How to Market Faster with Third Party Data

Your customers’ behaviors are fluid, constantly shifting. Their financial trajectories change. Their debt loads rise and fall. Their net worth expands and shrinks. And their income and employment are more fragile than ever. 

To see these subtle movements within your customer base and understand how they might affect your bottom line so you can take fast action, you need one thing: third-party data. 

Yet, accessing third-party data and merging it with your customer data can be a painful data-handling nightmare. 

Do these pain points sound familiar? 

The process of accessing, integrating, and managing third-party data is a modern-day, “devil-in-the-details” struggle for many organizations. Often, the problems are related to operational inefficiency. 

• Slow turnaround time. When you request data from a third-party provider, you might wait days, if not weeks, to get it. Then, follow-up data requests are frequently needed to achieve the desired analysis or outcome, adding even more time. 

• Storing the data. After receiving the requested data, you must store it. This requires extra money and resources for data that may only be used for a single analytic project. Each data update and new data request requires extra storage, and it piles up fast. 

• Securing the data. Every time you send, receive, and store data, it presents a unique data security risk. The more times you do it, the more it can increase your risk. 

• Structuring and integrating the data. Bringing third-party data into a legacy system or analytic environment often requires restructuring to align it with the current data framework. Then it must be integrated with your existing customer data to create unified customer views that can be mined for fresh insights. Unfortunately, this usually requires additional resources with limited capacity.

• Updating the data. Depending on how you’re using the data—say, if you’re using it to enrich your customer profiles—you need the data to be regularly updated. But that can restart the entire process, snowballing the inefficiencies. 

Taken together, these hassles slow down production, making it difficult to get your analytic models to market on time. This drains your internal resources, increases operational costs, and puts the kibosh on “right now” revenue opportunities tied to changing customer behaviors and market shifts. 

But not anymore. 

At Equifax, we’re changing all that by putting differentiated, ready-to-use data at your fingertips, within minutes of contract signing. Say goodbye to the data nightmares and hello to speed and simplicity. 

The solution: data that meets you wherever you are.

Your data “hassles” keep us awake at night. Helping you optimize your business and grow your bottom line are our top priorities. 

That’s why we enabled Equifax Ignite® Data as a Service (DaaS). It’s part of our inclusive Equifax Ignite cloud-based analytics platform, which includes everything you need—multisource data, analytics tools, a decisioning hub, and a feedback loop—to streamline the analytic development process and get your models and scores to market faster. 

The DaaS component allows us to meet you wherever you are by delivering Equifax data directly within your existing cloud platform. This removes obstacles and pain points associated with traditional data handling, so you can get to revenue faster and experience the far-reaching benefits and impacts of cloud-to-cloud data sharing. 

In other words, it’s a data solution that moves with you, supporting and increasing your business agility instead of holding you back or dragging you down. 

Cloud-to-cloud data sharing is like…analytic jet fuel. 

Accessing third-party data within your existing cloud platform is clearly more efficient than traditional forms of access and delivery. But, how so? In many ways, Equifax Ignite DaaS is like analytic jet fuel that helps streamline your processes so you can get your projects to market faster. 

• First, it’s fast. Think “one-click” fast. You review the available Equifax data within your cloud platform and click your selections. Within hours of contract signing (sometimes minutes), the data is delivered to your platform—the same platform that houses all your other data. This helps you efficiently pool and access ALL your data sources in a single cloud-based location, optimizing speed and simplicity. 

• That leads to the next benefit. Since the data is delivered and accessible within your cloud platform, it eliminates the need for data handling and storage, preserving your time, resources, and costs.  

• We simply deliver the data in a query-ready format so you can immediately start using it—no data prep is necessary. In case you’re counting, that’s even more time and cost savings. 

But we’ve taken extra steps to simplify things even further. For example, curated data sets are available for specific industries (Financial Services, Higher Education, Automotive Lending, Insurtech). We have thoroughly researched the highest-performing data sets, attributes, features, and scores based on industry-specific use cases, saving you the time and guesswork of wondering which data sets will work best. 

Yet, Equifax Ignite DaaS is also fully configurable with a long list of data and analytics solutions that can be combined to fit your specific business needs. To offer the widest possible reach and availability, it’s accessible via today’s leading cloud platforms including Snowflake, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud. 

In short, the production delays and resource constraints that all too often hamstring progress are now behind you. Having third-party data delivered directly within your cloud platform jettisons you ahead of the curve…ahead of customer expectations, ahead of your competition, and ahead of the market. You’ll get from data to “done” faster than you ever imagined possible. 

The real difference-maker? The data. 

Regardless of how efficient the delivery process is, it won’t matter if the data is low-quality or irrelevant. However, this is where Equifax Ignite excels. 

Our meticulously managed consumer economic data provides sweeping coverage of the U.S. consumer credit population, including access to traditional credit data plus alternative data to help you better understand consumers who lack credit. You’ll get insight into credit, bankruptcy, ability to pay, income, employment, wealth, and assets. You’ll see how people handle their ‘everyday bills’ for cell phones, cable, and utilities which aren’t usually reported to the credit bureaus. The same goes for specialty finance, alternative short-term loans, and more. 

There’s something for everyone, including tailored analytic tools spanning our expansive repository of differentiated data and attributes, powerful scoring models, and five years of monthly data archives. It’s a deep well of needle-moving data solutions that can help you:

• Score previously unscorable populations, expand your pool of prospects, and say ‘yes’ more often.

• Build a more nuanced and targeted understanding of your best customers. 

• Test and analyze powerful multisource data to better understand market and peer performance.

• Validate and optimize your existing models. 

• Better predict and mitigate risk related to delinquencies, write-offs, and fraud. 

• Inform a variety of strategic decisions around business planning, market investment, and expansion. 

Whatever business issue you’re trying to predict, better understand, or solve, our consumer economic data can provide the competitive edge you need. 

Looking ahead, the only thing that’s certain in today’s market is change. The best way to stay on top of (or ahead of) change is to leverage third-party data that helps you recognize and act on the constant shifts within your customer base. Equifax Ignite DaaS not only delivers the precise, “right now” consumer insights you need to know your customers better, but it also puts ready-to-use data at your fingertips faster so you can easily integrate it into your customer profiles, analytic projects, and market strategies in less time, using less money and resources.