Equifax UK Signs Data Partnership With The Access Group

Equifax UK said on November 4, 2026 that it has signed a data partnership with The Access Group, giving lenders instant, consent-based income and employment checks on more than one million employee records held in Access payroll systems.

The deal is not a financing event, and no investment or the Access Group funding behind it has been announced. It is a data supply agreement, and it matters to finance teams on both sides of the payroll relationship.

For employers on Access software, it promises fewer manual requests from lenders and mortgage brokers for payslips and employment letters. For accountants who run payroll for clients, it adds another route by which staff data leaves the ledger and reaches a credit file provider.

Equifax and Access disclosed no launch date, no pricing and no list of covered products. They also did not say how many Access employers are in scope. The one figure published is the record count, and it comes from Equifax.

What Equifax and The Access Group have agreed

Employees of organisations that use Access payroll software will be able to share their income and employment status digitally when they apply for mortgages, loans or credit cards. They will not need to ask HR or payroll teams for payslips or employment documents.

Equifax said employees authorise each sharing of their information directly from the source, with explicit consent. That places the employee, not the employer, in control of each release.

Kristina Burwood-Ansell, director of consumer products at Equifax UK, framed the record count as the point of the deal.

“By providing over a million employee records for instant verification, we accelerate the application process.” Kristina Burwood-Ansell, Director of Consumer Products, Equifax UK

Charles Butterworth, managing director of the people division at The Access Group, said the company chose Equifax “because of their established global leadership in verification services.”

Equifax also said the arrangement automates income and employment requests that now reach HR and payroll staff by hand. The companies published no time-saving figure to test that.

How the Equifax verification service works

The Access Group payroll data feeds Equifax’s Verification Exchange, part of its Workforce Solutions business. The service gives lenders and other verifiers a view of an applicant’s employment and income status without a manual request to the employer.

Equifax lists retail credit decisions, pre-employment screening and debt management as its use cases. Its developer documentation does not say where the underlying data originates, and the announcement does not name which Access payroll products supply it.

Access sells payroll within a wider people platform, and the term “Access payroll” covers more than one product. Until Equifax and Access publish a product list, a practice cannot tell which of its clients’ employees are in scope.

The mechanism is a form of payroll integration: pay and employment records move from the employer’s system to a third party by interface, not by email. Firms weighing how such connections are built can read Accountio’s piece on data integration in accounting firms.

The Access Group funding and scale behind the deal

The Access Group funding history explains why a payroll supplier can offer a credit bureau this much data. Hg and TA Associates invested in the company in 2018 at an enterprise value of about £1bn, according to Hg’s 2022 announcement.

In 2022 the Access Group funding round valued the business at £9.2bn, with Hg and TA investing again and GIC joining as a minority investor. That figure is the most recent valuation disclosed, and it predates this partnership by four years.

Scale gives the company a large installed base of employers. Equifax’s one million figure covers records only, not the number of employers or the share of Access payroll customers who will switch the feature on.

The Access Group funding has paid for years of acquisitions across payroll, HR and finance software. Firms choosing between standalone and bundled tools can compare the field in Accountio’s guide to accounting software with payroll.

Where the partnership sits among rivals

The Access Group already works with more than one credit reference agency. In March 2023 Experian announced a partnership with Access that lifted its employment and income coverage to 77% of UK employees.

That deal runs through Experian’s Work Report service. Employees consent to share pay data with lenders, and the service confirms income, employment status and tenure within seconds.

Equifax signed a similar arrangement with Sage in January 2023. Its Sage partnership connected Verification Exchange to Sage payroll software so that verifiers no longer contact employers directly.

The Access Group therefore sits with both Experian and Equifax. For a lender, the practical question is which bureau holds the record for a given applicant, and the answer will depend on the applicant’s payroll provider.

What the partnership means for employers and payroll teams

Employees will carry the consent decision, and employers will still hold the underlying records. Under UK GDPR, consent must be specific, informed and freely given, and it must be as easy to withdraw as to give. Neither Equifax nor Access has said how its consent screen, withdrawal route or retention period will work.

Payroll teams should expect questions from staff about what is shared and who sees it. Practices that run payroll for clients can prepare by checking their data protection paperwork against the UK GDPR pack for practices and, for EU clients, the EU GDPR pack.

Payroll leaders who want a wider view of the system and data problems involved can read Inside Payroll. The practical gain, if the service works as described, is fewer ad hoc requests landing on a payroll inbox in the week of a mortgage application.

The claims of faster and simpler checks cannot be tested yet. No processing times, error rates or adoption figures have been published, and the companies have given no pricing for lenders or employers.

What to watch next is the announcement of a launch date and a list of covered Access payroll products. Those two details will show how many employers can offer the service, and whether the one million records translate into live checks.