Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our Q3 trading update call. I hope you're all keeping well. I'm here with Lloyd. We'll take you through the trading performance. He'll take you through the trading performance after my opening remarks. Q3 was another good quarter. It was towards the top end of our expectations. Total group revenue growth was 15% at constant exchange rates, and organic revenue growth was 11%. North America and Latin America delivered double-digit growth, and we had a solid performance in the U.K. By segment, Consumer Services continues to perform very well. We're now at 128 million free members globally, which is great progress. There was very robust performance across B2B, with notable call-outs being our North America bureau when you exclude mortgage.
In all, we're on track to achieve the upper end of the full-year expectations that we set out in November. We continue our efforts to help people around the world to improve their financial health, and we're proud this quarter to award our Creating a Better Tomorrow award to a U.K. project which helped local authorities identify people close to falling into financial vulnerability, ultimately benefiting around 16 million people in the U.K. We are also now very close to the launch of our new Experian Go initiative in the U.S. following a successful pilot, and this is going to help millions of credit invisibles to get a credit profile for the first time. Now let me touch on some of the regional Q3 highlights, starting with North America. Market conditions have been good. Consumer, core bureau, decisioning, and health have all performed well.
Consumer credit quality is strong. Bureau volumes have been robust, with only mortgage in negative territory. This quarter, some highlights include further wins in buy now, pay later, continued good progress for Ascend, and very strong growth in decisioning. We're making good progress in employment verification services. The acquisitions we made are performing ahead of plan. We're winning new clients, and we expect to continue to make good progress in this new part of our business. Health has been very strong. The performance this year does include some one-off revenues that are linked to COVID-19, but growth is broad-based across the portfolio. What we refer to as a digital front door, where we help providers improve the efficiency of their digital portals, identity management offers and revenue assurance for healthcare providers are all performing very well. Consumer Services continues to make great progress.
We now have 49 million free members, which are successfully leveraging into new segments. Our credit marketplace is doing very well. We see favorable trends with strong volume growth in cards and in personal loans. Our lending panel has grown in recognition of the quality of our leads. All in all, we see favorable market conditions ahead. We've also begun the process of leveraging our free base into automotive insurance expansion. We've commenced the integration of Gabi, which will greatly enhance our insurance offer and give consumers a better shopping experience. We're highly focused on improving the membership experience by adding new features focused on financial health and to make our membership base stickier, and we're very happy with the progress that we're making to date. Turning now to Latin America, which also delivered double-digit organic revenue growth. The credit economy in Brazil is evolving at a rapid pace.
We have very good traction with our positive data attributes and scores. Our global platforms are also starting to drive more growth for us. The number of Ascend installations is up, as is demand for decisioning software. The acquisitions we've made add further to our opportunity, and we're particularly pleased with the progress of BrScan, which extends our position in the fraud and identity management market. Consumer Services delivered a strong performance. Q3 is when we hold our annual Limpa Nome credit fair in Brazil, and we help millions of Brazilians negotiate their debts, something we're very proud of because it makes a real difference to millions of people, and it is great for our brand in the Brazilian market. We've now started to integrate PagueVeloz, which will update the status of clean names more rapidly.
Our plan is to diversify the business, and we're making a lot of progress. Our credit marketplace and premium offers contributed meaningfully to the performance this quarter. We're pleased with the progress in the U.K. and Ireland, which delivered high single-digit growth. The fundamentals are stronger. It's translating into more effective new product innovation and an improved new business performance. Volumes have stayed fairly healthy, with strength in credit originations and eligibility, and this is partly due to the robustness of the underlying macro and also reflects our new business performance. We've made inroads into new customer segments, like buy now, pay later. Uptake of our global capabilities is also on an upward trend. It's encouraging to see greater consistency in the performance of our decisioning segment. In Consumer Services, continued expansion of our credit marketplace has led our growth.
Lead generations have been, volumes have been very strong. It's a further illustration of the strength of consumer balance sheets in the U.K. and the willingness of lenders to extend credit. In EMEA, Asia Pacific, bureau volumes are slowly recovering across the majority of our markets. Our ambition for this region is to build scale, streamline our operations, and drive profitability. We established strong positions in key bureau markets like South Africa, Spain, Italy, and Germany. We're also simplifying our operating structure and evaluating how we can serve clients more efficiently. We see a lot of opportunity in the years ahead arising from positive structural trends, and there's good demand from clients in areas like open banking and for cloud-based propositions. With that short overview, I'm now gonna hand it over to Lloyd for the financials.
Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As you've seen, we had another good quarter with organic revenue growth of 11%, which was at the high end of our expectations. Core lending markets performed well with strength in North America and Latin America. Health and Consumer Services also continue to grow strongly. Organic revenue for Consumer Services was up 19%, while B2B was up 8%. Including acquisitions, total revenue growth at constant exchange rates was 15%. Exchange rates were a 1% revenue headwind in the quarter, and including this, total revenue at actual exchange rates grew by 14%. Looking at the regional performance and starting with North America, where we had organic revenue up 13% with B2B up 10% and Consumer Services up 19%.
Inside B2B, our data business grew 7% organically, and within here, bureau revenue grew 15% organically with U.S. mortgage revenue declining 21% as volumes continue to decline from the highs of the refinancing boom in the prior year. We still expect mortgage to be a 1% headwind to group revenue for the year and into next year. Excluding this, revenue grew 16% organically as demand for traditional credit pulls and prequalification of volumes remain high. Ascend continued to grow well with growth across all platforms. Automotive grew 4% organically against the backdrop of tough trading conditions. Targeting grew 7%, continuing to benefit from the return of advertising demand. Our decisioning business grew 16% as all business units grew double digits. Health continued to perform strongly with 17% organic revenue growth for the quarter.
Volumes across the product suite remain strong, and we continue to benefit from some one-off COVID-19 related activity, which for this year as a whole, we expect to add around 4% to our Health growth this year. Decision Analytics had another good quarter with 13% organic growth. Volumes within identity and fraud continued to perform well, driven by demand from financial services clients. Consumer Services grew 19%, our eighth quarter of double-digit organic growth. Lead generation more than doubled during the quarter, benefiting from the return of credit supply earlier in the year. Moving on to Latin America, where organic revenue was up 11% at constant exchange rates, total revenue was up 21%. This included revenue from the recent acquisitions in Brazil. Factoring in the FX headwind during the quarter, revenue grew 16%.
B2B was up 10% organically, while Consumer Services was up 19%. Bureau revenue grew 10% organically for the quarter as bureau volumes continue to recover from the COVID-19 lows in the prior year. Growth was further supported by positive data. Ascend also continues to perform well with increasing numbers of installations during the quarter. Decisioning overall delivered 9% organic growth, driven by demand for collection products. Consumer Services grew 19% during the quarter. e-Cred, our lead generation product, performed well with strong demand for consumer credit propositions in Brazil. On to the U.K., we saw 8% organic revenue growth, up 10% at actual rates. B2B and Consumer Services grew 6% and 13% respectively. Bureau revenue grew 6% during the quarter, with total credit search volumes trending above pre-pandemic levels.
New business continues to perform well with key clients when supplementing volume growth. Decisioning grew 7% during the quarter in line with elevated online credit activity levels and new business wins. We've also seen an increase in fraud and ID related volumes. Consumer Services delivered strong organic growth of 13%, with lead generation almost doubling during the quarter. On to EMEA and Asia Pacific, where organic revenue growth was flat with data up 3%, offset by decisioning, which was down 6%. EMEA declined 4% during the quarter, where we've seen a slower return to pre-pandemic credit volumes overall, with the ongoing restrictions in this region for the current COVID outbreak. It's on an improving trajectory as we exit the year.
Asia Pacific grew 10% as the bureau businesses performed well in Australia, India, and Southeast Asia, with volumes continuing to recover. Now on to our guidance. Given the strong performance this quarter, we're tightening our organic revenue guidance to 12%-13%, the top half of our previous guidance, and all other guidance for the year remains unchanged. With that, I'll hand you back to Brian.
Great. Thanks, Lloyd. To summarize, Q3 was another strong quarter for Experian. We're realizing the potential in Consumer Services with a lot more to come. We're taking advantage of unique market opportunities like Brazil. We've entered new market segments like employment verification services, which have a lot of promise. This, coupled with the investments we continue to make in widening our data assets and innovation, gives us a lot of opportunity to sustain our growth both this year and beyond. We feel very positive about our prospects as a whole. With that, we're gonna open it up, open up the line for your questions. Back to you, operator.
Thank you, Brian. Yes, everyone, if you do wish to ask a question, please key star then one on your telephone. That's star then one on your telephone to ask a question. Thank you. Okay, Brian, your first question comes from Paul Sullivan from Barclays. Please go ahead, Paul. You're live in the call.
Yeah. Good morning, everyone. Three for me. Firstly, I'm a little intrigued as to why LatAm growth slowed so much and is running barely ahead of inflation, particularly in light of all the structural positives that you've been talking about. Should we expect a bounce back in the fourth quarter? That's the first question. Secondly, Lloyd, you touched on sort of lead gen sort of doubling again within U.S. consumer. But any more color on the other moving parts of the U.S. consumer business and the sustainability of growth from here? And then finally, Brian, your sort of thoughts on the bigger picture macro backdrop, what customers are saying to you, and any early thoughts on how we should be thinking about the shape of fiscal 2023. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks, Paul. Do you wanna deal with the growth ones, and then.
Yeah
I'll come back on the macro.
Yeah, sure. I'll start with lead gen. For all of the individual bits of the North America Consumer Business group double-digit in the quarter, if you think about the trend across the quarters, we've clearly ingested a lot of subscription members during the pandemic. As we go forward, we're expecting that bit of the business to trend more stable over the next 12 to 18 months with much more of our growth coming from the marketplace business, and obviously with the launch of the auto insurance product set on back of the Gabi acquisition. Probably looking ahead, you more likely to see the North America consumer business more in the low teens than the high teens, given that mix.
All bits of the business, you know, going well. On LatAm, clearly it takes a little while for inflation expectations to filter their way through the bits of contracting. In this quarter, Brazil was a bit ahead of the growth in LatAm overall, so some in the 12%-13% range. The consumer business was a bit slower this quarter, and that's really because we have the Limpa Nome fair, which is a mostly physical fair, and where we interact with lots of people, as Brian mentioned. It can be the growth in this quarter can be a bit focused on the performance of that fair and expect that to improve as we go into the fourth quarter. Probably LatAm growth Q4 is probably more like the 13%-15% range than the 11% that we saw in Q3.
Okay. Paul, then on the macro. I think we see, you know, if you exclude mortgage in North America, which is obviously linked to the refinancing cycle that we've been through in the last couple of years, we're seeing really good conditions. You know, I think the banks are in good shape, consumers are in good shape. The signs across the economies are pretty good. I know everybody's focused on the Fed increasing interest rates, but I think that's more to do with, you know, with the sort of hot conditions you're seeing across inflation and growth. You know, I think we feel pretty good about the outlook. There's no signs of distress anywhere in the system.
You know, obviously, when you look across as big a portfolio as ours, you know, and pick an economy, you can get whatever answer you want. You know, as we look across our bigger economies, say the U.K., for example, we've been surprised at how I think all of us have been surprised at how robust the U.K. economy has been, and that continues to be the case despite, you know, the sort of ongoing challenges of temporary lockdowns here and there. Of course, we do have some particular spikes in inflation coming later in the year with energy costs and so on that will feed through to consumer. You know, generally speaking, consumers face into this in pretty good shape. We can see that wages are rising.
You know, our overall view is pretty positive. You know, we continue to sort of monitor how the pandemic progresses. We're not through that, so we would probably expect, you know, continued sort of spikes here and there. I think the backdrop we feel is pretty good.
Any thoughts on the shape of next year at this stage?
Well, I think, I mean, Lloyd can comment a bit more detail, but, you know, we expect next year to be, you know, a year of really good growth. Lloyd, do you wanna?
Yeah. I think if you look at our guidance for the fourth quarter, you back out year to date, that suggests in the fourth quarter about 8%-9%, and that's after a 1% headwind on mortgage, and that's where consensus is for next year. We'll formally guide in when we get to May. You know, we're pretty comfortable at this stage, and that tells you know, we're pretty confident about the progression of the business.
Great. Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Sylvia Barker from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. You're live in the call.
Hi. Morning, everyone. Thank you. Maybe just to clarify a little bit on the Q4 moderation. You've now commented on full year 2023 as well. It seems that in a Q4 around that kind of 9%-ish level seems reasonable. If we think about the delta, the consumer subscription seems to be kind of probably 50-60% of that. I don't know if that's fair. Then maybe if you can just touch on the Health impact of the COVID-19 impact within the Health business and maybe just the core credit bureau. Secondly, just the free users within North America, I guess the growth in that slowed down a little bit quarter-on-quarter. Maybe just the dynamics there. We do get questions around how quickly that can carry on going forward. What is a reasonable expectation, I guess, of that user base growth and?
To what extent is that, you know, something to focus on given you're obviously cross-selling and building the business around kind of each user to a greater extent with more products anyway. Then finally, on margins in the U.K. and EMEA Asia Pac, just to check in on the previous comments. You said the U.K. margins should be reaching 30% at some point over the next few years, and then EMEA and Asia Pac should be profitable going forward. Just to check in on those two please as well. Thank you.
Okay. I think there's... I'll start with the UK and EMEA Asia Pacific. Yeah, no change to what we said before. The long-term guidance for the UK over 5 years is to get that back to 30% margins. This is the first year of that. You've seen in the first half's results a strong bounce back. You know, progression from here will be, you know, more ratable over that the next 4 years. On EMEA Asia Pacific, we're expecting an improvement in profitability this year, as we said. Then, you know, our goal is to really improve the financial performance of that business, and we'll have a bit more to say about that in May.
On the consumer user base, you know, we're continuing to add millions of free members across the base. A year back this year, Q1, we were 116 million, then 122 million, now 128 million. Some really good progress across that base. Naturally, you know, there are diminishing returns as you get up into a high penetration across those user base. Our goal is to expand that and continue to expand it, but to drive engagement with products. That's really where we're targeting all of the investment that we're making across the consumer base. We've got a pretty powerful distribution engine there.
Our goal is to be able to provide you know additional functionality into that consumer base, create value through that. Then just on the outlook, let's say 11% you know this quarter and in that 8%-9% range. Moving parts there. Clearly, we've got elevated growth in Q3 on Health. Some areas of elevation around the holiday season in the bureau in North America, etc. We probably expect North America to come down a bit, Brazil to go up a bit, EMEA Asia Pacific to get better. The U.K. B2B business will probably get a little bit better, but then the subscription business would moderate the consumer business a bit in the U.K. Those are roughly the moving parts. But you know, trajectory into Q4 and next year, underlying in the 9%-10% range with a 1% headwind of mortgages is where we're looking just now.
Sylvia did disconnect, so, I'm not sure if she wants to ask anything else. She just needs to press star one to come back in again. Okay. Would you like to take the next question?
Yes, please.
Yeah, no problem. It comes from Anvesh Agrawal from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. You're live in the call.
Hi, good morning. Just got a couple of follow-ups on what's been asked already, really. In Brazil, I mean, with sort of Limpa Nome probably sort of comping out and eCred still ramping up, can we be in sort of a couple of quarters where we see slightly slower trend, or you see an immediate ramp-up happening from Q4 and sort of Q1 next year? And then just on the auto slowdown, is that purely related to what's sort of happening with the supply shortages, or is there anything else that's sort of going on there? And then finally, the CFPB news that sort of came out, and I understand that you have sort of agreed to a new mechanism in order to how to address the third-party complaints. Are we looking for any additional cost from that or nothing sort of materially changes from that?
Rod, why don't you deal with Brazil, and I'll come back to CFPB.
Yeah. As I mentioned, the third quarter's a bit focused on Limpa Nome. You know, naturally, as the business gets bigger, the growth rates moderate a little bit. We're still expecting strong growth from the consumer business, and Q4, I think will be higher than we're seeing in Q3 as much more of the growth of the eCred business impacts it all. You know, as I look back, maybe three years ago, Limpa Nome was sort of 70%-80% of the business in the consumer business in Brazil. It's now about 50%. You can see the effect of the very strong growth in eCred that's having there. On auto, it's just really the supply chain issues that are well-publicized.
Anybody who's tried to buy a car recently knows you're having to wait a long time, and that's pushing down into lack of availability also in the used car market, where you're seeing a lot of inflation. I think we're gonna have to see those effects work their way through that business before we're likely to see growth elevated back into the high single digit range. Rod? Yeah, on the CFPB point, I mean, it's not a significant change. You know, certainly, you know, we will be adding additional resource to handle those additional volumes, but not significant in the overall grand scheme of things.
Okay. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Karl Green from RBC. Please go ahead. You're live in the call.
Thanks very much. I think you've just partly answered my question around the CFPB statement which came out earlier this year. I mean, they made some fairly strong comments about the industry being either unable or unwilling to comply with the FCRA. Just to be clear, in terms of those extra resources you're putting in, do you think that will take you to being deemed compliant with the law as per the CFPB's understanding of that?
Yeah. Look, let's get a few things clear here, which is that we've always been compliant with the law. There's never been any question about that. The CFPB has a different interpretation about how we should deal with mass complaints that come in through the CFPB portal. What's driving this is credit clinics, which the CFPB also acknowledge accounts for a very significant volume of the complaints they put through. Most of these are attempts to get data which is on people's credit reports changed. In some cases, there are valid reasons why that should be done, but in many cases, there is no valid reason. That's borne out by the you know, the number of times that the actual reports are changed themselves.
What we're seeing here is an escalation in volume of complaints into the consumer portal and an agreement between us and the CFPB about how we deal with those. We have always been obligated and always have dealt with complaints that come directly through to the bureaus. I think this is obviously an area the CFPB is very, very focused on. We expect that they will continue to pay a lot of attention to this going forward.
Okay. You would disagree with their contention that there's a question as to the compliance with the law?
Well, we've always been fully compliant with the FCRA. There's no question about that. What we're talking about here is a change in procedure in dealing with large-scale complaints.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. Your next question comes from George Gregory from BNP. Please go ahead. You're live on the call.
Good morning, Brian, Lloyd. Just one from me, please, following up on some of your earlier comments. The guided growth in U.S. consumer in the low teens with stable subscription businesses would seem to suggest marketplace revenues increasing fiscal 2023 year-over-year by in a similar magnitude, I suppose, to what they will have possibly increased in the current year. That's obviously against a base which is significantly larger. Just any color you can share really on the sort of, you know, the implied deceleration of the business. Appreciate some of those businesses will naturally mature, but you're also scaling up in new verticals. Just trying to get a sense of the range of scenarios on the U.S. credit marketplace into next year, please. Thanks.
Yeah. If you look at the current makeup of the business, about 60% is a subscription business. That's both credit education and identity theft, which are, they're really merging into a single product. About 20% is marketplace, and about 20% is partner solutions. If you think about the kind of natural evolution of that, the vast majority of our growth over the next few years is gonna come from marketplace. Credit subscription will have to really ingest the big peak of membership that we brought in over COVID. That's more likely to be, you know, broadly stable to up a bit over the next 12-18 months, before more normal growth would return.
If you think about partner solutions, that's kind of a mid- to a bit more than that growth rate under normal times. It's marketplace that's really going to drive the growth. I think, you know, if you look at that, you can see we're still expanding in very strong growth from that marketplace business as we continue to grow the propositions, launch the insurance business and expand some of the other propositions that we've got in the innovation pipeline. You still there, George?
Hi. Hi, Lloyd. Sorry. Yeah, I was on mute. Yeah, I guess I'm just trying to get a sense for the sort of context for that low single digit and the kind of implied growth rate on credit marketplace and whether in fact-
When you say low single digit, I didn't say I said.
I mean low teens. Pardon me. Low teens. Pardon me. Yeah. More just to get a sense for whether you know that could you know could possibly prove conservative given the pace of growth in your marketplace business and the scaling of some of the new verticals.
Yeah, I think, look, we've got, you know, a lot of exciting plans for that. We've grown what now is well over $200 million annual business. There are clearly a range of outcomes. Today it's 20% of the consumer business overall. You kind of have to factor that in, but it's clearly scaling well. You know, I think that probably covers it.
That's great. Thanks.
Okay. Thank you. There are no more questions. Back to you, Brian, for final remarks. Thank you.
Great. Thank you. Well, thanks everybody for joining today, and thank you for the questions. I hope you all have a good day, and we look forward to speaking to you again in May for our full year results. Thank you.