Escheatment is a $70 billion problem hiding in plain sight: every state, territory, and dozens of countries have laws that hand dormant and unclaimed accounts over to the government after three to five years of inactivity. Allen Osgood, co-founder and CEO of Eisen, left a five-and-a-half-year run as a payments product manager at Coinbase to build the compliance infrastructure that helps banks, brokerages, and crypto platforms reunite customers with their money before the states ever claim it. In this conversation, Allen makes the case that crypto is about to collide with escheatment rules written in the 1960s, and that most institutions have no idea how large their own dormant balances really are.
What We Covered
What escheatment actually is and how the state-by-state rules work
The $70 billion states are holding for more than one in seven Americans
Missingmoney.com and what happens after money is remitted
Ohio's fight over using unclaimed property to fund a football stadium
The Walter story: an E-Trade Amazon account liquidated to Delaware
What counts as a "dormant" account and why logins matter
Where Eisen plugs into the escheatment process
Why reactivation beats remittance, and the Binance.US 48% case study
Why institutions are blind to their largest dormant balances
The 12-to-24-month gap where accounts just age untouched
Displacing big-four spreadsheets with a single pane of glass, forecasting, and access controls
Data volume as the hardest engineering problem, and where AI earns its keep
The Claims Portal and QR-code reactivation
Why crypto makes escheatment far more painful, from volatility to dust
The coming wave of crypto liquidations and the tax problem
Channel strategy with the cores like Fiserv, and the road to 1099 and tax reporting
Key Takeaways
The best escheatment outcome is no escheatment at all. Eisen's real value is retention: keeping customers, deposits, and assets in the institution rather than shipping them to the state.
Institutions routinely underestimate their exposure. One prospect thought it had 10,000 accounts about to escheat, the real number was 100,000. The disconnect sits between the compliance team and the data on the ground.
Crypto changes the stakes. States generally require liquidation, so a dormant token gets sold, creating an unwanted taxable event and, if the market rips afterward, another Walter waiting to happen.
Stale data is the enemy. The information that comes due for escheatment is by definition three to five years old, so address enrichment (LexisNexis, Socure, USPS NCOA) and early engagement are what actually move the reactivation numbers.
About Allen Osgood
Allen Osgood is the co-founder and CEO of Eisen, a compliance operations platform that automates escheatment and account offboarding for financial institutions. Before founding Eisen, he spent about five and a half years as a payments product manager at Coinbase, where he first ran into the strange world of unclaimed property and stayed through the company's IPO.
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