by Angela Guess
Kim Nash of Network World recently discussed the Big Data held by Equifax. She writes, “As one of three credit bureaus in the United States, Equifax keeps financial data on every adult in America, plus people in 16 other countries. But the company knows much more than just what goes into an old-fashioned credit score. It maintains information about people who share the same phone number or address, ‘non-obvious’ relationships between individuals, loans for dental work, magazine subscriptions, rental history, real estate assets, investment wealth, retail purchasing, the type of federal tax return someone files, marital status, employment, utility payments, cable TV accounts, criminal records, debt-to-income ratios, changes of address, motor vehicle files, post office boxes, inferences about someone’s capacity to pay bills, predictions about someone’s propensity to pay, links to past and potential fraud crimes–and more.”
Nash continues, “This pile of more than 800 billion records is sliced, diced, analyzed and indexed into 26 petabytes of data. That’s more data than the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse, said to be the single biggest repository at the agency, with its relatively measly 1 billion unique documents. In all, Equifax has data on 500 million consumers and 81 million businesses worldwide. Says Equifax CIO Dave Webb: ‘We know more about you than you would care for us to know.’ In his wry British way, Webb alludes to the power of information and his push to derive ever more lucrative products and services from Equifax’s vast stores of it. Webb says Equifax can make money off IT innovation–that is, his staff’s ability to manipulate massive amounts of data better and faster than competitors can.”
photo credit: Equifax
