Experian has been named to Forbes’ list of the top 100 most innovative companies in the world.
The world’s most innovative companies were united by one factor at the heart of Forbes’ methodology: ‘investors’ ability to identify firms they expect to be innovative now and in the future.
This ‘Innovation Premium’, alongside other factors, determined whether a company is included in Forbes’ exclusive list.
For Experian, innovation is part of our DNA, from the 1950s when a punch card system was introduced to process credit information, to the present day, where our data labs are at the forefront of data science.
Experian DataLabs are staffed by teams of scientists with Ph.Ds. and applied research practitioners with expertise in advanced analytics and machine learning, as well as other advanced statistical methods.
The lab in North America has had some remarkable success with Fortune 500 clients where they been able to identify previously undetected risks and signals from data sets comprising billions of transactions. By analyzing many multiple variables in new ways—natural language processing against payment card accounts for example, they gain insights that are incredibly useful for our clients.
For example, one of the largest banks in American asked the DataLab to find more effective ways of convincing their debit card users to use their credit cards. To develop the solutions the lab analyzed about 7 billion customer transactions over a three-year period from the bank, and incorporated Experian’s data. The lab’s solution entailed finding 550 unique segments of users that the bank could target. That was far too many so the lab culled the segments down to 20. The bank was so pleased with the outcome it has engaged the lab in an ongoing contract. The developed solution is also being used by five other major banks.
Our culture of innovation is thriving as Experian continues to grow and lead the way in developing solutions and harnessing the power of data to turn insights into actions. That value added insight can help a consumer secure an affordable loan, improve their credit score, or protect their identity; or for a business to mitigate risk, help prevent fraudulent transactions, or even to ensure they are marketing their products and services to the right consumers at the right time and across the right channels.