Source: Equifax
Datawatch Corporation (DWCH), a leading global provider of visual data discovery solutions, and Equifax Ltd., the leading consumer and commercial insights expert, today announced an important strategic initiative to automate much of the data extraction from multiple unstructured sources including financial data used in Equifax's growing commercial business.
Equifax provides commercial credit reports and related services to its clients on over 2.3 million companies who file their accounts at UK Companies House each year, as well as comprehensive reporting on non-limited businesses. Equifax customers, who include major financial institutions, multi-national corporations and SME's, are then able to evaluate credit scores and facilitate business lending. This initiative will enhance Equifax's ability to update its business databases with the most current data on the UK business landscape while significantly reducing operational costs and maintaining data accuracy.
"As with most sectors, the competitive environment in our industry is becoming more challenging. It's crucial for us not only to offer competitive services but to be leading the field with innovative practices," states Nick Beresford, Equifax UK's Head of Data Operations. "This new collaboration with Datawatch will drive major business efficiencies, but most importantly will help us to become a Centre of Excellence globally for our customers. It's anticipated that this initiative will form the template for services across other Equifax geographies where the need to extract data from unstructured sources is also essential."
This new solution uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to record, verify and extract core data from the thousands of records received by Equifax each day. The complete solution leverages the Datawatch platform to take the readable electronic data from the OCR engine, apply business rules and verify the information within the Equifax environment using Datawatch's unique data protocols. Automating this process has taken data inclusion timescales down from days to hours.
"This has been a landmark implementation with a very forward-thinking team," concludes Haj Muntz, general manager EMEA at Datawatch. "At a time when speed of access and accuracy of data is increasingly critical to commercial success in this industry, we're exceptionaltionally proud to have been able to support this industry-first."