By Andy Davies, Financial Institutions Relationship Manager at Estatetrace
A year has passed since I wrote my note
I should have known this right from the start
Only hope can keep me together
Love can mend your life or love can break your heart
Lyrics from the Police’s unforgettable 1979 No 1 hit: Message in a Bottle. It’s a song all about connection and the unknown. Sting may not agree, but when I hear it, I can’t help but draw one or two parallels with how some financial firms approach tracing dormant account and policy holders!
As custodians of assets, financial institutions face a huge challenge re-connecting with their customers or their representatives where they may have moved home, gone into care, or passed away some time ago. Institutions must ensure all reasonable attempts have been made to locate them, or the customers’ representatives where the customer has died. However, options for customer tracing are limited.
We recently completed a project with a financial institution who had essentially been floating messages in bottles, trying to reconnect with gone-away/non-responder customers over a number of years. They must be commended for implementing a proactive process but even they recognised the limitations of their approach, due to process churn, and were looking for a more effective solution
The Problem with Traditional Customer Tracing Methods
They had been using the DWP letter forwarding services where, the Department of Work and Pensions takes letters sent to the last known details for a Pension or Insurance company’s customer, and forwards it to the new details they have on their file. Sounds great, and when deployed correctly, it can be a useful tool; however, there are a few challenges which mainly originate from the number of unknowns.
- The first unknown is, when will your letter be sent?.
- The second unknown is, ‘how successful has sending been? (gone away letters are returned, but this relies on a resident doing so).
- The third unknown is, where are the letters actually going? The DWP (rightly so, as a government body) “cannot provide you with any information about the person you wish to find. All details held by [DWP] are confidential”.
A Smarter Approach to Customer Tracing
At Estatetrace we often find that firms, who have deployed letter forwarding services, have found it almost impossible to garner whether any eventual response is due to that engagement or BAU re-engagements.
This approach makes it impossible to plan for a response to large batches of letters, as the number of people who will engage through the customer services department, and when, is a complete unknown.
The DWP service is certainly helpful if limited information, such as a national insurance number, is held, and we would advise the use of this service in this instance, however, only after an enhanced tracing project has been completed to obtain further information about the customer first.
The DWP even advises “Every effort must have been made to trace the person concerned before asking us to forward any letters.” A common question for our potential clients is, what does ‘every effort’ even mean?”
For the institution in question, we supported them by running an enhanced tracing project specific to cases which had used letter forwarding services over a number of occasions, but evidently with no re-engagement.
At Estatetrace, we help firms to track down gone-away customers or the representatives of deceased account holders to help repatriate assets, preventing them becoming lost in the system. Each customer will undergo their own individual investigation to find and verify their correct address, or to confirm if they have passed away. In this way, we enable client-focused financial institutions to re-engage with customers, or those who represent them.
Initially, we looked into the provider’s data set, prioritising clients over 85 years of age (life expectancy). We found that more than half of them had actually passed away and we traced the personal representatives of the deceased’s estate so the funds could be released.
A smaller, but still significant, proportion of people had moved house, and we were able to trace their new location. The provider was then able to re-engage with their customers, in their own time, via traditional mail, phone, email, or even through social media. Another portion was a little harder to trace. These situations are often where people have lost mental capacity and have moved to care facilities. In such cases it is perhaps even more important these vulnerable customers are traced properly as their assets may be required to pay for their urgent care needs. For this data set, we issued search requests to the Office of the Public Guardian to discover if Power of Attorney had been granted and if so, to who and where.
This example illustrates a revised approach to best practice and the provider’s commitment to putting customers first and we have been pleased to support their diligent efforts.
Regardless of the success rates of the project, simply receiving some intel back about their customers enabled the firm to identify ‘next steps’ which proved to be transformative.
Perhaps Sting would be just a little bit impressed by this financial institution’s efforts?