Thank you. Hello, everybody, and welcome to our full year results presentation. I'm here as usual with Lloyd, he'll run you through the financials after my overview, and we also have Craig Boundy on the call, who will join us for the Q&A session. The first thing to say is FY 2023 was a really good year for Experian. We delivered 7% organic growth against a difficult backdrop, which is a standout performance and a testament to the strength and depth of our business. Q4 organic growth for ongoing activities was 7%, which took us to 7% for the year. Acquisitions took total revenue to 8% at constant currency. EBIT growth was stronger. Underlying margins progressed, leading to a 9% uplift in benchmark EPS. Good revenue progress and good drop-through.
Our cash conversion, balance sheet position, and liquidity profile are all very strong. Now let me pick out a few highlights of our performance. All four regions contributed positively. B2C revenue was double digits at 11%. B2B revenue was also strong at 6%. North America grew 7%, a very strong result despite mortgage headwinds and tightening credit conditions. Latin America grew 16%, and we saw growth across the portfolio, driven by Brazil with outstanding performances across B2B and consumer services. U.K. B2B had a very good year with 7% growth overall and double-digit growth in our core consumer bureau, driven by new business wins. In the APAC improvement continues, and they had a very strong finish to the year in Q4.
I should highlight again the Q4 organic revenue growth was 7%, an improvement on Q3, which is really impressive despite the tougher conditions as the year progressed. You can see that our business outperformed market conditions substantially in FY 2023. This reflects many years of development to diversify and strengthen our portfolio and position our business to address higher growth opportunities. What are we seeing right now? As we said in our H1 and Q3 announcements, conditions were getting a bit tougher, and we expected this to continue through 2023, and that is actually what we have seen, a general tightening in lending criteria and a more cautious approach.
Underlying credit metrics actually haven't worsened materially. Delinquencies remain under control, and metrics remain strong in a historical context, as does what is the key economic data point, which is employment. We expect the overall impact to be contained. We still see good momentum across our business with good growth across many areas. While conditions might be a bit challenging, we continue to deliver outstanding performances. We expect to continue to grow through this period of uncertainty. Let's spend a minute focusing on the factors that are driving our performance. Broadly, our growth is coming from a few things: new business wins, new products, and expansion into higher growth areas. Investments we have made in data, advanced analytics, and other sophisticated software platforms all helped our performance in FY 2023.
You can see the scale of this in the chart here across B2B and B2C, with over $1 billion in new product revenues added since FY 2018. Within that, we've had great success launching into new areas such as Marketplace, Consumer Services, and positive data in Brazil, and more recently in Verifications and Employer Services in the U.S. and the U.K., to name just a few. The growth has been built on a framework of an inclusive high-performance culture, relentless focus on client service, and outstanding people engagement, allowing us to attract and retain the best talent. This slide also gives you a few data points to demonstrate the excellent progress we're making across all areas of our business. Alongside this is significant investment in technology. We recently signed an agreement with Amazon Web Services to be our preferred cloud supplier.
Over the next few years, we expect to complete the migration of the remainder of our technology estate to the cloud. We're already well advanced on this. All new products and all refreshed versions of existing products are already built in the cloud. Our U.S. Bureau, Ascend, PowerCurve, for example, are already in the cloud, as is the entirety of North American Consumer Services. Our approach has allowed us to continue focusing on new product build and revenue growth as we transition, and we're now deeply into legacy estate transition, which we'll complete in the coming years. When we talk about expanding into new areas of client spend, we thought we'd include a graphic that we use internally to actually give you some idea of this. Really as consumer behaviors change, clients have to consider every stage of the customer life cycle.
They obviously need to capture customers, minimize leakage, prevent fraud or loss, manage regulatory compliance, and drive down costs. Improvements in these processes require a lot of re-engineering. It needs new data, more data, and crucially, better technology solutions. We play across multiple parts of this value chain, not only for lending clients but for a wide set of customers. We look at all the products clients use and all the operational processes in and around our core activities. Things like what tools do clients use to amalgamate data, what platforms they use to build scorecards, how they test them, and so on. We build products that closely integrate with our existing capabilities to address more and more of these needs. The objective is to provide more cost-effective, better, and faster processes and position Experian further up the value chain.
We've also had great success extending these capabilities into new verticals, sort of listed on the right-hand side of this slide. Auto and health are examples that are familiar to you. Targeting is another. In the past, our targeting business would have seen declines in the current economic climate. Over the past five years, we expanded into higher growth segments by extending Experian's data and identity assets more deeply into the digital marketing ecosystem, and we're now at the forefront of innovation in this market. This gives you an idea of the process of how we assess our addressable markets, and we do have a very large or more accurately, a series of large addressable markets, and they continue to grow as we find new use cases. Consumer is a great example. This business used to be about access, report, and scores.
We provide not only insurance, cards, loans, but also a range of financial products, such as spend management and savings. If you take our core credit markets, chart here shows you the pure data loan, that is bureau data accounts for somewhere in the region of 20% of the opportunity. The rest is actually made up of activities that require huge amounts of data, but also a platform of some type, and that could be for analytics, fraud, originations, identity resolution, many others. Remember, these activities are not new, but the way they are done is constantly changing. An investment across all these areas is accelerating. We also have a somewhat unique opportunity, which is linking more and more of these capabilities end to end to drive further growth opportunities. All of this fits within a clearly defined strategic framework.
It starts with massive data sets and investments to improve data, adding more records, enhancing quality and depth. Superior data is a real competitive advantage that drives new client wins. We've also invested heavily to enhance platform solutions. Last year, we established a global group to bring all these solutions under a single structure to drive better integration and global scale. These solutions address a wide range of client needs. Ascend is an example of this. This platform itself is driving growth, but it is also driving new client data wins. We have many more platforms that either are already global or we have plans to make them so. These include fraud solutions, PowerCurve, Ascend Intelligence Services, and many others. In short, we have an amazing breadth of capability. All of our platforms are cloud-based, and they all leverage advanced technologies, including incorporating AI.
Linking these capabilities is going to drive further competitive advantage. This year, for example, we'll complete the work to make Ascend and PowerCurve, which are developed as separate products into one seamless interchangeable module platform. Clients will be able to go from model build, test, and design to execution without the need to use different platforms. This has many benefits, cost, speed, accuracy, and it's going to drive further benefits for us. The level of innovation we have in the business today is much more significant, and it's the successful execution of our strategy that has delivered these record results and which will help us sustain our long-term track record of delivering growth.
While elements of our business will always be impacted by the cycle, our business has evolved substantially and will continue to evolve, and we expect to benefit from this in FY 2024 and beyond. Let me share our perspectives on generative AI, which has recently become very topical. We have wide-ranging expertise in broader artificial intelligence fields, and we've been leveraging these in our products and services for a long time. The use of artificial intelligence is already included in products and markets such as Experian Boost, our Ascend Intelligence Services platform, Experian Lift, and extensively in our fraud portfolio. Generative AI is an exciting progression and a big opportunity for us. The key point is that the database technologies rely upon to train models is not included in the open AI ecosystem. It is proprietary data.
We have the tools and expertise to use these technologies. We will be using them in our products and services and in our internal processes. We see significant product opportunities. One interesting product-specific example is work our DataLabs and software solutions business have done to incorporate a user interface into our Ascend platform, which we started developing in 2021. It brings the power of these complex systems to non-technical users and enables Ascend users to perform natural language queries. We also see potential for many operational benefits by driving productivity and efficiency, some of which are already in place. One of the most popular applications to use the Python code generator, this technology holds the promise of significantly improving the productivity of software engineers.
Of course, we're also introducing additional quality control and compliance steps to scrutinize any auto-generated lines of code to prohibit unauthorized usage of any data elements. We will continue to develop our capabilities in a space while fully respecting the established regulatory governance in place to protect consumers and to ensure fairness in decisions that affect their lives and well-being. Let's now turn to the FY 2023 regional performance, starting with North America, where organic revenue growth was 7%, a very good result, particularly in view of the macro headwinds. Core CI and BI grew by 8% for the year when mortgage is excluded, and we can attribute this resilience to a number of factors. First, our market position is strong and has strengthened FY 2023.
While like for like bureau volumes have been under pressure in some areas, there's been strong resilience across many segments such as Prime, BNPL, Clarity, and combined with new business wins and continued revenue growth and software platforms have driven a really strong performance. Ascend Marketing is a good example of this, securing substantial new business from clients. One client in particular that was seeking to enhance and simplify their solutions. They did this by re-engineering internal processes and reducing their reliance on other third-party suppliers and consolidating their spend with Experian. We've also seen some really outstanding performance, such as in business credit, which really saw very little impact as a result of the strong new business wins, expanded data sets, and new product capability.
Adding to this is income employment verifications, which delivered over $160 million in revenue and was the fastest driver of growth in North America CI this year. We've established a robust data set with 47 million U.S. records, which rises to 152 million records when historical records are included. Experian Verify can now be accessed by mortgage lenders through Freddie Mac's Loan Product Advisor and Income Modeler. As this chart shows, we continue to add to our client count with 151 contracts signed, including 18 top mortgage lenders. Other areas of the portfolio grew strongly. Our targeting business grew 14% organically and has more than doubled its EBIT over the past two years. It's driven by growth in digital identity, advanced television, and Ascend Marketing.
The result is that digital products make up about 60% of the revenue, up from 26% a few years ago. Our auto business also saw strong growth. We benefited from increased marketing activity by dealers, driving demand for affordability solutions and new risk models to react to changes in market conditions and underwriting. Our health business is the third-largest segment in our North American business, performance was also positive. We're proud to have been recognized as best in class for claims management and contract management. We're introducing more products such as PowerCurve Collections, directly leveraging core Experian capabilities to drive further growth. This segment is not strongly correlated with broader economic movements, and we expect to continue to grow well here. North America Consumer Services grew double digit in FY 2023, driven by strong performance in marketplaces and membership products.
We added to our free member count. It was up by 10 million to 62 million, and the frequency of member interactions continues to rise. Clearly, there is some pressure on card and loan originations, and this increased as the year progressed. However, we outperformed, some of which is due to Experian Activate, which leverages Ascend capabilities to help clients enhance performance, increase conversion rates, and lower the overall cost of customer acquisition. Our auto vertical is also performing well. We're expanding the number of carriers in our insurance marketplace, improving the experience, and we expect to see a lift in policy sold as we move through FY 2024. We continue to add new features. Boosted Rent reached over 100,000 unique users. Premium Performance saw higher enrollments and increased revenues.
BillFixer is helping Premium members to save money and is part of an expanding cash flow and personal finances management suite. The Personal Privacy Scan is performing well, and we're very proud that Experian is now a top 15 U.S. finance app with a 4.8-star rating. Moving to Latin America, which had a great year, up 16% organically with substantial margin uplift, and FY 2024 looks set for another year of strong growth. Brazil is outperforming the market substantially. B2B and consumer grew materially. On the B2B side, growth is coming from all areas. SME had one of its best years ever. Our range of products in Brazil continues to expand, with Ascend and PowerCurve growing strongly and positive data attributes and scores adding materially to growth. We're also growing in new verticals and market opportunities, such as open receivables, income verification, and agribusiness.
Agribusiness, for example, was up 66% this year. We expect open finance to drive significant future growth. Spanish Latin America also delivered strongly as we leverage our global capabilities in this region. Consumer Services now addresses around half the Brazilian adult population. It grew over 30% this year and has moved into profitability. Free membership enrollments were up by 10 million to 81 million. Our credit Marketplace and premium services are in the early phases of scaling. Limpa Nome had a phenomenal year. Our brand is now the second most recognized financial app in Brazil. We're making great progress. I'm also excited to share that we've made good progress establishing a Consumer Services presence in Spanish Latin America, which has been in an investment phase. We now have 13 million free members, which will add to our free members total going forward.
The U.K. probably faced the most economic turbulence last year and yet delivered 5% organic revenue growth overall. B2B organic revenue growth was particularly strong, driven by new business wins in our core bureau. For example, we added around 2 million buy now, pay later records. We now have access to 77% of U.K. PAYE employment records. We had over 473 new logo wins, which was a record, including material gains in several areas such as utilities, telcos, public sector, as well as in financial services. We also launched a lot of new products in FY 2023, which we believe will drive our growth in FY 2024. Lenders, while cautious about the economic outlook, they're well capitalized, and they've continued to invest.
Products like Affordability Suite, cost of living, and expenditure models will really work very well in this environment. U.K. Consumer Services has been impacted by the pullback in credit supply, but we expect this to rebound quickly when the market comes back, and we're making progress with product enhancements and new feature introductions like Credit Lock, all of which have been well received. It was a year of transition for EMEA Asia Pacific. The result for the year was a stable picture, improving towards the back end with margins on an improving trajectory. The next phase, we'll see a push on leveraging our innovation portfolio more widely. We already see the benefits in some countries, for example, in Italy, which has been a great example of how we make innovation really effective, India, where we've seen good bureau success, and South Africa, where new products have offset challenging macro.
More work to do, but we're firmly on the path towards more profitable and higher growth trajectory. With that, I'll hand over to Lloyd for the financials.
Great. Thanks, Brian. Morning, everyone. As you've seen, we delivered strong financial results in FY 2023, meeting our growth guidance despite the macroeconomic uncertainty. For the full year, organic revenue was up 7%, with acquisitions adding a further 1%. FX was a 2% headwind to revenue growth. We grew benchmark EBIT by 9% at both actual and constant rates to $1.8 billion. EBIT margins were up 30 basis points at constant FX rates at the top end of our guidance. FX added a further 50 basis points, making total EBIT margin progression of 80 basis points to 27.4%. We converted that EBIT growth to EPS growth of 9% at both constant and actual rates. Operating cash flow remained very strong, with 98% conversion.
Return on capital employed was 16.5%, up from 15.7% last year. We've announced a full year dividend of $0.5475, up 6% on the prior year. Finally, as Brian mentioned, we ended the year very strongly financed, with our net debt to EBITDA leverage at 1.8 times. Looking at this year's growth in a historical context, if you exclude the effects of the pandemic, you can see on the chart that we've delivered five years of consistently strong organic and total revenue growth. Even during the pandemic, we delivered differentiated resilience and recovered strongly. As a reminder, we've grown in every one of the 17 years we've been a public company, including through the GFC and the pandemic.
This reflects the diversified nature of our business, the strong structural growth drivers and the innovation engine we've created. Turning now to the FY 2023 revenue growth. North America delivered 7% of organic revenue growth for the quarter and the full year. For Q4, we saw 6% growth in our core bureau, excluding mortgage. As expected, we've continued to see U.S. lending criteria trend tighter during the fourth quarter. We saw continued strength across Ascend and very strong double-digit growth from verifications and employee services, where we continue to win share with customers hungry for alternative providers. Mortgage revenue was down 21% in Q4 and 33% for the year. Q4 included a benefit from score price increases, which helped offset some downside from volumes, which were down 45% in Q4 and 44% for the full year.
For the year ahead, we expect mortgage volumes to continue to be down around 25%, with revenue down single digit, given the price increases. Given it now only represents 2% of the group, the headwind for the year ahead is expected to be minimal. Q4 saw continued strong growth in automotive as supply continues to return to the market. Our Auto Ascend proposition also performed well during the quarter. In targeting, our exposure to digital solutions is continuing to drive strong growth for us, particularly within digital activation and identity management. Health delivered double-digit growth in Q4 as the one-off COVID-related revenue in the prior year fell away. Excluding the prior year one-off, health would have grown 10% for the year as a whole. North America Consumer Services delivered double-digit growth in Q4 and for the full year, up 10% and 11% respectively.
Credit Marketplace grew well in Q4, increased personalization of customer journeys, the launch of new propositions, and the adoption of Experian Activate all supported double-digit growth in an environment where credit suppliers continued to trend tighter as the year progressed. Membership continued to demonstrate its counter-cyclical nature, and new sign-ups grew well across the second half as new features also helped to improve acquisition volumes. Our data breach business delivered strong growth in FY 2023 following a number of one-off contract wins. Latin America grew 13% for the quarter and 16% for the year. Positive data remains a key growth driver for the region. Global platform initiatives like Ascend, which grew 72% for the year in Latin America, and Experian One continue to support revenue growth.
Our plans in agriculture are progressing well, as Brian mentioned, and we now have 135 clients. Consumer services in Latin America continued to scale rapidly in Q4 with a strong performance from our Limpa Nome debt renegotiation platform and a growing contribution from premium subscription services. The U.K. and Ireland region grew modestly in Q4, up 2% organically, taking full year organic growth to 5%. Whilst lending criteria continues to tighten in the U.K., our affordability and eligibility products have performed well. On the decisioning side, fraud and ID continued to perform well, delivering double-digit organic revenue growth, while software stepped down from Q3 due to the large contract wins in that quarter. Consumer services declined 7% in Q4 and down 4% for the full year.
The tightening of the lending criteria and reduction in product in Marketplace impacted Marketplace, which declined high single digit in the quarter. Premiums, sub-subscription services declined as we see some attrition from the so-strong subscriber acquisitions we made during COVID. Our EMEA Asia Pacific business performed well during the quarter, delivering organic growth of 5%, taking the full year to 3% against a weakening economic backdrop. We made good progress through the year on refocusing the business on key strategic markets, and we expect to continue this momentum through FY 2024. Turning now to EBIT margin. Starting on the left on this chart, like you can see, last year's reported EBIT margin was 26.2%. As we did at the half year, we've represented last year's margin for the businesses we have exited during the last 12 months, principally in EMEA Asia Pacific.
This added 40 basis points to our prior year margin, bringing it to 26.6% on a like-for-like basis. North America organic margin was flat to the prior year, reflecting the mix of growth. Latin America margin increased 280 basis points during the year, reflecting the strong revenue performance across the region with increased profitability across B2B and profit and margin progressing nicely in our scaling B2C business. U.K. and Ireland margin was down 90 basis points. As referenced at the half year, this was principally due to the investment in our income verification launch and the active choice we've made to front-load investment behind that opportunity. Excluding that investment, organic margin was up 20 basis points, reflecting mix and operating leverage across the B2B business.
EMEA Asia Pacific margin improved modestly by 40 basis points on last year on a like-for-like basis. Now we're largely through our portfolio review, our focus is on optimizing and scaling the strategic markets and improving the profitability of the region. Central activities and positive regional mix added 20 basis points to the margin. Overall, this resulted in a margin of 27.1%, an increase of 50 basis points on the prior year organic activities. Acquisitions were a 20 basis point headwind and reflects the investments we're making behind the acquisitions. Including acquisitions, the constant rate EBIT margin was 26.9%, up 30 basis points at the top end of our guidance. FX was a 50 basis points benefit, reflecting a weaker pound sterling and a stronger Brazilian real. As a reminder, around 65% of our central costs are in pound sterling.
Our EBIT margin was 27.4%, an increase of 80 basis points against our restated position and 120 basis points up against our FY 2022 reported margin. Moving on to EPS, where we delivered growth of 9% on an actual and constant FX basis. We converted 9% benchmark EBIT growth from continuing operations into 9% EPS growth. Our interest rate interest expense increased modestly to $124 million, despite the large increase in market rates, thanks to our forward rate fixing program, meaning that the average interest rate on our net debt was broadly stable at around 3%. The tax rate is 26%, broadly in line with the prior year. Moving on to our capital investment and shareholder returns.
On the left-hand side of the chart, you can see our organic capital investment and acquisition spend. Net capital expenditure represented 9% of revenue for FY 2023, and a growing share of our organic capital investment is towards innovation in product development, which has grown strongly over the past five years. We made almost $3 billion of acquisitions across a range of markets and verticals. More recently, we made a number of acquisitions in Employer Services and verifications, and these businesses are now delivering strong organic revenue and profit growth. We've also moved into new verticals in Brazil through the purchase of our agri business, and we've acquired specific technological features like BillFixer in North America consumer space.
Over the 5-year period, we've remained disciplined in our management of capital and continue to generate strong returns on our growing capital base, this year at 16.5%. On the right-hand chart, you can see our shareholder returns. We've returned almost $3 billion to shareholders over the 5-year period through dividends and share buybacks. Today, we announced a full-year dividend of $0.5475 for FY 2023, up 6% on the prior year. Given that capital discipline, we end the year in a strong financial position, robustly financed with long-dated funding and low near-term exposure to increases in interest rates on our existing debt.
Over the past five years, our net debt has been stable. We ended the year with net debt to EBITDA of 1.8 times, compared to our 2-2.5 times net debt to EBITDA target leverage range. In the chart on the right, you can see we took advantage of the low interest rate environment to fix forward the majority of our debt. Around 90% of our total debt is fixed for the next 2 years, and around 60% is fixed for at least six years. In addition, we have no bond refinancing required until September 2024. Given this position, our interest guidance for the year ahead is $125 million-$130 million, broadly in line with FY 2023.
All this means we have a very strong liquidity and funding position, our program to fix forward interest rates has mitigated for some time the full impact on our current debt of rising interest rates. Taking a look at our usual reconciliation to statutory results, our benchmark profit before tax grew 9% at constant rates and 9% at actual rates, driven by the strong revenue and performance and margin expansion. Acquisition-related expenses were broadly flat. The increase in fair value of continuing consideration payable on prior acquisitions was $45 million, this was driven by TCC in North America, reflecting its strong performance since acquisition. Restructuring related and other costs is largely made up of the restructuring charges related to EMEA and Asia Pacific, which we announced at the half year. Statutory PBT before non-cash items was therefore up 2%.
Amortization and acquisition intangibles was $192 million, driven by the acquisitions in the current and prior year. There were impairment charges of $ 197 million, principally related to the EMEA business, which increased slightly from the half year on changes in market interest rates. Changes to non-cash finance remeasurements was driven principally by gains on interest rate hedging and the FX charges on intercompany financing, which leads to the statutory profit before tax of $ 1,174 million. If we look back on the longer term performance of the business, the chart on the left-hand side shows our B2B performance over the last five years, where you see we've added almost $1 billion to revenue with compound EBIT growth of 7% and margins up 120 basis points, all at actual exchange rates.
This growth has been broad-based, delivered from an acceleration of innovation and despite the FX headwinds during the period. On the right, you can see our B2C performance, where revenue and EBIT has grown very strongly and almost doubled since FY 2019. Like B2B, margin's also grown, up 120 basis points, despite significant and broad in-investment in innovation. As a reminder, our consumer business pays an internal charge for its data use to our B2B business. Our B2C business today, including that intercompany charge, is accretive to group margins. Looking below our segments, as you've heard from Brian, our strategic investments have diversified and broadened the group and given us exposure to an increasing number of rapidly growing markets.
To bring this to life, on this slide, you can see a number of our strong structurally growing markets across B2B and B2C, which are powering our growth with a chart showing reported revenue at actual exchange rates. Our North America bureau has grown 9% CAGR to over $1.5 billion. Inside this number, you can see how our strategic innovations of Ascend and verifications in employee services are powering growth with many years of structural growth runway ahead. Globally, Ascend is now live with 491 clients in 10 countries and has a TCV of $471 million and around $150 million of annual revenue, which grew strongly this year.
We exceeded our expectations for this year on verifications in Employer Services, where revenue was over $160 million, as Brian mentioned. Looking at our large and scaling verticals in North America of health, auto, and targeting, you can see that we have together $1.1 billion of revenue in structural growth markets, which have together delivered double-digit compound growth across five years. In consumer services in North America, we've innovated and diversified the business, creating millions of new consumer relationships with revenue scaling strongly at 15% compound, including double-digit growth in subscriptions.
We're continuing to make great progress in Latin America consumer services, where we've gone from having a small offline Limpa Nome proposition in FY 2019 to having credit Marketplace and premium subscription products, as well as a payments portal that allows online debt repayments to be reflected almost immediately in the consumer's credit score. Across our countries, we've scaled a material global Marketplace business to over $400 million of revenue since FY 2019. Overall, this growing exposure to structurally growing and diversified markets has ensured our resilient growth performance and underpins our forward outlook. Turning to FY 2024 modeling considerations which relate to our ongoing activities, as we said through this last year, we see a tightening credit market with a generally tougher set of macroeconomic conditions in the U.S. and U.K. in FY 2024.
Our guidance, therefore, assumes a tightening of lending markets consistent with this low U.S. and U.K. GDP growth for the year as a whole. We expect 4%-6% organic revenue growth for the full year. We expect to de-deliver modest margin progression at constant currency. Based on current FX rates, we expect FX to add between 0% and 1% to both revenue and EBIT growth. We expect net interest for the year to be between $125 million and $130 million. The benchmark tax rate is expected to be between 26% and 27%, given the increase in the U.K. corporate tax rate. The weighted average number of shares are expected to be in the region of 914 million for the year. CapEx is again expected to be around 9% of revenue.
We expect cash flow conversion to be over 90%. We've announced a share buyback program of up to $150 million to be completed by June 2024. With that, I'll now hand you back to Brian.
Great. Thanks, Lloyd. To summarize, we performed really well in FY 2023. We continue to see great opportunities for our business going forward. We have a really strong financial position, and we have confidence that we're gonna deliver good growth through FY 2024. With that, I'm now gonna hand you back to the operator for your questions for which we will be joined by Craig Boundy. Operator, over to you.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, you need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, you can press star one and one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.
Thank you. We'll now take our first question. Your first question today is from the line of Kelsey Zhu from Autonomous. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I have two questions. The first one is on the tri-merge to bi-merge implementation, which the regulators are estimating that process to be implemented in Q1 2024. I was just wondering if you can share with us, you know, what you're hearing in terms of whether this will be strictly implemented versus it's going to be lender's choice and how you're thinking about pricing for VantageScore. I have a second question on verification.
Okay, thank you. Craig, maybe I'll ask Craig to comment on that. There's a lot of changes going on in the mortgage market there, but they are gonna take some time to play out. to Craig.
Yes, good morning. I think it's, you know, there's still, as Brian said, still a lot of uncertainty in how some of those changes are gonna be played out. The most important thing is that we're able to make sure that everybody is able to be accurately scored based to allow them to get a mortgage. We think that our data places us really very well with the breadth of coverage alongside that, the strength of the analytical capabilities that we've been able to build. I think it'll take a bit of time for that implementation to work through, arguably with some lender choice going on there. We think we're very well positioned with the data coverage and the analytics that we've been building. We understand how to price into that market with experience over time.
Got it. Really helpful. Thanks. My second question is on North America verification services. Based on our channel checks, you've made very impressive inroads into the background screening space as well. I was wondering if you can talk about some of the latest progress across mortgage background screening and government for your verification services and kind of what your expectations are for FY 2024.
Great. Craig, why don't you take that one as well? Just give a bit of color on that.
Yeah. For, you know, for a couple of years now we've been strengthening the quality of data assets, but continuous with the strategy we deploy everywhere in the company, also the excellent analytics that we bring and the ability for people to access our services, in this case around verifications, in a way that really helps them with their decision-making framework. That can come into choices they want to make in both, you know, secured, so I think mortgage or other forms of unsecured lending. We think the very strong growth that we've had in the data assets that we've got and the client relationships, you know, continues to set us up well for strong growth across, as you say, a diverse range of client sectors.
Great. I think you had a question about the outlook for 2024. Lloyd, do you wanna just comment on that?
Yeah. This last year we grew organically over 30% in the employer and verifications segment. We previously said we would beat about 150. We're over 160, and we expect strong double-digit growth in the year ahead. You know, as I said, you know, quite a number of years of runway ahead of us, given the market position we find ourselves.
Thanks a lot.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question. Please stand by. This is from the line of Suhasini Varanasi from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. A couple please. The first one is on your guidance, which is for 4%-6% organic growth for 2024. Can you please talk about the phasing of the growth through first half and second half? Second, last year you mentioned in one of the calls that in a GFC type scenario, given the current business portfolio, you could expect growth to be in the range of 4%-5%, and given you no longer have as much drag from mortgage, that could even move to 5%-6% range. I suppose the question is, are you effectively incorporating that kind of a scenario in your 4%-6% outlook, and why, I suppose? Thank you.
Thank you. Lloyd, it's an outlook question, so why don't you give a bit of detail on that?
Yeah, happy to. You know, if you think about the portfolio, we've talked about the number of verticals we have that aren't really exposed to short-term changes in U.S. lending sentiment. You look inside the core bureau and the consumer marketplace business. Together, there's something like $1.1 billion of revenue that is most focused on shorter term volumetrics. Looking at that revenue, you know, a downside scenario with that revenue across the years incorporated in our 4%-6% guidance. What might the upside look like? A stronger recovery in sentiment, particularly across the second half.
You know, we think the range captures the uncertainty that we see, you know, in some lending markets, but, you know, particularly around some of the news flow in recent weeks. Pretty confident in that given, as you've seen, the strength of growth we have across quite a number of other verticals. In terms of the phasing, you know, given some of the trends that we talked about, we're probably more in the 4%-5% in the first part of the year, strengthening as the year goes on. We'll update obviously as we go. I think, you know, you've seen over this last year the resiliency of the portfolio to changes in macro economic performance. We expect that to continue. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question. Please stand by. This is from the line of Andy Grobler from BNP Paribas Exane. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Two questions from me as well, if I may. First one on verification again. You're up to 47 million records in the U.S. Can you just talk through how many of those are unique in nature? Kind of related to that, for verification, you've grown a lot in terms of your data assets in the U.K. Can you talk through what your expectations are for that market over the next few years? Secondly, just going back to your guidance comments, are you seeing kind of tangible weakness in those end markets in the U.S. already? Or is the expectation that that comes over the next few months? When you talk about tangible weakness, what are we talking?
Is it down five, down 10, down, or down more than that, in that 4% bottom of the range guidance? Thanks.
Thanks, Andy. I think that was actually more than two questions, but we'll give it a go. Let's just deal with the verifications in the U.K. first. Obviously that market has not really evolved yet, but you can see the rapid progress we've made, particularly with coverage. We think we're in a really great position. As I mentioned in my talk track, I think, you know, one of the things that we're excited about in the U.K. in FY 2024 is we have a lot of new products, and this is one of them. We expect to make really great progress in that. Obviously, we'll update you as we go through the year.
I think the second part or actually, the first question was probably the split between unique records and total records. I'm not sure if we've outlined that, Lloyd, but.
No, not in that way. Within the 47 million, you see, we added about 5 million during the year. Inside the 47, we've got 10 payroll providers, and we added 6 during the year. About a third of that 10 is exclusive and two-thirds non-exclusive. Then the rest comes from, you know, the growing employee services business that we have.
Then I think your question on the guidance was really around kind of what are we seeing today in the kind of U.S. credit market. I think it sounded like specific, Andy. I think the answer is we're not actually seeing anything really different. We, you know, we called out in H1 and Q3 that we expected things to get a bit tighter. That has happened. As I said, you know, nothing fundamentally kind of bad has happened from a credit metric perspective. We, you know, we've outperformed in FY 2023. Actually, our volumes increased overall because we saw really good pockets of strength. I think you see it quite mixed depending on which segment. For example, you know, obviously subprime was a bit more challenging.
Prime actually had a pretty good year in FY 2023, and we also saw some strong growth in places like BNPL. I, you know, I think it's, it remains kind of the same, and we're expecting that to kind of continue through FY 2024. Lloyd, do you wanna add anything there?
Yeah, I think, you know, as you think about the confidence in the lending system, as Brian referenced in his remarks, employment remains strong. The credit metrics around risk aren't elevated and are low by historical standards. The question often comes down to short-term changes in sentiment. You know, we saw in the U.K. around the mini budget some effects of that. You know, we saw across March and April some elements of short-term sentiment weakness around some of the news flow. That's been all encompassed in our guidance. You know, overall, for the year ahead, 4%-6% encompasses a reasonable downside and a reasonable upside case.
you know, of course, you know, we're optimistic that, as the year progresses, perhaps we get beyond the rate tightening cycle, and we can start to see some upside out of this year into the following year.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question. Please stand by. This is from the line of Justin Forsythe from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Hey, Brian, Lloyd, thank you for having me on. Appreciate it, and thanks for the color. A couple from me as well, if you don't mind. First, I wanted to hit a little bit on the countercyclicality, specifically in the subscriptions business. You know, I fully understand that conceptually, and I know it's something you talk about, for instance, during the GFC, but maybe you could brush through that a little bit. Like, what is it about this that makes it so countercyclical? You know, I know I would think that these types of solutions have maybe evolved a bit since the GFC. There might be a little bit more choice out there for consumers. You know, what makes people still wanna pay, perhaps, if there are free applications out there that do something similar?
Maybe you could walk through a little bit about that. Do people take into account, for instance, the savings they get, as a result of some of your solutions when they make a decision to pay, if you know any of that data? Secondarily, I wanted to parse a little bit into the Ascend growth. It seems like that platform's continuing to grow at quite a nice rate. I think TCV on like a mid-teens growth rate year-over-year. Can you maybe just parse through, I know you did a little bit geographically, but, like, what is driving the wins there as you, kind of expand that platform for other, you know?
Also a little bit, you know, on top of that, with the PowerCurve integration, it sounded like you thought that maybe could help, I don't know, accelerate revenues potentially in TCV going forward. What is it that's going to, you know, improve as a result of that? I understand it's integration, but, you know, maybe some tangible examples of how that can play out. Thank you.
Yeah, great. Thanks, Justin. Maybe I'll start off and ask Craig and Lloyd to chip in. First of all, on countercyclicality, you know, this is an absolute trend that we see every time when there is a, you know, bit of a downturn. We've seen it now in the GFC. We've seen it in COVID and, you know, almost like clockwork, as conditions tightened, we started to see those membership, you know, products, being taken up by more consumers. The answer is that there's still a tremendous amount of demand for credit out there. What's different is the supply has tightened.
As that happens, consumers and as a little bit more sort of concern comes into the financial outlook, consumers spend more time actually looking at, you know, what their credit score is, how can they improve it, what can they do to position themselves better? As you rightly pointed out, you know, the product is not really comparable to what it was in the GFC or even in COVID because we've made so many substantial improvements to it. Alongside that, there's a tremendous amount more value in that membership product. You know, I think all of those factors really play in, and we are absolutely seeing that both in the U.K. and in the U.S.
Just to add on the, on the numbers, Justin, so, you know, during the second half of the years, we, you know, we saw some of the, you know, the tighter macro conditions. We saw double-digit growth in signups from new customers in North America. We exited the year, so Q4 subscription revenue growth was 6%. You're definitely seeing that flow through from the elevated signups now into revenue growth, which of course is encompassed in, you know, the resilience of the consumer guidance for the year ahead.
Just moving on to your Ascend question. I think there are a few parts to that. The first one I'd say is U.S. still accounts for the majority of the TCV, but we're seeing very strong growth, particularly in Brazil and also in the U.K. You know, I think that's really good progress. The growth is coming because there's more usage of the platform, and there are actually extensions to what the platform does. You've heard us talk about modules like Ascend Marketing, which actually drove strong growth in North America last year. You've heard us talk about things like Ascend Ops. All of these things are really extensions of the capability of the platform to do more things.
If you think back to the slide I had in my presentation, which showed you the sort of the life cycle of the customer, we really believe that this gives us the opportunity to really capture more areas of client spend by making the processes more efficient, making, you know, things like the use and amalgamation of data across multiple platforms into one single platform. All of these things drive efficiency and cost at our clients and give us opportunities. Really good. I think on the. We're very excited about the Ascend, and in fact we're very excited full stop about all of the integration that we can do across our products. When you think about, you know, the life cycle of a credit model, it gets tested, people pull together, they need a platform to actually develop that.
They test it goes through compliance, then they want to put it into production. We actually have products that do all of those things. You know, we believe there's an opportunity that if we have combined platforms that can actually take that process from concept, design, test through to execution, that's another step forward in the kind of, you know, the sophistication and efficiency of the solutions that we can provide. We're pretty excited about that. I'll maybe I'd ask Craig to see if you've anything to add to that.
I mean, I think you covered it very well, Brian, with explaining how it fits in the credit life cycle. Like at the most basic, the Ascend products are big data analytics products. In the current environment, the demand for analytics, you know, continues to grow up, continues to go up as people are using more and more analytics. But what they then want to do is seamlessly deploy that analytics into production. That's where the integration with our PowerCurve suite of products comes. As that integration grows, you know, as Brian said, the use cases go up and the growth potential goes up as well. That's why we're so excited for what bringing together analytics and deployment into production, can allow us to help our clients do effectively in their businesses.
Great. Thank you. That's awesome color, both of you.
Great. Thank you.
Really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question. Please stand by. This is from the line of Andrew Ripper from Liberum. Please go ahead.
Morning, everyone. Well done on the numbers. A couple of questions from me as well. I'm starting off with one for Lloyd. Lloyd, just wondering if you can revisit the medium-term margin outlook for the U.K. and Asia PAC businesses. Are your expectations the same as they were sort of 1-2 years ago? Just on the U.K., obviously it dropped down a little bit. You've got, I think, quite an important stage of addressing the legacy technology estate. Maybe you can touch on that and how that might impact the P&L going forward.
Yeah, sure. No change to our long term position. We, you know, we aim to get the U.K. scaled market to around 30% margin. The EMEA Asia Pacific to mid-to-high teens. Yeah, the thing that gets us there is slightly different. For EMEA APAC, it's scaling of the markets, the strategic markets that we're focusing in on, and you'll continue to see us talk about that, and you'll see that flow through into margin progression. For the U.K., it's principally in the next phase around the technology transformation.
You saw, margin this year was really a story about the investment that we're making in the income verification segment and the access to records that we've secured a market-leading position on. You know, from here on, you know, we've got a few years to work through the technology transformation in the U.K. To some extent, you see benefit of operating leverage offset a little bit with some dual running costs on the technology side. That starts to pay off in the back end of that period. No, no change to the guidelines. We've got, you know, lots of, you know, detailed plans underway to get us to that 30%.
The timeline in terms of getting to 30 for the U.K., is that a sort of a 3-5 year ambition?
Yeah. I don't wanna be tied down, I think, on an individual year, Andrew, but, you know, it's medium term. It's, it's kind of around that range that you talked about. The exact year that we landed in, there's a lot that happens between now and then. It depends on our mix of growth and the investments that we're making, but it'll be around that level.
Sure. Okay. Then just, thinking about growth, obviously it's quite an unusual year this year in terms of the rate cycle potentially pivoting from tightening to loosening. And, you know, market expectation is for rate cuts over the second half. When you've sort of thought about your guidance for the year and, Lloyd, you were talking about the, potential phasing of growth over the year, have you factored in any benefit from sort of changing macro towards the back end of the financial year? Are you assuming things broadly stay as they are?
Stay as they are. you know, the thing that if you push at the upside sensitivity for a second, the key thing isn't really what happens in the macro, it's how macro feeds through into sentiment. you know, we see that the sentiment, you know, is, you know, is really important on, you know, on both sides of the scenario. That's really what, you know, could push us towards the top end of the range. No change in the macro assumptions for the year as a whole.
Just finally thinking longer term, you know, long list of sort of strategic highlights in the statement today. You know, you've touched on quite a few of them over the course of the call. When you get beyond the low in the credit cycle, how do you think, or maybe you can revisit what you think the medium to long-term organic growth potential of the business is?
Well, Andrew, I think, you know, obviously we think that the growth potential of business is substantial, and I don't think that's just the sort of our reflection. I think you saw that really actually this year and in previous years. You know, of course, when conditions get a bit tougher, some of the volume businesses, you know, growth comes off a little bit of that. Counter cyclicality really came into play this year. The, the secular trends that we outlined, you know, in the presentation and on many occasions previously, you know, all play into long-term growth opportunities. We expect that once we sort of get into a better macro environment, that, you know, our growth will accelerate.
Okay. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question. Please stand by. This is from the line of Oscar Val Mas from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Brian and Lloyd. I have three questions. The first one is going back on the guidance. Thinking about it by region. You've talked a lot about the U.S. Could you talk about Brazil and also the U.K. in 2024? It sounds like organic growth has improved. It looks like organic growth has improved in Q4, and you've won some contracts. Could you talk about Brazil and the U.K.? That's the first question. The second question, I guess, is going back on income verification, and in the U.K. it sounds like you have a market leading position. Could you just explain, is the business similar in the U.K. to the U.S., and are you seeing competition come up in the U.K.? Would you expect that to be aggressive?
The final question is a bit more, I guess, strategically on M&A. How is the pipeline looking? Have we seen multiples come down still? What areas should we be focused on in terms of M&A?
Great. Thank you for that. Lloyd, why don't you respond on the guidance point, and then I'll come back on the verifications on the M&A.
Sure. Starting in Brazil. The backdrop in Brazil to our business, the secular growth that we're seeing is really strong. You know, you can see across our B2B business how that's been driven by the introduction of positive data, which is a multi-year tailwind to growth in the B2B business. The B2C business you saw on my chart, you know, we've grown from a standing start to over $160 million of revenue, growing very strongly, you know, in any quarter in the 25%-35% organic growth. We expect that to continue.
You know, strong double digit growth in Brazil for the year ahead, driven by those strategic growth drivers. In the U.K., you know, a bit of a mix. You know, clearly in the first half we have, I think weaker lending conditions. We start to lap them, that position earlier in the U.K. because of the effect we saw about the middle of the year from the mini budget. You know, softer maybe in the first half, improving in the second half.
Okay. On the verifications, the U.K. market looks very different from the U.S.
I suppose the most significant point is the U.S. and the mortgage market, you know, verification of income is needed as part of the process, where that's not mandated in the U.K. You've had for a number of years, affordability assessments and income modeling in the U.K., you know, which have been proxies for that. Lenders are actually quite sophisticated in how they do this. This is really a new push into sort of moving towards verification over and above those solutions. The market's still really evolving. In terms of competition, you know, what I would say is I think we have the leading position. We've got the biggest record coverage.
We've obviously got the most extensive relationships into the industry, and I think we're really well-positioned, but we'd expect that there will be competition. I think there's quite a fair bit of investment going into this area from a number of different players as you also see in the U.S. You know, very optimistic about, you know, how much progress we can make in this and very confident in the position we've developed. I think on M&A, I think generally speaking, I think we feel reasonably optimistic about the opportunities that are ahead this year. There has been some moderation, in, you know, multiple expectations.
You know, we obviously talked about this last year and I think last year was kind of difficult because I don't think expectations really changed very much. We do seem to have sort of, you know, now that that's extended a bit longer, being to a slightly different environment. We, you know, we're gonna continue to look for opportunities. We have got a healthy pipeline. We always do. Whether we can meet, buyer and seller expectations is always where these things land. You know, they will be, you know, none of these will be a surprise. You know, they'll be in areas where we strengthen our core business.
It'll be, you know, in the core capabilities that, you know, we have such as, you know, our core credit business, data assets, fraud, identity, those sort of areas are the areas that we're all focused on.
Great. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question. Please stand by. This is from the line of James Rose from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Good morning. I've got two, please. The first is on product capabilities. You've given revenues from new products adding over $1 billion since FY 2018. Wonder what your expectations are, what they could contribute to FY 2024 from new product development. Then also in the marketplace businesses in the U.K. and the U.S., could you touch on what you're seeing in the fourth quarter and also into the first quarter and perhaps your assumptions for those businesses throughout FY 2024? Thank you.
Okay. I'll go on, maybe start with the Marketplace. We saw through the fourth quarter in the U.S. strong growth in Marketplace, a strong double-digit growth. You know, when you look within the quarter, some of the sentiment that we saw that started around mid-March around regional banks, that did, we did see some pullback, which is in line with the guidance that we talked about, and we've seen that continue into early April. We start the year, I think with more modest growth in that Marketplace business, but it is the area that recovers very quickly and very strongly as sentiment moves around.
In the U.K. business, that marketplace business has been weak since the mini budget around the half year. You know, we've seen that weak and stable. We expect that probably to continue through the first bit of the year, but we start to lap that around the half year because of the, you know, the timing that we had in there. On the new product, I won't give guidance on new product revenue, but I think you can see the shape of the chart and you can see the accelerating investment and really the breadth of market positions we're taking. You can see it on that chart I outlined.
You know, from our exposure to quite a number of fast-growing verticals, across our markets is increasing and as they begin to scale they, you know, provide obviously a good profit trajectory as well.
Great. Thanks very much.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question. Please stand by. This is from the line of Karl Green from RBC. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. I think you've sort of partially answered this question, but I'll just kind of maybe ask it slightly a different way. I mean, you have talked about sentiment there and how it's impacting, you know, various parts of the business. I mean, just specifically in terms of your range of organic growth outcomes for the full year, have you specifically factored in any changes in employment conditions over the next 12 months? I mean, yes, we could talk about, you know, interest rate cycles potentially pivoting, but employment is gonna be a key dynamic in things like the SLOOS survey, et cetera. Just anything more granular on that or maybe you are just sort of taking it from more of a high level view. Thanks.
Yeah, I think we start with GDP growth. There as we look out, it's a modest growth environment in the U.K. and the U.S. You know, forecasts move around from slight recession to slight growth. You know, if you say modest growth across the year as a whole, where we've bedded our forecasts. Clearly there can be some scenarios around that and employment and how employment varies, you know, is all part of that's all encompassed in the 4%-6% range.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question. Please stand by. This is from the line of Anvesh Agrawal from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Most of my questions have been answered, just a couple. First on Spanish Latam and the membership growth you have seen there. Wondering sort of what's driving that investment. Does that market have any similarities to, let's say, Brazilian business, and it can develop similar way longer term? Just, just curious to know what's the growth runway there. Secondly, you have sort of outlined the benefits from generative AI and how you can use it going forward. Are there any some... Could there be some challenges or if the way you deliver the service can change or improve upon because of generative AI? Just thinking on the other side.
Yeah. Great. Thank you. Let's deal with the Latam question first. Spanish Latam. Yeah. This is one of these things that we, you know, we take some time to build before we talk about it. Actually they've done a great job. It is the same kind of approach that we've used in Brazil. It's primarily in Colombia, and it's actually quite a substantial membership base now when you consider the population of that country. It will be full range of products, primarily focused on free marketplaces, which will evolve. Of course, in economies like that, you do have the opportunity for products like similar to the Limpa Nome kind of proposition that we have in Brazil. It's exciting.
Obviously scaled in the context of that market, very interesting and a good development. Going back to the AI question, your question was specifically on challenges. I suppose there's one angle to think through all of this, which is really the regulatory challenge around that. Of course, you know, we, you know, the provision of credit is heavily regulated in most of these areas. There will be a lot of scrutiny on this as we go forward. Actually this really is part of the strength of our propositions because, you know, we've incorporated all of that into, you know, the products that where we already use AI.
I think, you know, there's going to be some limitations actually on what can be done with this, particularly in a political context. We don't really see any challenges from, you know, to our core business, because I think the key point is that for these models to be effective, they need to work on the datasets. You know, our datasets are proprietary and that actually gives us a tremendous competitive advantage. As we think about that, we think very much, this is a great opportunity as opposed to, you know, there's some sort of lurking threat there.
That's very clear. Thank you.
Thank you. We have no further questions at this time, so I will hand the conference back to the speakers.
Okay. Well, great. Thank you very much for all your questions. That concludes today's session. Thanks for joining us. Hope you have a good day, and we look forward to speaking to you again in July for our Q1 trading update.