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2026.09.25 | TB | EXPN | Experian Fraud Upsell & AI

原标题：Experian – Fraud & Financial Crime Upsell & AI Expectations

#financials #software

Third Bridge · 2026-09-25

Analyst-led • 11 Sep 2026

Companies: EXPN GB

Tristan Prince (TP) Head, Market Engagement, UK&I (UK & Ireland) & MEA at Noto 360 Holding Ltd

Philip Atkinson (PA) — Third Bridge Sector Analyst

Agenda

Key Insights

Introduction

PA [00:00:02]: Welcome to Third Bridge's Interview entitled Experian – Fraud & Financial Crime Upsell & AI Expectations. I'm Philip Atkinson, and I'm here with Tristan Prince, former Director for Fraud and Financial Crime Product, UK and Ireland at Experian. Welcome to Interview, Tristan. It's good to have you here.

Just quickly before we do get started, could you please state either I agree or I disagree to the following statement: You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any such information, or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.

TP [00:00:43]: I agree.

PA [00:00:45]: Could you give an introduction to your background?

TP [00:00:53]: Yes, absolutely. I've been working in fraud and financial crime prevention solutions in the UK and globally really for almost the last 20 years. During my career, I've worked for start-up organisations. I've worked for well-established organisations such as Royal Mail Data Services, and a number of different companies through the process. I've had a very good understanding of the UK fraud and compliance landscape in general, both from a client perspective, working with a lot of banks, fintechs, insurance companies, financial services companies. Also, obviously, from a vendor landscape perspective around product development and go-to-market strategies. In my time at Experian, I was heading up the fraud and financial crime product portfolio, managing a team of 13 people looking after the UK&I and with a dotted line into the US for the fraud prevention and financial crime product portfolio essentially. I was at Experian for four years, again, managing the overarching strategy for those product portfolios and helping to drive the organisation forward.

Questions

[00:02:06] What impact might AI have on Experian's TAM?

TP [00:02:19]: I think the impact of AI is going to be significant, not only just for Experian, but for other organisations operating in this landscape. The reason I say that is that AI does two things extremely well. One of those is understanding and interpreting data and information. From a fraud prevention and financial crime perspective, one of the greatest jobs to be done is to understand what information is being presented, linking and associating that data with other data attributes and ultimately defining a decision. The other thing that AI is extremely good at is interpreting the outputs and automating some of those. From an operational perspective, one of the biggest challenges particularly in the UK markets, but globally as well, is the volume and velocity of fraud and financial crime.

For organisations that are looking to scale or significant organisations that are looking to maintain their cost base or reduce their cost base, having the capability to leverage AI to automate and improve some of the operational aspects of investigation is really significant. I think from an Experian product portfolio, my view would be, based on my background, that AI is going to be increasingly important and an increasingly important component of any of the products and services that Experian is offering in the fraud, financial crime and identity space. Making sure that the AI capability is tuned to the correct use case is going to be really important as well as making sure that the AI technology is providing organisations with those key benefits I've mentioned around analytical improvement and also operational improvement.

[00:04:11] Could you put some numbers on how you see the TAM increasing? What should we think about the new vertical expansion and volume we might see?

TP [00:04:26]: I think there's a couple of things. A large proportion of the solutions that are managed when I was in Experian were relating more so to application fraud and risk at onboarding of customers, which obviously is quite natural given the fact that Experian is a credit reference agency and a large proportion of their revenues come from that. The application volumes overall, it's been quite interesting over the last couple of years seeing how application volumes have switched from some of the tier 1 banks to the challenger banks. You've got brands like Monzo and Starling and others that are taking market share from some of the tier 1 banks, and you can see that from the application volumes that they get. I think one of the challenges for Experian will be as the application landscape changes, as organisations look to new technology, AI, etc, to automate and improve some of these processes, there may be some challenges overall in continuing to grow with the existing footprint that Experian have from a client perspective, both in the UK and globally potentially as well.

I would expect the impact of AI on those existing revenues will be quite significant because organisations are speaking to banks, speaking to fintechs and others from the off, they're looking for solutions with AI integrated from day one. Some of the existing and historic Experian products may not have the ability to integrate these capabilities. You could see potentially some impact and some erosion on existing customer revenue, what that might look like. You might be talking upwards of 5-10% potentially, something along those lines. I think the other piece will be the impact in net new revenue. Attracting new customers, as I say, organisations I speak to in my current role are all looking for solutions with AI native within the capability. Again, if you're out and competing with other organisations that maybe have some of this technology, it may reduce the ability to convert net new revenues as well.

[00:06:36] What would be your outlook for Experian based on the erosion potential and net new go-to-market? Is AI a positive or a negative driver at the market level?

TP [00:06:52]: I think AI is a positive driver from a market perspective. I think the challenge with any organisation that's been in the market for a number of years, it's not exclusive to just Experian. Some of the other credit reference agencies and other organisations have had solutions and products that have been in the market 30-plus years in some instances. Bringing the core infrastructure and technology associated with those products up to a modern standard and then also incorporating machine learning, AI and other capabilities is quite a challenge. For the start-up and scale-ups within this space who have been cloud first in their approach, you've got SaaS solutions that were built for cloud and scale and performance and data warehousing and all of these things from day one, that represents quite a challenge.

I know as an organisation, they're investing extremely heavily into AI, trying to drive AI into some of the existing solutions and obviously into the overarching fabric of the business. I think the challenge is when you've got a historic portfolio of products, it's not that simple and actually, it will take a little bit of time and effort in order to really go on that journey and bring those products up to speed. I think in the short term, that could represent a risk potentially where other newer entrants to the market have the ability to, out of the box, provide these solutions and requirements for clients, which could have an impact.

[00:08:25] Experian mentioned increasing levels of fraud. Could you contextualise that? What increases are we seeing?

TP [00:08:37]: It's a really great question. I think from a fraud perspective, the observations from Experian predominantly come from application fraud. Application fraud has been growing significantly. It's been driven heavily by data breaches, the availability of data on the dark web, but also AI and machine learning and other tools. Fraudsters don't have some of the challenges that other organisations have. They can use the latest technology. They have no GDPR. They have no challenges when it comes to sharing information across their networks. The scale and velocity of fraud is increasing exponentially even on application fraud, but then you've seen things like authorised push payment, money muling all of these types of things, which again are routes and ways in which fraudsters are extracting funds from the system and then sharing those funds into the criminal networks.

When Experian comments around fraud, typically, it's around the application side. Application fraud, it has increased YoY. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the largest source or the largest area for fraud. You look at public sector in the UK, that's significant. If you look at transaction-based fraud to give you a stat, an organisation like Cifas who focus on application fraud will get something like 400,000-500,000 records of fraud per annum updated to their Cifas database. When you look in the transactional space in the UK per day, it's probably 5-10x that amount of fraud that's occurring being reported, being stopped in real time as well. I think there's scale to be had in fraud prevention, but it doesn't necessarily sit in the application space. Moving into transaction, transaction monitoring and other areas is exactly where a large proportion of the fraud risk is occurring now.

PA [00:10:25]: Fraud is, in general, increasing, and the market for fraud protection is also increasing. However, the biggest increase is outside of where Experian plays, such as transaction fraud.

TP [00:10:42]: Yes, I think so, which is why you've seen from Experian some of the recent acquisitions and investments that they've been making to try to branch out of the application space. I think it's also to do with acquiring technology, infrastructure, etc, to scale into these applications as well. Yes, fraud in general is increasing, fraud prevention budgets are increasing. There is a tipping point for organisations. Anything above 10% of IT budget that's spent on fraud actually becomes restrictive to organisations, and you see the level of fraud increase for those organisations. The reason being the complexity of having many different products and systems and services. The smart players out there and Gartner have a report specifically around this. The smart players out there are observing the fact that they need unified case management, unified orchestration, unified risk and decision engine, the ability to orchestrate and receive data from many sources into one place because if you have too many systems, too many processes, too many user interfaces and too many sources of truth, organisations actually begin to fight less fraud than they are today. I think that will ultimately have a potential impact for Experian, but for the wider market.

[00:12:02] You mentioned that Experian is trying to branch out through acquisitions. Do you think that's the right strategy? Would the company need to continue buying to branch out?

TP [00:12:18]: I think acquisitions can be extremely valuable because you can bring new and interesting capability and also new and interesting people into an organisation. The key thing with any acquisition in any organisation is making sure that that acquisition has a place within the portfolio of products, services and solutions that you provide and then ensuring that those things are fully integrated into your existing technology stack and capability for simplicity for potential customers and prospects or existing customers and prospects. I think that's potentially one of the bigger challenges. Iovation was acquired by TransUnion as an example, it took a number of years for that technology to be integrated into the technology stack which then meant consequently that existing customers were not necessarily getting the same products and services that they received before.

Ultimately, you might lose some customers in the way. You might also find that other organisations that have got those things connected are able to attract more customers as well. I think from an Experian perspective, acquisition is definitely a good avenue to follow. It's got to be followed by execution and the ability to deliver value. Customers, the amount of banks I've spoken to in other organisations who say, "We don't want another API. We don't want another connection. What we want is everything coming through the same pipework." The more you can centralise products and services and capabilities, particularly in identity, fraud and financial crime, the more likely you are to generate more revenue and the more likely you are to be able to grow.

[00:14:00] What do you think Experian's strategy going forwards with fraud should be? Should the company continue with acquisitions? Could building out a team around fraud protection beyond the application be needed to gain some leadership sales and start that motion?

TP [00:14:20]: I think starting point with anything is assessing what you have in place today. Do you have the sales team and the knowledge within an organisation to branch beyond your core business? I think that definitely can be a challenge. Application fraud is one thing, but understanding transaction monitoring and even account takeover login and other pieces is a very different ball game. I think, again, from the experience and the background that I had, there were certainly some challenges around trying to branch into new use cases and even new verticals outside of the core client base. I think there's the potential that they can transform some of their existing technology, but some of the technology, they may struggle with. As I say, solutions that have been in the market for 30 years come with a lot of technical debt and a lot of challenges in moving those on to the next generation. There may be some rearchitecting or relaunching or rebuilding of products and services.

That's going to have an impact on existing revenues potentially as well because if you're having to sunset a product, for example, which is often the case, then actually you're going to lose some of those existing revenues in the process because certainly, the larger banks will do RFPs and assessments to understand what else is out there in the market. I think there's going to be an element of updating. There's going to be an element of replacing. There's going to be an element of acquiring, the greatest challenge of all of that is stitching it all together in a cohesive manner in order for clients to consume it, in order for clients not to have additional technical effort required from a development perspective in order to access the products and services and then also incorporate the data. Yes, there's going to be a number of challenges, I think, in the overall that may have an impact.

PA [00:16:20]: What does that mean for the fraud protection market's growth, and in comparison to Experian's revenue growth? It sounds like the company may struggle.

TP [00:16:31]: I can talk from public record if you look at the B2B revenues for Experian, particularly in the UK&I market, which is obviously public information, they're stagnant, and they've stalled. I think the challenge is partially down to the ability to access new markets potentially and access new use cases. I think revenues will stagnate if you continue to sell products and services to the same or similar client base, then eventually, you reach market saturation. Then beyond that, you would start to see potentially clients leaving in some attrition. I think the low single-digit growth rates that you've seen, particularly in the UK&I market. In some other regions, maybe they've had a little bit more success. Latin America, for example, Northern America with some of the product launches. Particularly in the identity and fraud portfolio, I think you've seen quite a lot of stagnation overall, and that's reflected in the numbers that are being published.

[00:17:38] Would you expect Experian's B2B revenue stagnation to continue for the next 2-3 years?

TP [00:17:43]: I would think that could be the case. The reason that I say that is one of the greater challenges as with any large organisation is effectively turning the ship into the market demand. If you think about organisations like Experian and some of the other big credit reference agencies, they're almost like an oil tanker. You can see an iceberg coming, but actually turning the ship, moving the technology, moving the people, moving every part of the organisation towards where the potential market opportunities lie is quite slow. I think that will certainly have an impact on the ability to adapt and change as the market is changing. The really interesting thing is in the UK&I in Europe, etc, there's so much legislative change at the moment.

There's a lot of new pieces of government policy, which are changing the direction around data sharing, around the ability to assess risk. Again, having a really rounded portfolio and a solution and pulling that together cohesively so that clients understand it and want to purchase it is quite difficult when you're in these larger organisations. I think it will probably be the ability to respond that might have some impact. I think the ability to launch and develop new products and services in a timely manner. Certainly, from my experience on the roadmap side, it was often extremely challenging as a starting point to get investment. Then following on from that, the timeframes around development were significantly long.

PA [00:19:25]: What do you think is the cause of the almost sluggish movement from Experian?

TP [00:19:34]: I think it's within any organisation of that size. There are a lot of decision-makers and a lot of different departments and a lot of people that need to be aligned. There's differing opinions and differing strategies and approaches. In a business like that, you have product teams based throughout the globe who all have their own priorities and their own things that they want to achieve. Trying to adapt that into local markets, the priorities that you might have in the UK market as an example, where clients are very advanced from a fraud perspective and a financial crime perspective may significantly differ to other markets like North America. Having a global product strategy is beneficial from a cost perspective, but not necessarily from an ability to deliver solutions localised to markets, meeting increasing market demands. That's something definitely I've seen firsthand.

PA [00:20:40]: What do you think Experian can do to rectify that, maybe a more local strategy?

TP [00:20:51]: I think they've done some of that with their approach to M&A. If you've seen some of the vendors, particularly in Latin America, for example, that they've been acquiring, they are using localised M&A and even in the UK&I markets, where you've seen publicly announced investments in Resistant AI, KYC360. I think what they're attempting to do at the moment is solve some of that with regional acquisitions and investments that are giving them the ability to provide a slightly different flavour of product and service into these different regions. I go back to my previous point around that, it will get you so far, but ultimately, organisations, they're looking for a central orchestration platform with case management with rules and decisions all in one place. If it feels clunky for a client in order to integrate a new solution, chances are they probably won't.

[00:21:54] How well-targeted do you think Experian's M&A strategy has been?

TP [00:22:07]: From my own personal experience, I think my perspective might be that they look for unicorns, but unfortunately, unicorns are very hard to spot. For a potential acquisition to meet all of the criteria that are defined to make their way onto the roster, I think, is quite difficult. Actually, as a result of that, I think they miss out on potentials to grow into new markets that potentially that they could have accessed through an acquisition. I think they sometimes miss out on really excellent technology that could have added value. As you'll probably appreciate, the majority of start-ups and series A-level organisations often are just on the cusp of profitability as an example, or may even be making a loss.

The reason for that is typically because they've invested a lot of time and effort into their product, into their people to grow awareness of the organisation. Finding those, what I'd call, laboratory conditions for an investment often seem to be quite difficult, which I think may have an impact overall vs other organisations that may just buy something because it's a really innovative and interesting piece of kit and then they figure out how to take that to market and how to make it profitable once it's in their portfolio, which again, you've seen from some of the other players within the fraud and identity space as well.

[00:23:49] How do you think Experian could change? Is it being more open to M&A?

TP [00:24:02]: The way I would put it is if you've ever played the game Trivial Pursuit and you have the little triangles that you need to put into the circle as you get the answers right. From a strategy perspective, they were looking for all the triangles in the circle. I think actually, what you need to do is sometimes you're going to have to miss a couple of those triangles because one of the other triangles is so much stronger. If it's a really innovative market-changing piece of technology, but the company, for example, isn't profitable, then it may be that you're buying them for the technology, not for the cost base of the organisation.

It may be that they've got an okay solution, but for some reason, they've got an amazing footprint into a new vertical or market like the insurance sector, for example, or e-commerce payments, etc, that just isn't accessible to you or your teams today. You're acquiring an organisation with an okay piece of technology, but with a footprint straight into an addressable market that could give you the ability to massively expand and grow your customer base and also upsell, cross-sell your existing solutions. I think thinking more so around is this a market play? Is this a technology play? Is it something else? Perhaps being less rigid on the overarching criteria might give a renewed energy and a renewed result to the strategy.

PA [00:25:33]: How well-executed do you think Experian's M&A is?

TP [00:25:45]: Historically, I can talk before I even joined Experian, but before I even joined Experian, I think poorly by their own admission and by the admission of some of the organisations that they've made acquisitions from. I think as with any kind of large organisation that buys another organisation, there can be a lot of attrition of staff in the process. There can be a lot of attrition of knowledge and information. You take the 41st Parameter acquisition as well that Experian had made very quickly after a number of people from that organisation had left and moved on to pastures new, which leaves a technology gap.

It leaves an understanding gap, which has an impact. I think even with some of the more recent acquisitions, I know that there's been a significant time lag between going to market when announcing an acquisition through to the market and then actually solutions and capabilities being available for clients to consume or other organisations to consume as well. I think time lag, definitely, which probably plays back into what I said around trying to incorporate technologies and capabilities into existing stacks. Then the kind of differences, let's say, in corporate cultures as well, I think will also have an impact.

[00:27:17] What might have caused that time lag between acquisition and solution roll-out, or for people to leave, besides corporate culture clashes? Was there a root cause that made M&A difficult?

TP [00:27:38]: Definitely. I think some of that has been knowledge loss and people loss even within the organisation itself. Even in some of the recent acquisitions that were made, people with a lot of knowledge about the organisation left that organisation through redundancy or other means. Having a knowledge gap in the organisation around the technology and the solution is going to have an impact on your ability to integrate something new into something that exists for sure. I think from a cultural perspective, some of the challenges there relate to different objectives. You look at an organisation that's been specialising in one particular thing for a number of years, whose people are aligned to taking that to market and developing it and then trying to disseminate that capability across multiple different use cases in an organisation with many different priorities and many different products and services that they're taking to market, I think, can be a challenge. What can often happen is people get lost within the organisation and I think lose direction. I think that has an impact on the ability to integrate these acquisitions and solutions into any business, not just Experian.

[00:29:04] What about the market's growth potential? Does Experian needing new solutions and M&A being difficult peg it into that stagnant fraud protection or solutions growth with a limited scope for upside even if there's M&A? How does this fit into the revenue picture?

TP [00:29:28]: I think I would position it as this. There's an overarching strategy and direction of travel within Experian, which you've seen from the Ascend technology platform, which is to try to deliver everything in one place. Within that process, some of the existing solutions and capabilities may get caught in the crossfire and dropped or replaced over time, but that's going to take time. I think they're in the messy middle phase at the moment, potentially where they're trying to upgrade and improve existing technology. They're rationalising products and capabilities, which again will have a roll-on impact in revenues. I would be probably expecting to see something in the low single digits from a growth perspective within that portfolio and maybe even within the B2B business as a whole certainly within the UK& I and potentially rolling into that globally.

I think Experian as an entity certainly has some growth markets. As I mentioned earlier, the Latin American market, certainly, there's an element of growth. There's some growth in the North American market and a little bit in EMEA as well. Again, I think given the existing technology stack, some of the challenges around speed to delivery, the challenges around even speed to integration and providing products and services to clients means that really single-digit growth, potentially lower end single-digit growth is probably what could be anticipated for the business, at least for the next couple of years.

PA [00:31:10]: Would M&A meaningfully change the story? When might that be visible?

TP [00:31:20]: With any organisation from an M&A conversation beginning, even concluding, my experience has always been at least 1-2, if not 2-3 years before you begin to see meaningful adoption uplift, integration capability to deliver as well. I think that will certainly have an impact on any uplift that could be delivered via some of the acquisitions.

[00:31:59] Could you contextualise long product development timelines? How long might it take Experian to develop new solutions vs competitors?

TP [00:32:12]: Compared to competitors, I can speak based on my experience within the current business that I work now, vastly longer timeframe. You're probably talking about from concept and initiation to funding to sign off at least a couple of years to get a meaningful product to market. That's with a strong wind blowing behind and global backing. For capability to be up and running within a business like the one that I work at the moment, you could be talking a couple of months for launching a new product or capability or integrating a new solution. I think that's going to be the challenge for a lot of these large organisations where they have got these historic product portfolios and capabilities is making changes in solutions that were created 20-30 years ago becomes increasingly difficult. Maintaining pace with the speed at which new capabilities and solutions are coming to market is going to be a real challenge.

[00:33:33] Do you expect any customer churn risk with platforms such as Ascend or CrossCore being displaced by competitors or by AI?

TP [00:33:55]: I can't speak for what I've seen recently other than what I've seen from engaging with the wider market in my current role. In my current role, I have definitely seen organisations that historically may or could have been clients moving to new technology solutions. I've seen clients building their own data warehouses, putting development teams offshore, building infrastructure and capability and moving away from vendor-led solutions. We're talking tier 1 banks that are moving away from vendor solutions because the combination between more cost-effective development resource offshore plus reduced costs for cloud storage and data overall, plus reduced development costs as a result of AI and other technologies and just general technological improvements are giving them the ability to step away from vendor lock-in with some historic agreements and actually moving to building stuff themselves or moving to a model where they just source data rather than paying for platforms and capabilities.

To answer your question specifically, without being able to reduce the cost base for a platform or a service and then consequently also improve the quality of the product and the service moving forward, that's going to cause customer attrition. It's definitely going to cause customer attrition. I think the market is pushing some of that, as I say, with technology improvements and reductions in cost. I think also the amount of new vendors that are opening up in the market, yes, it's definitely going to have an impact.

PA [00:35:48]: Quite often when we're looking at platform narratives, there's a platform, you build on to a platform that creates stickiness, but that attrition could also take place on the Ascend platform.

TP [00:36:02]: Absolutely. I think the reason for that is potentially the way in which it's architected and created. Ascend, as you'll see from the public materials from Experian, the Ascend vision was to have a technology platform with everything in one place where clients could flick on and access new services, products, insights, data, analytics, all of these different things through one platform. The reality of that is particularly in the identity and fraud space, there's still development effort and work required in order to enable products and services. Flicking a switch for one of the historic solutions that Experian have for a client isn't really that simple.

You're talking flicking a switch and potentially a 12-20-week delivery timeframe with time, effort and resource required client side and within the business to enable a product or service to become live. If you look at things like device behavioural biometrics where clients will need to deploy SDKs, web snippets, JavaScripts, etc, again, there's development effort required in order to do that. Depending on the product and the type of product and the way in which that product is going to be used, there's a level of complexity, which means that having everything in one place on paper vs having everything in one place in reality are two very different things. I think that will certainly have an impact on potentially the success of the Ascend platform and other pieces as that starts to pan out.

[00:37:38] To what extent would API [application programming interface] calls be impacted? Would Experian be retained as a data provider and still see some data consumption?

TP [00:37:57]: It's a really interesting question. I think if you look at, for example, the CrossCore universe within Experian, which is predominantly third-party solutions being incorporated into the CrossCore platform. You've got solutions like Emailage as an example, Sardine, which is a device and behavioural biometrics capability. You've got a lot of third-party solutions, which are data elements, which are providing value for a specific task like risking an e-mail address or risking a device or an interaction. Some of these services and solutions, there's potentially a risk that if organisations decide they don't need platforms or they want to build their own, they will go directly to these vendors for those solutions, which means there's no requirement for those data elements. There will certainly be some proprietary data elements within the business that organisations may need to come directly for.

Unless you're wrapping additional value adds around that, it becomes very difficult to justify the price point for providing, for example, an application fraud platform where actually the core value that's being delivered from the application fraud platform is an application fraud bureau, something like Cifas as an example, where Cifas now offer direct APIs and solutions anyway. I think there's definitely going to be the potential for attrition given a lot of the data elements adding value within the process are third-party data elements, not necessarily proprietary assets. That's going to be a challenge, I think, is maintaining value, maintaining unique assets and insights to retain customers in the existing software universe that they have.

[00:39:54] Management mentioned opportunities for Experian which might come from increased volume around AI. Do you see any products where fraud and financial crime might drive increased revenue?

TP [00:40:15]: There's certainly some. There's a lot of headwind in the UK at the moment or the move from one-off remediation and one-off batch processing to more ongoing customer monitoring, ongoing customer due diligence, ongoing monitoring for watch list, PEP, sanctions and other pieces. There's some market headwinds and a desire from organisations to move away from the historic processes to modern technology stacks and solutions that can help them manage risk for customers across the customer life cycle. There's definitely a market opportunity. I think the challenge and can reference obviously the KYC360 acquisition that occurred recently and Resistant AI and other pieces that have occurred. These are attempting to get access to technology and solutions that can help support with some of these things.

Part of that is probably linked to delivery of existing roadmap and speed to market. If there is a market opportunity, would you get the investments on, could you build it? Could you deploy it? Could you integrate it into the existing stack in a timeframe that meets the market demand that can potentially be a challenge? I think these acquisitions are potentially ways in which they are attempting to meet some of the market demand without necessarily some of the challenges that could be present. Yes, so I think there's definitely a market opportunity. Are they well set up to service that market requirement? I think that waits to be seen really.

[00:42:07] What attach rate do you think fraud tools have today into the existing customer base as a percentage?

TP [00:42:28]: I would probably say it's probably in the low double digits, maybe somewhat lower than that. I think as a credit reference agency, the large proportion of the revenues obviously come from the credit side of the business. In my tenure there, one of the greater challenges we had really was the incentivisation of salespeople against selling additional products and services. Salespeople are quite heavily coin-operated, as you can imagine. They tend to try to find their way to the easiest way to make their target and make their bonus. If there's no specific requirement around selling additional products and services, you tend to find they sell the stuff that's easy, that they know that's simple to take to market.

Fraud prevention solutions, financial crime prevention solutions are not simple, are not easy, require a lot of understanding and expertise, which is why the organisation had invested quite heavily in consultants and experts in order to try to support the sales team with those conversations. I think when I left the business, there was certainly an indication that they were only scratching the surface really with regards to the footprint in those product portfolios for the clients. I think part of that was down to expertise and part of that was down to the way in which the sales teams were incentivised.

[00:43:59] Do you think that there's an opportunity organically to increase penetration, for instance, with a different sales approach? Have customers already gone with a competitor?

TP [00:44:15]: My general feeling is some of the competitors that are in the market have been able to move faster and bring solutions to market that make them incredibly sticky and incredibly difficult to displace. Potentially, the boat has been missed somewhat for some of these organisations. I think retention continues to be a massive focus for the organisation, trying to retain those existing revenues, trying to show innovation within those existing portfolios of products, is the number one priority because the ability to attract and close net new customers in a very competitive market with some very innovative solutions and capabilities that are all-encompassing is quite challenging. Yes, I think there's a market opportunity. Are they set up? Do they have the knowledge and the experience and the sales team and the portfolio of products to be able to service it, to be answered, I would say.

[00:45:28] Do you think Experian can meaningfully increase penetration? Would any growth have to rely predominantly on net new customers?

TP [00:45:38]: It probably goes back to some of the points that we were discussing around the M&A strategy, which is there are open markets right now that are not a priority to the business that potentially are extremely lucrative seems from an identity fraud and financial crime perspective. Without the expertise and the focus of the business to those sectors, it really limits growth. Predominantly, the core focus, given the nature of its core business has been banking and financial services, where you look at things like the gig economy, you look at payment service providers, you look at e-commerce and e-retail even and some of these other areas.

There's massively growing, expanding markets that are growing significantly YoY that are looking for solutions and looking for capabilities, but continue to not necessarily be a focus for the organisation. Unless there's a fundamental change in the strategy to step away from the traditional customers that it serves and to also upskill and bring in the right people with the right knowledge about these new verticals, gaming, gambling, other areas as well, I think there could be stagnation. I think it's a slowly increasing gap in technology that could potentially be seen. I think there's certainly a gap in specialist market knowledge, particularly in the fraud and identity space that may limit.

[00:47:18] How are fraud solutions monetised? Is it through increased API calls or subscription? What's the pricing model?

TP [00:47:29]: There's a number of different models, depending on the solution and the product and the service really. The majority of platform capabilities essentially is a licensing model. There'll be an element of licence associated with the platform itself. There may be licensing costs or per transaction or per API calls for additional services and products within that, some of which might be owned, some of which might be third party. Some of the newer initiatives, I think, would focus more on holistic cost for things like customer management overall. I'll give you an example. For example, in device and behavioural biometrics and understanding ongoing risk of a customer across the customer journey, rather than paying every single time that customer logs into a website or processes a transaction, you would pay a one-off cost per customer per annum, as an example. There's a couple of different commercial models within there. The core is really like a platform or licence cost for some of the more historic solutions and then individual API calls for different products and services, again, with some variance on that between it being a transactional or application-based charge vs a per customer charge.

[00:48:55] You're expecting stagnation in B2B revenues. Consensus is also somewhat negative, anticipating B2B revenue to decrease from 2026's 13% highs to 10% in 2027 and 7% in 2028. That is still slightly above 2024-25's performance. Do you agree with that? Could Experian move towards single digit?

TP [00:49:30]: Bear in mind, obviously, I've been out of the business for a little period of time. My perspective would be unless something fundamentally has changed in the organisation since I left, then I would expect to see low single-digit, if not negative growth, potentially. The reason I say that is there has been a significant amount of resources that have left the organisation. The size of the team overall, particularly in the UK&I cross-product portfolios has been significantly reduced. Now I know, obviously, technology and other things can help to plug some of that gap. I think the number of people on the ground in order to achieve that growth has significantly reduced within the organisation. I think fundamentally, the sales strategy and approach has not changed for a number of years and probably preceding my tenure at the organisation has been fairly static. The challenge will be if you have less people with the same strategy taking the same approach to the same clients who are being attracted by other vendors and having changing priorities due to market conditions, could you expect to see significant growth? I would probably suggest that maybe not.

[00:50:53] What opportunity might Experian's model risk management tool driving for the company? It's built on top of Ascend. What attach rate would you expect to see for FY27 for the model risk, the machine learning piece?

TP [00:51:17]: Yes, it's a really interesting one. I can comment on this from years of experience of working in data and solutions. Fundamentally, in order for machine learning models to be successful, you need a strong data foundation. From that strong data foundation, which means mapping all of the different data elements and attributes that an organisation can receive. You then need to build features and you need to build profiles from that data in order to make it really effective in order to train models, in order to look for patterns and changes. I think one of the greatest challenges will be the ability for the existing and historic portfolio of solutions to provide data in a timely manner for that data to be mapped to central points where models can be used to deliver value and for it to do it in a timeframe that makes it suitable for the task in hand.

We're talking sub 200 milliseconds, unlimited transactions per second potentially when you get into things like payments and transactions, where you would need a decision from a model in that timeframe whether or not the data could be collected, whether or not the data could be indexed, libraried, available and then a decision made and output in a timely enough manner, I think still waits to be seen. Again, there may be some adoption. I would assume that the majority of that adoption will probably be in the core business credit side of the organisation. Whether or not that can easily be leveraged into fraud and identity products, where you've got portfolios of solutions, some of which are provided by third parties with different SLAs and data sources and schemas and information, anything. To me, it sounds quite an impossible task, but that's based on my background in data and analytics and fraud and financial crime.

[00:53:19] Do you think building on top of Ascend creates a virtuous cycle for Ascend usage, keeping customers there? You mentioned Ascend is also potentially at risk for churn. Could this add more revenue risk where whole chunks can be taken out?

TP [00:53:42]: I think any time you move everything to one single place like a contract or whatever, it's a case of all your eggs in one basket and then that basket effectively, potentially, becomes something that could be replaced. I think from an Ascend technology perspective, trying to integrate all of the existing and historic solutions and new solutions all into one place as well comes with a massive amount of technical effort and technical depth which means that in some instances, things take a lot longer than anticipated and cost a lot more money to do so, which means that in the interim, while things are being integrated, new features, new capabilities are not being delivered. You find you've got this centralisation of development efforts, centralisation of resource, attempting to try to bring everything together. If you look at a credit use case or how a credit person would use case management, machine learning, AI even and all of the legislation associated with credit like consumer duty rather, it's a very, very different application and a very different use case with very different things that jobs to be done than someone who's investigating high-level fraud.

A credit person needs to be absolutely sniper accurate with regards to their interpretation of data relating to the individual, and they need to be able to explain why they've made that decision. Where in a fraud use case, you're looking to try to understand, are these 10 different people with different e-mail addresses that may or may not share a first name? Is it the same person that's making an application? You look at centralisation of capability, centrally building capability like case management and machine learning capability vs the different use cases that the organisation has, it's going to cause challenges, I think, over time as their product roadmaps begin to converge and actually the use cases get forgotten in the process.

[00:55:52] Does Ascend provide resilience for Experian usage even if customers change their internal systems to capitalise on AI? Would they still be reliant on Ascend platform, or would that component go and that resilience is not really a factor?

TP [00:56:24]: The way that I would answer that question is look at your iPhone or your Android phone and the amount of apps that are included within it. How difficult is it to delete one of those apps and replace it with something else? It's fairly simple and straightforward, just because you've got an iPhone and it came pre-installed with a calendar, for example, doesn't mean that you're not going to suddenly decide that you need more functionality from a calendar and install another app. I think the Ascend technology platform does a great thing of presenting Experian's portfolio of products in one place. Does it mean that clients stick to using those capabilities overall? I think that's still definitely to be seen.

If I was a client going to market for a new application fraud system just because something came bundled alongside credit products and other services and other pieces that were not relevant to me like marketing and other pieces, would that mean that I would choose that solution? Would that mean that I'd continue to want to retain that solution in my business if there was a more robust, more modern solution out there in the market? Probably not. I think the concept of it is good in that it's trying to bring these things together. The practicality of it and the value add that it provides is probably still to be really properly articulated and seen in the market.

PA [00:57:50]: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts around Experian.

TP [00:58:04]: Thank you so much.

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