Latest results from Experian's Market Trends report shows that 17.3 million new vehicles have been added to the U.S. Market of light-duty vehicles on the road.

The adoption of EMV terminals has pressured attackers to migrate their fraud attempts to the card-not-present channel. This is a major driver to the increase in e-commerce fraud attacks – more than 30% over last year. Here’s how this fraud victimization has increased across the country: 16% in North Central states. 25% in Northeastern states. 32% in Southern states. 25% in Western states. Attackers are extremely creative, motivated, and often connected. Protect all points of connection with your customers to prevent e-commerce fraud with a comprehensive, multilayered approach. Where does your state rank?

It was two years ago when I found myself sitting cross-legged on my home office floor, papers strewn about as I organized piles of tax returns, W-2s, pay stubs, 401k and bank statements, and previous escrow docs. My task? Sort through it all, scan them (if I couldn’t access them digitally) and then upload/email them to a site for my mortgage broker to print and package for my refinance application. For a girl accustomed to Amazon Prime, mobile banking, social media and smart TVs, this monumental financial task seemed utterly archaic – even in 2015. Fast forward two years later, and the mortgage space has failed to make much progress. Clearly, the financial meltdown and Great Recession placed more regulation and compliance stresses on financial institutions. Verification steps and requirements needed to be strengthened – and that made sense. We want to make sure people are capable of paying for those sizable mortgage payments, right? Even now, I get flashbacks to scenes from The Big Short. Still, the hunt for paper, the endless scanning, the emailing, the document uploads required? In an era where the smartphone rules, how has the mortgage industry failed to evolve in the digital age? It’s no secret the financial services industry is typically slow to adopt the latest in technology advancements, but consumers are pushing. A 2016 Accenture survey reveals online banking is now the top choice of consumers at 28%, followed by branch banking at 24%. In the mobile banking space, there has additionally been a significant increase. From 2011 to 2015, mobile banking doubled (22% to 43%) and rose from 43% to 53% for smartphone users in particular. But what about mortgage? Finally, it seems, shifts are underway. In a recent Oliver Wyman paper titled Digital Mortgage Nirvana, the authors state, “Gone are the days when the only way to properly underwrite a mortgage was with long application forms and tall stacks of documents.” Once easy to carry in one hand, the average mortgage application file has ballooned to 500 pages, according to David Stevens, CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association. And while the application may not shrink, portions of the application process can be digitized and automated. Today, lenders have the ability to partner with data aggregators to verify a consumer’s assets and income with online solutions. In fact, lenders can take this a step further, feeding the data into their automated decision engines, providing the consumer with an approval, decline or conditions that must be met in order to clear the loan process. Nonbanks have been picking off business and disrupting the onerous mortgage process for the past several years. Think Quicken, LoanDepot and GuaranteedRate. But all mortgage lenders have the ability to speed up consumer verification and decisioning by partnering with data aggregators and leveraging solutions like Experian’s digital verification suite. Are we talking a one-click shopping experience? No. This is a mortgage after all, not your average online purchase. But banks now have the opportunity to dramatically enhance the mortgage experience for consumers. The question is whether they are ready to finally embrace a digital journey in the mortgage space in 2017, or will they let another year pass them by?

Experian recently acquired a minority stake in Finicity, a leading financial data aggregator enabling innovation in the FinTech industry through its modern RESTful API and Finicity Aggregation Platform. Steve Smith—chairman, CEO and co-founder of Finicity—has a passion and experience in developing innovative and disruptive technology, products and services that leads to efficiency for markets and, ultimately, improvements for consumers. Here he shares his thoughts about disruptive technology in the lending space and its benefits to lenders and consumers. Q: Finicity has said its objective is to take a loan application approval from weeks to minutes using its technology. That sounds pretty great, but how is that possible? How does this play out behind the scenes? A: Well, we’re living in a world where we, as consumers, expect very user-friendly experiences and we expect things to happen at digital speeds. The loan process is no exception. To deliver the experience consumers are expecting requires us to leverage the technology trends of digitization, mobility and big data. Finicity plays a foundational role by leveraging thousands of digital connections across financial institutions to aggregate consumer-permissioned account data. Once we have this data, we’re able to deliver real-time insights into an individual's financial health. This financial health assessment includes income and assets, two critical components to the loan approval process. All that’s required is the borrower to permission use of the data. Once that’s done, we’re able to gather all appropriate data across multiple accounts, rapidly analyze it and send a verification report to the lender. No papers. No multiple requests. No questions on the validity of the data. All done in minutes, not weeks. Q: This is very disruptive technology. What are the benefits for lenders? Consumers? A: Well, as we discussed, one of the major benefits is the speed to a loan. Furthermore, this reduces cost for the lender by maximizing loan officer’s time, while also freeing up loan capital as they can move through loans more quickly with a higher quality assessment. Another benefit for lenders is reduced fraud. Our information on income and assets is coming from real-time bank validated information. This eliminates the possibility of altered data. For consumers, it’s a dramatically simplified process. No need to chase down multiple documents. There are virtually no second requests for information, which we often see in the process. And they’re always in control of their information. All in all, it’s a dramatically better experience for both the lender and the borrower. Q: What sets this solution apart from others in the market? A: A few things set Finicity apart in delivering the quality of insights required. First, we are an industry leader in the number of financial institutions we connect with, ensuring broader access for more customers. Second, 95 percent of our integrations provide access to formatted data, something that’s critical to credit decisioning solutions. In these cases, we’re not screen scraping. This enhances our ability to collect bank validated transactions; we provide the financial institution transaction ID. This provides assurance of data quality. Finally, is our ability to categorize and analyze the transactions. This allows us to identify income streams and assets. Through this process, we’re also able to flag unusual transactions, like large deposits, that may skew actual assets. Q: The future of financial technology is still evolving. What lies ahead? A: We’re very excited about the future of financial technology and the impact that aggregation will have. Whether it’s financial management, digital payments or credit decisioning, real-time data will improve the experiences and the outcomes. As we’re talking about lending, this is one of the spaces that could see significant disruption. Our ability to generate a richer view of an individual’s or organization’s financial health will more accurately determine their ability to repay a loan. This will be a great benefit for those that have thin file or no credit history. We see a world where suitability for a loan will be driven by their actual financial life independent of their use of credit. One of the largest markets in the US is millennials. However, for consumers under 30, two-thirds have subprime or non-prime credit scores and one-third of millennials don't have any credit history. This is just one group underserved because legacy models don’t leverage the full extent of data available. Q: Is there anything else you can tell us about Finicity and its role changing customer experiences across financial service? A: For us, it all comes down to one thing: enabling individuals and organizations to have the information and insights they need to make smarter financial decisions. The data is there. We’re helping to unlock the potential of that data by working with innovative partners like Experian. To learn more about Experian and Finicity's account aggregation solutions, visit www.experian.com/finicity

Legitimate address discrepancies are common, which surprises most people. And handling every address discrepancy as a high fraud risk is operationally expensive and inhibits the customer experience. You can avoid this type of fraud by employing these best practices: Use a distinct Know Your Customer and underlying Customer Identification Program process. Avoid verifications based on self-reported data. Maintain hotlist addresses. Fraud always will find the path of least resistance, and organized criminals will test you daily to isolate the weakest link. Be sure to regularly revisit your own policies and procedures for handling this type of fraud. Address manipulation fraud  

Knowing a consumer’s credit information at a single point in time only tells part of the story. I often hear one of our Experian leaders share the example of two horses, running neck-in-neck, at the races. Who will win? Well, if you had multiple insights into those two horses – and could see the race in segments – you might notice one horse losing steam, and the other making great strides. In the world of credit consumers, the same metaphor can ring true. You might have two consumers with identical credit scores, but Consumer A has been making minimum payments for months and showing some payment stress, while Consumer B has been aggressively making larger pay-offs. Trended data adds that color to the story, and suddenly there is more intel on who to market to for future offers. To understand the whole story, lenders need the ability to assess a consumer’s credit behavior over time. Understanding how a consumer uses credit or pays back debt over time can help lenders: Offer the right products & terms to increase response rates Determine up sell and cross sell opportunities Prevent attrition Identify profitable customers Avoid consumers with payment stress Limit loss exposure The challenge with trended data, however, is finding a way to sort through the payment patterns in the midst of huge datasets. At the singular level, one consumer might have 10 trades. Trended data in turn reveals five historical payment fields and then you multiple all of this by 24 months and you suddenly have 1,200 data points. But let’s be real … a lender is not going to look at just one consumer as they consider their marketing or retention campaigns. They may look at 100,000 consumers. And on that scale you are now looking at sorting through 120M data points. So while a lender may think they need trended data – and there is definitely value in accessing it – they likely also need a solution to help them wade through it all, assessing and decisioning on those 120M data points. Tapping into something like Credit3D, which bundles in propensity scores, profitability models and trended attributes, is the solution that truly unveils the value of trended data insights. By layering in these solutions, lenders can clearly answer questions like: Who is likely to respond to an offer? How does a consumer use credit? How can I identify revolvers, transactors and consolidators? Is there a better way to understand risk or to conduct swap set analysis? How can I acquire profitable consumers? How do I increase wallet share and usage? Trended data sounds like a “no-brainer” and it definitely has the ability to shed light on that consumer credit horse race. Lenders, however, also need to have the appropriate analytics and systems to assess on the huge volume of data points. Need more information on Trended Data and Credit 3D? Contact Us

Fraud and address manipulation (Part 1) Identifying an address as incorrect seems simple enough. But in reality, address mismatches between an application and credit bureau data aren’t uncommon. Here are several legitimate reasons why this may occur: Change of residence. Credit bureau’s unique logic for determining which address is the "best." New/Emerging consumers often have fluctuating address data. Issuers that employ risk-based approaches allowing incorrect addresses to pass and those that use self-reported data for verification face the highest level of risk for this type of fraud. Next week, we’ll let you know how you can avoid these types of losses. Or you can get ahead and read our latest paper. Address manipulation fraud>

Divorce often affects financial health negatively. It’s expensive – often causing nearly $20,000 in losses.  A recent Experian survey found: 34% say their divorce put them in financial ruin. 19% percent say things were so bad they filed for bankruptcy. 39% report they’ll never marry again because of the financial loss of a divorce. Lenders can provide support to loyal customers by providing personalized credit education and create a new revenue stream for your company. Learn more>

Direct mail is not dead, but it's 2017. Financial services companies need to acknowledge there might be other ways to deliver credit offers and capture consumer eyeballs. There are multiple screens competing for our attention, including one of the originals - TV. Advertising and TV have been married forever, but addressable TV allows marketers to target on a much more sophisticated level. Welcome to credit marketing in the digital age. To help financial services companies understand the addressable TV channel, Experian marketing expert Brienna Pinnow answered the following questions in a short interview. What is addressable TV? Addressable TV is an amazing 1-to-1 direct marketing capability. To put it simply, addressable TV is the ability for an advertiser to deliver a TV ad to a specific household. From a consumer perspective, that means even if you and your next door neighbor are watching the latest episode of The Voice, you may see an ad for a mini-van while your neighbor sees an ad for upcoming one-day sale from their favorite retailer. With addressable TV, brands can define their target audience based on 1st, 2nd or 3rd party data (like Experian’s). With the help of satellite and cable companies, they can deliver a personalized, measurable experience. This is an exciting departure from the way that TV advertising has been planned and targeted for nearly 70 years. Instead of focusing on the program, marketers can now focus on the person. Addressable TV makes reaching a precise audience – the same way you would with a direct mail piece or an email – a marketing reality.  How long have marketers been leveraging addressable TV? Experian has been an pivotal player in the development of the addressable TV space. Since the first addressable TV trials back in 2004, nearly 13 years ago, Experian has provided the audience targeting data and privacy-compliant matching capabilities that make addressable TV possible. The past 3 years, however, have demonstrated unprecedented, hockey-stick growth in addressable TV. In 2016 alone, the volume of addressable campaigns doubled from the previous year accounting for nearly $300 million spend.  That trajectory remains the same in 2017 and beyond. So why are we seeing this growth now? Here are a few reasons addressable TV is continuing to grow… Scale: Millions of households can now be targeted using addressable technology, and the footprint continues to grow with smart TVs and additional cable operators. Data: As organizations put data at the heart of their business, addressable TV enables them to infuse their most important customer information into the targeting. Education: Agencies, data providers, and TV providers have invested time educating brands on the process and power of addressable TV. And now, advertisers are becoming more experienced at making this a consistent part of their marketing plan. Accountability: You’ll be hard pressed to find a marketer that doesn’t have to demonstrate ROI on their marketing campaigns. The measurement capabilities that addressable TV provides adds a layer of accountability and insight that was not previously possible. Technology: Experian has developed an audience management platform, the Audience Engine, which makes addressable TV possible in a matter of clicks. In the past year alone, our platform has distributed over 1,800 audiences for addressable advertising campaigns. What types of companies have been utilizing addressable TV? Have you seen many financial services companies test this channel? The early adopters of addressable TV were primarily automotive advertisers. Compared to other verticals, auto advertisers still spend the largest proportion of their budgets across TV. For that reason, they know it’s a necessity to see if their dollars are actually driving sales for their big-ticket items. Addressable TV solves that problem for auto advertisers. In a DIRECTV campaign leveraging Experian’s automotive data for audience targeting and post-campaign sales reporting, one major auto OEM saw a 26.2%  lift in sales for the advertised model compared to the control group. In the past few years, Experian has worked closely with advertisers across verticals – from retail to travel to finance – to launch addressable campaigns. Financial services clients particularly find Experian’s financial related segments, such as income or net worth, to be accurate and powerful in creating qualified target audiences that improve campaign performance. I’ve read that millennials are abandoning cable and TV providers in favor of services like Hulu and Netflix. Does this mean the market for addressable TV will shrink in the coming years? There is a segment of consumers who are abandoning traditional cable services. However, this doesn’t mean they are abandoning content. In fact, content consumption is at an all-time high with offerings from Roku, Hulu, Netflix, Sling TV, CBS, and beyond. All this shift in behavior means is that the definition of TV is becoming more fluid. “TV” doesn’t have to be a big screen sitting in your living room; it can be a laptop on a red-eye flight. And from a marketing perspective, the concept of addressable, 1-to-1 targeting is already moving into some of these products and services. The footprint of addressable TV will only continue to rise as consumers stay connected to the content they love. How can companies measure the success of utilizing addressable TV as a channel? Not only does addressable TV provide laser-targeted ad delivery, but it also opens up measurement capabilities that were never possible for TV advertisers in the past. Traditionally, TV audience measurement has focused simply on eyeballs and not revenue impact, with little insight into how TV advertising converts into sales. The primary source for audience measurement in the TV world has been program ratings and expensive brand studies. With addressable TV, that story is changing. With companies that collect second-by-second viewership data linked to households, marketers now have the ability to tie this data back to their online and offline sales. Experian is pivotal in making closed-loop TV reporting possible. As a data and matching safe-haven, we link together the viewing information from the target audience with the sales data provided by the advertiser. The end result is a privacy compliant report that clearly demonstrates the impact of the campaign on the target audience. Did the targeted audience visit a bank location? Email customer service? Sign up for a new account? Spend a certain amount? These are all questions our TV attribution reporting answers for clients. If a company wants to begin marketing in addressable TV, what is required in terms of set-up? Addressable TV may sound new, exciting or even complex. But it doesn’t have to be. Getting started is as simple as defining the target audience. Decide whether you would like to leverage your own CRM data, a custom model, third-party data or a combination of these data sources. If you’re still not sure where to start, ask yourself a very simple question, “Who am I sending a direct mail piece or email to in the next month?” There’s your audience. Better yet, you will be amplifying your message, reaching the customer with a consistent message and meeting them wherever they are. After you’ve determined who you want to target, a matching partner like Experian can work with you to show you the reach of your audience across TV providers. You’ll finalize your budget, creative and media plan while Experian distributes your audience to the selected media destinations. Before you know it, your campaign will be live, and reaching your target audience whether they’re watching Shark Tank or Sharknado. When the campaign wraps, you’ll be on your way to measuring results like never before. Are there any additional trends you see emerging in the addressable TV space? The future of addressable TV is related to both the targeting and measurement capabilities. More advertisers are working with Experian, for example, to launch coordinated campaigns. That doesn’t just mean launching a digital campaign and TV campaign at the same time. It really means targeting the same exact people for the digital and TV campaign. We like to consider this a "surround sound" approach where the customer or prospect experiences a consistent message across channels. As for measurement, Experian is working closely with advertisers to explore the power of mobile data. Recently, Experian partnered with Ninth Decimal and DIRECTV to incorporate mobile location data into the post-campaign measurement process for Toyota.  The results proved a 19% lift in dealership visits for those exposed to the campaign. This is an exciting development because this approach can translate well for any other advertiser who wants to measure metrics like location visitation. If you’d like to learn more, check out our Addressable TV whitepaper.

A recent Experian study found that the amount of time it’s taking for automotive loans opened in Q4 2015 to become delinquent is actually similar to the pace in 2008. When looking at the 60+ DPD rate across all risk levels, the delinquency rate for accounts opened in Q4 2015 reached 0.50% within 6 months, compared with 0.51% for accounts opened in Q4 2008. Lenders can design more effective strategies by using analytics to gain insight into the latest trends and target the right customers. Video: Auto Acquisition Strategies>

Reactivation campaigns make economic sense. They build on a brand’s previous investments, targeting customers who already are aware of and previously have engaged with your brand. Use these 4 steps to build a successful reactivation framework: 1. Analyze subscriber data to identify reactivation segments to target. 2. Identify subscriber activity to divide customers into at least 3 unique segments. 3. Develop messaging strategies for each segment. 4. Integrate or suppress inactive subscribers based on whether they re-engage. Reactivation campaigns can deliver significant incremental revenue and position inactive subscribers for further engagement in future campaigns. Download report>

Experian's fraud and identity platform, CrossCore™ won New Security Product or Service and Security Product Management / Development Team of the Year awards at the 13th Annual Info Security Products Guide’s 2017 Global Excellence Awards®.

As lenders seek to enhance their credit marketing strategies this year, they are increasingly questioning how to split their budgets between digital, direct mail and beyond. What is the ideal media mix to reach consumers in 2017? And is the solution different in the financial services space? Scott Gordon, Experian's senior director of digital credit marketing, recently tackled some of the tough questions financial services marketers are posing. Here are his responses: Q: We live in a world where consumers are receiving hundreds of messages and offers on a daily basis. How can financial services companies stand out and capture the attention of the customers they wish to engage with relevant offers? A: When it comes to the optimal marketing media mix, there is no “silver bullet.”  It varies from product to product. The current post-campaign analysis is showing us that consumers react positively to coordinated multi-channel messaging. We’ve seen studies showing that marketers can see up to a 30% lift in sales by combining email with social media, for example.  This makes sense, when you look at how consumers engage through devices. We are no longer a single channel culture; we check Facebook while watching TV, listen to podcasts while checking our email, etc. Consequently, marketers have had to adapt their campaign strategies accordingly – and this starts with the organizational structure. Far too often we see silo’ed groups responsible for disparate media verticals. For example, a company may have a direct mail group and a digital marketing team, and then (in extreme cases) outsource television to one agency group and social media to another. Aligning these groups and breaking down the barriers between the groups is a critical first step toward building a true multi-channel campaign strategy. This includes addressing budget concerns that are inherent with a culture where the size of a budget is tied to job security and corporate status. Aligning campaigns and finding the perfect cross channel market mix is much easier once you’ve broken down internal barriers and encouraged marketing collaboration. Q: What are some of the new best practices financial companies must embrace in 2017 in order to improve their marketing efforts? A: Thanks to tremendous efforts from industry leaders,  we can now utilize regulated data with the same proficiency that they’ve been executing campaigns using non-regulated data. This presents unique challenges, as the industry races to get up-to-speed on new capabilities,  take best-in-breed practices and apply them to the world of regulated campaigns. We’re seeing tremendous demand to combine programmatic advertising with people-based advertising, with cross-channel campaigns spanning mobile, video, social, and addressable TV. Measurement and analytics must play a large part in these strategies. While the industry hasn’t achieved true cross-channel measurement to identify a consumer’s path to purchase across multiple devices,  it’s getting closer, thanks to technology advances. Q: Is direct mail dead? How should financial marketers be using direct mail in 2017? How can it best be combined with digital? A: Direct mail is certainly not dead. It has its place among a media mix that continues to grow as new advertising technologies come to market and are adopted by consumers. Will direct mail’s influence diminish in the future? Possibly. At Experian, we are focused on making sure that our advertisers can reach consumers where they spend time, when they are most receptive to receiving messages, and most importantly in a cost-effective manner. So no matter where consumers shift their focus in the future, we’ll be able to support comprehensive targeted advertising campaigns. How can digital be best combined with direct mail?  We’ve seen encouraging results in retargeting direct mail with digital credit marketing like email and display. With that said, we haven’t seen a silver bullet solution, and we’re still advising our clients to put a heavy focus toward “test and learn” in concert with comprehensive campaign measurement and analytics protocols. Q: What are the advantages to serving up a firm offer of credit to a consumer in a digital format? Are consumers ready to embrace this type of delivery in the financial services space? A: The advantages of serving up a firm offer of credit to a consumer in a digital format are similar to those benefits for “traditional” digital marketing. Lower cost, more measurement capabilities, and greater flexibility to optimize campaigns are just some of the benefits. Early indications show that consumers are very receptive to digital credit marketing offers. It provides them with offers in the channels in which they spend time, in a  consumer friendly manner which offers them numerous paths in which they can have a voice in the messages that they receive. Q: Some say digital credit marketing should largely be directed to Millennials? Do you think other generations are ready to embrace this type of digital messaging? A: We don’t view digital credit marketing as an exclusive offering just for Millennials. It is a holistic consumer offering – applicable to all generations as our parents and grandparents make the move to new channels such as addressable TV and social media. Need more info on Digital Credit Marketing? Learn More

We’re excited to announce Family Account Management: a new feature available for our partners that makes it easy for their subscribers to extend identity protection services to family and friends. Family Account Management allows our partners to offer quick and easy enrollment, enabling new subscribers to opt in to a family plan by inputting family or friends’ email addresses within their portal. Subscribers can invite anyone of the age of 18 to join. Every family has different security needs and preferences. This feature offers plan options that can be configured to match the primary subscriber’s current enrolled services, or customized to include a set of services that best suits each family’s needs. The Consumer Sentinel Network, a division of the Federal Trade Commission, reported over 1.2 million fraud-related complaints in 2015. With identity fraud on the rise, we need to be more vigilant than ever before and take steps to improve our own security and the security of our loved ones. We all have unique identity elements, including birthday, email address, and Social Security number, and monitoring one person’s identity elements won’t minimize risk for other family members. That’s why Family Account Management is so important, allowing subscribers to extend coverage for what matters most – family. “Families are more connected than ever before, but with more ways to stay connected, there are new threats putting families at risk of identity theft,” said Joe Ross, Experian President and Co-Founder. “With Family Account Management, businesses can provide their subscribers with an easy and convenient way to extend identity protection services to their loved ones.” Visit our website for more information on identity protection products you can offer your customers and stay up to date with all Experian news on LinkedIn.

A recent analysis revealed a 9-point negative shift in the average VantageScore® credit score for personal loan originations from Q3 to Q4 of 2016. Additional insights into the personal loan market include: 67% of those who opened a personal installment loan had a revolving trade with a balance. 5% of consumers who close a personal loan open another within a few months of the original loan closure. 68% of consumers who open a new personal loan shortly after closing another one do so with the same company. Lenders must dig deeper to keep their loan volumes up in today’s competitive marketplace. Using a propensity score and attributes, as well as tools to learn more about ability-to-pay metrics and offer alignment, can improve your organization’s marketing and retention strategies. Learn more>