Dive Brief:
- Equifax named Bryson Koehler as its new chief technology officer on Thursday. In addition to overseeing global IT strategy and development, Koehler will work with data, analytics and products teams at Equifax to maximize technology in products and services. He will report directly to CEO Mark Begor.
- Koehler comes to Equifax from IBM Watson and IBM Cloud, where he also served as CTO. Before this, he served as chief technology and information officer at The Weather Company.
- Koehler will examine the use of artificial intelligence, especially in cloud-based technologies, as the company looks to improve security, reliability and data use, according to the announcement.
Dive Insight:
The appointment comes almost one year after Equifax discovered suspicious activity in a portal and nine months after the breach was made public. The company brought on Begor in April and a new CISO, Jamil Farshchi, in February.
Mark Rohrwasser, who was appointed interim CIO in September following fallout from the breach, will work with Koehler during the transition before returning to his former position of international CIO, according to an Equifax spokesperson. Russ Ayres, who was appointed interim CSO at the same time, is now deputy CISO.
As the new leadership team settles in and charts the path forward, Equifax has to fortify the systems that failed last year and keep pushing to stay ahead of the technology curve.
In March, the company launched a "regulatory-compliant" machine learning credit scoring system that uses neural networks to better assess risk. By bringing AI and ML projects to market that have been in the pipeline for several years, including an ML synthetic identity alert solution, the company is looking to keep abreast with competitors and rebuild trust in its products and services.
