Driving Financial Inclusion
We help people establish a financial identity and build a credit profile to enable them to gain access to financial services.
A financial identity is essential to access financial services like banking, and to build up a profile to get loans and credit from mainstream providers.
Read on for examples of how our products and services help in practice.
The challenge
Credit profiles are traditionally built on an individual’s history of payments for things like loans, credit cards and mortgages to help lenders assess how likely they are to repay future loans. But not everyone has this.
People without a credit history are unscorable by lenders, making it difficult to access credit. And those lacking a formal financial identity can be effectively invisible to lenders (‘credit invisibles’).
Unable to access mainstream credit at fair and affordable rates, they can face higher interest rates or pay a premium to access essential services. They may be forced to turn to unregulated lenders for loans.
Our solution
We are increasingly using alternative types of data to help build a fuller picture of creditworthiness – from utility bill payments and rent payments to data from bank accounts (with consumers’ permission). Our focus is on positive data from on-time payments.
This helps people who were previously unscorable or invisible to build their credit profiles.
Combined with traditional credit report data, insights from non-traditional data give lenders a more detailed view of a consumer’s financial health so they can offer credit at a fair and affordable rate.
Impact
- Products integrating non-traditional data are helping to increase the number of people who are visible and scorable by lenders.
- Read on for examples of these products and their impact.
The challenge
Millions of US consumers can’t access mainstream credit because their financial profile is too thin to be scorable or their credit score is too low.
Our solution
Our groundbreaking products, Experian Go and Experian Boost, use non-traditional data to help people in the USA build up their credit history. Both have been recognised as World Changing Ideas by the Fast Company Awards.
Experian Go empowers ‘credit invisibles’ to create their own Experian credit report in just a few minutes. All they need is their government-issued ID, Social Security number and a selfie to authenticate their identify.
With Experian Boost, consumers can give us permission to connect to their online banking accounts to identify payments for rent, insurance, streaming services, utilities and telecoms. They can then choose whether they want to add these to their Experian credit file to instantly update their score.
Impact
- Over 380,000 US consumers previously invisible to lenders have established a credit profile using Eperian Go since 2022.
- Over 360,000 of Experian Boosts have resulted in an unscorable consumer receiving a credit score by choosing to add non-traditional positive data to their Experian credit file since launch in 2019.
The challenge
Informal or gig economy workers in Brazil often lack formal proof of income. Examples include street vendors, micro-entrepreneurs, drivers and food delivery couriers.
They receive payments into their bank accounts and use them for purchases, bill payments and daily transactions. But without a traditional credit history, they remain largely excluded from mainstream credit.
Our solution
Our new open finance solution is designed to overcome this challenge by enabling people to use transactional data from their bank accounts as an entry point to credit.
The solution enables lenders to consider consumer-consented open finance data – such as bank statements, transaction flows, monthly income patterns and bill payments – in their assessment of creditworthiness.
Reflecting this information in credit scores can help lenders increase approval rates for credit.
Impact
- More than 1 million people have consented to connect their accounts, including micro-entrepreneurs and people working in the informal or gig economy.