Serve the public quickly and fairly

A division between departments striving towards the same goal can mean records end up out-of-sync, work is unnecessarily duplicated, or vital information is missed. Consolidating siloed personal records through a service like Aperture Data Studio offers greater personal understanding throughout the public sector.

Whether you’re working with UK residents or foreign citizens, accurately identifying individuals using a tool like the government’s Identity as a Service platform (IDaaS) means you can be assured of their identity quickly. If you need more specific verification, services like Experian’s Instant Document Verification can help validate personal documents without tying up your staff in manual processes.

Post Office data shows that 9,500 households move every day in the UK, and thousands of people get married or pass away. Tracking these changes ensures your department knows what’s happening and that your data stays accurate. Comparing your records to bureau data like Experian’s, either once or on a regular basis, helps combat data decay. 

Keeping data compliant with GDPR, the DPA and the additional demands imposed on the public sector by the Data Standards Authority can be a challenge. De-siloed data is the first step in ensuring breaches don’t happen, and services like Experian’s GDPR Data Integrity Assessment and Data Health Check can then help ensure those central records are properly stored and fully complete.

Are you dealing with the right person? That’s a critical question when you’re delivering public services, and it’s something an identifier like Experian’s ExPin can help answer. By making use of a unique data point, one of which has been created for every UK citizen, you’ll be able to ensure that one John Smith doesn’t get mixed up with another.

With your data expanded, perhaps by taking advantage of Experian Mosaic Public Sector, you can gain a far deeper understanding of the behavioural, demographic and socio-economic status of the citizens you’re working with. In turn this enables your organisation to act proactively and actively engage with citizens that need your help.

Through deep data analysis, tools like Experian’s can help categorise citizens in distinct groups, helping you direct your communications to precisely the right people. You can also access more than simple personal information, developing an understanding of online personas to discover additional insight which might not otherwise come to the surface.

Properly managed, organised and shared data sets allow for greater communication and alignment, not only with members of the public but between public sector services. The process of offering a smooth and coherent journey between different services begins with strong, consistent data.

When bringing a new employee on board, it’s essential that you thoroughly investigate their background. You’ll need to perform right-to-work checks, criminal and DBS checks, and ideally perform a full extended background check, looking at aspects like a candidate’s financial history or social media profile. Experian offers a host of tools that can help with each of these tasks.

By using services like Experian’s Detect and Hunter, you can check credit applications against over 100 million previous records, mortality data, known fraud lists, and even your own data to spot potentially fraudulent activity at the point of entry – before it has the opportunity to cause any kind of problem.

Organisations offering services like social housing, healthcare and benefits, and who work with limited funds, staff and resources, cannot afford to simply go on an applicant’s word. Experian’s tools can help confirm an applicant’s eligibility for any service based on your own criteria. On the other hand, the right tools and data may be able to help vulnerable applicants increase their credit bureau footprint.

Working with Central Sussex Councils, Experian’s data matching tools helped detect 1,200 priority risk cases when analysing Single Person Discount errors on council tax, recovering over £420,000 to the public purse. Quality consolidated data opens up the potential for advanced and focused analysis which can discover fraud which may not be otherwise visible.

Before you can collect, you need to find those who owe. This means keeping your records up to date, using fresh data of house moves, mortality and marriages to ensure you know everything you need. A cross-checking tool like Experian’s SuperTrace can help you discover changes of details, locate those who have evaded repayments, and avoid going after the wrong person.

Before you make a lending decision, it’s important to gain a true financial picture of a potential debtor. Using a tool such as Experian’s Affordability Check is one way to discover an individual’s financial means and adapt any offer to match, lowering the risk both for your organisation and for the citizen in question.

If you’re struggling to collect, consider the reasons why. Public sector collections have been criticised as being unfair and inefficient compared to their regulated private sector counterparts. Utilising a service like PowerCurve Collections can offer your organisation the opportunity to assess an individual’s financial situation and proactively offer a fairer solution.

Changing financial circumstances can lead to significant problems repaying debts – and, in turn, vastly increased demands on your teams. A service like Experian’s Bureau Insights helps you stay ahead of the curve, predicting broad trends and highlighting potential repayment issues through Open Banking data.

Manually processing every case of a debt falling into arrears is a costly process in itself. Automating both the approvals and collections processes allows you to free up your staff to tackle more difficult or unusual cases – and with the right tools, your collections demands can remain sensitive to a customer’s individual circumstances.