Redefining Auto Insurance Credit Economics at Rate Call 1

September 15, 2026 / 3 min read

For decades, personal auto insurers faced a hard tradeoff: absorb acquisition costs to access valuable credit-based underwriting insights, or delay credit ordering and compromise customer experience, pricing precision, segmentation, and efficiency.

Today, that equation is changing.

Verisk and Equifax are redefining how insurers assess credit risk through the Inflection™ Credit-Based Insurance Score. By combining advanced trended-credit predictive analytics with per-bind licensing options, insurers can move underwriting insight directly into the quote workflow while aligning costs to written business.

driving through traffic

There’s a new, affordable inflection point for auto insurance: access modern, economically resilient, trended-credit predictive analytics at Rate Call 1—yet pay only when you bind the business.

Challenge legacy credit economics

Many insurance leaders still operate under a legacy transactional model for credit data, even as they recognize that auto’s multiple-rate-call model is broken. In a soft market, cost pressure often pushes carriers to delay credit ordering, reducing report spend but limiting access to risk insights when they can matter most.

The question is no longer whether credit-based insurance scores create value. Credit has long been recognized as a powerful predictor of policyholder risk. The question is whether traditional access models are still built for modern market conditions.

Inflection redefines credit-based insurance score economics by removing many of these barriers. By bringing advanced underwriting insights to Rate Call 1 and aligning costs to written business, insurers can sharpen pricing precision while unlocking meaningful cost-saving opportunities.

"Insurers need faster access to predictive credit insights earlier into the customer journey. Together, Equifax and Verisk are helping insurers move advanced credit intelligence to Rate Call 1 in ways that were previously impractical from both a workflow and economic perspective." Bob Homer, GM - SVP Insurance and Alliances at Equifax

Activate intelligence at Rate Call 1

Leading insurers recognize that the quote experience is a defining moment in personal auto insurance. Inside the solution, the Inflection InitialQuote Score (IQS) helps insurers make more informed decisions at the start of the quoting process through APIs or Verisk’s LightSpeed^® Personal Auto acquisition platform.

Verisk Inflection

This approach addresses a fundamental challenge: improve underwriting insight without adding friction. Bringing credit analytics to Rate Call 1 can drive more accurate quotes, more efficient workflows, and a more satisfying customer experience while helping insurers identify opportunities earlier.

Equally important, Inflection is a modern, resilient, trended-credit model, jointly developed and supported by vast insurance expertise. Unlike point-in-time approaches, trended analytics provide a more consistent view of consumer risk by smoothing temporary fluctuations and spanning economic cycles.¹ The model also reflects the realities of today’s digital-first consumer.²

Accelerate profitable growth across auto and homeowners

Of course, a better economic model for accessing the solution only matters if the analytics deliver.

Inflection combines innovative delivery with predictive performance. Built by two powerful players encompassing insurance and consumer credit reporting, the auto and new homeowners credit-based insurance scores help carriers microsegment risk through a balanced framework that evaluates manageable credit behaviors and the relative severity of attributes.

Verisk analyses indicate that Inflection delivers up to 2.8X lift between the lowest and highest risk bands,³ helping insurers better align risk and rate while enhancing segmentation and underwriting precision.

According to Joe Wodark, Vice President of Auto Underwriting Solutions at Verisk:

"Verisk and Equifax moved beyond trying to build a better score. As industry leaders, we challenged ourselves to rethink how insurers access credit risk insight, how they pay for it, and how they use it to improve underwriting outcomes."

verisk equifax

Inflection isn’t just another credit-based insurance score. It is a new way to access credit—helping insurers improve segmentation, reduce friction, increase conversion, and accelerate profitable growth.

Build your business case

Why pay the same for quotes that never bind? Innovation isn’t just about stronger predictive models. It’s also about smarter economic models.

The result is transparent pricing that gives carriers greater flexibility to modernize underwriting workflows, explore straight-through processing, and build a stronger business case for moving credit-based insurance insights earlier into the customer journey.

Verisk supports retrospective analyses, proof-of-concept tests, implementation planning, and migration assessments to help insurers evaluate the opportunity. Discover the power of Inflection, where 100% of Verisk’s complete-variable retrospective analyses have demonstrated lift.

Contact your Verisk account executive to learn more

Request a proof of concept

1. Verisk-Equifax study of a random sample of 6 million+ anonymous credit-active consumer records from the first quarter of each year from 2008-2010 where an insurable interest could be identified, conducted in 2020. The average Inflection score varied only 11 points out of a range of 600 over the time period.
2. Equifax reports inquiries for mobile phone, internet, and pay TV account openings as “soft” inquiries, and Inflection does not decrease scores for these digital consumers.
3. Verisk analysis using Equifax and ISO data, 2025; between the lowest and highest risk bands in predicting losses over control models that don’t include credit-based attributes.