It is easy nowadays for consumers to lose track of their assets and difficult for financial institutions to keep up with their increasingly mobile customer base. A customer might have moved address and not notified your institution, or even had an account open for them as a child that they didn't know about until recently.

No matter what has happened, an asset that is marked as your customer’s is still theirs, and it is best practice to keep up to date with their ever-changing circumstances. The hard part is knowing where to start, right? Well, not anymore.

Vestigium offers an extensive tracing service for the strict purpose of asset reunification. We will re-research currently un-found gone-aways against continuously updating data sources, including the Vestigium Services consumer database. We work to save your financial institution time and effort.

To get your institution started, we have put together a breakdown of our services below:

Tracing Gone Aways

Vestigium implements researcher guided forensic tracing, querying combinations of data sources on a case-by-case basis to trace a known ‘gone away’ individual from their record-held address to the address which they currently reside at.

Vestigium follows individuals through their address history and confirms at each stage. This is important as some people may have been ‘gone away’ for many years and their circumstances would have changed several times (this can include name changing, as well as address changing, or expatriation). 

We work to a targeted 99% accuracy to ensure your re-engagements, KYC & AML checks are not wasted effort. 

Many of your gone away customers will be deceased. How many customers does your organisation have active on its books over the age of 85? Does this seem plausible to you?

For those who are deceased then, the next service applies to them.

Tracing Executors & Next of Kin

If someone has passed away, your institution may not already be aware (either because the death has not been reported to you, or a ‘gone away’ customer is found to be deceased upon the conclusion of a trace as above). Or your institution may be aware that the customer is deceased but have had no engagement from the estate.

Vestigium can help.

If Probate has been left by the deceased, we will purchase the probate documents from the government, and trace a named executor to their current address.

For those who haven’t left probate, we employ genealogical methods alongside our gone away tracing to provide current address details and the relationship of the next-of-kin to the deceased customer. This is referred to as Next of Kin Tracing.

Keeping Your Data ‘Good’

For many institutions who have made inroads to the issue of gone away and deceased customers, they are now looking for a way to keep those efforts up-to-date.

The Vestigium Living as Stated Health Check is an automated screening tool that identifies where there is evidence that any of your customers’ information is potentially incorrect or out-of-date and therefore provides a negative assurance against the accuracy of the rest of the book. Vestigium analyses the results of this check and provides you with a report containing recommendations on forensic tracing work required to rectify any bad customer data.

This allows institutions to embed strong processes to; firstly reduce the amount of gone away customers arising, and secondly quickly rectify where they do arise. This in turn reduces the need for costly project-based remediation work. The service also provides an enhanced mortality screening tool that identifies where further investigation is required to identify death.

Working with Vestigium

We believe our methods help institutions meet regulations including the FCA’s Principle 6, treating customers fairly, and assist firms to meet the guidance on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers and ESG values.

A client can become vulnerable at any time. Keeping in touch allows you to ensure that if anything happens, you are there for them with suitable advice, products, and services.

All this whilst significantly reducing the amount of gone away and deceased customers held on your institution’s books and saving you the time and money from engaging with the wrong people found via low accuracy digital matching.

Whether it's Pensions, Unit Trusts, or Premium Bonds, we can help you.

Get in touch today and help your customers be reunited with lost assets.