How to Find Lost or Dormant Assets

There is a staggering £51.6bn of so-called “dormant assets” in the UK. The term refers to pensions, bank accounts and other financial products that have been forgotten by their owners and have languished, untouched, often for many years.

These eye-opening statistics reveal:

• More than 10 million people have bank and building society accounts they forgot to close, with £4.5bn collecting dust in vaults around the country.
• There is currently £37bn in unclaimed pensions, meaning 1.6 million people are missing out on an average value of £23,125 each.
• Nearly £10bn more is sitting idly in investment and shares accounts, life insurance policies, child trust funds owned (and forgotten) by around 8 million savers.

Although £51.6bn is a huge amount, it is a gradual result of everyday life getting in the way of personal administrative tasks for millions of savers.

We know that life gets in the way

Simply speaking, it is often difficult to keep track of everything and when juggling work, family, day-to-day chores and still making enough time to relax, it’s easy to forget about your first bank account, a child trust fund from a great grandparent or an old pension pot you were saving into several job moves ago. For example:

• Marriage – People can get married, which invariably results in a change of name for one of the partners; leaving just one investment in a former name can lead to detachment.
• House moves – As circumstances change and families grow, people often move home. A house move is an incredibly busy and stressful time, so it’s no surprise that forgetting to update an address here or there is one of the top causes of people losing investments.
• Job changes – Thanks to auto-enrolment, every job move now leads to a separate pension pot and with the average person now having 11 jobs of the course of a lifetime, it’s easy to see how a pension pot could slip through the cracks.
• Bereavements – Towards the end of life, vulnerability challenges and ultimately, the passing of a loved one can provide numerous opportunities for investments and their corresponding paperwork to remain undiscovered.

The problem for most people is that they are unaware of how much they might have in dormant assets and wouldn’t know how to start to get them back even if they knew where they were. So, it’s easy to see how this financial housekeeping can fall down the list of priorities.

The solution – Gretel

Gretel is a new digital hub which helps customers reconnect lost bank accounts, pensions, savings and investments.

Gretel uses intelligent technology to see a customer’s past financial path, where they might have left money and then helps them reclaim it. Gretel is the only hub covering the entire financial services industry and is FREE for all consumers.