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/.
To trust or not to trust is the ultimate question when it comes to online, card not present transactions. For e-commerce merchants and online shoppers it should be a two-way street. But far too often, a customer who should be trusted has a transaction wrongfully declined. This tarnishes their relationship with the merchant, the bank and the credit-card company, resulting in loss of revenues, interchange fees and most importantly, lifetime loyalty. The impact of consumer action in the face of a decline can have real and measurable effects on all parties, including credit card companies, banks and merchants manifesting itself in lost revenues, lost fees and lost customer loyalty. In fact, in a recently commissioned independent survey by 41st Parameter, a part of Experian, 17% of consumers surveyed had an online transaction declined. That equals about $40 billion lost each year due to false positives… $40 billion that could be reclaimed. What’s even more distressing for consumers, however, is how they FEEL when their online transaction is declined. 83% of those surveyed felt upset, embarrassed or just plain angry. These powerful emotions are evident in WHO the consumer blames for the unwarranted decline – the simple fact is that consumers blame everyone; from the issuing bank to the credit network to the online merchant. Bottom line; everyone loses. Unnecessary operational costs. Decreased loyalty. Interchange loss. Lost revenues. These are just some of the negatives to unwarranted CNP transaction declines. This session will explore how to improve customer service and loyalty by leveraging information merchants and issues already have about consumers – including their buying patterns, methods and payment and devices they use. The combination of these and other factors creates a TrustScore which helps both the merchant AND the issuer determine if these are consumers that can be trusted – even if they only shop with a merchant on a casual basis. Recognizing customers through trusted digital identities and approving more CNP transactions in real-time provides the opportunity for online retailers to collectively boost top-line revenues by as a much as $1 billion annually. Vision 2014: To Trust or Not To Trust from Experian Business Information Services Tweet this! $40B lost each year b/c unnecessary red flags raised & transactions blocked http://bit.ly/41stinfo #vision2014 Click to Tweet 38% of online shoppers blame their credit card company for CNP http://bit.ly/41stinfo #vision2014 Click to Tweet What’s the key to commerce in the digital world? Trust. How do we know that? Here’s the data to prove it. http://bit.ly/41stinfo #vision2014 Click to Tweet [INFOGRAPHIC] How to foster consumer trust in a digital world http://bit.ly/41stinfo #vision2014 Click to Tweet
Increasingly Experian’s clients are questioning whether they are extracting full value from their data. There’s more data, more accessible analytic capability – there should be more value created. But this growing information asset needs to be harnessed by targeting it in the right way (generating the right insights) and having the processes to minimize the time from insight to action. Technology and techniques need to be aligned to efficiently capture, analyze and action customer insight in a concerted way, with the customer view at the center of this activity. Understanding customers’ current circumstances, and the challenges & opportunities they are likely to encounter, can help us establish what they need right now and predict their future needs. Identifying life event triggers, and effectively actioning these triggers, can help us ensure that we’re maximizing the customer’s lifetime value with the right communications, with the right content, at the right time. There are two distinct directions companies are taking to extract value from their new customer insight. The more established route is refining the current business (e.g., optimizing offer pricing, enhancing pre-attrition and pre-default models, and refining cross-sale relevancy models). But increasingly, companies are looking to their customer data as a platform for expanding their business – either by using their unique customer insights to market external propositions or by identifying adjacencies where their existing client base provides a competitive advantage. Either way, customer information can be the key to growth. Vision 2014: The evolving landscape of customer management from Experian Business Information Services
Gone are the days when news of a data breach was shocking. Today they have become all too common an occurrence. One of the most concerning issues around breaches is that many consumers' digital identities are based on a single email address or username/password.With stolen identity data in hand, criminals can submit fraudulent mortgages, credit card applications, even create fake credit cards, in the names of thousands of unsuspecting victims. Regardless of how the data is used, one thing is certain: breaches pose serious dangers to consumers, retailers and financial institutions. The need for customer-friendly fraud management is stronger than ever. A single layer of protection is simply ineffective as criminals are more efficient than ever in obtaining consumer identification details and compromising simple access credentials. While mobile technologies and the Internet itself have enabled consumers to have anytime access to their financial data, these advances are the very means by which criminals perpetrate fraud. And customer-friendly technologies and policies continue to outpace the controls and risk management. What controls does your organization have in place to ensure that a fraudster in Malaysia isn't using a legitimate identity and an anonymous proxy to submit credit card applications? Or to alert when a long-standing offline banking relationship suddenly enrolls online? The days and weeks following a breach are a time of heightened risk. Even after a breach has occurred, the risk can be managed. In “Know Your Enemy”, a fraud prevention focused break out session at Experian’s 2014 Vision conference (#vision2014), Ori Eisen @orieisen and Matt Ehrlich @ehrlichmatters cover current trends and practices for taking on the growing industrialization of fraud. Together with a risk executive from a leading bank, the team discusses several themes and emerging tactics, including: the cost of single channel fraud prevention strategies, the necessity of a layered security strategy that includes device and identity intelligence, and true real time, point of contact risk-scoring. Vision 2014: Know Your Enemy – a financial institution’s best practices for preventing the latest fraud attacks from Experian Business Information Services
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