How Experian (EXPN) Makes Its Money: Credit Data Fundamentals

Any Experian stock analysis has to begin with an awkward fact about the share price: Experian is a FTSE 100 constituent quoted in pence on the London Stock Exchange, but it is an American business in all but listing, and it reports its results in US dollars. Quotes in mid-October 2026 have sat in the region of 2,400p to 2,500p, or roughly £24 to £25 a share, while every revenue, margin and dividend figure the company publishes arrives in dollars or US cents. Mixing the two units is the quickest way to misread the company by a wide margin. This article looks at what Experian actually sells, what its most recent reported numbers show, and which parts of the business are carrying the growth.

What Experian actually sells

Experian is a credit bureau that has spent two decades turning itself into a data and software company. At the base of the organisation sit consumer and commercial credit files: records of who borrowed what, who repaid on time and who did not. In the United States that activity is regulated under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which shapes what the company may collect, how long it may hold it and what consumers are entitled to see.

Those files are the raw material for three revenue streams. The first is Financial Services, where banks, card issuers and lenders buy credit reports, scores, fraud and identity checks, and the decisioning software that automates lending decisions. The second is Verticals, which sells comparable data and analytics into health care, automotive, insurance, telecommunications and public sector customers. Together those two make up what Experian calls B2B.

The third is Consumer Services, which is the part most people have actually used. Experian offers free credit scores and reports directly to consumers, then earns money by matching those consumers with credit cards, personal loans, car insurance and now mortgages through a marketplace, taking a fee when an application converts. It is a very different economic model from selling bureau data to a bank: the revenue is tied to consumer credit appetite and to lender marketing budgets rather than to contracted enterprise spend.

Two structural features matter when reading the financials. Credit data is a business where incumbency compounds, because the value of a file rises with its depth and history, which is why the sector is a small group of large names: Experian, Equifax (EFX), TransUnion (TRU) and, in scoring, Fair Isaac (FICO). And like RELX (REL) or London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), Experian sells largely subscription and transactional data rather than physical goods, which is what allows the margin profile described below.

Experian stock analysis: what the FY26 numbers show

Experian's financial year ends on 31 March, so the most recent full set of audited figures covers FY26, the year to 31 March 2026. Revenue from ongoing activities was US$8,425m, up 11% at constant exchange rates and 13% at actual rates, with organic growth, which strips out acquisitions and currency, of 8%. That 8% compares with 7% in FY25 and 6% in FY24, so the underlying rate of growth accelerated rather than faded.

Benchmark EBIT, the company's preferred profit measure, was US$2.41bn for FY26, up 15% at actual exchange rates, on a margin of 28.6%. That margin was 50 basis points higher than the prior year at actual rates and 60 basis points higher at constant currency, which the company described as ahead of its own medium-term framework. Benchmark earnings per share rose 15% to 179.8 US cents, and return on capital employed was 17.2%.

Investors should note that benchmark measures exclude certain charges, so they sit above statutory profit. They are useful for tracking the operating trend across years, but they are not the same thing as reported earnings, and the gap between the two is worth checking in the annual report rather than assuming it away.

The more recent data point is the Q1 FY27 trading update, published on 16 July 2026 and covering the three months to 30 June 2026. Organic revenue growth was 7%, with total revenue up 10% at actual exchange rates and 8% at constant currency. Management left full-year FY27 guidance unchanged: organic revenue growth of 6% to 8%, roughly 1% more from acquisitions, and a currency tailwind of 1% to 2% on both revenue and benchmark EBIT. Half-year results for the six months to 30 September 2026 are scheduled for 18 November 2026.

Geographic mix: North America carries it, the UK does not

Experian's regional split explains most of the group's behaviour. On FY26 ongoing revenue of US$8,425m, North America contributed US$5,587m, or about two thirds of the total. Latin America, where the Brazilian bureau Serasa sits, contributed US$1,297m. The UK and Ireland, despite the London listing, produced US$942m, and EMEA and Asia Pacific US$599m.

Within North America the FY26 split was US$2,363m from Financial Services, US$1,510m from Verticals and US$1,714m from Consumer Services. That last figure is the striking one: North American Consumer Services alone is larger than the entire UK and Ireland business.

Organic growth rates in FY26 ran in the same order. North America grew 10% organically, Latin America 8%, EMEA and Asia Pacific 5%, and the UK and Ireland 2%. By activity, B2B grew 8% organically and Consumer Services 9%.

The Q1 FY27 figures reshuffled that ranking. Latin America was the fastest grower at 12% organic, North America slowed to 7%, the UK and Ireland improved to 5%, and EMEA and Asia Pacific dropped to 1%, which management attributed mainly to the timing of deliveries against a strong prior-year comparator. For anyone running an Experian stock analysis from a UK perspective, the point to hold on to is that the domestic business is the smallest and historically slowest of the four, so UK consumer credit conditions are a minor input to group results rather than the main one.

Margins, cash conversion and the balance sheet

A 28.6% benchmark EBIT margin is the signature of a data business with high fixed costs and low incremental cost per query. Once a credit file exists, selling another look at it costs very little, which is why organic revenue growth tends to pull margins up slowly over time rather than leaving them flat.

Cash conversion backs that up. Benchmark operating cash flow was US$2.2bn in FY26, a conversion rate of 93% of benchmark EBIT. A business converting most of its operating profit into cash has the option to fund acquisitions, dividends and buybacks simultaneously, which is roughly what Experian did during the year.

On leverage, net debt to benchmark EBITDA ended FY26 at 1.7 times, below the bottom of the company's own guided range. The chief financial officer noted that on a pro forma basis, allowing for buybacks not yet executed and acquisitions announced but not completed, leverage would have been about 2.3 times. The distance between those two numbers is a reminder that the reported year-end figure understates the commitments already made.

Acquisitions are a standing feature of the model rather than an occasional event. Experian completed four deals totalling US$792m in FY26, including AtData, an email identity and intelligence business acquired in February 2026 that added more than 10 billion email addresses to its data assets, and KYC360, a UK and Ireland regulatory technology provider aimed at financial crime prevention. Two further acquisitions, the mortgage shopping platform Own Up and the background-check platform Konfir, completed on 1 April 2026, at the start of FY27. Bolt-on acquisitions of this kind add roughly a percentage point of revenue growth a year on current guidance, which is worth separating from the organic rate when judging underlying progress.

Dividend, buybacks and how the returns are paid

Experian declared a full-year FY26 dividend of 69.25 US cents per share, an 11% increase on the 62.50 US cents paid for FY25. The second interim of 48.00 US cents was paid on 24 July 2026. Because the dividend is declared in US cents, the sterling amount a UK shareholder actually receives depends on the exchange rate applied at payment, so the sterling dividend can move even in a year when the dollar dividend is raised.

Buybacks have become the larger half of the distribution story. Experian executed US$725m of share repurchases during FY26, and alongside the FY26 results announced a further US$1bn programme on top of the US$1bn programme announced in January 2026. Combined with an 11% dividend increase, that signals management's comfort with cash generation, though it also explains why pro forma leverage sits well above the reported figure.

On valuation, the mechanics are worth stating plainly rather than judging. Benchmark EPS of 179.8 US cents for FY26 is a dollar figure, while the share price is quoted in pence, so any price-to-earnings calculation requires converting one or the other first. Published trailing P/E figures for Experian in October 2026 have ranged from roughly 20 to 23 depending on the source and on whether statutory or adjusted earnings are used. A P/E multiple simply expresses what is being paid per unit of historic earnings; it says nothing on its own about whether those earnings will continue, which is why the growth and margin lines above matter more than the multiple itself.

Risks and what to watch

The clearest near-term drag is visible in the Q1 FY27 numbers. North American Consumer Services organic revenue fell 2% as two long-term mass data breach support contracts wound down. Excluding those contracts, the segment grew 3%. That is a specific, dated, identifiable headwind rather than a structural decline, but it illustrates a real feature of the consumer business: large one-off breach remediation contracts can inflate a period and then reverse out of the comparison.

Several other risks deserve attention:

• Regulatory exposure. The bureau model depends on permission to collect and sell consumer data. Changes to the Fair Credit Reporting Act regime in the United States, or to data protection rules elsewhere, go straight to the heart of the product.
• Credit cycle sensitivity. Bureau query volumes and marketplace conversion both rise and fall with lending activity. A sharp slowdown in consumer credit origination reduces revenue without reducing the cost of maintaining the data.
• Currency. Reporting in dollars while listing in pence means sterling investors absorb a translation effect. Guidance for FY27 assumes a 1% to 2% currency tailwind, which could turn the other way.
• Brazil concentration. Latin America was the fastest-growing region in Q1 FY27, which cuts both ways: it means growth is increasingly dependent on Brazilian consumer credit conditions and the real.
• Acquisition integration. Four deals a year at US$792m adds capability but also goodwill, integration risk and the question of how much growth is bought rather than built.

What would change the picture

The things to watch at the 18 November 2026 half-year results are reasonably specific. First, whether North American organic growth stabilises around the 7% seen in Q1 FY27 or reverts towards the 10% recorded across FY26. Second, whether Consumer Services returns to growth once the data breach contracts have fully annualised out of the comparison. Third, whether the benchmark EBIT margin continues to grind upward from 28.6%, which is the test of whether operating leverage is still working. Fourth, where leverage sits once the announced buybacks and acquisitions have actually passed through the balance sheet, against the 1.7 times reported and the 2.3 times pro forma figure.

A useful Experian stock analysis treats the company as what the segment data says it is: a largely North American credit data and decisioning business with a fast-growing Brazilian arm, a modest UK operation, high margins, strong cash conversion and a shareholder return policy weighted towards buybacks. Growth has been running at the top of its guided range, the margin has been expanding, and the main identified headwind is a known contract wind-down rather than a loss of competitive position. Whether the current price reflects that mix is a judgement for each investor, and the figures above are the ones against which to make it.