Companies rely on accurate information about their customers, but just as important is having information that is complete, including data on customer locations. Through the process known as geo-enrichment, financial services companies can add location information to customer profiles, including data about properties, acreage, communities, towns, and cities. Geo-enrichment enables financial services institutions to know more about where their customers are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. This in turn enables better business decisions as well as customer service.
How Is Geo-Enrichment Helpful in Banking Services?
Knowing the true valuation of properties relies on more than square footage and appraisals, and extends to current and past sales and trust deed information to understand exactly what a bank is financing and why. Geo-enrichment entails a deep data-dive into historical data linked to location and ownership, providing a fuller picture of property value and loan risk. Mortgage prospecting, valuations, and risk assessment, among many other considerations, rely on location intelligence.
Financing decisions also rely on eventualities and possibilities, including whether certain areas are prone to unusual risks like wind and water hazards, fire, hail, tornados, hurricanes, straight-line winds, earthquakes, and lightning strikes. Here, geo-enrichment can access powerful datasets that calculate these risks in precise locations, and can assign natural-disaster risk scores to every single property in the contiguous United States, specific to a particular natural occurrence—and to a specific prospective customer/property owner.
Geo-Enrichment and Know Your Customer Requirements
For the banking industry, Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements are intended to guide them in heading off fraudulent transactions. Legitimate customers often have multiple banking relationships with single institutions, with identifying information stored in different formats in a multitude of databases. Geo-enrichment here can help verify legitimate identities and transactions—names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and much more—in providing the ultimate in customer verification.
However, would-be customers with numerous financial relationships in different institutions—and in conjunction with questionable partners worldwide—can raise red flags. Geo-location enrichment tools can parse, collate, organize, and analyze this information, allowing financial institutions to be fully KYC compliant.
Why Choose Melissa for Your Geo-Enrichment Needs?
Melissa’s custom property data solutions provide fresh, accurate real estate and property data on more than 140 million U.S. properties, including parcel and building information, calculated value, deed information, and history. Melissa technology also provides detailed information on the property owner and all other properties that owner has ever owned. Adding more than 400 fields of detailed property data to in-house records gives financial institutions the competitive edge to capitalize on market opportunities.