On the free route

Almost every country that runs a pension system now runs a free way to look inside it.

This is one of the quiet achievements of the last two decades of public administration. Records that once lived in filing cabinets now sit behind a login. A resident can see a contribution history, a state pension forecast and, in some countries, every workplace pension in one view, without paying anyone.

The United Kingdom offers a free Pension Tracing Service for finding the contact details of old workplace schemes. The Netherlands has Mijn Pensioenoverzicht, which shows the state pension and workplace pensions together. Germany has the online customer portal of the Deutsche Rentenversicherung. Australia lets people search for lost super through the tax office. Each of these is free, official and, for the people it was designed for, good.

Any honest account of stranded capital has to start here. Most people looking for an old pension should try the public route before anything else. A service that hides this is selling something. A service that leads with it is doing its job.

So it is worth asking the harder question. If the free route is so good, why does capital still go missing?

The answer is that the free route was built for residents. It works brilliantly inside the border and stops, often abruptly, at the edge of it.

The stop usually happens at one of three points.

The first is the login. As we set out in On credential exclusion, most portals open only with a national digital identity. Mijn Pensioenoverzicht opens with DigiD, and getting DigiD from abroad takes a Dutch citizen service number and an appointment. A former resident without those can know exactly where the record is and still be unable to see it. PensionHunter's guide to finding a Dutch pension from abroad walks through what is possible from outside the country.

The second is the scope. A national portal shows what that country holds and nothing else. It cannot tell a person that they also have a record two borders away. For someone with a single-country career, that is no limitation. For someone who worked in four countries, each portal is one window into a house with many rooms.

The third is the starting point. Most free tools assume the user already knows something: an insurance number, a scheme name, an employer that still exists under the same name. The free route is excellent at answering a well-formed question. It is less good at helping someone who does not yet know what to ask.

Germany shows the pattern clearly. Every person who worked there holds a lifelong record under an insurance number, and the online overview is free. But the online route opens with a German or EU digital identity, and a person who left decades ago may not remember the number at all. Other official routes exist, but they ask for patience and paperwork. PensionHunter's page on German pension records from abroad sets out both routes.

Australia is a different case, and an instructive one. There, small inactive super accounts are swept by law from funds to the tax office, which means the record often moves somewhere the owner never expected. The free ATO search finds it, if the person can get into myGov. The Australian lost super guide explains the sweep and the search for people who have left.

None of this is an argument against the free route. It is an argument for being exact about where it ends.

There is a useful principle in infrastructure design: build on the public layer, do not replace it. The public layer has legitimacy, permanence and the actual records. Anything built on top should route people into it wherever it works and only add effort where it does not.

For a verification service, this has a practical meaning. We always point people to the free government tracing route first, and we take nothing from financial advisers. Where the public route works, the job is to say so and step aside. Where it stops, at a login, a border or a missing number, the job is to bridge exactly that gap and then hand the person back to the official record.

Machines make this easier than it has ever been. An agent can read every national portal's requirements, compare them with what a person still holds, and tell them in plain language which doors are open. The free route becomes more useful, not less, when something can explain it.

The free route is the foundation. The work is at the border.

The summary, for anyone who left a country and left a pension behind:

• Most countries offer a free official way to find pension records. Use it first.
• It was built for residents and usually stops at the login, the border or the missing number.
• Each national portal sees one country only.
• Good services build on the public route and only bridge the gap where it ends.