Early Warning, a bank-owned security company based in Scottsdale, Ariz., is sitting on a mountain of valuable data, and that mountain is growing.

The company maintains a database that includes information on more than 95% of the active deposit accounts in the United States, Early Warning told Bank Innovation. It is wholly owned by Bank of America, BB&T, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, but serves all American banks, as long as they are willing to contribute their data to the pool. The company also bills every bank for use of the data, including owner banks, and is “highly profitable,” according to chief corporate development officer Eric Woodward.

“With the data we can look at identity-level data, beyond account level,” Woodward said. “We can take the data and look across segments to a understand a consumer’s use with the goal of eliminating fraud and managing risk.” Using its unique data set, the company is able to perform real-time identity checks in order to approve transactions and authenticate user identities. In years past, with less data and computing power, the company was merely able to view account balances in batches and provide periodic reports.

“Since our spin out of First Data in 2006, we have launched 8 new products, delivered 30 new releases to existing products, and increased our database of Consumer Financial Information from 100 TB to multiple petabytes,” Woodward said. “Our total accounts and transaction records have increased from 370 million to over 30 billion.”

The idea of data from 95% of the deposit accounts in the country is enough to make a marketer’s mouth water, but that is not part of Early Warning’s mandate. “We re not using the data to target or market. We’re concerned with the safety and soundness of the system.” Woodward said. “What we can do with the data and everything else must be permission-based. We are custodians of bank-owned data.”

Banks get access to data when they give it — the “give-to-get” model.

Investing in Payfone
It’s not only bank data in Early Warning’s vaults. On October 8, Early Warning announced “an equity investment and commercial agreement” with Payfone, a mobile authentication provider, and this partnership allows the company to see mobile carrier data and correlate it to the banking data it already holds.

The importance of a customer’s relationship with his mobile phone can hardly be overstated, and to provide safety and soundness, knowing the customer’s device is essential. Early Warning will now have network-based data from the big four mobile providers to authenticate individuals and better judge the risks associated with mobile transactions.

Mobile devices generate heaps of data, and that data is being added to the mountain Early Warning already has. A third piece, government data related to a customer’s financial life — is on its way.

Banks, telcos, and the government — it seems Early Warning will have a fairly comprehensive view of the financial lives of most Americans with these resources in hand. Given this, you would imagine Early Warning’s data warehousing and protection is state of the art, and Woodward and chief innovation officer Aaron Bartim assured Bank Innovation that it was.

Early Warning is gently pushing the industry to keep its data clean and, as much as is possible, to move operations to real time.

“We’re here to serve a purpose to the community,” Woodward said. ” We can provide an identity history to help banks provide the right products to customers. For underbajked or thin-file people, we can provide a richer data set. We can help people get to the right place.”