Accurate Customer Data
The number of UK consumers buying Financial Services products is in excess of 50 million. Pensions, insurance, assurance, loans, credit cards and mortgages are amongst the single biggest decisions that individuals make. In the 21st century servicing all of this is built upon computerised systems which store data. Therefore the bedrock of all of these systems depends on getting and keeping the data right. Every year 14% of people move and 7% of people die. Static repositories of data are therefore constantly battling against this change.
Money Laundering Compliance
Legislation over the last 10 years has defined processes to check the identity of individuals. New laws coming into play will also require businesses to vary customer due diligence according to the risk of money laundering or terrorist financing and to take enhanced due diligence measures in higher risk situations.
Share Registers
The number of shareholders in the UK has exploded in recent years. Share registers have increased exponentially as a result. Maintaining the accuracy of these databases is crucial. Individuals move all of the time, and such large databases get out of date as a result. Couple this with probate processes on wills and share registers accuracy is constantly eroded.
Bonus Notice Mailing
Before the end of every fiancial year you have to do it. Mail all of your customers with a progress report on the performance of their investment products. It is a big drain on resources and the volume of mail every year is enormous and getting bigger. Regulations stipulate that this has to be done. However, if you have proof that the individual is no longer at the address, then it is reasonable under certain circumstances that you do not mail the Bonus Notice to them. Moreover as an anti fraud measure this is a common sense approach.
Sweating your Data Warehouse Asset
The investment in the development of the single customer view in Financial Services organisations has been huge in the last 5 years. Having all of customers transactional data in one place can create tremendous insight as well as workflow and customer service benefits. From these warehouses, you can rank customers by value, by product bought, compliance attained and aid auditing of compliance as well as many other benefits. So you can answer questions like, who are our best customers, as measured by cost, revenue and profitaility. But can you answer why they are your best customers in terms of their drive to purchase? In other words, can you understand their demand?
Identifying Customer Opportunity
On average a pension is a 32 years commitment. That's a very long time to ask somebody to commit ~3% of their income to your product. Consumers take their time to decide to even enter the market. All too often it is seen as an infinitely postponable decision, "I must get round to doing that". The challenge for Financial Services companies is to align their service offering to an individuals demand cycle and make them a well timed, highly relevant offer which appeals to their needs. To do that, you have to understand what their demand is and quickly.
Accurate Customer Data
Without accurate data, processes become complex, increasing workflow, headcount and ultimately costs. Ultimately the customer experiences bad service leading to more expense putting it all right. This vicious circle is usually the direct result of simple things like addresses being out of date or duplicate records in the database and as a result actions against the wrong records. Simple basic errors as a result of data getting out of date. For example in a 100,000 record database, often less than 1% of a company's database can have a 21% deceased and goneaway content just because the records are only a year old. The average cost of sending a letter is 34p which means a sunk cost of £7,140 alone in mailing the wrong addresses. The problem is how do you deal with this constant change to keep costs under control and your service high.
Our Solution
Data Discoveries software is designed to protect this investment. We help you
Capture customer information quickly and accurately and react to change in your customers' lives.
Data Discoveries systems
Verify and
Enhance are designed to identify change as an embedded, automated and hence proactive process. As a result you are kept constantly informed of the change that is occurring to your customer's name, address and postcode data. Data Discoveries are the only company who supply solutions in this way.
Money Laundering Compliance
Fraud is on the increase. The Financial Times recently reported that "Mortgage frauds rake in at least £700m a year ... according to chief police officers " (05 March 08, Financial Times)
Therefore the fraudsters are coming up with "cleverer" ways of getting around the identity checks that organisations are putting in place. The issue is compounded by the fact that documents such as utility bills are easy to forge and identities can be acquired just by looking in peoples bins. Level 1 authentication establishes that an identity exists. Level 2, the required compliance level, requires that the individual concerned is that identity. If the supplied documents are fraudulent how can this be attained, particularly in a distance selling scenario?
Our Solution
Establishing the existence of an identity is relatively straight-forward via a number of tools in the market. Data Discoveries' Fastrac combines all of the data you require for AML compliance. Moreover, with 1,700 variables against every individual in the UK, Fastrac enables you to ask and confirm the answers to questions that only the true individual would know. This gives you over 1,700 shared secrets. As the only online tool that is designed to be integrated into your backend systems Fastrac gives you complete control over the identity checking process whilst insuring you meet compliance criteria.
Bonus Notice Mailing
The problem is pretty stark. You have to send out the bonus notice mailing. Costs per notice range from 73p to many pounds per pack. Add to this the cost of preparing the mailing file, the storage and processing of the data, and communication time with the various suppliers, and the cost to the business is huge. A lot of the notices never arrive and as the sacks of returned mail pile up in your mailing house each April your sunk cost increases. This is the reality of poor quality name and address data being mailed the Bonus Notice Mailings.
Our Solution
A number of our clients have reduced their costs, ensured accurate delivery of the bonus notice to their customers and meet the compliance requirements. Using Suppress or Enhance, our clients can easily identify individuals who are goneaway or deceased, from all of the verified sources of and deceased data. Enhance not only identifies the erroneous records but gives you the granularity to empower your decisions to not mail. It also gives you an audit trail for proof of compliance with the regulations. In house.
Sweating your Data Warehouse Asset
Warehouses are huge repositories of information that record history and are predominantly offline. With modern processing power and modelling techniques we can create insight. But in today's modern, online, web enabled fragmented media, we need to access insight in real time. We need to understand our customers immediately and cater to what they want, to leverage the true benefits of all of this information. Typically therefore, the data warehouse platform is too unwieldy to support a real-time environment. The data models are difficult to apply in the multitude of customer facing environments of the 21st century organisation.
Our Solution
Data Discoveries View brings together data, data models, customer change of circumstance data, and your data, together in a browser based, thin, application layer. The benefit is you can therefore drive workflow, be it geared towards sales or service, to deliver real time understanding of your customers' individual and household demand. This brings your warehouse alive.
Identifying Customer Opportunity
The competition in the worlds second largest financial services industry is immense. To win new business, and identify customer up-sell opportunities, timing is everything. Knowing when consumers are moving into demand for financial services products is difficult to achieve. Data that informs you of this change can be found across a number of different datasets and are usually supplied by a number of different suppliers. Real time access to data therefore creates a delay to this vital customer knowledge issue.
Our Solution
Data Discoveries' View lets you see what is happening in your database and identifies people in transition for example housemovers, people having children, people who's children are starting or moving schools, share dealings, marriage, marriage breakdown, retirement. In fact we have over 1,700 variables against every individual in the UK. This gives incredible insight into the changing needs of your customers and as a result you can identify people as they move in and out of demand for you products.
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