Treasury proposes central administrator for R88.6bn in unclaimed assets

How do you solve a problem of unclaimed financial assets? 

Well, if you are the National Treasury you create a central administrator to manage the nearly R90-billion in unclaimed assets in the country. This is the suggestion contained in a discussion paper put out for public comment on 20 August 2026.

According to the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) this figure stood at about R88.6-billion in 2022. This is essentially money that nobody has come to collect, sitting in dormant bank accounts, unclaimed retirement benefits and unpaid investment dividends and insurance proceeds. 

Under South Africa’s Pension Funds Act for retirement funds, an “unclaimed benefit” is any lump sum, pension or retirement money due to a fund member or their beneficiaries that has not been paid for 24 months from the date it became payable, and during which period the fund must trace beneficiaries. Further than this, there are no consistent definitions for other unclaimed asset classes. 

To deal with this, the Treasury is proposing the establishment of a central administrator, which it said in a media statement would be responsible for “record-keeping and tracing of asset owners and beneficiaries”. 

Treasury’s proposed centralisation model

The Treasury wants to change how unclaimed financial assets are managed by pulling funds from the financial institutions holding them into a centralised system. 

Under this model, an appointed central administrator would take over the data, tracing and claims process, while the assets are invested with the Corporation for Public Deposits (CPD), a subsidiary of the South African Reserve Bank whose main function is to accept and invest deposits from the public sector. If someone makes a claim while their assets are with the CPD, they will be entitled to the net balance of their account. 

The Treasury’s paper outlines that currently, each financial institution handles its own unclaimed accounts using its own tracing methods. Centralisation of this process is intended to support consistent standards and clearer accountability. 

An expiration date on claims 

In its discussion paper, the Treasury is also proposing a time limit after which an unclaimed financial asset can no longer be claimed. Two options are on the table: an age-based cut-off of 110 years, in which case the claim dies once the original owner would have turned 110, as well as a fixed period of 45 years when an asset would cease to be claimable 45 years after it first becomes unclaimed. 

According to the discussion paper, the 45-year period would achieve greater administrative efficiency. However, the Treasury said it had not taken a policy position on any option in particular, and therefore had done no analysis regarding the number or value of existing unclaimed assets that may be affected by any particular cut-off period. 

The discussion paper goes on to say that once the cut-off period is reached, the asset is to be “used in accordance with the approved CPD framework”. 

When asked whether this means that unclaimed financial assets would go to government revenue or stay with the Corporation for Public Deposits, or somewhere else entirely, and how the monies would be safeguarded, the National Treasury told Daily Maverick that “funds held by the CPD would be safeguarded through strong governance arrangements”. 

Regarding a claims procedure, the Treasury said that this process would be administered through the designated administrator and that the details would be finalised once the entity had been established. 

What the data shows 

While the FSCA put the unclaimed assets figure at approximately R88.6-billion in 2022, this number has not been updated since. Furthermore, the date should be taken with a pinch of salt as there is no common benchmark of what defines an unclaimed asset. In other words, there are no clear consistent definitions for asset classes that are not retirement funds. 

According to the FSCA, it does not have access to more granular data relating to unclaimed assets across the financial sector, other than for retirement funds. 

It said unclaimed benefits in the retirement fund sector were the largest contributor to all estimated unclaimed assets, at approximately 53%. Another sizeable contributor was the life insurance sector and collective investment schemes, at 38%. 

In terms of a year-on-year growth rate of unclaimed assets, the FSCA’s figures provided do not reflect consistent year-on-year growth over this specific period. It said that “information required to do this type of projection is largely held by the individual retirement funds”. DM

How to find out if you have unclaimed benefits

Money can become unclaimed for various reasons. Often, contact details of beneficiaries or policyholders change and they cannot be reached, someone can be listed as a beneficiary without their knowledge, or a policy can mature without the policyholder’s knowledge. Currently, South Africans can claim an unpaid benefit at any time, and the right to the asset remains with the policyholder or beneficiaries until it is paid out. 

One way of checking whether you have any unclaimed benefits is through the FSCA website, which searches across different financial institutions to see whether any money is owed to you. However, the FSCA only assists by providing contact details of a fund where the potential claimant must contact the fund directly and follow the normal claims process of that fund. Major financial service providers, such as Old Mutual and Sanlam, also have dedicated tracking pages to verify if funds are owed under a given ID number.