Non-notification of dormant accounts

Barry_Man

Does anyone know if there is standard practice about notifying or not notifying customers when bank accounts have been made dormant by the bank?

My wife had an old online bank current a/c which she had not used for a couple of years. When she tried to pay some money into it (via Faster Payments) it did not arrive. Turns out the receiving bank had made the receiving account dormant (in accordance with its Ts & Cs) - but she had never been notified of this. I would have thought it would make sense to notify the customer, but is there some (good?) reason for them not to?

Archi_Bald

What do the T&Cs say about notifying account holders?

Barry_Man

Absolutely ZILCH.

Ts & Cs do say "If you do not make any transactions on your account for one year in the case of current accounts and five years in the case of savings accounts then we may treat your account as being dormant to remove the risk of fraudulent activity. This means that we will stop sending you statements and letters"

Note the last sentence. But it would seem reasonable to at least notify that this is happening at the time it is invoked.

In any event, I was asking about standard practices and whether there might be some (good?) reason for not notifying. The above refers to "remove the risk of fraudulent activity", but once it has been made dormant one has to jump through a series of security hoops to re-activate, so notifying that it has been made dormant should not, in itself, be a risk.

jonesMUFCforever

Some banks do write letters to say either use the account, close it or it becomes dormant at a future date.


If your wife's account was an online one has she checked her spam email file to see if it was sent there?

Thrugelmir

Barry_Man wrote: »

but is there some (good?) reason for them not to?

Administration cost. There must be millions of dormant accounts that people have ceased using but never closed .