Author: Christian Nentwich, CEO of Duco – www.du.co

Today we announced the launch of our new Data Prep product at Duco, adding the ability for non-technical users to normalise any combination of complex structured data very rapidly.

So why would a company that has disrupted the way data reconciliation works do something like that?

You see… we didn’t wake up one day and get passionate about reconciliation. There is a method to our master plan.

What we actually care about is making it easier to manage data. Deciding whether any data in your core architecture is actually any good and using it effectively is hugely difficult. And that’s not even considering joining different datasets.

Data that cannot be trusted means slow mortgage decisions. It means payment mistakes. It means YOU not getting paid on your insurance policy. Your bank potentially losing your money. Or good companies going out of business because of the cost of dealing with their bad data – a drag of 15-25% on their total revenue, by one estimate.

This has to change.

Over the last twenty years we have witnessed the launch of one hard-coded point solution after another.

“Master data management” here.

“Data quality” there.

“Reconciliation” here.

Snake oil all over the place with big promises. Tens of millions to implement each time and, to be sure, solving some small problem – but leaving us with the billion dollar problem still intact.

It’s time to rethink all of these areas of data management. At Duco, we believe that truly solving these requires a focus on making access to data as easy as possible. Not on endless features or customisation that ends up ultimately dragging down the customer.

No – ease of access wins. That means massive scalability, machine learning and enough data exposure to start to actively repair.

So why Data Prep?

We spent the last seven years perfecting the use of natural language for data transformation in the recon space. There are 35,000 projects live on the Duco Platform. It is a core capability that many systems will have to have in future, as systems must adapt to data, not the other way round. So now we have packaged it as a product in its own right.

Innovation in Data Prep has been awesome, but highly focussed on analytics. That is not our interest. Our interest is core, operational business data and making it much easier to access in an auditable, controlled way.

Our reconciliation capability solves hundreds of use cases, going far beyond accounting in data migrations or customer consolidation. Data Prep adds hundreds more as our clients get creative, from customer onboarding, to reporting and data set consolidation.

Data Prep is one more step to making it much easier to manage data. Get your popcorn ready. There is more to come.