In recent weeks, we have seen a growing rise in racist attacks against the Asian and Pacific Islander community in America. These incidents are appalling and go against our values, culture and everything we stand for. We stand in solidarity with our Asian and Pacific Islander colleagues. No one should live in fear of any kind of physical or verbal threat. I appreciate the leadership of our Asian American Employee Resource Group, allies and leaders throughout Experian for their support of our colleagues, and the communities where we live and work. At Experian, I am proud of our rich programming and focus on Asian cultures. We are sponsors of the National Association of Asian American Professionals and Ascend, which both focus on advancement and equity for Asian-Americans. We are committed to driving equity and ending racism. The Experian family is rich because of the diversity we embrace. We must all play our part to #StopAsianHate.
After launching Experian Boost, the first-of-its-kind tool that allows consumers to instantly increase their credit scores, in March 2019 we recently reached a significant milestone. Millions of consumers have boosted their credit scores to the tune of 50 million total points. This means many consumers have improved score bands, saved money with better interest rates, and maybe reached some of their financial goals such as gaining access to credit for a home. In fact, we know our Boost users have gained access to more than 1.7 billion total dollars in credit as a result of improving their credit score. The idea behind Experian Boost is to give consumers control over their credit – to enable them to make real, substantial progress in their financial health journey by getting “credit” for paying bills on time. Our ability to help consumers in a challenging economic climate is what drives us to continue to innovate. For example, we recently expanded Experian Boost to add positive payment history for video streaming services such as Netflix in addition to telecom and utility payments. The benefits to having control and using tools like Experian Boost do not end there. Consumers receive a boosted FICO® Score, which is used by a majority of lenders giving them a great opportunity for credit with better terms. In the first year after launching, we saw one million consumers add a credit card and nearly 250,000 consumers acquired an auto loan. Also, some consumers earned a credit score for the first time. What is also significant about Experian Boost is that this type of financial control and opportunity gives consumers a sense of empowerment, motivation and satisfaction that they can take a positive step in their financial journey. We’ve heard this firsthand from consumers through focus groups, and we even featured some consumers in our commercials who shared their positive experiences in front of the camera. This sentiment of empowerment among consumers is especially important right now as many are struggling financially due to the pandemic. We have many exciting new tools launching in 2021 and will continue to focus on empowering consumers to reach their financial goals. To learn more about Experian Boost, visit www.experian.com/boost.
A year ago, as we celebrated International Women’s Day at Experian, none of us could have predicted what the year ahead had in store for us. It has been a year that has repeatedly tested us across so many facets of our lives. It has been a year that has reinforced the importance of our resilient and inclusive culture. And, it has been a year, that despite the unsettled environment, we at Experian have made progress. This year, as we kick-off our celebrations, we want to take a moment to acknowledge the passion, commitment and perseverance of our inspiring women and their allies who have contributed to that progress. Experian is celebrating International Women’s Day with employee-led activities around the world spearheaded by our Women in Experian employee resource group. We are also embracing this year’s theme of #ChooseToChallenge and started at the top of our house with our Chief Executive Officer, Brian Cassin, hosting a discussion between the inspiring women of Experian’s Board of Directors. The discussion focused on how to drive positive change and future growth. This event, and the participation of our board members, was reflective of Experian’s overall commitment to diversity. Each of our female board members shared what they will #ChooseToChallenge this year. Ruba Borno I #ChooseToChallenge the idea that opportunities are limited “Every opportunity is a gift. I choose to challenge the idea that those gifts are finite. Every time I climb a ladder, I want to keep that ladder behind me so someone else can climb it and we can rise together.” Alison Brittain I #ChooseToChallenge us all to become better allies “International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to reflect on the things that we can do, both individually and collectively, to champion change, support our colleagues and make a positive difference. Every day we need to strive to create a culture that supports inclusivity, so that everyone can unlock their potential and perform at their best, regardless of their background, gender, ethnicity or how they identify. We can become better allies by challenging the barriers to diversity and celebrating difference.” Caroline Donahue I #ChoosetoChallenge gender inequity “As a woman in tech, I was fortunate to have several amazing mentors, most of whom were men and my direct supervisors. They supported me and helped me thrive as a single parent with a global travel schedule. One of my motivations in joining the Experian board was recognizing that Experian has an amazing culture and believes in and supports women and their careers. Experian is committed to diversity and inclusion and knows that a diverse workforce creates better outcomes for employees and customers. I know we can achieve 50% amazing women at all levels at Experian, just as we have created great diversity on the board, including my fellow female board members. I am thrilled to be a part of this company and this journey.” Deirdre Mahlan I #ChooseToChallenge obstacles to being heard “International Women’s Day is an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate the many roles that women play in contributing to families, culture, work and government. This year’s theme, #ChooseToChallenge resonates strongly with me. As a leader and a woman, I aim to live honestly and courageously and through my actions inspire others to live according to their own truth. We all have a role to play in ensuring we can each contribute and use our voice authentically. The many talents, leadership qualities and authentic voices of women at Experian in powering solutions will continue to be key to the success of Experian.” Our goals for International Women’s Week 2021 are to celebrate women’s achievements, raise awareness against bias and act against inequality. This week is an opportunity to reflect and contribute to our continuous journey for diversity, inclusion and belonging, and most of all, Choose to Challenge, because from challenge comes change.
Does checking my credit report hurt my credit score? How can I improve my credit score? What’s the difference between a credit score and a credit report? These are a few of the questions I most often hear about credit, and the answers to these fundamental questions are essential to financial well-being. Understanding credit scores and the factors that influence overall credit health is important any time, but this is especially true in our current environment. As part of our ongoing commitment to consumer education on the road to recovery, I recently had the pleasure of partnering with Akbar Gbajabiamila, host of American Ninja Warrior, former football pro and financial fitness expert, for an Instagram Live event. Akbar is passionate about helping people develop a financial game plan and he understands having a good credit history is a key component of good financial health. During the Instagram Live event, I answered questions from Akbar’s fans and shared ways to improve your credit score through tools like Experian Boost. In case you missed it, you can watch the video recap on Akbar’s Instagram account (@akbar_gbaja) or at the following link: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CLpbdDJlaQ6/ View this post on Instagram A post shared by ??Akbar Gbajabiamila?? (@akbar_gbaja) A positive credit history can be the gatekeeper to many of the things we all want in life, and we’re committed to helping facilitate fair and affordable access to credit for all consumers, including those in marginalized communities. This is one of the many reasons I’m passionate about my role at Experian. Educating consumers about credit is an important part of getting the economy as a whole humming again and helping those most in need. If you have additional questions about credit, feel free to check out the free resources below. Additional credit education resources and tools Join Experian’s weekly#CreditChat hosted by @Experian on Twitter with financial experts every Wednesday at 3 p.m. Eastern time. Visit the Ask Experian blog for answers to common questions, advice and education about credit. Add positive telecom, utility and streaming service payments to your Experian credit report for an opportunity to improve your credit scores by visiting experian.com/boost. You can request a free copy of your credit report from each of the three credit bureaus once a week through April 20, 2022 by visiting annualcreditreport.com For additional resources, visit https://www.experian.com/consumereducationor experian.com/coronavirus.
We recognize that COVID-19 has challenged Americans across the country, and nearly a year later, people are still struggling to recover. Among the more pressing issues for people has been navigating the financial landscape and hardships brought on by illness and high unemployment rates. At Experian, we empathize with consumers and are committed to helping them manage their financial lives. As part of this commitment, Experian, along with the other U.S. credit reporting agencies, is continuing to offer free weekly credit reports to all Americans for an additional year via AnnualCreditReport.com. At Experian, we view ourselves as the consumers’ bureau, and aim to help people better position themselves as they recover from COVID-related hardships. We’re proud of our ongoing efforts to assist consumers, particularly during these difficult times. Financial and credit information is constantly updated, and we believe providing consumers with increased access to their credit reports will help them improve their financial health, monitor for lender updates and ensure there is no fraudulent or unfamiliar activity on their credit profiles. We are committed to helping facilitate access to fair and affordable access to credit for all consumers. Our goal is not only to help consumers build credit, but also to effectively manage it. Beyond our continued offering of free credit reports, consumers can access resources and educational materials to help learn about credit and other important personal finance topics. In fact, we recently launched our United for Financial Health project to empower vulnerable populations to improve their financial health through education and action. We’re continually exploring new ways to use our data and resources to empower consumers and to improve their financial health and recover from COVID-19; extending access to free weekly credit reports is just another step in that process.
A year ago, we shifted our business to remote working as the global pandemic took hold. Like the rest of the world, we had no idea how long we’d be away, but we didn’t really imagine we’d still be operating our business with a remote workforce a year later. What a year it has been. It is incredible to look back and reflect on how our lives have changed, how we were able to adapt to this new way of living and working, and really importantly, how we were able to keep innovating to help communities and businesses during this difficult time. We have captured highlights of our work and efforts in our North America annual diversity and inclusion report, 2020 Power of YOU. At Experian, the safety and well-being of our colleagues has consistently been a top priority. As such, we have been able to focus on serving consumers and clients when and where they need help the most. As a company, we expanded our benefits to take care of our employees. Coworkers jumped in to take care of each other. Our employee resource group dedicated to mental health and caregiving partnered with colleagues to create a dynamic set of tools and guides tackling different topics every week through webinars, articles and personal, candid videos from leaders. We supported each other during times of social unrest. We celebrated progress in growing our business. We logged 18,000 volunteer hours to increase financial inclusion, support frontline healthcare workers, honor active duty military and veterans, and fight hunger in underprivileged communities. We leveraged our diversity of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences to help vulnerable populations in crisis from COVID-19, including launching our United for Financial Health program. We remain steadfast and committed to equity for all. We are proud to start the new year with this wonderful look back at last year, propelling us forward to more opportunities to innovate and serve. We invite you to check out the 2020 Power of YOU Report here.
As consumer demand for the digital channel continues to increase at an exceptional rate it has created an opportunity for businesses to serve the growing ranks of connected consumers. The most important thing is for businesses to ensure they are putting the consumer at the heart of the relationship. Experian has been studying insights related to consumer behavior and business strategy throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. For the third wave of our Global Insights Report we surveyed 3,000 consumers and 900 businesses across the globe in January. We observed not only consumer demand for the digital channel increasing but that fact that these trends are persisting. We believe that what started as necessity has turned into a preference. According to the report, 38% of consumers expect to increase their online activity in the next 12 months. Furthering our belief that the preference for digital transactions persists, 60% of consumers are using a universal mobile wallet to make digital payments. We also found that the two top activities among consumers online are personal banking (58%) and ordering groceries and takeout food (56%). The report also shows that security remains at the top of consumers’ minds when they are transacting online. 55%of consumers say security is the most important factor in their digital experience – this is highest in the UK (65%), followed by Japan (64%). All in all, the new research confirms that this shift to online activity, which continues to increase with no indications of slowing down, is a contributing factor to consumers’ growing appetite for digital. In this regard, we found that businesses have taken notice and are investing more resources around the digital experience. In fact, 9 in 10 businesses have a strategy in place related to the digital customer journey. 47% of businesses have put this strategy into place since Covid-19. In addition, more than a third of businesses are increasing staff or support for digital operations and experience. Fraud is the biggest challenge among businesses. However, 55% of businesses plan to increase fraud management budgets. As we move towards a post-pandemic era, and more consumers start to prefer banking and shopping online, a digital channel strategy simply isn’t enough. There needs to be a re-imagined customer journey that connects identity, preferences, products, and service. And data and technology have the power to help transform your customer relationships.
We are excited to announce the annual launch of our Global data management research! This year, we surveyed 700 business leaders across the U.S., U.K., and Brazil to get their perspective on usage of data throughout the pandemic. There’s no question that data initiatives have been on the to-do list for over a decade now, but as the pandemic came storming in, businesses quickly realized that data management never made it to the top of the list. In other words, most businesses were not prepared for the rapid transformation they needed to sustain during the global health crisis because their data, simply, was not ready. There are three major takeaways from this year’s study: An acceleration of digital transformation has made businesses reliant on high-quality data. We find that business priorities have remained the same over the last few years: Customer experience and data security. However, these initiatives are more important than ever before, especially when it comes to digital transformation. Seventy-two percent say an acceleration to digital transformation has made their business more reliant on data and data insights. Why? With dramatic changes in customer buying behaviour during the pandemic, and most employees still working remotely, digital engagement and operations have become key to sustaining business growth during economic crisis. Our research finds that seventy-five percent of respondents say they have seen a dramatic change in their customer’s buying behavior during the pandemic. With stores closed, overwhelmed distribution and shipping warehouses, and unpredictable supply chains (bread flour, anyone?) …businesses need to leverage online platforms, like their website and social media, to stay engaged with customers. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for a brand’s customer experience to be solely digital. Furthermore, with increased online activity and non-essential employees working from home, there’s a chance consumer or operational data could be at higher risk of unwanted actions or unauthorized users. This is where data security plays an important role in keeping records, and the business, safe. From the efficiency of the customer experience online to the data that helps us analyze markets and attitudes changing at a dizzying pace…the right data has become indispensable. The need for a data-driven digital operation and customer experience has made companies realize how mature their data functions are, or where there is opportunity for improvement. Data was not ready to sustain the impact of the pandemic. For many years, we have looked at the maturity level of data quality in the market. Our hope was that this maturity level had increased to handle the new demands and desire for insight. Unfortunately for many, levels of quality data continued to fall short. Fifty-five percent of business leaders say they lack trust in their data assets, hindering their ability to be fully data driven. The level of inaccurate data has remained high over the past five years of this study. Organizations believe about a third of their customer and prospect data is inaccurate in some way. Additionally, only fifty percent believe their CRM/ERP data is clean and can be fully leveraged. Poor data quality creates several roadblocks within organizations, regardless of their maturity. While data can be inaccurate for a wide variety of reasons, such as human error or natural data decay, the impact is the same. Ninety-five percent of businesses have seen impacts related to poor data quality. This could mean that poor quality data damages the reliability of analytics (36%), negatively affects customer experience (32%), and negatively impacts reputation and customer trust (32%). These challenges are difficult to overcome in any economy, especially one facing a pandemic. Another challenging area is the inability to be agile with data. While eighty-four percent of respondents experienced greater demand for data insights, sixty-two percent admit a lack of agility in data processes hurt their response to changing business needs. Ensuring high-quality data and agility within data practices is vital to improve customer experience, streamline operations, and accelerate digital transformation. By investing in data management now, businesses can sustain success despite any future market changes that are out of their control. Investing in data now will help businesses weather the next crisis. Over the next six months, sixty-three percent of organizations see data management initiatives becoming more urgent—and the reason is resilience. Nine out of ten businesses are focused on improving data management resilience to at least some degree over the next year. Businesses are investing in several key areas of data management like improving data quality, refining data governance, moving data to the cloud, and automating data processes. With over three quarters of our respondents saying, “investing in data management initiatives today will help businesses better weather the next crisis,” organizations across industries are hopping onto the data train. This means that businesses need the right: People Processes Technology It’s important for companies to invest in the right areas of data today to recognize return on investment more quickly, build data resilience, and secure their future. During the pandemic, businesses continue to struggle with a lack of technology, data quality, and skills. Data validation software verifies data at the point of capture and can automate the data cleansing process, ensuring data pipelines are accurate and contain valuable insights. This will enable team members to analyze and manage valid data and streamline their time to focus on growth-building strategies. The right people, processes, and tools will not only help a business respond to the challenges they face in today’s environment, but also ensure a stable foundation. Now, more than ever before, have we seen the true power of data. With reliable insights, businesses have the strength to confidently pivot strategies as market shifts arise, sustain the impact of the global health crisis, and prepare for what’s ahead. Read the full report to learn how what you can do today to leverage data to respond to the current global health crisis and prepare for tomorrow. Download the research.
How we shop, how we bank and how we access healthcare — it’s all racing to digital and being mostly consumed at home. It’s the evolution of the “anytime, anywhere, anyone, anything” promise that the Internet made available to us in the 1990s. However, in order to deliver on that promise, we need to be able to reduce the chances of fraud by identifying people no matter where they are or what device they are using. The rise of digital has made being able to identify an individual even more critical. According to a recent Global Insights Report from Experian, there has been a 20 percent increase overall in consumer online transaction activities and 60 percent of consumers have higher expectations of their digital experience than before Covid-19. The challenge companies are currently facing is how to digitally identify individuals while maintaining a positive consumer experience. They need to rely on new technologies including data, biometrics, identity graphs and AI. When it works right, our experiences are more convenient, safer and it creates time for us to focus on other aspects of our lives. At Experian, we are committed to leading the race to digital identity. We use our more than 40 years of experience with success in matching, managing, and protecting identities and personal data combined with today’s most advanced technologies, including AI and machine learning to confirm the identity of an individual. Specifically, Experian is an identity leader in the following areas that impact our society on a daily basis: Fraud Prevention Being able to spot the good guys from the fraudsters is strictly dependent on establishing identity. At the most basic level, we need to be able to verify an individual as a real person and authenticate that they are who they say are. Businesses also need to ensure that the extra secure measures added in order to prove someone’s identity don’t cause too much friction. Today’s consumers are looking for both a convenient and safe experience. In fact, according to our 2020 Global Identity & Fraud Report, 74 percent of consumers said security was their top priority in their online experience, with convenience following closely behind. Most recently, Experian has focused on allowing businesses to reduce both fraud and friction as the world migrates towards a touchless society. Connecting with Consumers Identity is the foundation of the marketing ecosystem. It enables marketers to deliver relevant messages to customers across their most preferred digital channels. But with consumers jumping from device-to-device throughout the day, hundreds of digital touchpoints are created, and connecting these together to build a digital identity can prove challenging. Add to that, the deprecation of third-party cookies, disparate data sources and walled gardens, digital identity can feel like an uphill battle. Experian is committed to helping marketers address the digital identity challenge, connecting offline and digital identifiers into one single customer view. This will help marketers gain a clearer view of their customers across the buying journey and seamlessly deliver relevant content across all digital devices. Healthcare More than half of all deaths that are attributed to medical errors are due to identification mistakes. Despite some giant technological advances in recent years in patient management, achieving accurate and complete patient records remains a major challenge for the U.S. healthcare industry. It’s estimated that around 70 percent of patient data held in electronic health records is incomplete or inaccurate, and up to half of all patient records may not be linked correctly. Unreliable patient data presents some huge problems for health systems, from flawed diagnoses and treatment errors to unreliable analytics and billing mistakes. As patient portals become the new “digital front door” to access care services and manage things like scheduling and payments, and telehealth gains traction as a preferred care modality, fraudulent activity in healthcare will accelerate to an all-time high. Experian helps with healthcare’s largest challenges, including duplicate medical records, mistaken patient identities, pharmaceutical abuse and associated rising costs for patients and providers. We are committed to the industry-wide adoption of Universal Patient Identifiers on the part of providers, pharmacies, payers and other stakeholders in order to improve patient safety and improve industry standards. Combating Synthetic Identities Synthetic identity fraud, where criminals combine real and fake information to create fake identities, is the fastest growing financial crime in the United States. A critical step for lenders to protect their portfolios and manage risk is confirming whether a consumer who is applying for credit is real or not. The earlier in the process this is done, the better. Experian’s fraud prevention solutions, such as Sure Profile, help lenders differentiate between real people and potentially risky applicants, so lenders can confidently increase application approvals with less risk. Businesses are faced with more competition than ever before and consumer behavior is shifting at an unprecedent pace. Being able to identify an individual whether online or offline is critical in today’s environment. Businesses that don’t embrace technology in order to keep up with the changing needs of consumers will be left behind in the race to digital identity.
