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Let's suppose that a stranger is detected on our website. He's not a customer; but, maybe he's thinking of becoming one--either by changing banks or seeking to refinance his mortgage. Could you recognize him if he shows up again?

Well, sure, say the folks at Fair, Isaac and Co., San Rafael, Calif., if you call on the help of the company's new SmartLink data integration service, which assigns an identification tag to every inquiry that doesn't match an existing customer and compares it to the billions of records already stored in the Equifax referential database.

"There's a huge need for CRM data integration," says Larry Gulden, a director in Fair Isaac's marketing management group. SmartLink looks at data based on "customer touch-points" and compares each on a point-by-point basis, one at a time, rather than in volume. The result, ironically, is faster, more accurate data comparison, thanks in part to a new proprietary algorithm that makes it easier to identify relationships.

Fair, Isaac CEO Tom Grudnowski refers to the product's capability as...