Nope, this won’t help you recover that lost loose change from down the back of the sofa, but new website Mylostaccount has been launched to help you recover money from lost or dormant acounts with banks, building societies and National Savings & Investments.
The free service has been put together by the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), the Building Societies Association (BSA) and National Savings and Investments (NS&I).
mylostaccount.org.uk brings together the three tracing schemes of BBA, BSA and NS&I into a single website. This means that anyone with a dormant or lost account with a bank, a building society, NS&I – or all three – can initiate a search simply by visiting this website and completing only one application form.
There is an estimated £1billion sitting around in these types of account, so if you think you may have forgotten about some money in an account, it might be worth using the service to try and get it back. From 2009, a new scheme is to be introduced to use the money from dormant accounts for “community causes”, so if you think it’s not going to be worth the effort chasing it, at least you know it might be used for a good cause in the future and not just another way of banks earning more money.