Eric Haller appointed to lead Experian DataLabs globally

COSTA MESA, Calif., May 5, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Experian^®, the leading global information services company, today announced that Eric Haller will be the executive vice president of Experian DataLabs. Designed to help Experian clients and businesses throughout the world, Experian DataLabs will solve strategic marketing and risk-management problems through an advanced data analysis process, research and development.

"Clients are seeking innovative techniques and applications to capture the value that is hidden within their data assets. Experian DataLabs provide a safe and secure environment to partner with our clients to enable breakthrough data experimentation and innovation," said Haller. "In our labs, we're able to combine Experian's data assets with those of our clients to present a larger picture and to experiment with new and innovative ways of analyzing that data to deliver greater competitive advantages."

Experian DataLabs are staffed by teams of Ph.D. scientists and applied research practitioners with expertise in advanced analytics and machine learning, as well as other advanced statistical methods. The labs can take advantage of Experian data assets such as broad and secure consumer and commercial credit data and demographics, which can guide Experian clients in determining new approaches to challenging problems. Projects often tackle high-dimensionality issues where the combination of computer science, applied mathematics and business acumen intersect to create services that can be cost-effectively implemented.

"We've had some fantastic early successes in North America with Fortune 500 clients where we've been able to identify risk and marketing-related signals from data sets comprising billions of transactions," said Haller. "For example, we have applied a natural language processing technique — typically reserved for document classification — against payment card accounts, enabling us to create spend behavioral insights that were incredibly useful for our client."

Recent Experian DataLabs engagements

• Proprietary recommender system that considers frequency, value, accuracy, diversity and novelty of data. One implementation runs more than 28 quintillion calculations and leverages insight from more than 5 billion transactions. The approaches include collaborative filtering and merchant similarity indexing.
• Historical spend probability calculation and algorithms where individual profiles for consumers and small businesses are updated daily with new transactions; alerts are generated when events take place that are outside of expected behavior parameters. One implementation runs daily updates on more than 120 million individual profiles.
• Income estimation derived from anonymized automated clearinghouse deposits using advanced clustering techniques. The process is able to identify more than 60 distinct income deposit patterns, and the output has been linked to assess direct deposit account liquidity risk and cross-sell product sequencing.
• Other projects include evaluating the impact of multiple social media data sets on commercial credit risk, improving point proximity estimation using geolocation data and assessing consumer sensitivity to changes in product pricing.

Cloud and Big Data environment

Experian DataLabs operate in a compliant, safe and secure environment for both internal and collaborative research to take place. Nearly a petabyte of data storage is provisioned by Experian in the United States to support research and development activities. The environment allows for multiple Big Data projects to occur simultaneously.

"Given Experian DataLabs' success in North America, we're investing in global expansion with two more labs being built in London and Sao Paulo, Brazil," said Kerry Williams, deputy chief operating officer at Experian. "Under Eric's leadership, Experian DataLabs will help our clients harness data and analytics to provide insights needed to make better decisions, create value and deliver that value to customers."

For upcoming news about Experian's DataLabs, visit our news blog.

About Experian
Experian is the leading global information services company, providing data and analytical tools to clients around the world. The Group helps businesses to manage credit risk, prevent fraud, target marketing offers and automate decision making. Experian also helps individuals to check their credit report and credit score, and protect against identity theft.

Experian plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN) and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 index. Total revenue for the year ended March 31, 2013, was US$4.7 billion. Experian employs approximately 17,000 people in 40 countries and has its corporate headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Nottingham, UK; California, US; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

For more information, visit http://www.experian.com.

Experian and the Experian marks used herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Experian Information Solutions, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

Contact:Michael TroncaleExperian Public Relations
1 714 830 5462
[email protected]

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SOURCE Experian