Scottish Widows has launched a new pension tracing tool to help people find lost pension pots.
It is estimated that there are 3.3 million lost pension pots in the UK, worth a combined £31.1 billion. With people changing employers an average of 12 times, the retirement specialist warned that the problem of unclaimed pots is likely to worsen without intervention.
Developed in partnership with The Pension Lab, the new tracing service is designed to help find any lost or unclaimed pension pots and decide what to do with them via a simple three-step journey in the app.
Once logged into the app, customers enter their national insurance number to begin the tracing journey. The customer then needs to digitally sign a letter of authority to enable The Pension Lab to contact providers on their behalf.
Users can also enter other data, such as previous employers, who the pension was with and the years it was active, to speed up the process.
Chira Barua, CEO of Scottish Widows, said: “Too many people are going into later life without a clear picture of what they have saved, simply because their pensions are scattered across different jobs and providers. With millions of pots sitting unclaimed across the UK, helping people reconnect with their savings is an important first step in improving retirement outcomes.
“We’ve made pension tracing simple and accessible, to make bringing pensions together in one place as easy as possible so that people can properly understand their future finances and take control of them.
“By combining innovation with practical support, we’re helping more people turn good intentions into meaningful action.”
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