Every participation programme ends in a payment run
Registration, validation, years of scheduled engagement — all of it exists so that at the end there is a population who can be identified, contacted and paid. A claimant who cannot be paid was never really retained.
Mediatasks holds the record. Moving regulated money to tens of thousands of individually verified people is a different discipline, with its own permissions and its own liability.
A claimant’s value is measured when the money reaches them.
Four ways a won case still pays badly
These are the failures nobody plans for, because distribution is treated as an administrative afterthought to a legal result.
Paid out of the client account
The firm carries the reconciliation, the fraud exposure and the regulatory weight itself.
Bank details collected years too early
Details taken at registration are stale by settlement. Accounts close, names change, people move.
A population that stopped answering
A claimant who cannot be reached cannot be verified, and a claimant who cannot be verified cannot be paid.
Reconciliation by hand at volume
Tens of thousands of individual payments, checked manually, against a court-approved timetable.
Regulated rails, built for the legal sector
Shieldpay is a payments business authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Services Regulations, with a separate trustee arm supervised by HMRC as a trust service provider. It works with a large part of the top-tier claimant bar and has built its litigation practice specifically around group and class distribution.
Its model has three steps, and the order is the point: verify the payee, hold the funds in a safeguarded account, then disburse. Verification happens before money moves, not after a payment bounces.
- Firm
- Shieldpay — regulated payments and escrow for the legal sector
- Regulation
- FCA-authorised payment institution under the Payment Services Regulations 2017; trustee services supervised by HMRC
- Role
- Settlement distribution: payee verification, safeguarded holding of funds, and disbursement at class scale
- Method
- Verify · Hold · Disburse — open-banking account checks and KYC/AML before any payment is released
- Reach
- UK and international payments with currency conversion for overseas class members
- Integration
- API, so the payee file and its status can be reconciled against the claimant record rather than emailed as spreadsheets
- Reference
- shieldpay.com
Two columns. One case file.
The division of labour is deliberately clean. We are responsible for the population still being reachable when it matters. Shieldpay is responsible for every pound that moves after that.
Neither column reaches into the other. Money does not touch Mediatasks, and the claimant relationship does not transfer.
Participation infrastructure
The claimant, end to end.
- Claimant acquisition and registration
- Eligibility validation and data quality
- One claimant record, maintained for the life of the case
- Engagement and dormant-cohort recovery before payout
- Claimant communications through the payment window
Settlement distribution
The money, end to end.
- Payee identity and bank-account verification
- Settlement funds held in safeguarded accounts
- UK and international disbursement with currency conversion
- Reconciliation and a payment-level audit trail
- Failed-payment handling and unclaimed-funds process
Fig. 01 — the join. Column A delivers a population that can be paid; column B pays it. The payee file is the only shared surface.
Money never passes through Mediatasks. That is a design decision, not a limitation.
Stage by stage
Distribution is designed at the beginning of the case and executed at the end. The work in between is keeping the population in a state where it can actually be paid.
Stage 04 is where the two disciplines genuinely need each other.
Verification only works on claimants who still answer. Re-engaging a dormant cohort is a participation problem that shows up as a distribution failure.
Case design Participation strategy, and the claimant record built to carry what payout will require. Distribution requirements specified now, so nothing has to be retro-fitted years later.
Registration Identity captured to specification at intake, with provenance on every field. Guidance on what can be relied on at payout — and what deliberately should not be collected yet.
Quiet years Scheduled contact that keeps the population reachable through the life of the case. Rails, permissions and safeguarding structure agreed well before any settlement is in sight.
Verify Dormant-cohort recovery, so the class that gets verified is the whole class. Open-banking account checks and KYC across the payee file, before any money moves.
Hold The schedule of payees, reconciled line by line against the claimant record. Settlement funds held in safeguarded accounts, outside the firm’s client account.
Disburse Claimant communications and query handling through the payment window, in the firm’s name. Payment at volume, UK and international, with reconciliation and failed-payment recovery.
Design the payment at the start of the case and it is a process. Leave it to the end and it is an incident.
Documents, not introductions
A joint engagement that produces nothing but a warm handshake is not worth publishing. These are the artefacts the joint engagement is designed to put on your desk.
Client money stays within regulated permissions at every step. Mediatasks holds data, never funds.
The two firms are separately owned, separately regulated and separately instructed. Payment services are provided under Shieldpay’s own permissions; Mediatasks is not a payment institution and does not handle client money. Data-sharing terms are agreed in writing before any payee file moves.
The one discipline every case eventually needs
The partner register sits above the operating modes, not inside one. Whichever configuration of the Participation Operating System™ a matter runs on, the distribution discipline attaches the same way.
The other entries on the register are optional by case. This one is only optional until you win.
CasePartners™
Your book, our infrastructure. Payout is where a book that was never engaged shows what it really cost.
Read the mode →LeadPartners™
We build the book. Years of engagement exist so that this cohort is still reachable at distribution.
Read the mode →ArbPartners™
US mass arbitration. Awards resolve individually, so distribution runs continuously rather than once.
Read the mode →- Jurisdiction
- UK · EU, and international class members paid in local currency.
- Best introduced
- At case design. The claimant record has to be built to pay from; that cannot be added at settlement.
- Also useful
- On approach to settlement, where a book needs re-engaging and verifying before a payment run.
- Not a fit
- Distributions run through a court-appointed administrator with its own paying agent already mandated.
Questions of substance
Why not just pay from our client account?+
You can, and firms do. At class volumes it means the firm absorbs the reconciliation, the fraud exposure and the regulatory weight of tens of thousands of individual outbound payments. A safeguarded account moves that into a regulated payments business whose entire job it is.
When should we collect bank details?+
Not at registration. Details captured at sign-up are years stale by settlement, and holding them that long is a liability with no benefit. They are collected and verified in the payment window, through a journey built for it.
What about claimants who have gone quiet?+
This is the clearest reason the two disciplines belong together. Verification only works on claimants who still answer, so dormant-cohort recovery has to happen before the payment run rather than being written off as unclaimed funds afterwards.
Can class members abroad be paid?+
Yes. International payments and currency conversion are part of the service, which matters in EU collective actions where the class is rarely in one country.
Who does the claimant deal with at payout?+
Your firm remains the relationship. Shieldpay operates the payment journey and its support; we run the programme communications around it, in your name. The claimant should experience one case, not three suppliers.
How is the arrangement paid for?+
Each firm is paid for its own work, on terms agreed with you in writing before it begins. Neither firm pays the other for an introduction. The specification sets out the commercial basis in full.
Request the specification.
The joint specification sets out scope, the verification and safeguarding model, the division of responsibility at payout, audit and reporting, and the commercial basis in full. Sent as a PDF, no call required.
Request the specification
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