All posts by Editor

While the runways boast couture and fashions that you rarely see walking down the street, some of the top cities in the U.S. are keeping comfortable in their sweats. For the second year in a row, the nation’s top per capita consumer of sweats is Philadelphia, PA while New York was seventh, Los Angeles ranked eighth, and Chicago was twentieth.

According to a new study by Experian Marketing Services, niche social networks significantly increased their market share of all visits to social sites, with Instagram and Pinterest leading the pack. The following graph illustrates the global growth between July 2011 and July 2012, based on share of visits to all sites by country: Other niche social networks that have experienced significant gain include Stock Twits in the US, Redidt in Australia, and FanPop in the UK.

According to the Experian Automotive industry market trends and loyalty report, Toyota finished third in overall corporate loyalty, with 45.7 percent of their customers who returned to market during Q1 2012 purchasing or leasing another Toyota vehicle. Toyota’s corporate loyalty ranking had dropped to 41.8 percent in Q2 2011, the first full quarter after the earthquake and tsunami. Honda’s corporate loyalty was 42.1 percent in Q1 2012, after falling to 36.4 percent in Q3 2011.

“Today, the CFPB announced a final rule addressing its role in supervising certain credit reporting agencies, including Experian and others that are large market participants in the industry. During a field hearing in Detroit, CFPB Director Richard Cordray’s spoke about a new regulatory focus on the accuracy of the information received by the credit reporting companies, the role they play in assembling and maintaining that information, and the process available to consumers for correcting errors. We look forward to working with CFPB on these important priorities.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is coming up on its one year anniversary, and the questions still persist around what it means for credit reporting agencies and other providers of data to the financial services industry. One major focal point has been the agency’s “new” authority to supervise and examine large market participants, like Experian.

Experian Automotive today announced that it will offer National Motor Vehicle Title Information Systems (NMVTIS) Reports to California auto dealers, enabling them to stay in compliance with new government regulations.

Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise® announced today that Google accounted for 65.02 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending June 2, 2012. The combined Bing-powered search comprised 28.12 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 14.95 percent and 13.17 percent, respectively. The remaining 65 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 6.86 percent of U.S. searches.

Last year, Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) introduced the Medical Debt Resolution Act (H.R. 2086), which would amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act to require the Consumer Reporting Agencies (CRAs) to remove paid or settled medical debt from a consumers’ credit file.

 Experian Automotive today announced that there were 17.3 million more light-duty vehicles seven years and older on the road in the United States than there were three years ago. According to its Q1 2012 Vehicles in Operation (VIO) market analysis, Experian Automotive also found that there were more than 245 million vehicles on U.S. roads, and that the age of vehicles increased when compared to Q1 2011, up 1.9 percent to an average age of 11 years.