Greater transparency in buy now, pay later activity is key to helping consumers build their credit histories and supporting responsible lending.
Experian North AmericaScott Brown, Group President, Financial Services
Affirm plans to report all pay-over-time loan products issued from April 1, 2025, and beyond, including Pay-in-4. The move will help drive greater transparency into the buy now, pay later market while helping consumers build their credit histories over time.
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Today, we stand at the forefront of a digital revolution that is reshaping the financial services industry. And, against this backdrop, financial institutions are at vastly different levels of maturity; the world’s biggest banks are managing large-scale infrastructure migrations and making significant investments in AI while regional banks and credit unions are putting plans in place for modernization strategies, and fintechs are purpose-built and cloud native. To explore this more, I recently had the privilege of attending the annual Reuters NEXT live event in New York City. The event gathers globally recognized leaders across business, finance, technology, and government to tackle some of today’s most pressing issues. On the World Stage, I joined Del Irani, a talented anchor and broadcast journalist, to discuss the future of lending and the pivotal role of data and AI in building a more inclusive financial system. Improving financial access Our discussion highlighted the lack of access to traditional financial systems, and the impact it has on nearly 100 million people in North America alone. Globally, the problem affects over one billion people. These people, who are credit invisible, unscoreable, or have subprime credit scores, are unable to secure everyday financial products that many of us take for granted. What many don’t realize is, this is not a fringe subset of the population. Most of us, myself included, know someone who has faced the challenges of financial exclusion. Everyday Americans, including young people who are just starting out, new immigrants and people from diverse communities, often lack access to mainstream financial products. We discussed how traditional lending has a limited view of a consumer. Like looking through a keyhole, the lender’s understanding of the person in view is often incomplete and obstructed. However, with expanded data, technology, and advanced analytics, there is an opportunity to better understand the whole person, and as a result have a more inclusive financial system. At Experian, we have a unique ability to connect the power of traditional credit with alternative data, bringing a more holistic understanding of consumers and their behaviors. We are dedicated to leveraging our rich history in data and our expertise in technology to create the future of credit and ultimately bring financial power to everyone. The future of lending After spending two days with over 700 industry leaders from around the world, one thing is abundantly clear: much like the early days of the internet, today, we are at the cutting-edge of a technical revolution. Reflecting on my time at Reuters NEXT, I am particularly excited by the collective commitment to drive innovative, and smarter ways of working. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of how data and technology can transform financial services, and Experian is positioned to play a significant role. As we look to the future, I am excited about the ways we will create new opportunities for businesses and consumers alike.
The advertising ecosystem has seen significant transformation over the past few years, with increased privacy regulation, changes in available signals, and the rise of channels like connected TV and retail media. These changes are impacting the way that consumers interact with brands and how brands understand and continue to deliver relevant messages to consumers with precision. Experian has been helping marketers navigate these changes, and as a result, our marketing data and identity solutions underpin much of today’s advertising industry. We’re committed to empowering marketers and agencies to understand and reach their target audiences, across all channels. Today, we are excited to announce our acquisition of Audigent—a leading data and activation platform in the advertising industry. With Audigent’s combination of first-party publisher data, inventory and deep supply-side distribution relationships, publishers, big and small, can empower marketers to better understand their customers, expand the reach of their target audiences and activate those audiences across the most impactful inventory. I am excited to bring together Audigent’s supply-side network as a natural extension to our existing demand-side capabilities. Audigent’s ability to combine inventory with targeted audiences using first-party, third-party and contextual signals provides the best of all worlds, allowing marketers to deliver campaigns centered on consumer choices, preferences, and behaviors. The addition of Audigent further strengthens our strategy to be the premier independent provider of marketing data and identity, ultimately creating more relevant experiences for consumers. To learn more about Experian and Audigent, visit https://www.experian.com/marketing/ and https://audigent.com/.
As businesses, we want to know our consumers and their habits so we can offer the best customer experience possible, whether in store or online.
The world in 2018 is defined by data. Vast quantities of information flow through our lives like threads across an elaborate tapestry. On a micro level, these threads bind the business world together. But they also come together to weave a picture of the economy that is colourful, detailed, and uniquely fascinating. At Experian, we process more than 1.5 billion records per year, making us specialists in the processing and understanding of this data – and in making sure it is used for the benefit of consumers and businesses. To share our unique perspective, we’ve created our first ever Spending Power Index. The index looks at the UK’s income and spending habits, including both a detailed view of the present, and insight into longer term trends and the nation’s changing preferences. Giving businesses the bigger picture Stepping back from day-to-day business to look at the whole economy is a chance to identify new opportunities and work out the best ways of adapting to new challenges. The insights we’re providing through the Spending Power Index are designed to fuel that process by offering a view of existing and emerging trends across all demographic segments of the UK economy. What is the Spending Power Index? We’ve defined ‘Spending Power’ as a combination of key factors: Average income growth over time Levels of spending for one demographic group when compared to another Levels of spending as a proportion of incomes These combined factors reveal a wealth of hidden information about income and spending. All these insights have been drawn from Experian’s modelled data using secondary sources such as our ‘Financial Strategy Segmentation’ (FSS) tool. The data for this comes from a range of publicly and commercially available sources, such as the edited Electoral Roll, the UK Census and permission-based market research data taken, for example, from the lifestyle questionnaires many of us complete. New insights and confirming market trends Some of the insights revealed by the index have been surprising, while others fit into social trends that are already well understood. We found some areas of significant shift, such as the movement away from owning possessions and towards spending on life experiences. But we also confirmed some new and fascinating trends such as the emergence of Generation X’s forty somethings as the biggest earners and spenders in the UK economy. Find out more by reading the full Spending Power Index report here.
In our increasingly digital world, there’s a growing expectation among consumers to only receive personal and relevant content from brands.
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