Melissa Data, a leading provider of contact data quality and direct marketing solutions, today announced Personator, an integrated data quality Web service designed to provide identity verification and fraud prevention for ecommerce applications. Personator does this by offering the unique ability to determine whether associations between different elements, such as name and address, are correct. This increases accuracy by ensuring a valid and correct link between the data and identity of individual customer contacts.
With the capability to compare incoming customer and prospect data against multi-sourced data sets—including telecom data, USPS datasets, title and deed information, financials, and GIS—Personator can verify an identity, correct addresses, and append missing contact information. This level of intelligence is particularly important in ecommerce and call center applications, helping to reduce fraud and data entry errors by confirming a name matches an address; correcting address, telephone, and email information; and appending information such as address type as a residence or business, if the property has been vacant for more than 90 days, and if the address is missing a suite or apartment number.
“Verifying that a name ‘belongs’ to a certain address can be highly effective in improving customer service and data quality across the organization,” said Bud Walker, director of data quality solutions for Melissa Data. “This level of confidence in the data is key to quickly authenticating an identity—helping online merchants and other companies prevent fraud and accurately determine risk.”
Personator is flexible and cloud-based, supporting multiple protocols such as SOAP, XML, REST, and JSON. Personator’s Check feature allows overall improvement of contact records through data parsing and conservative corrections; its advanced address correction (AAC) technology allows more aggressive corrections and appends to address data. Personator’s Verify feature enables data managers to validate whether the different elements of a record truly correlate to the same individual. Specific data can be nominated as the centric record (for instance, a postal address or an email address) providing an effective means to determine whether other contact data elements correlate.