Inside the Infrastructure Behind Europe’s Collective Claims Market

As collective claims continue to expand across Europe and abroad, the operational work behind them is becoming just as important as the legal and financial strategy. For funders and law firms, success in collective actions now depends not only on assessing merits, quantum and enforcement, but equally on the ability to identify, onboard, validate, communicate with and ultimately distribute recoveries to large claimant groups across jurisdictions.

Aggregate Claims Solutions, spun off from Deminor to bring specialist claims management infrastructure to law firms and litigation funders across Europe, has supported more than 60,000 claimants in matters including Madoff, Steinhoff and Fortis/Ageas, contributing to recoveries exceeding €657 million across 23 jurisdictions.

We spoke to Aurélie Duchêne, BD Manager at Aggregate, about what is changing in the collective claims market, where claims management can make or break a case, and what funders, lawyers and investors should be thinking about before scale becomes a problem.

A note on terminology: throughout this interview, when we refer to "infrastructure", we mean Aggregate’s combination of a dedicated claims management platform (Aggregate360) and an experienced team of claims analysts working in tandem. Neither element functions effectively without the other.

1. Collective claims have become more prominent across Europe, from shareholder and competition claims to consumer and mass harm cases. What are the biggest changes you are seeing in the market right now?

Over the last five years, collective actions have gained significant momentum across Europe. In our view, this trend is primarily driven by three factors: (i) the implementation of the EU Representative Actions Directive, which has accelerated the development of collective redress mechanisms across Member States; (ii) increased enforcement activity by the European Commission and national authorities, particularly competition authorities; and (iii) the rapid growth of litigation funding, which provides law firms and claimant organisations with the financial resources needed to pursue complex collective actions.

We are also witnessing an important geographical shift. While collective actions have traditionally been concentrated in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, jurisdictions such as Germany, France, Spain and Italy offer some of the strongest growth potential in Europe as their collective redress frameworks continue to mature and market participants become increasingly familiar with these mechanisms.

At the same time, collective actions are becoming increasingly complex and cross-border in nature, often involving multiple jurisdictions, languages, procedural rules and data requirements. Managing these cases effectively requires more than technology alone.

Advances in automation have reduced the cost and complexity of managing claimant groups at scale, making cases that were previously considered operationally unfeasible economically viable. However, as collective claims continue to expand across borders, the support of experienced claims management providers with multi-jurisdictional expertise is becoming essential to ensure consistency, coordination and effective execution throughout the lifecycle of a case.

The types of claims being pursued are also becoming more diverse. Beyond shareholder litigation, we are seeing significant growth in competition, consumer protection, data privacy and mass harm claims, often involving claimants across multiple jurisdictions.

2. Aggregate Claims Solutions has supported more than 60,000 claimants across matters including Madoff, Steinhoff and Fortis/Ageas. What have those large-scale cases taught you about what separates a well-run collective claim from one that struggles operationally?

The clearest lesson is that the quality of the early stages determines everything that follows. Data structured correctly at intake is data that holds up at filing, at settlement, and at distribution. Gaps introduced at the beginning compound at every stage.

The second lesson is that speed under pressure is only possible if the infrastructure is already in place. On ARCO, we onboarded 13,000 Belgian retail clients with 80% completing the process within two months of the filing deadline. That was only achievable because the platform and the team were ready before the pressure arrived.

Third, it is crucial to give each claimant the tools to track their own situation throughout the case. In proceedings that run for years, claimants who cannot see where they stand disengage. And disengaged claimants create friction at every subsequent stage, including distribution. Our role is to ensure that every claimant always has visibility over their own file.

Finally, infrastructure needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the structural differences between opt-in litigation and opt-out settlements. The operational logic is not the same, and a rigid system will struggle when requirements shift mid-case.

3. Cross-border collective claims often involve different claimant populations, languages, procedural rules, data requirements and expectations. How do you build a claims infrastructure that can work across jurisdictions without losing control of the process?

The answer is one centralised process with localised outputs, not separate operations running in parallel. Consistency of process is what holds a multi-jurisdiction case together.

In practice, that means multilingual capacity across both the team and the platform from day one, with the ability to scale with local interim claims handlers for higher-volume matters. It also means a platform flexible enough to adapt at intake: preliminary questions that filter claimants and automatically route them to the most suitable onboarding flow, depending on their profile, jurisdiction, and the documents they are able to provide.

From there, the platform can communicate automatically with defined groups of claimants depending on language, jurisdiction, the status of their individual claim, and the stage of the proceedings. Funders and legal teams receive consolidated reporting across the full claimant base, regardless of where those claimants are located.

The risk in cross-border cases is fragmentation: different parts of the process managed by different teams with different standards and no shared infrastructure. Data can become incompatible. Communication can diverge. By the time the inconsistency surfaces, it may already be embedded across thousands of records.

4. In collective litigation, aggregation can create leverage, but it also creates complexity. What are the most common pressure points in claimant onboarding, validation, communication and distribution?

On onboarding, experience from previous cases allows us to design a process that will work smoothly for 90 to 95% of claimants from the start. But you should always expect the unexpected for the remaining 5 to 10%. What matters is the ability to detect complex situations quickly and adapt. That requires both an experienced team and a platform flexible enough to modify flows without disrupting the cases already in progress. There is always a learning curve, because each case brings its own specificities. The objective is to reduce that learning curve through experience, standardised processes and adaptable workflows.

On validation, the risk is inconsistency at scale. When standards are applied unevenly across thousands of records, ineligible or inaccurate claims make it through and the problems surface later, at the worst possible moment. The solution lies in combining standardised validation criteria, automated workflows and human oversight to ensure that every claim is assessed consistently throughout the process.

On communication and distribution, the same principle applies: keeping claimants genuinely engaged throughout the lifecycle is what smooths every subsequent stage. That requires both automated touchpoints at the right moments and a team of experienced analysts available to handle the situations that no platform can resolve on its own.

5. Funders and law firms often focus heavily on merits, quantum and enforcement, but claims management can determine whether a case is actually executable. At what stage should claims management be built into the funding and case strategy?

We can get involved at any stage, and we have. But the cost and risk profile changes significantly depending on when that happens.

Ideally, claims management enters the conversation at the assessment stage, before a case is committed. At that point, the operational model has a direct bearing on whether the case is viable at all: how many claimants need to be reached, across which jurisdictions, with what data requirements, within what timeline. Those questions shape the budget, the claimant strategy, and the risk profile.

Operational review should sit alongside legal and financial due diligence, not after it. Retrofitting a claims management infrastructure mid-case is significantly more costly and introduces risk that is difficult to contain. A firm that has spent months acquiring claimants using a process not designed to produce the data ultimately required by counsel will face rework that is disruptive and expensive, and puts unnecessary pressure on an otherwise well-founded claim.

6. Technology is now central to claimant onboarding and engagement, but trust and transparency remain critical. How do you balance automation with the need to give claimants confidence in the process?

Automation handles scale and consistency. Trust is built through communication, design, and the people behind the system.

Our platform handles intake, document collection, validation workflows, and reporting. But the automation is entirely supervised by our claims management team. Intelligent guardrails are in place for GDPR compliance and data security. The platform adapts to the complexity and specificities of each case. None of that is left to run unsupervised.

On the claimant side, confidence comes from clear language, timely updates, and predictability: knowing what is being asked, why it is being asked, and what happens next. In long-running cases, maintaining that confidence is an active discipline, not an automated output. A team of experienced analysts is available to answer claimants' questions directly, handling situations that a platform, however well-designed, cannot resolve on its own.

7. Distribution is sometimes treated as the final step, but recent collective actions have shown how difficult it can be to get recoveries into the hands of affected claimants. What should funders and lawyers be thinking about earlier in the case to avoid problems at the payout stage?

The starting point is claimant engagement. Claimants who have been kept informed throughout the process, who understand their status and what to expect, are significantly easier to reach and work with at distribution. That is not a distribution strategy. It is a consequence of managing the claimant relationship well from the beginning.

On the data side, the structure you design at intake should have the settlement requirements in mind from day one. Payment details, identity verification, entitlement data: these need to be collected to a standard that will hold up when the case concludes, which may be years later.

That said, collecting distribution information from scratch at the end of a case remains a viable option, particularly when a reasonably quick resolution can be anticipated. The key is making that choice deliberately, as part of a planned approach, rather than arriving at distribution without a strategy.

8. Looking ahead, where do you see the next wave of collective claims activity coming from, and what kinds of cases will require the most sophisticated claims management infrastructure?

Several areas are generating significant momentum. Consumer financial services, regulatory enforcement actions, competition matters and data privacy claims are all expanding. Privacy and data leak cases in particular are an area we are watching closely: the combination of large claimant populations, individual harm that is difficult to standardise, and complex evidence requirements will create real operational demands.

On the question of sophistication, the most demanding cases are those that combine opt-in litigation with an in-depth review of every individual piece of evidence. In those cases, there is no shortcut: every record must be assessed on its own terms, at scale, without compromising accuracy. That is where the combination of an experienced team and a purpose-built platform makes the difference between a case that executes and one that does not.

The operational challenges of collective claims are rarely new. What makes the difference is the ability to identify them early and respond effectively, a capability the Aggregate team has developed through more than 20 years of experience managing complex collective actions across multiple jurisdictions.