Margin test

We recently wrapped up a special community outreach effort during Financial Literacy Month that reflects something important to Experian – helping consumers, especially underserved populations, understand credit and how to harness it to their benefit. It’s important to rally around a cause like this at peak times throughout the year, but financial literacy and, more importantly, financial power for all is what drives us every day, every month and every year. Empowering consumers is the fuel behind our innovation and the portfolio of credit tools we have developed in the past few years and those to come. While there are different viewpoints around the use of credit scores to assess consumers’ credit-worthiness, credit bureau data remains the most effective means for understanding a consumer’s financial situation. This is why we continually innovate to find new ways of utilizing that data to give consumers more control and allow lenders to see well-rounded consumer profiles. Our charter led to the launch of the first-of-its-kind tool, Experian Boost. By allowing consumers the ability to directly add positive payment history for recurring utility and telecom bills – even video streaming services – to their Experian credit report, they can take a proactive step to improve their credit score and gain more control. While lenders benefit by seeing additional data about consumers that considers positive behavior for paying these types of recurring bills that hasn’t been factored in the past. It’s a win-win situation, and we’ve seen the positive results. To date, Experian Boost users have gained access to more than 1.7 billion total dollars in credit as a result of improving their credit scores, while 1 million consumers added a credit card in the first year after the launch. Also, nearly 250,000 consumers acquired an auto loan and some consumers earned a credit score for the first time. For those who had thin files and weren’t able to enter the credit ecosystem before, obtaining a credit score for the first time and learning how to improve it can be life changing. Our mission is to drive financial inclusion and facilitate access to fair and affordable credit for consumers; that objective is not just on our minds during one particular month out of the year. Experian Boost was a lengthy initiative in the making, and we believe one big step in the right direction to achieve our objective. It won’t stop there. I’m looking forward to more innovation to come that continues to assist consumers in gaining more credit knowledge and control over their credit in order to reach their financial goals.

In many countries around the world June 1st marks the beginning of Pride Month. This annual celebration of the LGBTQ+ community is a time to reflect on the progress that has been made and the work there is still to do for LGBTQ+ equality around the world.   As well as being a time of celebration, Pride Month offers a chance for us to get to know each other better. It is a time to think about how we create a truly inclusive workplace for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.   Everyone should feel safe, included and respected at work. It is up to all of us to create the right environment for LGBTQ+ colleagues to prosper and thrive, and we’re proud to work closely with partners like Stonewall and Out & Equal to help us achieve that goal.  Around the world, Experian stands for diversity, for equity and inclusion. We support and welcome our LGBTQ+ colleagues, and we are proud to celebrate with you today and every day. 

This morning, we announced our year-end earnings. Once again, we have demonstrated our resilience in the most difficult of circumstances. With this set of results, I am pleased to report that Experian has now grown through two major global economic downturns. None of this would have been possible without the incredible hard work and commitment of everyone in the company. The coronavirus pandemic is the gravest crisis faced by the world for a generation. From the beginning, Experian moved quickly to make our data insights available to governments, health services, communities, businesses and charities around the world. We also worked rapidly with lenders and governments to support financial accommodation programmes. This has proven to be crucial in making sure financial assistance reached those who needed it, helping people to manage their financial health and ensuring that our economies kept moving through these turbulent times. Looking ahead to the next financial year, our vision for Experian is to continue to bring the benefits of our world class data and analytics capabilities directly to consumers and wider society. Data-led decision making, and technology have been critical in helping humanity to take on the biggest challenge in a generation. It will be a crucial driver of the global economic recovery, helping us all to bounce back stronger and providing the foundations to flourish in the years ahead. I am tremendously proud of our employees around the world. Our people’s professional and personal responses to the pandemic, and the results we have delivered, have been remarkable. We have worked from our kitchen tables, while home-schooling our children, and caring for our family members. We have pulled together and gone above and beyond during one of the most turbulent times in a generation. There can be no greater testament to the character and the strength of our team. I think it’s no overstatement to say that we have delivered one of our most remarkable performances ever. We have made important strategic progress. We have pressed ahead with new product innovation, with our technology transformation, and we have extended our presence across many new markets and segments. As we enter our next year, we do so with strong foundations for further growth and the uplifting confidence that even through the most challenging of times, we can and will continue to create a better tomorrow for everyone.

In March 2020 we left our office desks without knowing we would not return for over a year. It’s been an incredible year and as our focus shifts to navigating our way out of lockdown and our hopes for a post pandemic life, it’s hard not to be reflective. At Experian we have taken the opportunity to rethink how we work going forward. We have had a lot of feedback from our people and we know they want to continue to have a degree of flexibility, but they’re equally keen to maintain the collaborative and innovative culture we have cultivated over the years. The pandemic has accelerated innovation in ways of working and gives us an opportunity to reimagine where, when and how work gets done. Whether it is our data scientists working on brilliant new concepts, our product designers taking part in hackathons across several countries at the same time, or our creative teams working on advertising concepts for a purple cow; we have learned over the past year that flexible working is no barrier to creativity and innovation. When our offices re-open we will give people the opportunity to work in a way that works for everyone – this may be working remotely, in the office, or a mix of both, and flexibility over start and finish times.  In some cases, we may ask people to be office based. Our aim is to strike the right balance between what works for an individual and what works for the business. This balance can mean that we provide more flexibility to people during their workday. It is not just about remote working. It's our commitment to make a difference in our people's working lives. We're obsessed with finding new ways to use data to help transform lives and create a better tomorrow.  Our powerful combination of smart minds, deep data, and sophisticated technology enable us to do things that others can't. And we also want our working culture to make a world of difference to our colleagues. Our culture is what connects us across the world. The role of the office will serve an enhanced purpose and we plan to maximise collaborative spaces and ensure people have the space and create time to connect with their teams – even if it’s on a more ad hoc basis. This is important to us and we make no apology for occasionally insisting on team meetings in the office to make sure we preserve our special culture. Looking back and learning from lockdown has been essential to form our new flexible working plan. It has been clear that colleagues have been experiencing the situation differently. Many of our colleagues have really enjoyed the freedom of working from home, spending more time with their families in some cases, and working at a rhythm that suits them – allowing them to time manage their days to fit in things like more regular exercise, for example. And many have really valued the time they’ve got back from cutting down on all the travel in and out of the office. For others, remote working has at times tested their mental wellbeing. Many of us live alone or have stressful home lives to manage which means that going into a dedicated place of work can be a blessing, maybe even a necessity, or simply a preference. It’s also been a time when businesses have had to embrace the technology of connectivity more than ever before. This has actually brought more of our people together – albeit virtually. Video calls are now a well-established part of our lives. It has been great to get more facetime with colleagues around the world – technology can deliver that for us, but it’s taken a pandemic for us to really embrace it. It’s not been a one-size fits all experience. What this crisis has reminded us, beyond everything else, is that we are all individuals living different lives. As an employer, if we can take one thing from this experience and build on it, it’s that our people will benefit from being offered different working arrangements to suit individual circumstances. We want to give colleagues the option of creating a working environment which suits their situation. So that they can do the best job possible and deliver great results, yes, but also so that they can live fulfilled and balanced lives. It has been a very challenging time, but we can deliver positive outcomes. We need to embrace this moment and build a future of work that is fit for purpose in the 21st century.

A little more than a year removed from the beginning of the pandemic, and we’re still seeing many of the most vulnerable and underserved communities struggling to find a stable financial foothold. These are consumers with little to no credit history and are often underrepresented in the network of bank branches and sometimes less familiar with what’s available to them in the consumer credit system. The pandemic has taken a toll on the fabric of our financial ecosystem, and we need to help these consumers get back on their feet. That’s one of the reasons we’ve partnered with the 100 Black Men of Greater Washington, D.C. Together, we’re launching a broad financial health initiative to assist multiple African American communities suffering COVID-19-related hardship. But the partnership is just one of the ways Experian is assisting marginalized and underserved communities. Addressing Financial Inclusion Experian is deeply committed to helping marginalized and low-income communities access the financial resources they need to live. That’s why we’re working to ensure we find ways to help underserved consumers gain access to fair and affordable credit by assisting them in building their credit profiles. We view ourselves as “The Consumers’ Bureau,” and it’s our commensurate responsibility to do everything we can to drive financial inclusion. We are working side-by-side with lenders, credit scoring companies and consumers to eliminate credit invisibility and improve financial equity. Our teams at Experian, diverse as they are, feel passionate about this very important mission. We understand that a big part of the solution relies on bringing new sources of data into our credit files, so that credit scores reflect all of a consumers’ relevant financial behavior. We strongly believe that these new sources of data will augment and thereby enhance our current credit data as an effective means for lenders’ assessment of a consumer’s financial situation. There’s a percentage of the population—on average, it’s 17% of Americans, measured by FICO—who are excluded from the credit economy because they simply lack a credit history. To that end, we’ve been a pioneer in using rental, utilities and telecom payment data to help broaden credit access for consumers. Boosting 6 Million In fact, more than two years ago, we created Experian Boost, which was a first-of-its-kind service designed to help consumers instantly improve their FICO® Score by giving them credit for on-time utility, telecom and streaming service payments. All of those elements are conceived to be part of people’s credit scores, however utility and cell phone providers have not collaborated to report their data to all credit bureaus. With Experian Boost, we empower consumers to report the data themselves, and more importantly, 70% of consumers benefit from doing so, seeing an uplift in their credit score. And to date, more than 6 million consumers have used Experian Boost with over 50 million cumulative points added to FICO Scores across the US. Our Commitment to Financial Health But our commitment doesn’t end there. Consumer credit education and best practices are key to setting marginalized consumers up for financial success. Through Experian’s United for Financial Health initiative—we’re empowering vulnerable people and communities to improve their financial wellbeing through that very belief. In addition to our partnership with the 100 Black Men of Greater Washington, D.C., we’re working closely with Operation HOPE, Black Girl Ventures, and NAACP Empowerment Programs, to help disenfranchised groups improve their credit standing, provide entrepreneurial education for Black and Brown women entrepreneurs, and offer grants to help homeowners at risk of losing their homes In addition to our consumer credit education initiatives with our partners, we continually push credit education materials and programming through our own social media channels and community outreach efforts. In honor of Financial Literacy Month, we’re hosting a #CreditChat on Wednesday, April 28 at 3 p.m. ET, entitled, Closing the Financial Literacy Gap in Underserved Communities.   We believe helping underserved communities better understand the credit ecosystem and equipping them with the tools and knowledge to improve their credit standing, are mission critical to a healthier financial life. And we’re hopeful this #CreditChat discussion is another step forward in that journey. We won’t rest until the job’s done. We’ll continue to innovate and find new ways to use data in the credit scoring process, and work arm-in-arm with consumers and lenders to improve financial access. Through our investments in data and advanced analytics, we’ll continue to help lenders identify consumers who are excluded from the credit ecosystem, but who can fulfill their financial obligations and pay responsibly. We want to empower consumers to take control of their financial lives, and will continue to take strides to do so.