Sole Account Holders – A Sole account is opened in the name of the person who owns it or just one individual. Holders of these types of account ranges from the poor peasant farmers and students to top company executives and other high ranking civil savants.
In relating with this group, the bank officials must be courteous enough and should try as much as possible to treat each customer equally. This is important because some are highly connected.
Some of them are opinion leaders in the society and some can be link for the bank to big business customers. The Sole account holders gives a subtle definition of a personal account, starting a banker customers relationship with sole customers is very simple.
The bank gives an invitation to all by opening its doors for business. A customer makes an offer by walking into the bank branch or by writing to request that an account be opened for him.
Sole Account Holders And Their Activities
Under a normal circumstances, a bank accepts such offer once its requirements are met. This acceptance can be by opening the account or accepting to open it after some conditions have been met.
Majority of Sole account holders, request for deposit accounts, either savings deposit or time deposit (or fixed deposit accounts) but some also ask for the opening of demand deposit (or current accounts). The requirements for these accounts are basically the same excepts that in the case it was decided that one referee is enough, it is still wise to demand for two referees when opening a current account.
Requirements For Opening An Account
To open a personal sole account, the account holder is expected to provide the following information;
- Full name(s)
- Full address (either business address or residential address)
- Occupation
- Name of employer
- Husband or wife occupation
- Next of kin of the applicants
- Age declaration
- Specimen signature
To collect this information the banker normally provides a standard mandate form. A part from completing this mandate form the customer is also asked to provide two recent passport photograph of the applicant for easy and better identification.
The bank usually provides a standard referee form to be completed by the referees. The age of the customer is not very necessary except that it helps to determine whether the customer is a minor. The occupation of the spouse (husband or wife) is required because it helps the bank to identify certain types of fraud.
Failure to ask for it may make it possible for the bank to be accused of being negligent and not exercising reasonable care in a case of conversion. For the same reason, it is very important to ask for good references if the customer want to open a current account into which he can pay cheques.
A thief using the payee’s name can use a stolen cheque to open a current account. If the bank fail to demand for references, the bank is not protected from the liabilities of conversion.
The specimen signature is very important because it is what the banks will use in verifying the cheques and other mandates (or withdrawals instruments) that the customers will send when he begins to operates the account. Customers should therefore be advised to sign in a manner that they can repeat without being irregular.
This is to avoid his cheques being returned on account of signature irregularities. There are two problems that often arise in the running of Sole account holders. The first is change of name is more common among married women who would like to change their maiden name to that of their husbands.
Other individual also change their name just because they like to do so. In each case the bank must demand for court affidavits and other official papers to back up the change. This is because the change of name may be to enable the customer to pay in a stolen cheque.