Finance, retail, charity dealing with dirty data

Financial services companies, charities and retailers are wasting money by not keeping to a disciplined data integrity regimen.

A third of financial services organisations outsource customer database de-duplication but seven out of 10 aren't convinced these services are effective in keeping their customer details up to date.

silicon.com Financial Services

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According to a survey by address verification company Experian QAS, nearly half of FS companies mail out to more than 50,000 contacts at least once per month, but a third find it difficult to synchronise updates across multiple databases.

Retailers and FMCG companies are not much better, with four out of 10 electing to de-dupe customer databases manually.

Both sectors are spending about a week of billable hours every year de-duping their customer details.

The survey identified charity as another sector that suffers from dirty data. According to the report, 90 per cent of charities don't have confidence in their processes to clean up their donor names and addresses and only a third think their databases are 100 per cent accurate.