As I embark on this new career journey with Enformion, one of the most common first questions is why Enformion? Enformion has the most comprehensive view of consumers and businesses in the United States. Enformion’s database creates endless possibilities to help solve industry problems for a product leader. I often use the analogy that Enformion is sitting on vast petroleum reserves and the only question we have as a product organization is whether we will make plastic, gasoline, or jet fuel.
In addition to the intellectual gratification of addressing thorny industry problems, there is the satisfaction of beating the competitors and growing Enformion’s market share. I love to win. But for me, it is not enough to do well, I want to do good. I want to serve. Enformion offers me an opportunity to do that by making it easier for companies to accurately verify people who would not traditionally be served.
Let’s talk about consumers first and then talk about businesses. The buzzwords in the industry are “underserved”, “underbanked”, “thin-file” (a.k.a., “unscorable”), and “no-hit” (a.k.a., “credit invisible”) demographics.
The “underserved” are people in the United States who may be young, immigrants, or not active in the traditional financial ecosystem. These people represent a tremendous value to our economy, and they deserve equal access to products and services. It is with great pride that I commit to building solutions to make it easier to verify these “underserved” populations for loans, deposit accounts, money transfers, and government benefits.
I was born in Bogota, Colombia to a father of Welsh-American heritage (thanks for the unique name, Dad) and a mother of Colombian origin. I moved to the U.S. at the age of 5 with English as my second language. I watched my parents struggle to make ends meet through a series of blue-collar jobs. I was the first in the family to graduate from college and often had to navigate the world of financial services on my own, confronting difficulties in establishing a solid credit profile while taking on numerous student loans.
In addition, my older brother and father have the same names. Their credit files have been inextricably intermingled for years.
I learned through personal experience that accurate identity verification is hard and even harder for certain demographic groups. Enformion’s mission is to make identity verification easier…for everyone.
Stay tuned for my next post where I’ll discuss how my background combines with Enformion’s mission.
—Garient Evans, SVP of B2B Products
