20 November 2008 :

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Two major banks launch campaign to track down dormant account holders

10 September 2008

HSBC and Halifax want to find owners of dormant accounts

HSBC and Halifax, two of the UK’s largest banks, have both launched campaigns to reunite customers with their dormant bank accounts and forgotten money.

A bank account is considered ‘dormant’ if it has not been touched by the account holder for 15 years.

An estimated £250m-£350m is thought to be lying in dormant bank accounts, while £150m lies untouched in building society accounts and £466m is dormant in NS&I accounts.

HSBC is going to write to 12,000 of its customers with dormant accounts and is aiming to track down another 5,000 who have moved address since being an active customer of the bank. HSBC thinks that there is over £24m to be reclaimed by the 17,000 customers – an average of £1,400 per bank account.

Although the average figure per account stands at £1,400, 276 of the accounts have a total balance of £9m and there are 17 accounts containing over £100,000.

Carlos Wanderley, general manager of HSBC customer propositions, said: “We are planning a sustained campaign of correspondence, active tracing and publicity.

“We will also be conducting research into the primary causes of account dormancy, which we hope will allow us – and the industry – to model accounts that are most likely to become dormant in the future,” he added.

The Halifax, meanwhile, is aiming to reunite account holders with £29.6m. There are over 25 dormant accounts with balances of over £50,000 and four with balances over £100,000.

According to the site mylostaccount.org.uk, which aims to reunite customers with forgotten money in bank accounts, record numbers have been making efforts to trace their money. The site was launched in January and has since seen around 140,000 submitting claims for their forgotten funds.