Experian Integrates Commercial Data Into Its Ascend Platform To Empower Smarter Credit Decisions

Experian has announced that its full commercial credit data is now directly available inside the cloud-based Ascend analytics and decisioning platform, so lenders and other organisations can run analysis and build models on that data in one place. This is aimed at enabling faster, more accurate, and more automated credit decisioning, particularly for UK business lending.​

What Experian is adding

• Ascend users can now access Experian’s commercial data on more than eight million UK businesses, including detailed borrowing and repayment histories.​

• The integration exposes over six years of full‑file commercial credit data such as Commercial CAIS, Risk Scores and CATO, alongside the user’s own internal datasets.​

How it changes the Ascend platform

• Ascend remains a cloud-based analytics and decisioning environment, but now combines consumer, commercial and other data assets with advanced analytics tools in a single interface.​

• Users can work in the Ascend Analytical Sandbox to explore data, build and test models, and then deploy those models into production much more quickly than with traditional, separate systems.​

Benefits for credit decisioning

• Lenders gain a more holistic, granular view of SME performance, helping them assess risk, price credit, and set limits with greater confidence.​

• The integration removes the need for separate data feeds and manual pulls, which supports faster time-to-decision, better automation, and improved consistency across the credit lifecycle.​

Who it’s aimed at

• Primary users include banks and alternative lenders focused on SME and corporate lending, as well as other organisations that need commercial credit risk insight (for example, insurers or large corporates).​

• Experian notes that major financial institutions such as Metro Bank have already participated in pilots using this commercial data within Ascend to support lending models before the full launch.​

If you share your role (e.g., bank, fintech, corporate), a tailored outline of concrete use cases and workflows for this new capability can be provided.