About a month ago I received a compelling email marketing solicitation from a company I had never heard of called Claimdog.  The email, which I have reproduced in its entirety below, claimed that Claimdog could help me painlessly retrieve $169.75 Stanford University (one of my alma maters) owes me and which is now being held as unclaimed property by the State of California.

Most prudent people would send this email solicitation to the trash immediately .  Yet, I opened and responded to Claimdog’s missive for several reasons:

• The Claimdog email was highly targeted.  It included the address where I lived for just one year while in CA, as well as a note from the CEO of the company highlighting our common Stanford connection.
• I’m really interested in the whole category of businesses built on “Open Data”–see here and here.
• I’m super cheap, so if it was easy to retrieve $169.75 I was going to try. (Skip the Jew jokes please.)

Taking the Leap of Faith

As I went through the claim process on Claimdog’s well-designed website, I took two actions most sane people would never take:

• I provided Claimdog with my social security number
• I actually paid Claimdog a small commission before I received the promised unclaimed property check from the State of California.

Then I waited…

In the interim, I half-expected to see an article in the New York Times “Haggler” column about all the people who had been suckered by the Claimdog scam.  Instead, the strangest thing happened–an apparently real check for $169.75 came by mail from the State of California!  Assuming the check cashes, this is a pretty amazing result and one I did not expect.

Open Data and Trust

This experience reinforced two areas of interest for me and my clients recently.

1.  The “open data” or “public data” movement continues to grow and is beautiful to watch.  Open Data initiatives are a great example of the public and private sector working together to make government more accountable while simultaneously helping fuel new start-ups that use public data and add more data, or applications, to it.
2. The trust issue.  I took the leap of faith to trust Claimdog.  Most people won’t.  Overcoming this lack of trust is a critical issue especially in many cloud B2B transactions, especially in FinTech.  I continue to believe that many of the B2B FinTech solutions being offered are excellent, but they lack the necessary brand trust to “ignite”.  It is going to take trusted brands plus new solutions to succeed.  PayPal’s SuperBowl ad was a good example, though it lacked a puppymonkeybaby!

Postscript:  Digging for Gold

After successfully retrieving my funds from California, my next step was to search for funds in other places I had lived. Sure enough, the State of Illinois had more than $100 of unclaimed properties from addresses where I had lived up to 30+ years ago!  Unfortunately, Illinois is not Claimdog-friendly and requires all sorts of arcane information to be submitted offline.  How can I prove where I lived in 1982?!