Equifax is a global data, analytics, and technology company. It partners with banks and financial institutions to enable empowered decision making with data-driven insights. Headquartered in Atlanta, USA, Equifax has operations across continents. Its India operations are headquartered in Mumbai and operates as a joint venture between Equifax, USA and seven leading financial institutions. Equifax provides data on credit-related activity of customers to banks, NBFCs and other financial institutions. It collates data on individual consumers and businesses and presents it in a highly readable format.

“The STT GDC India partnership has enabled us to leave the management of data centre to experts and focus on critical issues, such as innovation, modernization efforts, agile development and contribute as responsive partners and stakeholders in our customers’ business”

Shailendra Chaturvedi, AVP- Information Technology, Equifax

Customer Challenge

As a leading provider of services to financial companies, Equifax plays a key role in market education, development and expansion—a major objective being financial inclusion of underserved population. Data is an increasingly crucial input in this and Equifax plays a disruptive role by providing validated data to create a winning model for all stakeholders.

Equifax strives to have a comprehensive data collection strategy; agile and responsive systems; and continuous innovation with new products and services. This positioning enables Equifax to be a valued partner as its services empower financial companies with appropriate inputs and take fast decisions to offer the right product to the right customer at the right time.

At the same time, Equifax caters to customers that operate in intensely demanding and competitive market conditions and require high availability and uptime of systems and processes. Equifax required a robust and secure technology backbone to fulfil its business obligations and needed a data centre provider to support it with necessary infrastructure.

Having a secure data centre was a pre-requisite for Equifax as it stores massive amount of customer information in its data centre. Operating in the financial services market, another crucial need was adherence to regulatory and compliance requirements. Yet, setting up and managing a data centre is time-consuming, tedious and distracts from the core activity. So, Equifax turned to STT GDC India to take advantage of its colocation facilities.

STT GDC India Solution

Equifax uses STT GDC India colocation facilities in Mumbai wherein STT GDC India provides best-in-class infrastructure provisioning along with necessary power and cooling to run the data centre, allowing Equifax to focus on innovation and deliver top-notch data and analytics services to customers. It is a partnership that began in 2010—since Equifax started operations in India— and has grown over the years, enabling Equifax to focus on innovation and deliver more value to its customers.

Says Shailendra Chaturvedi, AVP- Information Technology at Equifax, “The STT GDC India partnership has enabled us to leave the management of data centre to experts and focus on critical issues, such as innovation, modernization efforts, agile development and contribute as responsive partners and stakeholders in our customers’ business.”

More importantly, the high security inherent in STT GDC India data centres has enabled Equifax to meet critical regulatory and compliance requirements. Certified by global standards’ bodies, STT GDC India data centres provide five layers of physical security from the perimeter right up to the shelf where servers are hosted. In keeping with industry best practices, these layers include a combination of physical and automated checks and control at the perimeter; facility; floor; quadrant and at the cabinet level.

Customer Benefits

STT GDC India has empowered Equifax to continuously innovate and create specialized credit products. Equifax is able to meet its primary objective of enabling financial access to a larger pool of people by leveraging data analytics while helping lenders deliver quick and hassle- free loan disbursal.

Specifically, following benefits have accrued to Equifax:

• Helped focus on its core objective of delivering value to financial companies with data collation, management, presentation and analytics-based insights instead of spending time in managing real estate, power and cooling of data centre.
• As a service provider to financial companies, Equifax has stringent compliance and regulatory requirements, which STT GDC India has helped to meet with multiple layers of physical data centre security.
• Equifax is able to demonstrate its sustainability practices by working with a conscientious partner—STT GDC India data centres run on 30% renewable energy.