experience in the information business
our history and our tradition in data is
around credit payment background well
the market today needs to understand the
business a lot more than just their
credit payment history and so for us
it's about changing the game to make
sure that all of that unstructured data
combined with our structured data
provides a more comprehensive view of
the business we have over 3,000 sources
of data we update 200 million records a
month on that data we have billions of
rows of data between current data
archived historical data derived data
sets we take that complex data set and
all that volume and we deliver an
assembler credit report in less than a
second we do a lot of business with IBM
today so we knew that the data science
elite team at IBM was going to come in
and make a difference right away and
once we started to engage and talk about
our problem our business problem we were
trying to solve it was clear to us that
they were going to help us make a
difference very quickly not in a year
but in a few months we really knew that
we had to figure out how to get the data
into an environment where we could do
the work and we went through an
extensive process of a validating of the
Watson studio platform to move the data
into there to do the POC
after we had the POC this environment
stood up we brought the data over that's
when things really started to click the
one thing that was great about Experian
is they had such a good data they knew
their data the data was very clean and
they were very eager to apply machine
learning and apply it everywhere in AI
so my team was built specifically for
this problem we embarked upon that
proof-of-concept and it turned out to be
in the area of our corporate linkage and
a particular area where we had a lot of
value to our data and it turned out to
add a tremendous amount of value on a
very short career
within 90 days we had the
proof-of-concept the results of which
had demonstrated that we could improve
our coverage by 500% and lower our cost
by 80%
so we knew we had a winner right there
we started out by not really realizing
that there was a place for analytics in
what we call our back office and it was
shortly after our first meeting with the
consultants at IBM that we realized oh
my gosh
not only do we have an environment for
that where it makes sense
but as one of our consultants put it we
had a target-rich environment for that
so that was the point which I knew we
were onto something very big the future
for data science at Experian is complete
disruption of an industry that has has
focused on the analytics in the front
end and the products to actually
improving the core assets if we hadn't
started with the data science elite team
I think we'd still be trying to figure
out how to implement our vision and what
tools are going to help us do that
