Equifax’s Chief Marketer Shares Her Journey in Driving Cloud Transformation, Customer Trust

Miriam McLemore: Julia, you’ve had an interesting path to strategy and marketing. Would you tell us a little about your background?

Julia Houston: Sure. I’m a lawyer by training, so I started in Equifax’s legal department. After our cyber security incident in 2017, I stepped into the role of chief transformation officer, where I led the strategy and execution of some changes and supported our cloud transformation. I had to get up to speed on cloud technology and security quickly. From there, the role of chief strategy and marketing officer was a natural next step because it’s about describing and delivering the value we’ll get from our cloud investment and bringing that value to our customers through the capabilities the cloud enables.

Miriam McLemore: You were at Equifax before the security breach, and through it, and into the selling of this transformation. Could you walk us through that journey?

Julia Houston: I learned a lot about change management and the importance of stakeholder buy-in. We had to make sure everyone in the company, not just our technologists, embraced the journey we were embarking on. We had to sell it across all our different audiences so that they understood the value we’d deliver with it. Everyone in the organization had to understand how the cloud transformation would impact our overall business and their specific parts of it.It was a huge culture change, but I think the organization was ready for it. We talked about it as a real opportunity to look inside our business and use it as something to catapult us forward. We kept in mind what happened, but also everyone, our leadership team, and employees, was looking for ways to rethink what we wanted to be in the market.

Miriam McLemore: And what about your customers? How have they accepted the transformation?

Julia Houston: Once we could explain the value the cloud could bring to them, our customers were on board. We’ve had to migrate, or are in the process of migrating, all of them. But even those that were unsure have come on this journey with us because they embrace the benefit it will deliver—the ability to innovate and make decisions more quickly, bringing value to their bottom line.

Miriam McLemore: You didn’t just adopt the cloud, you went cloud-native, and that’s a big difference. As the marketer, how do you talk about that with your customers and with consumers?

Julia Houston: We’ve spent a lot of time making sure our salespeople and all of our teammates understand what going cloud-native means. We talk about the Equifax Cloud; that’s what we feel we’ve delivered through this huge investment we’ve made, moving to a single data fabric. And the possibilities that lets us deliver are endless.

Miriam McLemore: How are your customers and regulators responding to Equifax’s goal of becoming a secure-environment leader?

Julia Houston: After what we’ve been through, trust is even more important. We are stewards of consumer data, so protecting that data and ensuring its privacy is fundamental to what we do. And the cloud enables that. We talk a lot about our security being built in and not bolted on. That sums it up, and it resonates with our customers.

Miriam McLemore: Have you made security everybody’s job, rather than having a separate department for it?

Julia Houston: That absolutely is the approach we’ve taken, times 10. We’ve taught everyone what it means that updates are more automated, that we can patch more easily, and that we have a smaller surface area for attacks. We’ve also emphasized that everyone owns security. It’s embedded into our incentive plans and the fabric of what we do.

Miriam McLemore: Are you starting to see the proof points that you expected of this transformation?

Julia Houston: Now that we’re getting all our customers fully transitioned and our old systems decommissioned, we can focus on the growth, innovation, and new product delivery the cloud enables. Now we can deliver products in weeks instead of months. And we’ve got a global, scalable infrastructure that lets us build something once and deploy it across our global markets with customizations that take little additional engineering, which makes us faster and more efficient.

Miriam McLemore: And I assume it positions you better from a competitive standpoint.

Julia Houston: We think the cloud really differentiates us from our competitors. We’ve got these unique data assets, advanced analytics, and a cloud-native data fabric, so we can take that differentiated data, enrich it with our advanced analytics, and deliver unique multi-data solutions. That is something that only Equifax can do.

Miriam McLemore: You mentioned the Equifax Cloud. What do you mean by that?

Julia Houston: We’ve invested $1.5 billion into this journey we’ve been on for the past few years. The Equifax Cloud is the foundation of our business. We’ve moved a hundred different siloed data exchanges into a single data fabric, and then our technology—our cloud-native infrastructure—is also in the cloud, which allows it to evolve with our customers and consumers.If these few years have taught us anything, it’s that we need to stay ahead, stay on offense, stay on the front foot, and continue to evolve without becoming complacent. Those are really the keys to staying competitive.

Miriam McLemore: What’s the next chapter? Where are you going to spend time and energy?

Julia Houston: Our next chapter is about leveraging this investment we’ve made for growth. So, it’s innovating in new products and driving at speed. We’ve built the ability to do things faster and better and more efficiently, and now we will deliver on that. We have built a culture of customer-centricity, so we’ll innovate alongside our customers and enable them to deliver better decision intelligence faster.