When Shola Anifowoshe, the daughter of Adekemi Anifowoshe-Ogunpola, began the process of reclaiming her late mother’s Access Bank corporate account in July, she thought it would be a walk in the park.
It has been three months since then, and there has been minimal progress because the bank keeps mounting roadblocks in her path.
The deceased was a proprietress of a primary and secondary school she had established in 1978, 33 years before she died in 2011. The journey with Access Bank, however, did not commence until 2005, six years before she died.
“My mother opened a corporate account with Access Bank in 2005 for a company called Modern Age Educational Services Ltd. It had ten directors, including my late mother, late stepfather, my niece, my brother-in-law, my five siblings, and me,” Anifowoshe told FIJ.
Anifowoshe was out of the country at the time. When she returned, Anifowoshe visited an Access Bank branch in Jos to inquire about what she would need to recover the account and withdraw the money in it.
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The first branch she visited was the Access Bank branch at Bauchi Road, Jos. Queen Malo, a staff of the bank, attended to her. Malo told her she needed to provide her mother’s death certificate, a letter of administration and a bank certificate from the probate office to recover the corporate account. The banker assured her that the process was an uncomplicated one.
However, Anifowoshe’s experiences in the following months proved Malo’s statement wrong.
Anifowoshe told FIJ that she had her fair share of Nigerian institutions’ bureaucratic processes when registering for her National Identification Number. She had flashbacks from this moment and decided she would not proceed with recovering the bank account.
A MILLION AND ONE EXCUSES
Anifowoshe resumed the process in July. It became a nerve-wracking experience, as she stumbled from one hurdle to another while the bank staff members fed her with a million and one excuses.
“I did not meet Mrs Malo in the bank when I returned in July. I met Mary Johnson, another staff and I told her about the account. She informed me that it was a corporate account and that the process for closing the account would be different and a lot more complicated since it was a limited liability with directors and possibly shareholders,” Anifowoshe told FIJ.
“I informed her that the listed directors were all family members comprising my late mother, late stepfather, my siblings, my eldest niece and myself, and that the company had been defunct since the early 2000s. She told me she would look into it and promised to call me back the following day.”
Johnson had no word the following day, so Anifowoshe sought out Malo at her new office and continued the process with her.
“I submitted all the documents to her. She has been communicating with Mr Bright, the compliance officer, and Mr Gerald, the officer in charge of the corporate account in the bank’s branch in Ota, Ogun State, where the account was opened. Mrs Malo told me much later that my mother was the sole signatory,” Anifowoshe narrated.
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Malo informed Anifowoshe that she would need to get the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) document for the company and instructed her colleague to search for it. This colleague spent two weeks searching for the said document and failed to find it.
This made Anifowoshe impatient and she resorted to searching for it herself. She told FIJ that she was able to retrieve a partial CAC status report in less than five seconds of her search. Anifowoshe also contacted another Access Bank staff to assist her in retrieving the CAC status report for her deceased mother’s company.
The staff informed her that the account had been listed as a post-no-debit (PND). When Anifowoshe asked Malo about this, she told her it was standard procedure and that the other staff was new in the banking industry.
Anifowoshe thought providing the CAC status report would be the end of the line for her, but she was wrong.
“Mrs Malo gave a series of excuses. At some point, she said her phone was faulty and I gave her money to fix it. Another time, she said she could not access her email or that their server was down. Things ceased to make sense,” she lamented.
Displeased with how Malo and other staff were addressing the case, Anifowoshe called the bank’s contact centre and asked to speak to a supervisor.
“A supervisor called me back and told me they would need to conduct an anti-fraud search mandated by the CBN, which could take up to a year. Malo and other staff of the branch never told me about this. I was also informed it was an antifraud search,” Anifowoshe told FIJ.
“The supervisor also told me that even if the search came out clear, there would still be a restriction on the account because the BVN/NIN I provided did not match that of the account. I found this strange because I did not fill out any paperwork at the bank.
“Is it customary for a bank staff member to fill a very important form on my behalf without my consent? And to make matters worse, to fill it with incorrect information, creating yet another hurdle for me?”
On another occasion, Archibong, another bank staff asked Anifowoshe for her late stepfather’s death certificate. She was not in possession of the certificate because her mother was his third wife and she no longer had contact with her step-siblings.
Anifowoshe showed up with copies of online publications attesting to her stepfather’s death.
“One publication was from the Daily Post and it was the governor of Ogun State mourning his demise and paying tribute for his contribution as commissioner of education. The others were blog posts, one made by him and another by a writer,” Anifowoshe said.
“Mr Archibong said blogs could not be used and that the Daily Post was not a national newspaper but a blog. I honestly thought the Daily Post was a newspaper. He instructed me to bring an article from The Independent.”
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Anifowoshe also added that she recently realised her mother had made a mistake while registering the company and misspelt her marriage surname and this was going to be another hurdle.
She contacted the CAC and was told that she needed to file annual returns for the last 18 years as the company was inactive and this would cost her N250,000.
“Mr Archibong advised me to hold off on starting the process for the annual returns and instead submit a letter to the branch manager along with all my paperwork, explaining about the error with the name and that I had been in contact with the CAC about initiating the process of a name change,” Anifowoshe told FIJ.
‘I THINK THE BANKING SYSTEM IS FLAWED’
Anifowoshe’s experiences since July have her convinced that the banking system in Nigeria is flawed and that banks are allowed to continue unjust practices and display a lack of transparency to customers.
She is also bothered that she had to be going in and out of banking halls for three months and getting attended to by bank staff members who did not provide her with succinct information and instead created hurdles on her path.
“The bank has dragged things out for weeks, claiming they needed information about the company that was supposedly hard to find. After I was able to rather painlessly produce said information, now they are stressing that it is a deceased account?” Anifowoshe said.
“It is very unfair to not simply provide a customer a clear list of documents needed at the onset of a process such as this. I am told one thing and an entirely different thing has transpired. There should be clear and readily available information for the customer to review as one embarks on this journey of account retrieval of a deceased family member’s personal account or corporate account with a deceased director.
“The step-by-step process of the procedure should be clearly stated, as well as its duration. There are so many things that have transpired that I find quite unbelievable. I find it ludicrous that Mrs Malo felt it was not necessary to explain the ins and outs of what a corporate search is and the duration. Especially when it was abundantly clear I lacked adequate understanding of what she was talking about.”
FIJ sent a message to Olawale Aderinlokun, Access Bank’s head of media and public relations, on September 13 and shared more details as he had requested on Wednesday.
Aderinlokun did not respond to FIJ’s message until Tuesday morning. He said he would contact Anifowoshe, but Aderinlokun had not contacted her at the time of publishing this report.
FIJ also emailed Access Bank’s customer care on September 13. In their response, they apologised and asked for more details. FIJ responded to their email on Wednesday, but like Aderinlokun, there was no response from them at press time.
Shola’s experience with Access Bank reveals what the relatives of deceased Nigerian bank customers experience when trying to reclaim, recover or withdraw funds from the deceased’s account.
In April, FIJ published a report about how First Bank refused to release money in a deceased’s account to his wife who is an Iwo-based civil servant.
The post Customer Visits Access Bank for 3 Months Yet Can’t Reclaim Late Mother’s Account appeared first on Foundation For Investigative Journalism.