Equifax And IBM Partner To Help Companies Better Serve Customers

ATLANTA, May 8, 1996 -- Equifax today announced it had joined IBM to market to the financial sector new computer technology that helps banks and other institutions better understand and target the needs of their customers.

IBM's Intelligent Miner toolkit will be used by Market Knowledge, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Equifax, to demonstrate to financial institutions how they can better analyze their customer data, develop attractive custom products and increase the profitability of their marketing promotions.

Equifax's Market Knowledge, Inc., based in Chicago, offers a broad line of services ranging from strategic counseling to marketing information systems and customer or prospect management. IBM's Intelligent Miner knowledge discovery toolkit now will be added to the array of Market Knowledge's available computer technologies.

The Intelligent Miner is a set of neural network services and tools that can be used by financial institutions to better analyze customer data. The IBM software is on the front edge of a trend toward "data mining" -- using computers and software applications to better track, analyze and market using available data on a company's own customers.

"This is ground-breaking technology that's going to help us even better support our clients," said Thomas F. Chapman, executive vice president and group executive, Financial Services Group. "We are a financial information management company and our customers look to us to help them solve business problems. And there's a lot of potential for dramatic change if you can better understand what your customers really want."

The Intelligent Miner is particularly useful in organizing large amounts of raw data for analysis. It advances the technology in part by creating a unique one-step or umbrella framework for the process instead of having to step through a long list of separate operations.

"IBM sees data mining as a largely untapped market with a wealth of business opportunities," agreed Tim Negris, vice president, sales and marketing, IBM Software solutions Division. "The potential for providing consulting, systems integration and application development services through data mining is setting a new maxim for the '90's and beyond."

Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX), committed to Global Information Leadership in the Information Age, is the leading provider of information services that help grant credit, authorize and process credit card and check transactions, insure lives and property and control health care costs. Established in 1899 in Atlanta, Equifax today employs 14,000 people throughout North and South America, the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Revenues for the 12 months ended March 31, 1996, totaled $1.7 billion.