Equifax UK and The Access Group Partner for Instant Income and Employment Verification

Equifax UK and The Access Group have established a strategic data partnership to automate income and employment verification for over one million employees. By integrating payroll data directly with credit referencing, the move eliminates manual paperwork for mortgage and loan applications, significantly reducing friction in the lending journey for both consumers and financial institutions.

What was announced

The partnership integrates The Access Group’s payroll software with Equifax’s verification services to provide a digital-first alternative to traditional document gathering. This allows employees of organisations using Access software to verify their financial status instantly and digitally when applying for financial products such as mortgages, loans, or credit cards. Previously, these individuals typically had to manually request payslips from HR departments, compile documents, and wait for lenders to process physical or scanned files, a process that often introduced delays at critical moments in the application cycle.

Under the new system, when an employee applies for credit, they are given the option to share their information directly from the source. This is facilitated through a secure digital journey where data is shared only with the explicit consent of the employee. Equifax provides over a million employee records for this instant verification process, drawing data directly from The Access Group's payroll systems. This approach is designed to provide lenders with the certainty and security needed for responsible decision-making while removing the administrative burden from employer HR teams. The service is a component of Equifax’s broader Income Verification suite, an ecosystem designed to accelerate the application process through instant data verification across the UK.

"This partnership with The Access Group supports our commitment to ensuring that UK consumers and lenders can access the information they need in a friction-free way while helping to reduce the administrative burden for employers. By providing over a million employee records for instant verification, we accelerate the application process and provide the certainty and security that lenders need to make responsible decisions, faster. It also reinforces how the broader Income Verification suite is a leading ecosystem for instant data verification."

Kristina Burwood-Ansell, Director of Consumer Products at Equifax UK

"Our customers trust us to help them run their payroll efficiently, and that relationship extends to the employees whose pay we process. We chose to partner with Equifax because of their established global leadership in verification services and extensive network of lending clients. It enables us to offer something genuinely valuable to those employees: the ability to verify their income and employment instantly, at the moment it matters most, without any of the usual hassle. It's a natural extension of what we do, and we're proud to be making a real difference to people's financial lives."

Charles Butterworth, Managing Director of People Division at The Access Group

The companies involved

Equifax UK is a major credit reference agency and a subsidiary of the global Equifax corporation. The company plays a central role in the UK’s financial infrastructure, providing the data and analytics that underpin lending decisions across the banking and credit sectors. It has a significant presence in the verification services market, leveraging its global scale to provide tools for identity, income, and employment checks that help mitigate risk for financial institutions.

The Access Group is a prominent provider of business management software, including payroll and HR solutions. Its People Division, led by Managing Director Charles Butterworth, handles the pay and records of a vast workforce across the UK. The company focuses on helping organisations run their operations efficiently, and this partnership represents an extension of its core payroll services into the financial well-being of its clients' employees. By partnering with Equifax, The Access Group connects its extensive payroll network with a wide ecosystem of lending clients, facilitating smoother financial interactions for the individuals whose data it manages. Both companies occupy influential positions in their respective fields of data management and business software, focusing on the digitisation of previously manual administrative tasks.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed Equifax UK’s efforts to integrate data into consumer-facing financial tools. Recently, the agency was selected by Nationwide Taps Equifax UK to Provide In-App Credit Scores for 6 Million Users, a move that brought credit visibility directly to a massive retail banking audience. The company has also been active in providing consumer guidance, such as when Equifax UK Issues Financial Health Tips as Energy Price Cap Rises to £1,723. Additionally, Equifax has participated in broader industry initiatives, including the SuperTech WM Launches Open Innovation Lab to Combat Fraud in the West Midlands. These developments occur alongside shifting consumer habits, as noted in reports where Young UK Consumers Ditch Credit Cards as BNPL Claims 22% of Retail Finance.

What this means

This partnership highlights a significant shift toward "source-of-truth" data in the lending industry. By bypassing the consumer as the primary document gatherer, lenders can mitigate the risks of fraud and human error associated with manual uploads and "doctored" payslips. This moves the needle for the UK mortgage market specifically, where "time to offer" remains a key competitive metric for lenders. However, it puts pressure on traditional credit bureaus and verification providers who lack direct integrations with major payroll providers. The success of such initiatives raises questions about the long-term role of Open Banking versus direct API integrations with HR systems in the race for instant credit decisions.