Today, I’m talking with Alex Lintner, who is the CEO of technology and software solutions at Experian, the credit reporting company. Experian is one of those multinationals that’s so big and convoluted that it has multiple CEOs all over the world, so Alex and I spent quite a lot of time talking through the Decoder questions just so I could understand how Experian is structured, how it functions, and how the kinds of decisions Alex makes actually work in practice.
There’s a lot there, especially since Alex is in charge of the company’s entire tech arm. That means he oversees big operations like security and privacy, and now, of course, AI — all of which is always important, but is even more critical when you factor in what kind of information Experian collects and stores about, well, literally everyone.
See, if you want to participate in the economy in the way the vast majority of us do — renting an apartment, buying a car, getting a job, or applying for a mortgage or a student loan — you’re part of Experian’s ecosystem, whether you like it or not. You’ll hear Alex talk about “consent” a whole lot in this episode, and he’ll argue that you can opt out, but the reality is, interacting with Experian is pretty much non-negotiable in the economy we live in today. It’s hard to do basically anything involving money without a credit score.
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That’s really the tension at the heart of a company like Experian: Credit scores dominate so many aspects of our lives, and they are controlled and calculated in ways that it feels like we have very little direct influence over. At its heart, Experian’s core service is data — data about people, about their money and what they do with it, about the decisions they make, the bills they pay or don’t pay. And this extremely valuable data weirdly makes Experian a part of your life — a life that becomes much smoother if the data the company collects about you tells a good story. So Alex and I spent a good chunk of time talking about the responsibility Experian feels toward the people it serves, not just on a security and privacy level, but also a moral one.
A lot of people don’t like the power Experian has, and by extension, they don’t like the company, either. I asked Alex pretty directly about that, and I found his answer to be a little surprising. Maybe one of the most memorable answers we’ve ever gotten on Decoder, really.
I also asked Alex pretty directly about the other big, messy question taking up the room: generative AI, and how exactly we can trust nondeterministic systems when they start interacting with really sensitive data.
You’ll hear Alex talk a lot about AI oversight, and how it’s being woven into the systems Experian uses for everything from risk assessment to predictive financial modeling. But the AI systems themselves are inherently risky — they get things wrong, they hallucinate, they might make incomplete or incorrect conclusions about very real human beings in ways that drastically affect lives.
So I really dug into how Experian sees AI technology being used internally and within the broader scope of credit reporting. And I also pressed Alex on the capability gap between what AI might be able to do today, what we think it can do or what AI executives tell us it can do, and then the reality of what it actually does and how well it does it.
The stakes for this stuff are very, very high at a company like Experian, and more than just its reputation relies on people thinking it’s being a responsible steward of their personal data and that the institutions it hands that data over to are using it to make responsible, fair decisions.
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