What to do when a client will never be contactable.

In the course of attempting to re-establish contact with a gone-away client, a firm may learn that an event has come to pass that means the client will never be directly contacted. This blog post outlines the three most common scenarios, and what firms can do to tackle the challenges.

As is common in client facing firms, the vast majority of your time will be spent handling the small minority of clients that for one reason or another don't fit within your regular process and should be treated on an exceptional basis. When it comes to re-establishing communications with gone-away clients, then the list of exceptional categories is long, and will add considerable additional expense to your operational process, management resource requirements (as every exception needs a decision to be made on it), and potentially your delivery timeline if you haven't factored in dealing with the exceptions early enough in the process. Dealing with exceptions is all part of our services and is part of the reason why we are so confident that outsourced client outreach is more operationally effective, cost effective, and less risky than if you were to go it alone.

To help give you a flavour of the type of exceptions that you may come across we have put together some guidance for three typical scenarios.

The Incarcerated Client

You may come to learn that a client of yours is incarcerated either by being informed directly by a known individual (i.e. family member) or by referencing public source information. You should seek to validate the information by contacting the "Find a Prisoner" service in England & Wales, the Scottish Prison Service in Scotland, or the Northern Ireland Prison Service in Northern Ireland. In each case you will be expected to provide a reasonable amount of personal information on the underlying client in order to assist the public bodies in identifying whether the person is incarcerated, and additionally whether they wish to open communications with you. It may be a number of weeks before you receive a response from the prison service therefore it is important to act on new information quickly. In most instances a prisoner does have the right to refuse opening communications with your firm. It will be important to know from the outset your firm's stance on returning funds to incarcerated clients, especially if there is potential that the money could be deemed proceeds of crime and / or subject to money-laundering obligations. Equally a firm should consider how they wish to treat the funds in the event that the client wishes not to speak to them.

The Deceased Client

Similarly to incarcerated clients, you may come to learn that a client of yours is deceased from being informed directly by a friend or family member, or by searching publicly available sources. You may already have produced a policy that covers how to proceed in such instances, in which case we would expect it to cover the validation of information received (i.e. what official documents need to be provided by the client's representative), the process of confirming who the beneficiary should be, and what to do in the instance that probate is yet to be granted. An additional consideration, which we have found to be particularly important, is how the process described within the deceased client policy may differ where the funds in question are of low value. Depending on their relationship, it may be a particularly distressing process for the client's representative that is dealing with the matter, therefore understanding your firm's own appetite for reducing the administration requirements in instances where there is low risk, is advisable.

The Corporate Client That Has Liquidated

Usually you will have hoped that the corporate client of yours that has wound up will have informed you, withdrawn their funds and closed their accounts already. However this is not always the case, and therefore you will need to be prepared to validate the liquidation of a corporation prior to following the required steps. Please bear in mind that this differs from other exceptional cases such as corporations that have had a name change and not informed you, or where there has been a change of owner / control and a new authorised signatories list is required. These two instances need to be treated through other means. In the case of the liquidated corporate client, once you have validated the information, usually through searching Companies House or by contacting the appointed liquidator, then you will need to follow the steps outlined in the Government Legal Department's Bona vacantia dissolved companies policy paper. This should be available via a Google search. Bear in mind that this exception, along with all the others mentioned will add considerable time to your processes so plan for them early.

If you want to discuss an aspect of this blog post, our services, or any other related queries, then please contact us and we will be happy to help.