Equifax Enhances Ability-to-Pay Assessment Capabilities
Recent Acquisition Enables Credit Issuers to Gain Sharper View of Consumer's Ability to Pay
ATLANTA, Dec. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX) today announced the expansion of its suite of solutions available to help credit issuers and lenders assess consumers ability to pay. As a result of its ongoing investment in adding capabilities that provide a more complete picture of a consumer's financial capacity, Equifax is uniquely positioned with a full suite of income, spending, credit, and wealth solutions that help issuers assess consumers' ability to pay across the entire customer lifecycle. With its recent acquisition of IXI Corporation, Equifax has further deepened its insights into consumer wealth, spending capacity and behavior and the ability to meet financial obligations.
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With a wide range of financial capacity products, Equifax aids lenders in designing a custom program that leverages a combination of Equifax's solutions and the issuer's own data to evaluate their current and prospective customers' ability to pay. As credit issuers evaluate their options to comply with the amendments to Regulation Z, they may want to consider which tools offer the highest level of knowledge of consumer's behavior to meet the specific needs of their firm.
Equifax enables a timely and holistic view of consumers' "ability to pay" by offering specific measures to complement a firm's own risk management data and strategies. Firms can take advantage of these solutions today, including:
-- Ability to Pay and Capacity Scores
-- IXI Ability to Pay Index(TM)(ATP): Ranks households based on their
ability to pay financial obligations; factors in income, spending,
and credit
-- Credit Capacity Index(TM) (CCI): Identifies a consumer's ability to
safely take on additional debt, delivered as an index with up to 4
reason codes
-- Income and Employment Verification
-- The Work Number® Income: Employer provided, verified income at the
individual level
-- IXI Income360®: Estimated total household income including income
from wages and income generated from invested assets, continuous up
to $2M
-- Equifax Personal Income Model(TM): Estimated individual income
-- Equifax IRS Direct: Verify income using the IRS's Form 4506-T
-- Consumers' Current Monthly Obligations
-- Equifax Credit Report: Up to data credit files of more than 200
million consumers
-- Discretionary Spending Capacity and Disposable Income
-- IXI Discretionary Spending Index (DSI® ) and Discretionary Spending
Dollars (DS$(TM)): Estimated household discretionary spending,
exclusive of non-discretionary expenses, provided as a dollar amount
or index
-- Analytic evaluation of more than 100 debt and income relationships,
real time or batch delivered
These unique data sets and insights help issuers assess a consumer's ability to pay at multiple touch-points, including:
-- Batch Prescreen: Implement a cost-effective method to assess if a
consumer will meet the ability to pay criteria during selection to avoid
spending unnecessary marketing dollars
-- Instant Prescreen: Conduct an automated, real-time assessment of the
consumer's ability to pay to facilitate a good consumer experience
-- Invitation to Apply: Identify segments with higher ability to pay
profiles in order to target segments that improve net response rates
-- New Account Underwriting: Assess the consumer's ability to pay in order
to approve the consumer for a new card
-- Line Management Review: Assess a consumer's ability to pay prior to
granting a line increase
"Equifax has aggressively pursued our vision to build a true 360 degree view of consumer capacity," explained Dann Adams, president, U.S. Information Solutions, Equifax. "In effect, recent legislative amendments are a validation of this vision. Our proactive stance now allows us to lead the industry in assembling these client-tested tools for assessing consumer ability to pay."
"We're excited to be able to add IXI's wealth, income, and spending insights into Equifax's robust solution set," said Tom Dailey, president of IXI, a business unit of Equifax. "Top credit issuers are already leveraging IXI's ability to pay insights to help them evaluate consumer financial capacity. By combining the predictive power of modeled financial measures, such as income, with the accuracy of bureau data and verified income, credit issuers have additional options to minimize risk and assess consumer ability and willingness to pay."
For more information about Equifax and IXI visit www.equifax.com and www.ixicorp.com.
About Equifax Inc. (www.equifax.com)
Equifax empowers businesses and consumers with information they can trust. A global leader in information solutions, we leverage one of the largest sources of consumer and commercial data, along with advanced analytics and proprietary technology, to create customized insights that enrich both the performance of businesses and the lives of consumers.
With a strong heritage of innovation and leadership, Equifax continuously delivers innovative solutions with the highest integrity and reliability. Businesses - large and small - rely on us for consumer and business credit intelligence, portfolio management, fraud detection, decisioning technology, marketing tools, and much more. We empower individual consumers to manage their personal credit information, protect their identity, and maximize their financial well-being.
Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Equifax Inc. operates in the U.S. and 14 other countries throughout North America, Latin America and Europe. Equifax is a member of Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500® Index. Our common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EFX.
SOURCE Equifax Inc.
Released December 8, 2009