Empowering the Future: Experian’s Vision for “Self-Driving Money”

Experian is at the center of a rapidly evolving financial services landscape where data and AI innovation are reshaping how people and businesses interact with money.

To hear more about it all, I am joined by Malin Holmberg, the CEO of Experian U.K. and Ireland on the Money 2020 floor.

Marlin Holmberg, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

So let's start with this wonderful event.

What is it that you think makes Money 2020 so critical for FinTech and of course Experian?

Well, it's one of the areas where you can have a broad conversation around fintech, probably the biggest in the world.

So you have all your clients, all the innovators in the space, and all your partners as well here in one place.

So it's really where the conversation happens.

And I think this year is particularly interesting because you're really seeing this shift with AI.

I think we're in a pivotal, at a pivotal moment in the industry, starting from where we are with spearmint.

With AI into sort of scaling with AI, almost moving into the next era of self-driving money, and that's where Experian is right at.

We want to empower the era of self-driving money.

And how nice to know that the key factor in that is to bring human beings together to actually talk about it.

Exactly.

So with AI being such a major focus in the world, how is Experian using it to transform AI, in particular in the UK and Europe?

But I think that the biggest challenge to deploy AI to scale it properly, is to get it safe, to get a trusted system around it, and that's where we pay.

So it's safe data and trusted governed data.

So we have launched a couple of things within the AI space.

We launched yesterday here actually at Money 2020, the Experience and Agentic operating system within our platform, and that will help financial institutions scale AI through the whole lending journey.

Um, and we have another product we launched a few weeks ago which is the trusted agent and that we did with Visa and a few other partners and that's really to enable the agentic payment.

So back to your point about human, we need to find the human behind the agent, right?

And that's what we do.

It's so interesting to see in all of these ways of transformation, how much collaboration across the industry is, is required to really impact um the activities that that we're looking at.

What are you hearing in terms of those clients and partners um about the key trends, the demands, and perhaps some of the challenges?

I think that the main challenge that we're hearing from our customers is basically balancing the day to day operational activities of driving operational efficiency, good customer experience, and at the same time transforming the business into an autonomous banking system with.

So that challenge and that conflict is tricky for our clients.

So we try to help them with our Our trusted solutions in the first area of um the the traditional area of banking, but then in the new space, we try to partner with our clients to really look at the longer term journey with AI and how we can support them in that.

It's an interesting journey to be on and for sure discovering new challenges as we go along.

When it comes to the wider fintech landscape and in particular how Experian sits right in the middle of all of that.

What are you seeing as how could you describe the macro environment and what are you?

Seeing there as some of the challenges, I think if you look at the fintech space, I would probably describe three big trends at the moment.

So one is you're moving from an era of growth into more of profitability and managing that bottom line for the fintechs.

So that's a shift to support that in the industry.

I think the other space is Ford.

There is a proliferation of Ford, in volume and the complexity of the Ford.

So you need to fight fire with fire here with um leveraging AI to fight the AI Ford coming at you.

Yeah, so that's the second thing, uh, and I think the third thing is, how do you move into the era of, of a self-driving.

Money.

So the agentic AI, how do you do that?

How do you write that in the right way?

Absolutely.

Well, in that case, and with that in mind and that huge question, if we were to sit down again in a year's time at the next Money 2020, what would you say that Experian's success story for 2026 should or would be?

I think success for me and for Experian would be if we have improved the outcomes for clients and customers by scaling AI properly.

It's really powering the self-doubting money era.

That would be a success.

Well, it's a very, very good goal, and we wish you the best with it.

Our thanks to Malin Holmberg, CEO of Experian UK and Ireland.

Thank you for taking the time and enjoy the rest of Money 2020.

Thank you so much.