Data Quality with Innovative Systems

Innovative sell several products under the “Enlighten” banner, specifically Enlighten Profiler, Enlighten Cleanse, Enlighten Match, Enlighten Transform and PostLocate. As can be discerned from these titles, Innovative covers the full range of data quality functionality, from profiling through to data cleansing, merge/matching, address validation and geocoding, data enrichment and transformation.

Fig 1 – Data democratization, our approach

Innovative’s products are often used in banking in business projects like “know your customer”, which is increasingly important for regulatory compliance. One example outside the banking sector is Uber, who use Innovative in conjunction with a partner company called Quantifind to carry out identity confirmation and background checking on potential employees – for example, screening job applications for criminal convictions. Tightening up data quality around customer data is important for many companies these days, as can be seen with regulatory fines of several high-profile companies.

Customer Quotes

“In the system’s first year of operation, customer recognition increased enterprise-wide – by as much as 70% at some locations.”
Multi-Brand Hospitality Company

“Address data was standardized at a rate of 99% for a dramatic improvement in address completeness and accuracy.”
Large Latin American contact center

“The bank cleansed, linked, and householded more than 220 million individual and corporate records from nine multi-language data sources.”
Leading APAC Commercial Bank

A key differentiator is the product knowledge base, which enables you to find common misspellings, and identify typical customer name and address errors. This knowledge base has been built up over decades of processing billions of records in many alphabets and languages. For example, there is a Spanish “grammar” that understands the rules of that language. One other technology differentiator is the way that record matching is handled.

Fig 2 – Customer perception of product and service strengths

Many vendors use a deterministic matching system that examines elements of a record and looks for exact matches etc between records; anything below (say) an 80% match needs a manual review, above this is regarded as a match. The difficulty is where exactly do you set the threshold? Too high and you get false matches. Innovative use a “match string” and rate the likelihood of the two records being a match based on their knowledge base, not just exact matches. Hence ‘Dave/David” may not quite be a match but if the records also have an exact match for social security number, then a match is likely. This has been shown to significantly improve automated matching quality in a number of customers.

Innovative Systems have solutions that are particularly applicable to complex data where a large number of records are involved. In such situations, getting an improved level of record matching can be quite significant. The quality of the software in such situations was a common thread across dozens of publicly available customer reviews that I read when researching this document.

A survey of the Innovative Systems customer base carried out by a 3rd party market research firm showed that the responsiveness of the vendor and the quality of the matching technology were what customers perceived to be the key differentiators of Innovative Systems. In one specific customer project there was a 62% reduction in false positives after implementing the Enlighten technology, with 115,000 fewer matches translating to over 9 person-years of savings.

The bottom line

Innovative Systems has a long track record of data quality improvement in complex situations in some large and demanding customers, some with billions of records. Its knowledge base, built up over decades, gives it a distinct technological differentiator. This is worthwhile testing thoroughly on your corporate data compared to other data quality solutions that you are considering (or have already deployed) as a customer.