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Organizations everywhere are looking to do more with their data assets, as well as better leverage open data and third party data sources for additional consumer insight. The good news is that there is no shortage of information available. The bad news is that wrangling and making sense of all that information can be very challenging. That is why we see 61 percent of U.S. companies stating inaccurate data is undermining their ability to provide an excellent customer experience. However, there is a new breed of data professionals trying to change all that. New talent is coming into organizations looking to unlock the power of data to transform business operations and better serve clients. Businesses everywhere are eager to bring on these data professionals; to the point it is creating a frenzy around data staffing. If you are looking to hire new data professionals, you are certainly not alone. According to a new Experian Data Quality report, Investing in Digital Transformation: This Year’s Most Sought-After Data Roles, businesses are hiring a mix of business- and regulation-focused data positions. Below is a chart showing the top roles being hired according to U.S. respondents and also c-level executives specifically: There are a few key roles I want to highlight. First, data analysts. They are the most sought-after data role by U.S. organizations, mainly because they are so versatile. They are individuals placed across departments to analyze data in such a way that it can be used for business intelligence. 57% percent of businesses spend a majority of their time analyzing data, and this role is key to ensuring they’re getting the right results. The most important role for c-level executives is the chief data officer (CDO). The CDO has seen a lot of hype in the past few years and at this point we are seeing more general adoption of the role. This individual is responsible for developing and implementing an information strategy, which includes disciplines like data security, governance, quality, and management. They also will oversee a team of data professionals who bridge the gap between the business and IT. We have more research on this role in particular coming out next month, but they will often shape cross-functional data organizations and how well businesses can achieve the data insight they desire. In general, with all of these roles, talent shortages are a problem. Relative to demand, very few experienced individuals exist on the market. This means organizations need to come up with creative ways to attract and maintain this talent to keep up with the changing business landscape. For more information on these and other data roles, download a copy of our new report: Investing in digital transformation: This year’s most sought-after data roles. Download the complete "The Year's Most Sought-After Data Roles" report.

We’re at a critical point in our nation’s history. We need to make a stand and address the root causes of financial instability in this country. I believe the lack of financial education and access to cheaper financial products are two of the key contributors impacting people’s financial health today.

As Serasa Experian’s Corporate Sustainability Manager in Brazil, I’m dedicated to my job promoting diversity and inclusion efforts at work.  But it also happens to be my passion. I believe that companies have a responsibility to reflect the diversity found in society, giving everyone equal opportunity to excel regardless of color, gender or disability. And yet, while a lot of companies over the years have made great strides toward hiring a diverse array of people, sometimes the harder — yet more impactful — work is making sure that diverse group of employees can continue to develop professionally after they’re hired. To this end, Serasa Experian’s Business Network for Social Inclusion (Rede Empresarial de Inclusão Social) launched a program called the Top Talent Project, which encourages and accelerates professional development once someone with physical disabilities is hired. I don’t want to simply hire people with disabilities; I want to ensure they can be productive and grow in their roles. While people with disabilities can bring great experience and skill to their positions, they may need some help integrating into teams. That’s why we work closely with each new hire, their managers and their mentors to guide them on a daily basis. If someone is hearing-impaired, for example, they may know only sign language and not Portuguese, making it difficult for them to communicate with their team. Through the Top Talent Project, we train new hires to communicate at work with their Portuguese-speaking coworkers. And then we give sign language training to their team members! We work hard to create a working environment that ensures success for everyone. In 2016, Serasa Experian received the United Nations Good Practices for Workers with Disabilities Award for our inclusion work in Brazil. That same month, I also was honored to receive the Empregueafro Award from the City Council of São Paulo for promoting ethnic diversity. All these accolades make me so proud because they’re a reflection of the way we at Experian take care of our people. Ten years ago, I changed careers so I could focus more on making the world a better place. Serasa Experian has given me the opportunity to do just that.

"If you’re taking an emergency call (999 in the U.K.), it’s easy to spell a name wrong. And sometimes people reporting a crime won’t give you their name at all. So, after 13 years, we’d collected thousands of duplicate or incorrect records. That might seem trivial, but linking data with the right person can be crucial to a case. You might speak to a vulnerable person and miss that they’re a repeat victim of crime. The bottom line is that, to keep people safe, we needed better data. I asked Jon (at Experian) if he could help. He certainly could. I applied for Home Office funding for the project and, after three nerve-wracking months, we actually won it. Then it was, ‘Alright, how’s this going to work?’. Experian set up a system for us called Pandora. It took our data, cleansed it using Experian data – filling in gaps, adding data streams so that, using our own matching criteria, we managed to merge thousands of records. The result was data that’s as clean and accurate as we could possibly get it. We call it our Golden Nominal database -- and the difference is phenomenal. Now, incoming calls prompt one or two records instead of hundreds, giving us a clear view of the caller. If someone’s calling about domestic violence, we’ll see whether they’re a repeat victim, and get them help fast. And frontline officers can run instant checks on a suspect from a phone, seeing how big a risk they pose and whether to call for support. We’ve got a way to go, but we’re already creating a thousand fewer records a week. And it’s all down to Experian’s work behind the scenes. It’s delivering exactly what we wanted."

When it comes to credit for small businesses, it’s a classic chicken-and-egg situation: you can’t get credit until you have credit history, and you can’t get credit history until someone grants you credit. I know this first-hand because my own parents were small-business owners in California. My parents had built an independent insurance agency. I distinctly remember as a kid sitting in the backseat of our car and overhearing the discussions they would have about their struggles to grow the business or how they would make payroll that month. Many small businesses don’t have access to small-business loans or business credit cards, so they rely entirely on the business owner’s personal credit to make purchases. This means that while there may be a credit history for the individual, there is none for the business itself. This also means that whenever my parents needed money to get through the month, they essentially had to put their livelihood at risk because there was no separation between personal and business loans. The lack of access to funds, and the consolidation happening in the insurance industry at the time, led my parents to take another big risk – they sold the business and our house, and they liquidated their retirement accounts and put everything into a restaurant franchise. They felt there would be more stability representing an established brand owned by someone else. When I graduated from my MBA program years later, one of the things that first attracted me to Experian was the opportunity I had to ease the burdens of small business owners through my work here. The work I do really hits home, because I’m working every day to open up small-business credit, using different types of data. In today’s economy, a lot of great business ideas – profitable ones, at that – never get a chance to see the light of day simply because they don’t have the capital they need to grow. Experian is making business ideas a reality by gathering, analysing, combining and processing a breadth of new data that allows us to develop credit scores for more people and paint the most realistic picture of a situation. By verifying a business’s history, its social media accounts, its website sophistication and traffic, and customer reviews, we can measure a small business’s legitimacy, how long they’ve been operating and how they’re growing. This information, coupled with transaction data, all help determine a business’s credit worthiness and allow us to give its owners greater access to capital. Data is a huge enabler for positive change because it can give small-business owners access to credit that they wouldn’t receive otherwise. When used in the right ways, data can empower and enable small businesses to get the funding they need to hire employees, invest in their business or open a new location. In many ways, I’m helping people just like my parents.

About a year ago, my colleague Natalia invited me to join her in a new volunteer opportunity with the Ministry of Housing in Colombia. The Ministry had created a new program called Mi Casa Ya – which means in English “My Own Home Now,” to help people in Colombia own their first homes. Excited and eager to lend a hand, Natalia and I introduced ourselves to Alejandro, the Director of the National Housing Fund at the Ministry of Housing. Alejandro told us how an unexpected roadblock threatened to derail the program. He had created Mi Casa Ya so that even the poorest people in the country could get a government subsidy to purchase a home. To get the subsidy, they just needed to qualify for a mortgage from a local bank. But that was the problem. In order to get the bank loan, applicants needed a strong credit history. Yet most of the people looking to take advantage of the subsidy through Mi Casa Ya, he explained, were considered “credit invisible.” That is, they had no viable credit history, thin or un-scoreable credit files, or they simply had bad credit. So banks had no choice but to reject them. Natalia and I heard the frustration in Alejandro’s voice, and we knew just how we could help. We told Alejandro that if the Ministry could determine which individuals were being rejected by the banks, we could come in and build credit scores for them using Experian’s data. You see, building credit histories is the sort of thing we do every day at Experian. Over the years, Experian has innovated with analyzing traditional and alternative data sources, such as public records and magazine subscriptions, to create the most accurate and realistic picture of someone’s credit. And by unlocking the power of this data, we are able to identify the data sets that can help lenders make better decisions when making loans, especially for people with thin credit files. Working with Natalia and Alejandro for Mi Casa Ya over the past year has been incredibly rewarding – and our work here isn’t done! Since I work in the legal department at Experian, I am now involved in reaching an agreement with the Ministry of Housing to help advance this project. The details are tricky and the process is tedious, but when I think about the people whose lives we have the ability to transform, I just get excited. Because of our work, many more families in Colombia will be able to fulfill their dream of owning their own homes – that’s huge.

Experian celebrates Financial Literacy Month #FLM2017 each year working with the Jump$tart Coalition. We want financial literacy, but more importantly, we want people to reach financial capability.

By volunteering through Experian’s Sohos Reais – Real Dreams – project, I taught a mother of five about understanding basic business concepts so she could expand her sewing business and keep pursuing her dream. I grew up with parents who loved helping others, which fostered my love for volunteerism. Now that I work at Experian, this passion has blossomed as I’ve volunteered in many different capacities, from dressing as a clown to cheer up people in hospitals, to helping teach financial literacy to small-business owners in São Paulo, Brazil. Experian’s Sohos Reais – Real Dreams – program is designed to help connect entrepreneurs and small-business owners with experts who can advise them on how to help their business succeed. My volunteer partner, Diana, and I went through the training together, and a few months later were contacted by Aliança Empreendedora – Experian’s project partner – to help support a local entrepreneur. We were sent information about a woman named Adriana who was looking for advice for her sewing business. When we first met at Adriana’s house, she welcomed us into her home, fed us toast and black coffee, and introduced us to her five children. Adriana is a single mom whose husband left her after becoming a drug dealer. She told us how he had stopped supporting her and the children financially, and how Adriana now relied on her sewing business to support herself and the children – two of whom had serious health issues. Creating this business had been her dream since she was 12, when she had made her first dress for a school party. Now, she sewed colorful shopping bags and purses every day that she sold for R$1.25 a piece – a tiny price compared with the amount of work it took her to produce them. While she loved her job, Adriana told us that the money she made from her sales barely allowed her to cover basic living expenses, like water and electricity. She was on the brink of giving up her dream. The more we talked with Adriana, the more Diana and I realized that what she needed most was someone to help her understand basic business concepts, like cost and revenue. I thought that if we could help her control the money going out, we could solve a lot of her problems. Adriana was eager to learn, so right then and there, I showed her how, by keeping track of costs and profits, she could pay her bills and start to save money for her family. After our first meeting, a group of us from Experian were so inspired by her story that we raised R$1,415 for Adriana to buy fabric for her bags, and gave her a book to help her track her finances. Now every time we meet, Adriana brings the book with her, full of notes – she says it helps her work out her profit from the bags she sells so she knows how much more fabric she can buy. I never imagined that just sharing my financial knowledge with someone could help change their life. By volunteering with Real Dreams, Diana and I helped Adriana get back on her feet and continue pursuing her dream as a small-business owner and provider for her family.  

I recently attended a conference in Alwar, India, hosted by Experian and the International Finance Corporation. During one of the sessions, I met a single mother of two who had recently moved to a rural village in India. Her husband had left her and she was hoping to pick up work as a tailor once she purchased a sewing machine to support her family. As we talked, she confided in me that she was having trouble securing a loan from microfinance institutions because she didn’t have papers to prove her identity. And since she was new to the village, no one knew who she was. Without a proven identity, she couldn’t qualify for a loan and get the money she needed to support herself and feed her children. Indian banks predominantly serve urban customers whose credit reports are extensive. However, most customers from smaller districts and rural towns – like this woman – can fit their credit history on less than a page. Identification may be the only way they can verify their character to secure a loan. As I sat with this woman, I started telling her about our Prove ID tool that I had recently helped to develop. Using an individual’s biometrics, the tool would search her credit history, bank card and any information that can prove she is who she claimed to be. I explained that by using this tool, she could now prove what village she’s from, that she was a permanent resident in her new village and that she was likely to repay her loan. She was stunned and overwhelmed. In that moment, I realized that rural clients often need human connection to clearly understand what a bank or microfinance institution requires in order to obtain a loan. Many rural customers can’t read the brochures or pamphlets sitting in a bank, but by engaging them in conversation, you can effectively educate them about how to prove their identities and build their credit profiles to successfully access the finances they need. As a Product Developer for banks, I sometimes get so caught up on how to make products run that I lose sight of how the work I do impacts the community. Helping one woman discover Prove-ID to secure a loan and provide for her family inspired me. I want to continue being more involved in my community to help others who may not be literate learn how to prove their identities so they can better support their families.