Dormant Accounts

Requirement

Since 2011, the UK’s 30 biggest banks and building societies have been voluntarily transferring money left in dormant bank accounts to a unique scheme – Big Society Capital. So far more than £600m has been redistributed to charities with plans now under way to raise a further £2bn by expanding it to unclaimed insurance pay-outs, share sales and other UK-domiciled financial products.

Banks and building societies can transfer funds to this central fund from accounts which have remained untouched for 15 or more years, and when the customer is no longer contactable. This provides reputational value as well as reducing the administrative burden of managing dormant accounts.

To transfer with confidence, banks & building societies must ensure that all avenues to find the customer have been exhausted. They must document and be able to demonstrate these efforts.

Challenges

• Customer data is often stored in multiple internal databases and formats, with varying levels of accuracy. Frequently data is not complete.
• As customers’ lives change, sometimes the same customer will have different identities even within the organisation’s proprietary systems.
• Customer data is often readily available from external sources such as credit reports & social media. Gathering & validating that data and getting it into a standard format requires resources.

Solution

Gather 360 enables banks, building societies and insurance companies to;

1. Access the data they need to declare an account dormant - Gather 360 enables data gathering from different sources and systems across the bank, including legacy infrastructures, multiple databases and diverse IT platforms as well as data from external providers; in different formats; financial & non-financial.
2. Bring record considered dormant into a standard data structure - Gather 360 sends data requests to the selected data sources, stipulating the clear and structured format required, ensuring the request can be understood and confirmed. Gather 360 identifies critical errors, provides warnings on data-quality and relays these to the data-sources for correction.
3. Enrich records with additional data – Gather 360 can enrich customer records with additional information, eg. contact information from external sources, credit information or information from social media.
4. Certify data accuracy - Once the data requests are returned, validated, consolidated and transformed, customer data is certified accurate.
5. Automate data gathering - Gather 360 will automate the process, providing real-time customer data in the required format.

Unlike most data tools, gather 360 is designed for business users, not the IT team. It's easy to configure & deploy via a web-portal and comes with a bespoke dashboard.

Gather 360 is secure. It’s hosted on Azure cloud, but it can also reside within internal infrastructure.

Here’s how gather 360 works