New system to help Cancer Research UK validate supporter bank details
Howard Lake | 8 February 2012 | News
Cancer Research UK has implemented a bank account validation tool to help it prevent the loss or delay of donations through inaccurate bank account details and to save time in re-engaging with supporters. Using eVERIFY from electronic payment solutions provider Albany Software, the charity expects to reduce the number of donations lost through human error in providing bank details.
The new system, which integrates with CRUK’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system through Albany’s API toolkit, will crosscheck and validate UK bank account information provided by donors. It will do this in real-time, enabling the charity to validate the donor’s details while they are on the phone.
Previously the charity could validate bank and credit card details only when it initiated one of its bi-monthly Bacs runs. It made the organisation entirely reliant on the accuracy of the details submitted by its donors over the phone. It would then have to contact the donor again to find out the correct details, costing more time and money.
Rakesh Jena, Senior Business Design Manager at Cancer Research UK, explained that Direct Debit payments are a core financial process for the charity. “Before implementing eVERIFY,” he said, “there wasn’t any decisive control on how the account numbers and sort codes of donors were taken, which resulted in rejected payments and essentially lost donations. Our staff then had to backtrack and phone the donor again to get the right details so the payment would go through, which effectively meant campaigning twice for the same donation.”
The system has been in place for two months and Jena reports “a big improvement in the number of rejected payments, with all the incorrect payments we’ve flagged at point of entry being prevented from going through the rejection cycle.”
www.albany.co.uk
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.