Experian’s plan to integrate telecom and utility bill payments into credit profiles should help lenders originate loans to a broader pool of consumers, according to Greg Wright, Experian’s consumer bureau chief product officer. “Lenders can actually see [consumers’] true creditworthiness and what their real financial behavior is,” Wright told AFN.
Early testing and analysis showed that depending on the credit tier, 5% to 15% of the population would move into a better score category. “For the lender, that means there’s a broader pool of people that I can lend my products to without taking more risk,” he said. “Usually, when you want to reach more consumers, it means you have to take on more risk and, in this case, that’s not true.”
Experian is partnering with Finicity, a provider of real-time financial data aggregation and insights, to provide the service. Experian will allow consumers to add their telecom and utility bill information by signing up for a new service called Boost, which will be available next month.
Once their water, energy, gas, cell phone, and cable bill data is submitted, their credit scores will be updated instantly. “When lenders pull the credit report for the next auto loan, the [added data] will be on the report and the score,” Wright said. Early testing showed that the risk predictiveness of credit scores was maintained with the new service.
