Innovation Capitalizes
On Growth Markets
The success of Enabling Technologies underscores the innovative
thinking within Equifax that leads to new growth opportunities
through the development of new products and markets. Consider
the small-business lending market. Growing more than 20 percent
annually, this market is big business for our bank customers,
who find that a small-business owner can be more than twice as
profitable as an individual consumer. Through innovation, Equifax
Commercial Solutions has expanded rapidly from a one-dimensional
database product into a fully integrated platform offering superior
predictability through scoring and decisioning capabilities –
an industry first using this unique data. Market acceptance is
growing as evidenced by sequential quarterly growth in transactions
and more than doubling annual revenue in 2005.
Personal Solutions is another area where innovation is occurring
in a dynamic growth market. We estimate the current market for
direct-to-consumer products is $1 billion and growing. We continue
to invest in this opportunity with products such as subscription-based
Score Watch™ and 3-in-1 Monitoring. Subscription revenue
is a key driver of growth in this market. It creates more sustainable
revenue and cultivates long-term relationships with our membership
base – an ideal platform from which to cross-sell future
products.
The trust and integrity of the Equifax brand is an important competitive
differentiator for Personal Solutions, where data security, technology
reliability and privacy protection are well recognized by mainstream
America. If you have seen Firewall, Harrison Ford’s
latest movie, then you can appreciate our brand strength. When
Ford’s character discovers that his identity has been compromised,
he logs onto the Equifax Personal Solutions website to determine
the damage. We are proud to note that we did not pay or lobby
for this exposure, but rather the director wanted to use our services
to inject an element of reality into the movie.
Innovation speaks many languages. The Latin American market is
expanding rapidly for us in part due to new thinking that has
transitioned the business into an integrated, value-added solutions
provider. Strong sales growth for decisioning and marketing solutions
throughout the region underscores this point. Leveraging our core
competencies to develop new solutions for the markets where we
currently have a presence also will help drive international growth.
In addition, we will look to our effective Latin American model,
where we have often utilized partnerships to build market presence,
as we evaluate new global opportunities. |
