The people who studied these systems — and helped reform them.

Dr. Michael Turner is one of the foremost authorities on consumer credit, credit access, and alternative data. For more than two decades he has worked with governments, regulators, lenders, and development institutions to use data more fairly in credit decisioning — work that has helped open the door to credit for hundreds of millions of people. He coined the term “credit invisible.”

He founded and leads PERC and its affiliated research centers, including the Information Policy Institute, the Alternative Data Institute, and the Asia-Pacific Credit Coalition — heading a body of work that spans consumer credit, data policy, and financial inclusion across continents.

This work is not purely academic. Michael's June 2003 report on fair credit reporting was debated in Congress, which adopted all six of PERC's recommendations into FACTA. He has presented findings to the U.S. Congress and state legislatures, federal agencies, and central banks and finance ministries worldwide, and has served on the DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee.

Beyond credit reporting, Michael has been retained as a damages expert in data-breach matters, quantifying the consumer harm that follows large-scale exposures of personal and financial data.

Patrick Walker is a credit-scoring and quantitative-research expert who has designed models, run large-scale empirical studies, and briefed senior officials on how credit reporting and scoring changes affect real people. His work turns raw credit data into rigorous, understandable evidence for courts, regulators, and lenders.

His experience sits at the intersection of economics, statistics, and credit operations: constructing and evaluating credit-scoring models built on traditional and alternative data, simulating how new data sources change score distributions and access, and measuring the performance and risk characteristics of newly scored populations.

Patrick has led studies showing how fully reporting utility and telecom data can turn previously unscored consumers into scorable, good-performing borrowers, and has presented findings to U.S. housing and financial regulators, central banks, and international institutions. He is skilled at making complex statistical work clear to non-technical audiences while giving opposing experts enough detail to engage.