Experian^® retains historical data on a monthly basis for the previous eight years. Archived data consists of Experian credit information which includes trade, inquiry and public record files. Additionally, attributes and scores are also returned. All data returned contains no consumer identification information, enabling you to analyze credit data without regulatory restriction.

You can use archived data for:

• Market profiling and strategy assessments — Understand how your customer segments have changed in the new economy. Determine if new, more profitable customer groups now exist, or find emerging markets that provide new opportunities.
• Developing custom scoring models — Models deliver greater predictive ability when decisions are rooted in historical actions of your customer base. Archived data gives you a historical view of your portfolio’s behavior so you can establish criteria for risk and response models.
• Validating and adjusting criteria of existing custom scoring models — View patterns, such as an increase or a decrease in risk that may be developing within your portfolio. Use this knowledge to improve portfolio strength by changing scorecard cutoff strategies or policy rules.
• Conducting Champion/Challenger testing — Test and evaluate scorecards and strategies to determine which are most effective.
• Analyzing nonresponders — Test and improve the effectiveness of your direct-mail programs. With archived data, you can compare the characteristics of customers who have responded to your offers with those who have not and adjust mailing strategies accordingly.

Flexible input options are available. Provide us with a list of your customers/prospects, or have us pull a sample population. With greatly expanded analytic capabilities, we can pull a list for you based on demographic and credit criteria.

Choose the output option that best fits your needs. Whether you need scores and/or attributes or require full raw trade data, Experian has flexible output methods.

• Standard output — All consumer identification (including any other elements unique to a consumer and any information by which the customer could identify the consumer) must be stripped prior to output to the customer or third-party processor. As such, no inquiries need to be logged to the file.
• Additional processing by Experian — You provide performance data (or other data) to Experian, and we will append archive data, which will be stripped of consumer identification prior to output.
• Additional third-party processing — Experian sends archived credit data with a match key (i.e., sequence number) to a third-party processor, so data from additional sources can be appended. This option requires a specific third-party processor agreement to be in place before the data can be released.
• Additional processing by client — If you have a database of customer identification that contains performance data and demographic data, you may assign a sequence number to each file. You must certify that you have destroyed the link between consumer identification information and the sequence number before Experian will return the appended credit data.

The more you know about existing or potential customer behavior, the better you can manage your business. With archived data, you can generate powerful business intelligence about your accounts to make smart, profitable credit decisions.