TransUnion Launches Innovation Lab to Accelerate Lenders' Growth with Real-Time Data Access and Analytical Expertise

CHICAGO, IL--(Marketwired - March 06, 2017) - TransUnion (NYSE: TRU) announced today the launch of its Innovation Lab, a new offering to help lenders accelerate growth, power new models and identify expansion opportunities in real time. The Innovation Lab is housed in TransUnion's Chicago headquarters and gives participants access to TransUnion's proprietary data environment and analytics experts. TransUnion unveiled the Innovation Lab at LendIt USA 2017, a lending and FinTech conference.

"The Innovation Lab is the next phase in TransUnion's commitment to our customers. By delivering more data and greater access to top analytical talent, we empower our partners to make smarter decisions," said Steve Chaouki, executive vice president and head of TransUnion's financial services business unit. "TransUnion is uniquely positioned to help our customers test and validate their ideas, because we can combine their data with the full breadth of TransUnion's data, and leverage the best analytic talent of both organizations to solve business problems in real time. The Innovation Lab can significantly enhance our customers' speed to market."

Each Innovation Lab engagement is tailored to the participant's business needs. The Lab includes a two to three day immersion with TransUnion analysts and Prama℠ analytics, powered by TransUnion's massive data environment. Early adopters of the Innovation Lab have worked with TransUnion to build new models, size markets and expand into new asset classes. The Lab integrates with TransUnion's startup lender development program, further helping FinTechs compress the time from business concept to market launch.

"TransUnion's Innovation Lab delivered a completely custom and hands on experience," said Sasha Orloff, CEO and co-founder at LendUp. "Working with TransUnion's analytical talent, we were able to obtain high quality, reliable data very quickly and understand how we could apply it to our business. The Innovation Lab engagement helped us shorten our development cycle by identifying and applying the best of TransUnion's assets to better understand our target customers."

Among the first Innovation Lab participants are CreditShop (Austin, Texas), LendUp (San Francisco) and Payoff (Costa Mesa, Calif.).

"In the Innovation Lab, we were able to iterate rapidly and learn fast," said Warren Wilcox, chief marketing officer at CreditShop. "We also got a deeper understanding of TU's capabilities, including some new credit variables that we probably should be using. We also created and ran several new models right on the spot. I think the Innovation Lab is dynamite… and that many TU clients should consider doing this."