Experian Assistant Wins 2025 FinTech Breakthrough Award for Innovation, Empowering Businesses to Succeed 

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.

I joined Experian in 1993. In more than three decades since, I’ve had a front-row seat to a remarkable evolution in how financial institutions use data and analytics to make decisions.  The technology has changed. The amount and types of data available have changed. And the speed and sophistication with which we can turn that data into insight would have been difficult to imagine when I started my career.  Through all that, one principle remains the same. Better data can lead to better decisions, and better decisions can create more opportunities for consumers and financial institutions.  That’s why today’s announcement at Experian Vision 2026 is particularly meaningful to me.  We announced Experian Cashflow Data Bureau Inc., an important new foundation for how we believe financial institutions will use data to make decisions and support consumers.  Building on the power of credit  Credit data has been foundational to the financial system, and it will continue to play that essential role. But today, we have an opportunity to see more.  For years, Experian has invested in expanded data because we believe responsibly using additional information can help lenders develop a more complete picture of a consumer and ultimately help expand fair access to credit.  That can be especially important when a traditional credit history doesn’t tell the whole story. From earning a steady income, paying bills consistently, maintaining sufficient balances and responsibly managing their day-to-day finances, a consumer may have a limited credit file but still have a rich financial life.  Consumer-permissioned cash flow information can help provide insight into those behaviors and give lenders another view into a consumer’s current financial health and capacity. This represents a very useful and meaningful signal.  This isn’t about replacing credit data. It’s about building on an incredibly powerful foundation with additional, current information that can help lenders better understand the consumers they serve.  From proving the value to putting it to work  We’ve been building toward this future for years.  Our experience with expanded data and open banking has helped us develop increasingly sophisticated ways to turn bank transaction and balance information into useful insights. We’ve introduced Cashflow Attributes and Cashflow Score for consumer and commercial lenders and, the Experian Credit + Cashflow Score, which brings consumer-permissioned cash flow insights together with Experian’s traditional credit, trended and alternative data in a single model.   Along the way, we’ve seen the conversation with our clients and partners evolve.  Increasingly, they aren’t asking us whether cash flow information can provide value. They’re asking us how to put it to work.  How do I access the information? How do I test it against my portfolio? How do I turn millions of transactions into useful insights? How do I incorporate those insights into my existing strategies? And how do I do all of that responsibly and at scale?  Those are important questions, because the next generation of lending requires more than access to another source of data.  It requires infrastructure and trust.  That’s what Experian Cashflow Data Bureau Inc. is designed to provide.  The new consumer reporting agency operates under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and serves as the enabling foundation for Experian’s broader cash flow ecosystem. It brings together capabilities spanning consumer consent and connectivity, standardized cash flow reporting, categorization, attributes and scoring, analytics and decisioning.   We’ve spent decades building the data, analytics, technology and consumer reporting expertise financial institutions depend on every day. Now, we’re applying that experience and discipline to cash flow.  The goal is to make the combined power of credit and cash flow easier to put to work, giving our clients a more complete view of consumers and the ability to turn those insights into better-informed decisions through a single, trusted provider.  This is another step toward a future where our clients can understand a more complete picture of a consumer’s financial life, make better-informed decisions and create more opportunities for people to access the financial products and services they need.  I’m excited about where we’re headed and proud that we’re continuing to build the data, technology and infrastructure to help move the industry forward.  To learn more about our cash flow capabilities and what we’re building, please visit https://www.experian.com/experian-cashflow-bureau.  

For many small businesses, the need for credit can come well before they’ve had time to build a deep credit history. A business may be growing, bringing on employees or investing in new equipment, but its credit file may still offer a limited view of its financial health. That challenge is becoming increasingly relevant as more businesses enter the market. The number of small businesses in the U.S. has increased from 30.7 million in 2019 to 36.2 million in 2026, according to Experian’s latest Commercial Pulse.¹ For lenders, that growth creates a familiar underwriting challenge. Traditional commercial credit data remains essential to assessing risk, but a limited credit history can leave lenders with fewer signals to evaluate a newer business. This can make it harder to distinguish between businesses that simply lack credit history and those that present greater credit risk. Cash flow data can help close that information gap. Permissioned business banking data provides current signals related to liquidity, revenue trends, operating expenses, debt exposure and repayment capacity. When used alongside commercial credit data, these insights can add context when the credit file alone doesn’t tell the full story. Building on what we’ve learned We’ve spent the last several years looking at how we can use cash flow insights to help more consumers access financial products and improve their financial health. And we’ve seen meaningful results. More than 19 million consumers have connected their accounts to Experian Boost or our Personal Financial Manager to improve their credit scores. And by leveraging consumer-permissioned banking information through our Cashflow Attributes and Cashflow Score, our clients can manage risk more effectively and increase fair access to credit.  More recently, we’ve integrated our Cashflow Attributes into Experian Activate, our consumer marketplace, to help connect consumers with credit offers that better reflect their financial circumstances. Extending cash flow insights to commercial lending Today, we are extending that experience to commercial lending with the launch of Experian Cashflow Attributes for commercial lenders. The solution transforms business bank transaction data into more than 500 attributes that can be incorporated into underwriting and decisioning strategies. The value is not in replacing established credit information, but in adding relevant signals when the commercial credit file does not yet tell the full story. Our preliminary analysis shows Cashflow Attributes for commercial lenders are particularly useful for businesses with thin credit files, providing up to a 24% lift in predictive performance when paired with traditional commercial credit data. As more new businesses enter the market, combining commercial credit and cash flow insights can help lenders assess risk with greater context, refine underwriting strategies and identify opportunities to extend credit responsibly. This is a meaningful next step in our commitment to helping the industry put cash flow insights to work at scale. And there is more ahead. As cash flow insights become a more integral part of financial services, we see significant potential to apply them in new ways, helping financial institutions make more informed decisions and expand financial opportunities for the consumers and businesses they serve. To learn more about Experian Cashflow Attributes for commercial lenders, please visit https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260929177531/en. [1] Experian, “More Businesses, New Risk Signals: Rethinking Small Business Credit,” August 24, 2026.