Officer ID Changes

As part of DueDil’s commitment to providing a comprehensive and contextualised view of SMEs and the people behind them, we are continuously finding ways to improve our offering by adding more insight to our products.

As a result, we are planning a rollout of an improvement to our officer identification system. This includes: 

• A new officer ID redirection system that will eliminate the issue of missing IDs.
• A significantly enhanced officer conflation system which will produce more accurate officer matching and reduce duplicates.

These changes are non-breaking and are planned a month from now (w/c 21st Dec 2020).

The following sections expand on some detail about the background of the problem, the solution and timelines.

Background

One of the key problems we aim to solve for our clients is to accurately identify officers of companies. This is a significantly harder problem than accurately identifying businesses since businesses register with a unique identifier, and that identifier is immutable and stable over time.

In contrast, there’s no unified mechanism provided by official registries to uniquely identify officers, and the problem of false positives due to common names is significantly harder. That’s why we built the new officer ID system; to provide you, as our clients, the capability to uniquely identify an officer entity, and be able to then link that to a full view of that officer’s appointment history.

Plan

We are planning two major upgrades to improve our officer identification system - this will also ensure this system remains reliable over time and minimise chances of data inconsistencies in the future.

• Officer ID redirection system: Due to the nature of the problem mentioned earlier, our automated conflation algorithm is always trying to merge officer records from various providers when we have strong evidence that those multiple records correspond to the same real person. As a result, it is likely that in the future, some IDs that you might have previously retrieved and saved in your internal systems will get mapped to a new, conflated ID. This system will allow you to query our API (or web app) using any of the IDs and always get redirected to the canonical, most up to date version. This means that in some cases, you might get in the API response an ID different from the one you requested. Rest assured that this behaviour is intentional and you should consider the returned ID by the API as the most recent version for the given officer.
• Upgrades to our conflation engine: As with any data product, iteration is key to getting the best outcome possible. As a result of testing and gathering feedback, we have identified a few changes to our conflation logic that will result in significant improvements in officer conflation (more matching and de-duplication of officer records). These upgrades are ready but we will release them following the redirection system release so that you don’t encounter any issues with missing data owing to an existing ID getting conflated into another one.

Timelines

We plan on releasing the redirection system and conflation upgrades in a month from now (w/c 21st Dec 2020). In terms of concrete changes you will experience, this is a non-breaking change, and the main observable change being that in some cases, when using the officer vitals, officer appointments or PEPs and Sanctions endpoints with an officer ID, you might get back a different officer ID to the one you queried for. But as mentioned before, you can continue to query the API with either ID, though we recommend you always use the latest version of the ID.

We’ll make sure this release goes smoothly and without any disruption to you. We firmly believe that this is a major step forward for the product and that it will yield significant benefits to you.