Introducing Infact – from the Founders

We’re excited to introduce Infact and our mission to modernise the way credit information is shared, with a goal to improve consumer outcomes and lending performance for our partners.

Infact's co-founders, Andy Milligan and Will Mason, have spent 20+ years innovating in the credit market. Despite leading on innovations like Open Banking and working with and at mainstream CRAs, we never found a scalable and effective way to build a complete, accurate, and timely view of a consumer’s credit profile (share a consumer’s credit balance and performance in real-time).

While lenders’ ability to utilise new data sources to split risk has significantly improved over the last few decades, traditional credit bureaus have failed to innovate at the pace required to meet modern lenders’ needs.

The challenges that existing credit information poses to modern lenders are well documented in the FCA’s Credit Information Market Study, and although we could recite the high-level summary of inaccurate and incomplete data, we have summarised our view on the challenges below.

• The data structure for existing CRAs credit information sharing hasn’t really changed for 15 years. They have innovated on the edges but not in the “core” credit bureau.
• Existing CRAs are still dependent on fixed addresses rather than combining more modern forms of identification.

• Existing CRAs cannot reflect credit information accurately given that the information is out of date when it is shared.
• When that data is shared, it is in a flat structure that loses the richness of the products that lenders and their consumers would recognise.
• Existing CRAs use credit hungriness from search records to negatively impact credit scores as a poor proxy for real-time information not being available. This penalises consumers who are declined for reasons outside their control.
• This also means that existing CRAs’ corrections are slower as they rely on the source of the information to correct the data and re-share with them which can take a further month to feed back through.

Each of these challenges significantly limits lenders’ ability to improve performance and deliver better outcomes for consumers. We’ve talked to hundreds of credit risk leaders across the UK and North America and observed first-hand how they have struggled to increase responsible lending by finding new populations to lend to or incorporate new data sources to improve existing credit risk policies.

Modern lenders that have evolved to leverage new data sources for credit decisioning are winning. Today, we’re seeing a rapid trend towards lenders building teams of data scientists with a focus on building innovative credit risk policies that use internal and external customer data to improve lending performance and consumer outcomes. These lenders are “data hungry” and have a clear advantage over their competition.

Data hungry lenders are segmenting their customer populations and tailoring risk policies to each segment to maximise their revenue and reduce default rates. They are constantly testing and integrating new data and technology to find their own prime customers.

Modern, data hungry lenders are our Partners.

We are excited to be building Infact, our authorised challenger CRA, focused on delivering up-to-date, contextual affordability and credit information to help modern lenders increase responsible lending and improve consumer outcomes.

Infact helps modern, data-centric lenders with our product suite designed to help every stage of the customer life cycle. Think traditional credit products reimagined for the 21st century.

• Affordability built for a seamless checkout or application experience.
• Credit Risk insights that offer a real-time view of a consumer’s credit balance and usage. No more 30–90-day delays in reporting.
• Modern technical capabilities such as person-centric matching and API-based reporting, with a collaborative approach to retrospective data analysis.

We’ve assembled a deeply passionate team of builders from companies like Runpath, Credit Kudos, Visa, Microsoft, PayPal, and Experian and are thankful to be backed by some of the best founders and investors in the market.

If you’re curious about what we are building or you’d like to start a conversation you can reach out to our team here.

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Infact is Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority as a Credit Reference Provider and is committed to continuing to innovate and deliver in the consumer credit information market.  

Infact Systems Limited (“Infact”) is registered in England and Wales (company number 14032664), at 2-7 Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DE. Infact is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN: 978629)