There are a number of possible reasons why someone cannot be fully verified i.e. the triangulation of name, address and bank account information against the records held by the Credit Reference Agencies (CRAs).
The CRAs cover a significant proportion of the population, but cannot be exhaustive in every way - for example:
- Not ALL banks / financial institutions submit data to the CRAs; we have seen issues previously where banks / ex building societies fall into this category.
- You (‘the account’) may not be ‘consented’ to share with CRAs, especially if the account is ‘old’; all new accounts are - generally automatically consented.
- The account maybe classed as a business account.
- The account may be a non-current account such as a ISA or Savings Account – not all accounts of this type are shared.
Banks only routinely started relaying information about bank accounts, overdrafts and mortgages to credit reference agencies from around 2000 onwards.
If you therefore opened your bank account before the end of the millenium - when most banks began obtaining customer consent to share this data and the notion of full data sharing had not yet been fully envisaged – you may be known as a ‘non-consented account’ with the CRA databases.
If this does apply to your account or one of your customers’ accounts, the bank involved might actually be able to accept consent now to begin sharing data. We’ve heard of a number of cases where the banks customers have approached their particular banks to make this change and following an email / letter / phone call (the process may differ from bank to bank), the information held at the CRAs is updated in the following weeks / months.