The customer

Estatesearch helps estate executors and the financial services industry trace people and assets.

Estatesearch verifies the deceased’s name, address, and date of birth, then looks for any aliases or previous addresses. Supplying financial services firms with the most complete, accurate identity information maximises asset recovery while saving the estate time and money.

The challenge

Tracing hard to reach or "Goneaway" customers for financial services and legal customers is a key priority for Estatesearch, they need to understand who has moved or passed away and source new contact details for their clients where possible.

To help their customers successfully identify accounts and policies, it's integral that they have access to a rich selection of data sources to help find hidden links between individuals, organisations and property. GBG is Esatesearch's trusted technology partner to simplify and speed up these complex investigations.

In 2022, Andy Davies, Business Development Manager, was tasked by the business to see if they could improve their operational processes and speed of investigation. Although an experienced GBG Investigate user himself, Andy decided to first evaluate the other tools on the market.

The solution

After evaluating other vendors, Estatesearch found GBG Investigate was still the best solution for its needs by a considerable margin. With access to over 1.5 billion records containing enhanced, interlinked financial, property and fraud data, with millions of consented, live telephone numbers that help confirm residency and provide another contact option.

Competing products had a markedly less comprehensive data selection. From experience, Estatesearch knew GBG’s reference data is reliably accurate and current, with complete transparency on data sources and update cycles.

It also preferred Investigate’s user-friendly interface that makes searching quick and intuitive – ideal for rapid, train-of-thought investigations. Intelligent graph visualisation makes it easier to interpret results and spot vital leads and linkages. By comparison, competing products often took a “black box” approach, simply returning a result with no information about why or how a match was made.

Following this vendor evaluation, Estatesearch’s confirmed that GBG Investigate was the best solution on the market for its requirements outperforming all competitors. Furthermore, it was decided to expand the number of licenses to provide Investigate insight to more Estatesearch employees.

“We have to tackle some tough tracing challenges. We couldn’t succeed without GBG Investigate.”

Andy Davies, Business Development Manager | Estatesearch

The outcome

With increased licences for their team, Estatesearch has improved the speed of overall investigations, reduced costs for their clients and help trace and locate more accounts and assets.

Where the initial identity data contains multiple errors, investigators can use fuzzy matching to enhance their search and contact the relevant party. They can pick and choose the data sets for each trace, perhaps the Electoral Roll, phone records and credit data for one job, then deceased and Land Registry data for another. Investigate’s ease of use means new staff can learn it quickly, bolstered by support from GBG’s training team.

Alongside using the Investigate API to help automate their investigation workflows, Estatesearch are looking to use GBG's Investigate Managed Services which will allow them to bulk upload lists of individuals to quickly identity if they moved housed or passed away, further improving the efficiency of their investigations.

“We value the breadth of data GBG's Investigate solution holds, helping our team to make data led decisions to quickly identify, information for our data subjects.”

Andy Davies, Business Development Manager
Estatesearch