Building an in-house data enhancement solution demands significant time, resources, and expertise. By partnering with an established provider like MX, businesses can bypass these challenges and gain access to innovative capabilities from the beginning.
When evaluating potential data enrichment tools or data enhancement solutions, it’s essential to consider the following criteria to ensure your chosen partner delivers measurable value:
Security
Any data enhancement solution should operate on a secure platform with secure integrations to ingest, store, and return raw and enhanced data elements. This is foundational and should be your first requirement when reviewing data enhancement solutions.
Consumer-Permissioned Data Sharing
Consumers should own and have control over their financial data. And, new regulations are on the horizon that will ensure this is the case. Data enhancement providers should deploy modern user permissioning approaches, such as OAuth, that allow consumers to approve use cases and select the account(s) and data to be shared.
Coverage and Accuracy
Consider core key metrics to ensure you are choosing a quality data enhancement solution that delivers the coverage and accuracy you need. This includes:
- Accuracy: Are transactions being cleansed and categorized accurately? For data cleansing, this metric can assess how well the solution turns messy descriptions into clean, user-friendly transaction descriptions. For categorization, it assesses the quality of the categorization rate (e.g., MX has 21 top-level categories and 98 subcategories). Anything below 100% indicates some transactions are miscategorized (false positives).
- Coverage: Is the highest quantity of transactions being processed with high confidence? How many transactions does the data enhancement solution recognize and categorize? This could include merchant coverage — being able to accurately label and categorize different merchants — or other factors like geolocation — does the tool recognize an accurate location for where the transaction took place? For instance, MX’s merchant coverage includes more than 620,000 merchants. And, MX has a physical location flag to ensure financial institutions know if transactions were processed in person instead of relying solely on location data from the business, which can sometimes be misleading as it shows a headquarters location versus where the transaction actually took place.
It is also important that you understand how performance numbers are calculated, how their sample-based estimates relate to their overall population, the additional data elements generated, and the value of each segment that is created.
Improvement and Learning
No system is perfect. It is important to understand the provider’s approach to addressing issues and making improvements over time. Does the solution leverage machine learning or artificial intelligence to automatically cleanse transactions, reduce redundancies and drive improvements? Are you and your users able to submit feedback? How is that feedback assessed and used to improve the platform?
Solution Speed
The value created by processing data quickly will vary from use case to use case but faster is almost always better. A solution that can process data as it is ingested, and return the largest number of near real time responses, provides a smoother user experience and ensures that user interfaces are always providing fresh, accurate, and actionable data.
Data Volume and Experience
Enhanced data volume and big data experience are important considerations when choosing a partner. Most large data enhancement providers will meet the threshold of data volume and data diversity to scale with increasing data loads, and may be able to build meaningful statistics for modeling and identify behavioral insights. It’s also important to consider what types of transaction or financial data the data enhancement solution can process, such as investment data.
Turning Data to Action
Data enhancement is the first step in being able to more effectively leverage data to meet customer and business needs. The right partner can help you take that enriched data to the next level with data-driven insights and personalized experiences to support consumers where they are in their financial journey — and help your business drive growth and engagement to reach your business goals.
Ready to get started? Request a demo to see how MX Data Enhancement can bring clarity and insight to your data.