Equifax has been expanding beyond credit bureau data in recent years by providing better access to a broad range of their own fraud, employment, wealth, commercial and alternative data sources as well as 3rd party data to position themselves as an insights company. As part of this focus, their Decision Management platform, InterConnect, was rebuilt from scratch as a foundation for cloud-centric and multinational decisioning applications. InterConnect is designed to support a broad range of decision management solutions, with an initial focus on customer acquisition.
InterConnect is designed to be a secure cloud-based decision management platform to define and execute decision policies at the front line. It is focused on delivering robust data, powerful decisioning and streamlined technology.
There are four main decisioning tools in the platform
- Insight Gateway
Streamlined transactional access to diverse data sources. - Attribute Navigator
To manage and deploy the data catalog and derived attributes. - Model Integration tool
A single tool to integrate, audit and deploy predictive analytic models into production. - Rules Editor
A rules management environment for creating, testing and optimizing business rules
These four decisioning tools are presented in a common decision portal that is role-based, so only selected elements are exposed to users. This portal is gradually becoming the presentation layer for all Equifax services.
Insight Gateway gives real-time transactional access to data sources. This includes many standard data sources (such as Equifax’s own credit bureau data) as well as specific local data sources developed in each country Insight Gateway uses a microservices architecture, JSON and self-description to make integration flexible and visual. It is supported by a Data Provisioning Tool that allows for discovery and conditional orchestration/integration.
Attribute Navigator allows users to create a catalog, define the attributes, test and deploy. It supports the definition of custom attributes against multi-bureau data, third party data or customer data. Customer data may be hosted by Equifax or can be sent on each individual transaction. The environment supports testing and auditing of attributes.
Model Integration Tool lets teams integrate, audit and deploy predictive analytic models. It supports scorecards as well as decision trees and ensembles. It can guide users through the integration of SAS, SPSS and R models to generate PMML ready for execution in the platform as well as a specification document for compliance and governance. This generated PMML, or other PMML models, can be executed in the Interconnect platform using the well-known Zementis engines (both ADAPA for cloud deployment and the Zementis Hadoop plugin – reviewed here).
Rules Editor is based on the modern rules platform provided by Sparkling Logic – SMARTS (most recently reviewed here). This provides a data-driven rule editor with authoring, visualization, testing and simulation all in one interface. The rule authoring environment supports cascading and inheritance, rule flow management, champion/challenger, trace execution and reports on key performance metrics.
Configuration of the four services for individual customer requirements and solution orchestration at runtime is delivered by Equifax’s professional services. InterConnect can be custom-designed or accessed as a pure platform utilizing all or individual service as needed. It is available in the US, Canada, UK, Spain, Peru, and Chile. Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Mexico, Australia and India are expected to be added in the future.
You can get more details on the platform here.
