ING Direct relies on GT Loca geocoding and address validation service to maintain a 'single point of truth' for customer address information
ING Direct, Sydney Australia

Business Challenge
ING Direct is the Australian operation of the ING Group, a global financial institution. A 'Direct' bank is a virtual bank or a bank without branches. By eliminating the costs associated with physical bank branches, Direct banks may offer higher interest rates and lower service charges on their products than their competitors.

Consistency in address information is of vital importance to banking organisations as incorrect customer addresses can impact on the effectiveness of the business systems that banks rely on for day to day operations. With over a million customer accounts ING Direct's Risk Management team wanted to improve the bank's address information by purging duplicated and incorrect addresses from databases and establish links between customer accounts. ING Direct turned to Geomatic Technologies (GT) for help.

Services Overview
GT Loca is a fully managed service that 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 such as Ausway, GT Loca is able to geocode large volumes of addresses and resolve partial or incorrect addresses against these authoritative sources. GT Loca has an advanced self-learning capability, correcting common spelling mistakes in place and street names and applying additional geographic aliasing to smooth and resolve geocoding errors.

ING Direct's address information is provided to GT as a series of address files. The batch geocoding facility in GT Loca enables a large number of addresses to be geocoded quickly. GT Loca successfully matches each address to a latitude and longitude. Address files are then returned to ING Direct 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).

ING Direct has secure access to a dedicated on-demand address geocoding and validation web service where addresses are processed monthly.

Outcomes

• ING Direct now uses the GT Loca derived addresses as its 'single point of truth' for address information, improving the effectiveness of those business systems that rely on accurate customer addresses.
• ING Direct can focus on core business activities and avoid the cost spirals associated with data inaccuracies and address data management.
• ING Direct is able to lower volumes of returned mail and the associated costs.
• Accurate address information enables more effective customer communication helping ING Direct to achieve high standards of customer service.

Images above from left to right
A couple using online banking. A Credit Card. Australian currency.