Innovative Systems signs Abbey National.

Innovative Systems Inc., the Pittsburg-based information services company, has signed contracts with Abbey National PLC and Bradford & Bingley Building Society.

Innovative Systems is supplying both organizations with software and services to enhance the quality of their customer data bases. Innovative Systems specializes in technology that pulls together the information in a bank's customer file.

With $19.6 million in assets, Bradford & Bingley is the largest building society in the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in Bingley West Yorkshire.

Abbey National, a building society-turned-bank in London, has assets of $125 billion.

"The more accurate our information is, the better we can understand our customer's needs. Conversely, inaccuracies can detract from the services we provide," said Brian Leary, a project director at Abbey National.

Mr. Leary said Abbey National has spent years building a customer data base. The accummulated information represents millions of customers, accounts, and policies, and there have been the inevitable inaccuracies, duplications, and other difficulties.

The ISI system provides qualitative and quantitative assessments of the bank's records, then identifies fragmented client relationships, despite differences due to misspellings, data entry errors, and variations in name and address information.

The system reformats and standardizes data for a new customer information resource that uses a dictionary to identify client names and relationships.

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here.
MORE FROM AMERICAN BANKER