We founded Black Oak about a decade ago to address the challenge of large, complex data sets and the ability to link all of those records together. In the mid-80’s, I ran a mortgage banking operation and one of the things that we did was buy loans from multiple suppliers. The quality of information that they provided without going on-site for an audit was insufficient for us to make an evaluation of the loan and to make them a bid.
In that case we had to go to the source document but that information was locked in so many different systems that we had to build a lot of custom programming to be able to pull that together. A group of us recognized that’s a consistent problem across every business, so we got together and built HiPER and formed Black Oak.
When I got here, the company was still trying to figure out what it was. So what type of products and services they wanted to try and monetize and what type of impact on the industry, even picking the industries that were interesting. Within about 2 years roughly, we decided that we wanted to make an entrance into big data with the increasing attention to very large data volumes.
We’re been very fortunate to have really talented people that work with us. One thing you’re going to find that’s different about Black Oak is that we have some of the most experienced people in the field -both from an industry perspective but also an academic perspective. We have very specific knowledge about entity resolution and I’ve only seen a handful of other companies that we’ve talked to over the years that have known as much about it as the people we have here.
We improved our customer’s decision-making capability, so they can make better decisions. They can make decisions to offer more accurate lines of credit. They can make customer service decisions all in real-time using our linking technology.
We are all about generating value from the information, but looking past that value and seeing what the potential value could be if we added some other components. What could we possibly build? We’re always looking for what that next step might be. We’re small and dynamic enough to move be able to make that move quickly and effectively with laser focus and get right to the heart of the matter. Black Oak’s mission is to help our client make their customer’s lives simpler.