Penny | using technology to plan a better retirement

Penny is an app based company that enables people to track down their lost pension savings and help plan for their retirement. The company’s strong growth has helped the Bristol-based company attract funding from Google’s Gradient Ventures and Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield.

We spoke to the company’s founders - brothers Josh and Nate Stott, and Ben Stokes - about the company’s growth plans and how changing working patterns are causing more people to lose track of their retirement savings.

What does your company do?

Penny is an app based pension company which helps ordinary people track down their lost pension savings. With more people changing jobs more often, many lose track of their pensions. In fact, over the last four years, the number of lost pension pots in the UK soared by 75% to 2.8mn. The total value of this lost money comes to over £26bn and the average unclaimed pension pot is £9,500.

Young people are often the worst affected as they are more likely to switch jobs or have been made redundant. Our automated pension finding technology helps people from all backgrounds find their lost savings and plan a better retirement.

We’ve added to the team to ensure that our users receive a knock your socks off service that they are unaccustomed to in the finance world. We have live chat through a company called Intercom that makes query handling quicker and creates better engagement. Instead of days we respond in minutes. And yes, there is a real person at the other end!

Tell us about your UK and global operations.

Penny was set up in Bristol, by the three of us - two brothers Josh and Nate Stott and Ben Stokes, who joined as CTO. We are still a small team of just 8. Josh is focused on the customer journey. Nate has the unenviable task of heading up the Ops side of things and dealing with the pension providers. And Ben looks after the tech stack. The rest of the team have experience in pension transfer management, customer services, ecommerce, software development, AI and computer science.

David Henderson joined in the past 6 months. He adds a wealth of experience in Pensions and Financial Services having worked at Hargreaves Lansdown for almost 20 years. David had senior roles there such as Head of Pensions and Head of Transformation. It was during his time at HL that we first reached out to David for advice.”

The UK, and the South West in particular, has been a great place for Penny to grow as a business. The national Network of FinTech, specifically FinTech West, has been super supportive. Whether that's been through exposure at events, introductions or advice. The UK fintech cluster continues to grow and that’s been great for us when we were raising funds

What are the benefits of being UK based?

The UK, and the South West in particular, has been a great place for Penny to grow as a business. The national Network of FinTech, specifically FinTech West, has been super supportive. Whether that’s been through exposure at events, introductions or advice. The UK fintech cluster continues to grow and that’s been great for us when we were raising funds.

2022 was a strong year for us. We had a 1,404% increase in the number of lost pensions found and our assets under management rose by over 100%.  This helped attract interest and investment from high profile investors. We raised £4m in seed funding, with contributions coming from Google’s Gradient Ventures and Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield. Gradient Ventures is Google’s AI investment fund, which predominantly invests in US-based companies.

The investment allowed us to spend more time developing our proposition. We previously partnered with an established pension provider to run our pension scheme. Now we run our own scheme, the Penny pension plan. We have more control over our offering so we can better tailor our service and be more responsive to our users’ needs.

At Penny we have great relationships with the two Bristol Universities, which in the next year will produce over 300 fintech related graduates. In terms of recruitment, this is ideal. We have been keen to support this growth and provide guest lectures and help shape the curriculum for the students.

We see the recent launch of CFIT [Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology] as a huge benefit for UK fintech. CFIT is a private sector-led body focused on driving forward financial innovation in the UK by bringing together experts from across the finance and technology ecosystem. Its aim is to identify and address opportunities and barriers to growth for UK fintech. If we can benefit from some of this knowledge or from partnership opportunities then great.

At Penny we have great relationships with the two Bristol Universities, which in the next year will produce over 300 fintech​ related graduates. In terms of recruitment, this is ideal. We have been keen to support this growth and provide guest lectures and help shape the curriculum for the students

What are your growth plans and how does the UK feature in these?

We have just launched our new SIPP (self invested personal pension) and are busy onboarding new users. In the coming months we will be launching a new version of the app that will make it easier and quicker for users to track down their lost pensions. We are looking to add more tools and support features for users to help them plan for retirement. Our users have told us that they feel more confident about their future retirement planning now that they can manage their pensions on our app. They have a better level of knowledge of where their money is invested since transferring to the Penny pension scheme.

Longer term we would like to explore new markets, possibly the US and or mainland Europe. Whether it is pensions or other investments, if we can help individuals track down their lost assets and help them better plan for their future then that’s a great message.

Our focus for now is making pensions accessible, cutting out the jargon and helping ordinary individuals plan better for their retirement. It’s their money and they should have control over it.