Press Releases
ICON's IT Giant's Series - An Evening with Richard Fiddis
March 2008
Richard Fiddis of Experian took the chair on Tuesday the 4th March as the 10th participant in the popular ICON’s IT Giants series at Intellect office, following on from a string of global names such as Intel, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, ARM, Qualcomm, Symantec and Qinetiq.
Richard was UK MD prior to the float of the business in 2006 and has since moved focus to spearhead the push into emerging markets and in particular India, Russia, China and Japan.
In his introduction Peter Purton of Wireless Business Review explained that “you may not have heard of Experian but they have almost certainly heard of you!”
Experian credit databases hold information about the credit status of more than 460 million consumers and about 35 million businesses around the world. The information is collected from publicly available sources and lending organisations and is used by clients to confirm the identity of applicants and to help them decide whether to provide credit and on what terms. It also assists them in determining what measures to take when a customer fails to fulfil the terms of a credit agreement or other obligation.
As Alan Bristow of ICON Corporate Finance pointed out; that if more sub prime US lending institutions had used Experian’s services then maybe we would have avoided the “credit crunch” that is gripping major banks worldwide.
Experian has an interesting story to tell. It evolved in 1980 from the internal department that provided credit checking facilities for the GUS Group. Since then it has grown rapidly with 20 acquisitions prior to its demerger in 2006 and today it’s a global leader in providing information, analytical tools and marketing services to organizations and consumers. It employs 15,500 people in 36 countries and has annual sales of nearly £2bn of which over half are in the US.
The UK headquarters remain in Nottingham and is the home of a state of the art IT centre that houses it's UK IT function having been built at a cost of £33m.
Technology is at the heart of everything as it allows for greater automation and functionality and in particular credit scoring which is in big demand, particularly in US and increasingly here. As a result, much of the technology is controlled internally with central IT centers in the UK, India and US. Also, being so acquisitive, they house the technology of the acquired businesses and so have “an Aladdin’s cave of different technologies”. They are a heavy mainframe user with a staggering $250m annual spend on IT.
What keeps you awake at night asked Peter. Without a blink, Richard responded that it was data breach. A competitor was affected in the US recently but Experian’s record is excellent and they are very focused on retaining that record. It also explains the use of centralized IT functions which allow greater security over the data and allows them to have a single standard data encryption.
Asked how big an issue fraud is, Richard explained that it is not only significant but also appears in many different guises with money laundering, identity theft, sleeper fraud and collusion to name just a few.
Identity theft is a particular problem in UK and “victims can take up to two years to find out that they have been affected and typically 3 or 4 credit lines will have been drawn in that time”. In emerging markets it is often difficult to differentiate between fraud and bad debts.
So, if more customers used Experian products could the credit crunch be avoided asked Alan Bristow tongue in cheek? Well not entirely answered Richard “while the tools and techniques are there, if banks insist on lending 125% of a properties value to someone with no job then you are storing up trouble”.
With Citigroup and the like already having to make enormous multi billion dollar provisions there is clearly a lot of trouble and the banking systems are having their “moment of truth”. It seems that however smart your technology you can never eliminate greed from the system.
