Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend Equifax Workforce Services annual user conference in Scottsdale. It was an almost intimate affair with a little more than 200 customers attending – with its great advantages for all attending – like direct access to executives, a lot of networking opportunities and a great opportunity for Equifax customer to look at other Equifax products and offerings. Customers were overall very positive on products and direction, and even more open to exchange experience and best practices, when it comes to compliance HR professionals are (literally) all in the same boat.
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Equifax Workforce Services (EWS) was started with the Equifax acquisition of Talx, which today forms the backbone of the Equifax employment verification business. Coupled with strong offerings in compliance, largely centered on the hiring process and subsequent onboarding, EWS helps to automate the hard part of the process with I-9 services, background checks, WOTC data capture, call outs to benefits etc. With employment verification and unemployment insurance validation EWS has equally strong offerings in later phases of an employee life cycle. And not surprisingly EWS customers are in high turnover and / or industries that show a lot of seasonal hiring (e.g. retailers, food and beverage etc.).
It was good to see that EWS is not resting on its laurels in the compliance area – but also looking at other strategic applications. And there are 2 key areas EWS is looking at:
Equifax Workforce Services (EWS) was started with the Equifax acquisition of Talx, which today forms the backbone of the Equifax employment verification business. Coupled with strong offerings in compliance, largely centered on the hiring process and subsequent onboarding, EWS helps to automate the hard part of the process with I-9 services, background checks, WOTC data capture, call outs to benefits etc. With employment verification and unemployment insurance validation EWS has equally strong offerings in later phases of an employee life cycle. And not surprisingly EWS customers are in high turnover and / or industries that show a lot of seasonal hiring (e.g. retailers, food and beverage etc.).
Compliance is the game
As general guidance, EWS seems to seek out areas of automation in the HR process landscape that are hard and unpleasant to automate and execute – but enterprises could get in significant trouble if they do not execute and run them well. Hence the headline that EWS is like preventive medicine for the HR department – similar as many people take their vitamins and minerals to prevent from disease taking over, EWS is happy to be the partner of taking care of all the ugly and hard compliance processes. Enterprises using EWS are generally buying automation of a vital, but not strategic service – unless it fails, so basically peace of mind and time to focus on other – often more deemed strategic HR activities.And beyond Compliance
It was good to see that EWS is not resting on its laurels in the compliance area – but also looking at other strategic applications. And there are 2 key areas EWS is looking at:
- Analytics– With the acquisition of Ethority EWS has a strong ETL and BI tool, but is looking at creating (true) analytics now, based on the Talx employment and more data. With over 70% coverage of the FT500 employments on file, there is a very attractive set of data to come up with insights that HR practitioners have been craving for since a long time.
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| An example of bench marking Equifax can provide. |
- Credit – EWS sees an opportunity to become a source of credit for consumers. The scenarios goes along the lines that FICO scores of consumers have no recovered (yet) from the last financial crisis, and employment verification (coupled with salary), can be a strong (or good enough) indicator to extend credit to a consumer. The purchase of automotive vehicles is the use case at hand.
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| Value to consumer and merchant of employment verification is obvious in this example. |
And Equifax employment verification business got a fresh boost by Equifax's recent win with CMS, where Equifax provides income verification for the ACA to work properly.