Virgin Money and Experian Partner on Digital Financial Products

Virgin Money will implement Experian’s full suite of cloud-based technology, including credit and lending, fraud prevention, analytics, governance and compliance.

In the first phase of this strategic partnership, Virgin Money will leverage Experian’s solutions to offer personal loans to both new and existing partners later this year, the companies said in a Monday (June 24) press release. Currently, these loans are available only to existing customers.

In addition, Experian’s Marketplace will begin offering personal loans from Virgin Money in the fall, according to the release.

Virgin Money is a Tier 1 bank with 6.6 million customers in the United Kingdom, while Experian is a global data and technology company, per the release.

“This is an innovative and exciting partnership with Experian that will help us drive improvements across the digital customer experience and support peace of mind for customers,” Virgin Money Head of Unsecured Lending Katherine Lovell said in the release.

Virgin Money will use Experian’s cloud-based technology platform Ascend and its full suite of services, according to the release.

The company will leverage Experian’s data and analytics to deliver more personalized digital financial products, to streamline the application process, to enhance security and fraud protection, and to gain insights that will aid its product development, the release said.

Together with the personal loans, Virgin Money will use Experian’s solutions to launch “a significant number” of future projects designed to help people achieve their financial goals, per the release.

“This new strategic partnership is an important chapter in showcasing Experian’s evolution into a data technology software company,” Jose Luis Rossi, managing director, Experian UK&I, said in the release. “The team at Virgin Money can see the best-in-class team, data and software we have and how it will help them realize their long-term ambitions.”

The launch of this partnership comes about three months after the announcement that U.K. bank Nationwide Building Society is set to acquire Virgin Money for $2.7 billion.

The boards of the two companies said on March 7 that the merger will create Great Britain’s second-largest provider of mortgages and savings.

As for Experian, it announced in May that it acquired a stake in Reward, a company that powers bank and retail rewards programs, in order to scale solutions across international markets.