Our responsibility: Create social and economic benefit through our products, services and capabilities, balancing commercial benefit with consumers’ rights and needs.
Experian’s core products and services have a significant and positive effect on society. We listen closely to our clients’ needs and adapt quickly to market conditions, providing them with the means for controlling their costs and reducing their exposure to financial risks.
Innovation is always important to us and we adapt our products and create new ones to help tackle the issues of the day, often with the input of clients. But as we do this for business clients, we keep an eye on the needs of the consumer. For example, our collections service supports businesses in collecting monies owed to them, but we also help them build up a comprehensive picture of consumers' circumstances so that collections teams deal with people sensitively and fairly.
To help consumers directly, we're constantly improving our products that help them manage their own credit and we are investing more in identity theft management services.
Keeping the needs of society and the consumer in focus is a priority for the foreseeable future as we embed these factors in our product development processes.
One way we show our commitment to society is in continuing to invest in small amounts of funding to encourage our people to come up with product developments that have a particular social benefit. We support proposals with 'seed corn' funding to help the business deliver such projects, even when economic pressure demands a fast return on investment.
See this year's CR Report case studies for news on two such developments in microfinance and employee diversity.