Going Beyond State of the Art to State of the Future

By Venkat Achanta, Chief Technology, Data & Analytics Officer, TransUnion

While TransUnion’s OneTru^TM solution enablement platform was “officially” announced in March of 2024, the topic has been top of mind for the company for well over a year. In that time, I’ve often been asked, “So, how exactly does OneTru transform your company into a future-forward innovator?”

There’s no simple answer, but my explanations invariably begin with, “It starts by making a massive investment in the absolute best minds — and then telling them to think differently than your entire category.”

In our case, that means thinking like a platform company —one that delivers leading-edge solutions and SaaS products.

Like any bold departure from the norm, the benefits of our new mindset deserve some explanation. Please join me for a few minutes to explore how we’re reimagining the enablement of data and analytics, along with a few illustrated examples of the difference it’s already making.

Fusion of technology with data and analytics

With OneTru, we’ve abandoned the silos of “technology over here and analytics over there.” We’re creating a culture that embraces its reputation for excellence in data and analytics while thoroughly infusing and inspiring it with a no-holds-barred advance into the future of enablement via technology. We’ve always been in the business of making trust possible, and now we’re making that quicker, easier and better than ever.

We have 700 of the best data scientists working alongside analysts and engineers to collaborate on developing OneTru. It’s a unique platform because it simplifies security, governance and privacy; amplifies access to insights; and accelerates speed to modeling and marketplace deployment.

Creating all that requires a new level of synergy and skill set adaptation. For instance, many of our data analysts are also becoming machine learning engineers. After all, if we’re going to create an enablement platform that’s endlessly adaptable and expanding, we, as creators and a company, must endlessly adapt and grow too.  

A big vision — realized step-by-step

That’s what happens when you combine technological audacity with organizational practicality — which is essentially the advice I give to those who want to be change agents, whether in large organizations or as entrepreneurs.

In other words, have a clear vision that matters, resonates and is bold enough to make a resounding difference to your organization. But also have a logical view of how you’ll ‘crawl, walk, run’ to make it a reality. We must be able to take tip-of-the-spear use cases and solve them to develop the momentum that will ladder us up to the goal, making the vision progressively more tangible and believable.

I’ve taken my own advice at TransUnion, and the results so far have moved us higher up that proverbial ladder. We’ve been able to set a new strategy of deeply modernizing and standardizing the infrastructure. Plus, we’ve sold our Board and investors on the investment required to make that happen. And we’ve begun to deploy it and see results. For example, we’re helping customers solve complex problems much faster via our OneTru enabled collaborative Innovation Lab experience.

OneTru and a look into the future

OneTru consists of four layers — Data Management, Identity, Analytics and Delivery — allowing users to leverage a host of TransUnion products in credit risk, fraud and marketing easily and seamlessly. The platform will provide an end-to-end, one-stop shop for getting value out of data insights and actioning those insights.

And while our competitors may use similar language to describe their enablement offerings, OneTru is different. It will capture the entire data analytics value chain, starting from being able to ingest raw data to identity resolution. Customers will be able to create insights and deliver easily through real-time APIs and streaming platforms.

From a competitive standpoint, no other information and insights company is leveraging those capabilities throughout the entire organization and using them to assemble SaaS solutions and platform as a service solution for their customers.

Meeting customer challenges

Since launching OneTru, we’ve invited companies to bring us their most daunting challenges — and they’ve obliged.

For example, in fraud prevention, they’re looking for real-time models because fraudsters are always seemingly a step ahead in the kind of fraud they commit and patterns they use. Leading companies need models that can rapidly learn new capabilities and be very adaptive.

We will help customers develop adaptive machine learning models that stay one step ahead of these fraudsters and detect new patterns. That’s not easy to do. In fact, it used to require months of validation. But now, we have the capability to put up challenger models very quickly.

Always looking toward the future

OneTru is the manifestation of TransUnion’s tech transformation and will continue to evolve and expand. But it’s poised to make an impact, both internally at TransUnion and externally for our customers.

Consider just a few examples:

• We will collaborate with multi-party customer teams in clean rooms that were once impossible to imagine. Thanks to privacy-preserving innovations, we allow the sharing of aggregate insights without giving access to raw data.

• We will enable a new level and speed of identity resolution which can handle noisy digital data with offline indicators and connectivity elements to provide decisioning that’ is more nuanced and confident.

• OneTru will advance us beyond low-code environments to a no-code future where customers will eliminate time-consuming clicks of coding and embrace time-saving conversations of agent-assisted problem-solving

It's been a transformative year at TransUnion. We’ve developed a new way of thinking, new capabilities, and a new level of collaboration and impact with customers.

But as far as we’ve come, I’m proud to say that we aren’t satisfied with delivering state-of-the-art data and analytics enablement. Instead, we’ll keep thinking in terms of the “state of the future.”