Consumer credit reporting agency Equifax finished migrating its credit database to the cloud in mid-January as part of a five-year, $1.5 billion process to move its technology stack and data to the cloud.  

“We’re in the last mile. It’s a big investment … people, time and money,” Automotive General Manager Lena Bourgeois told Bank Automation News‘ sister publication Auto Finance News at the NADA Show in Dallas last month.  

“The whole notion and vision of the cloud for us … is that [our customers are] going to have access to more data faster, and more transparent data,” Bourgeois said. “All of our data will be linked in key together.” 

Google is the company’s main cloud provider, but Equifax has redundancies with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, Bourgeois said. Given “the size of our business and the massive amount of data we have, we had to pick somebody that could handle that,” he noted. 

A key driver in the choice to use Google as Equifax’s primary cloud provider was the lack of space limitations, Bourgeois said.  

“Everybody wants to do AI and machine learning and run technology on top of data on their side,” she said. “Sometimes when everybody does that on big sets of data, you run out of space, and then things break down. And so now, that’s not going to be a factor anymore.”  

Auto lenders, manufacturers and financial institutions have been working to migrate technology stacks to cloud infrastructure. Toyota Financial Services, for one, began work in 2021 to replace its legacy system with Mazda Financial Services’ cloud-based system, which it created using AWS, and subprime lender Exeter Finance also has been migrating its tech stack to Azure.   

Cloud providers Amazon, Apple, IBM and Microsoft all reported year-over-year increases in cloud-related revenue in Q4, according to earnings reports.  

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the cost of Equifax’s cloud migration. The cost to migrate to the cloud amounted to $1.5 billion. 

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on Bank Automation News’ sister site, Auto Finance News.

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