Relx held a 90-minute investor seminar focussing on RBA''s Business Services RBA CEO Mark Kelsey and his team presented the Business Services (BS) division, the largest and fastest growing segment within Risk and Business Analytics. This segment accounted for 44% of RBA''s H1 21 revenues and derived 76% of its revenues from the US. A bit more than a third of BS revenues are derived from Fraud and Identity solutions, a little bit less than a third from Financial Crime Compliance and the remainder from Credit and Business Risk. Sustainable competitive advantage Relx claims to be number 1 in most of the segments in which it operates. Its strong linking technology coupled with contributory and proprietary databases constitute the main competitive advantage. Each new customer is contractually required to contribute its data sets to the Business Services platform. This creates positive network effects and a strong barrier to entry. Current growth trends remain solid Looking at the H1 21 performance of RBA, management argued that BS was growing ahead of the 10% divisional average. Insurance was said to have ''longer cycles'', which we interpret as suggesting relatively lower growth rates. Data Services is largely subscription driven and late cyclical with relatively weaker trends in H1. However, management stated that since mid-year Data Services had returned to historical growth levels, which we believe were around 10%. High single-digit growth ''for a decade or more'' Management argued it can maintain high single-digit revenue growth rates for RBA for a decade or more as it continues to innovate, expands into adjacent markets and pursues an international expansion strategy while benefiting from supportive underlying market trends (rise in online fraud, increasing financial regulation, growth in ecommerce and ebanking, etc). We remain Outperform and see Relx''s 9M trading update on 21 Oct. -- likely to show sustained strong top-line growth at RBA and the...