TrueCredit.com is TransUnion’s free trial/fee-based service that offers consumer tools for measuring credit viability, managing the risk of identity theft and help plan for borrowing.
Many of the tools offered at TrueCredit are syndicated and sold through Consumer Connect, the credit bureau's branded external service offering to financial and marketing institutions that reuse the services in their own branded campaigns.
TransUnion has embraced an architecture of loosely coupled services and had always intended to extend and resell consumer-facing tools to partners in a channel of credit-related institutions. But in initial projects, Consumer Connect required internal resources to build consumer facing credit services for partners, an expensive and time-consuming process. In that model, “you essentially become an extended IT resource for the partner organization," says Scott Metzger, CTO at TransUnion Interactive, the consumer-facing arm of the company.
Metzger tells Information Management the new proposition is to expose APIs to partner organizations with access to underlying Web services at TrueCredit.com. This allows partners to engage outside resources or build their own service linkages through a managed interface that monitors access to tightly regulated consumer information. For that, and also to manage and monitor internal service access, TransUnion Interactive chose Sonoa’s API management solution.
Shared Web services present a variety of challenges to enterprises that offer varied access to regulated information across different groups of internal and external constituents. Metzger says TransUnion required uniform policy management across all applications and data sources accessed by its employees and partners in five specific areas: secure access, routing, caching, transformation and operations. What he described as a "very brief proof-of-concept" clarified the build or buy proposition. "We needed an XML gateway or a brokerage tier where we could implement and configure these policies independent of how many of the Consumer Connect capabilities a partner licensed."
TransUnion is using ServiceNet in a virtual in-house deployment that could one day extend to additional non-proprietary information on the cloud, Metzger says. Sonoa’s ServiceNet solution is also offered in an appliance model or as a hosted cloud-based service used by clients that include MTV, Warner Music and Pfizer that analyze incoming as well as outgoing traffic to ensure the quality of RSS feeds and other kinds of content. Sonoa VP of Marketing Scott Regan describes his company's solution as a kind of "circuit breaker" that manages and monitors controls on data and user access.
Jim Ericson is editorial director of Information Management, a SourceMedia publication. You can reach him at Jim.Ericson@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jimericson.
