Innovative Systems

Last Updated: 26th March 2024
Analyst Coverage: Andy Hayler

Data quality is not a new subject, and no vendor illustrates this better than Innovative Systems, which was founded in 1968 and has been working in this sector for over five decades. Founded in Pittsburgh but with international offices, including London, Innovative was a pioneer in data and identity validation, with particular strength in the financial services industry.

These days most new customers deploy Innovative’s product “Enlighten” on the cloud e.g. in Azure, but the company still has customers running its software on IBM mainframes. Interestingly, hardly any of these customers have plans to migrate off the mainframe in the coming years, on the basis that the platform is highly reliable.

The Enlighten software offers a full function data quality suite, as you might expect from a company that has been in this business for over fifty years. The key technical differentiator is their knowledge base, built up by processing billions of customer records over many years. This knowledge base has a rich understanding of common customer data record errors and misspellings, not just in English but in a variety of languages and alphabets.

The company is currently seeing a lot of data quality activity in data migration projects, as customers migrate to the cloud or undergo mergers and acquisitions. Another growth area is data enrichment based on precise geographic location. For example, an insurance company might want to know all sorts of aspects of a potential customer’s house for insurance purposes: is it in a flood plain, is it in a high crime area etc. Similarly, companies now need to be able to process customer identification without necessarily having the need to turn up to a bank branch with physical documentation; there was a considerable impetus for improving this on-line validation during the Covid pandemic.

Innovative competes with both the broader data management players such as Informatica and IBM, as well as more targeted niche players. Its considerable track record in data quality is reflected in a client base that consistently record high levels of customer satisfaction in surveys, some of this helped by a very experienced team of professional service staff. If you are considering a data quality solution and want one that has a long-proven track record, then Innovative is one that you should consider.

Company Info

Headquarters: 790 Holiday Drive, Pittsburgh, PA 15220, USA

Data Quality with Innovative Systems

Last Updated: 26th March 2024

What is it?

Fig 1 - Data democratization, our approach

Innovative sell several products under the “Enlighten” banner, specifically Enlighten Profiler, Enlighten Cleanse, Enlighten Match, Enlighten Transform and PostLocate. As can be discerned from these titles, Innovative covers the full range of data quality functionality, from profiling through to data cleansing, merge/matching, address validation and geocoding, data enrichment and transformation.

Innovative’s products are often used in banking in business projects like “know your customer”, which is increasingly important for regulatory compliance. One example outside the banking sector is Uber, who use Innovative in conjunction with a partner company called Quantifind to carry out identity confirmation and background checking on potential employees - for example, screening job applications for criminal convictions. Tightening up data quality around customer data is important for many companies these days, as can be seen with regulatory fines of several high-profile companies.

Customer Quotes

“In the system’s first year of operation, customer recognition increased enterprise-wide – by as much as 70% at some locations.”
Multi-Brand Hospitality Company

“Address data was standardized at a rate of 99% for a dramatic improvement in address completeness and accuracy.”
Large Latin American contact center

“The bank cleansed, linked, and householded more than 220 million individual and corporate records from nine multi-language data sources.”
Leading APAC Commercial Bank

What does it do?

Fig 2 - Customer perception of product and service strengths

A key differentiator is the product knowledge base, which enables you to find common misspellings, and identify typical customer name and address errors. This knowledge base has been built up over decades of processing billions of records in many alphabets and languages. For example, there is a Spanish “grammar” that understands the rules of that language. One other technology differentiator is the way that record matching is handled.

Many vendors use a deterministic matching system that examines elements of a record and looks for exact matches etc between records; anything below (say) an 80% match needs a manual review, above this is regarded as a match. The difficulty is where exactly do you set the threshold? Too high and you get false matches. Innovative use a “match string” and rate the likelihood of the two records being a match based on their knowledge base, not just exact matches. Hence ‘Dave/David” may not quite be a match but if the records also have an exact match for social security number, then a match is likely. This has been shown to significantly improve automated matching quality in a number of customers.

Why should you care?

Innovative Systems have solutions that are particularly applicable to complex data where a large number of records are involved. In such situations, getting an improved level of record matching can be quite significant. The quality of the software in such situations was a common thread across dozens of publicly available customer reviews that I read when researching this document.

A survey of the Innovative Systems customer base carried out by a 3rd party market research firm showed that the responsiveness of the vendor and the quality of the matching technology were what customers perceived to be the key differentiators of Innovative Systems. In one specific customer project there was a 62% reduction in false positives after implementing the Enlighten technology, with 115,000 fewer matches translating to over 9 person-years of savings.

The bottom line

Innovative Systems has a long track record of data quality improvement in complex situations in some large and demanding customers, some with billions of records. Its knowledge base, built up over decades, gives it a distinct technological differentiator. This is worthwhile testing thoroughly on your corporate data compared to other data quality solutions that you are considering (or have already deployed) as a customer.

Commentary

Innovative Systems update

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Data Quality with Innovative Systems

Innovative Systems

Company Info

Data Quality with Innovative Systems

What is it?

What does it do?

Why should you care?

Commentary

Solutions

Research

Data Quality with Innovative Systems

Data Quality (2023)

Data Quality (2022)

Data Assurance

Data Quality (2019)