Master data management
An independent admission policy beside the platform you already run.
A stewardship queue nobody can clear, or a match rule set nobody outside the team can defend.
Send your record together with the match your platform proposed. It comes back accepted, withheld or contradicted — a second opinion formed outside your own rule set, against a published admission policy that does not move because somebody's coverage number needs it to.
Two pages carry what this one only points at: where assurance stands, and every figure with the population it was measured over.
trust and security →every figure, with its population →On this page
MDM programme leads, data governance and stewardship teams, enterprise data architects, and anyone accountable for the customer or party master.
Buying breadth as the product: we hold a fraction of an incumbent’s records and are not building a global company graph. Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
How it actually goes wrong
What causes it, what it costs when nobody notices, and the part of it a resolver can reach.
A master data platform is genuinely good at the things it was bought for: workflow, stewardship, hierarchy management, rules for which value wins when two sources disagree, and pushing a golden record out to the systems that consume it. What it does not have is an outside opinion. The match rules are yours, tuned by your own stewards against your own data, and there is nothing anywhere in the estate that can look at a proposed match and disagree with a citation. When the rules are wrong they are wrong consistently, and the platform's own confidence score cannot tell you so, because it was computed by the rules being questioned.
The consequence shows up as two piles. One is the stewardship queue, which grows faster than anyone can work it, because the safe setting for the thresholds is the one that escalates more. The other is the merges that never reached the queue at all, because the rules were confident. Nobody audits that second pile, and it is the expensive one: a wrong merge propagates into every downstream system on the next publish, and unpicking it a quarter later means reconstructing a decision that was never recorded as a decision.
Meanwhile every deadline that lands on the business lands on the master. A payment message that will not accept an unstructured address, an invoice that requires a customer's national identifier, a regulatory register that wants each counterparty identified by a legal entity identifier — all of them are questions about whether the party record points at the right company, answered by a system whose matching rules nobody outside the data team can defend.
If that reads like your week, create your Free workspace and upload a company CSV to see which rows match and which need review. Contact us separately if you want a guided first file.
Start freeWhat we do about it
Each of these runs today. Where one needs a column you might not have, or fails in a particular way, the sentence says so.
- 01
An admission policy you did not write
The bar a match has to clear is ours, it is published, and it lives in the code rather than in a settings screen: A match below 0.90 confidence is unrepresentable. The record comes back as an abstention with a ranked shortlist instead. The rule travels with the resolution outcome itself rather than with whatever called it — a domain invariant — and it is checked again on the online, batch and replay paths, so a sub-floor accepted match cannot be constructed anywhere. It is an acceptance contract, not calibration evidence: it says what we refuse to return, not how often an accepted match is right. Read it with the coverage it costs. Your stewards can disagree with it. They cannot quietly move it. - 02
Accept, withhold, or contradict
Three outcomes rather than a score. Accept means the evidence supports the match your platform proposed. Withhold means we compared the pair and would not call it either way. Contradict means we reached a different answer and can show you the register page that says so. Every one of the three carries a receipt, and the mix is reported per provider, per jurisdiction and per evidence tier rather than as one blended agreement rate. - 03
Temporal evidence rather than a snapshot
Every fact carries when it was first seen, when it was last confirmed and how many confirmations there have been. When two sources disagree, the value that wins — survivorship — ranks on last confirmed rather than first seen, because continued confirmation is stronger evidence than novelty. Freshness breaks ties only within a source tier and never across one, so a stale register value still outranks a fresh web observation. The entity reports the age of its stalest field, not its freshest. - 04
One winner per field, whatever order the file arrives in
The survivorship order is total: one set of facts has exactly one ordering regardless of arrival order, so an unchanged record re-assembles byte-identically and does not fire a downstream change-data-capture or screening event. Name-like ties break on case shape, so a tie between two spellings does not export shouting into your master. The precedence runs registry and reviewer first, then filings, then you, then cited web research, then commercial vendors, then anything inferred. - 05
The abstentions are the queue you can price
Every unresolved row carries a typed cause and the cheapest of your own columns that would make it decidable — a domain, a registration number, an LEI. That converts a stewardship backlog into a data-acquisition decision with a cost attached, which is a different conversation from asking for more stewards.
Which of these is your export?
One export usually sits in three of these at once. Your rate is set by the columns still standing once the names have been stripped back to a comparable form.
A party record with a registration number or an LEI already attached
Decides deterministically. The number is checked for register shape rather than for string equality, so a Companies House number is recognised as eight characters behind an optional letter prefix rather than as a string of digits.
Measured100% (317/317) on the representative GB fixture.
A party record plus the match your platform proposed
Adjudicated as a stateless pair. Nothing is stored, no entity is created and no catalogue entry is made — useful when you want an opinion rather than a record. The trade is that a stateless comparison mints no receipt, so where you need the audit trail you want a resolve rather than a match.
No published rateThis shape has not been measured on a published fixture, so the behaviour above carries no rate.
A legal name plus a registered address
Resolves on the postcode tier where the postcode survives normalisation. Where the address is a trading address rather than a registered one, it behaves as context — which is retrieval evidence, not an identifying signal.
Measured98.74% (313/317).
A bare numeric registration number that has lost its leading zeros
Abstains more often than the padded version, and this is worth checking before a run. A GB registration number is self-naming only at its full eight digits; six or seven bare digits are equally a charity reference, so the cascade refuses rather than picking a register. Send the padded column if you have it.
No published rateThis shape has not been measured on a published fixture, so the behaviour above carries no rate.
- Identifier — A company number or an LEI
- 100% 317/317
- Name and postcode — A company name and a registered postcode
- 98.74% 313/317
Zero wrong bindings were observed across the historical six-shape recording and the separate domain fixture. Observed correctness was 1.0000 on accepted outcomes; this does not guarantee an error-free new workload.
317 live GB companies sampled from the 2026-08-01 Companies House snapshot, with same-name siblings included. Identifier-rich arrivals seed the catalogue before the weaker input shapes are evaluated. Historical results on an internal UK fixture with a preloaded catalogue. The September 5 replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot establish current calibration. No independent customer holdout or global coverage claim. The whole table, including the shapes this page does not use, with the safety results and an account of what none of it demonstrates.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
Not sure which of these your export is? Create your Free workspace and inspect your own CSV columns. For an assisted composition preview, contact us with the file: we tier each row by its strongest surviving signal before quoting a Sprint.
Start freeA proposed match your platform is confident about
One pass, in order, including the rows that do not resolve. The interesting rows are always the ones at the end.
A party record carrying a legal name, a trading address and a domain, together with the entity id and 0.94 confidence your platform assigned it.
- 01The pair is scored independently, against the register rather than against your rule set.
- 02The domain resolves to a company whose registered address is in a different town from the one on your record, and whose company number differs from the one held on the proposed target.
- 03A disagreeing strong identifier is decisive, so the pair is answered as a non-match rather than escalated.
- 04A pair check stores nothing, so the party record is resolved as well, and that writes a receipt recording the identifier rule that decided it, the evidence, and the register URL the contradicting number came from.
A contradiction: we would not have made this match, here is the register page, here is the decision id. Your platform's 0.94 is untouched — it is a statement about its own rules, and this is a statement about the register.
The point of the example is that the disagreement is checkable in about thirty seconds by opening the cited URL. A second confidence score would not be checkable, and a second confidence score is what most match-quality tooling produces.
That example is ours. The one worth having is the same walk-through on eight rows of yours.
Start freePrefer to put it to a person? Talk to us instead →
What this will not do
Each of these is a decision we intend to keep. Read them before you scope the work.
- This is not a master data platform. There is no stewardship workflow, no hierarchy management UI, no survivorship rule builder, no publish pipeline and no golden-record distribution. If you do not have an MDM, this does not become one.
- We do not consume your platform's match rules or tune them. The opinion is independent precisely because it is not derived from them, which also means it cannot tell you which of your rules produced a bad match.
- The packaged incumbent-contradiction ledger is not shipped. It is declared absent from the audit pack with a stated reason rather than delivered empty, so today the comparison is a working session rather than a downloadable file.
- The matcher does not yet consume negative constraints. A pair a reviewer has separated stays separated for the same bytes, but materially changed content for the same company can be proposed again.
- Batch resolution is order-independent within one batch only. How you chunk a file changes the answer in a measured way, and both directions are real: smaller batches collapse more duplicates, one batch buys order-independence within it.
- Nothing revalidates on a schedule. A fact's last-checked date advances only when a resolution happens to re-observe it, so this does not replace a refresh cadence you were relying on somebody else to run.
We will not tell you how many dangerous merges we will find
We do not promise a count of dangerous merges prevented, and you should distrust anyone who does before they have seen your file. Zero is a normal, honest result: two rows carrying contradicting company numbers are refused outright and never reach the guard that would have counted them.
What this product does not have — no SOC 2, no external validation of the accuracy figures, no customer holdout — is published in full, with the retention, erasure and tenancy detail a security review asks for. Read the trust page →
Check these scope limits before integrating. Free signup lets you inspect your own company CSV; if a requirement falls outside the published scope, contact us and we will tell you whether it is supported.
Start freeThe method behind this, at length
5 articles that carry the working this page summarises.
- GuideSurvivorship and golden recordsMerging records is only half the job. Field-level survivorship, source precedence, temporal facts, per-field provenance, and why last-confirmed beats first-seen.
- GuideWhat is entity resolution?Entity resolution decides which records refer to the same real-world thing. What it is, why company identity is hard, deterministic versus probabilistic matching, and why fuzzy matching is not entity resolution.
- GuideHow to measure entity resolution accuracyPrecision, recall, abstention, pairwise versus B-cubed cluster metrics, Wilson intervals and out-of-fold evaluation. Why a single accuracy number for entity resolution is always meaningless, with worked arithmetic.
- GuideEntity resolution vs record linkage: which term is rightRecord linkage, entity resolution, deduplication, entity matching, entity linking and identity resolution name overlapping problems from different fields. What each term means and when each one is correct.
- GuideISO 20022 structured address requirementsCBPR+ payment messages are to stop accepting fully unstructured postal addresses. Swift delayed the 14 November 2026 date on 27 August 2026. What changes, and the identity work it forces.
The same pipeline, in other people's words
One product, described 6 other ways. If your team has a different vocabulary for the same file, start from the page that speaks it.
Audit company overlap before a CRM migration
Review duplicate companies across both exports while every source ID is still intact.
CRM and RevOps
Which accounts are one company, which merges to refuse, and a receipt for both.
Supplier master and accounts payable
Duplicate vendors, remittance conflicts and concentration you cannot see.
KYC and onboarding
Counterparty identity with a receipt that survives seven years.
Reference data
Every identifier a company is known by, each separately cited — and the ones nobody holds.
AI agents
A counterparty check before the agent acts, and a receipt for what it acted on.
Start with your own company records.
Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration.
300 credits. No card.
For a guided review of your file, explore the Merge Safety Sprint →
Questions about master data management
Does this replace our MDM platform?
No, and it would be a bad trade if it tried. Workflow, stewardship, hierarchies, survivorship configuration and distribution are the platform's job and none of them are on offer here. What is on offer is the one thing a platform structurally cannot give you, which is an opinion formed outside its own rules, with a citation and a receipt. It feeds the stewardship queue rather than replacing it.
How is your confidence different from the score our platform emits?
Ours is calibrated against recorded outcomes rather than computed from a rule weighting. Every published value is the bottom of a 95% confidence interval rather than its midpoint — the Wilson lower bound — taken over the measured accuracy of the population that decision belongs to, so a thin population reports a lower number instead of a flattering one. The values are pure functions of recorded trial and error counts with no tunable term, and the test suite recomputes every shipped value from its counts, so an edited constant fails the build. Confidence limits depend on the recorded population. Confidence bounds depend on the recorded evidence population; there is no universal score for every match. Read match_confidence_basis and the evidence. A 0.99 filter can return some v8 adjudicated matches while excluding valid identifier matches, so validate its coverage cost on your own inputs.
Can we run this continuously rather than as a one-off?
Yes, and that is the intended shape. The one-off is the diagnostic that establishes whether there is anything worth doing; the recurring form adjudicates the matches your platform proposes as it proposes them, enforces the confidence and evidence policy you set, preserves the incumbent's own response under its licence, and reports the mix per provider and per jurisdiction. Learning from your reviewed outcomes is part of it, with the reviewed verdicts kept out of the automated population every accuracy figure is measured over.
What does an abstention cost us in coverage?
Coverage, and that is the trade the floor buys. On the gated continuous-integration fixture end-to-end resolution was 70.78% (499/705) against a 99% internal product goal that is not met, with 63.10% of pairs decided automatically. The precision is partly good because the system declines the hard tail. What the abstentions give back is a typed work list rather than an unexamined merge.
Our stewards will want to overrule you. What happens then?
That is supported and it is recorded properly. A verdict requires a review-scoped credential, the reviewer identity is the immutable name assigned when that credential was minted rather than a name supplied in the request, and the acting credential and surface are stored on the decision so a caller cannot argue with them. Reviewer verdicts are stamped as human review and deliberately excluded from the automated population the precision figures are measured over, so no human certainty is laundered into our number.