The Revenue Stream That Could be a River
Estate recovery has a way of sitting at the bottom of the priority list until it becomes a problem. It boils down to financial institutions’ decedent account recovery process being reactive. Someone notices an obituary, a returned statement, or a family member’s phone call before a file ever opens. That works, sort of, until volume grows and the same handful of staff are still tracking deaths, matching them to accounts, and chasing probate filings by hand.
Case Study: Credit Union Sees 7,500% ROI with Probate Finder OnDemand®
Recently, we partnered with a mid-sized midwest credit union who ran into this scenario. Its estate recovery process was reactive by design. Staff waited for signals that an account holder had died, then scrambled to confirm probate status and file claims before deadlines closed. This process had no way to surface probated estates on its own, so estates went unclaimed simply because nobody knew to look for them.
The fix was automating the identification step entirely, so probate records were matched to accounts continuously instead of on a lag. That single change did two things at once: it caught estates the manual process had been missing, and it freed staff from the parts of the job that were pure lookup and matching. That let them spend their time on claims that actually needed judgment.
Within a year, the credit union had filed $1.86 million in probate claims and posted a 7,500% return on the cost of the platform. Just as telling: one partial month of recovered settlements covered a full year of service. The volume had been there all along. What was missing was a system that didn’t depend on someone happening to notice.
Replicate These Results for Your Estate Recovery Efforts
For institutions still running estate recovery as a side task bolted onto collections or member services, the question worth asking isn’t whether the current process works. It’s how much of the actual opportunity it’s built to see in the first place. If you’d like to see what Probate Finder OnDemand can do for your organization, click here to request a demo!
