One platform or six logins: intelID vs going direct to each provider

Every firm doing locate, recovery or due diligence work in New Zealand arrives at the same question eventually. Hold an account with each data provider directly, or run the enquiry through one platform that holds them for you. Both work. They cost different things, and the difference is not mainly the line item on the invoice.

Logins

Direct access means a separate account with each provider: credit bureau, company register, title register, security interests, insolvency, and whatever is used for contact and online presence work. Six sets of credentials, six session timeouts, six password rotations and six onboarding processes when a staff member joins or leaves. Offboarding is the part that is usually missed, because a departing user has to be removed from each one individually.

Through one platform there is a single account per user, with the role controlling which sources that user may reach. Adding a person takes one action. Removing them takes one.

Invoices and minimum spends

Direct accounts each carry their own commercial arrangement. Several carry a minimum monthly spend or a prepaid balance, which means paying for capacity whether or not the month required it, and reconciling several bills against several cost centres. A quiet month still costs what the minimums add up to.

Consolidated access is one monthly subscription plus a fee for the searches actually run, all plus GST, on one invoice. There is no bundle to use up. A month with four enquiries costs what four enquiries cost. Terms are set out on the pricing page.

Result formats

Each provider presents its data in its own structure, with its own field names, its own date conventions and its own idea of what a match is. Reading five of those side by side is a skill, and it is a skill that does not transfer well between staff. It is also where errors enter a file, because two records that describe the same person differently are easy to treat as two people, and two records that describe different people similarly are easy to merge.

A consolidated result normalises the presentation. The address the credit file holds, the registered office the company record holds and the proprietor the title record holds appear in the same shape, which is what makes corroboration a reading exercise rather than a translation exercise.

Audit records

This is the part that matters most when something goes wrong. Direct accounts each keep their own access log, in their own format, for their own retention period. When a subject complains or a provider audits access, evidencing why a particular search was run means assembling a record across several systems and hoping the reasoning was written down somewhere at the time. Usually it was not.

Where the enquiry runs through one platform, the authorised purpose is declared before the search and recorded with it. One query, one user, one time stamp, one stated purpose, covering every source the enquiry touched. Producing that record is a lookup, not a reconstruction.

Reconciliation time

The hidden cost of direct access is the hour or two per file spent moving between systems, exporting, reformatting and writing up. It does not appear on any invoice and it is charged to your own staff time. Across a caseload it is generally larger than the search fees themselves, and it scales with volume in a way that platform access does not.

When direct access still makes sense

If your work draws on exactly one source, holding that account directly is the simpler arrangement and there is no reason to change it. The case for consolidation appears as soon as a typical file touches three or more sources, or as soon as more than one person is running searches and the access record has to hold up to review. That is the position most investigators and recoveries teams are in.

What a consolidated enquiry looks like in practice, source by source, is set out on the skip tracing page.