As today’s economic conditions continue to unfold—and often, surprise us all—it’s important to have an analytic strategy grounded in historical data. One that helps you analyze, understand, and better anticipate the impacts that shifting consumer behaviors and market trends may have on your business and your bottom line. 

The usual go-to data source for this is archived data. Archived data consists of historical and geographic consumer data. At Equifax, we offer this. However, due to industry-standard data fulfillment processes, it could sometimes take weeks to get the right archived data in your hands.  

But not anymore. 

Here, we explore a new way to access archived data via the cloud so you can get more of the historical data you need in hours or days, not weeks. 

A fast, “right-now” solution for real-life use cases, via the cloud.  

In business, one of the smartest ways to move forward is to learn from prior business decisions and customer behaviors. But this analytic “history lesson” can require a lot of time and resources, either sorting through your internal data (which is often only stored for a limited number of years) or manually requesting historical data from a third party. Either way, it’s a waiting game. It can take a while to manually search and prod through an internal index box for data or idle for weeks as a vendor processes and eventually sends your request.  

Once you get the data, there’s more waiting. That’s because it often needs to be synthesized and sorted before insights can be derived. Or worse, you find that you’re working with limited or disjointed data sets and need to start all over. This creates immense operational inefficiencies, including:

• Production delays that can hamstring business agility.

• Increased data storage costs associated with storing and downloading historical files.

• Increased security risk linked to the back-and-forth exchange and storage of files.

Thankfully, all that’s changing for the better. 

Today it’s possible to access archived data on demand from Equifax, via the cloud. So instead of waiting weeks to compile the historical data you need to validate models and adjust your market strategies, you can shrink that timeline to roughly 24 hours. 

Think of this solution as a “self-serve” environment—sort of like a sushi menu—where you can see all our available data options and select exactly what you need for your analytic projects. You can even monitor the progress of your request and save your criterion for future use. Everything is purpose-built to eliminate inefficiencies associated with standard data fulfillment requests and put a tailored mix of archived data in your hands, in a fraction of the time. 

Here are just a few of the many real-life use cases it can support. 

• Risk assessment: Compare specific customer types and attributes in certain geographies against the results from your current models to ensure offers, terms, and limits are profitable. This is a best practice in many industries including banking, automotive lending, mortgage, and more, and a smart way to boost your competitive edge.  

• Academic research: See the trends and impacts of micro- and macro-economics for a given area and timeframe. The possibilities are practically limitless as researchers can tap into anonymized consumer data spanning decades to better understand everything from spending patterns, household financial health, and homeownership to geographic hot spots for varying degrees of affluence, poverty, and much more.  

• Location expansions: Assess the financial health and demographics within specific areas to determine if acquiring an existing business or opening a new one would be beneficial or risky. This might include opening a franchise business, a satellite office, a new bank branch, or even a new automotive dealership. Wherever and however you can imagine growing and expanding your business, you can get fast access to the archived data you need to perform your front-end due diligence. 

Discover insights you didn’t know you needed.

With traditional archived data, you submit your data request and, in return, get exactly what you requested—nothing more, nothing less. However, accessing archived data on demand via the cloud gives you access to all our consumer data for the requested dates and/or geographic location(s). 

It’s a huge eye-opener because you’ll get a ton of new data types, attributes, and features that you may never have considered using before. From there you can explore and tinker with the data to find new ways of enhancing your model performance, optimizing your marketing strategy, or reducing your risk.   

For example, say you’re researching consumer buying patterns and exclusively targeting credit-specific data archives. Since you have access to all available Equifax data, you may become curious about other factors like location or lifestyle. On the spot, you can easily add those (and other) attributes to your research, further deepening your learnings and, ultimately, your ability to act and deftly move your business forward.  

On-demand access to nearly 20 years of archived data.

Having two decades' worth of consumer economic data at your fingertips sounds great until you consider how much space (and money) it might take to store this amount of data on internal systems. Or how much time it would take to sort through it every time you needed to query and access it.

However, you can get on-demand access to nearly 20 years of archived data. This includes the full boat:

• data features, 

• models and attributes around credit,

• bankruptcy risk,

• financial behaviors, 

• channel preferences,

• income, 

• employment, 

• wealth,

• assets and lifestyles, 

• spending capacity,

• buying propensity, 

• and much more. 

It’s everything you need to visualize and better understand specific consumer behaviors and market trends over time so you can validate your models and intelligently pivot your strategies, if necessary. 

In summary, every second matters when you’re trying to get your analytic models and strategies to market. If you’re still using traditional methods to access historical data, a better way exists. Check out Archives on Demand to quickly access the foundational context you need to move forward with intelligence, speed, and confidence.