Duplicate data is a significant issue that impedes an organisation’s ability to derive meaningful insights, occupies pricey storage space, disrupts customer data, and ultimately results in erroneous business decisions. When data is extracted for a project, IT managers, data analysts, and business users encounter duplicate data issue. However, the effects of duplicate and polluted data on the entire organisation become apparent when they cause a business initiative to fail or experience a delay.
What is Duplicate Data?
Duplicate data are identical data entries that are stored in the same data storage system or multiple systems across the organisation. A variety of data fields including customer names, primary address, contact number, date of birth, and so forth, are susceptible to duplication in the banking industry. Duplication can occur because of human mistake, system failure, or malicious activity. Data duplication is more complicated than we think. The following types can help you assess duplicate data issues.
Types of Duplicate Data
Banks and other financial institutions face a major issue with data duplication, which affects data accuracy, system performance, and storage efficiency. Some prevalent types are listed below:
1. Identical Duplicates Within a Single System
Cause: Data entry errors, copying information without proper checks.
Example: A customer’s account details are entered twice due to a typo.
Impact: Easy to detect but duplication causes manual effort to fix and slow down processing
2. Identical Duplicates Across Multiple Systems
Cause: Redundant data backups, saving information in different formats across systems.
Example: A customer record exists in both the core banking system and a separate database, both with identical data.
Impact: Due to this duplication, the SCV report’s overall customer and account counts are overvalued giving an erroneous impression of the number of customers and total account holdings. Also, this creates inconsistencies and reduces data reliability for FSCS SCV reporting and analytics.
3. Duplicates with Variations Across Multiple Systems
Cause: All systems do not maintain a constant update of changes to customer information (phone number, address, title).
Example: A client modifies their email address through the online banking portal; however, the previous email address remains in the CRM system.
Impact: Makes it harder to get an entire view of the customer and impedes effective communication.
4. Non-Exact Duplicates (Most Challenging)
Cause: Inconsistent formatting, a lack of standardised data definitions, variations in data entry (typos, abbreviations).
Example: One system may record the name “Andrew Johnson” for a customer, whereas another may read “A. Johnson.”
Impact: Hardest to identify, leads to incorrect FSCS SCV reporting, hampers the identification of fraud, and results in substandard customer service.
Causes of Duplicate Data
Organisations could face grave consequences from duplicate data in generating FSCS SCV reports. The primary reasons for duplicate data are as follows:
1. Errors with Manual Data Entry
Multiple records may be created because of human error, misspellings, and typographical errors made during data entry. For instance, human error could result in the entry of a customer’s phone number twice in slightly different formats like the inclusion of hyphen, space, etc.
2. Ineffective Data Integration
Duplicates may arise when spreadsheets are used to transfer data between other departments or systems. Let us say a branch lists new customer accounts on an Excel spreadsheet. If this data is not properly integrated with the core banking system, it is possible that duplicate entries will be created.
3. Absence of Standardisation
Duplicate data can be produced by inconsistent formats, abbreviations, or differences in data entry between systems. For example: The instances like the subtle differences in data entry, such as typos (e.g., “Roger” vs. “Rojer”) or the use of abbreviations (e.g., “St.” vs. “Street”) can lead to duplicates.
4. Absence of a Core Banking System
Customer data could be dispersed among several independent databases in financial organisations lacking a centralised core banking system. Duplicate consumer information can arise due to the lack of a unified platform, leading to the formation of data silos across multiple systems.
5. System Upgrades and Migrations
Moving data during system upgrades or structuring data to new banking systems can act as a haven for duplicates. Incomplete data transfer methods, inconsistent data mapping between old and new systems, and the requirement for manual intervention during migration are all factors that could contribute to the unintentional duplication of customer, account, or other crucial entries in the SCV report.
6. Issues with Data Synchronisation
Duplicate entries may arise when many databases or systems try to sync data without enough cooperation. For some tasks, certain banks may have internal legacy systems. When data needs to be transmitted across systems, these bespoke manual systems may produce duplicate data if they fail to properly integrate with the primary data infrastructure.
7. Poor Data Quality Controls
Duplicate data may enter the system if there are insufficient controls and checks in place to ensure data quality.
8. Absence of Discrete Identifiers
Systems that lack unique identifier constraints or depend on non-unique identifiers may encounter difficulties in mitigating the occurrence of duplicate data.
9. Workflow Procedures
Duplicate data could accidentally be created by business processes and workflows that lack clear standards and controls.
10. Issues with Data Governance
The same customer or account information may be independently collected and stored by many departments or individuals because of the lack of defined norms for data ownership and management. Repeated entries in different systems are caused by this lack of data governance.
Despite good intentions, integrating siloed data sources might cause duplication. Differences in data formats, nomenclature conventions, and definitions among different systems may give rise to records that appear to be distinct but are, in fact, representative of the same entity.
It is vital to tackle these sources of data duplication to guarantee the precision and effectiveness of data administration in a company.
The Need to Eliminate Duplicate Data
1. Data Accuracy:
Inaccurate analysis and reports could result from duplicate data, which can also influence the quality of business decisions.
2. Operational Efficiency:
By piling up in databases, duplicate data reduces workplace productivity. Eliminating duplicates improves operational efficiency by streamlining data management procedures.
3. Cost-effectiveness:
Excessive storage space is used by redundant data, which also raises infrastructure expenses.
4. Client Experience:
Inconsistent data and irregular client interactions may arise from duplicates.
5. Regulatory Compliance:
To follow data protection laws, regulated sectors like banks must maintain accurate and compliant records, free from duplicate data.
Impact of Data Duplication on FSCS SCV Reporting
Data duplication has several major effects on Single Customer View (SCV) reporting:
- The accuracy of SCV data can be impacted by duplicate records, which can cause reporting errors. Duplicate data can distort reporting metrics and give an inaccurate picture of how customers engage and behave.
- SCV reporting can mislead concerning consumer behaviour, preferences, and business interactions due to duplicate data.
- It takes more time and money to deal with duplicate data, causing resource drain. The process of discovering, merging, and maintaining duplicate information takes more work than other data utilisation techniques for SCV reporting and analysis.
- Duplicate data can give rise to inconsistent customer experiences, as it prevents banks from having a holistic view of their customer base.
- Compliance with consumer data regulations might be difficult with duplicate data. This might have an impact on adherence to laws like the GDPR and have negative legal and financial repercussions.
- Implementing suitable technology and strategies for data cleaning and deduplication processes is essential to addressing these issues and ensuring the dependability and accuracy of SCV reporting.
Data Deduplication
Data deduplication is the process of finding and removing duplicate data entries from a storage system or dataset. Data deduplication reduces redundant copies of data, which helps to increase productivity, optimise storage capacity, and improve data quality. This procedure is particularly effective for large datasets or storage systems, since redundant data could take up precious space and affect the overall performance and quality of the data.
How Data Cleansing is Done via Data Deduplication?
Data deduplication is an essential element of data cleansing, as it facilitates the establishment and maintenance of dependable customer records, adherence to regulatory obligations, and functional clarity in FSCS SCV reporting and transactions.
Identification of Duplicate Data
Duplicate records are detected through the utilisation of automated tools that employ similarity algorithms, data pattern matching, or unique identifiers.
Sophisticated algorithms analyse the data to find patterns and similarities between entries, potentially marking duplicates for additional inspection.
Eliminate or Merge the Identified Data
Choosing whether to remove duplicate entries while retaining the most accurate and comprehensive collection of data, or to integrate them by aggregating data, is the subsequent step after discovering duplicate records.
In certain cases, the duplicates are merged and the data is aggregated to establish a single, correct record and resolve redundant or contradictory data.
Standardisation of Data
FSCS SCV reports rely on data standardisation to ensure accurate information. This process enforces consistent formatting guidelines across fields like customer names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers. Standardising data formats makes it easier to identify and manage duplicate entries. For example, if two customer records have the same name with different standards like David Warner and D. Warner, standardisation would ensure they appear identically as David Warner, enabling efficient detection and removal of duplicate entries. This not only improves data quality but also ensures accurate information about a bank’s customer base and account holdings.
Allocation of Unique Identifiers
Every entry is assigned a unique identifier, which prevents duplication and makes deduplication operations easier in the future.
The aforementioned identifiers function as keys to differentiate and label specific records contained within the dataset.
Automated Matching
Sophisticated algorithms and fuzzy matching methods are used to compare and match records sensibly.
Rather than depending just on precise matches, these techniques make use of fuzzy logic to take into consideration minute differences or inconsistencies in the data to ensure the presence of accurate FSCS SCV reporting.
Validation & Verification
After deduplication, the data is thoroughly validated to ensure that redundant data has been successfully eliminated without inadvertently removing important information.
The goal of validation checks is to confirm that the deduplication procedure improves data consistency and correctness.
Scheduled Maintenance
As fresh data enters the system, scheduled data deduplication operations are instituted to continuously find and fix duplicates.
Organisations can preserve data integrity and lessen the gradual buildup of duplicate data by employing a regular deduplication strategy.
By means of this all-encompassing procedure, organisations can promise a single, precise, and unified view of their customer data.
How SCV Forza Resolves Duplicate Data?
SCV Forza is an automated, reliable, and pioneering solution specifically engineered to optimise and augment the generation and administration of Single Customer View reports in the financial industry.
SCV Forza ensures the precision and integrity of the Single Customer View (SCV) reporting process by employing several strategies to circumvent data duplication. Here’s an extensive overview of how SCV Forza helps to overcome data duplication:
Automated Data Integration
Identification and Reconciliation
The platform uses fuzzy logic based on artificial intelligence to find and fix duplicate entries or incorrect data points in the dataset.
This lessens the effect of duplicates in the final reporting data by allowing the system to effectively match and merge linked entries.
Data Validation and Control
Stringent data validation and control procedures are carried out by SCV Forza through interaction with Core Banking Systems (CBS) and other external data sources.
By finding and removing duplicate information, these processes assist in guaranteeing that the final SCV reports are devoid of unnecessary or erroneous customer data.
Comprehensive Data Cleansing
By identifying and integrating customer records that may exist in multiple datasets or accounts, SCV Forza performs exhaustive data cleansing procedures to eradicate duplication.
The likelihood of duplicate SCV reports is diminished by the platform’s assurance of a pristine and consolidated dataset.
Reports of Exceptions and Manual Intervention
SCV Forza creates exception reports showing possible duplicate entries for manual examination and intervention in situations where automated procedures might not fully resolve potential duplications.
This adds an extra degree of confidence by enabling financial institutions to resolve any outstanding data duplications before the submission of the SCV reports.
Additionally, SCV Forza encompasses the following features:
- Maintains data security throughout the lifecycle in accordance with ISO standards and regulatory mandates.
- Automated reconciliation throughout the accounting period and a comprehensive audit trail are available.
- Improves data quality and delivers accurate SCV reports for automated decision-making.
- Provides periodic regulatory updates to ensure compliance.
Transform your data management with SCV Forza! Experience the power of automated data cleansing, efficient duplicate data removal, and precise SCV reporting.
Book a demo now to see SCV Forza in action and take the first step towards streamlined and compliant data management.
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