Gretel, the UK’s leading platform for reconnecting people with lost and dormant financial accounts, has launched e-trace, the UK’s first fully digital tracing service for financial institutions, including life insurance providers, banks, investment companies and pension providers.
The solution enables firms to locate and re-engage customers in days rather than months, while reducing operational costs and demonstrating compliance with evolving regulatory expectations.
The Dormant Assets Act 2022 and the FCA’s Consumer Duty require firms to show proactive, fair and outcome-focused engagement, yet most tracing still relies on manual, paper-based processes. And dormancy is a growing challenge for the industry. Despite extensive remediation efforts, the number of “gone-away” or unresponsive customers continues to rise, particularly across long-term savings, pensions and insurance.
Gretel’s e-trace offers an alternative. Built on Gretel’s established reconnection platform, it allows firms to identify verified digital contact details and reach customers through branded, secure online channels. The result is faster tracing, stronger auditability, and improved customer experience, all while removing the cost and environmental burden of traditional mail-based methods.
“Life insurance policies often span decades, making customer contact one of the sector’s biggest operational challenges,” said Duncan Stevens, CEO of Gretel. “Tracing shouldn’t be a reactive exercise triggered only when accounts go dormant. e-trace helps life insurers act earlier, engage customers digitally, and maintain trust over time. It transforms tracing from a compliance necessity into an ongoing part of responsible customer lifecycle management.”
Key impact of Gretel e-trace
- Regulatory alignment for financial service companies, demonstrates proactive engagement and ‘reasonable efforts’ under the Dormant Assets Act and FCA Consumer Duty.
- Operational efficiency: Up to 75 per cent lower cost than traditional manual customer tracing methods and completion times measured in days, not months.
- There is currently high consumer mistrust with unsolicited letters frequently mistaken for scams. This branded digital outreach drives higher response and reconnection rates, reducing disengagement risk.
- It will eliminate paper, postage and transport emissions inherent in manual tracing.
- Future readiness and proactive engagement with customers. Ensures companies are acting before customers become “gone-away” or dormant. Enabling continuous customer data hygiene and earlier intervention to prevent dormancy recurring.
Already supporting major banks, building societies and pension providers, Gretel’s ecosystem combines proactive digital tracing with ongoing customer discovery through its public platform. Together, they create a scalable, compliant and environmentally sustainable approach to reconnection.
Gretel will also release a new insight paper, The Future of Tracing: Why Digital Will Replace Manual by 2027, exploring how proactive, digital-first tracing is set to become the industry standard.
