Anyone who’s ever applied for a loan is familiar with the credit bureaus that help to determine creditworthiness. Among the best known is Dublin-based Experian, which has undertaken a journey to transform and redefine its business far beyond its historical core. Although it remains the world’s largest credit bureau operator, Experian has been systematic in developing a broad range of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) enterprises operating across 32 countries.
The focus on innovation has underpinned its efforts to build up its data businesses while investing in new business opportunities and decisioning and analytical platforms, an approach that has helped it to triple its revenue in the past 20 years. Experian’s chief strategy and investment officer, Michael Meltz, recently spoke with McKinsey senior partners Saptarshi Ganguly and Gökhan Sari about Experian’s growth journey. In this discussion, Meltz explains how the company is using gen AI to add capabilities and offerings and is shifting to a platform operating model to grow and scale more efficiently.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Building on a culture of growth
Gökhan Sari: You were previously an equity research analyst at J.P. Morgan, and you now lead strategy for Experian. Can you tell us about that journey and how Experian evolved over that same period?
Michael Meltz: I joined Experian in 2012, following a dozen years on Wall Street, where I was an equity analyst covering the media and information services sectors. I was one of the few analysts covering information services and the first US analyst to initiate coverage on Experian, and at some point, I realized that I was much more interested in the growth of businesses and business models than stocks. When an opportunity arose for me to transition to a leadership role at Experian, I took it.
Experian has always had a growth-oriented culture, which I appreciated before I joined. We have a broad mix of B2B and consumer-facing businesses and an intense focus on serving customer needs. We help empower consumers in their financial lives, and we also help businesses grow, manage risks, automate processes, and increase operational productivity in an increasingly digital world.
Over the past decade, we’ve significantly increased the size, scale, and profitability of the company, which took a lot of hard work. We’ve invested to strengthen the core data businesses, developed new analytical and decisioning platforms, embraced cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and expanded in adjacent market spaces like health, automotive, and agribusiness.
In recent years, one of our biggest achievements has been to fundamentally change our orientation with consumers, to the point where we’ve now developed direct relationships with over 200 million people globally. This has led to strong growth in our B2C business and significant differentiation compared with many traditional competitors. Experian is now one of the largest consumer financial platforms in the world.
Gökhan Sari: You’ve talked often about Experian’s growth-oriented culture. What would you point to as reflective of that mindset?
Michael Meltz: The company has tripled in size over the past 20 years, reflecting a long-standing emphasis on growth within our existing markets and exploration of new markets. Interestingly, approximately 50 percent of revenues today are from businesses that didn’t exist or were tiny 20 years ago.
Our B2B businesses account for about 70 percent of our revenue, while the B2C side is about 30 percent. Our leadership team spends a lot of time thinking about things we can do to capture more growth—extending further and deeper across the value chain, reshaping our business models, or moving into entirely new spaces. You see that focus in the innovation we’re contemplating and investing in, like gen AI, which is undeniably transformative and a significant accelerant for many trends.
Several years ago, we implemented a new approach to customer-led innovation, which resulted in a more systematic approach to how we identify, manage, track, and resource innovation. This created an even stronger foundation for future growth and has fueled some of our most exciting new product innovations.
We’ve now developed direct relationships with over 200 million people globally.
Finding value in the gen AI journey
Saptarshi Ganguly: What has your gen AI journey looked like? Where are you seeing the value as opposed to just the promise?
Michael Meltz: We have more than 10,000 people in product, engineering, data, and analytics roles, which has helped spur a lot of learning, testing, and thinking about what gen AI could mean to our business and our clients. Over the past few years, we went through a comprehensive process to develop effective risk controls, implement governance structures, and create the right environments to support innovation. We’ve created focused global communities of subject experts, implemented extensive training programs, and invested in key capabilities. We wouldn't have results today if we hadn’t gone through this foundational journey building up experience and capabilities.
Like some other companies, we use AI copilots and code generators as “buddy programmers” to accelerate our development processes and enhance our quality-assurance and testing procedures. We also created an internal Experian gen AI platform that comprises managed services, reference architectures, and end-user tools for safe, efficient use of AI within Experian. This is a vendor-agnostic environment that lets our developers use various LLMs [large language models] through a single API. This is used globally.
We see many gen AI use cases around product innovation and productivity, finding ways to improve processes and efficiency, reducing costs, and freeing up funds for reinvestment in higher-opportunity areas. Many customers are asking for solutions that provide insights faster, help them save money, help them quickly query in an accurate way, and pull together disparate information.
One example on the B2B side is with Ascend, our cloud-based analytical platform that allows lenders—and we have over 1,000 of them, including some of the biggest banks and card issuers globally—to build, refine, and optimize models. Ascend democratizes complex analytics, enabling lenders to implement extensive segmentation within their customer-acquisition strategies, better understand how they will manage those customers once they bring them on board, and more seamlessly manage their model development process.
Within the Ascend platform, we launched Experian Assistant, which is built on an agentic AI framework. It provides immediate responses to user questions, enhances model transparency, and helps parse multiple model iterations quickly by selecting optimal modeling features along with coding and deployment support. This innovation significantly improves the process of model building and can reduce development time from months to days and sometimes even hours.
Another example is a product we’ve recently launched to help clients manage regulatory compliance for model risk governance. The model-building process brings with it a lot of documentation requirements from regulators. We are using gen AI to help automate and streamline that entire process so that you don’t have to manually create a book the size of multiple yellow-page directories. Our solution documents everything in real time as you’re developing and refining the model, which can reduce the time needed to do this by more than 50 percent versus traditional methods.
We wouldn’t have results today if we hadn’t gone through this foundational journey building up experience and capabilities.
Saptarshi Ganguly: And what sorts of gen AI programs have you rolled out on the B2C side?
Michael Meltz: We have a lot of exciting things underway in our Consumer business, where our goal is to empower people in their financial lives. We aim to provide Experian members with much deeper personalization so they can find and use products that are more effective and rewarding for their needs.
One example that we’ve launched is EVA, or the Experian Virtual Assistant. It’s an AI agent that allows our members to interact with their personal financial data in a way that wasn’t previously possible and helps them better understand aspects of their financial health and think about scenarios to improve it. We’ve now rolled out version 3.0 of EVA to our entire base of over 80 million registered members in the US.
Extracting value from the data
Gökhan Sari: These examples underscore where your real competitive advantage lies—your data. How are you maintaining that advantage?
Michael Meltz: We have exceptional data assets across the company and invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually to bring in new data and enhance our processes. We have clearly defined data strategies in every business where we operate, and we are constantly thinking about what we need to do to ensure our data superiority.
We measure the accuracy and quality of our data and maintain data lab groups focused on client R&D and emerging technologies. That includes always looking for areas that can augment our existing data assets and open up entirely new commercial opportunities, like mobile data, e-commerce transaction data, open finance, and open banking.
A key focus for us is accelerating our Consumer Services business. We now have over 200 million registered Experian members across the US, Brazil, the UK, Colombia, and other countries, which makes Experian one of the largest consumer financial platforms in the world. The goal is to help people use data to improve their financial outcomes. As a result, Consumer Services itself is becoming an engine of data and analytics, which helps improve outcomes for clients all across Experian’s businesses.
Consumer-permissioned data is essential to our strategy. Many businesses like ours haven’t traditionally accessed this data in the past, but it’s powerful in terms of financial predictiveness and the ability to drive positive outcomes for consumers.
To me, that’s one of the most exciting things we’re doing, because we’ve inverted the traditional model. We’ve changed that relationship and created growth opportunities within the Consumer Services business. This broader flywheel creates further opportunities and connection with our credit bureaus and our other businesses, such as those focused on employment verification, automotive, marketing, and even health.
We have exceptional data assets across the company and invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually to bring in new data and enhance our processes.
Gökhan Sari: How do you acquire and ingest this data so it can work with your existing systems?
Michael Meltz: Data strategy is a top priority at Experian, with executive- and board-level visibility. We have data road maps for all our businesses, and to help manage all of our data and data businesses, we’ve established a chief data officer in each region where we operate. We also have a global steering group of chief data officers to share best practices, cross-pollinate innovations, and drive operational excellence.
We’ve invested heavily in Brazil, a fast-growing market where historically there hadn’t been a “positive data” framework of reporting on-time payments to credit bureaus as there is in the US and many other developed countries. The regulations changed a few years ago to make that happen, and it resulted in a different dynamic. We had to gather new data assets, build new models, develop new analytics, and form new partnerships. The end result is the creation of a much more expansive data asset and product set where we feel like our position is now significantly better than any of the competitors.
We also enhance our data inorganically with M&A and minority investments that support our strategy. We’ve acquired a number of data businesses across the world focused on areas such as open finance, categorization, fraud, and digital identity, all with an aim to help our clients make more-informed decisions to run and grow their businesses. One example was a business we acquired in the US several years ago called Clarity, which essentially is about alternative finance. It gave us access to an end market that we weren’t participating in, but also data on different demographics and income levels that we didn’t have at the level we needed. It’s become the basis for thinking about capabilities like “buy now, pay later.”
We’ve acquired a number of data businesses across the world focused on areas such as open finance, categorization, fraud, and digital identity.
Saptarshi Ganguly: What sorts of shifts and investments have you made to support and scale this approach?
Michael Meltz: We have a lot of data sets and services that layer onto each other, and by connecting more of them, it becomes easier for our clients to access and use more of them. That’s a foundational part of our strategy.
We’ve made big strides in advancing the platform components of our business. For many years, for example, we sold a range of distinct decisioning software, fraud tools, and other analytical engines for risk assessment. They all had separate logins, even when the same group was using them. So we’ve made a big push to integrate them onto a single platform to make it easier for clients to essentially access a menu of Experian products.
A few years ago, we created a global organization called Experian Software Solutions to accelerate our product development efforts. This has reinforced a platform mindset within Experian and allowed us to further unlock the potential of our breadth of analytics, decisioning, fraud, and identity products. We recently combined Software Solutions with our global technology groups to get additional scale benefits and maximize the opportunity for our 10,000-plus developers, data scientists, and technologists around the world.
We’ve been working on this integration capability for a number of years and have invested significantly in the technology infrastructure side to support the platform operating model. As a result, we continue to shift more of our product investment to new areas of growth as opposed to the maintenance side. This has occurred while increasing development spend sixfold over the past ten years.
We spend over $1 billion annually on technology, with an ongoing focus on modernization, upskilling, and the acquisition of tools.
Network architecture, security, and resiliency
Gökhan Sari: One of the big themes for companies in the financial-data business is network architecture, resilience, and security. How are you protecting your data?
Michael Meltz: In a business like ours, technology and information resiliency, reliability, and security are paramount. Our products connect to other systems as well, so we also need to think of the flows that occur in that chain.
It should come as no surprise that technology and infrastructure are among Experian’s largest expenses. We spend over $1 billion annually on technology, with an ongoing focus on modernization, upskilling, and the acquisition of the tools to help us build those products.
