Winning the Name Game in Asset Recovery

The purpose of any corporate asset recovery effort is to locate and retrieve all unclaimed property that is associated with a given company’s name. For that reason, a successful asset recovery might just be the ultimate answer for the age-old question, “What’s in a name?”

But sometimes the unique characteristics of a company’s name can create a challenge when attempting to locate its assets through conventional approaches. Sometimes a name can get in its own way.

Any corporate entity with a “complex” name commonly prone to spelling anomalies is especially at risk of having difficult-to-locate unclaimed property. Consider for example the J.C. Penney Company.

Although there is no solid evidence to back the claim, this company must certainly have one of the most commonly misspelled names in existence.

A comprehensive search for their unclaimed corporate assets would definitely require pursuing any number of potential spelling and punctuation combinations: JC Pennys, J.C. Penny’s, JCPenney, Penney Company, JC Penny, and Penney’s.

The Problem With Online Search Tools

Companies that have similar challenges with their own names will find that the popular online property search tools don’t offer much help with this issue. Websites like missingmoney.com only allow the input of a single name or search term at a time. More importantly, these web tools are unable to conduct a “wildcard” search that accounts for misspellings, abbreviations, non-standard punctuation, or acronyms in the company’s name.

In the end, these in-house search efforts can result in a lot of fruitless work, with a lot of a company’s assets remaining undiscovered.

Boomerang Asset Recovery overcomes these very issues by employing a robust Automated Property Locator that intuitively searches and identifies a company’s listed assets, anomalies and all. Our proprietary software uses machine learning to get better at identifying the many ways a company’s name can be misspelled, allowing us to cast an ever-wider net.

Do you believe there may be unclaimed assets sitting out there somewhere in your company’s name? If so, you might wish to use J.C. Penney as an inspiration for pursuing it. In case you didn’t know, the “C” in J.C. Penney stands for Cash, as in James Cash Penney.