England & Wales Cricket Board
The ECB distribute £118m per year to the county and recreational game. Sports data validation is critical in ensuring accuracy for its Investment Management System so that funds reach the right places. The ECB now benefits from improved data accuracy with zero direct debit failures & a significantly reduced risk of fraud.
Founded in 1997, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) is the single national governing body for cricket in England and Wales responsible for developing and supporting all areas of the game, including participation programmes that get children active and playing cricket. The ECB is a not-for-profit, with all income being reinvested to support and grow the sport.
Challenge
The ECB were working with a number of suppliers to separately validate email, phone, address, and bank data in the Investment Management System within its charitable arm England and Wales Cricket Trust, which handles the distribution of circa £20million of annual grants, and various amounts of interest-free loans to recreational cricket clubs. As with many sports clubs their requirements fluctuate with the cricket season running from April-September, although they were tied into expensive annual licence fees year-round, prepaying for defined numbers of lookups and minimum monthly charges regardless of actual usage, and in some cases, paying penalty prices for over-consumption.
The suppliers did not offer live reporting to monitor actual usage, and this posed a challenge for day-to-day management, ultimately rendering the solution inefficient.
Solution
Data8 Unify offers unrivalled flexibility in accessing Data8 Validation services. Unify provides access to key validation services under a single credit pack. This eliminates the need to purchase separate credits for individual services, such as email, bank, address and phone validation to get best value from your budget.
The online portal provides access to live real-time reporting for greater flexibility and easy management. Services can be added or removed at a click of a button to drive efficiencies.
The bespoke API enables the Unify Packs to work seamlessly across The ECBs existing system landscape and create a simple, cost-effective solution that supports the fluctuations of on and off-season requirements, with the additional benefit of being able to monitor costs and consumption on a per-system basis.
Results
The ECB benefits from greatly improved data accuracy with zero direct debit failures and significantly reduced fraud risk as account details are accurately captured and validated, together with fully automated emailing of grants applications processes and direct debit reminders for loan repayments.
The flexible credit payment structure and real-time consumption model has allowed the ECB to include additional services at a lower overall cost compared to using individual suppliers with up-front charges for lookups that were either under-used and therefore lost, or over-used and therefore incurred penalty fees.
Integrating a single API into the investment Management System was straight forward and it better streamlined the development process with reduced time spent on testing lookups & validations compared to dealing with numerous APIs and suppliers. Data8 were the only solution providers to offer all of our requirements and with no lookup wastage.
