YouSaid · the spoken record

Experian's tech chief

lines on the record: 67
first: 2026-01-26
most recent: 2026-01-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Per interaction with the consumer, or whether you want to call us. We have call center with thousands of people. It is a US-based call center. A lot of people complain about, oh, I talked to a person in country accident and accident. I couldn't understand. And we don't do anything like that because we want to do right by the consumer. We are, even in our B2B business, really it's a B2B to C business because at the end we affect our consumer, which is what you keep emphasizing. And we are very conscious of that responsibility and try to show it and how we continue to evolve our services.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunately, you know, I don't want to make any political statements, but that is unfortunately correct with that. We try to have our own compass of what's right and what's wrong. And we try to empower consumers. So opting out needs to be easy. Opting back in needs to be easy. We have several ways of doing that. I was going to call it stages or more severe, create freeze and then it's harder to undo create lock easier to do and undo depending on what happened to you, identity theft or not, or just a precaution or just because you don't like it. So we allow you to lock your data away and we should make that easy. We should make that easy in whichever way you want to contact us, whether you want to do it online, which is economically better for us. It costs us less.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at Experian. I don't know who you're referring to, but not at Experian. And I will tell you this. So the good thing about the business model that we have, it's a scale model. We talked about scale a lot and you sort of talked about the risk of scale. But the benefit of scale is as you scale, there are some costs that are fixed, that are then distributed over a greater amount of business and therefore you actually have natural scale benefits, meaning your fixed costs are a larger part of your total cost, the bearable costs are a load of your variable costs. So when it comes to security, what does that mean? That means if, you know, today we have 200 million consumers that give us their information and tomorrow we have 300 million. There is not a 50% 300 million, 50% bigger than 200 million. There's not a 50% increase of security costs.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the enabling cost of all the other investments we're going to make. So, I'm going to buy all the tooling, I'm going to hire all the people that we need to keep us safe. And we're going to deploy the technologies that do that the best. And we're going to try to stay ahead of the bad actors who do deploy AI, who do now, as you said, actors use bots to get in. We bought a company called Nura ID, which detects bots at a much better way than anything else that we have seen. Banks are eating it up. So there's an economic incentive, by the way, to do that well because it's a service we provide and we got to stay on it.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the first dollar we should spend If we don't do that well, we don't have a reason for existing because a bad actor will go in. Just to say it for a second, I've been here 10 years. Last time we had a breach occurred two weeks into my tenure at experience, so 10 years ago. We are now, we are in a business where we actually protect the identity of people whose identity was stolen because we have access to the dark web. We know how to clean it up. So when Equifax had their breach, they paid us to protect the consumers whose information was stolen. So, you know, I'm not saying we're perfect at it, but we're pretty darn good at it. So good that even our competitors give us that business. It's job number one, Nilai. There is no two ways about it. That is the biggest risk.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. It's the right thing to do. Because what you're pushing on, Nila, is you are expressing in your own words what kind of company we are. I would probably express it differently, but directionally, you're describing it right. When you're in that business, you need to have a really clear ethical compass on how you conduct business. We have that at Experience. Boost is an expression of that. Let's help the consumer get it right. Let's help the consumer fix their score if the score is wrong. It's not okay if the score is wrong because it makes life really difficult. And therefore, we have provided the mechanism to do that. By the way, for that, you need a real-time bureau. We're the only real-time bureau in the world. Nobody else is real-time. Your delay is 30 days. So if they had a functionality like that, our competition, you put in the information 30 days later, you get your score updated. It's useless. We built it real time. You put your data and it changes right then. And you can go back.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, I just think there's a feeling of helplessness that comes with that score sometimes, right? There's a feeling of lack of recourse, particularly if you feel that score is wrong, right? And that's where I think a lot of the”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that we don't have people upset and therefore not liking experience. I don't think they don't like experience. They don't like what that score expresses at the time. And if we have issued it to whatever lender they talk to, then the finger gets pointed at us.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Credit bureaus, other credit bureaus, they only take lending history. So have you had a loan before into account? Well, there's other recurring financial payments, your streaming service, your cell phone bill, et cetera, et cetera. There are so many payments that you make your utility bills that you make every month, and if you make them reliably every month, that should be part of your score and therefore increase your score. We have created a system called Boost Experience, where people can upload that information and that credit score goes up so that they don't have to go through that period, that idea, because I did rent an apartment. I did pay all my utilities, et cetera, et cetera. And I wanted to have access to credit. So we tried to lower the hurdle and therefore have fewer of those people who are impacted by life circumstance to me was the fact that I was an immigrant.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in those situations, there are much worse stories than my personal stories, but I just want you to know I've felt it before. What we try to do is we try to do away with people having low credit scores by giving them tools to improve their credit score. The way that the initial formula was written, it allowed for all recurring financial transactions to become part of the score. I don't want to pick on our competition, so I'll phrase it this way. We're the only ones who allow that.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came here just about exactly 30 years ago. And when you're an immigrant, you don't have a credit score. You don't have access to credit. Life's really hard. Really, really hard for us immigrants in the beginning years. And I wish there were a system that the law would allow to make life easier for people like us. But there isn't. And my life became difficult, you know. because I you know wanted to stay here and you know i went to school here that's initially how i came here and then i i wanted to stay here and get a job and all of that and if you don't have credits you know you're riding public transportation to work etc etc i mean it's you know i had an hour and a half commute for for years and years because i couldn't afford a car couldn't buy the car because i didn't have enough cash it life life's hard”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“are active with our direct-to-consumer business. We have hundreds of millions of consumers who proactively make their data available to us. We protect our identity. We do everything that I described earlier. We give them access to comparing financial products so they can lower their cost of borrowing. We give them access to lower cost car insurance, et cetera. And those consumers like us. And I know that because we ask them and we get a net promoter score and we look at that religiously every month to see how are we doing? Are we doing right by all these people, et cetera, et cetera? Now, there is another population that may not have that relationship with us that have through life's circumstance have a bad credit score. And those people, you know, sometimes don't like us. And I'll make it really personal. Nilai Alex was one of them. I'm an immigrant”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think enough people do. Let me maybe answer the question not with one sentence, but be a little more granular. I could point to data of the consumers who give us their data. So we have a direct-to-consumer business. And in the various countries that we...”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you can draw a worldwide comparison and you still have to say it is the best credit economy in the world. It really is. And there is lots of stochastic data around it. We are part of that connected ecosystem. We're not all of it. We are part of that. And we try to perform our role within that connected ecosystem responsibly and the best we can. If somebody has an idea on how to make it better, we'll be first in line.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true to lenders. Yes, yes They will make a decision anyway, wouldn't they? Like, I told you the story about C Ramo, who is long gone. He made decisions. People will make decisions about you and about whether they lend to you. And the more you have to do that at scale in North America, we have 247 million Americans. If you want the economy to blossom, if you want people to have access to credit, you need a scalable model. Not saying that our system is perfect.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Couple of words. First of all, we're not volunteer. So we don't do reputation scores. We are very much in, like I said earlier, financial services, healthcare, automotive and digital marketing. So that's where we play. And I think I answered that question earlier. Why is it in the interest of people that their data gets used so that they get access to credit, access to healthcare? so that they know the vehicle history of the car they're going to purchase etc etc so we try to use data for good we do not make decisions so you used this phrase do you think people are comfortable that experience can make decisions we don't do that we provide information”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you describing a good outcome? No, it's not a good outcome. And that is the outcome you want to avoid. It's the answer to your question. If you trust AI to the point where you blindly trust it and always follow it and you don't check yourself through the data scientist in the example that we discussed a couple minutes ago, It bears risk. So the real job that we have is to make sure that doesn't happen. And the interaction with the human still happens. You can sort of force it in rather than it automatically, AI automatically doing what it does.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me to tonight I'm seeing the Colorado Avalanche play hockey. Take me to ball arena in Denver. And so it will put in the directions from where I'm at. And I will be taken there. I got so used to that tool that I now listen to the tool all the time. Though I know the area really well and sometimes it doesn't give me the right route”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has to do with the interaction of AI to the human. So the way I look at AI, and I think a lot of people do, is it's a digital teammate or a digital workforce. So if it is that, then that teammate or that team would perform a certain task and it would contribute it to the work of the overall team. We assume, hey, if we provide the following information to a person as an assistant in their workflow, they are going to use it that way, and therefore it's a good thing. Well, we're not always right. People don't, I sometimes compare it with a Mercedes car and I can talk to the car and it has a map that I can talk to and say, hey, Mercedes.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yeah, because we test everything before we put it in production. So it happens all the time. Like nothing goes into production without going through that kind of process. We have synthetic data and we have depersonalized data that we use for testing, new models, new agents, and we don't put anything into production until we know it works.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes one Or like Human oversight through data scientists. I think we're too early in the journey that we can let it run on its own. I think we need to all practice responsible use for a data company. It means we lean on some of the strongest human assets that we have and as our data scientists. They need to look at the output and they need to look whether it's accurate or not. And if it's not accurate, we turn it off and we fix it. If it's not fixable, we would throw it away. Have you run across that, by the way, but we would do that?”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would be in a small language model because basically what the model does, it reports out what's happening and it just one number is smaller than the other. That's not math. It doesn't do the calculation. It just recognizes it.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No LLMs, we've built our own large language model. We've built SLMs, small language model for smaller tasks. We have about 200 agents built into our products already now. So there are different ways in which we use AI. But yeah, we built an LLM.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Performance. By the way, that happens today, but it happens with slews of people, not automated, not real-time, not as accurate as AI can do. And so we think there's a real improvement of the process there because it makes lending fairer, more accurate. It allows the lending products to behave the way that the regulator intends them to behave. And therefore, it's AI for good. just like we try to make data available for good and that's important for people to understand a data company like ours i like i said currently i cannot see that we make our data accessible to any public uh ai provider and therefore let them build their large language model based on our data by the way the large language model are much better at text than they are at math”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prompt the person who has created the model or the oversight department in the financial institution there is model drift. Not only do we tell them that there is model drift, we also tell them what variables in their model are the reason for the drift. You're missing a data element. You set it too low. You set it too high. You need to open your funnel to people with lower credit scores. And then we allow them to adjust the model so that it behaves the way that they had filed it with the regulator. So what I'm trying to tell you through that, it's not that we use AI to access all of the personal information of people. We use AI to look at outcomes derived data and interpret that and then make it available to humans so that they can use it in the way that it needs to be done in the example, you know, so the human oversight of model.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look like and how the models are supposed to behave, meaning what kind of person qualifies, how many loans they think they have, what would the loan losses be with the regulator. So they do that, they develop the model, the lending product goes out, people start applying, the banks starts paying out the loans, and then loan losses start coming in. People start missing payments. So that's a model behavior, you know, because there's a prediction of how much of that will there be. If those variables come off, the industry term for that is its model drift. So maybe the low losses are higher. Maybe we're not getting as many people of that age group. Maybe late payments are more than we thought. Those kind of metrics, it's called model drift. If it comes off, we use artificial intelligence when those models drift to”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creating their products is basically through a model. The model says, I have this loan product and I think the acceptable risk is this type of person that behaves in the following way. Our data feed set. So it can be the credit score, it can be where you reside if it's a local or a regional bank. It can be you lending history. Do you have the capacity to take on another car loan? It can be your income has it increased over time and therefore is it projected to continue to increase, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a whole bunch of data that goes into those models, none of which need to know whether it's Milai or Alex or who specifically we are. It's all about do we fit that model. The lenders need to file what those models”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can do without knowing. It's Nili, it's Alex. You don't have to know. You live in New York. I live in Colorado. You don't have to know your background, my background. You just look how we behave. So it's depersonalized data on which all those services are provided. Then let me move to the second part of the question, which was about AI. And you implied in how you asked your question that there is access to that data. Let me first say our data is not accessible by any public AI or gen AI models. And we currently don't see a way that we're going to go there. What we use AI for primarily is to make sure that governance is done correctly, explainability is provided, and human oversight is better than it was before. Let me give you an example. The way that financial services”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that to me to us was the beginning of credit scores. He just looked at how did people behave and what did people have in common who were good loan risk because he gave away the pharmaceuticals without having money in his hand and who were a bad lending risk. That is part of how our company started. And that's still how we practice our business. If you understand how people behave, you don't have to know their age, their gender, their ethnic background, their sexual preferences, all the stuff that's written down in law anyway. We should all think about that. And our business should work like that. And there's plenty of regulation that stipulates that it is, well, that's our very heritage. You look at people's behavior. So what we do with the data, usually the data is depersonalized. Because what I just...”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Loan, so they came and said, Look, I'm sick, I have this. I can't pay for it. Can I just have the medicine so I can get better and I'll pay you in the future? And he so trusted and did that. And then, you know, his immediate relatives, people he know well, told other people, hey, CRMO does this. And then people started coming who he knew less well. And he said, well, who are you? And he said, well, I know your brother or your employer or this or that person. And he expanded it. And soon, fast forward a bit, there was a line. outside of his general merchandising force with people who he didn't know anymore people coming to him because he had a big heart he gave away pharmaceuticals drugs without any securitization uh and he was a smart man and so he started writing down on paper what are the kind of attributes of those people who i gave drugs to pharmaceuticals to that paid me back and who didn't”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nila, a great question and really perfectly articulated. Let me give you two answers to that. One is Just explaining how we think about the credit score, you called it a relatively recent from the 80s. So if it's okay, I'm going to provide a different perspective to that. And then I'm going to talk about just how we apply AI. Let me start first with the history of our company. We have a guy in our history. His name was C. Ramo, an Indian immigrant into the United Kingdom, and he ran a large merchant store. So kind of sold everything between sort of Nottingham and Birmingham there in the Midlands and England. And he had a big heart. So one of the things that he did is when there were people who he knew well, he did give them”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Build out how the AI models might talk to each other in databases. How do you evaluate all of that risk and still be trusted as Experian? Because that seems like an awful amount of new risk as the technology shifts.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put this into practice. Let's talk about how AI might be changing your business and what you're doing. The foundation here is that even the idea of the credit score is relatively recent, right? This is a creation of basically the late 1980s, and a lot of people can have a lot of feelings about their credit scores. And I would say experiencing transunion Equifax. You can have a lot of feelings about whether or not those companies are responsive to you if you have feelings about your credit score and where they come from. In a world of AI, you have vastly more opportunity to make something richer, right, in the data because you can query it differently, you have vastly more opportunity to collect information because you can ingest more unstructured information and provide predictions. And then you have vastly more risk, right? Because the models might hallucinate the data or they might reflect some underlying bias in the data set as a whole. Or you might have huge security problems as we”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if that happens, it is usually because I refer to a principle that they did not take into account. And I try to be a principle-based leader. I have a clear hierarchy of how I make decisions. I talked earlier about privacy, consent, security. It's at the top of my list. And it's not always the most economic decision. And therefore, you know, my CTOs might suggest something that makes more sense from an economic perspective. maybe isn't as tight from a security perspective. And then I veto it and I say, well, we're going to pay the extra money and we're going to do it anyway. But it happens very, very rarely because people know the principles that we work by. So if you have clear principles, you listen to people, surround yourself with strong people, you make the room for a debate that is open, transparent, very inclusive.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think God has given us two years and one mouth because we should listen twice as much as we talk. So as a leader, what you need to do is you need to hire world-class teams and people who are better at what they do than you are. And then you need to let them do their work and you need to let them speak. And at the end of the day, I try to surround myself with people who can scrutinize what people have in their brains and what's being shared. And if they come to a consensus, I usually go with the consensus. You can probably count on a couple of fingers how often in a year I will go against what those group of CTOs would want to do.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the end, it's always migrations. It's never anything but migrations. It's a truth of every company. This is the other question I ask everybody who comes on Decoder. You're describing the kinds of decisions you make and the manner in which you make them. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, we are on the side of letting everybody speak their piece and hearing everybody out. And if that takes several meetings, then we let that happen. But at the end, we all align. And even those who would have preferred a different decision than rather in the same direction. Those are the spiciest of all decisions.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there are so many, you know, SPICY is when it comes to enforcing a standard where people need to maybe decommission a tool that they love, decommission a tool that their developers love, decommission a tool that's embedded in all the customers, and then adopting the standard means of migration at a minimum for our internal technology teams and maybe even for the clients because it becomes an effort that takes time, it becomes an effort that costs money, becomes an effort that clients don't like. And therefore, you know, making such a decision is long contemplated and requires detailed plans because you don't only need to think about, well, is it the right standard or not? But what are the sort of consequences of secondary and tertiary consequences of the decision? That gets spicy. And we're not on an autocratic organization.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Differences go both ways. We try to do this in the early morning hours for California, 6 a.m., 7 a.m. my time. And then everybody dials in. Altogether, I think we have 20 people dialing in. There are 10 CTOs and CIOs dialing in. And then there's our SISO on that meeting. Our risk officer is on that meeting. We have some people who drive specific topics. So for example, the person who drives our AI initiatives and coordinates it across the company, et cetera, et cetera. When we did the cloud migration, you know, we are at the tail end of that. There was a person on who was responsible for the cloud migration. So they're all high level people. I'm going to call it an expensive meeting with real decision makers. Meeting lasts about three hours. And we have a monthly.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a right hand person, so we have a group CTO, Rodrigo, and he works with the CTO to say, what do you think we should talk about? And then he makes a decision on what's on the agenda. It gets to me, call it a week before the meeting. I say, yeah, I like it or I don't want to talk about this. I want to talk about that. Goes back out and I then sent to them so that everybody can prepare. Everybody dials in. It's a worldwide meeting, you know, complicated that makes early mornings for me because I sit here in Colorado and just because”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, how do you align those roadmaps? You can very quickly see how you might have one division working in one product, then another division is also working on, and that is redundancy you might not need, or you might decide, actually, they need to be more different than similar. How do you align that?”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's the 4,000 plus 7,000 equals 11,000. Up to 23,000 employees that we have at Experiment, 11,000 work in technology organizations. 4,000 work in the central group that's sort of mined and the other 7,000 work in the business units.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want to apply data analytics and AI into the hands of all of the business units that build their product. So the question is, what can I build centrally that enables them to do that faster so that we can stay innovative, they can stay innovative? And so you have shared data foundations and shared back-end services, you have modular services that people can use. And then you have AI models that can also be reused if they access the same type of information. Typically that's appropriate when it's deep personalized information, not personalized information. And that saves us then from building, if you put the three together, so the shared data foundation backend services modular services and AI models, you then don't have to build one-off apps anymore, but you can reuse a lot and focus on the feature.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, think about it like this way. So my title is CEO for Experience Software and Technology. The software stands for all the software we sell to our clients. So on that side, I am more, you know, I'm in charge of, okay, what does the product look like? Is it evolving the way it is? Do we have competitive advantage versus everybody who competes with us? And the product needs to be the best. Certainly we try to always be the first or the most innovative first best. And in some cases, only product that can do with our products do. And that's how we make money. That's how we grow those businesses. It's a typical market going role. The other part of my title, technology, that stands for our technology infrastructure. That's a little bit what we have talked about so far. So that's empowering all the business units with all the services that they need. Yeah. And we do have platform builds. The way I think about it is.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does seem that whenever there's a technology shift, the push towards centralization appears, right? We need to get a hold of this. We need to understand how to use it. Then we can spread it back out to the divisions. I'm just curious. You described yourself as a provider of backend solutions. That's your job. Your title is CEO. Do you think yourself is the CEO of an infrastructure provider inside of Experian? Are you a vendor to the other divisions?”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would tell you doing more centrally is probably a good idea. Because like I said earlier, I think about AI as a platform capability, not a feature. And therefore, you have to have that capability everywhere. And you have to allow reuse of models. And you have to govern it very carefully. And I think doing that once rather than, you know, we're in 23 countries, 23 times is a good idea.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're trying to walk that fine line exactly like I explained. My job is build a backend that is superb, make our platforms the most secure and least expensive way for us to deploy software to our customers. And the regions and the business units job is to build products that respond to consumer needs. And there is sort of functional needs depending on the use case. That's the business unit. And there is regional needs that's based on the context that I just talked to that can vary by country. Yeah, working good enough, but we're evolving. You know, we're growing as a company, which is a nice thing to do. And I would say, you know, I've worked at other large corporations. As you know, the pendulum swings. So, you know, sometimes do a little more centrally. Sometimes you do a little more locally. And you always reevaluate and see what's working. In the AI world,”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got seven direct reports and then it goes down. And then the other 7,000 are in technology organizations. And I still set the standards and the policies, our technology policy that everybody needs to work by, but they're not in my direct reporting line.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dials to comply with the country specific regulations. And that's why we have the matrix function. So some central functions that look at achieving scale, that look at achieving clear governance, doing everything the same way, and market specific to the consumer needs, the context that is specific to a specific country. That's our region. That's how you should think about it.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The context, so call it the economic context, call it the socio-economic context. So how much do people make, et cetera, et cetera? That differs everywhere in the world, so it differs whether you're in the United States or my native Germany or India or Australia. We are active in all these countries, and the context is different. And therefore our go-to-market oriented business units, they have CEOs that look over the region, understand that context really well, and the product is applied appropriate for that country. And by the way, regulation varies. So we do have to adjust some of our security and privacy.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT