Data8 announce improvement to business matching and cleansing

Oct. 11, 2011 - PRLog -- To improve their business data cleansing, data8 have invested in the Royal Mail's BCF (Business Changes File) as an additional resource to their online services.  This file is derived from the mail redirections for businesses (the business version of NCOA). Additionally, data8 say they have significantly improved their business matching routines.

Antony Allen, managing director data8 said, “Looking at the figures from the Insolvency Service the number of firms liquidated in the first three months of 2011 was up by 3.7% to 4,121, this is an increase of just over 2% on the same period a year earlier. Data8’s improved matching and cleansing service will help our customers keep track of this rapidly changing business environment”.

Richard Hartland, technical director data8, explained “Business names are complicated things that are wrapped up in company branding and controlled by significant legislation. Companies offer many similar variants of a company name at the same address. For example a company could be legally known over a period of time as ‘XYZ Company Limited ’, ‘ XYZ Company UK Limited’ and ‘XYZ Company plc’”.

He continued, “The first 2 of the 3 of these names could now be dissolved on companies house, with the last one (the plc) being the current trading entity.  However, most people trading with XYZ Company are going to simply know the company as "XYZ Company" and their CRM system is likely to just have the stem name "XYZ Company" in the company name field”.

The challenge faced by all data professionals is to reliably work out whether the business is a goneaway, has been dissolved or is still trading. Using a variety of techniques, developed in-house,  data8 say they can now break down the name of the business into its constituent parts and match each element separately, improving the accuracy of any matching.

Hartland concluded, “Tracing the history of a company is far more complex than a domestic address. However, by using the BCF alongside our other business reference files such as the Companies House database we can improve the performance of our service so that marketers can trust their data”.

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data8 Ltd is the premier data enrichment specialist.
Customers access data8’s cloud based application to complete online data cleansing, this is backed by a bureau service and a data integration package allowing companies to validate their data.