In Barry Libenson’s four years as Global Chief Information Officer at Experian, the credit bureau has undertaken a modernization effort with a price tag in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And, according to Libenson, that investment is paying off.

Silos are breaking down, operations are centralizing and the company is shifting to common platforms for development and technology infrastructure, Libenson said. Furthermore, better connectivity with customers, thanks largely to a cloud-agnostic approach and a universal hub for application programming interfaces (APIs), is driving growth at the company, he noted.

Experian already is processing 100 million transactions per month, or 1.2 billion per year, on its API hub, according to Libenson. However, the company is on pace to be processing 2 billion transactions annually by 2020, he said.

In an interview with Bank Innovation, Libenson discussed Experian’s digital transformation and how the company addresses the changing expectations of its customers. An edited version of this conversation follows:

BI: How has Experian changed over the past few years?

Libenson: The really big shift has been that we now have an organization of roughly 5,000 technology workers who have gone from operating in a very standalone, siloed way to a much more organized, universal approach. We had never met a database we didn’t like, a piece of hardware we didn’t like or a programming language we didn’t like. You name it, we had it. We now have a common development platform inside the company, a common agile scaling methodology across the company and a common infrastructure platform on which we operate.

The idea was, ‘How do we accelerate the innovation process and the development of new products in order to ensure that we can deliver more robust products to the market?’ The way customers consume information and want to consume information has changed quite a bit over the last four or five years, and the new models allow us to deliver information to customers either programmatically, in the cloud or on-prem, with a lot more flexibility than before. It used to be we dictated the terms under which we would deliver data. Now, we let the customer dictate the terms.

BI: What drove change at Experian?

Libenson: The first was the need to be able to deliver information to the large financial institutions in any way they wanted to consume it. Our historical model was to deliver an application that would connect back to the mothership and allow credit reports to be delivered or run campaigns on behalf of an organization and then provide them with the results, but these were fairly complex processes and could generally be done only one way. We increasingly were  hearing from customers that they want the application running in the cloud, in either Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft Azure, because they don’t want it on-prem. They don’t want to have any responsibility for managing it.

Second thing, they don’t want a program from us; they want the data we have. In other words, they want to know the last time Barry didn’t make a payment on time or how many houses Barry has owned over the last 20 years, but they don’t want us to draw inferences from the data. They want to do that. They want to buy access to the data from us instead of the insights.

BI: How do you meet those needs from a tech perspective?

Libenson: If we wrote code in one of our own data centers, we needed to be able to move it into the cloud quickly. If we built something in AWS or Azure and somebody wanted us to move it on-prem, we needed to be able to do that quickly. The idea was a strategy of build anywhere, deploy anywhere. We also needed to set up a universal API hub that would allow us to deliver data rather than applications to customers so they could consume it programmatically.

It was critically important to have this done the same way by every business across the globe. We didn’t want four or five different API hubs because we have quite a few customers who are multi-regional. Take, for example, American Express. We didn’t want American Express to have one experience in the U.K. and then a completely different experience in the U.S. That universal approach was the biggest part of the initial technology transformation. The second part, which we’re in the midst of right now, is how do we replace some of the older legacy platforms, which have been in place for a long  time and are very reliable and robust, and move them to a new architecture?

BI: What are the key considerations there?

Libenson: Consistency and accuracy. If we’re not 100% certain that a piece of data belongs with an individual, 99.99% certain is not good enough. We won’t associate that data with an individual until we’re certain we know the individual with which it should be associated because of the importance of getting this right. These systems provide scoring algorithms and results based on people’s behavior. When you take it from an environment that’s been in place for 20 years and move it into a new environment, first and foremost, it has to score the exact same way. We’re not changing the scoring model or the analytics; we’re changing is the technology platform that delivers the results.

BI: What’s Experian’s approach to the cloud?

Libenson: Our development platform is identical regardless of where you’re building now. Whether you’re in our private cloud, the public cloud or operating in a hybrid mode, you’re going to be using and seeing the exact same tools in any environment. We’ve gone 100% open stack and open source. We picked OpenShift as the open stack platform because of its ubiquity and ability to run in Azure and AWS, as well as in any private cloud. Our approach is to be Switzerland on this. We want to be able to run the application stack where the customer needs it to run, and we want the ability to move it on a moment’s notice.

BI: How have APIs changed how Experian does business?

Libenson: There were concerns within certain parts of the organization that this ran the risk of cannibalizing our existing delivery model and client base — that if all of a sudden you gave people the ability to access data programatically instead of through an application, they would demand to pay less, no longer ask for credit reports or only ask for a small amount of data. Essentially, they had concerns it would reduce the value proposition that Experian brings to the table.

My response to that was, ‘Look, this is a capability I believe we need to have at an enterprise level, but you, as a business unit leader, can decide how you want to use it or not. I’m not telling you to API-enable your entire application stack, but I am going to make certain we centralize this effort so that we have a single API hub for the company and some governance around naming conventions in order to ensure that customers have consistency.’ Everybody agreed that was a reasonable approach and, ultimately, we selected Apigee, prior to it being acquired by Google.

We immediately saw an uptick in internal use, and we saw a fair amount of public use from fintechs and startups. Before we knew it, we were starting to get quite a few requests from very large financial institutions to use the API capabilities.

Two big things happened. The first was demand went through the roof. We’re now processing more than 100 million transactions per month through the API hub, so we’re roughly at 1.2 billion per year. One year from now, I guarantee we will be at more than 2 billion transactions. The second was validation that this would not cannibalize our business. We basically haven’t seen anyone replace the traditional use of the application stack with API calls. This has proven to be almost an entirely augmentative part of the business, and there was essentially a pent-up demand that existed within a lot of these firms for applications that they wanted to build.

It’s not disrupting the normal business we conducted with customers but adding on to what we previously were doing before that. We’re engaging in conversations with customers on a regular basis and are building out those API entry points on a daily basis. It’s one of the fastest growing parts of the business we have.