the year progressed. Performance across our B2B business was very strong, we've been 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.
Had another strong year of cash conversion and return our capital alongside it. And within our capital allocation, we continued our organic investment in innovation and new product innovation, made a number of inorganic investments including the agreed acquisition of ClearStore as well as returning significant capital to shareholders. As you've heard from Brian, organic growth accelerated to 8% in Q4, bringing total revenue growth the year to 8% and organic revenue growth of 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.
And 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. And finally, following the really strong momentum we've seen through the year, and the progress we've made in 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're seeing through the year. On the left, you can see the organic growth progression in our B2B business. And 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.
And 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. On the right hand chart, you can see the consumer services progression, which we've seen improved markedly during the year, really reflecting the success of the new product launches and that rapidly scaling free consumer base. And 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 back 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 on our performance across a 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. And in UK B2B, we secured some major white experience client wins, had a strong second half to the year with a required percent organic revenue growth for the year as a whole. And EMEA Asia Pacific, as Brian said, had a great year. Delivering double digit top line organic growth and both sub regions there, and we're in double digit for the full year.
And 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. And we have a modest FX tailwind of 1%. So 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 and margins in North America, and the UK reflected that new product growth and EMEA and Asia Pacific continue 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 weakness in Spanish, Latin America that we saw in the middle of the year. And margins in Consumer Services reflect the support we've been putting behind the new product launches of, the last period as well as the revenue contraction we saw when you take the year as a whole. Acquisitions provided by uplift, margin 10 basis points. And after 10 basis points, FX benefit, you can see the overall position was 27.7 basis points.
27.7 percent, up 10 basis points overall for the year as a whole, in line with constant currency, which is in line with our guidance we provided at the start of the year. Turning to the regional results, and I'll comment as usual on the performance at constant exchange rates. And starting with North America, where total revenue growth was 8% and organic growth was 6% and the acquisition impact came through principally comparability and CSID. Credit services grew strongly, up 11% overall with organic revenue growth of 9%. 4th quarter organic revenue growth was 14%.
Consumer information saw good growth in credit prequalification, origination and account management. Mortgage performed strongly, following the start up of the new Fannie Mae, our trended data contract, and that 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. Carriage Services had a strong, 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, Ford And Analytics, including some major one Experian wins.
And in Marketing Services, we had another strong year largely driven by our growth in targeting. So 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. And while organically revenue declined 2% for the year, it was up 2% in Q4. And this return to growth was mostly driven by the growth in subscription products, particularly the identity was product, which contributed just short of $20,000,000 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 and from a relatively low base in the prior year, and also from Partner Solutions as we expand our position with existing clients. So given this progress. As Brian said, we now expect Consumer Services to continue to improve. And for the first half of FY 'nineteen, we'd expect are projected in the mid single digit range.
Overall EBIT for North America was up 7% to 833,000,000 and the margin of 31.5 percent 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 of 7% in Brazil, Growth And 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 decision, software, analytics and also for scoring. Marketing services, our revenue increased 29 percent as we made good progress in growing our client base and also, introduced some new products and services. And overall benchmark EBIT for the region increased by 5%.
Over to the UK, an island 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, technical revenue increased 7% and organic revenue growth was 4% with good growth in credit reference background checking and credit prequalification 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 full prevention. Marketing services grew by 4%, principally across digital marketing, and that takes the UK's total B2B growth for the year.
To 5% 9% in Q4. And Consumer Services, we saw overall decline by 16% as we'd signaled moderating sequentially as we went through the year, with 4th quarter down 12%. And we expect that improving trend of about 3% improvement each quarter to continue through FY2019. Credit Match continues to deliver very strong growth in referral rates, and we are obviously very excited about the opportunities combination of Experian with ClearStore. Overall then, at the EBIT level, the UK grew by 2% with the margin of 80 basis points 31.3%, really reflecting margin leverage across B2B, more than offset by, more than offset the consumer services transition costs.
EMEA and Asia Pacific was up strongly up 11% for the year and I said that was double digit in both subregions. Credit Services was up 3%. We'd be both particularly across Southeast Asia and a solid performance in EMEA. We had multiple new agreements for PowerCurve, our decision software, helping to drive Decision Analytics growth where we had another great year, up 18%. And Marketing Services also performed very well, up 12% with strong growth across both data quality and targeting in this region.
And as expected, the growing scale across EMEA and Asia Pacific have brought the region into profitability overall for the year. Turning now to EPS. FY 2017 benchmark EPS was 80 $8..4 per share. Our growth in benchmark EBIT from ongoing activities was 7%, reflecting the strong organic revenue growth performance. Interest expense increased to $85,000,000 and interest as interest rates started to increase during the year, and we saw a benefit from share repurchase program with weighted average number of shares now at $917,000,000 for FY 2017.
Overall, then, a strong performance with that 11% growth in the 40 benchmark EPS. Taking a look at our usual reconciliation from benchmark to statutory results. You can see amortization of acquisition and intangibles increased slightly to $112,000,000, 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 $57,000,000 of one off legal charges in the year, and these relate to a settlement of our ten year old legal disputes in a disposed business in Canada and also an increase in a provision relating to a historic U. S. Legal disputes. Taking all these into account, before noncash financing remeasurements, statutory profit increased 17 percent to $1869,000,000. Non cash financing remeasurements moved from a $67,000,000 credit last year to a $24,000,000 charge, and that's that moving principally due to FX rates.
In our pursuing business in the prior year. The statutory profit for continuing operations was therefore 845,000,000 up 4% on FY 2017. Turning to cash performance, as we expected, cash generation strengthened in the second to give another good year. Our conversion rate to benchmark EBIT into operating cash was 93% while ahead of our 90% target. And operating cash flow was $196,000,000, free cash flow, $916,000,000, and that represented a 102% conversion of benchmark earnings to cash.
Onto our capital framework continues to reflect the capital framework that we outlined about 3 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 run past transactions during the year, made a number of minority and venture investments. And we raised the dividend by 8 percent to $44.75 per share, reflecting the great momentum you've seen during the year and also the the strong outlook we've got for the year ahead. And we completed $566,000,000 of our share repurchases by year end.
And, today announced another $400,000,000 program of which around $300,000,000 will be accretive. And we'll continue to report strong returns on capital. During the year, the return on capital employed was 15.7 percent. On to net debt. On the balance sheet, we ended the year with net debt of $3,400,000,000, up $200,000,000 on the prior year.
And after generating free cash flow of $1,200,000,000, 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% to 2.5% range. And if we include clear score in that and adjust you'll see where, we would have been at 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 and really reflecting the way that we've been managing the business under the 1 Experian ballot. We'll report on this basis from Q1, and 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. But as we've discussed, we're increasingly managing the business RB2B business on a 1 Experian basis following the disposal of CCM. Now it feels appropriate time to bring up our businesses together and report them as a B2B business. And within B2B, I 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 field marketing services segment between data and decision. I would say we've provided a detailed reconciliation in the back of the presentation.
I can spend some time with the offline talking through that and the IFRS 15 adjustments. So on to some modeling considerations for FY2019. We now expect total revenue contributions pro form a for the positions completed in FY 'eighteen to be around $75,000,000 on a pro form a basis. Remember, I said that was about $65,000,000 a few months ago. So real strengthening performance from from Kyra in particular, of which about $30,000,000 is reflected in FY 'nineteen.
Obviously, this excludes the acquisition of Cresco, which remains subject. We'll see an 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'll be about a 1% headwind so the year had something to keep an eye on as we exited the year. On to, IFRS 15, As expected, the impact is fairly immaterial.
On average, across the group, revenue will be recognized slightly later. And this is under current accounting standards. The FY 'eighteen adjustments around $78,000,000 to annual revenue and $31,000,000 as profit after tax. There's no impact on cash. And, accordingly, our FY 'eighteen cash conversion would have been about 3% higher when you restate it for the new standard.
So that solidifies our cash conversion very well in that mid-ninety percent range. And, it's important to say the majority of the revenue deferred relates to contracts where we receive the cash up front. So when you see the restated balance sheet, you'll see an increase in deferred income. So that tells you as cashless. Already received, but will be the revenue will be recognized a little bit later under the new accounting standard.
We expect net interest for FY2019 to be around $110,000,000, and that's inclusive of the share buyback that we've announced say, and it really reflects the increase in interest rates that we've seen over the last year. And the benchmark tax rate is now expected to be in line with FY 'eighteen in the range of 25 percent to 26 percent and a cash tax rate we'd expect to be in the high teens. Taking into account the share repurchase program that we've announced today, the weighted average number of shares is expected to be in the region of 901,000,000 for the year ahead. And we expect CapEx to continue around 9% of revenue as we continue to invest in the innovation and technology agenda to drive our growth. So to summarize, it's been a good year.
We delivered good financial and strategic progress in FY 2018 with a strong finish strong growth in revenue, our EBIT and earnings per share. We've been disciplined in a capital allocation focusing on investments in high return growth initiatives and also capital returns to shareholders. As we move into FY19, can see the fundamentals of the business are really strong, and we've got good momentum. And we therefore expect another strong year of revenue growth EBIT growth at or above revenue growth and 3rd strong progress in benchmark earnings per share. And we'll continue to apply our capital framework with a strong focus on investing for growth and creating long term shareholder value.
So with that, I'll hand you back to Brian. Alright. Thank you, ladies. So we built 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, we're driving towards those new opportunities.
Investments that we've made in our business, including technology, product, 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. So we have a lot of confidence, as we look forward. We're excited about what we can do. And with that, I'm going to ask Kerry to join us on stage for questions.
Thank you. We've got to take one from the front here. We have.
Yes, good morning. It's Paul Sullivan from Barclays.
Given you're sort of
lifting the lid on margin improvements, how should we think about that going forward? And you did a 110 or 100 basis points in B2B At worst, flat seems very, very conservative. So how should we think about moving answer this year. Yes.
So I'll let Roy 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 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 real 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. And we just had a huge range of things that we can put capital behind it. Now having said that, we are in a position where our higher growth rates There are really two stage discussion. 1, annual business produce operating leverage, absolutely, yes, you can, and it is.
And then if it's a choice as to, is it better to let that level drop through the bottom line? Or is it better to continue to invest in your business to drive your growth in years 2, 3, and 4 thereafter. We think that this year, we are able to do a bit of a, right, we're able to hopefully the performance was strong enough to allow us to, as you say, benchmark, yeah, flat, hopefully a bit better than that. And the rest will really be about exactly how fast and where we continue to put capital in the P and L to work. And that to us is a very important factor as we look at the long term growth of business.
Yes, the only thing to add is, clearly, at these product lines, it creates significant optionality for us. And we're in that dynamic environment. You see that across all of our markets, great opportunities to invest. That will be our priority. But 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 given the opportunities we've got to invest, but clearly we've got optionality.
The 14% growth you saw in in U. S. Credit services. So focus shifts to the sustainability of that growth, how did 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 Harry to jump in on this, but I mean, a large part of it is actually the products that we've introduced. I mean, we can point to specific contract values that we've got for ASCEND, for example, it still didn't exist. 6 months ago. It's very strong. So yeah, the cycle is, the environment is good.
So there's no doubt that there's a bit of benefit from that. But the supersize growth you're seeing on top of that is really the stuff we're doing. I guess the probably the litmus test on that is, as we said, this is the strongest growth that we've have had in credit services. Since any of us can remember, and Gary, we probably have a longer memory than most of us in that. But, so I think it's really a lot of it is what we're doing in the context of a good environment.
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 the share. Besides that, it's all within the normal operations of the business. It's driving the growth.
So 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 at this year, we've been fairly flat on that in North America. The reason is that's really that. And that shows the strength of that product offering alongside our credit service sale in North American. That that's a sticky cell when you combine them.
It's a pretty unique cell for us.
Matija Gerbert from Goldman Sachs. A couple of questions on my side. Firstly, on the Brazilian consumer opportunity, right? So, you can say, Hintas, there's quite a lot of debt. We do not yet see in the divisional breakdown Brazilian consumers, I think it will be quite curious to see that will it happen going forward that you will report separately.
I mean, With all this consumer that you have, do you think that could become a business day at the size of the UK, for example, which is $200,000,000 of, let's say, revenues within a reasonable couple of years' time frame? A bit of color on that would be interesting.
Well, first thing to say is actually, hopefully it can cross on the slide, but the the build out of the business has been spectacular there scaling to 22,000,003 customers as in, frankly, just about the best performance you can get for business of its type anywhere, right? So that's great. I think the second point is, is that we have this view we talked to you about before, which is that relationship with the consumer is really important. They increasingly are and will be an important source data going forward. That's actually happening in Brazil today with the ratios of the Gulf.
And I think that the opportunity really starts to come when positive data comes in. Because, you know, we have primarily in that 22,000,000, you have a lot of people who are looking to find out you know, about their credit score and they might have had credit issues. So they're not prime customers, right? But what, of course, positive data is going to do is going to allow us actually have much richer information set and we'll expand the credit market. So that's where that customer base really comes into play.
And 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 built roughly what will this year be a $50,000,000 business across the U. S, UK, and Brazil, which is not bad from a standing start. I think that can Brazil be numbers you mentioned a $50,000,000 to $100,000,000 revenue in consumer services over, say, 3 to 5 years.
That's actually the outlook and the plan that we have. And we think it can get there. We have to continue to scale, with, build that audience even further. We've got to introduce the products we're building those out. I think we will see some acceleration in revenue in consumer in Brazil this year.
I think it'll be FY 'twenty and 'twenty one where the rubber really the world on that, but we're excited about it. And I think it's fantastic achievement. Carrie, you want to add anything
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 consumers. So scaling out for as many consumers as possible is priority number 1. And we already know that some other have turned away from the market simply because of the great progress that we've already made in Brazil. And so, 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 we'll 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 couple of, say, sessions, maybe, you know, that was our stable to slightly decline the business on the educational contract.
Time, it seems that you sound a little bit more, say, positive, I, it's your offers. Are you seeing growth returning there or
I didn't catch what charity you're
talking about with the with with the partners in the in the consumer services in the US.
Yes. No, we are positive about that. We have a very large part of the 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. The addition of CSIBM has really changed the nature of the conversation with potential clients because it's across both a credit and an identity form that really improves our outlook. I think we've got two questions. Maxim, please. Thank you.
Good morning.
Tom Sykes from Deutsche Bank. Just on your margin improvement and the different moving parts in that. So if you're 10 to 30 basis points this year, and consumer is 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 to 10 to 30 basis points to the group. Then also if you look at the cost base breakdown.
It looks like your data and IT costs went up about a 100 basis points, which maybe was a bit of a might have been a bit of a surprise, I don't know, but 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 as marketing costs go up? And can you actually get any leverage on your labor costs So
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 about business. So that's more of a one off contribution. You wouldn't expect that marketing services to step forward, so strongly in a in a normal year.
But overall, as we said, you've got significant optionality, right? In the year ahead, would expect consumer services, things like the launches that we've got to do in the investing behind scaling there. Probably come down a little bit more, maybe from around 21% to around 20%. But, 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 enhanced the proposition.
So 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 count. And so, yes, that's an increase in costs, but you see it very much flowing through to the top line, both through the business. Okay.
Thank you. And if I can call that one question on margin, but 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 that business So are you able to say, a, what the contribution of CSID, the U. S. Consumer Service is granted. And perhaps just to comment on what's happening to the base level of subscriptions, in that business as well.
Please.
Sure. So moving parts are on consumer. The split between direct and affinity is still about sixty-forty. In that affinity about the board partner solutions, you've got a growing CSID business, as you say, is annualized. The old pure credit affinity businesses is declining.
There's 2 offsets. So we've got a growing partner solutions business, maybe a low single digit in the year ahead. And then on the direct to consumer, credit subscription, the traditional credit education, I apologize, it continues to decline. When you take subscriptions of credit and identity together, our subscription basis is now growing. And, if you take the, the new products across both identity and lead generation.
Look out over the, the year ahead, There's a pretty significant step up in contribution from that. So 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.
Morning. It's George Gregory from Exane BNP Paribas. 2, please. I'll just one, I'm just following up on that. That last question, Lloyd.
The just thinking about the evolution of IBWorks and and lending works. Obviously, this year, will benefit from the significant growth in ID works over the year. Just wondering how you see ID works evolving over the coming few years. And similarly, how should we think about lending works evolving over the over the medium sectors?
Well, they're both kind of grow. In terms of evolution, the identity works products at scale really rapidly. We're not seeing any tail off on that. We're not seeing any change in market conditions. We still think that we have a long, long way of growth for that business I mean, 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 many 1 year, it's a bit hard to predict, but you've seen the pace of which we've gone in FY 18, we expect it to continue at a similarly fast pace in FY19. Lending Works is building from a much smaller base. When we talked to you last year, we said we're focusing on identity works first and lending works second. Large part of that was because we had to build out the product offerings on the dice and get complete market coverage.
And the second thing we talked to you about was, we need to ensure that we maximize the traffic for the intent, which traffic is actually coming for. So we've got, that's why I referenced the fact that we're leveraging CRM and exact previous customer basis at current and past experienced members and driving profitable growth, right? It's easy to drive growth in a a business like lending where it's driving profitable growth is the key. And that's what we're focused on building out. So I think we're taking it at what we think is the appropriate types.
It will 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 regeneration markets are 2 very significant markets that are available to us. We've got the right way we've got the products. And when you look at the now close to 40,000,003 members we've got across our 3 core geographies, we've got a real opportunity there to to really progress and scale our business.
Thanks. And just one quick question on the IFRS 15 change. I just wondered if if that has any impact on the evolution of margin, going forward, given the deferral of that, that revenue being recognized. Shouldn't be.
When you restate the new margin comes down slightly, but that means your revenue in future years is more underpinned because it comes back. But no change on growth to rates, no change on margin progression. It's, it's really, it's just a technical a different way that you record the revenue? Thanks. I haven't practically got this far without an IFRS question.
I'm pleased.
Andy Grobler from Credit Suisse. No IFRS questions. Just one on 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. And there's the 2 aspects of this. One is how it impacts clients business and secondly is how it impacts our business because we actually made massive progress in the application of automation robotics in our home 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 costs out Now, that means the proposition has significant value.
Let's take a sense. Where are we taking cost out there. Well, if you look at the job of an analyst who's creating models in a bank, massive amount of time was actually spent in something called data prep, right? Data prep means taking big datasets and putting them into an environment where you can actually do the analysis. Take them back to the amount of time.
Takes up a huge proportion of our analyst time. The Send platform completely eliminates that because the data is preloaded and the models are ready to work and it can take it ingest the data from different sources. So you have massive efficiency being delivered through the platform. That saves then the hell of a lot of money. And so it's a value equation.
How much though, how much are we saving them at this solution? And 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. So, yeah, reduce costs overall, but more spend geared towards the solution that's actually helping that company. And then carry on our own business.
Yes. So that's right, Brian. And it's a good question. So I've got 15 years of watching, the prices, cost efficiencies, the automation in this industry, what's been occurring And, you know, it's no longer about selling data in a credit score. Right?
It's about all of the value that Brian was just articulating. And our capabilities across 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've seen, we have seen a market decrease in pressure on prices and more of a focus on help us run our business better. And so 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. And 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. So kind of two parts to the answer. Lots of opportunities internally, which we've been doing and we'll 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 that we've talked a lot about ascend and all these capabilities. When you're going to see prospective clients, when they say no, why do they say no given 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 and 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 basically say, well, we can't focus on not because this is our problem here blah blah blah or, you know, we, you know, 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 there 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 are looking at and we talk about Lotte Power curve, cross core sand, these products take a long time to sell. Into a B2B environment because of the complexity of that B2B environment. So it does take a bit of time for market perception to start to happen. This is why Xandr has so rapidly been accessing the marketplace.
It's a real measure of its success. But once you get there, I I think it really quickly becomes, widespread that, you know, this is a product that people have to have. So I don't know if you have that. Yes. So a few
more examples on that. In the software space, we might not want to 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? So you might not be successful there because they've already have an embedded estate with a competitor. The same thing applies on the credit side. If someone has they're already buying data and analytics in the account management programs from one of our competitors.
And 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 providers. So you might not be successful in that instance. When it comes to competing for new new software, new analytics, someone looking for new data sources, And the deals that we're competing in, we're winning the majority of those deals are none.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Morning, Ed Steele from Citi. Two areas I'd like to talk. I'll pass it out, please. First of all, obviously, you've won this large trend of data contract. To what extent is Trendedata already, looked at by your core Financial Services clients in your credit US Cape Bureau.
And and why wouldn't over time all of your or most of all or all of your clients use it? So Can you just talk about that, please? And the second, Erez, I talked about is in the North American Consumer Services Division, you've talked about the fairly obvious trends within that. But if you look at the core subscribers within the credit part of that vision, which is probably about half of the revenue last year, perhaps. Just putting your the qualitative comments you're making about the visibility for growth, decline growth improvement in the next few quarters.
It seems like you sensed that the resilience within that consumer base 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 renewed, that's basically.
Okay. And Cary, do you want to take that?
Yes, sure. Sure. So on trended data, so we we launched trended data 10 plus years ago. We focus primarily in the credit card market, and have many customers in that space today. So we've recently then moved it into the mortgage market, which is the trended data opportunity that we're referencing.
It's sophisticated. It's sophisticated analytics. And so your medium to larger clients are the ones that are likely to utilize it. So it's not something that a smaller credit union or 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. But it's it's, 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.
Noah, do you want to take the question?
Yes, I think, I think we've seen this for a little while as you see some of the newer clients roll off the credit education products, you're seeing some you enter more of a rump that's more resilient. The other thing is we're obviously increasing the functionality that targets those consumers. And think of this as an ecosystem, a customer comes in one place and we give them the opportunity to meet the needing long as they need to change, you've given the opportunity to move across. And that just naturally makes it more resilient. And also the access is pretty unique for us to call center agents to help people across our businesses is something that really differentiates us.
So those three things together. I think, I mean, you're right. We're seeing more resilience. Obviously, it's still an area that's 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, and thanks for taking my questions. I just have 2 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 and I didn't catch any specific ranges. Did you articulate those and I missed them or do you have ranges you can share with us in terms of revenue growth this year?
Yes. We're clearly going into the year with some really strong momentum. So We've said next year, our official guidance next year will be another strong year of growth. What does that mean? I would guess as a year as a whole, something in that 6% to 8% range, but we're clearly going to start very strongly.
So probably more in the in the top end of that range as we go through the first half and we'll see some of the new products develop in the second half.
That's really helpful. And then can you guys talk a little bit about bigger picture as you divide into these 2 new categories? I know their business you've had for a long time consumer and then B2B. As you think about the incremental dollar that you're spending from the little, the higher revenue growth that you're seeing, Where are you looking to put that incremental dollar? And I guess maybe it's more of a long term ROIC question.
How do you where do you see the incremental dollar being most useful or most productive over a medium term period? Thank you.
I think Brett, you know, if you look back at the progression of our decisioning business, the combination of decisioning with data is really is really our play. And that's a real value play, not a cost plus play. It's very sticky with our clients because it's really adding value. And as you see, the explosion of different data across different verticals and industry our decisioning software can play in multiple verticals and multiple markets. And Brian talked about the combination of Ascend power curve.
Power curves is a decisioning tool. You can apply to any real time decisioning, and we see a lot of opportunity for that. Thank you.
Good morning, Rajesh Kumar from HSBC. Just in terms of appreciate that a lot of organic growth with new products. But, in terms of the traditional, drivers like mortgage cards, Could you 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 3rd major player seems to be quite significant.
Okay. Do you want to deal with the first one live? Yes. Kerry, do you want to pick up on the second? So obviously, the you call it the traditional growth, it varies by market.
So you 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, but marginally up in Q4.
Which given the backdrop that we thought was good performance. Our core credit are doing very well, really strong and robust. Volumes in the core credit market. And mortgage, obviously, if you strip out the the trended data contract, mortgage was positive because of price volume down a little bit. But, you take all of that together in North America are really strong.
In Brazil. Obviously, the economy is improving. Some of our metrics lagged that. So obviously employment is a good metric that still continue to go up a little bit, but we're seeing a drop off in some countercyclical revenue, which is usually a good early signal. Into the UK.
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. And obviously, we're keeping a close eye on the UK economies some of the uncertainty get resolved in the year ahead.
Yes, the divergence in the growth rates that you referenced It's simply what the other competitors said in their earnings release, which is they haven't had the opportunity to compete for new business. Given what's occurred to them. And so that's, that's had an impact on. And, and, you know, it's it's at the margin for us. So it's not the big driver of our grows.
But in totality for them, it's probably significant, at least that's their, that's their statements to the effect.
So the question was over the next 2 to 3 years, do you expect some reshuffling of that market shared within the market?
I think that we will continue to win our share of the business because of our capabilities and what we bring to the market. And 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 was actually the opportunity to make new market. It's not a market share, but 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. So the new market, growth that Julia, all we're very excited about. 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.
I'm coming back to revenue growth. And can you help us understanding how 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. And the second question, can you clear the Xafra, Cambridge Analytica and company that you have no exposure to any big contracts with Facebook or else, which might, might be kept in
the near term or ever. Okay. Do you want to deal with the price volume? And I'll come back to Facebook question. Yes, 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 of the value goes back in. Through the decisioning where we see ever increasing value. So we're winning more share of wallet and the size of the overall wallet is increasing. So probably the best way I would be able to.
The one thing I would point out is that, traditionally, revenue is helped in Brazil because of price increases, but 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% right now. So 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 that's been a global partner for us over the last few years. And of course, as you know, Facebook will close down all their product categories. What do we do? We actually allowed people to build all these segments according to the Experian data sets on the Facebook, platform. And what it means is that those, those audience creation, that will continue but actually it'll be done, by the clients themselves and they'll still use the data on the platform.
It'll just be delivered in a different way. So, I think there will be some temporary lumpiness as we move through that, but I don't think long term has any impact. And no, we don't have any exposure in sight that I think will impact them over the last few months.
And that and any movement, any lumpiness is included in
your guidance, on the organic growth?
Thank you. Okay. Well, it does look like we've got any more questions. So thank you all for coming today, and we'll speak to you later in the year.