GBG In conversation with Ross McDonald

Transcript

Darnell Walker, Head of New Business Sales, GBG

Hi I’m Darnell Walker. I've been with GBG for over a decade working specifically within identity. And I'm joined today with Ross MacDonald, one of our product owners.

Do you mind just telling us a little bit about the Multi Bureau product offering because I know that you've been heavily involved.

Ross McDonald, Product Owner, GBG

So Multi Bureau is ultimately connecting to multiple credit reference agencies. And it's bringing it into one suite. And what this will allow our customers to do is have less integrations.

What’s happened in the past is customers have had a first wash, second wash, third wash approach for CRAs but this enables them to have a single integration, to bring them together and for GBG to work out the logic of how to mesh these results together.

Ultimately looking at how can we get an uplift without the need for a secondary provider. And, we bring a bit of logic towards breaking out those results in order to bring a bit of intelligence and help raise those match rates.

So we're not looking at looking at one bureau than another, we're actually blending them. And when I say blend, we're actually looking at all the matches and the deeper data in there. So the individual account types, which is looking at whether it's a mortgage agreement, or telecoms agreement, utility or whatever else, and we're distinguishing between what the providers are returning.

So as a company, we can be confident that they're not relying upon duplicate matches in order to achieve that pass criteria. We're actually removing those duplicates, so we’re providing that level of intelligence which would, I suppose require a lot of development work on a customer's side in order to make a coherent process.

DW: So what can customers expect from our Multi Bureau product?

RM: Ultimately, it comes down to the confident of where the match comes from. Because with GBG’s identity verification solution, we can dig deeper into the data, and ultimately pull apart what exactly the different types of data are.

So we're not ending up with duplicates from two different sources. So this could be a mortgage agreement. You know you've only got one, but both CRAs are bringing back that you've got a mortgage agreement, we can say that's a duplicate, and we can look for unique matches in order to determine that the pass threshold is met for our customers.

So this leads into the configurability, which is something which our customers can control.

It's not just a black box solution, they can set what exactly are passes and in the results, they’re getting the granular output. See you’re seeing where exactly that pass has come from, or fail. And if they do need to look into that person at a later date, they can see exactly what has happened in the audit trail.

And the final point is really around resilience. So by having two different CRA providers, if one does have problems they can go to a secondary as well.

DW: So customers are getting lots of benefits there. From an auditing perspective, they've got the confidence to be able to explain to an auditor why they've passed or maybe rejected a customer. And then also that resiliency as you talk about.

One of the grey areas that customers have always found is meeting the AML regulations, because it's a risk-based approach and their interpretation of it. How do you think that by taking the two bureau product, we help them meet these requirements?

RM: Good question. In ID3global global, GBG’s verification tool, we do have a high level of configurability. So we allow our customers to set what exactly should be a pass. So this could be different sources. It could be bringing in sources for anti-fraud, anti-impersonation, sanctions and PEPs, and Multi Bureau is no different.

We can set what exactly can be accepted. So it could be the age of agreement, it could be looking at the type of agreement. So as I mentioned before, some examples mortgage, telecoms, utilities, it could be deemed one of those isn't seen as appropriate for that risk-based approach.

So we're ultimately providing a validation service on what we can match what we can't, which will provide a clear, transparent way for them to determine whether their risk-based approach to compliance has been met.

DW: Can you give us an insight into what you had to do to get to this point to bring the solution to fruition. So, kind of understanding the process of developing the Multi Bureau product.

RM: It started with the needs of our customers, so there was a need from our customer, they wanted more data because obviously you want to make sure you can onboard as many customers in a quick and easy and also risk-based approach.

But once we started looking at it, it was working with partners and data partners, in order to determine what's the most feasible route to take. This spanned our commercial teams through to products, looking at design, what it fundamentally wants to look like, so speaking to customers, and also internal stakeholders, and then mapping this with our development team for them to, I suppose, create the magic in order to get everything implemented and ultimately live.

DW: That's given me a really good understanding to our Multi Bureau solution. I really appreciate your time Ross. Thank you very much everyone for watching