Equiniti chooses Datactics to Trace Shares

Datactics Ltd, a market leader in data quality and matching software to financial services and government, today announces that Equiniti Data Services, the leading specialist in identity verification and tracing has purchased FlowDesigner to enhance its data matching and research capabilities.

Equiniti Data Services has over 25 years’ experience in identity verification, customer tracing, mortality screening and data enrichment services. In particular, it runs large scale tracing programmes using sophisticated business analytics to return unclaimed assets, such as shares to their rightful owners. This means that Equiniti Data Services clients, including many FTSE 100 PLCs, keep their share registers up-to-date, improving data quality and reducing costs associated with operations, such as the distribution of annual company reports.

The decision to use Datactics was made after a short Proof-of-Concept study using real client data. Datactics’ flagship product, FlowDesigner, ran in parallel with existing systems, allowing both outputs to be compared to measure the quality of client data and accuracy of matching. Datactics was considered to be easy to use, with Equiniti Data Services data content specialists being able to build sophisticated matching logic without the need for software programming. Another notable benefit of FlowDesigner, was its powerful in-memory engine which will become a key component of Equiniti Data Services’ expanding big data services.

Equiniti has further plans to implement a new pre-analytics layer using Datactics FlowDesigner that will on-board, profile and cleanse ‘big’ client files (made up of millions of records) before matching against third party sources, such as name and address data, national registers and social media. This will help to automate a predominantly manual matching process and vastly improve the speed and accuracy of Equiniti Data Services match rate, enabling resources to be freed for expert analysts to conduct further research in more detail.

Duncan Stevens, Managing Director at Equiniti Data Services, commented: “With 11% of the UK population moving house each year and around 353,000 people emigrating, keeping track of customers can prove difficult. With the expansion of our service offering we have opened up a wealth of opportunities enabling us to target further markets which will extend our client base to companies and organisations based outside of the UK.”

“Datactics provided us with a fast and scalable solution that integrated easily with our existing workflows and was implemented in a matter of weeks. Equiniti Data Services is constantly on-boarding large volumes of citizen data. Fast and efficient standardisation of this data is vital to our business. This easy-to-use software has enabled us to accelerate and simplify many core tasks.”

Commenting on the deal, Stuart Harvey, Datactics CEO, said, “We are delighted to have been signed by a major financial services innovator like Equiniti. Our willingness to engage in a proof of concept at short notice with the Equiniti Data Services team convinced them of our strengths in the area of data quality and matching. We look forward to working with other units of the Equiniti Group as they seek to employ our technology more widely.”

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