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When it comes to credit for small businesses, it’s a classic chicken-and-egg situation: you can’t get credit until you have credit history, and you can’t get credit history until someone grants you credit. I know this first-hand because my own parents were small-business owners in California. My parents had built an independent insurance agency. I distinctly remember as a kid sitting in the backseat of our car and overhearing the discussions they would have about their struggles to grow the business or how they would make payroll that month. Many small businesses don’t have access to small-business loans or business credit cards, so they rely entirely on the business owner’s personal credit to make purchases. This means that while there may be a credit history for the individual, there is none for the business itself. This also means that whenever my parents needed money to get through the month, they essentially had to put their livelihood at risk because there was no separation between personal and business loans. The lack of access to funds, and the consolidation happening in the insurance industry at the time, led my parents to take another big risk – they sold the business and our house, and they liquidated their retirement accounts and put everything into a restaurant franchise. They felt there would be more stability representing an established brand owned by someone else. When I graduated from my MBA program years later, one of the things that first attracted me to Experian was the opportunity I had to ease the burdens of small business owners through my work here. The work I do really hits home, because I’m working every day to open up small-business credit, using different types of data. In today’s economy, a lot of great business ideas – profitable ones, at that – never get a chance to see the light of day simply because they don’t have the capital they need to grow. Experian is making business ideas a reality by gathering, analysing, combining and processing a breadth of new data that allows us to develop credit scores for more people and paint the most realistic picture of a situation. By verifying a business’s history, its social media accounts, its website sophistication and traffic, and customer reviews, we can measure a small business’s legitimacy, how long they’ve been operating and how they’re growing. This information, coupled with transaction data, all help determine a business’s credit worthiness and allow us to give its owners greater access to capital. Data is a huge enabler for positive change because it can give small-business owners access to credit that they wouldn’t receive otherwise. When used in the right ways, data can empower and enable small businesses to get the funding they need to hire employees, invest in their business or open a new location. In many ways, I’m helping people just like my parents.

April = Tax season. For some people, it is a dreaded time of year when they have to comb through file after file to make sure every financial document is accounted for. It can be a sore reminder that the previous New Year’s resolution of being organized may have failed. With your taxes filed (hopefully you didn’t have to extend), you may have the motivation to get your financial documents back in order and do some spring cleaning. What better time than now, during Financial Literacy Month. This month is dedicated to highlighting the importance of financial literacy and teaching Americans how to establish and maintain healthy financial habits. Every week Experian discusses financial behavior topics on Twitter and Periscope Join the @Experian_US #CreditChat every Wednesday at 3 pm Eastern time It is the perfect time to take a step back to evaluate your financial standing. Especially if you were in a situation where you were scrounging up funds to pay Uncle Sam. Do you need to adjust your budget or even create one? Do you know how to budget? If you were one of the lucky ones who expects a refund, do you feel confident in making the best financial decision on what to do with it? There are lots of resources to help guide you and answer your questions. Take advantage of those resources! To give you a jumpstart, Rod Griffin, Experian’s director of public education, has the following tips to help you improve your credit history: Review your credit report regularly —Your personal credit report is an easy-to-read record of your credit accounts and total indebtedness. Be sure to obtain a copy of your credit report once every 12 months (and especially before major purchases) and dispute any information you believe is inaccurate. You can request a copy of your report directly from Experian or once every year from Annual Credit Report. Check your credit score —Credit scores can play an important role in your financial journey. They translate the information in your credit report into a number reflecting the risk of doing business with you. To check your risk, request a credit score when you order your credit report. You will receive an explanation of what the score means and which details from your credit report are most affecting it. Keep your utilization rate low —Your utilization rate, or balance-to-limit ratio, should never exceed 30 percent of the credit limit. Your total credit card balances should never be more than 30 percent of your total credit card limits, and you don’t want any one card to have a balance of more than 30 percent of its limit. Both can hurt you. Remember, 30 percent isn’t a goal; it’s the maximum your balances should ever be. The lower your utilization rate, the better. If you have missed payments, get current and stay current —Late payments, called delinquencies, may have a major negative impact on credit scores. To see the fastest improvement in your scores, catch up on late payments and pay down your balances. Late payments are the most important indicator of credit risk, so they have the greatest and longest-lasting impact. The more recently the missed payment occurred, the greater that impact will be, and the more missed payments you have, the longer it will take to recover. If you fall behind on your payments, contact your lenders to see if they can improve the terms of your debts. Need answers to your credit questions?

About a year ago, my colleague Natalia invited me to join her in a new volunteer opportunity with the Ministry of Housing in Colombia. The Ministry had created a new program called Mi Casa Ya – which means in English “My Own Home Now,” to help people in Colombia own their first homes. Excited and eager to lend a hand, Natalia and I introduced ourselves to Alejandro, the Director of the National Housing Fund at the Ministry of Housing. Alejandro told us how an unexpected roadblock threatened to derail the program. He had created Mi Casa Ya so that even the poorest people in the country could get a government subsidy to purchase a home. To get the subsidy, they just needed to qualify for a mortgage from a local bank. But that was the problem. In order to get the bank loan, applicants needed a strong credit history. Yet most of the people looking to take advantage of the subsidy through Mi Casa Ya, he explained, were considered “credit invisible.” That is, they had no viable credit history, thin or un-scoreable credit files, or they simply had bad credit. So banks had no choice but to reject them. Natalia and I heard the frustration in Alejandro’s voice, and we knew just how we could help. We told Alejandro that if the Ministry could determine which individuals were being rejected by the banks, we could come in and build credit scores for them using Experian’s data. You see, building credit histories is the sort of thing we do every day at Experian. Over the years, Experian has innovated with analyzing traditional and alternative data sources, such as public records and magazine subscriptions, to create the most accurate and realistic picture of someone’s credit. And by unlocking the power of this data, we are able to identify the data sets that can help lenders make better decisions when making loans, especially for people with thin credit files. Working with Natalia and Alejandro for Mi Casa Ya over the past year has been incredibly rewarding – and our work here isn’t done! Since I work in the legal department at Experian, I am now involved in reaching an agreement with the Ministry of Housing to help advance this project. The details are tricky and the process is tedious, but when I think about the people whose lives we have the ability to transform, I just get excited. Because of our work, many more families in Colombia will be able to fulfill their dream of owning their own homes – that’s huge.