"We're demutualising to become a bank. We're getting close to the agreed deadline but haven't finalised our share register."
Business Manager, UK Building Society

Our Brief

The building society was undergoing demutualisation and needed an accurate share register within a tight 12-week deadline to comply with financial regulations. The process needed to be executed to the highest level of accuracy to minimise the impact of correcting share mis-allocations later and resultant negative PR for the new bank.

Our Approach

The initial challenge was to create the list of customers who were entitled to shares. However, the account systems were not designed to produce this type of information as they were all keyed around the account, rather than customer. We worked with the mainframe maintenance teams for each system to pull out customer details for each account and then aggregate this into a single list. This resolved the majority of simple allocations, where a customer had only one account. However, for customers with multiple accounts or where they were deceased, a manual matching process was necessary. We mobilised and managed a large team of temporary staff working alongside permanent staff to resolve the remaining difficult cases.

End Result

Share allocations were prepared to a high standard in time for demutualisation. The level of mis-allocations was low as evidenced by the small number of queries that had to be dealt with after listing.