A single customer view (SCV) is a consolidated record showing, for each depositor, the total of their eligible deposits at a bank, together with the personal details needed to pay them. In the United Kingdom, banks and building societies must be able to produce an SCV file for all their depositors at short notice, so that the Financial Services Compensation Scheme can pay protected depositors quickly if the institution fails.
The requirement is part of the Prudential Regulation Authority's depositor protection rules. It was introduced after the run on Northern Rock in 2007, when depositors queued outside branches partly because they feared that compensation would take months. Outside regulation, "single customer view" is also a general data term for combining all information about a customer into one profile, but in banking it usually refers to this deposit protection requirement.
Single customer view in plain terms
Imagine a shop that keeps each customer's loyalty points on separate cards for different branches, under slightly different spellings of their name. If the shop suddenly closed and had to pay everyone back, it would take weeks to match the cards to the right people.
A single customer view is a ready-made list that has already done the matching. For every depositor, it shows one name, one address and one total, so that if the bank collapses the compensation scheme can start paying almost immediately instead of sorting through messy records.
Regulatory requirements in the UK
- Producing the file. Firms must be able to deliver an SCV file to the PRA or the FSCS within 24 hours of a request.
- Aggregation. Each depositor's eligible accounts must be combined into one record, with the compensation-relevant balance calculated, including accrued interest.
- Account marking. Accounts must be flagged by eligibility and status, for example whether they are active, dormant, subject to legal dispute or sanctions, or held in trust or as joint accounts.
- Exclusions. Ineligible deposits, such as those of other banks, must be identified separately.
- Systems and testing. Firms must maintain systems that produce the file accurately, test it, and report to the PRA on their compliance.
The FSCS aims to pay most depositors within seven days of a bank's failure, which is only possible if the SCV file is complete and accurate. The protection limit for eligible deposits, as of November 2026, is 120,000 pounds per person per authorised institution, with higher temporary protection for certain life events such as a house sale.
What an SCV file contains
A typical record includes the depositor's name, address, date of birth and other identifiers, the account numbers and balances of each eligible deposit account, the currency, any interest accrued, the aggregate eligible amount, and flags for special cases. Firms often draw this from several systems, including their core banking platform, savings systems and records held by third-party administrators. Poor data quality, such as duplicate customer records, inconsistent addresses or missing identifiers, is the most common obstacle.
Joint and trust accounts need special handling. A joint account is normally split equally between the holders unless records show otherwise, and each holder's share is added to their other eligible deposits before the limit is applied. Accounts held by a trustee or agent for others may require details of the beneficiaries before compensation can be calculated, so firms must flag them and know where the underlying records sit. Getting these cases wrong can either delay payment to genuine depositors or lead to overpayment.
Compliance and assurance
SCV is an ongoing obligation, not a one-off project. Banks run regular test files, reconcile SCV totals to their general ledger and investigate exceptions. The PRA reviews compliance and may ask for independent reports, and the FSCS tests files received from firms. New products, migrations to new systems and acquisitions are common points of failure, because they can create records that the SCV process does not capture. Firms that offer accounts through partners must ensure partner records also feed the SCV, which links to the wider question of pass-through deposit insurance in the United States.
Similar requirements elsewhere
The EU Deposit Guarantee Schemes Directive of 2014 requires member states' schemes to repay depositors within seven working days, which has pushed banks across the EU to maintain comparable depositor data files. In the United States, the FDIC's recordkeeping rule for timely deposit insurance determination, adopted in 2016, requires the largest banks, those with two million or more deposit accounts, to maintain systems that can calculate each depositor's insured and uninsured amounts quickly. All these rules aim to keep deposit insurance credible, since protection that takes months to arrive does little to prevent a bank run.