• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 9, 2019

Equifax created a new product through a partnership with Neustar initially to support the financial services industry, but plans to expand into other areas such as telecommunications, entertainment, and travel and leisure.

The financial services offering will become available in the first quarter of 2020, with expansion into other industries by the early part of the third quarter.

The partnership combines the data assets of both companies, which Ian Wright, chief data officer for data-driven marketing firm Equifax, refers to as “superior segmentation.”

It’s a “story” that no one else has been able to tell, he said.

The partnership for the financial services focuses on solving a roadblock created by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and Fair Housing Act (FHA) that required financial services companies to eliminate protected class variables from all targeted marketing campaigns. Most segmentation models were built on targeting signals such as age, income and marital status. They are now unusable. 

The challenges to support financial services do not exist in other areas, but the performance of campaigns -- from search to display and video -- partly relies on data, no matter what the industry.

Equifax contributed average assets and liabilities, asset composition, the propensity to buy certain financial products and services, and other variables that provide insights into consumer financial behavior. The data links to Neustar’s identity graph to describe the financial profile for households in the U.S.

The combined data will provide additional qualitative insights such as the next-best product to target when the product the consumer originally wanted is no longer available. It also might provide insights such as whether the consumer is a "soccer mom" or whether he or she is a digital millennial living by themselves.