My last blog of the KYC 2.0 series was devoted to privacy compliance. I talked about a non-intrusive way of building a record for each customer that holds all the necessary information in case you need it for privacy compliance. Quadient's statement: If handled properly, privacy compliance can be a real value driver. Ok, so I just assume by now you know about the holistic approach for financial services. Now let’s focus on another vital part of KYC 2.0: enrichment.
Why data enrichment and Big Macs don’t go together
Enrichment is nothing more than enhancing existing data with additional data. Sounds easy, but is in fact extremely hard to accomplish. Think of it this way: Why bother having a wheatgrass smoothie for breakfast when you know you’ll have two Big Macs with fries and a large milkshake for lunch? When you look at it from a holistic point of view, it makes sense that you want to purge your body completely before you start feeding your appetite for healthy stuff.
So, coming back to data and systems, you are of course absolutely right in wanting to enrich your data! Every bit of data management effort should be aimed at making your data more accurate, complete, accessible and ultimately reliable, and enrichment should be the cherry and cream on top (or chia seeds and goji berry, whatever you think is best). You just don’t want to invest in enrichment until you are absolutely sure the data isn’t going down the drain through some other department of your organization.
Data enrichment services
There’s the obvious enrichment service like address check that will enhance deliverability, the do-not-email list that will prevent you from reaching out to contacts who have registered to have their details removed from mailing lists, blacklist matching (for Customer Due Diligence purposes; next blog!) or for example the deceased check that helps you identify and remove those records where the individual has passed away. Sure, you want to reduce any unnecessary expenditure and to be compliant with rules and regulations, but more importantly, you want to avoid customers and prospects thinking you have no clue as to who they are or what they need.
Before you start
So before you can start enriching you need to make sure the to-be-enriched data are up to scratch. I’m not talking about them being super complete or actual-or they obviously wouldn’t need enrichment in the first place- but at least being in the right format, standardized, but also as complete as possible. Why? Because you basically pay for every bit of data that you want to add to your existing data. The more you already know about your contacts, the less you have to acquire. So it makes sense to first do a thorough check to see if there might be valuable contact data sitting somewhere in your organization. After all, you don’t want to go to the store to buy those expensive goji berries if you have some lying around at home. So how do you bring your data, which might be scattered over many departments and sources/systems, together in such a way that you can make your enrichment shopping list? Yet another hurdle to take.
Enrichment: not unless you have a Single Customer View
Marketers just love enrichment. They depend on it. Especially right before the start of a marketing campaign it is important for them to be able to rely on the fact that they send their stuff to a contact list that is cleansed and deduplicated and contains as much information on each contact as possible for accurate targeting. So for marketing enrichment makes sense. But what about the rest of the organization, how will it help them? The KYC 2.0 answer is of course, it won’t, unless the organization has a Single Customer View. A Single Customer View (SCV) is a way for organizations to consolidate all their contact data from different data sources into one unique, complete and actual record for each contact. And that, enabled by strong identity resolution capabilities, is what is at the heart of KYC 2.0.
I will elaborate on this topic in the 5th and last blog of the series, but first I will spend a blog on what is at the core of any regular KYC (not KYC 2.0!) solution: Customer Due Diligence.
