Unlocking social care efficiencies: The role of ID verification technology
Guest blog by Barley Laing, UK Managing Director at Melissa #techUKSocialValueWeek
Barley Laing
UK Managing Director, Melissa
Barley Laing joined Melissa in 2014 during an exciting expansion phase of the California headquartered company.
As Managing Director, with 24 years of technology and data industry experience, his role is focused on meeting the customer onboarding, data quality and ID/compliance needs for organisations in the UK and worldwide.
The team that Barley heads up provides sales, data consultancy and technical support for their wide range of software solutions, which help organisations to achieve efficient data verification and management; and meet ID, Know your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements.
Under his leadership Melissa’s UK office has experienced double digit growth over the last five years in a row, including 21% in 2021. Over this period he has significantly grown the UK client base, which includes: the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office; GCHQ; Financial Conduct Authority (FCA); BBC; BAE Systems; GSK and Mars.
Adult social care takes the largest slice of a local authority’s budget at around 39 pence in the pound 2023 - 24. This figure is set to grow as the national living wage and national insurance contributions rising from this month (April), putting extreme pressure on already stretched budgets.
According to the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, the majority of English councils are on the verge of financial collapse with local authorities facing a £9.3 billion deficit by 2026-7. Therefore, driving efficiencies has to be the main focus for all local authorities.
Obtain clean contact data from claimants
The best starting point to drive efficiencies is to check the eligibility of those applying for adult social care. This requires the collection of accurate contact data from applicants in the first instance, because when contact information such as name, address, email and phone number is accurate the verification process becomes more reliable.
It’s only then that ID verification technology can confidently cross-reference the provided information against official databases or other authoritative sources without discrepancies that could lead to false positives or negatives, as well as more successfully recognise suspicious activity and prevent fraudulent claims.
Address verification – the foundation of contact data quality
It’s vital to begin with address verification, which ensures the collection of consistently accurate, standardised addresses. This is particularly important when six million people move every year in England and Wales, or when there’s a danger of “misplaced” spend on adult social care that should be funded by another organisation. Put simply, you need to know if the claimants are in your catchment area or another council’s.
Furthermore, address verification is usually recognised as the foundation of contact data quality, because once you have access to an up-to-date address, it makes it much easier to match and verify identities across various sources.
Lookup or autocomplete technology
Using lookup or autocomplete technology is an ideal way to source accurate user addresses and other contact data. For example, using an address lookup tool, it’s possible to deliver an appropriately formatted, correct address at the onboarding stage, when the claimant starts to input theirs. It’s an important way to source accurate user addresses and other contact data, with around 20 per cent of addresses entered online containing errors. These include spelling mistakes, wrong house numbers, and incorrect postcodes, as well as incorrect email addresses and phone numbers, largely due to errors when inputting contact information. Additionally, the number of keystrokes required when entering an address is reduced by up to 81 per cent using the service. This speeds up the onboarding process and improves the whole user experience.
The good news is that similar technology can be employed to deliver first point of contact verification across email and phone, so these vital contact datasets can also be verified in real-time.
Data cleaning platform
A scalable data cleaning software-as-a-service (SaaS) that can be simply accessed, and doesn’t require coding, integration or training to use, to deliver address and wider data quality in real-time across existing user databases, is another option. It can cleanse and correct contact data and match records, preventing duplication. With an intuitive interface, it offers the opportunity for data standardisation, validation, and enrichment, ensuring high-quality contact information across many databases. It can clean data both as it’s being collected and held data in batch. Outside of SaaS, such service capabilities can also be accessed via cloud-based API, Microsoft SQL Server or deployed on-premise.
Electronic ID verification technology (eIDV)
It's not enough to only use data hygiene technologies to prevent possible ‘misplaced’ spending and fraud. It’s important to use an electronic identity verification (eIDV) platform to make sure the claimants are who they state. An automated eIDV tool can be accessed via delivery mechanisms, including an “out-of-the-box” user interface with no integration required; or cloud API; and scaled up or down according to the needs of the users.
With these platforms “always on”, they are able to cross-check, in real-time, the names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers provided by users during remote onboarding. This avoids a negative impact on the user experience, while preventing fraud.
For the best outcome, it is vital to obtain an eIDV tool with access to billions of consumer and business records from reputable sources around the world, including government, utility and credit agencies.
Employing automated technology is significantly quicker, more accurate and cost effective for undertaking ID verification and preventing fraud when compared with manual checks. There’s no additional staffing or training costs, and there’s considerably less danger of human error when using this technology. Instead, those eligible for care are onboarded swiftly, ensuring they receive what they need quickly.
As local authorities focus on balancing the books preventing any “misplaced” spending and avoiding fraud in the delivery of costly adult social care is crucial in these challenging times. Having technology in place to ensure they are collecting clean contact data on citizens and delivering the necessary electronic ID verification checks is key.
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Heather is Head of Central Government Programme at techUK, working to represent the supplier community of tech products and services to Central Government.
Prior to joining techUK in April 2022, Heather worked in the Economic Policy and Small States Section at the Commonwealth Secretariat. She led the organisation’s FinTech programme and worked to create an enabling environment for developing countries to take advantage of the socio-economic benefits of FinTech.
Before moving to the UK, Heather worked at the Office of the Prime Minister of The Bahamas and the Central Bank of The Bahamas.
Heather holds a Graduate Diploma in Law from BPP, a Masters in Public Administration (MPA) from LSE, and a BA in Economics and Sociology from Macalester College.
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Junior Programme Manager - Central Government, techUK
Charles Bauman
Junior Programme Manager - Central Government, techUK
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