Prudential
Prudential formed in 1848 is a well-known household which provides life, pensions and savings products. Many of their clients had taken out pensions and other savings policies, as people were encouraged to save for the future. However, as time passed, many people forgot they had taken out such policies, and as people's circumstances changed and they moved house or died, Prudential lost contact with the policyholders and their beneficiaries. Thus by the late 1990's, the company had millions sitting in these "orphan" accounts from thousands of matured policies.
Around this time, many banks and financial institutions were criticised for failing to hand over money that didn't belong to them. It became a requirement to notify the holders of dormant or orphan policy accounts or else risk financial penalties from the FSA. Therefore Prudential began investigating ways of tracing the policy owners or beneficiaries of matured policies, and decided on the solution offered by Data Discoveries.
Data Discoveries software not only verifies and corrects names and addresses, but can find trace where a person resides today. It will search back through the historic data to identify when a person was last at a given address then, using date of move and co-habitee information, will search forward to find their new address.
Using Data Discoveries, Prudential was able to trace 25,000 people, resulting in a pay back of £22 million to customers, many of whom unaware these policies existed. This included beneficiaries whose relatives had taken out policies many years previously. The project was not only a successful customer relations exercise for Prudential, but many customers re-invested the money back with Prudential to provide for future generations.
Prudential continues to use Data Discoveries' Solutions to verify customer name and address details, identify goneaways and trace policy holders with excellent results.
