Returned Mail

We get a pretty good bit of returned mail at our bank. I am curious to know how other banks handle this. We seem to get returned mail on the same people over and over. Some of the envelopes even have messages written on them saying the person no longer lives there or please change the address etc.
Are there any kind of guidelines on how you handle these. In the past we have just changed the address to hold so they would not go out. Is that normal practice? Could you just not print them? Thanks for any help!

All returned mail is held at a central location and we attempt to contact the customer by phone for them to provide a change of address. If we are unsuccessful we place comments/alerts in our customer database with hopes that when they visit a branch to conduct a transaction the teller can address the problem. In the meantime, we continue to mail statements and hold the returns. We are a small community bank so we don't have too many and for now it's manageable.

In the meantime, we continue to mail statements and hold the returns.

That is a complete waste of time and money. You can reproduce anything at anytime, why hold on to the paper.

Most banks, if they get returned mail make an effort to locate the customer immediately. If they can't, they put an alert on their systems, shred the mail in question and immediately shut-off future statements, etc., until a new address is located.

We shred all of our return mail after 90 days if the customer has not picked it up. So it wouldn't be against any kind of regulation to just archive the statement and not actually print them? I have asked our ops people and they said we couldn't not print them but I am pretty sure you do have that option.

Ask them just what are they printing them for??

So they can stay in paper archives for how long?

Are they not already in archives electronically?

Can't you, at the drop of a hat, reproduce them anyway if the customer shows up on your doorstep?

Would that not be easier than manually going through your last three years of returned mail to find each and every statement the customer might have missed? OH - apparently they think it is fine to shred them after 90 days????

Once they get through with those questions, have them point to a law or regulation that says you have to print a statement or attempt to deliver a statement when you can't locate the customer.

Nothing like giving the current people at that address most everything they need to commit identity theft......on a monthly basis no less.

Ha! Yes the last part is what has been going through my mind. Thanks!

We normally try to contact the borrower and get their most updated address. Sometimes you just have borrowers/customers that do not want to be found/communicated with.

You're in a tricky situation. Do you have any address verification software? We used to utilize this and it would not only provide the borrower's old address but most recent along with the month/year they changed it with the USPS. That seemed to work pretty well in trimming the amount of returned mail we received.

If you're presorting the mail via IMB (intelligent mail barcode) you should be able to have your software provider change the settings to not only "kick out" bad addresses but also "addresses that do not match to the borrower(s) name(s) I believe. Check with them.