The background

The ability to accurately identify existing customers in real-time across multiple products and channels is crucial for the smooth running of any business. It forms part of a successful ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) strategy, avoids duplicate charges to client accounts and minimises costs incurred by using third party identity services. Furthermore, weak customer identity resolution may also open avenues for fraudulent activity.
A regulatory change on 5 April 2022 by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) prohibited all pension providers from applying management charges to multiple pension funds owned by a single person. Additionally, if the combined fund was less than £100 in value, no charges could be applied to the account.

The challenge

This regulatory change resulted in an urgent business need for our financial services client to meet the 5 April 2022 compliance deadline or face regulatory sanctions of up to £10,000 per day.

Our client needed to accurately match over 7 million policies, consolidating multiple sub £100 pension funds (held by single individuals) into member-aligned fund portfolios. In some cases, this consolidation would raise the combined fund value above the £100 threshold, enabling the levy of administrative charges and improved revenue generation.

Due to our expertise in large-scale data cleansing, knowledge graphs, digital person matching and critical system development, our client chose 6point6 for our ability to meet challenging deadlines with high-quality code.

Strategy and solution

This project required a fundamental rethink of how our client resolved identities. Tasked with designing an architecture that could be implemented alongside business-as-usual systems and processes, multiple Agile scrum teams, comprised of both customer and 6point6 staff, delivered:

• A bespoke person-matching service built on AWS utilising Kafka, Java services, AWS Neptune graphDB and Elasticsearch, that resulted in an accurate and cleansed data set
• An approved process to allocate individual borderline cases for more detailed analysis using Camunda, for manual resolution
• Rapidly refining client requirements and producing architecture documentation by exploiting the 6point6 Agile Architecture methodology
• A minimal risk delivery through the creation of a data informed, objective decision based roadmap and effective project management that tracked and communicate ongoing progress to stakeholders through Jira boards

Results that matter

The successful implementation of the person-matching service now enables our client to fully meet regulatory compliance whilst at the same time improving profitability. In addition, this transformation project delivered:

• Extensive 6 figure annual client savings through the consolidation of over 5 million pension funds into 3 million plus, with a 40% optimisation of the client data set
• A fully integrated person-matching service with established client systems including the customer submission website, without disruption
• Improved customer interactions by embedding a business-as-usual process to remove duplicates