-- Gretel, the UK's unclaimed assets specialist, estimates that £89 billion sits unclaimed across dormant and lost financial accounts in the UK. Research from the ABI and the Pensions Policy Institute puts the number of lost UK pension pots at 3.3 million, with a combined value of £31.1 billion.
SuccessionKeeper, a UK platform that helps families keep track of financial accounts so they always know where to look, says a regulatory change due in 2027 could make this problem more visible than ever.
From the 6th April 2027, most unused defined contribution pension funds will fall within the scope of inheritance tax for the first time, under the Finance Act 2026. Until now, these pensions sat outside the estate and were not part of an executor's tax reporting duties at all. From 2027, personal representatives, typically the executor of the estate, will become responsible for tracking down, valuing, and reporting every pension asset to HMRC. For families without a complete record of what their loved one held, this turns an already difficult administrative process into something far riskier. An undiscovered asset can mean delay, dispute among beneficiaries or unexpected financial exposure for the executor.
A Gap That Existing Tools Do Not Cover
The government's Pensions Dashboard, designed to help savers locate lost pension pots, has been in development for several years and does not yet have a confirmed public launch date. Its scope, when it does launch, is expected to cover UK pensions only. Bank accounts, ISAs, investments, insurance, property, digital assets, and overseas accounts would all fall outside it.
For UK residents who have lived or worked abroad, additional complications can arise, including foreign institutions operating under different legal systems, correspondence sent to addresses no longer in use, and documentation requirements that vary by jurisdiction. SuccessionKeeper co-founder Peter Vulchev says this was the situation he found himself in.
Vulchev, a senior finance professional with a career spanning major global investment firms, discovered around ten years after moving from the US to the UK that his 401k account showed a zero balance. According to Vulchev, the US financial institution holding the account had transferred his savings to the state government as unclaimed property, after correspondence sent to an old US address went unanswered. The account had been flagged as abandoned, despite Vulchev logging into it every quarter as part of professional compliance requirements throughout that period.
Recovering the funds took more than three months, during the COVID period, and involved notarised documents, identity checks and calls across time zones. Vulchev says his wife had known the account existed but only vaguely, without much detail. Vulchev says the experience made him think about what would have happened if he had not been the one to notice. The first gap would have been not knowing the provider or who to contact. The second, more significant gap would have been the absence of any statement or notes giving context to the account - which employer it was tied to, and the years he had contributed. With that context in place, a zero balance would have been recognisable as a problem worth pursuing, rather than simply the end of the story.
The Platform's Approach
SuccessionKeeper was founded by Peter Vulchev and Deyan Nenov, whose background is in software consultancy, including building infrastructure for clients such as Amazon and Autodesk. The founders say that before building the platform, they looked at existing tools and found most fell into one of two categories: those built primarily for wealth management among high-net-worth individuals or static record-keeping tools where information is entered once with no mechanism to keep it current.
The platform's central feature is a check-in mechanism. Users are contacted at a frequency they choose, and if a user stops responding, SuccessionKeeper begins a notification sequence that contacts a designated primary nominee before any information is released. Nenov says the goal was to build something that stayed accurate over time rather than a one-time entry that quietly goes out of date.
According to the company, login credentials are never required, and account numbers and balances are optional. Users instead record provider names, account types, notes, and documents intended to give a family a starting point. The platform operates on a flat monthly subscription rather than advertising or data resale.
The platform is built on Google Cloud infrastructure with AES-256 encryption and is GDPR compliant as a UK-registered company. “We hold the map, not the keys,” Vulchev says.
Context on SuccessionKeeper’s Mission
With the 2027 inheritance tax changes approaching, and no single government service currently covering the full range of assets that UK households typically hold across pensions, banking, investments and property, both in the UK and abroad, the responsibility for maintaining an up-to-date record of these assets currently sits with individuals. SuccessionKeeper positions itself as one option for maintaining that record, covering multiple asset types in a single place and updated through ongoing check-ins rather than a one-time entry.
SuccessionKeeper is available at: successionkeeper.com
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