Experian plc is a global information services group with operations in 40 countries. The company now employs 17,000 people with corporate headquarters in Dublin, Republic of Ireland and operational headquarters in Nottingham, United Kingdom; Costa Mesa, California, United States; São Paulo, Brazil; and Heredia, Costa Rica. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. Experian is a partner in the U.K. Government's Verify ID system.
History
In the UK during the 1970s, GUS plc, a retail conglomerate with millions of customers paying for goods on credit, employed John Peace, a computer programmer at the time, to combine the mail order data from various GUS businesses and create a central database to which was later added electoral roll data as well as county court judgements. GUS's database was commercialised in 1980 under the name Commercial Credit Nottingham (CCN). In 1996 GUS plc acquired the US credit reporting business Experian, formerly known as TRW Information Services, from Bain Capital and the Thomas H. Lee Partners and merged it into CCN.
During the next ten years, Experian broadened its product range to new industry sectors, beyond financial services, and entered new markets such as Latin America, Asia Pacific and Eastern Europe. The business expanded through both organic development and acquisitions. In October 2006 Experian was demerged from the British company GUS plc and listed on the London Stock Exchange.
In August 2005, Experian accepted a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over charges that Experian had violated a previous settlement with the FTC. The FTC's allegations concerned customers who signed up for the "free credit report" at Experian's Consumerinfo.com site. The FTC alleged that ads for the "free credit report" did not adequately disclose that Experian would automatically enroll customers in Experian's $79.95 credit-monitoring program.
In January 2008, Experian announced that it would cut more than 200 jobs at its Nottingham office as it moved development work to India to reduce costs.
Experian shut down its Canadian operations on 14 April 2009.
Experian Business Credit Report Video
Notable acquisitions
The acquisition in 2002 of ConsumerInfo.com enabled Experian to start supplying credit reports to consumers, enabling consumers to monitor their credit status.
In 2004 Experian acquired CheetahMail, a business founded in 1998 that provided e-mail marketing software and services. In the same year Experian also acquired QAS, a supplier of contact data management and identity verification solutions.
In 2005, Experian acquired PriceGrabber for $485 million. Also in 2005, Experian acquired FootFall, an information provider to the retail and retail property industries: Experian FootFall. Still in 2005, Experian acquired LowerMyBills.com for US$330 million.
In September 2006, Experian announced its purchase of Northern Credit Bureaus, located in Quebec, Canada.
In June 2007, Experian acquired an initial 65% stake in Serasa, the market leading credit bureau in Brazil and now the largest credit bureau in the world. The purchase price for the initial stake was $1.2bn. This was the first acquisition for Experian in Latin America.
In mid-2007, Experian acquired a number of software companies with products that filled gaps in their existing portfolio. The intention was to be able to offer Experian's customers an Experian-branded product for all phases of the customer lifecycle. These included:
- Emailing Solution, a French e-mail marketing company. The intention was to grow the existing CheetahMail business with the acquisition of this new client portfolio.
- Hitwise, an internet monitor that collects data directly from information service provider networks.
- Tallyman debt collection management software from Bristol-based Talgentra.
Experian purchased RentBureau in June 2010, which houses rental payment histories on over 7 million US residents; this data will now be included in Experian US consumer credit reports as of January 2011. In March 2012, Rental Bureau launched in the UK. By including rental payment data in credit reports, several million people living in private rented accommodation will have the ability to access more and lower cost credit deals.
In August 2010, Experian became the first CICRA licensed credit bureau to go live in India. Since then the company has provided Experian credit reports to lenders and consumers in compliance with the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) guidelines.
Experian purchased a majority stake in Techlightenment on 17 January 2011, as part of Experian's strategy to grow its digital marketing capabilities. Techlightenment is a data driven technology and marketing company based in the UK, which helps clients to leverage advertising through key social media platforms. Techlightenment will form part of the UK Experian Marketing Services Division.
In May 2011, Experian acquired a 98% holding in Computec S.A., a credit services information provider based in Colombia, for the equivalent of US$380m.
In June 2011, Experian acquired Medical Present Value, Inc. (MPV), a provider of data, analytics and software in the US healthcare payments market. Its products are used by healthcare providers to manage payments between patients, commercial payers (such as insurance companies) and government programmes.
In July 2011, Experian acquired Virid Interatividade Digital Ltda ("Virid"), an email marketing company offering email delivery, email based behavioural segmentation, real-time campaign reporting, mobile delivery and social media integration in Brazil.
In December 2011, Experian acquired Garlik Ltd, a provider of web monitoring services in the UK. Garlik helps consumers to protect themselves from the risks of identity theft and financial fraud.
In May 2012, Experian announced it had signed an agreement to sell PriceGrabber, its price comparison shopping business and North America online lead generation activities, which operate under the brands Classes USA and LowerMyBills to Ybrant Digital Limited, a digital marketing services business based in Hyderabad, India. However, since then, Experian has announced that Ybrant Digital has failed to comply with its obligation to close the transaction and Experian considers Ybrant Digital to be in breach of contract.
In February 2013 Experian launched its consumer credit bureau in Australia. Experian will provide consumer credit reports to utility, financial and telecommunication companies. This launch follows the passing of the Privacy Amendment Bill in November 2012, which will mean a step change for lenders, who will now be able to take positive (in addition) to negative credit history into account when making lending decisions.
In October 2013 Experian bought 41st Parameter, a fraud-prevention vendor, increasing its presence in the fraud prevention market and extending its presence into web fraud transaction protection. Then in November 2013 Experian bought Passport Health Communications, a data and software provider, enabling it to offer clients in the US healthcare industry a one-stop-shop to manage risk and to satisfy their payments requirements.
Operations
Experian's principal lines of business are credit services, marketing services, decision analytics and consumer services. The company collects information on people, businesses, motor vehicles and insurance. It also collects 'lifestyle' data from on- and off-line surveys.
Experian provides services in North America, Latin America, UK and Ireland, Europe, Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific and reports its financial performance across those regions. Activities in these regions are grouped into four principal activities: credit services, decision analytics, marketing services and consumer services.
Like the other major credit reporting bureaus, Experian is chiefly regulated in the United States by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, signed into law in 2003, amended the FCRA to require the credit reporting companies to provide consumers with one free copy of their credit report per 12-month period. Like its main competitors, TransUnion and Equifax, Experian markets credit reports directly to consumers. Experian heavily markets its for-profit credit reporting service, FreeCreditReport.com, and all three agencies have been criticised and even sued for selling credit reports that can be obtained at no cost.
Experian US handles its credit disputes in its National Consumer Assistance Center (NCAC) in Allen, Texas. You may contact the NCAC once you have a copy of your personal credit report by calling the number that is located on the personal credit report itself. Experian opened a second NCAC in Santiago, Chile in March 2007. Many divisions of the Allen NCAC as well as several other business functions including software development have been relocated to the Chile location.
Experian provides regional data at nationalscoreindex.com which shows average credit scores by region and zip code as well as various other measures of household debt. The site does not indicate if it uses a FICO based credit score, the new VantageScore, or some other scoring model.
The company's largest operation is Experian North America, a consumer credit reporting agency that is considered one of the three largest American credit agencies along with Equifax and TransUnion.
Corporate responsibility
Experian states that its corporate responsibility initiatives are focused on six key responsibilities: communities, consumers, employers, data, products and services and environment.
In July 2012 Experian launched a free online teaching resource called "Values, Money and Me", designed to help primary school pupils explore both practical and emotional issues around managing money. The tool aims to give young children a head start in life by helping develop their financial knowledge and abilities, as well as their attitudes and values towards money. Values, Money and Me has been awarded a Quality Mark by pfeg, a UK financial education charity.
Sales to identity thieves
Experian subsidiary and data aggregator Court Ventures sold personally identifiable information on at least hundreds of thousands of Americans to Hieu Minh Ngo, a man in Vietnam, who then resold the information through the identity fraud enabling websites Superget.info and Findget.me. The information offered for anonymous sale on these websites included individual's name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, place of work, duration of work, state driver's license number, mother's maiden name, bank account number(s), bank routing number(s), email account(s) and other account passwords.
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