Crescent Bank UK

The Problem#

• Crescent Bank’s customers hold accounts governed by English law but wish their estates distributed according to Islamic inheritance rules (faraid) — creating dual-system estates
• Wills drafted by external solicitors often fail to comply with faraid or fail to comply with English formalities — because the solicitor does not understand both systems
• The bereavement team spends an average of 8 hours per deceased account holder manually reconciling two legal systems
• Mahr (the bride-gift, a priority debt in Islamic law) is frequently overlooked by non-specialist solicitors
• The bank handles approximately 350 deceased account holder cases per year

How They’d Use INHERIT#

• Activate both the uk-england-wales and islamic-succession extensions simultaneously on a single estate.json with willType: "dual"
• Use the islamic-succession extension for full faraid structure: school (most UK Muslims follow "hanafi"), heirClassifications[] with Quranic fixed shares, wasiyyaRules with maxPortion: 33.33 and toNonHeirsOnly: true
• Record mahr as a priorityDebts[] entry with type: "mahr" to ensure it is paid before estate distribution
• Apply the uk-england-wales extension for nilRateBand, residenceNilRateBand, and inheritanceTaxRate — because English IHT applies to the full estate regardless of faraid distribution
• Use person.json with culturalDisposition via common/cultural-disposition.json to handle nasab (patronymic) naming conventions
• Model kinship.json relationships accurately — the distinction between full siblings and paternal half-siblings affects faraid shares

The Integration#

• Bidirectional: the bank generates INHERIT documents for customers planning their estates (export to solicitors) and imports INHERIT documents from solicitors administering deceased customers’ estates
• Internal compliance validates that wasiyyaRules.maxPortion does not exceed 33.33% and that heirClassifications[] are consistent with the declared school

The Business Case#

• Bereavement team reconciliation drops from 8 hours to 2 hours per case — saving 2,100 staff hours annually across 350 cases
• Solicitor errors on faraid calculations reduced from an estimated 25% to under 3% through structured dual-system documents
• Customer trust improves measurably: Net Promoter Score for estate services projected to rise from +12 to +45

Before / After#

Without INHERIT:

1. Customer’s family contacts Crescent Bank to report a death
2. Solicitor sends the will — drafted without specialist knowledge of faraid
3. Bereavement team discovers the will allocates 50% to a non-heir (exceeding the one-third wasiyya limit) and omits the mahr entirely
4. Team manually recalculates faraid shares, contacts the solicitor to explain the issues, and requests a revised distribution
5. Solicitor revises, but the English IHT position is now inconsistent with the faraid distribution
6. Full reconciliation takes 8 hours; case resolution is delayed by weeks

With INHERIT:

1. Customer’s family provides an INHERIT document with both uk-england-wales and islamic-succession extensions active
2. Bank system validates wasiyya limits, mahr inclusion, and heir classifications against the declared school automatically
3. IHT and faraid are calculated from the same structured data — no manual reconciliation needed
4. Bereavement team completes the case in 2 hours