Equifax’s Ignite Data and Analytics Platform

We saw this platform since its infancy around a decade ago and how far its come since then. The platform is designed for marketing, risk, modeling teams to leverage latest data from Equifax’s assets such as their credit database as well as their alternative datasets to build models directly on the platform.

Traditionally, credit risk modeling teams have to request multiple records over time from credit bureaus (not just Equifax) to perform any types of reject inference studies. (If you don’t know what reject inference is, please call us… no, actually please call Equifax). This is very costly and time consuming, by the time the bank’s analytics team piece if all together, they are distracted to do something else and the need has passed by another shiny object.

This platform allows data science team members to upload their banking and lending records and match, merge and analyze on their own time with the latest samples and sample datasets at Equifax going back many many years.

The cost of using this platform is a whole lot less than requesting a few months worth of retro records and oftentimes it’s incomplete and you might need to ask for another set of records or records from another data asset database.

But more than just an analytical platform, Equifax has now introduced a robust reporting system (with critical reports built) to show clients on their lending performance. 

Because Equifax has lender contributed data points, the reporting tool can easily compare your performance vs, your peer and industry performance in a series of analytical reporting tools. It will also slice and dice your existing portfolio and quickly detect any unintended “mis”-treatments of certain cohorts or consumer segment. 

It’s a powerful tool and one that stands on its own besides the other analytical capabilities we mentioned before. 

Any self-respecting bank of financial institutions that want to keep a close eye on their customer acquisition performance and their existing portfolio performance with respect to macro economic trends should look into this. If you can’t find a contact, please visit our Marketplace and click on Equifax.

Equifax’s One Score

If you are thinking about Neo, played by Keanu Reeves from the movie series, Matrix, you are correct. This score is also the chosen one. 

Now let us explain, some years ago, there were four or five major subprime credit bureaus. Slowly over time, prime bureaus such as Equifax started to buy them up. In fact Equifax picked up two of these subprime bureaus, TeleTrack from CoreLogic (that’s another story for another time) as well as DataX

The genius of the One Score is that Equifax is mixing the attributes from these two subprime bureaus with their prime ACRO file (bonus points for decomposing the ACRO acronym). 

Why? It’s a well known fact that the US consumers move from subprime to near prime and then onto prime credit space in a very fluid fashion. Having a lens (models or scores) trained on both of these populations would do wonders for both prime lenders and subprime lenders.

Why? For instance, if a consumer is sliding from prime to subprime space, with one score, the subprime lender might offer them a slightly different product to help these consumers through a potentially tough time in their financial life and help them to get back on track. This provides an extraordinarily welcomed customer experience and one they are sure to appreciate.

For prime lenders, if they see subprime or new-to-prime customers from the One Score lens, they might always offer something that gradually grow these consumers into bigger responsibilities to help them and the lenders to ease this population into the prime space as opposed to jam them up with larger financial products that they aren’t accustomed to.

We think Equifax's One Score shows a lot of promise to give lenders the extra boost to approve as much as 10-20% of the otherwise declined population. And with an approved population, the right line assignment calibrated with One Score can help lenders to give the right product to this population at the right time.

and Beyond

We wish we had more time to spend with the team from Equifax but we walked away with the feeling that their technologist and risk strategists have ears to the ground and understood what banks and lenders need. 

They are also prepared for the eventual rate correction and have the right set of tools for capital markets and originators to jump back into expanding their lending portfolio.

See you guys next year!

About LendAPI

LendAPI is the only digital onboarding platform for banks with a powerful Product Studio and Rules Studio on one platform.