From a registration mark, CDL Vehicle Information Services (VIS) tells you everything you need to know about a vehicle in real-time, with over 200 attributes including valuation, MOT, finance, DVLA and claims history.

With comprehensive coverage, CDL holds data on every registered vehicle across the UK, including Car, LCV, HGV, Motorcycle and Plant, and is the country's leading provider of vehicle look-up services, best known for the number one digital used-car and vehicle ownership marketplace, MyCarCheck.com

VIS data also acts as the backbone for many bespoke corporate solutions, carrying out over one million checks per day for B2B partners and returning data securely through simple XML API integration over the web or configured over AWS PrivateLink.

Use cases span motor trade, insurance, finance, parking and other vertical markets:

• Full provenance check to give people peace of mind when buying a used car
• Keeper change notification service
• VIN look-up to identify cloned registration plates and verify a vehicle's true identity
• Stolen Vehicle Reports from the Police National Computer
• VRM look-up for B2B applications, speeding up online customer journeys
• White label solutions
• MOT data checks: average mileage insight broken down to the most granular level, including common failure reasons and advisory information
• Insurance rating purposes

Data sources include:

• The Driver & Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA)
• The Police National Computer (PNC)
• The Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders (SMMT)
• Motor Insurance Anti-fraud & Theft Register (MIAFTR)
• Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA)
• Thatcham
• National Association of Motor Auctions (NAMA)

Applications, including MyCarCheck.com or B2B customer applications request VIS data using an API call, available via a simple XML API integration over the web or configured over AWS PrivateLink.

The request is handled by a load balanced containerised JAVA application and the data is held in relational form on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). The application determines which data the caller can access and an appropriate SQL query is formed; the SQL is executed and the result is returned to the application.

Automation is key to ensuring CDL can quickly deploy the solution at scale in a consistent way while still maintaining high availability. (Previously, working with customers to provide secure connectivity to the VIS APIs was often time consuming and required manual actions.)

CDL uses AWS PrivateLink as a highly available, scalable technology that allows it to privately connect a customer VPC to our VIS VPC endpoint services, ensuring the ultimate security and privacy of customer data. This massively speeds up adoption of VIS services; for example, the configuration of the customer account can be made very simple by providing a CloudFormation template.

Scalability is further supported by the horizontally scalable containerised application layer and data replication across multiple RDS instances using materialized views.

"CDL Vehicle Information Services has provided AXA with consistent and reliable vehicle data to enrich car insurance quotes for over 10 years. The range of car value estimates enables us to better predict the cost of repairing or replacing vehicles and therefore tailor insurance premiums more accurately, while vehicle history and ownership information is useful in predicting accident likelihood, which forms part of the insurance pricing calculation."

Richard Bretton, Motor Pricing Director, AXA Retail

• Axa Retail VIS data supports AXA Retail to enrich its pricing routines at point-of-quote, providing access to an extensive range of industry data, from MOT history to keeper change, outstanding finance to valuation, and theft to write-off details.
• Sabre Insurance The insights derived from VIS data have proven to be accurately predictive of potential claim, supporting Sabre to make more informed rating decisions.

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• Vehicle Information Services