Financial institutions in the Shazam electronic funds transfer network now may help their members with identity-theft recovery, a process that can be costly in both dollars and time.
Shazam and Bloomington, Minn.-based United Bankers Bank, a subsidiary of United Bankers Bancorporation Inc., are offering financial institutions Shazam’s ID TheftSmart service for 79 cents per household per month, Tim Henry, managing agent for the bank’s insurance subsidiary, United Bankers Agency, tells PaymentsSource. The financial institutions can then package the service as a perk to their top customers or add a markup and sell it to their members to earn revenue.
United Bankers provides deposit, lending, investment and consulting services to more than 800 community banks in 13 states located throughout the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest.
Identity theft rose 13% in the U.S. in 2011, according to a Javelin Strategy and Research report. Thieves can access finances and health insurance, open credit accounts, even begin employment using a person’s identity information. For individuals to resolve identity-theft issues, they typically spend an average of 330 hours and between $851 and $1,378, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.
ID TheftSmart works as insurance; subscribers who have their identification stolen can turn to risk-management company Kroll, which will repair the damage done by the thief or thieves.
“All the different organizations that need to be contacted to get identity restored–credit bureaus, Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the local Department of Motor Vehicles, the postal service, the Federal Trade Commission–that’s what Kroll does for (enrollees),” says Henry.
This protection is different from the standard fraud protection financial institutions provide debit and credit cardholders, Jim Ghiglieri, a Shazam spokesperson, tells PaymentsSource. Fraud protection recovers funds charged fraudulently and prohibits further use of the stolen card information, while identity theft can involve more than credit card data, he says.
“There may some institutions that absorb these costs and give it to all their customers just as a kind of a peace of mind-type product,” Ghiglieri says.
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