In many business systems the risk of missing a match must determine the scale of the search.

Compare the risk of missing:

In fraud, criminal and alert data, the important high risk record will often be harder to find because the identity alteration becomes more devious and complex.

In data which is collected over long periods, the important record will be hard to find because time may have altered the identification in the search data.

With complex or locally entered foreign data, an important record will be hard to find because of its tendency to contain severe error.

High-risk searches must be thorough. With today’s data volumes, thorough searching must use intelligent keys and search strategies to manage the volume and quality of records returned.

Even with intelligent keys and search strategies, being thorough necessarily increases the volume of candidates returned. Because of this, reliable matching must also be used to assist the user by refining and ranking the list, and in some systems actually by matching the record, based on all available identity data.

Lower risk searches can afford to be less thorough, and can take advantage of assumptions about the stability of the data to provide quick access.

If you value your business, don’t trust the same strategy or scale of name search for transactions of different risk values. You may need to automate the choice of strategy relative to the transaction’s risk. Index the critical data separately and more thoroughly than the non-critical.