Since 1968, PBS has managed and developed payment systems and payment cards. They are currently the industry’s leading operator in the Scandinavian market. PBS has 850 employees and handles over 1.3 billion card transactions annually through one of the world’s most advanced and future-proof payment platforms.
Over 130 million monetary transfers, or giros, are initiated in Denmark every year. Sending a giro normally requires that the payer travel to the post office to complete a form. PBS sought to enhance the efficiency of this process for itself and its clients by introducing an electronic payment process to replace the paper-initiated giro. But because of the “push” nature of the giro payment, where money is taken from a payers account and delivered to the payee – with the payee initiating the whole process – it is critical that the funds are delivered to the correct account.
The electronic payment system introduced by PBS effectively replaced giro payments, allowing individuals or corporations to register to receive payments electronically – resulting in greater convenience and cost savings for everyone involved.
However, for this process to work correctly, the system processing the payments needed to be able to correctly match the payee and payer, necessitating high-quality data and sophisticated matching throughout the system. The company needed a system that could accurately match the information with registered payees in batch. However, because the existing system relied on one-at-a-time user inputs to initiate the payments, exact matches were unlikely. To address this issue, PBS turned to DataFlux.
PBS chose DataFlux to perform data matching within the new electronic system. DataFlux technology allows users to extend business rules across enterprise systems for real-time data matching and monitoring. Additionally, because DataFlux offers pre-built localization software for over 240 countries, PBS was able to utilize existing Danish name, address and company standardization rules present within the software, saving a significant amount of development time.
PBS used DataFlux technology to profile the data in order to get a quick overview of the data quality problems, and then standardized the data from various sources.
After installing DataFlux technology, PBS launched a pilot project to verify the accuracy of the data matches. “We performed various tests of random checks of production data,” Dorthe Grabau, director, Domestic Payments at PBS said.” In the beginning, we were very strict, as our goal was zero mistakes. We asked 10 people to check 500 matches between the creditor’s data and the online bank’s data, and we found no errors in these 5000 matches”.
After the successful pilot, the electronic payment system was introduced via online banks and television commercials, with a target group of 2.8 million citizens who have a Web-based bank account. Now, customers have the option to receive an email or an SMS to alert them of a waiting payment at their bank.
With DataFlux technology, PBS is able to automate a traditional part of the outreach process – delivering the correct invoice to the right person. DataFlux technology is able to automatically perform the analysis and matching to correctly link the accounts in batch. DataFlux allowed PBS to automate a time-consuming process – with no errors.