Smarter identity resolution through payload fallbacks with Faraday

We are excited to announce a significant improvement to how Faraday handles real-time identity resolution with payload fallbacks—a new strategy for producing consistent, reliable, and useful results for Lookup API users, even when an identity is only partially recognized.

A challenge: partial matches

Faraday maintains a comprehensive, industry-leading database of U.S. consumer identities and insights, which we use to enrich identity data provided to us by clients. Even then, we sometimes are given identities that we only partially recognize—most commonly, we recognize an address, but not a household, or an address and a last name (household), but not a specific person. In these cases, Faraday would attempt to choose the closest or best match from our system, but would still resolve the request to a single identity.

Our solution: payload fallbacks

To address this challenge, we've implemented a hierarchical approach to identity resolution that ensures meaningful results even for partially recognized identities.

Now, when our real-time API is queried with unrecognized individuals who have a known address or postal code, we aggregate data from other known individuals at that location to provide a meaningful composite score and set of attributes. Each API response includes a match_type field that transparently indicates which resolution level was used:

Match Type	Resolution Level	Description
address_full_name	Person	Exact match to a specific individual
address_last_name	Household	Data aggregated from individuals with the same last name at the given address
address_only	Address	Data aggregated from all individuals at the address
postcode_only	Postcode	Zipcode-level aggregated data

When the address_last_name or address_only match types are used, we additionally provide a cohabitants array (limited to 10 entries) that gives visibility into the individuals used for aggregation. This array helps you understand exactly how the aggregated values were calculated. Match types which do not consider address components (e.g. email_last_name) are not subject to aggregation.

Example: If you submit an address with no name information, and Faraday knows five individuals at that address, we'll aggregate their scores and traits to provide a representative result.

Benefits for your business

These enhancements to identity resolution deliver several important benefits:

• More complete data with fewer gaps or null values
• Higher-quality predictions by leveraging household and geographic patterns
• Better handling of address-only or partial identity information
• Transparent methodology that clearly indicates the resolution level used
• Consistent results across all your Faraday deliverables

Rollout details note

Some payload fallback features will be rolling out gradually by default, such as the postcode_only match type. For existing Lookup API users, this match type will only be available after your targets have been updated.

If you’d like access today or want to confirm your status, just reach out to your SAM and we’ll get you squared away!

In conclusion

Faraday’s enhanced identity resolution ensures you get the most reliable insights, even from partial matches. By aggregating traits at the household, address, and postcode levels, we provide more complete data, higher-quality predictions, and greater transparency.

Want to see how we turn partial matches into actual, reliable predictions? Learn how score aggregation enhances modeling accuracy in this blog. Or already convinced to put better identity resolution to work for your business? Let’s talk.