As financial organizations have shifted to offering online and digital services, the number of changes required to support this transformation increase — as do customer expectations.
All financial organizations must strive to Know Your Customer (KYC) in order to tailor services and marketing efforts.
The key element to personalized customer interactions is collecting and maintaining the most accurate information about the customer. Addresses play a critical role in this. An address is one of the most decerning bits of information you have on your customers and prospects. Having good, accurate, reliable addresses supports your KYC and Customer 360 initiatives and is essential for customer record matching and deduplication, householding, and even fraud detection.
The demand for superior customer experiences is growing, and the banking industry is not exempt. Calls for efficiency, clarity, and transparency are taking precedence over more physical elements like products or services. Delivering high-quality experiences means integrating tools that allow you to collect and enhance the data necessary to develop insights and map out the customer journey.
However, it is not enough for financial institutions to simply collect customer data and then use that information to make decisions. As with many industries, your insights are only as good as your data. If you do not collect and maintain high-quality, accurate data, you cannot make trustworthy, data-driven decisions.
Customer-obsessed companies that make insights-driven decisions — based on high-quality data — are growing more than 30% annually on average. – Forrester
Banking industry challenges
The banking industry is evolving daily, and to stay competitive, you need solutions that help you understand, engage, and protect your customers. Data management is a vital piece of the customer satisfaction puzzle, especially when collecting correct and accurate data, such as personal names and addresses. This must remain at the heart of your business strategies and bottom line.
Between the fast accumulation of large volumes of data and data decaying about 20-30% every year, per a recent report by IDG, maintaining high levels of data quality can be a challenging task.
Consider all of the information required to open a new account: two forms of identification, along with personal information like date of birth, physical address, and phone number. Failure to verify and validate this information can lead to a plethora of ripple effects for your business, including the following:
- Reduced fraud detection capabilities
- Reduced ability to detect duplicate customer records
- Inability to inform the customer of important tax, compliance, and regulatory information
- Inferior “Know Your Customer” capabilities, leading to improperly targeted marketing and poor localized customer resource planning due to not properly understanding the customer location distribution
- Misaligned data from various sources and databases causing system and business disruption
To mitigate risks of fraud and non-compliance and to prevent disruptions to the banking customer journey, it is critical that banks reset their customer-experience priorities and place a strong focus on data management and address verification solutions.
IBM QualityStage AVI powered by Loqate
Address data plays a crucial role in how relevant experiences will be for end-users. It is the most reliable way of identifying and matching customer profiles and can enrich databases, leading to more significant insights, increased efficiency, and more revenue.
Integrating a solution like IBM QualityStage AVI can greatly impact any financial organization struggling to stay afloat in this ocean of data. IBM InfoSphere QualityStage offers rich capabilities to create and monitor data while enabling you to investigate, cleanse, and manage your data while helping you gain more value from your information assets.
Loqate — in partnership with IBM for over 10 years — has enriched solutions with global address reference data for over 245 countries and territories. Their global address verification and geocode solutions power the Address Verification Interface (AVI) within IBM QualityStage, helping to support your data quality, Master Data Management (MDM), and governance initiatives.
IBM QualityStage AVI supports the parsing, matching, formatting, transliterating, and enhancing of millions of address records per hour in both batch and real-time — all without your privacy sensitive addresses ever leaving your secure environment.
Benefits of IBM QualityStage AVI
IBM QualityStage AVI enables you to do the following:
- Standardize, improve, and verify your customer address records, allowing you to correctly identify your customer base and consequently improve customer satisfaction and reduce fraudulent activities.
- Improve success rate and cost savings of distribution of important annual tax documents and compliance information and further adhere to regulatory requirements.
- Qualify addresses used for targeted marketing through improved and standardized address quality, ensuring proper delivery that follows the USPS® Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS™) requirements and meets USPS postal standards.
- Conduct proper physical resource planning based on correct customer distribution, allowing for branches, ATMs, and other services to be ideally located when utilizing AVI’s ability to generate lat/long coordinates from addresses.
- Standardize and streamline address data across all systems and databases, helping in the detection and reduction of duplicate records and leading to a customer “golden record,” aiding your MDM, Customer 360, and KYC initiatives .
The combination of IBM’s QualityStage AVI and Loqate’s Address Verification solutions delivers safe and robust data quality and management capabilities that can help financial services maintain or speed up their pace of innovation. IBM provides address reference data updates quarterly, so AVI stays current. Unlike external address services, with IBM’s QualityStage AVI solution, your addresses never leave your firewall because AVI brings the address reference data for the world’s addresses local to your servers for unmatched security and best-of-class performance.