If you have previously relied on another supplier for address data cleansing and deduplication, you may be reviewing your options. AFD Refiner has been cleaning address data since 2003. It cleanses, corrects, matches and deduplicates address data in bulk for hundreds of organisations, processing billions of their records every year.
Refiner is developed and supported by the Postcode People at AFD Software. We have been helping organisations get contact data right for over 40 years and are planning to continue to do so for the next 40 years.
Data On Demand, whose consumer database is the UK’s largest, moved to Refiner after their previous address matching supplier let them down. They tested four alternatives before choosing AFD.
Address data is difficult, trying to match it to valid data is where AFD excels.
Refiner cleanses your address data against the most up to date and authoritative source of data, Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF). It spots and corrects errors, fixes formatting, adds missing postcodes and identifies duplicates. You might need to bulk clean addresses in a one-off exercise, or cleanse data as part of a regular automated process. Refiner handles both. It can also append valuable extra data, from property attributes and geodemographic classifications to grid references and UPRNs.
The matching logic behind Refiner has been developed over decades. A postcode arrives as hd33wz with no space. Daisylea Lane should be two words. Refiner sorts this without anyone touching it. Deduplication runs on any combination of fields including name, organisation, property, postcode, phone and email, so you decide what counts as a duplicate.
It also handles data received from other organisations. Northumbria University receives student address data from UCAS and needs to remove its inaccuracies.
Our address data experts are on hand to assist with your migration and can provide a Free of Charge data audit to show the results Refiner delivers on a real sample of your data.
Refiner is flexible in its deployment options. Run it installed on your own infrastructure, hosted by AFD, or as a hybrid of the two. Whichever you choose, data updates arrive automatically every month, so you are always cleansing against current PAF data.
Refiner is trusted at serious volume. Lonsdale Direct Solutions, a mailing house handling client-supplied data every day, put it like this:
Beyond the software itself, you get access to the widest range of datasets in the market. Royal Mail PAF and Ordnance Survey AddressBase Core sit at the core, with supplementary data covering property attributes, occupancy, geodemographics and more.
And you get UK based support from people who know the product inside out. Many of our team have been speaking with the same customers for 10 or 15 years. When you call, someone who understands your setup answers.
AFD Software has been helping organisations validate and cleanse contact data since 1983. Thousands of organisations rely on our solutions, from household names such as AO, AXA and Compare the Market to sole traders. We are an independent, family-owned and highly experienced team with active development and update work alongside a long-term product roadmap.
We can’t speak for another vendor’s roadmap. What we can tell you is that if you are looking to move, Refiner is a proven, actively developed alternative with a long-term product roadmap behind it.
Your data cleansing doesn’t have to stop. Refiner covers address correction, PAF cleansing, deduplication and suppression, and our team will help you plan the migration so there is no gap in your processing.
Refiner integrates with existing database processes and can run as part of an automated batch workflow. Tell us how your current setup works and we will map out how Refiner fits.
Refiner processes millions of records per hour. Send us a sample of your data and we will run a proof of concept so you can see the results and the speed for yourself.
We look forward to discussing your specific requirements. Contact one of us today by calling 0333 433 0711 or email postcode@afd.co.uk.
We serve thousands of organisations and a network of hundreds of partners across multiple industry sectors, enabling them to have full confidence in their contact data.