Equifax Inc., one of the nation?s leading credit-score providers, has outpaced its rivals with a fully developed mobile strategy that recognizes the evolving habits and needs of its customers.

Under the leadership of a former top Sears executive, Atlanta-based Equifax?s four-pronged strategy for mobile is unique in that it embraces all key elements of the medium ? SMS, mobile Web, applications and GPS ? to meet both mobile marketing as well as mobile commerce objectives.

?During the past 6-12 months, we?ve seen significant month-over-month growth of customer interactions with Equifax via various mobile channels, including SMS, mobile Web and native applications,? said Ravi Acharya, senior vice president of technology for global Internet solutions at Equifax.

In this in-depth Q&A, Mr. Acharya spells out Equifax?s approach to mobile, how consumers are increasingly accessing their credit scores, security concerns and how this medium will pay off with the learnings gained in these early days. Please read the interview: 

How critical is mobile to Equifax's future?
Mobile plays a critical role in our product strategy, as we look to leverage mobile to increase customer engagement and accommodate the more on-demand lifestyle of today?s consumers. 

Many of our online products and services are already well suited for on-the-go access.

We are continually harnessing the power of Equifax data to create more innovative content for our customers?fraud rankings, credit index?to empower our customers to take more control of their financial lives. 

And we are committed to providing Equifax customers with easy-to-use, fast mobile touch points, so they can access their products and our site on their terms. 

How mobile are Equifax's customers?
Increasingly, Equifax customers are accessing the Web site via mobile devices.

Checking product alerts and viewing credit scores are the most popular activities performed on mobile devices.

During the past 6-12 months, we?ve seen significant month-over-month growth of customer interactions with Equifax via various mobile channels, including SMS, mobile Web and native applications. 

Further, Equifax?s mobile customers access their products at different times of the day than our Web customers. This speaks to our ability to enable customers to interact with their product at their convenience, on their terms. 

You've said before that Equifax takes a look at the right use cases where customers can use mobile better than the desktop Web. What does that mean?
We believe there are customer-expected capabilities that are must-haves in the mobile channel. 

For example, customers are accustomed to accessing their credit scores and credit reports via the Web, so, naturally, they would expect that same functionality in the mobile environment. 

However, there are product features that are more suitable for mobile devices because the feature functionality is more contextually relevant to real-time activities?applying for a mortgage, auto shopping and instant credit apps. 

One example is Credit Report Control, a product feature that enables customers to protect their identity with the ability to lock and unlock their Equifax credit file in real-time. 

So, if a customer is at a car dealership and wants to finance a loan, they can unlock and relock their credit file via their smartphone at the dealership only for the period of the loan decisioning. 

Credit report alerts are another feature example. 

Customers with monitoring products receive SMS or, via the iPhone or Android app, alerts to notify them of changes to their credit file like if a new account is opened. 

If the customer does not recognize the new account, they can call the appropriate credit grantor directly from their app on the smartphone.

Under your direction, Equifax has developed a four-pronged approach to mobile. Can you dive deeper into that?
Our mobile strategy was devised around a four-pronged strategy to ensure that we could support a majority of our customers with optimal value-add capabilities. 

It also gave us an opportunity to test and learn from real customer behavior, enabling us to course-correct as needed.  

The first element of our strategy was to deliver certain minimal features in a device agnostic way.

This resulted in leveraging SMS as the best mechanism to deliver mobile alerts to a broad set of customers, regardless of the type of mobile device they owned. 

Measuring the opt-in adoption of this feature and correlating this to customer retention provided us with additional insights to implement the next elements of our strategy. 

Given the fact that most of our existing mobile customers were reaching us via the iPhone, in parallel we built out an iterative roadmap of features. 

Starting with the Credit Report Control feature and supplementing it with richer alerts capabilities, we evolved over a few months to include credit scores, report summaries and additional product information. 

Additionally, we started leveraging the native capabilities of the iPhone?s GPS to add richer features in some of our freemium products, for example, Equifax Places.

With the rapid growth of the Android market, seeing an increasing number of our customers trying to reach us via their Android phones, we began implementing iPhone-comparable features on that platform as well. 

From a technology perspective, entry into this platform was significantly easier, given that most of our complex business logic was coded in APIs and therefore could be completely reused.

The fourth prong of our strategy was to optimize our Web site for access from any smartphone. 

Complementing the native applications, the focus on the mobile Web site was to enable consumers browse products and actually purchase via the phone. 

Again, leveraging a common set of APIs enabled rapid iterative delivery of site capabilities.

Do you view mobile as a customer retention tool versus acquisition?
The SMS, iPhone and Android iterations of our current Equifax Mobile offerings were designed to encourage customer retention?to put the power of your Equifax monitoring product in the palm of your hand with real-time, on-the-go access to your product.

Over time, freemium features have been added to the apps to enable people who may not be Equifax customers to stay on top of their credit and identity at an aggregated level, which, in turn, can drive opportunities for acquisition. 

Our mobile Web site, however, is more focused on acquisition where we make it very simple to find and buy products on mobile devices.

So here's a question on everyone's mind: Why would anyone conduct credit transactions on mobile phones while on the go?
Most life-events involving credit happen outside of the home and during times where you?re not in front of a computer.

Information about your credit and credit score is much more valuable if you can access it when you need it and use it to make more informed financial decisions. 

Like the earlier example of the car dealership, there are several other life events purchasing major appliances or other big ticket items, relocating to a new neighborhood, travelling to a new city or sending a kid to college, where having situational information like incidences of fraud in the area or your credit score puts you in a more informed decision-making position.

Which product lines are you promoting via mobile?
Most of our flagship products are available via mobile, including our three-bureau monitoring with scores product, Equifax Complete, as well as our identity protection product, ID Patrol and our online debt reduction tool, Debt Wise.

And what about the security concerns ? what if the phone is lost, hacked into or the line drops midway through a transaction?
Given the sensitive nature of our data, we have rigorous processes in place to ensure we minimize risk to consumer data. 

One of our guiding principles is to not store any customer sensitive data on the device. 

We leverage our services-based API infrastructure to securely pull required information from authorized users in real-time and it is not persisted on the device. 

We're now into a cycle where consumers upgrade their smartphones every time the contract expires. Will any sensitive data reside on the device itself?
As customer information is not stored on devices, but retrieved in real-time from our APIs, customers can change devices as frequently as they like or maintain multiple devices at the same time and get to their information seamlessly and securely.

Mobile commerce or mobile marketing: where does Equifax see mobile's better use?
I would say we are equally interested in mobile for commerce and marketing.  

Real-time technology and location-based services are expected to drive mobile retail and we?re already in-market with offerings. 

We are seeing an increasing number of product purchases via our mobile Web site, so we are obviously paying close attention to mobile commerce. 

Still, a significant number of those purchases come from existing customers and indirect marketing leveraging the mobile channel is playing an important role. 

Additionally, we expect that our freemium products will help in marketing to non-customers and drive acquisition.

How closely integrated are Equifax's mobile operations with the company's many channels?
Equifax Mobile is tightly integrated with the broader direct-to-consumer business unit. 

Given the highly personal and social nature of mobile devices, interacting with end consumers is providing us with key learnings that can be adopted across other channels.

You pioneered mobile development at Sears. What lessons did you learn about customer and prospect engagement and then apply them here?
When we started mobile at Sears, consumer adoption of mobile was fairly nascent but fast growing. 

The [Sears] retail use case was also more intuitive to both brands and consumers, hence entry was fairly straightforward. However, some of the early analysis of customer behavior was interesting. 

For example, one of the very first purchases on the mobile site was a Motorola mobile phone. 

Over time, customers were buying $2,500 lawn tractors over the phone at all hours of the night. 

Based on examples like that, one of my earliest learnings was that customers are not shy to use these emerging technologies for fairly substantial purchases. 

Eventually, it became obvious that rather than over-analyze and predict consumer behavior, a better option was to test various incremental capabilities and observe real-time behavior to tweak our direction. 

At Equifax, many of the foundational learnings still apply in terms of keeping interactions simple, fast and accessible. 

However, given the sensitive nature of our data as well as subscription business models, we have to apply a different level of security rigor, as well as go-to-market strategy. 

We see some similarities in actual consumer behavior and continually look to apply the key learnings into future iterations.

So, taking a look at what you've done so far, how would you rate Equifax's mobile growth? How are customers responding and what are you doing now that you wouldn't have done when you started out?
I would say we are at the early stages of our mobile journey. 

Overall, we?ve done a good job of delivering solutions that make sense for our customers. 

We are seeing increases in adoption rates, both from an acquisition and retention angle, and are excited to hear from and apply our customers' feedback with each new release. 

When we first started, we had not planned on building out an iPad application ? didn't know about it ?but have since been supporting that as well. 

We are also integrating our mobile marketing efforts within new channels like social media and existing channels, like paid search and that is helping increase adoption rates.

What next for Equifax and mobile?
We have a few exciting initiatives planned that will further extend our mobile reach and strategy. 

As our products evolve, mobile will continue to play an important role as a bridge across multiple channels. 

Ultimately, we?ll keep listening to our customers and applying learnings to make Equifax Mobile even more of a value-add to their lives.