Banco Popular Group with presence in Spain, Portugal and the US has a team of over 14,400 professionals. Informatica Data Quality is part of an operational improvement and customer attraction and retention initiative taken by the bank.

The quality office at the bank publishes a monthly data quality index based on 23 variables that ensure data completeness and quality. These 23 variables include fields such as name, date of birth, education level, CNAE (standard industrial classification) and CNO (occupational title) codes etc., and are classified as mandatory, necessary or desirable.

The mandatory fields refer to regulatory compliance, the necessary fields to business requirements and the desirable fields to ideal data (customers’ interests and tastes, for example, for sending personalized offers).

One of the main advantages of the installation of Informatica Data Quality, which is due to be deployed in 2010, is the autonomy and independence gained by the quality office, since it is able to define its own data quality rules (which only needs to be done once, since they can be reused) without being dependent on the workload of the development teams.

Once the new solution is deployed, it is expected that the data quality level, which will be included in the monthly report, will be increased to 90% for all variables (currently around 74%).

Moreover, the automation of the whole process will save a significant amount of time for the quality office technical team, who will then be free to analyze the data in depth. Finally, the solution will improve the company’s ability to respond to regulatory changes in the financial industry affecting data management and protection.

Alberto Romero, director of quality office at Banco Popular, said: “In view of the excellent results of a proof of concept on 280,000 records, Banco Popular decided to use Informatica Data Quality. The advantages it offered us included a complete dictionary of the existing domains, which is a key aspect for launching offers by email, and it was very easy to use for users without a technical background.

Our intention is to involve business users from branches to regional management in data quality so that it is not seen as a task exclusively for IT. Good data quality ensures a better and more effective business strategy.”