A customer came to us certain they had 10,000 dormant accounts. When we looked inside their systems, the real number was 100,000.
That gap is not unusual. Across the institutions we work with, dormancy exposure is routinely underestimated by 5 to 10 times. The accounts that get flagged tend to be the ones someone already knows about. The rest stay invisible until they surface, often when the money is already on its way to escheatment.
This is the problem at the center of our new report, The State of Dormant Account Risk.
It draws on operational data from the Eisen platform across 42 client organizations, 54 state and territory jurisdictions, and 13.9 million individual accounts. It’s the first view of its kind into the dormant account compliance pipeline from the inside, spanning both traditional financial institutions and crypto platforms.
The findings challenge a few assumptions that many compliance teams still rely on. These three stand out.
Three findings that should change how you think about dormancy
Let’s start with the one that surprises teams most: escheatment is far more preventable than it looks.
1. Proactive outreach keeps money with the people who own it
Escheatment can feel inevitable: accounts go dormant, the state takes custody, and there’s nothing to be done. The data shows otherwise. Across the platform, proactive outreach kept $53.5 million with rightful account holders, money that would otherwise have been remitted to states. For every dollar sent to a state, roughly four dollars stayed with the account holder. A governed compliance process is not only defensible. It produces measurably better outcomes for institutions and their customers alike.
2. Crypto is now the largest and fastest-growing source of risk
Crypto and virtual asset accounts make up 88.5% of the accounts we monitor. Virtual asset escheatment is no longer a niche concern. It’s the majority of the compliance surface, and most platforms are only beginning to understand their exposure. The teams that have instrumented their pipelines are finding account volumes well beyond their initial estimates.
3. The regulatory cost is climbing
California now requires certified mail for due diligence notices on accounts down to a single penny, at $15 to $20 per notice. For crypto platforms holding millions of small wallets, that requirement turns a quiet back-office task into a significant operating cost. And the cost of getting compliance wrong, through audits, penalties, and asset seizure, is higher still.
What this means for your team
The dormancy pipeline is bigger, costlier, and more recoverable than most teams expect. The institutions that look closely tend to find more accounts, more jurisdictions, and more complexity than they planned for. They also find real opportunities to keep money where it belongs.
If you have not yet measured your own exposure, the safest assumption is that it is larger than your current estimate. The good news is that you can do something about it.
Download The State of Dormant Account Risk using the form on the right-hand side to see the full dataset and what it means for your compliance strategy in 2026.
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