Understanding the OEM Partner Opportunity for Babel Street Match

Partnering with Babel Street helps original equipment manufacturers build “successful revenue-generating solutions,” according to The Partner Opportunity For Rosette Name Indexer: A Total Economic Impact™ Partner Opportunity Analysis. [Note that Rosette Name Indexer is now Babel Street Match.] The analysis, commissioned by Babel Street and conducted by Forrester Consulting (which maintained editorial control over study results), calls Babel Street Match a “powerful and scalable name-matching solution” that contributed to the success of products created by each OEM interviewed.

To determine the economic opportunity presented by using Match as the name-matching component of software products developed by third parties, Forrester interviewed Babel Street OEM partners working in the financial services and consulting sectors. These companies’ revenues range from $20 million to $5 billion annually. For illustrative purposes, Forrester aggregated the characteristics of these companies and combined the results into a single representative or “composite” organization — a global company headquartered in North America. 

According to the Forrester study, the composite organization — which employs Match as a component of its own products, rather than building a name-matching solution in-house — delivered an ROI of 82 percent over three years, while achieving investment payback in less than 12 months. Other direct financial benefits obtained by the composite include a 65% gross margin by year three of integration. The composite also attributes 33 percent of its revenue directly to Match.

We believe these statistics bolster what Babel Street and its OEM partners have long felt: deploying Babel Street Match as a component of an original software solution often proves more effective and less costly for OEMs than architecting their own name-matching capabilities.

But many partnership benefits are unquantifiable. For example, Babel Street believes that using Match drives innovation among OEMs and elevates their offerings in the fields of AML/KYC compliance, open-source intelligence, and threat intelligence. These benefits help OEMs improve business for themselves and their customers, especially those operating in government, law enforcement, finance, and healthcare sectors.

How?

As a world-class AI-powered software solution for fuzzy name matching, Match works across 25 languages and a variety of different scripts to quickly analyze, match, and score the names of individuals, organizations, and locations against structured and unstructured text. In doing so, Match dramatically reduces false positives and the concurrent need for manually investigating them. It enables users to tune match parameters to meet their own thresholds, and provides meaningful, easy-to-understand match scores. In part because of these capabilities, governmental security agencies use Match for more than 500 million watchlist checks daily.

Match benefits pertinent to OEM partners include:

• Faster, more accurate name matching: The Forrester study notes that Match delivers precise name matching, reducing false positives and negatives. OEM partners interviewed for the study listed technical capabilities such as accuracy… speed and performance as factors influencing their decision to use Babel Street Analytics in their solutions.
• Integration and scalability: As an API, Match works atop popular search engines such as Elasticsearch — enabling swift integration with OEM products. The scalable nature of Match enables OEM partners to deploy it for multiple uses, products, and regions.
• A valuable partnership: According to the Forrester study, partners “valued their relationships with Babel Street, the support they received, and the opportunities they had to collaborate and share influential feedback.”

The benefits OEMs achieve because of their partnership with Babel Street flow to the OEMs’ customers.

The study states that “the speed and accuracy driven by Match enables the composite to build a better solution and thereby provide measurably better experiences for its customers and end users.” In Babel Street’s experience, these “better experiences” may include the benefits of faster time to insight for OEM customers. For example, a financial services institution may be able to develop better client relationships because by using Match to more quickly resolve entities in alignment with AML/KYC mandates, it grants credit faster than its competitors.

In addition, OEM partners often find that their relationship with Babel Street improves customer- retention efforts. Match is regularly updated and improved — and Babel Street bases these improvements in part on input from OEMs and their customers. Updating solutions to meet OEM and end-user needs can potentially reduce churn, saving OEMs the cost of replacing existing clients.

Engineering a smart, fast, accurate name matching solution is an expensive, challenging process. OEMs may not have the necessary technical and linguistic expertise on hand for the project. Finished products may be slower and less accurate than solutions now on the market. They may return a surfeit of false positives. They may cover too few languages. They may result in unhappy end users.

Is building a name-matching solution in-house really worth your organization’s time, effort, and expense?

According to The Partner Opportunity For Rosette Name Indexer, OEMs working with Babel Street may enjoy several quantitative and qualitative benefits. These include a sound return on investment, fast payback, improved customer relationships and improved customer retention rates.