Unclaimed Balances: Financial Institutions and Trust Companies

Find all information related to unclaimed balances year-end reporting.

Per the Bank Act and the Trust and Loan Companies Act, all accounts, deposits and negotiable instruments that have been inactive for 10 years must be transferred to the Bank of Canada once a year. For complete details, see the Financial Institutions Reporting Guide.

The 2021 unclaimed balances year-end process for financial institutions and trust companies is open from November 15, 2021 to December 10, 2021.

The Unclaimed Properties Office will communicate with you in Fall 2021 to begin the process.

Before you begin: Assess your situation

Regardless of whether you have unclaimed-balances data to submit, you must contact us by email.

If you are no longer the contact person for unclaimed balances

  • Provide us with the new contact information by .

If you have unclaimed balances

  • You are required to submit your data to the Unclaimed Properties Office within the yearly timeframe.

If you don’t have any unclaimed balances

  • You are required to let us know by that you do not have any data to transfer at year-end.

Submit your unclaimed balances data

The deadline for submitting unclaimed balances for 2021 is December 10, 2021.

1. Upload and transfer your data to us

  1. Log in to the Financial Institutions Reporting Portal.
  2. Upload and transfer the unclaimed balances data for your institution.

If your data file generates an error

  1. Refer to the Financial Institutions Reporting Guide.
  2. Make the necessary corrections.
  3. Re-upload the file.

2. Inform us by email before transferring the funds

Send us the following information by before transferring your payment to us.

  • the name of the institution, and the institution number in the file
  • the date and method for transferring funds: Lynx or Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT)
  • the total dollar amount that you’ve sent
  • the total dollar amount per file
  • the number of records per file

If you are submitting on behalf of multiple institutions, or if you are submitting more than one file per institution, you must provide the above information for each file.

The email should be sent one day prior to the transfer of funds.

3. Send your payments to us

The deadline for submitting your 2021 payment by Lynx or by EFT to the Bank of Canada ends on December 10, 2021. For details, refer to the Financial Institutions Reporting Guide.

The payment should be sent as early as possible the day after the email is sent to the Bank.

Contact us

Email
Phone
1-800-303-1282