Equifax Inc. (NYSE:EFX) has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Manipal ProLearn, the professional learning arm of Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE), to collaborate on producing industry-ready professionals specialized in data science and analytic skills for the Banking Financial services and Insurance (BFSI) sector.

Nanaiah Kalengada, Managing Director and Country Leader, India and MEA for Equifax and Ravi Panchanadan, Managing Director & CEO of Manipal Global Education Services

Equifax currently employs around 150 data scientists at its analytics centre in Bangalore. Of these, around 40 data scientists are working with Equifax’s CoE in the U.S. “We hire about 10–15 data scientists every year,” said Nanaiah Kalengada, Managing Director and Country Leader, India and MEA for Equifax.

“Data sciences is an emerging field that has seen tremendous growth in demand for the relevant skills. Being a global leader in Data and Analytics, Equifax will offer recruitment platform and help moulding the curriculum to industry’s real life use cases and best practices thus providing an opportunity to budding data science professionals to build the required skillsets,” said Nanaiah.

As a part of this arrangement, Equifax will hold webinars and classroom sessions to help train the students of Manipal Global in data analytics for the BFSI sector. Equifax India will also continuously evaluate students of Manipal ProLearn for placement in their Analytics team. In the recent placement season, Equifax made four offers of employment to students of the PG Diploma program in Data Science. In its third year since inception, the 12-month program has already been taken by close to 200 people.

In the BFSI sector, Manipal Global Education Services now trains around 20,000 people annually, of which 7000–8000 are trained on campus. The company has 45 BFSI institutions on board. Over a period of ten years it has trained 25,000 people for ICICI Bank alone.

Atlanta headquartered Equifax conducts several on-campus programs at Georgia Tech and Cornell. The company is looking at increasing its academic engagements in India.

“Today, the largest requirement for data analytics professionals — about 40–45 percent is from the BFSI sector,” said Ravi Panchanadan, Managing Director & CEO of Manipal Global Education Services. “This tie-up aims to bridge the gap between what is the actual requirement of the industry versus what is being taught to the potential students in the field of data science/data analytics. Equifax will equip ProLearn professionals in the banking segment with technical know how to manage analytics in the banking domain.”

“We play a role in enabling responsible growth in credit by providing required insights to lending institutions in the country,” said Nanaiah, referring to the company’s credit bureau in India. “We provide insights into how the credit ecosystem is performing.”

Equifax is also working on addressing the segment of the population that is new to credit: correlating data points like location, spend-patterns, income etc with credit score.

Manipal Global Education Services has started developing a Digital Learning Stack, which will enable a unification of the company’s several services. This is expected to be released in the next 6–7 months. The company registered a revenue of around Rs. 1,000 crore last year.