Editors’ Note

Craig Boundy joined Experian in November 2011 as Managing Director of Experian U.K. and Ireland. Prior to joining Experian, he was CEO of Logica in the U.K., having joined Logica in 2008 as CEO Global Operations. Earlier, he was at Cable & Wireless, where he was Chief Operating Officer of its business in Europe, the U.S. and Asia, and also served as Sales Director and then COO at Energis. Boundy attended Lancaster University in the U.K., graduating in management studies and German.

Company Brief

Experian (experian.com) is a leading global information services company. During life’s big moments, from buying a home or a car to sending a child to college to growing a business by connecting with new customers, Experian empowers consumers and its clients to manage their data with confidence. It helps individuals to take financial control and access financial services, businesses to make smarter decisions and thrive, lenders to lend more responsibly, and organizations to prevent identity fraud and crime. Experian has over 17,000 people operating across 44 countries.

Will you provide an overview of Experian North America’s business and how you define the Experian difference?

Experian’s U.S. headquarters is based in Costa Mesa, California, and I have the pleasure of serving as the CEO of Experian’s business in North America, which is the largest part of the Experian group. We have roughly 6,500 employees in our North America business. We work with data and information to help businesses, consumers, and government departments make smarter decisions with the information available to them in order to get better outcomes. This could be as simple as helping a bank decide what credit limit to give somebody on their credit card. It might be helping somebody who can’t get a credit card or a car loan improve their credit score so they can get access to a financial product that makes a difference to their lives. We provide information to help companies authenticate that somebody is who they say they are in order to prevent fraud and remove criminal activity from society that places a huge burden on all of us. It may be our software and our data and our information working in the healthcare system to help hospitals and patients make sure that people have access to the best financial plans. Everything in our company is designed to help individuals and businesses use data and information to get better outcomes.

How broad is Experian’s target market?

Experian’s target market is everybody. A perfect example is one of our products, Experian Boost, because it helps to bring it to life. Experian Boost is a completely free product offering that lets you go onto our website, connect your bank accounts or digital banking credentials, and add information to your credit file that should be on your credit file in order to immediately increase your credit score. That’s applicable to anybody in the U.S. I did it myself and received more than a 20-point increase in my credit score.

It took me less than two minutes to do and now that information is added onto my credit file. We actually have a website that keeps a live track of people boosting their scores in real time throughout the U.S., and this helps secure a lower interest rate or access to a new product that they’ve never had before. This is a product that everybody in the U.S. should use.

…more than two million consumers have connected
to Experian Boost and boosted their scores.

How are you building awareness for the Experian Boost offering?

Let me start with a couple of stats that might be helpful. We launched the product less than a year ago and, in that time, more than two million consumers have connected to Experian Boost and boosted their scores. This is a great start, but there are still hundreds of millions more people that should be using it. How do we get the awareness up? We advertise on TV. We advertise digitally. We work with charitable organizations to help particular populations that could really benefit from Experian Boost, particularly community groups that will see new opportunity from improving their credit scores.

How critical is it for Experian to build a diverse and inclusive workforce and will you highlight your efforts in this area?

Diversity of background, diversity of experience, and diversity of thought brings new ideas to an organization which brings innovation. Our culture of inclusion and diversity underpins our business success which underpins what our brand stands for.

We always hire on merit and hire the best people we can get. Part of being the best means that they bring diversity of thinking and diversity of background to Experian. It is absolutely necessary to create different kinds of outreach in our hiring in order to broaden the pool of candidates and we are doing this at Experian. Wherever we can find and access the best talent pools, we’re going to try and go there and find the best people and try and persuade them to come and join Experian.

Experian is a technology company. How critical is it for the company to not lose the personal side of the business and the human touch?

It is absolutely pivotal. At our core, we’re a technology-enabled company. That’s absolutely true. We employ some of the smartest people you ever want to meet and they all understand technology. They all understand science. They all understand mathematics because they need to understand data. They need to understand information. However, this means nothing if you can’t turn it into products that people want to use and that people want to buy. The strength of the design that goes into the quality of our products and how they look and feel is all about the human factor and this is actually part of technology nowadays.