201503 CM March

HEAD TO HEAD
THE MAX
FACTOR
Sean Feast caught up with Experian’s Max Firth
to discover how much has changed in the Business
Information market over the last 25 years.
EXPERIAN can trace its roots back
to the early 1800s when a group
of London merchants started
swapping information about
customers who were poor payers. Forward
wind almost 200 years to 1996 and the
‘modern’ Experian was born, becoming
an independent company listed on the
London Stock Exchange (LSE) ten years
later with a commitment to develop its
business worldwide.
Since then it has emerged as a truly
global player, delivering data and analytical
tools to clients around the world, helping
those clients to manage credit risk, prevent
fraud and improve marketing intelligence
and therefore business performance. It has
rightfully gained a reputation as a leader in
its field through innovation and delivering
tangible business information ‘products’
that support business growth.
But the success of the company,
and indeed the growth in importance
of ‘business information’ per se, has
not always been a guarantee. Max Firth
started working in the industry in 1990 for
the pH Group, a data analysis business:
“The challenge at that time was to get
businesses to understand the value that
we could bring,” he explains.
Today, however, Max says it is almost
inconceivable that companies would
not use credit information to inform their
business decisions: “Their view then
was that there was nothing we could tell
them about their customers that they
didn’t already know.” That view has
now changed to the point that Business
Information (BI) is integral to business life.
It is perhaps not a surprise that Max
Firth is so passionate about his business.
An Englishman whose Indian mother and
English father met at Oxford, Max left Eton
with A-levels in double maths, science
and English for the same Oxford spires
to study Psychology, Philosophy, and
Physiology (PPP). It was, he believes, the
perfect degree for his interests: “It was a
mix of the arts and the sciences,” he says.
“What many scientists lack is the
ability to write, but given that I had to
produce two essays a week, it was the
ideal preparation for delivering client
presentations at work.”
He left Oxford with no fixed career
ambitions, but since his father had always
worked in small companies he opted to
do the same, joining the pH Group as
one of its first employees: “pH was a data
analysis company run by people with a
strategic consulting background, and
much like my degree, it was a perfect mix
of the arts and the science, giving a story
to explain what the numbers meant.”
Max spent a most enjoyable 17 years
at the group, working on both the client
and IT sides of the business in the UK and
France. He gained extensive knowledge of
the banking, telecoms and utilities sectors,
and helped the group expand to the point
that it attracted the acquisitive attentions
of larger players in the market. Many of
the banks, who had come to rely on the
pH Group, were understandably nervous
about dealing with such a comparatively
small business but this disappeared with
the acquisition of the group by Experian
in 2007.
Having only ever worked for an SME,
Max had little concept of how a larger
organisation worked, but was pleasantly
surprised: “With larger corporates, the
rules are different,” he explains. “If you
take an area, for example, such as HR,
smaller businesses are not expected to be
expert and so certain issues are allowed
to ride. With a larger company, however,
the assumption is that they are more
sophisticated and are therefore expected
to behave impeccably.”
Max quickly realised the advantages of
being part of a large corporate: “SMEs by
definition tend to be niche, and in joining
Experian we began to see what other
services we could offer to our customers
and what other opportunities were
possible. The landscape was huge, and
the possibilities virtually infinite.”
In 2011, Max took over the leadership
of Experian’s BI business with
responsibility for business information
across credit and sales and marketing.
The business comprises four distinct
business units: Data, focused on Data
Quality and Strategy, including regulatory
responsibility; Strategic markets, focusing
on the top 30 or so clients; Enterprise
Markets with 2,000 clients; and SME with
over 25,000 smaller customers.
The smaller customer segment is
perhaps the one that Max is the most
excited about, having overseen the
acquisition of Riskdisk three years ago
and developed My Business Profile, a tool
that enables businesses to understand the
factors impacting their credit score: “SME
are often expert at making products, but
not so expert at understanding why they
have been declined credit or a loan,” he
says. “My Business Profile helps them to
do that, and is therefore something that
really helps our SMEs customers to grow.”
Many are keen to harness business
intelligence to improve the customer
journey – something that Max considers
to be a major change. He cites his own
experience in choosing a local club at
which to play his 12-year old son at
squash: “All squash courts are the same,”
he says, “so I chose the one that had the
best mobile booking facility. My decision
was therefore based on a simplified
customer journey, and this is what we
are trying to do for our customers. We
need to make it as easy as possible for
our customers to use our services and reengineer
them for their own needs.”
Max says that alternative lenders have
also been quick to embed new thinking:
“Big banks often look at data but because
of their size and their legacy infrastructure
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