Mixed up name, Mixed up accounts

Do you know any people who have the same name? Were there any problems arisen when they did official transactions?

The BBC News Business “Accounts merged after name mix-up by Prudential” reports that Insurance company Prudential wrongly combined financial information of two customers, who share the same name, surname and date of birth, in March 2007. A spokesman for the Prudential said that it was because a financial advisor of the first customer wrongly provided information of the second customer. The company was noticed this matter many times during the past three years; however, it ignored to solve the problem immediately. Consequently, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) fined Prudential UK £50,000 for the failure to figure out when the problem appeared.

I think that financial information is a sensitive data; therefore, the person who is involved with this information should be very careful. There are many adverse effects on many people. For example, as stated in this case, it mix account balance. What will happen if one person who is not honest withdraws all money from the mixed up account, while the other account owner does not update passbook for a long time? The right owner will not be noticed that his money has already gone by the other who has the same basic identities. Besides, the financial company may possibly mix credit card information which is normally reported to credit bureau— a company that collects individual’s credit information and provides it as requested. In this case, if one customer has not paid any bills for ages and the other customer punctually pays the bills, the responsible person could be on the blacklist because of the mistakenly mix up.

At first, I think that this kind of problem is unlikely to occur in Thailand because Thai people mostly have to very different names. Even though the same names have the same pronunciation, they are not the same writing style. However, there might be a problem with some simple popular names that share the same writing style. In order to avoid the mix-up, the Ministry of Education required students to fill out their parents’ name in application forms. If there are multiple students having the same name, they should not have parents sharing the same name as well. I think this is one of good ideas that some companies may consider to apply it to the personal data section.

__________

Reference

Accounts merged after name mix-up by Prudential. (2012, November 6). BBC News Business. Retrieved November 8, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20221648