Alliance & Leicester is using low-cost software to
help it eradicate "dirty data" and comply with an industry
agreement on sharing customer account information.
The financial services group has purchased software from Datanomic
for less than £10,000 to underpin its data cleansing
programme.
By 2007 lenders will be required to guarantee a high level of
accuracy on shared customer data passed between banks under the
Credit Account Information Sharing Scheme, which promotes
responsible lending.
To comply with the scheme, Alliance & Leicester will have to
scan 12 million customer records in its back-office systems to
check for inaccuracies, such as mis-spellings and out-of-date
information. The software can run on desktop PCs and will receive
data from mainframes.
"The software from Datanomic has enabled Alliance & Leicester
to embark on a process to understand its data quality issues and
detect the source and detail of any discrepancies" said John
Pridmore, senior manager for data quality at Alliance &
Leicester.
Pridmore would not speculate on how much inaccurate data the
Alliance & Leicester records contained. "Ours is a data-driven
enterprise with responsibility for £6bn of lending a year and
complex regulations - there is no margin for error," he said.
In addition to helping Alliance & Leicester comply with the
Credit Account Sharing Scheme, Pridmore said the data cleansing
exercise would save the IT department about 10-15 man-days a
year.
"[The software] will mean that I am not going to the IT department
and getting them to write bespoke [data checking] queries for me,"
he said.
Benefits of the data cleansing exercise
The Datanomic software combines data audit, cleaning,
error-prevention and compliance functions for enterprise systems.
The rules-based software was originally developed for a user in the
oil and gas industry.
Data cleansing will help Alliance & Leicester comply with
the Credit Account Information Sharing Scheme, which is due to come
into force in 2007 and operates in line with the Data Protection
Act
More accurate customer data will help improve marketing and
sales initiatives and will also be used by customer relationship
management software l IT staff will spend less time having to
write data queries.