Consumers of financial services are increasingly empowered with greater control of their own data; disruptive forces like Open Banking are bringing with them powerful new applications. Gretel is a great example. This free online service reunites consumers with lost and dormant accounts held in the UK. If there’s a pension, bank or investment account out there that’s been forgotten and mothballed since the rightful owner got married, moved house or moved jobs, Gretel’s partnership with GBG ensures it can be matched to a new name or current address.

Based on Gretel’s own calculations, there are nearly 20 million customer accounts with a combined value of over £50bn that have been lost or forgotten in the UK alone. This includes £37 billion in pensions, £5.3 billion in lost investments and shares and £2.2 billion in lost Child Trust Funds.

Reconnect with lost money in less than three minutes
Gretel deploys GBG’s identity technology, and access to millions of data records, to match consumers and reconnect them with their lost money in less than three minutes1. All anyone registering for the free service at www.gretel.co.uk needs to do is enter their name, date of birth and address to identify a dormant account.

Duncan Stevens, Chief Executive of Gretel said: “At a time when the cost of living in the UK is at its highest level in 30 years, getting the £50 billion of dormant, lost and unclaimed money from savings, investments and pensions back into the hands of the consumer, where it belongs, is more important than ever before.

“GBG provides the digital identity engine that powers the Gretel platform. It’s having fast access to incredibly rich identity data and GBG’s advanced identity technology that ensures we can fulfil our promise to help consumers find their money, for free in three minutes or less. Gretel then helps them to reclaim it.”

Useful and timely innovation
A survey of 2,000 adults in the UK conducted by Opinium Research conducted for Gretel between 18-22 March 2022 highlights that almost half (44%) of all UK adults think they may have a lost or dormant account, yet only 13% have ever tried to track them down.

Almost a third of those surveyed (31%) hadn’t tried to find them because they didn’t know how to do it or where to start. Others were not aware that it was even possible to search for lost accounts or assumed it would be too expensive and not worthwhile, despite the average value of a lost investment being over £2,800, and a lost pension policy being £23,000.
Spencer Lynch, Director of Innovation, Wealth, and Pensions at GBG said: “We are excited to be partnering with Gretel to deliver this useful and timely innovation. There are an increasing number of consumer and citizen services that make a virtue of open banking and open pension data to help people better manage their financial assets, but you can’t manage money that you can’t find or have forgotten you even had.

“Consumers demand and expect to be able to sign up for a service quickly and start using it immediately, and so speed and convenience matter to the success of any digital service. Thanks to GBG technology, all users need to do to take advantage of Gretel’s quick and easy-to-use discovery service is enter who they are and where they live. We then connect them to accounts associated with a previous address or name.”