Experian Innovation Lab Celebrates 15 Years of Transforming Industries

As AI agents take on tasks for people and businesses, trust is essential. Good technology should make something difficult a little easier, whether it helps someone understand their finances, helps a business spot fraud, or enables an agent to act on a person’s behalf securely. A few recent honors recognize the people and work behind those kinds of advances at Experian. Recognizing leaders in AI Vijay Mehta, Experian’s Global Chief AI Officer, and Kathleen Peters, Chief Innovation Officer, Identity & Fraud, were named to the 2026 H2O AI 100. The list recognizes leaders advancing the practical impact of AI. Vijay’s work includes bringing teams across Experian together around a shared AI strategy. As he described in a recent interview with AI Innovator, Experian is moving beyond adding AI tools to existing tasks and looking at how AI agents could change the way some work gets done. Kathleen leads Experian’s work on Experian Agent Trust™; a framework developed with our partner ecosystem to support agentic commerce. Helping people make sense of their finances Experian Virtual Assistant, EVA™, received a Gold 2026 Globee® Award in the Best Conversational AI & Next-Gen Chatbot Solution category. EVA is available to more than 85 million Experian members. In secure conversations, it can help people understand their credit and get a clearer view of their finances in real time. Members can review spending categories, spot notable transactions, and find recurring bills or subscriptions. EVA can also help members decide what to do with those insights. They can manage subscriptions, explore prequalified credit card offers from third party lenders through Experian Marketplace, and take actions related to their Experian credit file, such as freezing their Experian credit report. EVA combines AI with Experian’s data expertise and financial information members choose to securely connect. Members decide which accounts to connect and can revoke access at any time. Experian designs and monitors its AI systems with governance, testing, and privacy controls intended to support accuracy, fairness, transparency, and consumer protection. A workplace shaped by its people Experian ranked No. 6 on the 2026 Fortune Best Workplaces in Technology list, four places higher than last year and its highest ranking to date. The list is based on employee feedback about their workplace experience. That recognition belongs to the people who bring ideas forward, work across teams, and build technology for consumers and businesses. Innovation recognized in Southern California At Octane’s 2026 High Tech Awards, Experian was named Best Large Company Disruptor/Innovator. The awards celebrated companies and leaders helping shape Southern California’s innovation community. Experian Agent Trust was also named a finalist in the Cloud AI Awards’ “Best AI Infrastructure Solution” category. That recognition highlights the importance of building trusted foundations as AI agents take on more tasks. Together, these honors reflect how Experian is putting AI and innovation to work: helping people understand their finances, helping businesses spot fraud, and building trusted foundations for AI agents to act with a person’s permission. They also recognize the people behind that work, whose ideas and collaboration turn technology into useful experiences for consumers and businesses.

Lending is becoming more automated, more connected and increasingly powered by artificial intelligence. But across many lending processes, a significant gap remains between that vision and today’s reality. New research from Celent, a global research and advisory firm for the financial services industry, highlights that gap and how quickly financial institutions are moving to close it. According to the Celent 2026 Enterprise Decision Intelligence Survey, 82% of lenders plan to increase their spending on decision intelligence technology over the next two years. By 2028, Celent projects decision intelligence adoption will increase 32 percentage points in mortgage lending and 28 points in consumer lending, with more than half of lenders expected to use it across key lending processes. The automation gap creates an opportunity Automation is already well established in some areas of lending. Celent found that 68% of credit card decisioning is fully or mostly automated today, compared with 31% of small business term loan decisioning and just 19% for mortgages. Manual processes and fragmented technology can increase costs, slow decisions and make credit risk and fraud management more complex. For borrowers, they can mean additional friction and longer waits. Closing that gap requires more than automating individual steps. Financial institutions increasingly need to connect data, analytics, models, decisioning and workflows across the credit lifecycle. Decision intelligence moves into the mainstream Celent defines decision intelligence as an integrated approach that combines data, software, rules management systems and artificial intelligence to optimize decision making. The research finds that decision intelligence platforms have entered the mainstream as lenders look to connect capabilities that have traditionally operated separately. More than eight in 10 lenders plan to increase their investment in decision intelligence technology over the next two years. Data management is also among their leading investment priorities, reflecting the importance of a strong foundation for automation and AI. The result is a shift from automating individual lending decisions toward creating a connected decisioning environment across the credit lifecycle. AI makes trust even more important AI can accelerate this transformation by helping financial institutions extract more value from data, improve models and analytics, and make decisions faster. As AI evolves toward agentic systems capable of acting across complex workflows, the opportunity to automate more of the lending lifecycle grows. But so does the importance of trust. Celent finds financial institutions are prioritizing data integrity, lineage, privacy and control, along with secure deployment, explainability and auditability. As AI moves deeper into lending, institutions need to understand the data being used and how decisions are reached and governed. They also need ways to connect AI agents with trusted data, analytics and decisioning while maintaining governance, controls, auditability and human oversight. From decision intelligence to agentic AI Experian is helping financial institutions address these needs through the Experian Ascend Platform™, which brings together trusted data, advanced analytics, model development and deployment, decisioning, and fraud and identity capabilities in an integrated environment. Decisioning on the Experian Ascend Platform™ provides a flexible, component based automated decision engine designed to help lenders operationalize data, models and strategies across the credit lifecycle and turn intelligence into faster, more informed decisions at scale. Experian’s Agent Operating System™ builds on that foundation with a trusted agentic AI layer within the Experian Ascend Platform. It is designed to enable AI agents from Experian, financial institutions and partners to work together through a common trust, semantic and orchestration layer, with governance, auditability and human oversight built in. This creates a path from using AI for individual tasks toward orchestrating more complex workflows. The Agent Operating System is designed to connect agents and capabilities across data, models and workflows, allowing organizations to begin with targeted use cases and expand over time. By connecting data, analytics, decisioning, workflow and AI, financial institutions can create a common foundation for continuously improving decisions while laying the groundwork for trusted agentic automation. As Craig Focardi, Principal Analyst, Banking from Celent explains: “Decision intelligence is evolving from a point solution into enterprise infrastructure. As lenders extend these capabilities across products and the credit lifecycle, the opportunity is to create a common foundation that connects data, decisioning, workflow and AI, enabling institutions to make better decisions faster and continuously improve how those decisions are made.” The next phase of lending automation will be about more than applying AI to existing processes. It will be about creating a trusted, connected environment where data, analytics, decision intelligence and AI agents can work together across the credit lifecycle. For financial institutions, that offers a path toward more intelligent, orchestrated workflows while maintaining the governance, transparency and human oversight needed to operationalize AI confidently at scale. Source: Celent 2026 Enterprise Decision Intelligence Survey, May 2026.

Healthcare providers are preparing for a new wave of Medicaid eligibility verification requirements that will increase the need for timely, accurate income and employment verification. At the same time, organizations continue to face staffing pressures, reimbursement challenges and growing patient expectations. To help providers address this challenge, Experian Health has integrated Experian Verify into Patient Financial Clearance and its revenue cycle portfolio, bringing instant income and employment verification directly into healthcare workflows. By bringing these capabilities together, we can help providers reduce manual verification work and use verified information to support Medicaid and financial assistance screening earlier in the process. As new One Big Beautiful Bill Act requirements take effect on January 1, 2027, healthcare organizations need efficient ways to verify patient information without creating additional administrative burden. Traditionally, income and employment verification has relied on document collection, follow-up requests and time-consuming manual reviews. That can mean more work for staff, longer eligibility determinations and delays in determining an appropriate financial pathway for patients. By embedding Experian Verify within Patient Financial Clearance, providers can access verified income and employment information in seconds. For revenue cycle teams, that means using verified information to support Medicaid and financial assistance screening within the workflow they already use, rather than relying as heavily on document collection and follow-up. What I particularly like about this launch is how we brought capabilities from across Experian together around a specific client need. Patient Financial Clearance has long helped healthcare providers identify patients who may qualify for Medicaid or financial assistance and guide them to the most appropriate financial pathway. Experian Verify, meanwhile, provides instant income and employment verification through one of the nation’s largest employer payroll networks. Bringing these capabilities together gives providers another way to address growing verification demands within a single workflow. This is One Experian in action in a very impactful way. We’re combining data, technology and expertise from across the business to address a problem our healthcare clients are facing now. More importantly, we’re doing it in a way that fits into the workflows their teams already use. Ultimately, the benefits extend beyond providers. Faster access to verified information can help patients navigate financial assistance processes more easily, reduce paperwork and provide greater clarity around coverage and eligibility. As these requirements move closer, revenue cycle leaders should be looking now at where income and employment verification still depends on document collection and manual follow-up. Bringing verification directly into the financial clearance workflow is one more way we can help clients reduce administrative burden, support earlier decisions and help patients better understand their coverage or financial assistance options.