With growing digitization, it’s proving to be more and more of a challenge to differentiate between useful data, and data that has been fabricated or is spam. This dilemma creates a huge demand for analytics to mine valuable information for business use. Fulfilling this demand with unique data and analytics (DNA) is the focus of Equifax India, which is headquartered in Mumbai. With more than 116 years of experience, and its bureaus operating in 19 countries, the company has developed proprietary algorithms that can go through millions of records in the split of a second and fetch the usable records for the customers.

To harness the escalating opportunities in Asia, Equifax was set up in 2010 as a joint venture between Equifax Inc., USA and seven leading financial institutions of India and today embraces 1,200 member institutions across foreign, public sector and private banks, non-banking financial corporations, co-operative banks and microfinance institutions. After establishing two successful models in Peru and Ecuador, the company launched its microfinance bureau in India in May 2011 that scales up to 168 million unique accounts currently.

“With Indian banks adopting analytics far more readily in the last two years, we are partnering with key clients in big data to compute large data sets faster than the traditional computing technologies,” says Manish Sinha, India Country Leader.

Equifax processes imperative information of customers, provided by their member institutions and bestows information reports, built from the Equifax consumer credit database. This facilitates the borrower to maintain and review his or her credit history, and helps the lender improve asset quality by ensuring that they are extending credit to financially-stable customers. Access to the database of records is facilitated through a standardized web based portal, or directly from the lender systems to company’s system.

Products like Equifax Risk Score and Portfolio Review help Equifax clients manage the risk of their own existing customers. The standardized web based portal of Equifax, which is called BureauOne, uses web services to integrate into clients’ LOS (Loan Origination Systems) and provides verified outputs by connecting to another product, called Verify ID. Verify ID has abilities to reroute inquiries based on errors/no-hits from one bureau to the next.

“It completely automates ID verification and verifies multiple data points including PAN Numbers, Aadhar Numbers, Voter IDs, etc. These are interposed for customer operational efficiency with a single data entry with the credit enquiry,” says Manish referring to ‘Verify ID’, the product introduced by Equifax to identify mismatches and alert lenders.

Equifax India also has an analytics centre of excellence in Bangalore,which caters to U.S., Indian and Middle Eastern markets. For the U.S., Equifax India builds and validates a plethora of generic and custom scorecards, and it also supports analytics teams in building and validating bureau attribute suites.

In India, analytics work spans the entire customer life-cycle. Amongst them, customer segmentation for effective marketing, campaign management frameworks, and scorecard implementation are the strategies Equifax uses to help its clients derive the right ROI on their analytical investments.


The major differentiators for Equifax India are its unique value proposition that involves data, technology capabilities and analytical insights, and leadership in the MFI business. In the future, the company plans to evolve from being legacy-focused (credit data and repayment risk) to even more insights-focused, leveraging big data, advanced analytics, domain expertise and leading-edge technology.