If you use Faraday — for predictions, appends, personas, or anything in between — you've been using the [Faraday Identity Graph (FIG)](/catalog) whether you knew it or 
not. FIG is the foundation everything runs on: a continuously refreshed collection of 1,500+ attributes on 240 million US consumers, curated and normalized from leading data vendors. Every lead score, every data append, every audience we help you build draws from it.

Consumer data is the foundation of modern marketing — and what businesses need from that foundation has changed. Models are getting more sophisticated and need richer, time-aware inputs to keep getting better. Marketers want to act on signals the moment they emerge, not weeks later. Data science teams want documentation and metadata they can actually build with. And operations teams want predictable release cadences that fit their change management processes.

FIG v2 is built for where consumer data needs to go next. It's a complete rebuild of our consumer data system that introduces historical data, an expanded and redesigned attribute catalog, continuous data refreshes, and release pinning — so the foundation underneath your marketing keeps pace with what your business is asking of it.

Here's what's new:

## 1. Hundreds of new attributes, with richer signal across the board

We expanded our underlying [attribute set](/catalog) significantly — adding hundreds of new data points to capture consumer signals we couldn't surface before. We also harmonized unwieldy groups of related attributes into cleaner replacements with more expressive, consistent names.

**What this means for you:** richer raw material for every prediction, append, and audience you build. More signal in the data means models can pick up on patterns that were previously invisible, which translates directly to better prospect targeting and higher marketing ROI.

## 2. A redesigned catalog you can actually navigate

We rebuilt our [data catalog](/catalog) from scratch around the expanded attribute set — retiring data points that weren't pulling their weight and reshaping what remains around the attributes that consistently drive better prediction quality. Every attribute now comes with detailed documentation: descriptions, visual data distributions, and technical metadata designed for both marketers and data scientists.

**What this means for you:** less time hunting for the right attribute, faster model iteration for your data science team, and a catalog that both marketers and analysts can actually use without a data science degree. 

## 3. Historical data

FIG v2 carries the [full history of values for every attribute](/blog/fig-v2-historical-data), each one timestamped and annotated with precision and source metadata. Rather than knowing someone's income is \$85,000 today, you now know it was \$62,000 five years ago, \$74,000 three years ago, and \$85,000 today.

This is possible because Faraday has been a careful steward of consumer data for over a decade. We've been collecting, normalizing, and preserving these observations the whole time. FIG v2 is the first time we've been able to surface all of that accumulated history in a structured, ML-ready format — every attribute is now a timeline of events rather than a single point in time.

**What this means for you:** dramatically better predictive models. Models trained on current-state data are actually learning what people look like *after* they convert — not before. Take a home remodeling brand trying to predict who'll buy new windows: after someone buys, there's a contractor transaction, possibly a HELOC, elevated home-improvement spend. Those signals weren't there when they were still a prospect. If your training data captures people as they look *after* converting, the model goes hunting for prospects who already bought.

With FIG v2, we can press rewind and train on what a person looked like just before they became a lead — so models learn what a genuine pre-purchase prospect looks like and get dramatically better at finding more of them.

For data science teams, every historical observation comes with the metadata you need to use it directly: data types, statistical types, directionality guidance, coverage breakdowns. If your team builds internal models and wants rich consumer context that goes back in time, this is the dataset to do it with.

## 4. Fresher data, delivered continuously

Our new infrastructure [ingests fresh data from vendors as soon as we receive it](/blog/fig-v2-freshness-release-pinning) — no more waiting for scheduled monolithic releases.

**What this means for you:** less stale targeting and fewer wasted impressions. This matters most for time-sensitive signals like recent movers, life events, and income changes — the kinds of triggers where a few weeks of lag can mean the difference between reaching someone at the right moment and missing them entirely.

## 5. Release pinning

We've heard from many of you that you love getting the most current data automatically. We've also heard from teams with strict change management requirements who need more control over when their data updates. FIG v2 supports both. You can now [pin your account to a specific FIG release](/blog/fig-v2-freshness-release-pinning), and new updates won't apply until you move your pin date forward.

**What this means for you:** stability when you need it, freshness when you want it. Teams with regulated workflows, locked-in model versions, or careful release calendars get to upgrade on their own schedule — without sacrificing access to the latest data when they're ready.

### **What this means for your account**

* **FIG v2 is live today for all new accounts**  
* **Existing accounts will be migrated over the coming months** — no account will be moved without coordination with your team  
* **Your current account keeps running as-is** throughout the process — there's no disruption until you're ready  
* **Questions about your migration or timeline?** Reach out to your account manager

## Ready for even better customer data?

FIG v2 is a fundamental shift in what consumer data can do inside Faraday — better models, fresher data, hundreds of new attributes, a catalog you can actually navigate, and a release cadence that respects your operations. 

We're working through migrations as quickly as we can and will be in touch when it's your turn. In the meantime, if you want to go deeper on what's changed and why, reach out to your account management team or [read the full FIG v2 series](/blog/series/figv2).

FIG v2 is a complete rebuild of Faraday's consumer data system, introducing historical data, redesigned attributes, fresher updates, and new tools to make customer data easier to discover, deploy, and operationalize.

Now live: FIG v2 - the biggest upgrade to our customer data system, ever

If you've been following our FIG v2 series, you've already read about the [overhauled data catalog](/blog/fig-v2-data-catalog) and the [historical data upgrade](/blog/fig-v2-historical-data) that makes your models dramatically more accurate. Today I want to close out the series with something that might sound like a backend plumbing detail—but has real consequences for anyone running production pipelines on Faraday data: how we handle data freshness, and the new release pinning controls that come with it.

## How most identity graphs handle updates (and why that's a problem)

To understand why this matters, it helps to know how data updates typically work in the identity data industry.

Most identity graphs operate on a monolithic release model. Providers work with many data vendors, each of whom delivers updated data snapshots on their own schedule. The standard approach is to either wait for all vendors to deliver their latest data, or simply release on a fixed schedule—monthly, quarterly—regardless of when the underlying data actually arrived. Either way, the result is the same: a gap between when data is collected in the real world and when it's available to you.

The obvious problem: every day you spend waiting is another day the data sits there getting older. The release cycle itself introduces latency that has nothing to do with how fresh the underlying data actually was. **FIG v2 eliminates that bottleneck entirely.**

## Rolling releases: freshness without the wait

Now with FIG v2, instead of waiting for a full vendor sweep before publishing an update, we ingest each vendor's data the moment it arrives. Each new observation is processed, normalized, and added to the appropriate attribute's history vector—timestamped, sourced, and immediately available—without waiting for anything else.

The result is rolling releases. Every time even a single vendor delivers updated data, that data flows into FIG v2 right away. There's no more monolithic "release event" to wait for. The gap between when data is collected in the real world and when it's available to you in Faraday shrinks dramatically.

For most attributes, this is just a nice quality-of-life improvement—fresher data, more often. But for certain attributes, it's much more significant. Pre-mover signals, for example, are almost entirely time-sensitive. A pre-mover flag that's six weeks stale is considerably less valuable than one that arrived yesterday. With rolling releases, those high-velocity attributes stay sharp.

## Release pinning: you control when freshness flows in

Fresher data is almost always better — but there's a legitimate exception. If you're running a mission-critical pipeline and you've carefully validated the data distributions it depends on, constant rolling updates can feel like a liability. Think an automated risk scoring model at an insurance company, or a lead prioritization pipeline that's deeply integrated into a sales team's daily workflow — cases where an unexpected shift in data distributions could quietly change outputs in ways that are hard to detect and costly to diagnose. If you're in one of those situations (or something similar), you don't want things shifting under your feet without warning.

That's what release pinning is for.

In FIG v2, you can pin any individual pipeline to a specific date. What that means concretely: any new consumer data incorporated into FIG *after* that date is simply ignored for that pipeline. The pipeline keeps running—against exactly the data it was validated against—until you decide you're ready to move it forward.

The workflow this enables is deliberate and controlled. Say you're running a critical pipeline and a new round of vendor data has just been ingested into FIG. Rather than letting it flow in automatically, you:

1. **Make a copy of the pipeline.** The copy runs against the newer data.  
2. **Do your validation.** Check distributions, spot-check outputs, confirm that everything downstream still behaves as expected.  
3. **When you're satisfied, advance the pin date on your production pipeline.** The new data flows in. The copy gets retired.

You can do this on whatever cadence makes sense for your team—monthly, quarterly, or whenever a new vendor refresh comes in that you want to evaluate. You get the benefit of fresher data without ever being surprised by it.

For teams that don't need this level of control, the default behavior is simple: data stays fresh automatically, with no manual steps required.

## Freshness and stability, on your terms

The two ideas here—rolling releases and release pinning—are designed to work together. Rolling releases make FIG v2 the freshest consumer data platform we've ever built. Release pinning makes sure that freshness doesn't come at the cost of predictability for the teams who need it most.

Together, they represent something we think is genuinely new in the market: a consumer data system that treats data freshness not as a fixed property you accept or reject wholesale, but as a dial you can tune per-pipeline based on your actual operational needs.

If you want to learn more or start testing these capabilities in your account, reach out to your account management team. And if you missed the earlier posts in this series, you can catch up on the [data catalog deep dive](/blog/fig-v2-data-catalog), the [historical data deep dive](/blog/fig-v2-historical-data), or the [freshness and release pinning deep dive](/blog/fig-v2-freshness-release-pinning) on our blog.

And if you're new to the platform, reach out to [talk to a context consultant](/contact) to see what FIG v2 can do for your data.

FIG v2 features continuous rolling releases for immediate data freshness, while introducing release pinning to give teams precise control over when new data enters their mission-critical pipelines.

Deep dive: FIG v2 data freshness and release pinning

If you've been following our FIG v2 series, you already know about the [overhauled data catalog](https://faraday.ai/blog/fig-v2-data-catalog) and the broader [announcement of what's coming](https://faraday.ai/blog/now-live-faraday-identity-graph-version2). Today I want to go deep on what I think is the most technically significant upgrade in the entire release: historical data.

## What "historical data" actually means

The [Faraday Identity Graph](https://faraday.ai/catalog) has always given you an up-to-date snapshot of every US adult—what we know about them *right now*. FIG v2 changes that fundamentally. Instead of a single current value for each attribute, we have the full history of values going back many years, each one timestamped and annotated with precision and source metadata.

Think of it this way: rather than knowing that someone's income is \$85,000, you now know that their income was \$62,000 five years ago, \$74,000 three years ago, and \$85,000 today. Each of those data points has a timestamp, a confidence level, and information about where it came from. For you, this means every data attribute isn’t just a point-in-time number, but instead a timeline of historical events.

This is possible because Faraday has been a careful steward of consumer data for over a decade. We've been collecting, normalizing, and preserving these observations the whole time. FIG v2 is the first time we've been able to surface all of that accumulated history in a structured, ML-ready format.

## Why this matters most for modeling

The biggest immediate payoff from historical data is better predictive models. To understand why, it helps to think through how model training actually works.

Let's start with a propensity-to-buy model (i.e., a lead score model). When you build that model, you feed the algorithm historical examples: leads that converted and leads that didn't. The algorithm finds patterns—the characteristics that consistently differentiated the converters from the non-converters—and encodes those patterns into a model. Later, when new leads come in, the model applies those patterns to score them based on which is most likely to buy.

Here's the problem that a model without historical data has: if it’s trained without historical data then it is actually training on what the person looks like *after* they purchased, NOT the actual time of purchase. Take a home remodeling brand trying to predict which prospects are likely to purchase new windows. To train that model, you feed it historical examples: people who bought windows and people who didn't. But here's the catch—a person looks very different in the data *after* buying windows than they did *before*. After the purchase, there's a contractor transaction on their record, a home equity line of credit may have appeared, and their home improvement spend has spiked. Those signals weren't there when they were still a prospect. If your training data captures people as they look *after* converting rather than just before, the model learns the wrong patterns entirely—and the prospects it finds will be people who match a post-purchase profile, not a pre-purchase one.

Until now, this was a problem we could only partially solve. If a brand had leads going back three years, we could append current FIG data to those leads, but "current" data for a lead from three years ago is not the same as that person's data *at the time they became a lead*. A lot has changed in three years.

With FIG v2, we can press rewind and assemble a training dataset based on what they looked like just *before* they submitted the lead form and what they looked like after they purchased. The model learns what a genuine pre-purchase prospect actually looks like—and gets dramatically better at finding more of them.

## A first-of-its-kind resource for data science teams

Better internal modeling is the most immediate benefit, but FIG v2's historical dataset also opens up something that hasn't really existed before commercially: a comprehensive, historical consumer dataset that's fully ML-ready out of the box.

Every historical observation comes with the kind of metadata that data scientists actually need—data types, statistical types, directionality guidance, coverage breakdowns, and more. If your team is building your own internal models and wants to incorporate rich consumer context that goes back in time, this is the dataset to do it with.

## What's coming next: change detection

We're also excited about something that historical makes possible further down the road: monitoring when a person's profile changes in a meaningful way.

The most valuable signal isn't always the value of an attribute—it's the fact that the attribute just changed. Someone who *just became* a new homeowner, or *just had* their first child, or *just crossed* an income threshold is a fundamentally different prospect than someone who has been in that state for years. Life events create moments of opportunity, and right now, most brands have no reliable way to know when those moments arrive.

Having a full historical vector for every attribute makes this kind of change detection possible. We'll be sharing more about how we're building that capability in Q2.

## Try it this month

FIG v2 is in beta now and releasing this month. If you want to get your hands on the historical data and see how it affects your model performance, reach out to your account management team. And keep an eye out—we have more deep dives coming before the full release.

FIG v2 adds historical timelines to consumer data, enabling far more accurate predictive models by training on pre-purchase profiles instead of post-purchase ones.

Deep dive: FIG v2 historical data and what it means for your models

We recently announced the biggest update to the Faraday platform ever: an overhauled version of the [Faraday Identity Graph (FIG)](https://faraday.ai/features/faraday-identity-graph). FIG is the foundational dataset on which all other services at Faraday are built and if you want the big picture, check out our [main announcement](https://faraday.ai/blog/coming-soon-faraday-identity-graph-version2).

But today, I want to zoom in and talk about one specific, highly anticipated aspect of FIG v2: the data catalog.

## Starting from scratch

Over the last decade, we’ve learned a lot about how to structure data, and we’ve been continuously improving that whole time. But for FIG v2, rather than continue to make incremental updates, we took those years of learnings and rebuilt the dataset from scratch—ensuring every attribute is standardized, strictly categorized, and crystal clear.

Nowhere is that rigor more obvious than in our new data catalog.

## A better data dictionary

This new data catalog goes far beyond a standard data dictionary. It features an entire dedicated page for every single attribute in FIG v2.

[![FIGv2 data catalogue](/images/blog/fig-v2-data-catalog/data-catalog.png)](/images/blog/fig-v2-data-catalog/data-catalog.png)

Historically, a lot of this highly detailed data has only existed internally at Faraday and clients were required to go through their account management team to get these details. Now, for the first time, we are publishing it so that all of our users can get direct value out of it.

[![FIGv2 data catalogue example](/images/blog/fig-v2-data-catalog/data-catalog-example.png)](/images/blog/fig-v2-data-catalog/data-catalog-example.png)

When you land on these new attribute pages, you won't just find basic metadata like names and descriptions. We are showing you the true depth of the data by surfacing the really important technical details and historical context you need to make decisions, including:

- **Data distribution:** Exactly how many people are observed in each category, or how a numerical attribute is distributed across a histogram.
- **Technical properties:** The API name, category, unit, data type, statistical type, allowed values, and deprecation status.
- **Coverage breakdowns:** Exactly how many individuals have a known value versus a value imputed from their address or geography.
- **Data derivation:** Whether a value was directly collected/observed, modeled, or survey-based — so you know exactly how each attribute was produced.
- **Time series and contribution history:** A look at how many observations we've collected over time and the authorities that contributed them.
- **Directionality and interpretation:** Guidance on how to use the data (e.g., how missing values should be interpreted—does a missing value mean "we don't know," or should you assume it's "false"?).

## Built for marketers and data scientists alike

How you use this level of transparency really depends on what you're trying to build.

**If you’re a marketer,** let's say you’re looking for a specific piece of context to personalize an email campaign. In the past, finding that exact attribute usually meant digging through a dense, traditional data dictionary or—more likely—having to reach out to your account manager and wait for an answer. Now, you can skip the middleman, search the catalog yourself, and find exactly what you need to make a campaign feel bespoke.

**If you're a data scientist**, say using Faraday's data for internal modeling, things like data type and directionality matter immensely—they have a massive impact on the resulting accuracy of the models you're building. Instead of hunting for those specs, all of those crucial technical details are now front and center.

## Easier to browse, more to discover

When you start searching through the new data catalog, you might notice the data feels much cleaner. By doing a massive amount of consolidation and normalization behind the scenes, we’ve made FIG v2 much easier to navigate. Better yet, that cleanup created headroom for us to bring in additional vendors and add entirely new attributes.

So go ahead and explore—there is a lot more context about American consumers waiting for you.

**Interested in a specific data point?** If you're looking for a particular attribute or curious about our coverage for a specific demographic, we’re happy to pull those details for you. Just send a note to your account management team directly.

## What comes next

As we noted in our [main announcement](/blog/now-live-faraday-identity-graph-version2), FIG v2 is set to officially release in April. However, we are currently looking for beta testers to get in early. If you're interested in getting your hands on the new data catalog and taking it for a spin, reach out to your account management team to learn more.

And keep an eye out—we'll be dropping more deep dives into FIG v2 in the coming weeks\!

Explore the new Faraday Identity Graph (FIG) v2 data catalog to access detailed attribute pages, visual data distributions, and technical metadata designed for marketers and data scientists.

Faraday Identity Graph v2

Now live: FIG v2 - the biggest upgrade to our customer data system, ever

Deep dive: FIG v2 data freshness and release pinning

Deep dive: FIG v2 historical data and what it means for your models

Deep dive: FIG v2 data catalog