Tools will enable segregation without breaching the Fair Housing Act
Protected class variables such as age, income, and marital status, have been removed from targeted marketing activities by many financial services firms due to requirements of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and Fair Housing Act.
But a new partnership will enable marketers in the mortgage industry and other financial institutions to target certain groups that are not in protected classes.
Equifax and Neustar have agreed to work together to deliver segmentation solutions utilizing Equifax financial insights including average assets and liabilities, asset composition, propensity to buy certain financial products and services, and other variables that provide unique insights into consumer financial behavior.
This data is then linked with Neustar's identity graph to describe the financial profile for households in the US.
"This helps [financial institutions] to optimize their marketing to retain customers, and then build custom segmentation to identify their most valuable prospects," said Neustar Senior Vice President & General Manager of Marketing Solutions Michael Schoen. "Partnering with a leader like Equifax to develop a segmentation schema for the financial services industry, that's absent of any protected class variables, will give Neustar's financial services customers the ability to unlock a number of new potential use cases, that have been previously unavailable due to compliance concerns. These include custom audience targeting, activation, site planning, market sizing, offer optimization as well as measurement and attribution by customer segment."
