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/.
Experian® is pleased to announce its partnership with Clear Channel and the premiere of its iHeart Radio show, Credit & Finance Talk with Experian, which is already gaining lots of listeners. Credit & Finance Talk with Experian The show covers topics like “Getting Rid of a Bad Score” and “Items on Your Credit Report” to educate listeners on the importance of credit in their everyday lives. Listeners are invited to check back every week for new episodes of Credit 101, where you can get the inside scoop on how to live credit-confident. Premiere Endorsements The next time you listen to a Clear Channel radio station, you might just hear your favorite radio personality chatting about Experian Credit TrackerSM. Our partnership features premiere radio personality endorsements from Ryan Seacrest, Delilah, Jay Mohr, Steve Gorman and John Boy & Billy. Exclusive iHeart Radio Theatre Along with radio, Experian has the incredible opportunity to sponsor entertainment at the iHeart radio theatre and had the opportunity to already share the experience with fans of Coldplay, Young the Giant, and Rascal Flatts. We are excited to partner with Clear Channel to help bring credit education to consumers nationwide. Be sure to check back for more exciting episodes of Credit 101, engaging interviews, credit information and more. You can also find answers to common credit questions here on Experian.com.
The first 24 hours of a Data Breach Response are the most critical and we have the most important seven steps to insure that your organization does not go off track. A data breach of personal identity information or protected healthcare information is a breach of trust. Employees, patients, consumers or even partners are put at risk if their information is disclosed during a security incident. In this session Experian’s data breach experts walked attendees through the first steps in the response process that will insure businesses do not run into trouble with the affected parties, the media and regulators. We included specific examples of what to do and how to be successful in your response. We touched on the key things to avoid, tapping over 10 years of experience and nearly 13,000 incidents serviced. For more information, visit www.experian.com/24hourchecklist. Vision 2014: The First 24 Hours of a Breach from Experian Business Information Services
The Small Business Credit Share is a “give-to-get” data consortium in which members provide more detailed data about the performance of the accounts in their portfolios. In exchange for expanded contribution, members get exclusive access to enriched information that is deeper in content than what is available to standard Experian clients or through competitive credit share programs. They benefit from the more comprehensive reports, business credit scores, attributes, and reporting that are available. The Small Business Credit Share is open to all credit granting institutions, including financial institutions, companies that issue trade credit, telcos, utilities and others. The tradeline performance reporting from this broad swath of B2B companies helps drive the effectiveness of the products that are available to members. The Small Business Credit Share has firm qualification standards to insure consistent information and regular reporting guidelines are followed, to help protect the interests of all members. In the past two-plus years, there has been good growth in the member base of the Small Business Credit Share. While attracting new members from a variety of industries, there also continues to be growing interest from financial institutions who presently report to other data consortia about becoming Small Business Credit Share members. Experian is working with them to highlight the advantages of reporting to multiple reporting agencies. In addition to increasing the likelihood that their interests will be protected if their customer’s obligations are more widely reported, they also give themselves more flexibility to manage the expense side of their operations. And when (not ‘if’) regulatory bodies shift their focus to the small business arena, some lenders are envisioning that broader reporting could become the rule. For example, the SBA is requiring that all SBA-backed loans be reported to commercial bureaus; whether that means to all commercial bureaus or to simply at least one is unclear. But the SBA’s rationale is clear: they want credit histories established for these companies so that SBA-backing should not be needed in the future. There are some exciting new products in development for Small Business Credit Share participants. The first of these is the upcoming release of an additional set of attributes which have been developed based on consumer experience and which will add considerable insight for credit risk managers. To assess their information value, these attributes were overlaid into a proof-of-concept score. The resultant model showed a 22% lift in KS and a 29% increase the percent of ‘bads’ pushed into the bottom 10% of the score range. There is also an ongoing development effort to replace the current Small Business Credit Share acquisition score. The new score will clearly benefit from the availability of the new attributes, but will also benefit from being developed on a population booked over a 2-year span from a much more recent time period (Nov 2010 to Oct 2012). The new score will be a blended model, with a ‘commercial-only’ option for clients that do not want to consider any consumer data within the score. The model will also use bureau-leveled consumer attributes, which will allow the model to work not only with Experian consumer data, but with consumer data from Equifax and Trans Union as well. Vision 2014: A Current Look at Commercial Credit Consortium Data from Experian Business Information Services
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