Views: Does your bank have Customer data pollution ?

Over the last three years, any bank i met up with irrespective of the region, size, how tech savvy the bank is, or if the bank had a data warehouse or an enterprise CRM; all had a common concern 'The challenge is clean customer data'. Essentially, since most banks operate on a silo mode, the customer information gets defined in different places to varying levels of data quality, leading to a 'Polluted customer data' from an enterprise point of view.
This is a concern for all banks going in for any new enterprise solution since interfacing and data quality is an issue. The question is 'how do you identify and link up the related customers defined at various business silos'? This answer is in the quality of customer data and the available parameters. In some countries regulations have played their part in the solution by implementing KYC (countries like India now lay a lot of emphasis on KYC) norms. With KYC, linking up customers is possible using parameters like Social security number, Passport, PAN numbers, etc. However, the challenge is the KYC implementation is not complete. Larger banks capable of investing in Master Data management systems (MDM) have gone for ambitious projects creating a centralized warehouse for the customer information. Whereas mid sized and smaller banks are left grappling with the challenge. One of the possible solutions to this problem is having a mediation capability that could deliver the required customer information. Mediation from BFS perspective is an ETL tool working along with a business rules engine. Customer information from various locations could be collated, cleaned and transformed (using Meta data) based on the rules defined in the rules engine. The transformed customer information can then be delivered to the newer solutions with the mediation system acting as a data bus. Later, however if there is a change in the eco system or a new implementation of CRM, the rules could be changed so as to continue to deliver the required information.