What is ANKLink™?
ANKLink™ provides additional information to End User and Limited Service Providers with NCOALink™. ANKLink™ will enable NCOALink™ Limited Service Provider and End User Mailer licensees to optionally acquire an additional 30 months (19-48) of change-of-address information. The ANKLink data will not return the new address, but will return all other information (footnote codes) including the move effective date.
Customer Application
Potential benefits to customers using an in-house (VeriMove) solution:
- In-house (VeriMove) End User and Limited Service Provider customers that only get 18 months of data may also send new lists to a service bureau to get up 19-48 months move data. With ANKLink™, only ANKLink™ matches which might be only 5% of list-which would reduce their service bureau costs.
- End User and Limited Service Provider customers could develop some business practices around this information- such as for mass marketing mailings simply not sending to these customers (to save costs on materials and return postage) or for known customers, having customer service call these customers to get updated address information.
Customer Licensing Impact
ANKLink™ is now offered by the USPS as a new, optional, licensed enhancement to NCOALink™. When licensed for ANKLink™, customers will receive this additional data on their weekly/monthly NCOALink™ DVDs.
License fees (in addition to NCOALink fees) are $750 and $3,500 per year for End User and Limited Service Provider respectively and are paid to the USPS. Customers can update their existing license through a form currently available on the USPS RIBBS website.
Current NCOALink™ customers adding ANKLink™ in this CASS cycle will not have to re-certify until the next CASS cycle.
New ANKLink™ customers will certify with ANKLink™ data.
Background
Group 1 was involved in early Betas for the ANKLink data structure and has been monitoring the progression of this service. From the original Beta, the database has been expanded to provide move information indicators only for a larger period of time than originally proposed.
Group 1 Software Offering
ANKLink™ support for all platforms will be available in the next release of VeriMove. Aside from supporting the “return code 77” and effect move date for these ANKLink ™ matches, we will be offering some post processing options to generate an ANKLink™ hit list so customers can better utilize this list in a specific business process, such as matching the list to phone numbers (if known) and having a call center contact these customers to get address updates.
The weekly/monthly data received by customers that license ANKLink will be larger. This will impact load time (from the DVDs) and transfer time (after loaded, moving the extracted files) if data is transferred to another platform such as mainframe. Load and transfer times can be expected to increase 2 or more times.
As an example:
| Database type | Load file size (GB) | Transferred file size (GB) |
|---|---|---|
| NCOALink™ (18 mo.) | 8.6 | 6.2 |
| ANKLink | 21.0 | 17.6 |
Processing time would also be expected to increase almost as much as expected hits in the 19-48 month data. For example, depending on the nature of the list, if another 20% hits were found from 19-48 months–processing would almost increase that amount (as VeriMove would find matches but not have to find return address information).
