With inflation hovering at around ten per cent, triggered largely by the growth in energy prices due to the conflict in Ukraine, costs for many financial institutions are spiralling at a rapid rate. It’s leaving many worried about remaining competitive in the future as they contemplate price rises for products and services. 

Those in financial services are considering making some tough decisions regarding their outgoings to remain competitive. However, before making any big cuts have they thought through improvements they can make to their back office using the appropriate technology? Technology can be used to save money and improve performance to ensure they remain competitive during these inflationary times. This is particularly the case when it comes to technology that ensures the delivery of accurate customer data, because of the value it provides in reducing inflationary pressures.

Data quality problems

Ninety-one per cent of organisations have data quality issues, which is perhaps not surprising when customer contact data degrades at around 25 per cent a year without regular intervention. Also, 20 per cent of addresses entered online contain errors, such as spelling mistakes, wrong house numbers, or incorrect postcodes, primarily caused by people mistyping their details via their mobile devices.

This leads to inaccurately targeted communications and deliveries, meaning valuable budgets are wasted. The customer has a poor experience, which has a negative impact on retention. Also, any learnings from inaccurate data will be incorrect, and having incorrect data encourages fraud.

To prevent this those in financial services must use technology that ensures contact data is not only collected accurately at the customer onboarding stage, but regularly checks, cleans and enhances held customer data. This will have a big impact on their organisation’s bottom line and help to mitigate the inflationary pressures they are under. However, for such technology to be effective it needs to have access to billions of up to date global consumer records from reputable third parties, such as government agencies, credit agencies and utility companies.

Address autocomplete

A good starting point to ensure you collect accurate data is to use an address autocomplete or lookup service which enables address validation. These tools gather accurate address data in real-time at the onboarding stage by providing a properly formatted, correct address as the user begins to input theirs. It also enables the delivery of a standout service by reducing the number of keystrokes required by up to 81 per cent when typing an address. This speeds up the onboarding process and reduces the probability of the user not completing forms to open an account or make a purchase, for example.

Deduplicate data

Duplicate data is commonly caused when two departments merge their data, or it has been collected via different touchpoints then not checked for duplicates or mistakes over a significant period. Having duplicate data is costly both monetary wise and in reputation. It adds cost in terms of time and money, particularly with duplicate printed communications, the distribution of which can adversely impact on the sender’s reputation. Those on the receiving end will see this as a waste of money and resources at what is a challenging time. To avoid this source an advanced fuzzy matching tool to deduplicate data and create a unified record for customers. It’s something that will also reduce the potential for fraud.

Data cleansing

Undertaking data suppression, or cleansing, has an important role to play for those organisations looking to save money and protect their reputation. These tools will highlight those who have moved - commonly called goneaways - or are otherwise no longer at the address on your database. Additionally, suppression services that include deceased flagging ensures mail and other communications are not sent to those who have passed away, upsetting their friends and relatives. A final point to note is that using such services on an ongoing basis reduces the cost of using ID verification tools, because they will be much less likely to flag inaccurate data, which they charge on a per record basis to identify and correct.

Data cleaning SaaS platform

It’s never been easier or more cost-effective to manage data quality in real-time. Today, it’s possible to pay for a licence to access a scalable data cleaning software as a service (SaaS) platform that requires no code, integration or training. Just plug in and benefit, straightaway. This technology instantly cleanses and corrects names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers worldwide. It matches records in real-time, ensuring there is no duplication, and delivers data profiling to help identify issues for further action.

With inflation not coming down significantly anytime soon, now is the time for those in financial services to ensure their organisation’s customer data is cleaned on an ongoing basis, which means using technology which has access to billions of contemporary global consumer records. By doing so it will be possible to improve customer communications, deliveries of products and services, and overall experience, which in turn will drive customer revenue, and avoid fraud. This way data cleaning technology will play a big role in offsetting increased costs in other areas of the business, helping financial institutions to remain competitive and profitable during these challenging times.