Executive Spotlight: Frank Blaul of Equifax

Frank Blaul of Equifax

Frank Blaul, senior vice president of government services at Equifax, spoke with ExecutiveBiz about his firm, his management style and the biggest challenges in the business today.

ExecutiveBiz: Could you briefly tell our readers about your background and your current role at Equifax?

Frank Blaul: My background really spans the last 25 years where I have worked for/with Fortune 200 companies within the IT space; companies like HP, IBM, EDS and Xerox, to mention a few.  Over the course of my career, I have served on several industry/technology advisory councils sharing best practices on how to successfully develop an effective channels relationship strategy. This experience has been particularly valuable with respect to how manufacturers vs. services providers plan for growth and manage their business. I’ve been schooled on the Deming’s Total Quality Management (TQM) process, a process that became very popular to the U.S. back in the early ’90s, and today’s popular Six Sigma management process.

My career started directly out of college in the mid ’80s with a company that was traded at the time by the name of R.H. Donnelley (Telco’s Yellow Pages marketer), which was a Dunn & Bradstreet subsidiary. My sales, sales management and general management career developed over time. I served as president and general manager for an office products distribution company for approximately seven years. In this position, I had sales, marketing, finance and operations-related responsibilities. It was this role that provided me with a strong foundation and true day-to-day operating and P&L experience. It also taught me the importance of surrounding yourself with good people. I’ve worked with VC-backed firms and have also worked in industries that extend from the commercial to the public sector.

One of the greatest management experiences that I had was at IBM. At the time, the company wanted to regain its No. 1 share in the Enterprise Storage market segment worldwide. The company had a hard time accepting that a competitor’s storage device and software tools were managing terabytes of information connected to IBM’s 390 Mainframe computing systems. Over an approximate 24-month period, the company was able to double its business and regain its No. 1 share position in the enterprise segment. The worldwide business unit expanded from approximately $1.3B to $3B.

ExecutiveBiz: Explain your role at Equifax.

Frank Blaul: My primary responsibility at Equifax is to expand our current footprint into the Government Sector. This will be achieved by leveraging our existing contract base, aligning our core solutions capabilities to the Government Sector, and expanding our relationships with the systems integrator community and with small businesses that have a good past performance track record. Presently, we are in the process of increasing the number of capabilities we have available on our GSA Advantage Schedule.

ExecutiveBiz: Equifax isn’t really known for its government space; maybe you can talk about that.

Frank Blaul: When you think of the Equifax name, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

ExecutiveBiz: Credit.

Frank Blaul: Yes, a credit bureau. The true story is that we are really much more than a credit bureau. For instance, over the course of the last three years, we have invested over $1.5B, adding wealth, employment and income information to our data assets.

Equifax is a global provider of information solutions for businesses and consumers. We’re in 16 countries and we provide products and services that are based on databases of consumer and business information derived from numerous types of credit, financial, public record, small business, demographic and marketing data – much of it unique to us. We use analytical tools to analyze this data to create customized insights, decision-making solutions and processing services for businesses and the government.

Since I’ve been here over the last year or so, we have been conducting interviews and meetings with the government in order to learn more about what it is they want and need. We have a 110-year history of solving business issues and we’re translating the company’s capabilities, offerings and value proposition to help the government solve critical information solutions problems.

We have surveyed the market; we’ve listened closely to our clients and partners so that we have a better understanding of where the government can utilize our capabilities. As a result, we’re focusing on four practice areas: investigative services, workforce management, ID management and predictability sciences and analytics. Equifax has been a longstanding partner with the government and we are operating off a solid contract base. We have many core agencies in our portfolio with which we do business. My role is to take that contract base and expand it; utilizing a sell-to, sell-through sales model.

ExecutiveBiz: What is your plan for partnering with the systems integrators community to grow your business?

Frank Blaul: That’s a great question. The systems integrator community and the small business community are clearly a part of our strategy. As you know, the federal systems integrators – when you talk about IT modernization, infrastructure, data center consolidation, application development, business Intelligence, data warehousing and cybersecurity – they’ve really got the depth and breadth in these areas and have active contracts.  They are able to provide a full 360-degree solution to help government solve for those areas that I’ve mentioned and, in addition, serve as the primary contractor to be held accountable for the contracts Service Level Agreements (SLA’s).

ExecutiveBiz: What would you say your biggest challenge in business is today?

Frank Blaul: Equifax is a household name in the banking, telco, auto and financial services industries, providing information solutions on consumers.

1. Our No. 1 focus is to improve our brand awareness in the government sector; to become the thought and category leader like we have in the other industries mentioned.

2. Today, we are primarily thought of as a credit bureau that provides online credit monitoring for government employees, which is not the complete story. Many government clients are not aware that we have been in the commercial market segment for ten years, i.e., providing risk scores on business establishments. A recent OMB report has suggested that in FY 2009, there was over $100B of improperly paid funds to contractors alone! We have the technology, data assets and solutions to help mitigate against this activity.

3. There is a lot of dialogue going on right now around federal contracting and the aging workforce, while the government has promised to become more transparent. Our workforce solutions will enable the government to quickly verify a perspective candidate’s employment and income information. Our E-ID Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA) solutions, combined with our data, software, technology and analytics, will help the government validate individuals coming into their firewalls.

4. Finally, we have tremendous analytics-trending capabilities tied to consumers and small businesses to help predict and determine ability to pay. We see this demand increasing, particularly from many of the banking/financial regulators and lenders with large lending portfolios.

ExecutiveBiz: How would you describe your management style?

Frank Blaul: I’m hands-on and would never ask somebody to do something that I’ve never done or wouldn’t do myself.  I have strong ethics and I believe in people delivering upon what they say they are going to deliver upon. In my role, I’m here to help and serve as a sounding board for my team, not to do their job. I genuinely believe people are a company’s greatest asset. That’s how I would sum it up.

ExecutiveBiz: What else are people surprised to learn about Equifax that our readers should know?

Frank Blaul: Equifax has unmatched data assets when you think of attributes around credit, financial information, wealth, employment and income information and verification. We have vast depth and tremendous assets around public records and demographics.  The information that we have – on 260 million consumers, 180 million households, 25 million business establishments, and so on – it really translates into a strong value proposition in the Government market space.  It positions us well to be that trusted adviser to the government, the systems integrator community and to the small business community as well.

ExecutiveBiz: What is something most people don’t know about you, personally?

Frank Blaul: I have four children and I am what is referred to as a Catholic Christian development leader. I teach sixth-grade students on Sunday mornings for St. Luke’s Catholic Church in McLean.  I’ve been known for my passions associated with running, weight training, golf and cars.

ExecutiveBiz: Those are all of the questions that I had, was there anything else that you would like to add?

Frank Blaul: For your audience – I would encourage them to call upon us to learn more or refer them to our website at www.equifax.com/government. We’ve got a phenomenal team here with great subject-matter expertise.

Posted by Staff Writer on Tuesday, September 14th, 2010. Filed under General, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry