Experian’s award-winning Ascend Intelligence Services™ is helping to democratize AI by making intelligence accessible for lenders of all sizes. Atlas Credit, a midsized lender, turned to Experian® for their world-class data, in-depth knowledge of credit and extensive modeling experience. Using Ascend Intelligence Services, Experian’s cloud-based custom model API service, Atlas Credit is now able to make instant decisions, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and higher booking rates.
“In a world of constant change in economic conditions and consumer behaviors, lenders recognize that their models are being disrupted and are looking for ways to approve loans with confidence,” said Shri Santhanam, Experian’s executive vice president and general manager of Global Analytics and AI. “Traditional custom models for lending can be slow and resource intensive to develop and deploy to keep up with the fast-changing market conditions and the business needs of today. To address these needs, you need to be able to rapidly develop and deploy ML-powered models in an agile way at low cost. We are now able to offer this to more lenders no matter their size, such as Atlas Credit.”
Using Ascend Intelligence Services Challenger™, Experian data scientists rapidly build a machine learning (ML) custom credit risk model, optimize a decision strategy and deploy the model in production, reducing time to impact by six months. Ascend Intelligence Services Challenger has prebuilt pipelines to Experian’s vast data assets — traditional credit data, alternative financial services data, industry leading attributes — and has data wrangling capability to seamlessly combine client and third-party data. Also embedded is Experian’s 20 years of analytics IP, enabling the build of high-impact, regulatory-compliant and explainable models.
“As we continue to expand our geographic footprint, we needed a better way to originate loans than our current manual review process,” said Brandon Mays, president and CFO of Atlas Credit. “Experian’s cloud-based AI solutions for custom models, custom underwriting strategies and instant decisioning helped us accelerate growth without taking on more risk.”
Ascend Intelligence Services is a fully managed analytics service delivered digitally by Experian data scientists. It helps lenders deliver better results up to 5x faster, accelerating time-to-market all while allowing them to make sound business decisions. Ascend Intelligence Services allows lenders to:
• Access an easy-to-use web portal, including ability to conveniently ingest data, review and comment on intuitive dashboards, and download reports.
• Work with an Experian data scientist to create best-in-class ML models using our rich data, credit expertise and modeling experience.
• Benefit from a state-of-the-art optimization engine to define your underwriting strategies and business outcomes.
• Receive a model API endpoint with the score, decision and adverse action reasons for instant credit or batch decisioning.
• Get real-time visibility in the health of each model.
• Have flexibility to rapidly retrain the model when its health deteriorates, or the business need changes.
Modules within Ascend Intelligence Services include:
Ascend Intelligence Services Challenger™
Ascend Intelligence Services Challenger™ is a custom model API build service, providing a powerful, dynamic and collaborative model development, retraining and deployment service.
Ascend Intelligence Services Pulse™
Ascend Intelligence Services Pulse™ is a proactive model monitoring and validation service that helps lenders monitor and validate the health of their models.
Ascend Intelligence Services Foresight™
Ascend Intelligence Services Foresight™ is an automated business intelligence service with built-in AI tools that allows lenders to access customized benchmarks and growth insights.
Experian’s Ascend Intelligence Services is part of Experian’s trusted Experian Ascend Technology Platform™, which offers unique capabilities across data, analytics and artificial intelligence — including advanced ML methods.
To learn more about Ascend Intelligence Services, visit https://www.experian.com/business-services/ascend-intelligence-services.
About Experian
Experian is the world’s leading global information services company. During life’s big moments — from buying a home or a car to sending a child to college to growing a business by connecting with new customers — we empower consumers and our clients to manage their data with confidence. We help individuals to take financial control and access financial services, businesses to make smarter decisions and thrive, lenders to lend more responsibly, and organizations to prevent identity fraud and crime.
We have 17,800 people operating across 45 countries, and every day we’re investing in new technologies, talented people and innovation to help all our clients maximize every opportunity. We are listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN) and are a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
Learn more at or visit our global content hub at our global news blog for the latest news and insights from the Group.
About Atlas Credit
Ever since our founder, Thomas A. Young, opened the doors of our first office in Tyler, Texas on January 11, 1968, Atlas Credit has grown into one of the most reputable and responsible consumer lenders in the state of Texas with now over fifty locations across the state. As a company, our existing and future customers represent our most valuable resource. Our mission is to treat every customer with honesty and respect while providing top-of-the-line customer service that you won't find anywhere else. With multiple locations and a wide range of loan terms, our staff is always ready to help you with your small loan needs.