No one likes waiting around for answers. When we ask a question, we want the response right away, preferably by yesterday. And we want to know that behind the answer is factual information, not a hunch or best guess. Real-time data ecosystems makes this possible through two core principles:

• Procuring these answers swiftly from all the right places
• Delivering them to the place they are needed.

As an example, a transaction team is working to understand the risk associated with a new partner. They start by understanding who the counterparty is they are dealing with – is it a company or an individual? Real-time data reveals the people behind the entity. Later in the same transaction, it becomes apparent that you could benefit from knowing more about the company you're dealing with. Instantly pull in firmographic data to find out its number of employees, its revenue turnover, its principal places of business and any other information you need to gain a more trusted picture of how your customer operates.

Any team in your organisation – from sales and product to marketing and human resources – can benefit from this self-service approach to consuming data. Rather than data concentrated in the hands of a few specialists, there are significant benefits to having it accessible and actionable organisation-wide.

With mission-critical data integrating easily into day-to-day processes, an organisation can shrink their decision window. Speed up the time to 'yes'; respond to threats; take advantage of opportunities. Become agile enough to continuously evolve with the marketplace and environment, adjusting and responding to changes in conditions and customer preferences.

When you use similar data sources to your competitors, how fast your organisation can move is vital for competitive advantage. An agile organisation equipped with real-time data can translate information into action faster and ship out innovative solutions quicker. They can take a value-driven approach to projects, prioritising the tasks that directly create value for their customers across the entire customer lifecycle.

The transformation of data into consumable formats 

Equifax is undergoing an enterprise-wide digital transformation that will help our customers cultivate agility. A key advantage of our multi-year A$2 billion cloud-native initiative is the removal of technical barriers between data sets, allowing our customers to consume and combine data like never before. Rather than waiting for insights or consuming them in static report format, you will be able to carry out your own discovery of what's going on in your organisation using real-time data.

Our unique and proprietary data assets, technology, and analytics worldwide will be accessible in a single connected environment, known as data fabric. Data fabric will streamline data from analytics to production, making it possible to pull real-time data from any local or global source that benefits your query. Then work with that information to get the answers you need in a highly efficient manner.

Here are some ways you can expect our digital transformation to help you make real-time decisions, solve complex problems, and deliver the insights you need to build your business agility.

Less time to train models into production

Our API-first strategy will speed up the development process by making it easier for teams to assemble and interconnect back-end data sources to client applications. Rather than building dozens of APIs to get an end-to-end view of data, developers can build to our comprehensive and reusable REST API. Mobilise data from multiple sources in milliseconds for fast ingestion into internal decisioning systems. With this seamless connection comes faster time to market and reduced development costs.

Unified view of data for optimised workflows

Access a single source of truth irrespective of how you connect with our services. Whether you build directly to our API or consume data through our web portal, there is a unified environment from where data can be accessed and shared by internal and external teams. Benefit from our over-arching security-by-design framework that protects data across all applications and platforms.

Easier to scale for growth

Batch processing will become normalised across all of our capabilities, making it far easier to run analytics on large volumes of data. Acquire, process and interact with big data in a way that achieves quantifiable business benefits.

Less lag time for faster decisions

Reduce the time it takes to retrieve data ready for analysis. The frictionless environment of data fabric supports zero or very little latency. Make faster decisions by viewing data from multiple sources, including real-time data sets, structured and unstructured data, in a single standardised environment.

Innovate for competitive advantage

Test and iterate new ideas without incurring massive project development costs. Pull in relevant data for prototypes in hours or days, not weeks or months. Fail fast, learn early-on what doesn't work and pivot to the next prototyping cycle far more rapidly. Drive improvement and constantly transform your products and services to keep pace with your customers.

Understand your customers for better service

It will be significantly easier to place your end-consumer at the forefront of your processes as the driving force for continuous improvement. Bring multiple data sets together for analysis to deliver a more rounded view of the customer ecosystem. Make informed decisions backed by user behaviour data from disparate yet connected sources.

Mitigate risk for greater protection

With a global overview of interlinked data, it will be harder for bad actors to escape scrutiny by hiding their activities across international borders. Real-time alerts and enhanced identity assessment and fraud prevention solutions will make it easier to fulfil due diligence obligations and protect against risk.

To find out more about the Equifax digital transformation, contact your Equifax Account Manager or fill out the Contact Us form below. Also, check out our FAQs to answer your questions about our cloud technology, data security, implementation schedule and more.