How Experian is using data to unlock financial power for everyone

Figuring out who’s creditworthy is getting more complicated, and millions of Americans are stuck with “thin files” or are considered credit invisible. That means they’re struggling to borrow or access credit, while lenders miss out on potential customers.

To tackle this, credit-scoring companies are stepping up and evolving.

Recently, for example, last year, FICO launched a new program to help expand the use of alternative data for credit scoring. But years before that, Experian fired an opening salvo when it introduced Experian Boost, which helps consumers improve their credit scores by tapping into their payment histories for rent, insurance, and even streaming platforms.

And now, the man behind Experian Boost, Jeff Softley, is helping transform Experian’s consumer business further, turning the company once known almost exclusively for credit reporting into what he describes as “every consumer’s financial copilot.”

Part of that strategy is the recent launch of Experian Smart Money, which, like Experian Boost, is a service devised to help consumers build their credit. But Smart Money allows them to do so without taking on debt. Instead, it works by having users pay their bills with a debit card that works in tandem with Boost, using eligible transactions to potentially increase a customer’s credit score.

That’s really just the beginning, says Softley, who is on a mission to broaden Experian’s role in consumers’ financial lives. For some who have rightly grown skeptical of credit reporting bureaus, that may sound questionable, as those bureaus (Experian and its key cohorts, Equifax and TransUnion) have had their share of issues in the past.

Experian, however, believes it has worked out a model for creating new services that have put it on another level relative to its competitors.

“It’s a data business”

“We were a very narrow business, delivering credit reports and scores to consumers,” Softley says of Experian’s former iteration. “We were the front end of a credit bureau. And today, it’s a totally different business. It’s a data business.”

Reams of data are allowing Experian to step into its new skin. Softley notes that a decade-and-a-half ago, when fintech companies were popping up left and right, making it obvious that one-dimensional financial firms were going to need to innovate or get left behind, Experian found itself in no-man’s-land. The company had experienced 16 straight quarters of decline, and leadership was antsy to find new ways to expand or evolve.

So Softley says they “took a small team, put them in a different office, and had them build a different platform. That’s the platform we use today.” That new platform involved moving away from a focus on supplying credit reports through FreeCreditReport.com—you may remember the catchy FreeCreditReport.com commercials, which were countered by the FTC’s own commercials—and double-down on Experian as a brand.

Softley says that meant building new products and services that were unique and relevant, and above all, actually served a purpose. That’s how Experian Boost came about. It was in its conceptual stage in the early 2000s, he says, “on a sticky note.”

Spirit of ’08

The financial crisis and Great Recession gave Experian an opportunity to put its plans for evolution into action. During that time, “new needs emerged, and new opportunities emerge if you’re listening to the consumer,” says Softley.

And Experian was listening. In focus groups and interviews, consumers were saying that they didn’t want to be punished for their past financial behavior via a bad credit score, but instead wanted to be rewarded for what they were doing now and in the future.

It was an ideal time to get the ball rolling on Boost, which gave consumers a sense of agency and control over their credit scores and rewarded them for sharing their information related to their finances and expenses. Still, the backend tech and infrastructure also needed to be in place to be able to aggregate the data, crunch it, and spit out an updated credit score.

Experian had the ability and manpower to do it, so it was off to the races.

“It was a watershed moment,” Softley recalls. “It was one of the first products that all of Experian built because it drew from so many capabilities across the organization.” Experian tested it out, and it actually “became a business case, and the business case became the platform rebuild.”

From there, the company started to zero in on developing and launching “products that allow you to leverage your data to open up financial opportunities—Boost helped create the blueprint to intertwine data and technology.”

Industry experts agree that Boost did push the envelope for consumer-facing credit products. “Experian was the first to come out with plain-English credit reports back in the day,” says Gerri Detweiler, a credit expert and the former director of Bankcard Holders of America, a nonprofit consumer credit and advocacy organization. “So while Boost is an innovation, they’ve been at the forefront of the consumer market for some time.”

Detweiler says that Boost is also notable because it raised the visibility of alternative data for consumers, or their ability to leverage it to their advantage. “It’s helped open up the ecosystem,” she says. “There are some criticisms and limitations,” she adds. That’s true—a WalletHub ranking of credit-builder products released in August 2024 ranked Boost 15 out of 20, and noted that it didn’t report negative information to creditors, which may be problematic.

Detweiler says that consumers (and creditors) should take that into account, and realize that Boost or similar services are “not going to be a cure-all” for people with thin or bad credit. “But it will open the door to other products that can further help people rebuild their credit.”

A new trajectory

That process has landed Experian with its current development model: Finding a consumer need, determining the best way to help them, and then creating a product or service that acts as a solution. Some trouble spots that the company could be looking at wading into include finding ways to help people buy homes or cars, or even developing tools for small business owners.

But there are also areas that the company likely won’t explore, or at least not right now. That could be because the technology simply hasn’t caught up to the moment yet, which was the case with Boost, which ultimately incubated for a decade or so before the technology existed to create a fast, effective product.

In the meantime, Experian is working on new AI features, such as a new virtual assistant. That will play a bigger role in 2025, with the aim of becoming a full-blown “financial copilot” for customers. Softley says that everything the company is doing now, though, can be traced back to the shift of thinking of itself as a data company first and foremost.

“Viewing ourselves as a data company put us on a different trajectory,” he says. “And this next chapter is all about providing financial power to all consumers.”