Experian IT gears up for downturn

Experian is keen on virtualisation

Credit information firm Experian is adapting its IT delivery model to better meet the demands of its cash-strapped clients in the financial services sector.

The company, which provides services to institutions such as Barclays, Egg, HBOS, HSBC and Lloyds TSB, is increasingly driving standardisation and use of service-oriented architecture (SOA) across its products and services to remain competitive during the downturn.

As risk management takes centre stage in the banking world, finance firms are less interested in customer acquisition and more focused on retention and extracting additional value out of existing clients via rigorous debt collection, Experian IT director John Finch told Computing.

“The emphasis around our product development has shifted to accommodate the changing demands of our clients,” he said.

“We will be still using our core data assets to help clients make the right profitable decisions, but there is less upfront credit check activity and more focus on debt and value management.”

According to a survey carried out by Celent, global IT spend in banking will dip to $353.3bn in 2009 – a 1.3 per cent decline compared to $358bn in 2008 – ­ so IT leaders in the sector will aim to eliminate the cost of joining up systems where possible.

“Clients are coming to us and saying: ‘We like what you’ve got, but we don’t want to do any integration, make it available sooner’. That is because they don’t have budgets available,” said Finch.

“Our response is to offer a set of standard solutions, by aggregating a lot of our products in many different ways. That way, we are able to carry out large and customised projects that do not require integration but offer all the capability.”

In addition to such SOA-based initiatives, internal automation will play an important role in Experian’s IT agenda in 2009, as will virtualisation. The aim here is to reduce costs and then invest the savings into product development.

This year, the firm will continue working on datacentre and server consolidation to accommodate newly acquired businesses – ­ the company has some 2,500 HP servers, of which about 700 are virtualised. Around 80 per cent of newer servers are virtual and some 200 older computers will go virtual this year.

“We are introducing more virtualisation to the business partly for the green computing agenda, but also to deal with our ever-increasing scale,” said Finch.

He believes that in tough times, good service will stand out as a key differentiator. So savings generated by internal standardisation are expected to improve service levels. “Clients do not want to change their systems and want to do the least amount of maintenance, so service becomes a critical determinant and competitive advantage. It also means that if we do a good job, our clients don’t have to move,” said Finch.

One of the key aspects to Experian’s strategy to speed up product time to market is an outsourcing agreement with Perot Systems, which supports, maintains and develops legacy applications and provides resource flexibility for new work on large projects.

Some 300 Bangalore-based contractors have worked with the firm since January 2008, in addition to 500 in-house staff who work in the company’s IT “crown jewels” – analysis, design, quality control and project management.

With the uncertainty sparked by the recession, Finch said one of his key goals is to keep departmental spirits high.

“It is quite easy to cut training budgets in a recession, for example. But we are a service organisation and an important factor in being successful resides in people being motivated, so we keep investing in the capability of our IT staff,” he said.

“However, finding the right knowledge as we expand remains a problem. It is true that there are more people available in the market as a consequence of the credit crunch, but finding the core expertise that we need is still a tough challenge.”

Experian by numbers
• 56 per cent of clients are financial services institutions
• 2,600 servers, executing up to 7,500 million instructions per second around the clock
• 700 terabytes of data storage available
• 3,500 terabytes of tape archive
• Data processing centre uses around 1,000,000kwh of electricity per month
• About 30,000 data processing batch jobs run every night