In a collective lawsuit, a significant amount of documentation is often required per claimant to prove their inclusion in the relevant class. The more extensive and complex the documentation, the more challenging it becomes for an initiative to successfully build a case. Often, this arises due to registration processes being set up without considering the needs of the claimant or lacking alignment with the required documentation. This results in interested class members not converting into clients or a significant increase in claimant support inquiries. As a consequence, considerably more resources are needed to build a viable case.

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Challenge:

Reducing the number of claimant support inquiries and increasing the number of clients who meet all eligibility criteria in a Dutch lawsuit regarding excessive variable interest rates on bank loans.

Solution:

Implementation of the Daccs registration process, Claims Management, and Data Processing solutions.

Result:

A staggering 75% decrease in the number of claimant support inquiries and a significant increase of 47% in the number of eligible clients.

Background

In the Netherlands, there is an ongoing lawsuit against banks for charging excessively high variable interest rates over many years. Claimants participating in the collective action had to provide detailed information about the loans they have or had with which banks. Additionally, they had to provide variable interest rates on a monthly basis over a period of up to 15 years to compare them with the appropriate rate in the European market. This challenge resulted in many claimants having questions about how to submit the required documentation, which documents were necessary, and how they could determine the compensation they would receive.

Submitting documentation

For a collective lawsuit, a standard registration process is insufficient when it comes to collecting documentation. At the initial registration stage, visitors to an initiative do not have the necessary documents at hand. They must first gather the documentation themselves before they can submit it to the initiative.

To ensure that an initiative receives the correct usable documentation, clear communication about the required documents is essential, especially when these documents form the basis for determining damages per claimant.

If this process is not well-established, it can result in significant resource investment to process the data correctly, particularly in collective actions with large numbers of participating claimants. This can jeopardize the financial feasibility of the case. This was also the case with this banking lawsuit, which involved approximately 300,000 loan holders.

The solution

Qollect chose to partner with Daccs to address these challenges. By utilizing the data already collected in the initial phase of the case, we could tailor our solutions directly to the participating claimants' needs.

For Qollect, we set up a fully automated data processing system using the Daccs solutions. This allowed all documents to be processed and verified automatically without manual intervention. Claimants could immediately see if the submitted documentation met the requirements or if additional documents were needed. Together with our Claims Management solution, claimants could autonomously register, maintain, and modify their claims.

Furthermore, this provided the ability to automatically extract the necessary data from the documentation to calculate damages per claimant. These data were then presented to claimants through the portal. This resulted in detailed insights at both macro and micro levels regarding the case and claim value.

The outcome

The number of support inquiries from claimants needing assistance with submitting their documentation significantly decreased compared to the initial phase of the case. Additionally, the number of fully eligible claimants increased significantly. As a result, Qollect and Daccs have become the largest party in this collective lawsuit, with over 25,000 eligible claimants.