Text size

Equifax (ticker: EFX), the credit reporting company, is planning to team up with Fair Isaac (ticker FICO), the creator of the FICO credit score, to sell consumer data to banks, the companies said Wednesday.

The goal of the partnership is to take Equifax’s troves of data on millions of Americans and “connecting it and embedding with FICO’s differentiated software,” Equifax CEO Mark Begor told Barron’s in an interview Wednesday. “It really allows companies to more easily absorb data.”

Equifax shares were up about 0.3% midday Wednesday, while FICO shares were down about 1.6%.

Companies like big banks, insurers, and telecoms are voracious consumers and constant producers of consumer data, but the process of taking that information and fitting it into the right system, let alone analyzing it, is an arduous process that remains time and labor intensive.

“Banks have wanted to stitch together all the different data about their customers for a long time, and combine it with external data, with third party data from the bureaus and social data,” FICO CEO William Lansing said. “Making that low-cost, fast-to-market, that’s what this is all about.”

The goal is provide a “turnkey solution, where our data is piped into FICO’s software capabilities,” Begor said.

Equifax’s consumer data goes far beyond the credit files that are built by the three credit bureaus using information provided by financial institutions and includes things like the cellphone and utility records of 200 million Americans, payroll and employment information, and brokerage accounts details.

Equifax remains under scrutiny from state and federal regulators regarding its data breach, which hit about 148 million Americans.

Begor joined Equifax as its new CEO nearly a year ago and said that he believes that the business customers’ worries over the company’s information security are “behind us.” The company has announced several billion dollar in incremental technology security spending. He faced harsh questioning before House and Senate committees in February, but feels that the company is “moving to a more normal mode of operation.”

The two companies, he said, have been discussing a partnership for about a year. Begor noted that he and Lansing have known each other since they both worked at General Electric under Jack Welch.

Write to Ben Walsh at ben.walsh@barrons.com