After my master's in international corporate law, my career began as an academic researcher at the University of Utrecht, then took me to ABN AMRO in Amsterdam, to Merrill Lynch in London, and later to institutional asset management in Malaysia and Singapore. Along the way I worked for organisations that had changed names, merged, been acquired or no longer existed. Like millions of people who have worked internationally, I discovered that finding old pensions was far more difficult than anyone expects.

The problem was not simply knowing where to look. Employers had disappeared. Pension administrators had changed. Records were fragmented across countries, and every address held for me was decades out of date. Tracing my own pension history took months of research, correspondence and verification.

That experience led me to develop a structured research methodology for tracing workplace and state pensions across borders. It combines technology with human expertise, employer history reconstruction, corporate records, pension databases, public registers and country-specific research carried out by specialists who understand how pension systems work in their own jurisdictions.

The first case that methodology ever solved was my own.

Today, it forms the foundation of PensionHunter. Every search follows the same disciplined process, combining AI with experienced researchers and a global network of pension experts to uncover information that generic searches, government portals and AI alone often cannot.

The method we use today is the one I created to solve my own pension search. Now it helps people around the world solve theirs.