Data cleansing (also known as “data cleaning”) should be an integral procedure within any organisation that holds consumer data. Data cleansing allows you to maintain the highest data quality by de-duping, suppressing and appending key personal details.

Our experience proves that many organisations in the UK do not keep their suppliers’ records up to date which may lead to operational risks and fraud exposures. It is important that you know who you are dealing with and therefore have valid details for every supplier, such as the contact name, telephone number, address and the bank account where applicable.

IDM offers this service either included as part of an agreed work for our client or as a separate service. Data is validated using the Postcode Address File (PAF®) which is the most up-to-date and complete address database in the UK, containing over 28 million addresses.

Main benefits include:

• Incorrect postcodes are amended
• Recoded postcodes are updated
• Missing address elements are added
• Spelling errors are corrected
• Verified addresses are consistently formatted

The following chart is a sample of average integrity of supplier addresses for 41 cross-sector organisations split into the four categories:

• Verified (valid addresses, potentially may include some with minor information missing)
• Unverified (addresses within this group failed validation against the PAF file and were not recognised)
• Foreign (addresses based outside UK)
• Amended (addresses must have important missing elements added in order to be recognised)