Stock Spotlight: Experian
FILMED IN JULY 2025
Experian is a global data and analytics company that helps businesses assess credit risk, prevent fraud and verify identities, underpinned by a proprietary dataset built over nearly 200 years. Brown's Mick Dillon believes the company benefits from the essential role credit plays in economic growth and financial inclusion, while growing online lending and fraud risks make trusted data increasingly valuable, positioning Experian strongly for long-term growth.
Transcript
Experian is a global leading credit bureau. In fact, it's the largest of the three global credit bureaus. The market's attractive because credit is a core driver of GDP. We specifically like Experian because they have enormous data sets of proprietary data that are critical to helping the job to be done, which is “Can I make this loan with confidence that I'll get paid back?”
Experian is a global leading credit bureau. In fact, it's the largest of the three global credit bureaus. And they help companies assess their risk when they're making loans.
The job to be done for the customer really hasn't changed in over 200 years. Since Experian was founded back in 1826 by some London merchants, who banded together and shared information on customers who failed to pay back their debts.
What happened in the Industrial Revolution was as businesses grew to a scale where they couldn't know each individual customer properly, but about 20% of customers were buying on credit, it meant that they were at the risk of being fraud or swindled or fraudulent members who would take the credit, but then never pay them back.
The need that Experian meets is essentially they help businesses such as banks and stores and other financial institutions assess if a lender has both the ability to pay them back and the willingness to pay them back.
And there are very different questions, because the first question is about have you got the means and the wherewithal? Have you got the cash flow to pay me back? But the second question is about behavioural economics and it's “will you pay me back?” or “Will you pay somebody else back first if times get tough?”
So as credit drives global GDP and credit drives the global economy lenders need to know both “Can you pay me back and will you pay me back?”
The market's attractive because credit is a core driver of GDP and credit inclusion in particular lifts societies and communities out of poverty and these two things make the market attractive because it helps make us all better off.
Within the financial system, trusted data is becoming more and more important because more lending is happening online. We're seeing more sophisticated frauds come online. We're seeing banking fraud happen. If you can bring trusted data into the decision-making process, you can help us make better decisions and better credit within the economy.
We specifically like Experian because they have enormous data sets of proprietary data that are critical to helping the job to be done, which is “Can I make this loan with confidence that I'll get paid back?”
By having unique proprietary data that helps the decision making process, it enables more credit to get extended to more people in the economy, which helps drive GDP and that comes down to a fundamental data source at Experian, which separates them and makes them the largest credit bureau.
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