TransUnion

According to the group, Chinese cars that entered the market four or five years ago are now coming back as trade-ins, and some owners are discovering that their vehicles are worth far less than they expected.

And there's evidence supporting CMH's concerns, so research from TransUnion found that the Chery Tiggo 4 Pro lost 27.1% of its value over three years, compared with just 20.5% for the Kia Sonet.

Furthermore, Chinese brands now account for roughly 20% of new car sales in South Africa.

But with so many new names entering the market, CMH says that it's difficult to know which ones survive for the long term.

Exactly.

Even credit bureaus like TransUnion are having to add synthetic identity fraud scores now.

The entire financial system is basically trying to engineer ways to protect you from yourself.

OK, but I have to zero in on this phrase Incognito uses, location derived relationships.

Okay.

And this is a federally authorized website for requesting free credit reports from all the three primary bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.

And you can request those.

It used to be actually once a year, but now it's actually as much as once a week, and there's no charge, right? Okay.

Royal Caribbean, upside.

S&P Global, TransUnion, HCA, Freeport, Kirk, Hubble, Johnson Controls, Pantera, Corning.

Everyone has strong upside.

And so I think we need to broaden the lens on realizing that maybe all of this economic activity from AI is bleeding out further.

Siloed or incomplete data was the top reason that marketers gave for doubting their measurement in a July 2025 survey.

of 196 US marketers by eMarketer and TransUnion.

And just to note that TransUnion also sells its own MTA product.

Now Albertsons and Best Buy have that same limit.

They only report back sales and exposures made through their systems.

And Jack Foster from LiveRamp thinks that that's kind of the point.

I think that we need to trust brands, he says, and the retailer partners to be able to make decisions and not spoon feed them an answer and have us all pretend that it's 100% accurate," he said to me.

And just wrapping up here, the marketers in this survey from TransUnion and eMarketer aren't finished with MTA.

And that's pretty much the only reason why your credit score is between the random range of numbers that it is.

If a company has the inputs, and when I say if a company, there's actually three credit bureaus who are separate from FICO, Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

You've probably heard of at least some, if not all of those in the past.

The credit bureaus kind of stand between FICO and then you and lenders.

And it's this whole ecosystem where either you or lenders are providing information to the credit bureaus, that's Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.

And then the credit bureaus are taking that information that shows up on your credit report and using the FICO algorithms.

And there are there is not just one FICO score.

So you can check your credit multiple times a year.

FICO has been a monopoly for decades.

There's always been an alternative called VantageScore that's run by the credit bureaus like TransUnion and Equifax, but no one ever used it because the financial services infrastructure is based on FICO.

Okay, most of the loans in the U.S., like Canada, are securitized and resold as mortgage-backed securities, right? And so no one wants to buy a loan, a commercial loan, commercial manager doesn't want to buy a loan if they can't trust the credit score.

So that's why FICO exists.

It's going as a social credit score.

So much that the CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, this is the bureau that helps you remove and delete items off your credit reports, you know, Experience, TransUnion, and Equifax.

These are the people that you write a letter to to basically clean up your credit and they help protect consumers.

But the chatbots in consumer finance, they issue a strong, strong warning on this.