Welcome to the Experian Thought Leadership Hub

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the credit card landscape, offering key insights to help your business tackle today’s challenges and uncover opportunities for growth.

Key insights:

• Credit card debt reached an all-time high of $1.17 trillion in Q3 2024.
• About 19 million U.S. households were considered underbanked in 2023.
• Bot-led fraud attacks doubled from January to June 2024.

With behavioral analytics, Grasshopper Bank supercharges their team’s efficiency through improved top-of-funnel fraud detection and better-informed resource allocation.

Key Results:

• More accurate rejection at top-of-funnel onboarding, drastically reducing manual review costs and API calls
• Streamlined client onboarding through advanced fraud detection tools
• Refined cost-awareness, informing operational spending for the acquisition team as well as fraud team

Fraud risks have held many financial institutions back from committing to real-time money movement, but the danger of indecision could cause hesitant businesses to miss out on billions. We break down the biggest myths around RTMM and how they’re impacting the financial world.

Key Insights:

• 80% of U.S. consumers want to make payments faster and more direct, opening a lucrative opportunity for businesses who offer real-time money movement capabilities
• How FedNow changes the RTMM landscape in the U.S.
• What makes real-time payments more vulnerable to fraud (and how fraud teams can adapt)

While lenders like credit unions, CDFIs, and MDIs help bridge the gap to financial possibilities for consumers and small business owners, navigating the financial inclusion landscape can still be challenging. Allow Experian to guide you to business growth within underserved communities – helping you to find and approve more consumers while confidently mitigating risk. Learn how our portfolio of data and analytic solutions helps drive your business goals at every turn. We specialize in providing strategic consulting to help you elevate your financial inclusion approach.

Account takeover (ATO) fraud is surging, with losses reaching nearly $13 billion in 2023 — a 15% year-over-year increase. As fraudsters become more sophisticated, this upward trend shows no signs of slowing.

To protect your organization and customers, it’s critical to implement comprehensive, scalable fraud prevention, identity verification and authentication solutions. Discover why Experian was recently named a leader in ATO prevention by Liminal.

Dive into key trends important for the financial services industry including credit activity, lending standards, loan demand, originations, delinquency and consumer sentiment.

Key takeaways: 

• Underlying economic activity remains solid and a soft-landing remains the base case, but weaker labor market conditions have heightened concern about the outlook.
• While there remains some stubbornness, inflation has generally continued to moderate towards the Fed's 2% target with improvement seen across both goods and services.
• Recent revisions to real income growth and consumer spending suggest that households are on better footing than previously thought.

Explore Gen Z's habits and attitudes toward credit, personal finance, marketing, fraud and more.

Gen Z fast facts:

• There are 69.3 million Gen Z-ers in the United States.
• They spend six or more hours per day on their cell phones.
• They collectively demand purpose and accountability from brands they interact with.

They demand the creation of more opportunities for people of diverse and underrepresented backgrounds. Lack of financial resources and funding options are seen as barriers in achieving their goals.

Source: Statista, McKinsey & Company.

Learn how credit unions can optimize their credit limit strategies to grow card use, increase member loyalty and manage risk.

Fast facts:

• Credit card balances increased by $55 billion in December 2023, about four times the increase from November.
• 35% of holiday shopping was done in December 2023, peaking at 9% of total holiday sales the week before Christmas.
• 68% of credit card owners regularly use at least two credit cards.
• 41% opened their recent credit card because they wanted to build their credit score and history."

Explore state-level and industry level data that banks, credit unions and fintechs can leverage to track the downturn and be correctly positioned for the recovery in this monthly report.

Data highlights from this month’s report include:

•  The Federal Reserve announced a 50bps rate cut during the September meeting.
• Annual headline inflation cooled from 2.9% to 2.5%, getting closer to the Fed’s 2% goal.
• Mortgage originations increased 7.0% in August.