Experian 2016 Annual Report Download - page 30

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Chief Executive’s review continued
We’re also positioning Experian Health
to address emerging marketplace
needs such as the trend towards ‘pay-
for-performance’, which will affect all
healthcare providers. We think this will
place greater emphasis on transparency
in the payment process, heightening
the need for data and analytics and
expanding our addressable market.
While Marketing Services has remained
weak, we are pleased with progress in
cross-channel marketing, having on-
boarded a number of new clients across
a wide range of industries. While growth
in cross-channel is not yet sufficient to
offset attrition in email marketing, we
are encouraged by a growing pipeline
of opportunities and a positive reaction
for our products from industry analysts.
We are also executing on our strategy
to more closely align our Experian data
quality operations with other parts of
Experian, and this is opening up new
market opportunities across several
vertical markets.
Over the past two years we have taken
many actions to reposition Consumer
Services. Organic revenue growth moved
into positive territory in the second
half of the year and the business is
now poised to address a larger and
more dynamic market. Our goal is to
enrich the services we provide, making
them more attractive to consumers
and helping to diversify our sources
of revenue.
Our premium service, Experian.com,
is growing strongly. We’re attracting
members who want to interact and
engage, and the take-up rates for our
mobile apps and educational services
such as ScoreTracker are encouraging.
During the year we also launched a
new service enabling consumers to
access their credit report for free. This is
proving to be a successful mechanism
for drawing traffic to our site, which can
be commercialised in a variety of ways.
Since launch we have accumulated over
three million totally free members.
The prospective acquisition of CSID is a
further important step in the execution
of our strategy, enabling us to attract
a broader range of consumers by
packaging identity protection as part of
our membership services, broaden our
offer to third-party white-label partners
and expand consumer identity protection
services internationally.
Latin America
Helped by counter-cyclical revenues and
our new growth initiatives, our business
in Latin America has held up well in a
worsening economic environment, with
organic revenue growth of 7%.
While we continue to be cautious on
the economic outlook in Brazil, we are
investing during the downturn to develop
our business for the longer term. We
have restructured our sales approach in
order to capture a greater share of the
small and medium enterprise market.
We are building relationships with
consumers to provide new services as
well as to collect positive data opt-ins.
We have made significant progress
in integrating our software and fraud
prevention services, which has led
recently to much stronger performance
in Decision Analytics, and we are
repositioning our Marketing Services
business to focus more on cross-
channel marketing and data quality. We
have also taken steps to make our cost
base more efficient by setting up a new
facility in the city of São Carlos.
These factors have helped us this year
and will continue to support growth in
the coming year.
UK and Ireland
We delivered a good performance in the
UK and Ireland, with organic revenue
growth of 5%.
Our business-to-business (‘B2B’)
business in the UK has performed
well as we benefit from investments
made in product innovation, customer
service and ever closer integration of
our product set. Over the year we saw
strong market uptake of credit pre-
qualification and business information,
as well as identity verification services.
We have delivered progress across a
number of client segments including
small businesses, banks, government
departments and other areas. It was
a good year for new business, with
a large proportion of our new wins
coming about from the combination of
services from across our key business
activities. This approach has helped us
to maximise opportunities as clients
have invested in systems upgrades and
fraud prevention. We are also creating
new markets as we find new uses for our
data, such as in the UK energy sector
where we are helping to track fraud.
While Consumer Services delivered
growth for the year as a whole, we
are seeing evolutionary change in the
market, similar to the changes which
have occurred in North America. This
market shift gave rise to some slowing
in signing new member subscriptions
and some attrition towards the end of
the year, and we expect these trends to
continue in the forthcoming year. We are
responding in a similar way as we have
done in North America, by broadening
our product range and diversifying our
sources of revenue. For example, we
recently secured wins from B2B clients
who are providing Experian scores
on statements to their customers and
other membership services. This helps
to reinforce our leadership position
as the provider of scores and data
used by the majority of UK lenders
in credit underwriting decisions. We
plan to launch further new services for
consumers in the coming months.
Strategic report •Chief Executive’s review