Client:
Large, well-known financial services company specializing in investment management for financial advisors and brokers.
The Problem:
The client purchased a similar firm, located in another state. As the two companies went through the merger there were six different HR databases between them, which were never properly integrated. Four years later they realized they had no single point of record on either their internal representatives, or their large base of independent representatives. History records for each person could not be integrated because of the different keys used by the pre-merger databases. Simple name-address matching wouldn’t work due to the long time lapse between the merger and the initiative to correct these problems. The client came to us after their own IT department had invested considerable time and resources and still couldn’t fix the problem. Part of their failure was their reliance on off-the-shelf data cleansing software.
The Challenge:
To consolidate all the various databases into one comprehensive table of internal and independent reps, with their most recent contact information, validated and standardized.
The Solution:
A comprehensive solution required several standard processes, along with others developed specifically to address this client’s problem. All records were first standardized and parsed. Move updating was then performed on the file, along with name/address/phone validation. Then Business / Residential validation was employed to identify business vs. home addresses. This flagged SOHO locations vs. true residential.
To identify the duplicates for consolidation purposes we ran our dedupe process multiple times in a cascading fashion from conventional name/address to a customized name/region methodology. Each pass of the files yielded smaller and smaller subsets of matches, but that was to be expected with the tightening of the criteria.
The Results:
In the end, we identified and consolidated 4,196 additional records over and above their own internal efforts. This brought the consolidation initiative to a success benchmark of just over 91%. The remaining records were flagged for manual follow-up. The 4,196 additional records we consolidated them represented 4,196 individual phone calls they would NOT have to make to manually verify these records.