Equifax Statement on Recent Coding Issue

Equifax identified a coding issue within a legacy, on-premise server environment in the U.S. slated to be migrated to the new Equifax Cloud™ infrastructure. This issue, which was in place over a period of a few weeks, impacted how some credit scores were calculated. The issue took place between March 17 and April 6. We can confirm the issue was fixed on April 6. Information in consumer credit reports was not changed as a result of this issue.

We know that businesses and consumers depend on our data and Equifax takes this technology coding issue very seriously. As part of our commitment to resolving this issue, Equifax has conducted extensive analysis of credit scores used for consumers seeking credit during the time period of the issue. Our analysis indicates that for those consumers there was no shift in the majority of scores during the three-week timeframe of the issue. Our data shows that less than 300,000 consumers experienced a score shift of 25 points or more. While the score may have shifted, a score shift does not necessarily mean that a consumer’s credit decision was negatively impacted.

We are collaborating with our customers to determine the actual impact to consumers.

Equifax would also like to address that recent media reports have cited a statement made by Equifax CEO Mark Begor at a June investor conference, the Cowen 50th Annual Technology, Media and Telecom event. The citation was taken out of context and the full quote from the transcript of the event is as follows: "We had a coding issue that was a mistake made by our technology team, in one of our legacy applications that resulted in some scores going out that had incorrect data in it. We fixed the issue. We have been working with our customers over the past five or six weeks to really collaborate with them about what impacts there may be. We think the impact is really going to be quite small, not something that is meaningful to Equifax, we are in close collaboration with them making sure we stand behind it. Obviously any data quality issue is a big issue for us. We take it very seriously, and it's one we are going to make sure we are going to fix."

The reference made by Mark to the impact as "quite small, not something meaningful to Equifax" is specifically related to the materiality of the issue to Equifax’s overall financial profile in the context of a discussion with investors. Mark continues to clearly state that, with respect to customers and consumers, data quality is “a big issue for us” and that ”we take it very seriously.” Unfortunately, this additional context was omitted from the original story.

Again, we do not take this issue lightly. The issue has been fixed, we are working closely with lenders, and we are accelerating the migration of this environment to the Equifax Cloud, which will provide additional controls and monitoring that will help to detect and prevent similar issues in the future.

We remain on track in our plan to move from 50% to nearly 80% of Equifax environments in the new Equifax Cloud by the end of 2022 as we move towards becoming the only cloud native data, analytics and technology company in our space. The overall result of our transformation will be a better infrastructure with better detective and preventive controls, which will be positive for both customers and consumers.