Handling Irregular Addresses in the UK

NPA gains faster credit checks with Satori address verification solutions

US-based, NPA provides consumer credit loans for a network of merchants domestically as well as to a number of foreign outlets, including ones in the UK. To check a person’s credit in the US, most firms rely on a social security number, whereas in the UK, there is no equivalent ID. Instead, the home address is the central means of matching customers to their credit records. In the US, most addresses fit neatly into online entry forms, but once business operations cross the pond, addresses often fail to line up the same way.

To take a famous British example, the location of John Lennon’s boyhood home was officially 251 Menlove Avenue, but mail for the house could also include its proper name, Mendips, in the style of English manors. His later workplace tacked on localities to its postal identity: Abbey Road Studios, 3 Abbey Road, St John's Wood, London, NW8 9AY. In short, addresses in the UK can include many optional elements that make comparisons more difficult.

NPA needed a system to check UK borrowers’ credit in short order, but the irregularity of UK addresses created slowdowns.

"UK addresses are not like those in the United States," explains Tim Valdez, Senior Business Analyst of Foreign Markets at NPA. "In the UK, addresses can be written many different ways. It could be as much as: building name, building number, street address, province, postal code, locality and city. You could have different combinations of these elements.

"The question it presented to our department was: ‘How do we determine if an address is complete when some addresses can have seven elements, while others have three or four?’"

Cleansing CRM contents with MailRoom ToolKit Architect

To speed-up its UK credit checks, NPA adopted MailRoom ToolKit Architect from Satori Software.

Satori technology is best known for validating the deliverability of addresses and automatically correcting spellings and abbreviations to conform to USPS® standards. Fortunately for NPA, Satori also supports postal systems abroad, including Royal Mail®, which services England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

"The Satori Software solution, in conjunction with the Royal Mail data, helped us format our UK customer addresses in a way that our system could use," explains Valdez. "When presented with US-style address fields on a web form, UK customers with long addresses often put all these address elements on one line."

By running addresses through MailRoom ToolKit Architect, NPA could break up these long address entries in its CRM database. The application rearranges the various elements into a standard format recognized by Royal Mail. Once scrubbed, the data can quickly be matched to corresponding records in the third-party databases that NPA uses to check credit history.

"It would be almost impossible to do business."

"When a customer applies for a loan, it’s all about speed. If you don’t get to them quickly then they could possibly say ‘this is taking too long, I need to go to somebody else.’ So the credit check has to be automated," says Valdez. "The way Architect is integrated with our CRM software, we can make sure a new address is formatted correctly within seconds."

Today, all credit applicants enter their information online. Besides cleansing its existing databases, NPA has integrated MailRoom ToolKit Architect verification as a subroutine in its web forms. Newly entered data is immediately run through the appropriate address validation routine, re-formatted and sent to the next step in the automated approval process.

"If the process wasn’t automated," says Valdez, "it would be almost impossible to do business."

Initially, Satori representatives helped Valdez and his IT staff with advice on how best to install the server-based software into the company’s system. Once operational, the integration has been virtually worry-free. "Our new credit check system has been running like a champ," he says. "All we know is that it works and after a while we forget Architect is there. If we had to contact Satori a lot, it wouldn’t be a successful solution.

"Good integration was very important to us because of the speed we need for credit approvals," says Valdez. "Out of all the packages we compared, Satori provided the best solution."

About NPA

Headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas, NPA funds consumer credit loans to borrowers, internationally. For more information, please visit www.national-processing.com.