Equifax Knows Speed Pays When Delivering Credit Data

Equifax Inc. isn't the highest-profile member of the financial-services community. Yet the 102-year-old consumer credit-rating firm works behind the scenes not only for banks, but for most businesses that make large consumer sales. And as Equifax uses technology to improve service to its business customers, the benefits are trickling down to the consumer.

The past 12 months have been anything but dull for Virgil Gardaya, corporate VP and chief technology officer of Equifax. Gardaya went into 2001 knowing that for the year to be successful, he had to come up with a way to deliver as close to instant credit information to customers as possible. He also knew customers needed those services to be just as quick and accurate across international borders, and Equifax needed a seamless global data and communications center.

First on the list was migrating all users away from an age-old digital audio tape terminal system for retrieving credit data and onto the Internet.

Globally, Equifax recently outsourced a $80 million telecommunications-consolidation project to IBM Global Services, Spanish telephone company Telefonica, and AT&T to link all data centers in Europe and South America with the United States.

But perhaps the most important development to the financial-services industry as a whole was Equifax's March launch of Score Power, a consumer credit-score disclosure application developed with fellow credit-rating firm Fair Isaac and Co. With Score Power, consumers can retrieve their own credit scores over the Internet. This is crucial to financial institutions as they migrate all their goods and services to the Internet with the promise to customers of fast and easy loan-application processes. "One of the challenges of online banking is that customers have to go offline to fund the account or authenticate their application, and Equifax is doing things to enable banks to do that up-front," says Paul Jamieson, director of banking and payment services at research and consulting firm Gomez Inc. "Now as consumers are applying online, the bank can authenticate the user based on reliable data in Equifax's database."

Already, this service has increased Equifax's scope in the financial-services marketplace. On the day Score Power launched, the Atlanta company racked up the same sales numbers it saw in the entire first quarter of last year. Next up, a wireless initiative that will make consumer credit data available to business customers via mobile devices. A car dealer, for example, could retrieve data from a Wireless Application Protocol-enabled phone in the lot to speed the sale of a car.

Whether through the integration of global networks or the delivery of data to wireless devices, Equifax knows that speedy delivery is key to becoming the premier credit agency. "We need to improve processes," Gardaya says, "so that our customers can get information to make decisions fast."