Empowering Small Business Growth
IN TODAY’S EVER-CHANGING ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT, IT IS IMPORTANT FOR A BUSINESS OWNER TO NOT ONLY UNDERSTAND THE BASICS TO HELP GROW THEIR BUSINESS - like what makes up a commercial credit score - but also figure out how to best navigate the various headwinds that they’re regularly faced with.
At Equifax, our purpose is to help people live their financial best and Sal Hazday, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Equifax U.S. Information Solutions Commercial Business discusses how we’re aiding small business owners in doing just that. Additionally, he provides insight around how Equifax can help small businesses grow, the differentiators we offer and some practical advice for any business, no matter the size.
Q: How can Equifax help small businesses start and/or grow?
A: We can help small businesses in three primary ways: finding customers, obtaining capital and getting paid.
First, finding customers begins with having the right data, and with one of the most comprehensive marketing databases in the industry, Equifax helps businesses improve their identification process and targeting of new business accounts. From a prospecting perspective, we’ve helped customers reduce their cost per acquisition - in some cases, by more than half.
Second, once the sales-addressable market is identified, we help business owners obtain needed capital by providing small business lenders and other financing companies with valuable insights through differentiated data, scoring, and analytics solutions, like OneScore for Commercial, to make better loan decisions. From an origination perspective, we’ve seen lenders approve as many as 15 to 20% more applicants with our solutions. This means more small business owners are getting the tools they need to grow their businesses.
Additionally, we launched a real-time, Know Your Business (KYB) online Business Verification Solution earlier this year that can help U.S. lenders and businesses of all sizes make faster, more informed decisions before onboarding new accounts or vendors.
And finally, we help them get paid by providing portfolio management solutions to effectively assess potential changes with their commercial accounts. With account management, we look to drive revenue growth in our customers’ portfolios by helping them manage their existing books of business.
Ultimately, we can assist with solving customer problems across the entire small business life cycle to give business owners, lenders and service providers the ability to make decisions with confidence.
Q: What differentiators do you think Equifax provides through its commercial solutions?
A: What separates Equifax is our expansive and differentiated data, combined with deep industry and analytical expertise. With credit data on almost 68 million businesses, including this unique data from both financial and non-financial tradelines, we are able to provide deeper insight into the activity of small businesses to help them gain greater access to credit. Pairing this data with a strong, customer-first mentality means our teams can better help our customers analyze and understand the data so that they can use it more efficiently to the benefit of their respective business in the future.
Q: What steps is Equifax taking to build a more inclusive economy and help people to live their financial best?
A: Differentiated data can help open up more opportunities for lenders to provide loans and/or new business owners to receive loans. To date, we've added over 1.1 million new merchant records to help build on thin-file businesses and have more than $4 trillion in total accounts receivable to help assess the long-term sustainability of a business.
Q: What is some practical advice you would give to small business owners?
A: Understand your business credit profile and where you stand today. Establish your banking relationships early. Use leases and corporate credit cards responsibly to establish credit history. And, maybe it’s a no-brainer, but of course, pay your bills on time!
Q: How can the monthly Small Business Indices report potentially help small business owners?
A: Our monthly Small Business Indices report helps businesses track changes in the marketplace by providing insights into lending, default, and delinquency trends. It can help validate what our customers have been seeing and experiencing in their own industries, while providing visibility to where the market is going overall. The indices help small businesses plot out growth opportunities, whether that's in a different industry or a new geography. And for our lending businesses, the indices provide additional context on default activity within different sectors to help them manage their strategies more effectively.
To learn more and view the latest reports, check out our Small Business Indices page.