Everyone urged to check if they have a 'hidden' savings account after man finds £300 in his

A homeless man has urged people to make a simple check after he discovered a bank account he knew absolutely nothing about. He found £300 and it completely transformed his life.

Brandon Marbaix was 22 when he managed to locate a lost bank account that had been opened when he was a young child. The children's savings account was opened through Natwest, but the family had lost all traces of it, and that's when he decided to track it down.

"My mum set it up for me when I was 10-years-old," Brandon told The Mirror. "She had been paying around £10 a month in for a several years. When I found it, it had £300 in."

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Brandon, who was homeless at the time, said he was able to use the money to put the deposit down to rent a flat - but it took him four months to get it back. "It was such a lengthy, complicated process to get it back manually through Natwest" he said.

Now, with the launch of new simplified money dashboard Gretel, he's encouraging everyone to check if they could have money in a forgotten bank account.

"You could find a forgotten pension or savings from your great grandparents - the reality is that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from checking."

Around 19.6million people in the UK are missing out on dormant or unclaimed money, according to figures from Gretel. Around 44% of UK adults think they may have a lost or dormant account.

Gretel launched in April to help reunite consumers with lost and dormant accounts in the middle of the cost of living crisis. The site works by partnering with banks and agencies to access the databases of dormant accounts.

There are nearly 20million customer accounts with a combined