Welcome! Whether you’re a faithful follower of the SJV or Wholesale Screening blogs or a new background screening professional just checking us out, you’re in the right place. We’ve launched InformData as a new brand in the background screening industry and this blog is the new home for insights, and analysis on regulatory, privacy, CRA best practices and everything related to background checks, or as we call it, people-data. It’s our hope and aspiration that you’ll be informed by subscribing to the InformData blog so your CRA can be better, faster and more profitable by using the free knowledge you acquire on these pages.
The core of our approach to providing CRAs with the best people-data possible centers on three principles. You’ll see these as themes in the way we present our analysis of industry trends and developments in background screening. Drum roll please… here they are.
API First. This is our approach to developing people-data solutions. Application Programming Interface or API for short. Why is API First important? Three reasons:
- Make people-data products modular and nimble
- Make our people-data easy to consume
- Future-proof the products you depend on
Our industry is constantly changing. Customers change the way they want information. Governments change what information can be shared or stored. Sources of information constantly expand and change. The data products your CRA depends on must be ready to change too and API First enables InformData products to meet new challenges faster, which is what your CRA needs to be competitive. In addition to being faster, our data must be easy to consume. Whether that’s by a third-party platform, using our platform user interfaces or by high-speed, direct, computer-to-computer connections, API First enables your CRA to get the information you need, when you need it, how you need it. Lastly, API First protects the investments you make in the data we provide. Designing with APIs as a priority helps to future proof your investments so your technology stack isn’t under attack by all the change going on.
Data Supply Chains. Readers familiar with our blog know that we always look at people, process and technology when we’re assessing the people-data business. Each remains critically important. But following our merger in 2021, we stepped back and took a fresh look at the way we provide data to our CRA customers. Doing that led us to formalize the processes we use to ensure access, accuracy, security and performance of our data. The result of this industry-first formalization is looking at ourselves as a data supply chain provider and tracking and reporting on the critical metrics that ensure your CRA has the data it needs, when it needs it, 24x7x365. Data Supply Chains are the future for our industry and the way CRAs can manage the increasing complexity of the data they need and the vendors who supply it, while confidently scaling their businesses. InformData aims to be the leading Data Supply Chain provider for people-data and the foundation for CRAs to scale their businesses.
CRA-friendly business models. Pricing for data can be confusing. As reporting complexity has increased, data price options have too. Today CRAs can need advanced degrees in economics to translate price lists with thousands of lines into simple costs for their services. We can do better. We must do better if we’re going to enable CRAs to confidently scale their businesses. About a year ago we began experimenting with AI technology for creating smart pricing for data and services. We still offer the massive price list for CRAs who want to use it, but we’ve also figured out how to use information provided by a CRA to drive models that offer dramatically simpler pricing, a price that allows CRAs to buy data the way they sell results. We think simpler is smarter and we’re committed to continue to provide more CRA friendly business models for our data and services.
These are the principles behind InformData. They form the prism through which we view the increasingly complex challenges of providing CRAs with the best people-data possible and we look forward to regularly sharing our thoughts, insights, and analysis with you on these pages. If you’d like to subscribe, and we hope you do, please use the form below.