Ireland-based Experian’s Global Research & Development Centre opened in Cyberjaya on 5 November and will employ up to 210 staff within its first year, including 130 initially. Experian  will also invest up to US$50 million in the centre over the next five years.

Experian employs 15,500 staff across 38 countries and supplies around 2,000 information analytics and marketing services software and solutions to clients including organisations from the financial services, retail and catalogue, telecommunications, utilities, media, insurance, automotive, leisure, e-commerce, manufacturing, property and government sectors.

“We chose Malaysia out of 38 countries to locate our centre for the technical aptitude of its people, their ability to communicate in English, availability of skills and related infrastructure, intellectual property protection, easy logistics and support by the Multimedia Development Corporation,” said  said Ken Sansom, Experiann president, Asia Pacific.

Its Cyberjaya R&D centre, which is Experian’s only one so far for its decision analytics solutions worldwide, will exclusively develop Java-based solutions for Windows, Unix and mainframe computers for its customers worldwide.

These products include software installed on its clients’ computer systems as well as hosted in data centres and are accessible online.

The centre will initially hire experienced staff with at least two years experience and up to 10 years experience for senior staff.

“Later on, we will have a graduate programme to hire fresh graduates and are working with MDeC on this,” said Andy Went, the Global R&D Centre’s operations director.

Experian’s hiring policy is based on the overall quality of the person and suitability for the job, rather than the class of his or her degree. All applicants must sit for a technical test and they must also go through peer-to-peer interviews with its existing staff to further determine their suitability for the job.

Over the last 30 years, Experian had developed best practice analytical, consulting and product capabilities which help organisations to manage and prevent risk; prevent, detect and reduce fraud; meet regulatory obligations; and gain operational efficiencies through the customers’ relationship.

Its products combine data, analytics and software to improve decision making across the whole customer and consumer lifecycle and help its clients target and acquire customers, check their credit worthiness, retain customers, conduct customer relationship management and loyalty programmes.

Examples of hosted solutions are Experian’s fraud detection software which looks for patterns in data and maps them against known fraud patterns and puts in referral.

Hitwise, an Experian company, offers competitive intelligence online by monitoring how 25 million Internet users worldwide interact with 450,000 businesses and prduces reports, so that each one can profile their competitors and identify their marketing partners.

Experian CheetahMail offers email marketing and customer intelligence solutions plus a broad range of client services.