Vijay Mehta, EVP & GM of Global Solutions and Analytics at Experian – Interview Series

Vijay Mehta, Experian’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Global Solutions and Analytics, is a transformational leader with over 20 years of experience driving innovation, technology strategy, and growth. At Experian, he launched the Ascend big data platform, founded the Innovation and Solutions Group, and led the company’s cloud and AI transformation. Previously serving as CTO and Chief Architect, he built high-performing teams, developed SaaS solutions, and delivered strong revenue growth while cutting costs. His career spans leadership roles at Baker Hill, Sallie Mae, and RealMed, blending deep technical expertise with strategic vision.

Experian is a global leader in consumer and business credit reporting, data analytics, and marketing services, operating in over 40 countries with annual revenues exceeding $5 billion. The company helps individuals gain financial access, supports businesses in making informed decisions, and enables economies to thrive by leveraging data, advanced analytics, and emerging technologies such as AI and cloud platforms.

You’ve spent decades building out Experian’s analytics and AI capabilities. What drew you personally to this intersection of data science, risk modeling, and consumer outcomes?

What drew me to this space is the unique opportunity to use data and AI not just to solve technical challenges, but to make a real difference in people’s financial lives. Early in my career, I saw how powerful analytics could be in managing risk, but also how it could open doors for consumers—expanding access to credit, protecting them from fraud, and creating more personalized financial opportunities. That blend of rigorous science, complex problem-solving, and tangible positive impact on everyday consumers is what has kept me passionate about this work for decades.

The Ascend Platform is now cloud-native and leverages Mastercard’s identity verification data. How has this combination changed the way clients approach fraud prevention and risk decisioning?

The integration of Mastercard’s identity verification technology into our Experian Ascend Platform has transformed how our customers approach fraud and risk decisioning. By combining Mastercard’s secure, efficient identity verification capabilities with Ascend’s advanced data analytics, they can now authenticate identities seamlessly while working within a single, powerful environment.

Ascend has a deep, comprehensive feature set. It delivers unparalleled insights, advanced data visualization, and a streamlined model development process. To help our customers tap into all Ascend’s functionality and accelerate other advanced analytics, modeling, and decisioning tasks, we launched our real-time, agentic AI tool, Experian Assistant, last October.

With Experian Assistant, businesses can interact with complex financial data conversationally, making analytics more accessible and actionable. This ease of use fast-tracks decision-making, shortens model-development timelines from months to days (or even hours), and enables customers to quickly test, launch, and refine fraud-prevention strategies.

Together, these innovations enable Experian’s more than 1,800 cross-industry global customers to strengthen their defenses against fraud, enhance customer experiences, and make faster, better-informed risk decisions, ultimately reducing operational friction while boosting productivity and collaboration.

Experian serves nearly every major bank and lender in the U.S. – how do you ensure the platform evolves fast enough to meet the pace of innovation in generative AI and real-time analytics?

For more than a decade, we have developed transformative advancements, from pioneering no-and low-code AI solutions to developing groundbreaking credit risk assessment models that promote financial inclusion.

By harnessing the expertise of our Ph.D. level data scientists and software engineers and fostering a collaborative culture that fosters grassroots employee-driven innovation, we rapidly develop models, prototypes, and tests new technologies that keep pace with fast-evolving market demands and customer expectations. This dynamic approach, coupled with our deep experience in generative AI and machine learning, ensures we remain at the forefront of data-driven advancements that help our clients grow, solve business, challenges, and deliver better consumer experiences.

For example, we ensure the Ascend platform evolves quickly by continuously updating its AI/ML capabilities, integrating real-time data and partner innovations, and providing a flexible cloud environment where clients can rapidly build, test, and deploy new models—keeping pace with advances like generative AI and real-time decisioning.

How does Ascend use machine learning to adapt to new fraud patterns or identity threats, especially in an era of synthetic identities and deepfakes?

Experian’s Ascend Platform fuses a lot of signals (credit, digital identity, device, and behavioral data) and lets users build/deploy ML models and decision strategies right on top of that data. That combo is what helps it spot new fraud patterns—like synthetic IDs and deepfake-assisted impersonation—quickly and at scale.

With the growing pressure to deliver seamless consumer experiences, how does Ascend help organizations personalize decisions while protecting privacy and security?
Ascend does this by combining advanced analytics with secure, AI-powered tools. Experian Assistant enables businesses to interact with financial data in a conversational way, making complex analytics more accessible.

With real-time insights at their fingertips, our customers can quickly tailor decisions to their specific needs, enhance consumers experiences, and test or launch initiatives faster, all while maintaining strict data privacy and security protocols. This approach enables clients to improve productivity, foster collaboration, and deliver seamless, personalized services with confidence.

Many platforms claim to offer “AI decisioning.” What distinguishes Ascend from other analytics or cloud-based credit decisioning tools on the market today?

Experian Ascend stands out because it combines Experian’s rich credit and identity data with an end-to-end AI/ML environment—allowing users to build, test, and deploy models directly on regulated data in a secure cloud. Unlike generic platforms, it integrates decisioning, fraud/identity intelligence, and compliance-ready governance in one place, enabling faster adaptation to market and regulatory changes.

 Ascend also delivers measurable results. In fact, a independent study from Forrester found that Ascend helps financial institutions significantly improve both credit and fraud decisioning, delivering a 183% return on investment and paying for itself within 12 months.

AI bias is a growing concern in financial services. How does Experian identify and mitigate potential bias in its models—especially those used for credit decisioning or identity verification?

We take a responsible AI-first approach to product development, embedding fairness, transparency, and security into every stage of model creation and deployment.

We do this by identifying and mitigating AI bias by rigorously testing models for disparate impact, excluding or constraining biased features, using explainable AI tools (like SHAP/LIME), and continuously monitoring fairness in production. In credit and identity verification, we reduce risk by layering diverse data signals, validating biometric tools across demographics, and ensuring compliance with fair lending regulations.

How are your clients leveraging Ascend to not only reduce fraud or improve underwriting, but to actually grow their customer base and innovate new financial products?

Clients use our Ascend platform to uncover new customer segments with advanced analytics, streamline credit decisioning for faster approvals, and safely expand credit access by better distinguishing risk. They also leverage its insights to design tailored financial products and deliver more personalized customer experiences, driving both growth and innovation.

Given Experian’s global reach, are you seeing differences in how AI is being adopted across regions or financial systems? How does Ascend adapt to these varying data environments?

AI adoption varies, with markets like the U.S. and U.K. focusing on advanced credit and fraud models, while emerging regions prioritize financial inclusion. Our Ascend platform  adapts by working with local data sources, regulations, and market conditions, providing a flexible platform that supports regional compliance while maintaining global AI capabilities.

For example, as financial institutions accelerate innovation, they must balance the move toward GenAI-enabled capabilities with compliance to global model-risk-management guidelines such as SR 11-7 (US) and SS1/23 (UK). Experian Assistant for Model Risk Management which is integrated into the platform offers financial institutions with customizable, pre-defined templates, centralized model governance repositories, and transparent internal workflow approvals—empowering them to meet regulatory guidelines with confidence and efficiency.

Looking ahead, how do you see platforms like Ascend shaping the next generation of financial infrastructure? Will AI ultimately redefine what trust and identity mean in digital finance?

Ascend will be central to the next generation of financial infrastructure by blending advanced analytics, trusted identity intelligence, and agentic AI to deliver faster, more accurate, and more secure decisions. Agentic AI’s ability to learn behaviors, apply reasoning, and predict outcomes means it can automate complex, data-driven processes at a scale and speed beyond human capacity. The future will require “safe AI” frameworks – such as virtual assistants that keep humans in control of AI-driven processes – to ensure maximum effectiveness without ceding critical judgement to algorithms alone. In this way, Ascend can help redefine what trust and identity mean in digital finance: a balance between cutting-edge automation and human governance that fosters both innovation and confidence.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Experian.