Are you one of those people who opens savings accounts and then forgets about their existence? Or perhaps you have an elderly parent who has done so. It is believed that there is about £1 bn in unclaimed money sittinmg in so-called "dormant" accounts.
A new website has been launched to help people find their forgotton cash, mylostaccount which is a free service set up by the British Bankers Association and National Savings. It has details of dormant accounts from about 42 banks, building societies and national savings accounts, and allows people to search the database to see if they are listed. They've done this because maintaining dormant accounts with money in them is expensive, especially if it's on a legacy IT system they can't close till all the dormant accounts are closed.
Once you have found your account, you need to put in a claim, which will take up to three months to deal with as the bank concerned will have to verify that you are indeed the account holder and entitled to the money. If your bank is not listed in their database, you can still submit a claim and they will try to trace the organisation for you (usually it's the case that the bank concerned has been taken over and is operating under a different name).