What the people running the files say

We've been doing this since 1985 and honestly, until recently, the job hadn't changed much. One file might need a credit check, a company search, a title from LINZ and a PPSR. So that's multiple systems, multiple logins, multiple lots of credentials someone has to keep track of, multiple lines on the invoice at the end of the month, and then someone in the office stitching all those different-looking results into one report. The enquiry was never the slow bit. It was everything around it.

We moved to intelID to get rid of all that. One login. You say what the enquiry is for, pick the sources that file actually needs, and it comes back together. You're not forced to run the lot, and you only pay for what you run, which matters when all you needed was a current address.

Where it really shows is the hard traces. The easy ones were never the problem. It's the ones who've moved repeatedly, go by a different name now, no forwarding address, nothing recent anywhere. That used to mean working through system after system, each one giving you a piece, and the investigator carrying the whole thing in their head. Now it's all on the one screen and the pieces line up against each other. We're closing traces we'd have written off as inconclusive a year ago.

The OSINT side is the newest part of it and it's changed how we approach a difficult file. Registers only tell you what somebody has formally recorded somewhere, and on a subject who is avoiding being found there often isn't much. The digital footprint work comes at it from the other direction. Run a phone number, an email address or an old username and it comes back with the accounts and platforms tied to it, aliases, and contact points nobody has ever declared on a form. On its own that's a lead rather than a result. But put it next to the credit-linked address history and the company and property records and it corroborates, and suddenly you have a line of enquiry where you had a dead end. More than once it's been a clue off the digital footprint that told us which of two possible people we were actually looking at, and that's the call that decides whether you serve the right person.

I didn't expect the interface to matter as much as it has. There was no training day. No manual. People opened it and were working live files by lunchtime, because it's laid out the way the job actually runs. Everything comes back looking the same no matter where it came from, so you're reading a result instead of building one, and it exports straight into the file and the client report. What used to be an afternoon of copy and paste is just part of the search now.

And the audit side. Every search logged, against who ran it, when, and why. When a client asks, or a data provider asks, or a regulator asks, it's already there. We're not going back through diaries and old emails trying to work out what we did and when.

You can tell it was built by people who do this work. It's given our investigators time back on every single file.

I spent a long time in the police before I set up on my own, and you get used to a certain standard of tool. Everything in one place, everything logged, and if you needed to know something about a person you asked the system and it told you. Then you hand in your warrant card and all of that goes with it. Nobody prepares you for that. You go from a single interface to a dozen separate accounts, and you spend the first year working out which register gives you what and what it costs to ask.

That's what I'd been doing ever since. A credit enquiry here, the Companies Office there, LINZ for a title, PPSR for security interests, and every one of them a separate login with its own quirks and its own invoice. You get quick at it, but quick at a bad process is still a bad process.

intelID is the first thing I've used in the private sector that feels like the tools I had in the job. One login, one interface, and you ask it about a person rather than working out which of ten systems might hold the answer. It's arranged the way an enquiry runs rather than the way the data happens to be filed, which sounds like a small thing and is not.

The part that genuinely surprised me was how much is in there that I didn't know existed. I'd assumed I had a fair picture of what was available in New Zealand after all these years. I did not. The media archive goes back decades and includes the notices pages, which has given me things on a file that no register would ever have shown. Court and tribunal decisions searchable by party name, which tells you in about a minute whether the person you're looking at has been through this before. Insolvency events. Screening against sanctions and PEP lists, which I'd previously have told a client was a specialist job and outside what I offered. And the digital footprint work, which I'd have been sceptical about a couple of years ago and now run early on anything difficult, because it produces leads the registers simply cannot.

On a hard trace that combination is the difference. Someone who has moved repeatedly, uses a different name now, and has left almost nothing formally recorded anywhere. Registers alone give you very little on that person. But an old email address or a phone number comes back with aliases and contact points nobody has ever declared, and once you sit that against the address history and the company and property records, the pieces corroborate each other and you have a line of enquiry again. I have closed traces this year that I would have reported as unfindable and handed the file back.

The other thing I'll say, and it matters more to me than it might to someone who came into this from a different direction. Every search is logged against me, the time and the purpose I declared. That's how it worked in the job and it's how it should work here. If a client questions what I did, or a data provider does, the record is already written. That is worth a great deal when your name is on the door.

It has changed what I can offer as a one-man band. I am competing on work I would have turned down two years ago.

The pricing is what got me over the line. Small monthly fee, then I pay for what I actually run. No minimum, nothing I've got to use up before it expires. A quiet month costs me next to nothing, so it isn't a fixed cost sitting there that I'm having to justify to myself every time the invoice lands.

Then you use it and the data's current, which matters far more than people outside this work realise. The cheap tools will hand you an address that was right in 2019 and you don't find out until one of your people is standing at a door talking to a very confused stranger. What comes back here has dates on it, so I can see how recent something is before I act on it. That's the difference between a lead and a wasted afternoon.

And there's things in it I've not seen on any other platform. The digital footprint work especially. An old email address or a phone number comes back with aliases, accounts, contact points that were never written on any form anywhere. I hadn't had access to anything like that before. Every couple of weeks I come across something in there I didn't know was available.

I've been at this a long time and I'm usually the last one in the room to get enthusiastic about software. This one I'd put my name to.

We have been screening for New Zealand employers since 1997, and what we sell is a complete picture on a candidate delivered fast. That has always been the hard part. The picture is not hard to describe. It is hard to assemble, because the pieces sit with different providers who each want their own account, their own form and their own turnaround.

That is where the days go. Not on the analysis, on the waiting and the chasing. A client rings on a Tuesday wanting a decision by Friday because they have got someone starting Monday, and you are sitting there with three of the five pieces back and no way to hurry the rest.

intelID took a large chunk of that out of our process. Identity confirmation, credit position, insolvency, company and directorship records, sanctions and adverse media, litigation history, and the digital footprint side, all in the one place and back while I am still on the file. What used to be a time-spent waiting on separate providers is now largely done in an hour, and we are quoting turnarounds to employers that we could not have committed to two years ago.

The reputational and social media side of our enhanced due diligence has probably changed the most. It used to be a manual job, a person searching and reading and writing it up, and the quality depended on who was doing it and how long they had. Now it is a search that returns the accounts, the aliases and the contact points, and our analyst starts from a structured result rather than a blank page. Same judgement applied at the end, far better ground to apply it from.

The part I would emphasise to anyone in our line is the audit record. We are handing employers information that can cost people jobs. Sooner or later a candidate disputes a finding, and when that happens you need to be able to show exactly what was searched, when, by whom and on what basis. Every query is logged against the user and the declared purpose. We are not reconstructing anything from memory. That protects our client, it protects the candidate, and frankly it protects us.

Twenty-odd years in this industry and the tooling has finally caught up with the job.