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Experian A/NZ acquires Australian fintech Look Who’s Charging to bolster open data offering

Experian Australia & New Zealand today announces its acquisition of Look Who’s Charging, the Australian fintech startup which has solved the everyday frustrating problem of unrecognised bank transactions by providing instant clarification on the merchant behind a transaction.

(L-R) Current view, Look Who’s Charging view, In-depth merchant details

Look Who’s Charging is integrated with a number of Australian banks, with their data available to millions of Australians directly within existing digital banking applications.

The move will combine Experian’s global open data solutions with Look Who’s Charging’s advanced enrichment capabilities. Following the recent legislation of Open Banking as the first stage of the Consumer Data Right (CDR), the deal will create a market leading open data platform in the Australian market that will have wide ranging benefits for consumers, businesses and financial institutions.

Experian’s present open data solution, built in the UK, facilitates 40% of all UK Open Banking application program interface (API) requests.

Andrew Black, Managing Director of Experian A/NZ explains how the acquisition enables Experian to provide organisations with a sophisticated aggregation and categorisation solution and granular insights for them to apply across their business:

“If a transaction is unable to be categorised accurately, it is often classed as ‘unknown’ which can result in decisions impacting consumers being based on limited data. This can have a big knock on effect if, for example, banks are using one platform to help a customer understand their own income and expenditure, and another to decide what loan they can afford.

“With Look Who’s Charging’s enriched data integrated into our open data platform, we will be able to provide a uniquely accurate and comprehensive solution for the Australian market. This will help our customers lend more responsibly while enhancing their fraud checks and reducing their call centre traffic for unrecognised transaction queries, as well as ensuring consumers have a greater understanding of their financial situation.”

Over 1 billion transactions are enriched every single month through Look Who’s Charging’s platform to provide Australian consumers complete clarity on their spending.

“Look Who’s Charging’s forward-looking and problem-solving nature is aligned with our business and approach to innovation,” adds Mr Black. “We share the aim to help businesses and consumers make better and more informed decisions, and we are delighted to be working with a company who is truly having a positive impact on not only our financial services industry but Australian consumers too.”

Ben Elliott, CEO of Experian APAC commented: “The acquisition – our sixth investment in Asia Pacific since 2017 (following venture investments in Grab, Jirnexu, C88 Financial Technologies, BankBazaar.com and CompareAsiaGroup) – demonstrates our ongoing commitment to investing in this region and using our advanced data and analytics expertise to remove complexity from the lending process. Bringing Look Who’s Charging and our innovative solutions together will help Australian organisations, and ultimately consumers, as Open Banking standards are adopted in Australia.”

Founder of Look Who’s Charging, Stuart Grover, said: “We are extremely excited to combine the technology and data we have built to support the Australian banks with Experian’s market leading open data technology. We are very proud to have built Look Who’s Charging from an idea, born from the frustration of unrecognised transactions to a product which helps millions of Australian consumers, in under 4 years.

“With Experian’s scale, we have an opportunity to help solve more of the immediate problems faced by Australian consumers and financial institutions, whilst the Look Who’s Charging solution is also rolled out to other key markets around the world.”