£16.6m reunited with Halifax customers

30 July 2008

£30m is sitting in dormant Halifax accounts

A push to reunite customers with their dormant bank accounts has resulted in £16.6m being handed back to its rightful owners by the Halifax, the bank said today.

According to Halifax, over 7,200 account holders had successfully reclaimed their savings, each receiving £2,326 on average.

It also announced that 68% of accounts holding more than £50,000 had also been reunited with the rightful owners.

However, there is still a long way to go as the bank also said there was still £30.6m left sitting in 152,000 dormant accounts, working out at an average of just over £200 per account.

When an account has been inactive for at least 15 years it is classed as ‘dormant’.

The bank has found that a large proportion of these dormant accounts are held in “hotspots” including Liverpool, London and South Yorkshire. It said it would be targeting these areas with a campaign which will be launched sometime in September.

Halifax was the first bank in the UK to actively try to reunite customers with forgotten money. The bank did this by launching a dedicated website and by using data from credit reference agency Experian to trace customers.

The bank made the move just after the Government announced a plan where money from dormant bank accounts would be pooled into a central fund and distributed alongside lottery money. Savers would still technically have access to their money once it has been incorporated into the central fund, however, financial services companies are likely to try to find the savers before the government scheme is initiated.

A scheme called mylostaccount.org.uk was launched by banks, building societies and National Savings & Investments earlier this year with the aim of providing a ‘one-stop shop’ for consumers to track down their lost savings accounts.