How Experian helps Intuit to mitigate small business risk

Listen to a Risk Analytics Manager at Intuit discuss how he's benefited from a strong relationship with Experian. 

Transcript

Patrick Fernandez
Intuit

"It's been a relationship of openness and trust and we've been able to grow this relationship over the years"

Please introduce yourself and tell us a little about where you work.

My name is Patrick Fernandez and I work at Intuit in our Payments and Commerce Solutions Group. I'm a Risk Analytics Manager there, and our group is called Strategic Risk. We try to mitigate losses that may incur for our company. I manage a team of analysts that mine data so we look for trends and KPIs and we also work with third-parties such as Experian to help give us better insight into our merchant portfolio.

What are some of the biggest challenges in your industry?

I'd say in our industry there are three key areas of risk, the challenger industry, the first one has to do with gauging the business viability of a small business. This is both the entity itself and the principle, and we are trying to find the union and intersection of the risks facing these two. We find that the success of the individual, the principle,  has a lot to do with the success of the business but is only one of many different factors. The second one has to do with fraud and this is battling fraud, and the challenge here is the these trends change constantly. There's different patterns and we always need to stay a step ahead of these fraudsters so they don't take our money. And the last one has to do with compliance.  So there's various third-party external agencies that regulate our industry and we need to make sure that we are compliant with each one. These would include the card schemes and car brands, our sponsor banks and of course the U.S. Government - both federal and state.

What Experian products and services are you using?

We actually use a variety of products and services and they address the key areas I outlined earlier. So for the credit side, we use a whole suite of credit reports and scores that monitor both the entity and the individual and we get this from a variety of sources from the credit reports Premier Profile etc. On the fraud side, we also use the different types of ID verification tools and we use the Knowledge IQ platform and BusinessIQ platform. We want to make sure that the merchant who's applying with us and who we have business with is who they say they are. And the last one is for compliance. We use a variety of products that help us meet these different requirements from these entities so one of them would be for KYC or Know Your Customer and another one would be for restricted lists, like OFAC. So I see all of these different products give us give us a holistic and systemic way of addressing these key risk issues and at the end of the day it helps us to inform and execute on our risk policy so it's been great.

How does your relationship with Experian contribute to your company's success?

So at Intuit we are governed by a set of values and for us this isn't just words on a page, but it guides the way we do business and are measured by it on an annual basis. Our performance is actually based on these values, and I think that Experian actually helps us execute on these values especially when it comes to serving to our customers and I'll give you a couple examples - the first one is the value we called "Deliver Awesome". Every day Experian gives us the ability to monitor our merchant base where were able to hone in on just a very risky segment of the population to help mitigate losses there and for the vast majority of the population which is not as risky, they're able to go about their business unimpeded by risk. So we're able to help the shareholders mitigate losses while we're able to help our customers grow their business, so that's great. The second one is a value we call "Win Together". So we've declared as a company that we can't do everything ourselves, we need the help of people who are good at what they do while we do what we do best. And we have a stable of strategic partners who enable us to do this and I would consider Experian to be one of these strategic partners for us. Often times when we work in our relationship teams it feels like we're working as one company delivering value to our shareholders. It's been a relationship of openness and trust and we've been able to grow this relationship over the years.