Unclaimed Balances: Year-end reporting for financial institutions and trust companies

If you represent a financial institution or trust company, you must contact us at year-end regardless of whether you have unclaimed balances to report.

Per the Bank Act and the Trust and Loan Companies Act, all accounts, deposits and negotiable instruments that have been inactive for ten years must be transferred to the Bank of Canada once a year. For complete details, see the 2020 Financial Institutions Reporting Guide.

The unclaimed balances year-end process for 2020 ended on December 11, 2020.

To begin the process for 2021, the Unclaimed Properties Office (UPO) will communicate with you in Fall 2021. If you are no longer the contact person for unclaimed balances at your institution, please provide us with the new contact information by .

Before you begin: Assess your situation

Regardless of whether you have unclaimed-balances data to submit, you must contact us by email. For this, you’ll use a special email address exclusively for financial institutions and trust companies in their year-end activities.

If you are no longer the contact person for unclaimed balances at your institution, please provide new contact information to us by .

If you have unclaimed balances

If you don’t have any unclaimed balances

  • Let us know by .

Submit your unclaimed balances data

The deadline for submitting unclaimed balances for 2020 ended on December 11, 2020.

If your institution doesn’t have any unclaimed balances for 2020, let us know by .

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 2020 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 method for transferring funds: Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) 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.

3. Send your payments to us

The deadline for submitting your 2020 payment by LVTS or by EFT to the Bank of Canada ended on December 11, 2020. For details, refer to the 2020 Financial Institutions Reporting Guide.

Contact us

Refer to the “Contact Us” section of the 2020 Financial Institutions Reporting Guide.