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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“All right, let's get into that. So the way we work, we are a federated system. And it's not unusual. So maybe our title is unsuper intuitive and don't explain it, but let me try to explain it. You have central functions where everything is the same regardless of where you are in the world. Think of finance. Think of HR and think of technology. So you want to have technology standards. You want to have security standards that”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You buy capital as a reseller, which is what a bank is, the better the terms you get. And therefore, you have the potential of offering better terms to your borrowers, to the consumer. And therefore, I think the mix of local and national is a good mix. It has worked here in the US.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Presence is rare. Now let's talk locally versus nationally or super regionally. In North America we have the good luck that we have 7,000 financial institutions. That is a model that's unique in the world. We don't have that anywhere else. And if you go all the way from the top to the bottom, at the bottom, you would find these credit unions. And credit unions are typically very local, though they are now large ones like Navy Federal Credit Union. You're familiar with all of those, you know, that serve the armed forces everywhere or USAA who serves members and relatives of armed forces members for insurance and banking around the country. So there are some exceptions, but largely credit unions are very local. They do not have access to capital, like the large super regional or national lenders have. And access to capital is important because it is a volume game. The more...”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, they often act locally. So I don't want to name any names, but large international banks born in Europe, large international banks born in New York City where you're at. They have an American business strategy and then they have whatever British and Australian business. It's actually different. And their models are different. And lending criteria is different and the lending products are different. So there are sort of global”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a really interesting question. I'm the tech guy here. And from a technology perspective, I don't want to make a sort of macroeconomic or regulatory statement, but from a technology perspective, it's definitely true. Because if you have scale, you hold more information. And as you hold in more information, you need to deal with it responsibly. And again, it gets me back to those three tenets we need to protect privacy, consent, and security. And if you have more information, you better do it really, really, really good. to get back to your local or national or global scale. So first of all, there are very few global financial players. So let's start there. They are literally, we can probably count them on two hands. And even I know those companies from the inside, they don't always act globally.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are let me describe it in the following way. I look at UniLi and I ask you a couple of questions about, have you had a couple of loans before? What do you want to do with the money? How are you going to pay me back? And then I decided whether you're a good guy worthy of getting this loan or not. Well, if I give you the money at that point, I'm in the risk because the money leaves my account, the lender's account, goes into your account and you can do with money as you please. So it's a very high risk business. So the lender needs to have the information in order to make the decision. You, the consumer, needs access to credit because it will advance your standard of living, your quality of life, and your wealth creation. So privacy laws allow you to opt out, and it is actually in yours, the consumer's interest that you make the information available for lending.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In other words, you can look at countries that don't have access to credit like we have here in America. And you can look at their economic evolution lags behind that of the United States. You can look at families where maybe the parents didn't have access to credit and therefore they couldn't do what now their children can do who have access to credit. Or you can look at an individual of how fast do they advance because credit allows you to pay forward your earning power and your ability to repay a loan and therefore make investments that then can be accretive to your wealth. So put it in another way. If a lender would not have information about an individual, Alex or Nihili, they cannot make a decision about whether they're going to lend money for you. And let's be clear, lending is one of the riskiest businesses that”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have two answers to that. So the first answer is privacy laws are such that you can opt out anytime. So if you, Nila, I don't want your information stored, you can do that. You can do it on your phone so it doesn't listen to it and you can do it with us. The bigger answer I have is the following. And this is based on research. This is an absolute truth proven over many decades. And that is that prosperity for a family and prosperity for an individual is strongly linked to access to credit.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most people talk only about encryption, but it goes way beyond that, goes to access rights. I named that consent earlier. It goes to how do you store the information? You know, you can shard it, which I really like, you know, break it up. So when people find Eli's information, Eli's information, excuse me, they find maybe only your first name, not your last name. They maybe find your street address the word somewhere else and your account information stored again in another place. In other words, if you break it up into 25 shards, they'd have to break 25 encryption keys, know how to pin it back together to one individual in order to really understand Nili. That's complicated. So the game is we need to have security systems that stay ahead of the bad guy. And we need to have at the core of our mission, the core of our mission.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Consent and security at the center. That's how I think about it. So the database as a function sort of has morphed into data lakes and then now it's, you know, I would refer to it as a platform. Most of the data, what we do when we hold with the data is I start with the last part that I talked about. So keeping privacy, consent, and security at the center. What you really need to think about is how do you do that? And how do you do that better than anybody else? And how do you do that in light of the fact that the bad actors know everything that you just said, what you just said is we're one of the largest data companies in the world and therefore we got a lot of information. And bad guys like information. So, you know, to keep it secure, you need to have a, I'm going to call it a bulletproof setup from front to back of every application.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A giant responsibility, and we take it very serious. You know, there are a couple of aspects to that. Our business is based on consumer trust. Once the consumer starts losing trust, the brand goes nowhere. Investors start losing faith and everything goes down the drain. So, you know, if we don't do that part of our business well, there is all the other stuff that I could talk about and maybe talk about in a little while, it goes away. You talk about it as a database, you know. Nili, the way I would talk about it is I would talk about that our largest businesses are on modern cloud native NI enabled platforms. And these platforms let us securely ingest and massive amounts of data. Like you're saying in real time, and then apply advanced analytics and machine learning while we keep privacy.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have account numbers, et cetera. So we do need account numbers to match the accounts to people, but it never goes out. And it's double encrypted. So super protected. We don't use any of that information for any of the services that we provide, except for the pinning so that we can match it to a person.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a core element. I think you're overemphasizing the financial information. Financial services is one of the sectors. Like I said earlier, we have a lot of other information that is useful, that has nothing to do with sort of the core lending information that we have, the history of people's lending behaviors. And the other information is just as useful. So if you look at the automotive vertical, for example, we have an equivalent to most people know Parfax. We have something called AutoCheck, you know, has vehicle history, ownership history, maintenance and repair history, accident history. So there is a lot of other information that is actually relevant for these decisions. It's not only the financial information that we have about people. And by the way, when people say financial information often, it's in terms of”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into the hands of decision makers. And those can be in businesses, financial institutions, mortgage companies like you just said. But we also supply it to the consumer directly. And the objective is the same. The objective is to turn complex data, complex information into easy to understand, actionable guidance so that either the lender or the consumer can make a confident decision. Yeah, and that's the objective. You need the same data for that. And both sides need to see it because the data is the objective truth. And then the consumer can make a decision and the lender can make a decision if you're talking about financial services particular, which your example did.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, what you want to do is AI, if I go straight to the AI topic though, maybe we should back up a little bit. If AI is a platform capability, it's not a feature. And we use AI primarily to help embed governance, help explainability, which is required by law, and desired by the consumer, and to actually facilitate human oversight. So then back up into where we came from and your question at the core with all the data that we hold, from a technology perspective, and I'm the tech guy, so I'm not going to talk about the technology, that means that we apply data, analytics, and AI.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experian is a global data and technology company. We help consumers and businesses to make financial decisions and protect their data and identities. On the B2B side, we have four verticals, financial services, healthcare, automotive, and marketing services. On the D2C side, we protect consumers with information that helps them understand, protect and manage their financial lives. So we help them build credit, qualify for their next desired loan. My favorite example is they're getting their first mortgage, which is a hard thing to do in America, but a major wealth builder for Americans. We give them access to comparing financial products so that they can lower their borrowing costs. We protect them from fraud and identity theft. Like I mentioned earlier, and we help them save when they buy car insurance. So that's experience to me.”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Am very excited to talk to you. There's a lot to talk about. Experian is a sort of fascinating company. A lot of people have a lot of feelings about Experian, which I want to talk to you about. Every company that comes on the show lately, every executive tells me that they're an AI company. I think Experian wants to be known as an AI company. We're going to get into that. Why don't you tell me what you think Experian is today and what it has been and what you think it should be in the future?”
2026-01-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT