You already know what's coming. The question is whether your tracing operation is ready for it.
The FCA's Motor Finance Redress Scheme is no longer a forecast. Final rules are expected imminently, and when they land, lenders will be required to proactively identify and contact affected customers. Across agreements dating back to 2007.
Up to 14 million agreements. An estimated £8.2 billion in redress liability. And a scheme timeline the FCA has described as deliberately short.Here's what that means operationally: you need to reach customers whose details are, in many cases, seventeen years out of date.
If you work in a recoveries or compliance team at a UK lender, you already know what happens when contact data goes stale. The address on file returns nothing. The number rings out. Your internal team flags it as uncontactable. It sits. And slowly, almost invisibly, it becomes a regulatory gap, not just a recoveries failure.
Under the Motor Finance Scheme, that gap is no longer just a write-off risk. It's a compliance risk. The FCA expects lenders to take practical, proportionate steps to reach eligible customers. A supplier coming back with "unable to locate". Without methodology, attempt logs, or documented intelligence, is not due diligence.
It's a liability that sits with you.That's not a tracing failure. That's a process failure. And the firms still using consumer-grade tracing suppliers are about to find out exactly how much it costs.
The Real Cost of Getting This Wrong
Here's what slow, non-specialist tracing actually costs you — under the remediation scheme and beyond.
Every day of delay in the scheme is a day closer to FCA scrutiny. The regulator has confirmed it will monitor scheme delivery through quarterly management information returns. Lenders who cannot demonstrate proactive, compliant outreach will not be able to claim they tried.
Every "no trace found" without a paper trail is a gap in your audit file. Under a scheme of this complexity, where un-contacted customers have up to twelve months from scheme launch to opt in, your documentation of outreach attempts is not administrative tidying. It is your evidence of compliance.
Every supplier who isn't FCA authorised puts your institution in a position it cannot afford. Debt-related field activity, customer engagement, and information gathering in a regulated context all carry obligations. If your current tracing partner isn't directly authorised, that gap sits with you — not with them.
And every asset on a live book that remains un located depreciates in real time. Whether it's a financed vehicle, a piece of equipment, or a secured item, delay is never neutral. Delay is a calculable cost, on every single case, every single day.
The firms that used PPI as a case study know what happens when a remediation programme outpaces operational readiness. The ones caught without compliant supplier infrastructure at the point of scheme launch don't recover cleanly.
They rebuild. Slowly, expensively, and under scrutiny.
Learn More About Towerhall's Tracing System
Why Towerhall
TowerHall Solutions was not built for the general public market. We don't run skip traces for individual creditors, private investigators, or one-off cases. We are structured, resourced, and operationally configured to serve regulated lenders, banks, and asset finance companies. Institutions with consistent volume, FCA obligations, and case file standards that have to survive regulatory scrutiny.
That distinction matters more than it might appear right now. When a firm serves individuals alongside corporate clients, standards tend to drift toward the lower denominator. Documentation becomes inconsistent. Field agents operate without institutional protocols. Compliance reporting becomes a checkbox rather than a deliverable. When every process, every report, and every field visit protocol is built from the ground up for an organisation that could be audited tomorrow, the output is categorically different.
We've operated as a trusted supplier to Santander Consumer Finance since 2007. We've supported Close Brothers through vehicle repossession, arrears visits, and customer tracing for over ten years. We're the partner Stellantis turns to for vehicle recovery. These relationships exist because we've been through the governance forums, the quarterly reviews, the audit cycles, and we've delivered.
That's what institutional-grade tracing looks like in practice.
FCA Authorised. Directly authorised and accountable. Not a grey area. Not a partner arrangement.
Field-Agent Deployed. We don't stop at database searches. We deploy agents to verify, engage, and document, producing the kind of evidence that holds up when the FCA asks what steps you took.
Audit-Grade Reporting. Every case produces a file that survives scrutiny. Timestamped, methodologised, signed. Exactly what your audit trail requires under a redress scheme operating under quarterly FCA MI returns.
Built for Volume. Whether you're passing five cases or five hundred, the process doesn't change. Our infrastructure scales to remediation-level demand without degradation in quality or compliance output.
£97 million in assets recovered.
A 91.7% success rate.
70+ regulated institutions served.Those numbers don't come from a consumer tracing operation that scaled up. They come from seventeen years of doing exactly this, for exactly the kind of institutions facing exactly this moment.
Freqiuntly Asked Questions
What does "audit-grade reporting" actually mean in practice?
Every TowerHall case produces a complete, structured file: timestamped activity logs, attempt records, field agent notes, methodology documentation, and outcome evidence. Under the Motor Finance Scheme, the FCA will monitor delivery through quarterly MI returns. A supplier returning "unable to locate" without a paper trail is not due diligence — it's a liability. Our reporting is built from the ground up to be the documentation your compliance team actually needs.
Do you handle cases beyond motor finance. Such as asset finance or secured lending?
Yes. The Motor Finance Scheme is the most urgent live pressure for many lenders right now, but our capabilities extend across the full spectrum of regulated consumer credit and asset finance. Debtor tracing, vehicle repossession, asset recovery, field visits, process serving. We cover the entire recoveries lifecycle.We have long-standing relationships with Santander Consumer Finance, Close Brothers, and Stellantis Financial Services. These aren't one-off instructions. They are multi-year, governance-reviewed, audit-tested partnerships with institutions that hold us to exactly the same standards their regulators do.
What volume can you handle?
We work with institutions from 10 cases per month to several hundred. Our operational structure is built for institutional volume, not one-off instructions. We can onboard a new institutional client and be operationally ready within days.
Can we run a pilot before committing volume?
Yes. Most institutional clients begin with a scoped pilot. An agreed number of cases across agreed case types. To verify documentation standards, turnaround times, and case file quality before expanding volume. We recommend it.
You already know the cost of an open case. Every month it stays open, it either depreciates, ages out of recoverability, or consumes resource that should be applied elsewhere.The question was never whether to act.
It's whether your current supplier is the right one to act with, and right now, under the most scrutinised remediation programme the UK lending industry has seen since PPI, that question has a direct answer.
TowerHall Solutions is FCA authorised, field-deployed, and built from the ground up for regulated institutions. Not adapted for them. Not compliant-adjacent. Built for them.If you want to see what our case file standard looks like, how we handle case types similar to yours, and what a pilot arrangement would involve.
Request a case review. One conversation. No obligation. No pitch deck. Just a direct discussion between people who understand what's actually at stake.
Learn More About Towerhall's Tracing System
