Yorkshire Building Society encourages members to act!

Ahead of the Government’s proposal to use unclaimed assets in bank and building society accounts for good / worthy causes, Yorkshire Building Society is actively trying to encourage its members to act and avoid their money being grouped with these forgotten funds.

Unclaimed assets are defined as any money in an account where the account holder has not instigated any activity in the last 15 years. The Government’s proposal is expected to be implemented in 2009 and will see all monies in these accounts transferred to a central fund. Whilst these monies can be subsequently reclaimed, together with appropriate interest, this can be avoided by the rightful owner simply contacting the Society prior to the Scheme being implemented.

Although Yorkshire Building Society has around 3.5% of all accounts in this category the total value of these is under £3.5 million, representing only 0.03% of all balances. To avoid these accounts automatically transferring to the central fund, the Society is looking at a number of ways of encouraging members concerned to re-establish contact with the Society. The first stage has been to write to a selection of members currently in the unclaimed assets category, with an initial test mailing achieving a 50% success rate.

In addition Yorkshire is researching the use of specialist tracing agencies to help re-unite members with their accounts, particularly those who have changed addresses without notifying the Society.

Pete Sowden, Yorkshire’s Head of Service Quality said “We’re calling on our members who haven’t used their account for many years to re-establish contact with us by visiting their local branch with their passbook for updating or card to check their balance. This simple action can prevent their money being classified as ‘lost’ and they may get a nice surprise when they see how much their savings have grown. Members can also call our Member Contact Centre to confirm all the details we have for them are correct, and again this will remove them from the inactive account group.

“We were very pleased with the results of the test mailing and hope that further activity will see the number of inactive accounts held at the Yorkshire reduce dramatically. It should however be noted that whilst the number of accounts we have identified as being inactive for 15 years or more seems high, almost 80% of these accounts have a balance of under £10.”