Bobby Joseph is the head of Melissa’s Operations in India and the Middle East region. As Director of Key Accounts and Partners, he primarily works with the system integrator partners and enterprise-level end customers from India, the Middle East, and Africa.
What is Melissa?
Melissa is a leader in data quality and identity verification. Our address, phone, and email verification technologies help our customers maintain clean and accurate customer data. Our electronic ID verification tools equip financial institutions in their ongoing fight to prevent fraud.
Could you tell us more about your products or services you provide?
Melissa’s data quality tools give companies the ability to manage their customer data more effectively. Global corporations leverage these tools to verify and maintain customer information, ensuring the data in their database(s) and/or data repositories is up-to-date and accurate. Our Address Verification engine can be used to parse, standardize, clean, and verify addresses across 240 countries worldwide. Our real-time phone verification tool can be applied to confirm whether the phone number provided by a customer exists, is live, and can be reached. Melissa’s email validation tools assist companies with mailbox level checks, domain corrections, and live status of an email account. Our Electronic Identity Verification solution aids know your customer (KYC) efforts and speeds customer onboarding.
What problems do you solve with Melissa?
Customer data is the lifeblood of any organization. Unfortunately, there are too many variables in how this data is obtained and stored and, without proper processes, it rapidly goes bad (up to 25% per year). This can happen for a variety of reasons – it may have been entered incorrectly, it may be outdated, or it may be unstructured and fragmented across multiple systems. Whatever the issue, Melissa’s data quality tools can help:
- Invalid Data
An organization’s address data may be old. Perhaps a customer has moved from one residence to another. Typos can result from too fast or haphazard data entry. Email addresses are often abandoned and verifying whether the email account is currently active can prove difficult for many companies. Mobile numbers are equally vulnerable to changes and disconnection. Melissa’s contact data validation solutions help companies solve these issues.
2. Duplicate Records
Detecting and eliminating duplicate records can be tedious and time consuming. Melissa’s MatchUp Software is an extremely fast and powerful matching and deduplication tool that can be used on a variety of file types to solve not only simple deduping issues but also incremental deduplication problems.
3. Questionable Identities
During the customer onboarding process, banks and financial institutions must verify that the person in question has passed a ‘liveness’ test and is indeed who he says he is, and that documentation submitted is authentic. It is also necessary to make sure the customer is not present on terror or sanctions list(s). Any missteps in verifying customer identity can lead to serious fines and leave the financial services organization in crisis mode. In addition to standard contact data verification, Melissa’s ID verification solution provides national ID verification, watchlist screening, and age confirmation for peace of mind and regulatory compliance.
What are the major challenges that companies encounter as they integrate data from different systems?
Data is present in different forms, databases, and legacy systems. Some of this data might be very old (perhaps as old as 15 to 20 years). It might also be missing details, such as a postal code or locality. When companies move data from legacy systems or from one system to another, their first and major challenge is to retain the data in the newer, correct format. This requires hours of coding and sophisticated algorithms to arrange the data in the proper structure. Even so, this might not yield the proper results. Scenarios like this demand robust and proven data quality and validation tools.
How safe is Melissa, would you like to talk about your legal and security coverage?
Melissa has been in business since 1985 and is singularly focused on data quality. Our products hold industry certifications including SOC2, HIPPA, HITECH, and others. Our commitment to data security, coupled with the numerous data privacy and security principles established at Melissa, provides a high level of confidence to 10,000+ Melissa customers around the world.
Could you tell us about your professional team and support staff?
Our R&D and product teams are based out of Melissa’s California headquarters. Additional offices throughout the US handle most of the R&D, Product Development and IP. From a global standpoint, our large support center in India and a second operation in Germany provide 24/7 technical support across numerous territories and time zones; this enables reaction to customer requests within an hour of receipt.
What are the various industries you serve? Highlight few use cases where they have been benefited with Melissa’s solutions?
Melissa serves any and all industries in which exceptional data quality (especially customer data) is a business imperative. Our expertise is leveraged broadly by telecom, healthcare, financial services, and retail organizations, to name just a few. In all industries, we address the most complex issues related to data verification.
Do you have more information for our readers?
For more than 30 years and serving more than 10,000 clients worldwide, Melissa has been a leading provider of global identity verification and data quality solutions. Using cutting-edge technology and multi-sourced global reference data, we provide the solutions to support Know Your Customer (KYC) initiatives, prevent fraud, reduce costs and improve fulfillment – at every point in the data chain.
For more information, visit: www.Melissa.com
