Key issues for consideration

Balancing diligence of identification with project cost
The level of identification required should be based on both the degree of customer risk and your need for surety. Cost is naturally a major consideration.

To achieve the optimum balance, a multi-dimensional approach is recommended. If using an electronic data approach first, care must be taken, however, to ensure that the data used:

• has the depth and breadth to deliver a high rate of identification – if the hit rate is low then the proportion of your customer base requiring manual contact would be higher and therefore more costly

• is OIC (Office of the Information Commissioner) compliant for such use

• delivers the correct level of confidence in identity authentication for high, medium and low risk customers

• is working with customer records that are up to date and clean before the process begins

Pre filtering
Whilst the application of high level filters to exclude certain categories of customers may reduce the number that require re-identification, the cost of this approach in terms of opportunity costs associated with the development of the filtering capability may make the alternative of processing 100% through an electronic re-identification process more attractive. This may be re-enforced when taking into account the other benefits.

For example:

• ability to outsource the bulk process to a specialist with lower unit costs

• opportunity to data cleanse and append data to the supplied names and addresses

OIC compliance
The use of customer information is a sensitive issue. The Office of Information Commissioner (OIC) has very strict guidelines for the use of information. Experian works very closely with the OIC and can give advice on what can and cannot be used for the purposes of customer re-identification.

Can a compliance project offer commercial benefits?
Undertaking a Current Customer Review project is a significant investment in time, money and resource. Immediately following the completion of the project, customer files will be in a unique state (if adopting the Experian approach). Customer records will be clean. However as time passes the cleanliness of the databases will again degrade. Having undertaken the Current Customer Review project does provide your business with a unique opportunity to consider additional services that could provide future commercial benefits. These services include

• regular Maintenance and File Cleaning – having completely restated and cleaned your customer records, unique reference codes can be added to your records to aid future cleaning and database maintenance projects.

• adding information to your files to aid your CRM requirements and enabling a 'single customer view', add customer intelligence and understanding for future business development purposes. This data enhancement can be included in the batch processing of your files for the re-identification project, which makes it a uniquely cost effective time to make use of this service.

• employing Money Laundering and Fraud Detection Services to your new business processes. Your customer file is uniquely validated and verified, but this status can be eroded if new business processes fail to employ similar identification checks. Experian can discuss the use of these services if they are not already in place.

Monitoring progress
The requirements of the Current Customer Review initiative state that you must be able to account for the re-identification procedures you have adopted. The project you undertake must, therefore, provide an audit trail, a level of identification achieved, and be able to identify the method used.