Transunion has a lot of data. Does this trove of bits create a moat that startups attacking the credit data/scoring space will be unable to breach? And what exactly is the benefit of all this information? Transunion's data scientist will need to be able to actually do something with all of those bytes. And those of us that have worked with large dataset know that "big" data doesn't necessarily equate with "better" data. Lastly, do regulatory constraints render the insights gleaned from all of this data hoarding inactionable? These are all questions that I have yet to see answer too. Perhaps TransUnion can find them somewhere in the sexy new data stack they're building...
Do you know what a petabyte is? Well, TransUnion — which filed for an IPO last week — has 30 of them, and that number has been growing 25% every year since 2010. Those 30 petabytes (1 million gigabytes, for those of you who are not “Big Bang Theory” cast members) include data on 1 billion consumers worldwide. And TransUnion, which filed to go public last week, plans to continue growing its data on you in order to achieve a CAGR of 15% through 2018.
http://bankinnovation.net/2015/04/transunions-database-on-consumers-grows-25-every-year/