Pinpoint 2025: Day 2 recap

Published November 28, 2025

Developer access: Ask Smarty’s engineers anything

This session kicked off with some of Smarty’s developer team and experts in US address data, international address data, address verification, geocoding, and autocomplete technologies. A complete cross-section of the entire development team at Smarty was made up by these all-stars: Adam Charlton, Brayden Lewis, Bryan Amundson, Cami Blanch, Kent Gividen, Lyle Durland, and Savannah Ryan.

Here's a rundown of this Q&A session.

Google Maps shows it, so why isn't that good enough? Mapping tools optimize for returning a place on a map—even if it’s approximate—while validation tools that are worth their snuff must confidently say "yes" or “no” when an address is presented. Many validation tools are overly concerned with achieving high match rates, which often results in a high number of false positives (i.e., indicating that an entered address matches an authoritative dataset when, in reality, it doesn’t, or that many components had to be altered in the background to obtain a match).

Validation, by definition, is whether an address is valid, not if you can drive a car to the general area.

What's so tricky and complex about international address formatting, and how does Smarty deal with that? International addresses are difficult because each country has developed entirely different address standards and formats. While US addresses follow a consistent pattern, other countries like the Netherlands work in opposite ways—specifying street first, then postal code, then building number. Some countries don't enforce standardized addressing at all, instead using landmark-based descriptions.

Smarty overcomes these challenges through a combination of external expertise and internal resources, relying on data sources from countries where local experts understand address systems best. Smarty also leverages multilingual team members who speak 14 languages collectively across the organization.

How do Smarty’s systems remain reliable even during outages? The secret here is a cloud-agnostic approach. Rather than relying on a single cloud provider, Smarty operates across multiple cloud environments, which allows us to remain unaffected when major providers experience outages.

What do people mean when they say non-postal addresses? USPS and non-postal addresses are simply distinctions as to whether an address is in the USPS database. There are a lot of reasons an address might not be in the USPS database, but one reason could be new builds. Savannah described how her neighborhood is a new construction area, and for a long time, USPS didn't have her address in their database, even though the address existed. Smarty could find it because we use other data sources beyond the USPS database.

What are your favorite address oddities?

Adam's favorite is a dirt road named "2 Lazy 2 Road." The homeowner cleverly abused the address system by using "2" as the house number and "Road" as the street suffix, creating a perfectly formatted address that makes a humorous statement about not wanting to pave their road.
Brayden loves that in the Philippines, addresses are difficult to match because they're described using landmarks rather than formal numbering. For example, an address might be described as "second yellow house down this alley," making it challenging to process when addresses aren't officially enforced with numbers and street names.
Savannah mentioned a neighborhood in California that has streets named after the Devil—including Devil Road and El Diablo Street. It's located in the foothills near the Black Mountains, which fits.

Ultimately, the three main takeaways from this session are accuracy through avoiding false positives, enhancing your technical resilience, and fostering a quality culture that cultivates the best technology.

Care to hear all the juicy details for yourself? Watch the full video here!

Onboarding elegance: Resolving customer friction with enriched address data

Ben Roden (Product Marketing Manager for enrichment/FinTech) and Ryan Muir (Sr. Product Marketing Manager for geocoding/insurance) framed the session around one big theme: killing friction.

Customer expectations for smooth digital experiences are at an all-time high, with people expecting companies to have the right answer quickly and little tolerance for friction. When processes become too complex, it damages operations, conversion rates, and customer trust. Even small changes matter—reducing form fields from four to three increased conversions by 35%. When companies don't know information that customers expect them to know, it creates distrust and questions about legitimacy.

Enrichment can dramatically reduce the number of pages in multi-page digital flows by pre-populating fields with verified data behind the scenes. Instead of asking customers to manually enter information across multiple pages, companies can use property data, risk data, and other enrichment sources to instantly know details about a property or person based on an address.

For example, in a homeowner's insurance application that originally required five page loads, enrichment can condense it to one. Rather than asking customers for year built, square footage, roof type, and foundation type across separate pages, this information can be pulled from property data automatically. Risk data can pre-calculate suggested deductibles based on natural hazards and location risk factors. Customers then only need to verify that the information is correct instead of searching for and entering it themselves.

This approach not only reduces friction by eliminating unnecessary pages but also increases accuracy, improves conversion rates, and builds customer confidence by demonstrating that the company already knows what it should know about their property.

The takeaway was simple: companies should look for opportunities to use data enrichment to reduce friction in customer processes. Rather than asking customers to provide information that's already available through data sources, businesses should collect and verify that data behind the scenes, then present it to customers for confirmation.

This approach accomplishes multiple goals simultaneously: it streamlines forms and applications, increases conversion rates, speeds up customer journeys, improves accuracy, and builds trust by showing customers that the company understands their situation. The key is to think creatively about how enrichment data can either improve existing forms or completely transform business operations—not just making forms shorter, but reimagining entire processes.

The underlying philosophy is to shoulder the burden of data collection as an organization rather than placing it on customers, creating a more elegant and confident customer experience while simultaneously improving internal operations and business outcomes.

Ready to enrich your addresses with tasty morsels? Check out the full session here.

400 Million addresses by 5 PM: The ultimate speed guide to bulk address validation

In this session, Adam Charlton, Senior Software Developer on our Product Development team, showed us how to process hundreds of millions of addresses at breakneck speed.

There are several ways to process massive amounts of addresses quickly with Smarty. The easiest way is to use the bulk upload tool available on Smarty's website, which requires no coding. You can process up to 500,000 addresses at once.

Faster still is using the Smarty CLI. This is a downloadable tool that can process addresses at a rate of around 20,000 addresses per second, reaching a maximum throughput of 576 million addresses. There are no file size limits, although it outputs entire responses rather than allowing you to customize which fields you need.

The exciting one, though, is a custom coding approach that can be made easier by using one of Smarty's SDKs. Adam demonstrated building a solution live that took less than 15 minutes to make. Using the Go SDK, he was able to utilize batching and multithreading to achieve more than 70,000 addresses per second, enabling him to process over 400 million addresses in under 2 hours.

Need to watch this magic happen live? Well, it’s over, so you can’t, but YOU CAN watch the session’s recording here. 😜

No code required: Smarty tools for Excel, Sheets, and QGIS

Spencer Powell (Product Manager) showcased no-code and low-code ways to get addresses processed by Smarty: The single address tool, the bulk address tool, the Excel plugin, the Google Sheets plugin, and the QGIS plug-in.

Single Address Verification Tool

This tool validates one address at a time, either as freeform text or broken into components. Autocomplete suggests addresses as you type, saving time and improving accuracy.

The tool returns whether an address is valid and exists in USPS data, standardizes it by adding missing elements like ZIP+4 or street suffixes, and provides up to 55 data points, including geocoding information and a map plot. Results display in both raw and human-readable formats with explanatory tooltips.

The tool automatically corrects invalid data you enter, showing what it fixed. It works for both US and international addresses.

Bulk upload/list processing tool

This tool processes multiple addresses via CSV upload and provides a summary showing how many were full matches, matched with exceptions (flagging potential secondary address issues), or had no matches.

You can choose standard validation or enhanced matching, which includes non-USPS addresses. Adding a geocoding license provides more precise location data. You can review individual results within the tool or download everything as a CSV file with all metadata.

The tool handles international addresses and can process up to 500,000 addresses without performance issues.

Excel and Google Sheets plugins

These free plugins let you validate addresses directly within your spreadsheet. After installing, you authenticate using your Smarty credentials (auth ID and token).

You have three options for what data to return: validate only (just verification and cleanup), validate plus geocodes (adds location precision), or validate plus all metadata (returns all available data points). You can specify the geocoding precision level you want.

QGIS plugin

QGIS is a free, open-source spatial visualization tool. The Smarty plugin integrates address validation and geocoding directly into it.

To use it, you start with a base map (like Google satellite imagery) as your visualization layer. You authenticate using your Smarty credentials. You can then validate either single addresses or batch process a CSV file of addresses.

For single addresses, you type the address using autocomplete, label it, customize how it appears on the map (color, size, visual representation), and plot it. For batch processing, you map your CSV columns to what QGIS expects, and the plugin plots all validated addresses on the map with their geocoding precision data.

The result is a map showing validated, standardized addresses with precise location coordinates, useful for visualizing address data geographically

Spencer also provided a brief overview of our 13 Guidewire accelerators (e.g., verification and geocoding) and Smartylist, a command-line tool for even faster and larger bulk verification jobs (>500k rows), placing emphasis on the fact that you can standardize, validate, enrich, and geocode at scale right inside your spreadsheets, GIS, or via our CLI. No engineering lift required.

The sweetest part? You can watch the full video here.

How insurance businesses build efficiencies with geospatial data

In this session, Mountain West Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company showed how they had transformed a 75-year-old farm and ranch insurer into a modern, data-driven carrier by rebuilding their core systems and centering everything on accurate location intelligence. Tim Hayes (VP & CIO) and Kurt Marcus (Director of Application Innovation) described a 1,000-day journey from a 1970s-era mainframe to Guidewire’s cloud suite, modernizing policy admin, billing, claims, and documents.

That change let them write 50% more policies with 30% fewer staff and move from 14–15 days to same-day policy delivery, while giving customers real-time answers instead of “we’ll get back to you.”

A big part of that story was address validation and rooftop-precision geocoding.

In rural Wyoming and Montana, a “mailbox location” could be miles from the actual building, which made rating, wildfire and flood risk, and even reinsurance discussions unreliable. Their previous tool had occasionally placed a property five hours away from its real location.

By switching to Smarty’s rooftop geocoding and Guidewire-certified integration, they were able to drop a pin on the true rooftop, validate mail addresses more reliably, and significantly reduce costly overnight checks and documents—savings large enough to justify the entire implementation.

They also emphasized how location intelligence and third-party data reshaped both user experience and fraud/risk workflows. Agents and customers could start typing and select a clean, verified address, delighting customers and improving data integrity.

Want to hear their full success story? All you have to do is watch the session video here!

Smarty roadmap and predictions for the address data industry

Brent Francom (Director of Product Management at Smarty) and Berkley Charlton (President and Founder of Gateway Spatial) outlined the future that they see for address and location data defined by rising precision demands and tightening global privacy laws.

They walked through the industry’s progression from ZIP-level estimates to true rooftop and sub-building accuracy, noting that modern use cases—like flood and wildfire risk, parcel-level taxation, delivery routing, and telecom coverage—now require geocodes accurate within feet.

They also highlighted how regulations from USPS, Canada, the EU, and individual countries had increasingly dictated where data could be stored and processed. Smarty’s roadmap responds with regional API endpoints designed to keep data in-region for both compliance and performance.

They also discussed how AI has begun transforming address parsing and interpretation while still depending completely on authoritative data. To support that shift, Smarty has begun developing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration so that AI assistants and chatbots can safely call Smarty for rooftop geocodes and validation in real time.

Brent emphasized Smarty’s growing investment in enrichment data—risk attributes, tax boundaries, property features, and more—anchored by the company’s persistent unique address identifier, SmartyKey® , which allows customers to blend datasets reliably and unlock deeper insights.

Key themes they shared included:

Hyperlocal accuracy becoming table stakes. Sub-building precision, elevation, and granular risk insights are expected to drive the next wave of value.
Authoritative data remaining irreplaceable. Even using advanced AI models should require verified, trustworthy address foundations as the inputs. Good data in = good data out.
Privacy and localization laws getting stricter. Vendors need to support region-restricted data flows and complex country-by-country compliance with integrations that rely on verified information.
Persistent unique IDs serving as the connective tissue. They allow all enrichment—risk, property, tax, parcel, and neighborhood data—to unify cleanly.
Provisional address workflows gaining importance. Customers can potentially submit new-build or unposted addresses that Smarty validated and integrated early.
International accuracy requiring smart fallback logic. Country-specific nuances make global geocoding dependent on tailored cascades.

Together, their session painted a clear picture that Smarty’s roadmap centered on precision, compliance, enrichment, and AI-ready integration positions the company as the authoritative backbone for the next generation of location intelligence.

Want to hear more specifics from Brent and Berk? You can watch the entire session here.

Conclusion

With so many tidbits from industry experts and Smarty’s finest, we hope you enjoyed Pinpoint 2025. Thank you for attending live, rewatching sessions, and reading this blog now. We’re grateful for all of our partnerships and the effort you’ve made to make the world better validated. See you next year at Pinpoint 2026!

Didn’t get to see Pinpoint Day 1 either? You can access Day 1 recordings here, or read a summary of each session from Day 1 here.

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