Customer Spotlight: How Matrix Rental Solutions Strengthens Trust in Affordable Housing

A: My name is Sipho Simela. I’m the founder and CEO of Matrix Rental Solutions. I started the company back in 2021 with the idea of changing the affordable housing landscape.

We are the universal application for affordable housing rentals. We help operators, public housing authorities, and residents find better, safer, faster housing options.

A: Let’s face it. As solutions get better, fraudsters get smarter. We found that one of the biggest challenges in the rental housing market, particularly for affordable renters, has been building and maintaining trust. Whether it’s consumers submitting fraudulent documents or data during the application process, or bad actors claiming to be the owners and operators of those affordable rental properties, we found that trust is a delicate balance that’s hard to maintain.

Our universal rental application is an ecosystem that connects public housing authorities, consumers, and real estate operators. And we knew that part of creating this marketplace ecosystem comes with a certain amount of responsibility for maintaining the balance of who participates. When we looked for fraud solutions, we knew that to gain our clients’ trust, we had to offer a guardrail that prevented bad actors from accessing the platform.

A: The reason we selected Experian was that verifying identities using the most secure data was something we knew we needed to incorporate into our network. So now, when a consumer enters our platform, they go through a validation, a series of checks, to ensure that they are who they say they are.

Additionally, when operators and owners list their properties into Matrix, they go through a very similar validation check, which ensures that this isn’t a marketplace where anyone can come in. We truly do have constructive barriers to entry that ensure everyone in the market is accurately representing themselves.

Knowing that consumer protection and consumer data live within the four walls of Experian allows us to create an experience that ensures both sides meet at the same moment and are truly good actors in the transaction.

A: When we partnered with Experian, they provided a depth and a wide range of services and solutions that we were able to incorporate into the way our product functions. The amount of data they have to safeguard and the people who participate were a really nice extension of the way we were thinking about safeguarding our own network.

Experian’s fraud solutions restore market trust and allow consumers and operators to get off on the right foot in the pre-lease process, knowing that everyone here is coming with the best of intentions. That is a hard thing to build, but Experian fraud solutions have allowed us to run that process dynamically and have it natively embedded.

A: Our customers are achieving millions of dollars in savings. We really needed to find a partner that is cutting-edge, has industry experience, and offers the breadth and depth of solutions, like Experian, to partner with us and join hands in what really is a race to provide the best market solutions for our customers.

As a fraudster, you wake up every morning, and you think you have lots of options for how to commit fraud. Well, guess what? Matrix, powered by Experian’s fraud solutions, isn’t one of them.

The implicit value is what doesn’t happen. And every day, Matrix is warding off potential fraud. Through our partnership with Experian, we have put together a mousetrap that defends both consumers and the owners and operators of those real estate assets.

A: We now have a solution in place that makes it much more difficult for fraudsters to enter our network, regardless of the entry point.

As technology continues to advance and get smarter and all the amazing things that are happening with it, there is more of a need to ensure that data on consumers, owners, and operators are safeguarded by solutions like Experian’s fraud solutions.