Did you know that if you are made the next of kin of a bank account by a friend or relative, you do not have automatic access to funds in the account should the account holder die?

Well, according to the Bank of Ghana (BoG), the next of kin is only a nominee of the account holder who serves as a primary contact if the bank is unable to reach the account holder.

What this means is that the next-of-kin concept in banking operations is to trace the whereabouts of an account holder and not who inherits the account.

“This person should be close and know a lot about the account holder and that is why in practice, many people would use some of their close relatives, Mr. Augustine Amoako Donkor, Assistant Director, Financial Stability Department of BoG, has said.

He was speaking on the topic, “The Next-of-Kin Concept”, as part of a two-day media capacity-building workshop for selected journalists in the Ashanti Region.

The workshop, which sought to deepen the understanding of participants in the operations of BoG and also build their capacity in financial reporting, was attended by 25 journalists.

Resource persons from the Central Bank took them through microeconomic analysis and the significance of microeconomic indicators, monetary policy practice in Ghana, inflation dynamics in Ghana, developments in the foreign exchange market, as well as interpretation of the Monetary Policy Committee Pack.

Mr. Donkor said a customer of a bank reserves the right to choose even a friend who knows much about him/her as the next of kin because the main purpose is to have someone who can provide information on why the account holder is not reachable.

Processes to retrieve funds in the account of a deceased customer, according to him, is entirely a different issue when it is established that the owner of the account has indeed died.

“To inherit or have access to the bank account of a deceased person, one will have to be named in the deceased person’s will as a beneficiary of the account,” Mr. Donkor clarified.

He said the named beneficiary would have to go through a legal process for a court of competent jurisdiction to grant a probate which empowers the named beneficiary to obtain access to the deceased person’s account

Where the account holder dies intestate, interested persons would have to apply to be appointed as administrators of the estate of the deceased through the issuance of Letters of Administration by a court of competent jurisdiction to have access to the account of the deceased person, the BoG official said.

“In Ghana, this concept of next-of-kin is not defined in our laws, so our discussion is based on what traditionally has been the practice and that is what is likely to continue until such time that as a country we include this in a particular law,” he said.