GT Loca geocoding and address validation service helps customers locate merchants that welcome American Express credit cards
Singleton Ogilvy & Mather, Sydney Australia

Business Challenge
Singleton Ogilvy & Mather (SOM) is the Australian arm of Ogilvy & Mather, an international advertising, marketing and public relations agency based in Manhattan that operates nearly 500 offices world-wide, with a workforce of over 16,000 employees. SOM works with and builds some of the world's most recognised brands and has had a long association with American Express for whom it created the iconic "Don't leave home without it" advertising campaign in the 1970's.

American Express engaged SOM to incorporate a Business Directory function to the www.americanexpress.com website to communicate to card users the locations of Australian businesses that accept American Express Cards.

With American Express's list of businesses SOM began to geocode business addresses - the process of finding the associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from street addresses. Operating on a tight deadline, SOM utilised Google's web-based geocoding facility, but quickly concluded that this facility had limits that made the client's deadline impossible to achieve. SOM turned to Geomatic Technologies (GT) for help.

Services Overview
GT Loca delivers a 'single point of truth' for all address and property data. GT Loca contains a powerful geocoding and address validation engine. By connecting to accurate address and property data from various sources including PSMA Australia, State governments (e.g. VicMap), Australia Post and other commercial data suppliers (e.g. Ausway), GT Loca is able to geocode large volumes of addresses and resolve partial or incorrect addresses against these authoritative sources.

To meet the client's tight deadline the American Express business addresses were provided to GT as a series of address files. The batch geocoding facility in GT Loca enabled a large number of businesses to be geocoded quickly. GT Loca successfully matched each address to a latitude and longitude. Address files were returned to SOM via FTP or File Transfer Protocol with each record attributed with a geocode level (address, street, and locality) and a geocode confidence (score out of 100).

Outcomes
The GT Loca geocoding and address validation engine produced a number of outcomes that included:

• The gecoding of American Express business addresses was reduced from weeks to days so that the client's deadline could be met.
• By using GT Loca as a bureau service SOM was able to focus on delivering a Business Directory function on its client's website rather than spending time and money trying to geocode and validate thousands of addresses.
• GT Loca not only provided accurate geocoding of business addresses, but corrected existing errors in address lists, errors that can prove costly to a business.

Images above from left to right
An Amex card purchase. The American Express Customer Service website. Credit card.