TransUnion undergoes major modernization under Venkat Achanta's leadership

TransUnion, a global information and insights company, operates in over 30 countries, employing more than 13,000 associates and generating $4.5 billion in annual revenue. Under the leadership of Venkat Achanta, the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology, Data and Analytics Officer, the company has initiated a significant modernization effort. Achanta oversees a team of over 7,000 associates, focusing on product engineering, data science, information security, platform management, and data governance. The challenges faced included years of organic growth and acquisitions that resulted in more than 20 disparate technology stacks throughout the organization, presenting difficulties in presenting a unified enterprise structure to stakeholders and clients. As a critical part of the transformation, TransUnion adopted the OneTru platform, which acts as the core vehicle for facilitating modernization. This platform encapsulates the entire data and analytics value chain and allows the company to efficiently manage petabytes of sensitive consumer data. With this transformation, the company can derive thousands of models while delivering real-time insights through APIs, events, or batch processes. Internal teams using OneTru have acted as 'customer zero,' helping refine the platform for external client use. Several clients across various industries have since adopted the TruIQ suite, solidifying OneTru's role not only as a core internal solution but also as a foundation for client-facing services. Achanta also leads a significant organizational evolution focused on establishing platform engineering teams that support both the OneTru data platform and OneDev, a development enablement platform ensuring consistent policies and workflows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. He emphasized that the teams managing these platforms are guided by dedicated Chief Information Officers, while engineering leaders concentrate on product development and alignment with business objectives. The development of these platforms is essential in today’s fast-paced technology landscape, allowing TransUnion to maintain security and efficiency in handling vast amounts of sensitive data. Looking forward, Achanta has ambitions of expanding AI capabilities within the OneTru platform. This involves embedding AI agents that will enhance workflows from the initial stages of data onboarding through to model development. Additionally, he is focused on creating knowledge graphs and semantic layers that foster advanced reasoning capabilities at scale. TransUnion currently ingests over 50 billion interactions per day, representing an enormous challenge and opportunity for data-driven insight and decision-making. Achanta is committed to evolving the company’s technological backbone to remain competitive and agile in a rapidly changing market, and he has authored several bestselling books, including his latest work, 'Getting to Nimble.'