New bank account switching service to support thousands of consumers and businesses in Ireland

The imminent closure of Ulster Bank and KBC Bank Ireland means that around one million consumers and businesses need to transfer to a new bank before the end of the year. Today, Majorel, the global customer experience provider, has launched a brand new consumer platform – SwitchAGENT.eu – as part of its solution portfolio making this process as quick and easy as possible.

SwitchAGENT.eu 

Majorel’s digital account switching service enables customers to move their account to a new bank in just a few minutes and, at the same time, to inform all regular payment partners automatically about the new account details. What’s more, banks can also directly integrate the solution into their own websites and offer it to new customers to make switching easy.

RTE has reported that almost 300,000 affected customers have already opened new accounts, but this is just the first step in the account switching process.

Banking expert Thomas Hoffmann, Senior Vice President at Majorel, explains:

“The number of newly opened accounts is not the best way to measure how many account switches have been successfully completed. It’s very time-consuming for bank customers to ensure that they inform all their payment partners on their own. And since they often lack the information they need, and also the time, many bank customers give up and don’t complete the process."

On average, each bank customer has to inform around twelve payment partners about the account switch.

“Also, our experience shows that more than 50 percent of account switches are not carried out until the final four weeks of a bank’s operation,” says Hoffmann, who has worked on many bank closures and mergers in the European market.

“These delays bog down the account switching process and can lead to failed payments. That’s why offering a digital account switching service is so essential – it’s user-friendly, secure, fast and without any upper limit for the number of account switches – and therefore offers peace of mind to customers, banks and payment partners.”

With SwitchAGENT.eu customer can select their payment partners from a database and inform them about their new bank account at no cost. From the end of September, the account switching service registered with BaFin will also provide open banking interfaces based on the  PSD2 standard to make the switch even easier for bank customers. These can be used to access the transaction history of the old bank account and all important additional information like contract, customer and reference numbers. The new bank details can then be provided digitally to payment partners, along with all other necessary information. It then can be automatically updated in the payment partners’ own systems.

Majorel has delivered digital bank account switching services to leading European banks for over ten years, with several million successful switches annually. Majorel has already helped several banks with mergers and market exits and therefore has extensive experience enabling account transfers for hundreds of thousands of customers within just a few weeks.

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