AddressFirst

Why AddressFirst?

The AddressBase product suite from the Ordnance Survey is one of the richest, most advanced addressing products in the world.  As an OS Partner, Addresscloud have been delivering services based on AddressBase Premium since 2015 and process more than 10 million transactions a month.  However, the AddressBase products do not include some addresses, notably where:

• some organisations share the same delivery address, for example organisations using an accountant or lawyer's address as their registered legal address, or startups working in a shared office,
• some large user postcode addresses in a single location may have many postcodes for delivering mail, and
• new builds or new organisations which have not yet been processed and assigned coordinates.

Addresscloud overcome these challenges by "putting the address first": we assign a set of coordinates and an accuracy code to every Royal Mail delivery address in Great Britain. Where possible we use the AddressBase Core product to assign true rooftop level coordinates and a UPRN but falling back to postcode level coordinates from OS CodePoint Open where a property level match is not possible.

What is the difference between AddressFirst and AddressBase Premium?

There is no right answer when it comes to addressing however my view is that for residential insurance the closer we can get to the Royal Mail the better we match a customer's view of their address.

AddressFirst uses Royal Mail PAF as our primary source and we attach UPRNs and geo-coordinates to it.  Ordnance Survey treat local authority addresses as the primary source and attach Royal Mail addresses to these.  If you imagine a venn diagram with a very large intersection then most addresses will sit in that space however there will be outliers on either side.

The table below shows a comparison between the two datasets:

* Daily updates will be available to Addresscloud customers in 2022

We recommend all of our residential and SME insurers to use AddressFirst as we feel this is the best fit.

In addition to the PAF main file Addresscloud bring in the Multiple Residence and Not Yet Built products which add an additional ~1.5 million addresses.  We also map 435,000 organisation and 646,000 building name aliases from the PAF Alias product for optimal match rates including coverage of organisations based at home addresses which are not always covered by the AddressBase products.