Experian, the global information services company, has announced the launch of a suite of new capabilities for Ascend, its cloud-based analytics and technology platform.
These latest innovations aim to “increase operational efficiency, maximize profitability and support lenders and businesses in today’s rapidly changing market conditions and evolving consumer behaviors.”
Paul Speirs, Managing Director, Consumer Information Services, Experian UK&I, said:
“These new enhancements to our Ascend platform are a game changer in productivity and data access. Customers will be able to quickly create and manage models without significant investment in their infrastructure. This is in light of recent Experian global research showing that it takes 15 months on average to build and deploy a model for credit decisioning. Not only that, they will also get improved access to timely and accurate data which is one of the most common constraints in any analytics project.”
Key new feature updates to the Ascend platform include:
- Ascend Retro On Demand: Available now, this will be the fastest self-service retrospective data service in the market. It can now take less than four hours, from specification to data access, for customers to access up to 100,000 record retro files. This moves retrospective analysis from a periodic action to an anytime iterative approach, allowing analytical testing and value proving to be conducted at a much faster pace.
- Ascend Ops: While Retro on Demand provides proof of value, Ascend Ops simplifies model deployment, allowing customers to swiftly host and deploy models. By utilising machine learning, the solution offers the ability to build, test and manage new features and models for credit decisioning within days instead of months. It will reduce costs and streamline operations by allowing the rapid deployment of scorecards using Experian’s data via customer’s existing APIs, eliminating the need to recode and provides model governance support. This will be available from March 2024.
- Eligibility analytics: Key updates in soft search and performance data have been made to the best-in-class data and analytics environment within Ascend, including unique data from price comparison websites. This update offers valuable insights by enabling lenders to compare their performance with market trends as well as optimise lending terms to improve conversion.
Speirs added:
“Here at Experian, our goal is to connect the dots when it comes to data, technology, and insights and the Ascend platform showcases that powerful combination. It is uniquely built on the most complete credit behaviour database, offers actionable insights, and focuses on areas our customers have identified as highly inefficient in their day-to-day work. Whether a company wants to launch innovative products into markets, or diversify into new segments, understand competitive position, and market trends – or build, tune, or deploy models; Ascend can support it all.”
The Experian Ascend cloud-based platform is “a modern technology foundation that integrates client data, industry-specific data feeds and Experian’s unique capabilities in data, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide customers with the opportunity to assess risk and monitor and create change.”
It not only eliminates traditional barriers “like data limitations, lengthy preparation, skill scarcity, and IT dependencies but the vast ecosystem of end-to-end products provides flexibility and scalability and all within a secure environment.”