Address Cleansing using CASS/RDI

The Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) enables the United States Postal Service (USPS) to evaluate the accuracy of software that corrects and matches street addresses.

Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS)

CASS is both:

A certification for Address Validation and Geocoding software vendors.
A process leveraged by customers of CASS™ - certified software vendors to obtain output specified by the U. S. Postal Service®.
Note: The following points help you understand how CASS and RDI functions:
- CASS is used for United States addresses only. Hence, CASS must not be used to cleanse nonAmerican tenants when data includes non-American addresses.
- CASS can be bundled with Residential Delivery Indicator (RDI) data pack providing delivery type information, namely, whether an address is residential or business.
- CASS-enabled cleansing returns results in uppercase.

CASS for Software Vendors

The U. S. Postal Service Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) software certification program provides hardware and software developers, service bureaus, and commercial mailers a common measure to test the quality of their address-matching software. Software tests for CASS certification are graded by the U. S. Postal Service (USPS), National Customer Support Center (NCSC) and the results are returned to the developer to provide useful diagnostics for correcting software deficiencies. This certification is specific to any particular vendor’s use of the proprietary CASS API and encrypted reference data, both belonging to the USPS.

To achieve CASS certification, participants are provided test address data (150,000 records) and must pass with the following minimum scores:

98.5 percent for ZIP + 4, carrier route, Five-digit Postcode and LACS
100 percent for delivery point coding, eLOT, DPV or DSF2, and RDI

Note: The CASS certification is valid until the end of the current certification period, generally one year.

Choosing the CASS Certified Process

A CASS™ - certified process can only be deployed by a CASS™ - certified vendor. In Reltio’s case, leveraging the CASS™ - certified process instead of the standard (non-CASS) process requires extra commercial arrangements that must be sorted out at the time of the contract with the customer.

If you opt to leverage a CASS™ - certified process, you get encrypted CASS data from the USPS and the proprietary API for parsing, standardization, and validation which is also developed, supported, and managed by the USPS.

Non-CASS US Reference Data

The non-CASS US reference data includes all the address information in the CASS data file including the postcode information, with the exception of the additional indicators.

But more importantly, the non-CASS data file is ‘conflated’ by Relito’s Address Validation and Geocoding vendor with US reference data from additional reference data vendors outside of the USPS to give a more complete view of US address data.

Frequently Asked Questions

When should Reltio customers leverage a CASS process?
There are two distinct use cases for CASS:
1. Postal Discounts for Mass Mailing in the United States - When you send out large quantities of mail in the United States and you are looking to leverage postal rate discounts offered by the USPS for bulk mailers
2. DPV (also DSF2) - Delivery Point Validation, the CASS process outputs a flag that indicates whether or not an address is a valid delivery point for receiving mail or packages from the USPS. This can be important for you, especially in some regulatory use cases.
Does using CASS guarantee 98.5% accuracy?
CASS guarantees only that the vendor deploying the CASS™ - certified software obtained a minimum resolution of 98.5% against a database of test addresses for a subset of USPS address coding indicators: ZIP + 4, carrier route, five-digit postal code, and LACSLink.
What are the limitations of CASS over non-CASS process in Reltio?
- Less flexibility in address data quality - Bulk mailing, which is generally not the optimal use case for our customers address data quality requirements.
- Less flexibility in product modifications - In the non-CASS process, product issues identified can be brought to Reltio and our vendor for submission to modify, remediate, or enhance. The CASS process leverages the tightly defined API from the USPS and any changes are difficult and/or on average take longer, due to both the regulatory nature of the product and the agency that maintains it.
- Less complete US reference data - The CASS™ - certified process leverages only the encrypted USPS postal data, while the non-CASS process leverages a conflated US reference data set that includes the USPS postal data.
- Less flexibility in formatting output - The CASS™ - certified process requires certain words to appear in a pre-defined manner (For example: Circle will always show as CIR, Alley as ALY, etc.). Those formats cannot be changed. Also, CASS addresses show up as one line.
  Note: An address can be output to two lines. But, that is an example of the type of CASS restriction that will need to be accounted for in an implementation plan.

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