Transforming Workplace Pensions for the Digital Age | Interview with Chris Eastwood, Co-Founder of Penfold

Ryan Purvis 00:15:49
Hello and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings.

Welcome, Chris to the digital workspace works podcast you want to give us a introduction and tell us a little bit about your company. Penfold

Chris Eastwood 00:16:25
is absolutely thanks very much for having me. So I'm Chris, co founder and CO CEO of Penfold. We are a digital pension company trying to help everybody save enough for later life. So Penfold is primarily a workplace pension scheme. Today, we used to be a pension scheme for the self employed, but we have David as a workplace pension scheme from last year. And really, we're trying to just solve the problem of people not saving enough because pensions are hard to hard to use and too confusing. So trying to use technology to make everything about pensions much easier.

Ryan Purvis 00:17:00
Yeah, I have to but it's something that I struggled with when I moved here. Because in South Africa, you have quite a lot of financial education, actually. I mean, for large part, it's not the case. But when you grew up in a in a wealth mindset, well a family but in the majority of the population is, is poor. But if you've got the privilege, you do get taught how to, you know, have IRAs, which is equivalent to isas, you're always told to have a pension, you're always told to have a Provident Fund, etcetera. When we came here, it was almost difficult to find that stuff. only found out but I said, like five years after being here, which was a such a weird, like, oh, we should know about that.

Chris Eastwood 00:17:42
So it doesn't help that, you know, the rules are complex. And some of the concepts are complex. But generally speaking, yeah, the level of education about all sorts of financial matters is so low. And the problem is with pension specifically 2030 years ago or beyond, when people stayed in one job for their careers. And those those employers with defined benefit pension schemes provided them a level of income in retirement, due to the fact that they had worked at that company a long time. Now, the system's pletely changed, and individuals have to save in it's just like a regular savings account with tax tax relief added to it. So it's down to the individual to make sure they're saving enough. But that was never really communicated to to everyday people. You know, what not the state pension is not going to be enough for you in later life. So yeah, big problem, that level of understanding is around pensions.

Ryan Purvis 00:18:37
Yeah. And I think that's the point is, to a large extent, there was a there was such a point where the state pension went away. And for a lot of people, they'd never thought beyond that. They always kind of assumed that it was 150 pounds a week at that point. Now it's like 190 pounds a week, is what they're gonna get. And I mean, 190 pounds for a lot of people doesn't even cover the grocery bill, let alone all the other stuff they've got to pay for. For nowadays. I suppose we should probably mention this. Me. I'm not a financial advisor. And I'm looking at financial advice. I don't know if you are.

Chris Eastwood 00:19:06
We aren't we are not. Generic guidance. Yeah. Great. So

Ryan Purvis 00:19:13
So tell me about your journey setting up Penfold.

Chris Eastwood 00:19:17
Yeah, how did we end up sending it to setting up a pension company? I guess my history of pensions goes back to my first job when I saw, I have a did maths that you need to have quite like numbers saw an illustration about compound interest when I was quite early in my career, that was really powerful. That just sort of demonstrated the extreme power of starting to save early as early as possible when it comes to your pension, and even an extra sort of five or 10 years as to when you start and ended up doubling the amount that you have at retirement. So I saw that, and then became the annoying person that nagged all their friends about starting to save more into their pension. But the flip side of that was that myself, every pension platform that I used was super frustrating. And all my friends used. And what I would always hear back is that, yeah, I know, I should save more, but it's such a nightmare to actually do it. So that was sort of the context. And then a guy that I worked with at Deloitte, which is where we both started our careers, had just set up the company pension scheme at his old company. This is Pei, Gu, my co founder, and he found the process of setting up the pension, super painful. And the fact that none of the staff paid any attention to it got us both talking about pensions and how, you know, it's an enormous industry, pretty much everybody needs to save into a pension to support themselves after work. And yet, people are saving hardly anywhere near enough to be able to do that. And so, you know, we kind of looked at that problem, as there are two things going on there. And we've talked about one of them. One is people generally don't understand depends shins to actually kind of an interest, all these sort of big things and the money shy. And then pension platforms are hard to use as so much friction, whenever somebody wants to do something about a pension, it's painful, so it drops to the bottom of the list. And we kind of saw those two broad problems and thought, you know what we could, we could solve those with technology. So we can, we can look at all the processes that go on behind the scenes with a pension. And we can automate those, which allows, which makes the pension the process of pension saving much easier. And then we can communicate it to people in a way that people understand. And hopefully, we'll those two things together, get them saving more. So that was our kind of big vision that we had over a beer when we were catching up. And then the next morning sent an email to each other to say, right, should we actually do this thing? And three months later, though, where we go watching a pension company, despite neither of us, actually having worked in pensions before, but sort of worked around the pension space.

Ryan Purvis 00:21:48
And, and that lack of knowledge, was that actually a strength? Do you think or weakness?

Chris Eastwood 00:21:53
I think it's the lack of experience, working within pensions was a benefit in terms of not being and being able to think from first principles about some of these problems? You know, a lot of the early conversations we had were, oh, no, you won't be able to do it for this reason, or, Oh, no, it won't work like that, because X Y, Zed. And, you know, it's helpful to be an outsider for that sort of thing. And, you know, Pete worked in sort of HR and staffing and a lot of that benefits. And that side, that side of things, I worked in investment management, finance, we kind of were broadly aware of the steps involved without being bogged down in the detail of exactly this, how the status quo works, which I certainly think helped. And, you know, we've obviously had to learn quite a lot along the way as well.

Ryan Purvis 00:22:39
Sure, no, of course, and I think there's some of these things, timing, you know, I think the technology and the open, and if you fall under open banking, or there's another equivalent, but having access to API's that you can plug into, has made a big difference.

Chris Eastwood 00:22:54
We use open finance, open banking to power some of the oh, how customers pay into the Benjamins make it really easy to do that. But then slightly more more engaging features or parts of the experience where instead of a pension being a black box, your money's invested, we can. When you're and, you know, we can connect to people's bank accounts, look how much they're spending, help them work out how much they can afford to save into a pension, set up a variable payment, and then not once it's invested, double click and see all of the companies that they're invested in, vote on the ATMs of the companies that they're invested in all of this stuff that technology just enables, that kind of moves things on so many years ahead of where kind of a lot of paper based experiences were until quite recently.

Ryan Purvis 00:23:44
Yep. And I think what you're talking about there is is I mean, if I think about my experiences, and most of my stuffs with Vanguard, which was the, the one that I chose a couple of years ago because of one fees, but also to a level of they had the funds, but they also I could buy other stuff that I wanted. Whereas a lot of the other providers wouldn't allow you to buy anything unless it was the stuff. And some people want that flexibility. And I'm not going to slate the Vanguard experience, but there's can there's a lot to be wanting sometimes. And I think that's the sort of toss up sometimes is you got to find one that is usable, that meets your objectives. And then also, you can expand on it, if you want to expand on it, which sounds like you're doing you know, that expand to that extra step to get involved in the actual investments themselves or the companies.

Chris Eastwood 00:24:37
Yeah, I mean, the way we sort of looked at that whole thing is that there are platforms out there for people who know what they're doing, who know which savings wrapper to go into what they want their portfolio constructed from, and they're happy to put up with slightly painful kind of user experience to wade through and persevere to, to execute those trades. And that's not generally and that's a small proportion of the of the population, and maybe a small proportion that has quite high level of assets. So that's why a lot of go after that corner of the market. But for us, the bigger prize was on helping the other 90% of the population that has very, very little financial literacy and doesn't want to pick and choose how they're investing their money. And really, it's all about making the savings experience like opening an account, putting money into understanding what's going on, making that as simple as possible to make it less scary to not put people off so that they save more. So, yeah. Then the challenges so wanting to make things simple, but then make them engaging so that people come back to use them. So you know, you've got to balance those two things, but that's certainly been our in our There are approaches every two years.

Ryan Purvis 00:25:52
Yeah, I think trust is an important thing. Your your customers are going to trust, you look at their bank account. I mean, I remember years ago, a friend of mine saying, Yeah, I'm using the service and they come and look at your bank account and they take the, you do the rounding off, whatever you spent, then they put whatever you've whatever that rounding is into a pot, and the net pot goes into the investment thing. And I was like, I don't want someone to get my bank account. I really don't. And, you know, I think that that level of trust now five years down the road, now I don't care, because I've got so many apps that look at my bank, and anyway, categorising things and allocating things. So I don't have to do it, because that's a convenience thing. And I'm happy to have that. And to just have that little bit of money, that's, that's sliced up and put into a little pot. Yeah, the other month, you were like 50 bucks, and you're like, oh, that's, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have had the 50 bucks, because I would just carry on spending. Now that 50 bucks is allocated to, to go into a slush fund, let's say. And now you've got at the end of the year, what what that 600 bucks, put away in above whatever else you're doing, which makes you feel good. And then as you said, compound interest, if you understand all that stuff, if you can forget about that money. You know, five years from now, seven years from now it's doubled. If you're getting your 7% return, which in most cases you will get, as I said, General general advice. And it's, it's that was probably if you have kids and stuff like that, I mean, the amount of people so I read a little bit, but you know, I chat to parents all the time. And the ones that aren't saving for university and their stuff are really good. The kids are like one two years old. Just don't understand it. In third start the hill, this gets higher and higher. As the longer you wait,

Chris Eastwood 00:27:31
I'm gonna I'm gonna butcher this that but there's something there's a chap called Robert Gardner who says that the your your money savings habits, you've fully developed by the age of seven or something. So you need to that that concept of putting something aside for future really needs to be built in from from an early age. But going back to what you're saying before around, yes, it's, you know, a few bugs here and there, but it's yet starting as the important thing, because, as you say, starts to build up and then you realise, oh, hang on, I've managed to save a few 100 bucks, well, I can do more, and then it's just sort of snowballs from there. So yeah, it's about, you know, make getting those initial barriers to starting as low as possible. So we actually started at the moment, we, as I said, we're a workplace pension provider. And we so we speak to businesses with 50 to 500 staff and help them switch pension scheme. We started off life, we wanted to go direct, to end customers, to make sure that the end user, the actual savings experience for the end customer was as good as it could be, before we took it to businesses, and we focused on the self employed. So there's 5 million self employed people in the UK and only sent saving into a pension. So it's just astonishingly low. And, you know, the reasons were, broadly, what I've talked about is that the user experience and the complexity put people off. And so for us, it was just about making that the process of going from zero to having a pension is very, very simple as possible, and then standing on it from there. So that's, that's sort of where we spent the first first couple years of pinfall, which is yeah, as I say all about kind of making things as possible.

Ryan Purvis 00:29:10
So when you when you said the percentage cut out there for a second, what was that percentage?

Chris Eastwood 00:29:14
14 . So exactly, you know, you have you have 4 million of the 5 million self employed are just not saving for later life. And I think it's that you've obviously got a lot of other concerns, you know, you've got financial stability today to deal with, but millions of people aren't just at one end of the income spectrum that spanned all levels of income spectrum, all different types of jobs, all different types of industries, the savings rates were low and the government today read the report on this, which was how to solve a self employed savings crisis. And it found the same things that I've been talking about, it's not that you can't afford it. It's not that people didn't want to save for later life, it was just that it was a bit too difficult. With the when you're setting it up for yourself, so

Ryan Purvis 00:30:08
yeah, and I think, you know, putting money into a savings account, especially in this country with with the interest rates gonna get so small, and currency is devaluing all the time. It's not, it's not getting stronger. So even even forgetting your 3% I think, which is currently the going rate. The actual currency itself is devaluing faster than that. So you have to put it in something that's a bit more aggressive, which is your your stock market. I mean, even crypto as an option and again, you know, that's everyone has a personal choice of where they gonna put their money, but I think you have to have different vehicles and I think you have to make it automatic. I think that's what you're doing is you're making it automatic so you're not worrying about it every month. I hate to put money aside it's payment So first, and then Palmiter balls, so that later on in life have got some something.

Chris Eastwood 00:30:56
Exactly, exactly, which is, you know, the benefit that we move away from self employed people into people in full time employment. Awesome. And Rob came in government legislation 10 years ago that every business had to offer had to enrol all their staff in a pension scheme, which is great, it's got got so many more people saving into a pension now than were before. And you know, you have to the minimum level is 8%, unless the employee opts out, and that split between employer and the employees. So, employees spend pays in 5%, employee plays 3%. So as I say, that's a good thing. People are saving, the bad thing is that 8% isn't enough. You know, people, again, not advice, but really, it needs to be around 12% or higher, consistently throughout the career to generate a decent level of income. Obviously, lots of kind of educators around that, but But broadly speaking, that's the case. So the other problem with this with the auto enrollment is that the 8%, that people have a false sense of security over being enough can also be calculated on a small proportion of your salary and not your whole salary. So when you for some people, it might end up being only four or 5%, which is about a third of what they should be saving so can be quite alarming. I guess the good bits of advice for anyone is to just find out what, what scheme they are on or they're offering, how it's calculated to see just so they know. So they know what's going on and they can assess whether that's kind of the right thing for them.

Ryan Purvis 00:32:34
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, again a difference in cultures so so in South Africa, you have financial planners, financial advisors, that you almost you know, you can't walk anywhere without bumping into someone you know, who's doing that. And there are qualifications your CFA is and CFPs and all that stuff. So you know, they're not just you know, ambulance chasers to be thinking ideally qualified people and that's part of life you haven't you have when you talk to them, and they do medical aid to do insurance, they do your, your see your pensions. Here, I haven't, I haven't found that as much and it almost feels like to go and talk to them sometimes is quite alarming. They come across as very unapproachable, sell, and sometimes a bit too salesy, as opposed to trusted advisor. And I think having, I think we all we all quite used to having a technology interface now a chatbot, a website, we go to fill out a survey, answer some questions, get some advice. So having having a platform, you can go into it. Also people like to figure things out, or at least I do, like to figure it out myself, and then go and check my, my understanding as opposed to someone selling me something or telling me something? And I don't know what, what it all means. So I can't really make an answer. make good judgments. I have to talk a little bit anyway. But now, I'm sort of confused by all the stuff I've been told. So I need to have a simplified version. So I think finding ways to do that is important. Is that something you're tackling as well, I guess?

Chris Eastwood 00:34:07
Yeah, you're right. And actually, a lot of people don't have even the ability to have a financial advisor, because they're, they don't have a high enough asset, you know, majority of people don't earn enough or have enough saved up for it to be interesting to a financial advisor who charges a good point. And so yeah, it's gonna be a vise gap. And, you know, we, we are very much trying to fill that with not advice, but But education, you know, empowering people with the basics and the fundamentals so that they don't need necessarily need to go and speak to a financial advisor, but they can make some decisions for themselves around around their savings goals, you know, around, they've got high debt, then carrying down the debt before they start investing, isn't going to earn them as much, you know, credit card debts, get rid of all these sort of general kind of finance tips that ultimately put people in a better sort of financial position, which allows them to then save more into pensions. What's the ultimate sort of aim that we're trying to help people with? So yeah, we do from an education perspective to do that. And one of the things we're looking at at the moment is, actually Can we can we broaden that out? And where where people need specialist sort of personal guidance? Can we offer that to them either through a partnership with an advisor or even bringing advisor on board ourselves because, you know, 90 times out of 195 times out of 100. It's a basic set of fundamental kind of education will do the job but sometimes you do need a conversation about your personal circumstances. So that's one of the things we're looking at adding this year, I think,

Ryan Purvis 00:35:45
yeah, there's a I've got a very bad addiction at the moment, which is YouTube shorts. And there's an accountant on there, I cant remember his name is now but he's an American guy, and you need to, and you only get the five second 10 second, and it'll be someone who's spending like 25% 30% of his salary on a car. And it's like a weird car, like, you know, some big truck. And there's an American, it's very strange ways of paying for things as well. And his reactions are kind of what I'm thinking about. It's that kind of like, you're paying what, for what, and you only heard word, that sort of thing. And I think that's, you know, people are embarrassed to have those sort of conversations. And I think we've all got to have them. You know, if you if, you know, Ron would say to us, he always talks about the track amount of guys that have to own a truck, and a tight grip on the Bucky. And it's, you know, it's an unnecessary vehicle for the most part, but it's an ego thing, status thing. And I think you've got the data. And this is where we, I think Tizen is not at all what you're doing. But I think this is where it's going in the sense of tying it all together, if you can start aggregating all the data together, and you can start seeing those patterns. And those ratios are out of alignment. So you know, how much should you be spending on a house? How much should you be spending on a car, how much you should be putting away for savings, you've mentioned 12%, you know, how much you spend on a car, whatever that is, I forget the numbers, but but people don't know that about those things. So like, when I was growing up, you went and you into salary, you went and bought a car, and then you worked at your budget sort of afterwards, it gets you into trouble, you know, and then you have to earn more money to pay off your mistake. And you get into that sort of laundry cycle of all this dirty washing. Until you get on the you know, someone helps you to figure it all out and get on the right path.

Chris Eastwood 00:37:26
Yeah, so that's, yeah, that's, as we've been talking about, that's where technology can just leapfrog things. Now, because in the past five years ago, you'd have to go to a financial advisor, who then takes three months gathering all your kind of bank statements and analysing them and playing them back to you. These days, you just need to click an app and your bank account and it'll happen straightaway. And then it hasn't been cracked, yet, the sort of digital advice journeys, a lot of people are working on it. But it's only a matter of time. And certainly we'll be doing part of that on pairing kind of digital guidance and advice. That happens sort of in an automated way for people through their kind of savings, savings apps and products. So it just make the whole thing less, less scary, much easier, and allows people to make better decisions.

Ryan Purvis 00:38:20
Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, legislation is one good way of making it happen. And as you mentioned, the commitments and that sort of thing, and I quite liked reading to your website, you have a sustainability slant as well. I think that's important to finding the funds that make you feel good. Beyond just saving any money in the sense, I mean, you call it saving bird, I always think of it as investing I think saving, you'd save for a rainy day, but then you have to be investing. And I think there's there's a difference they but I liked it as an angle. And was that something you set out to do from day one? Was that something that came through through evolving the product?

Chris Eastwood 00:39:00
Yeah, that came through pretty much six months in. But we always wanted to have that that option for people where we have our standard range of investment portfolios, and then a range that is they do better on various sustainability metrics than the standard portfolio by disinvesting, in some, some badly performing companies from an ESG perspective, and then up weighting others. That's a that was always something I wanted to do. And something that we we added pretty early on, we are now wanting to go a bit further. So those the funds that we have are are good, you know, they balance getting a good return a positive risk adjusted return for people with doing, you know, better by the by the, on various sustainability metrics as I, as I say, but people would up people might argue they don't get far enough. So they're not funds that haven't have a genuine impact in the world. They're not investing in companies to actively reduce the carbon footprint. They're just, they're just not investing in the worst performance, if you see what I mean. So one of the things that we're looking at at the moment is adding another investment option or a range of investment options that people can choose to invest in either some of their portfolio or quite a lot of their portfolio, if they want their money to have have more of an impact in the world, for climate change for water, you know, all clean water, all sorts of things. Now, the thing that's taken us a while is that we want to, there's a lot of greenwashing out there. There's a lot of people that claim that funds investment plans do more than they actually do. Huge amounts of that, unfortunately. And also, you know, there's a lot of impact funds can be quite high risk and expensive, because they only invest in a small number of things. is not very diversified and they cost a lot of money. We want to blend cost diversification and impact. So no return. So find options that we are confident will, over a long term generate a positive return for people that don't cost an arm and a leg, but also aren't super risky. And, and have an impact. So it's quite hard to find, but I think we're almost there. And so we're hoping to add that later this year.

Ryan Purvis 00:41:18
And what's the interaction like with your customers? Are that I mean, do you do surveys, you talk to them? I mean, how do you decide these are the things you should be doing? Or not be doing?

Chris Eastwood 00:41:28
We do a combination of things. So we'll have three or four customer interviews a week just on a rolling basis, okay. And I even do some myself, I do what I try to do at least one every two weeks, just to kind of make sure I can hear from customers what's going on. And then we also put out surveys as well, we might have a specific range of things we want to ask questions on. So we will do a we'll do a one off survey to 2000 of our customers, or we have these Net Promoter Score kind of pulse, go out to proportion of customers every month, ask for feedback. And we can also do things like attach a question to a certain point of our website or our app that pops up when people are using that thing to get a very spot check in the moment. What do you think about this? What were you trying to do that that sort of instant feedback while someone is actually carrying out the action? Which is super sort of actionable? So yeah, I guess we do a range of things, because it's kind of, I suppose, product development, what I want is that we want to make sure that we're being customer focused and and building what, what is solving the needs of our customers. So yeah, do a lot of that stuff.

Ryan Purvis 00:42:38
And I mean, with those engagements, I mean, are you are you finding there's an age? Or the or the characters of ages you're dealing with that are telling you kind of who's got the appetite for this? And who does it? I mean, do you? I mean, it might be an obvious question, but are you finding as a young thing versus an old thing? Or was it across the board.

Chris Eastwood 00:42:57
So the distribution of our customers is something like early and late 20s to mid to late 40s is where the bulk of customers are. And then there's sort of a, but it's actually quite a flat peak in terms of the distribution. So but yeah, broadly speaking, is people at people in their 30s, a good chunk of our customer base, and I think a lot of that come from, you know, when we started off as self employed, we're a digital based product, you know, it's possibly more likely to, and it was, it was really, for people who are wanting to open a pension for the first time. As we've moved into workplace pensions, that has changed a little bit, because obviously, when you win a business with 100 500, staff, you're gonna have a much broader distribution of ages. So we have all sorts, but yeah, generally speaking, as you might expect for a digital savings product, it's sort of Yeah, 20s to 40s.

Ryan Purvis 00:43:51
Yeah. Yeah, I would think that would be your, your main, your main thing as well. I mean, I was fascinated, but I feel like the person growing up now has so much information to be educated. You know, they don't have to be taught over there. Yes, your parents will teach you something. But they can go look on tick tock, or Facebook or whatever they're using. In fact, most, don't use Facebook, live parties and tick tock and get some advice. Now, there's good advice or bad advice, I don't know. But you know, that they're more interested in it. And can learn it in 15 seconds, 30 seconds a minute. You know, they're listening, they have all the all the knowledge, but at least the concepts have been thrown at them to to build up a base. And of course, it's on your phone. So you know, that's that's that's in your hand. It's easy to use, you know, while you're while you're commuting, you're doing it to things also hugely important. Great, and plans for you mentioned the plans for the future. Is there a? I mean, is there an AI behind it? I mean, everything seems to have a behind it, or you guys kind of got the flow working as a kind of normal system, I guess.

Chris Eastwood 00:44:57
We were building it, we built AI into some of our customer support, around retrained AI models on our FAQ base. And all of the sort of stuff that customers might have to search around in our blogs to find information is now if they go in to the intercom, it's just there. So helping kind of deliver better customer support. One of the things that we're going to try we actually got a, we've got a sort of a day, we were I guess we're calling it a hackathon day. But we've got a product team that's working on a prototype of using AI to pursue sort of an AI guidance model within within the app. So So when someone to ask questions about savings and investments and sort of more general general questions, so we're building we're looking at that have aI enabled kind of guidance within the within the product? But that's probably the extent of it for the time being. And obviously, you know, content generation is quite helpful. But you have to keep quite a close eye on the output at the moment.

Ryan Purvis 00:46:06
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, everyone who's you chatting up will know that it'll spit out somebody that looks really good? Or confident? Do you have to have a bit of subject, subject knowledge or whatever to call it? Call it out for being wrong? But, you know, it is it is about scaling as well, I think I think you need be able to answer questions at all times in the night and end with the disclaimer that it's, you know, it's really this, but I think we need that

Chris Eastwood 00:46:30
you can train it on sources that you trust, then, you know, that's, that's part of the problem self.

Ryan Purvis 00:46:38
Yeah. And I think to a large extent, this is a space that is fairly well known. But I think you'd be pointed out education is the key and its, it's been able to explain a complicated concept, in a simple, simple way. And even, it might be as simple as, say, if you put a pound a pound away a day, for the next 365 days, this is what it is with compound interest versus just normal, simple interest. And if you're doing it, you know, we've seen your patterns, you go buy coffee, caffeine, your every Friday, if you put five bucks away, instead of buying a cup of coffee, or, you know, buy an espresso machine with capsules, this is what it could be for you. And you're going to have this much money at the end, because that's what your your trade off is. Your net is then you changed some behaviours as well. Exactly. What What's your sort of user base now? I mean, I saw 200 million for your your assets. I mean, what sort of numbers have you got people using the product.

Chris Eastwood 00:47:31
So there's been 4000 People with savings pots, so with money in their account 2000 kind of users who are partway through the process of setting up or using Penfold to track down their own pensions. So 44,000 are fully set up. And that took us about three years, well, just over just over two and a half years to get to that first 100 million of pension assets and then think it was eight months to then double that to 200. So it's, it's quite exciting. Now to see that kind of momentum, starting to shift where a lot of the customers that we brought on board in the early days are still that still with us and building up their pension pots, and combining their old pensions with benfold. But we've also brought on a load of new businesses and all of their staff over the last year. So we have now over 400 400 employees using Penfold. And, you know, that's, that's our main focus now on finding those new employers that are getting tired of the sort of older platforms that their staff never really engage with, or log on to, which is quite prevalent in the workplace pensions base, and helping them switch to kind of a more modern, more modern platform that helps their staff save more.

Ryan Purvis 00:48:52
The piece you mentioned there, but about sort of consolidation or aggregation of your pensions? I mean, I find that, like, my wife has worked for multiple companies. Yeah, so we know she's got pensions in two or three other providers. And it's almost like a detective thing to go and find it or document or, or something like that, to which provider was it, what was the policy number, etc, etc. In South Africa, we built a system called a steward, n, we have an ID number, and you just punch the ID number. And I mean, it's paid for service and secured and like our stuff, but in simple terms, you put the ID number in, and you get back a report of every investment, every piece of insurance, every medical aid that you've ever had. So your financial planner again, can go okay, you know, here's everything that's consolidated. It's very difficult to do that here. So far, unless you guys are solving that problem too. But honestly, just take your your National Insurance number, punch it in, get all those things in it, and then fill out the forms to move all across that other piece negative, like print out a form, sign it and send it back in to move it. Whereas just be great if you could just automate that to as simple as possible.

Chris Eastwood 00:49:55
Yeah, agreed. And so we've had built a lot of that where you just need to enter the name of the company, you worked for dates that you weren't there, and then we can help find policy number of the pension scheme you had input that all into our app, transfer the request back. So all you really need to do is click Enter the name of employer and then click yes a few times. And that should do the transfer for you. But what you're describing with the with the system based in South Africa is so the government at the moment are trying to launch what's called the pensions dashboard, which is exactly that. Which is one one thing where you put in your National Insurance number in it and it shows you all of your it keeps getting delayed and delayed and delayed but you know, a couple of years when hopefully that happens that that'd be great because usually solve this big lost pots problem where there's 28 billion pounds of lost pension pot It's out there, because people lost track of their policy number, so then everyone will at least know where their pensions are. And then they can choose whether which provider they want it to be with out of choice based on which one provides the best service and value for money. So, you know, that'll ultimately be, you know, the savings picture will be in a much better place when that when that dashboard is here, but in the meantime, we kind of were replicating a bit in our product.

Ryan Purvis 00:51:17
Yeah, look, I think you can go so far to solve the problem for what it is. And I think you'd rely on the government, I think, also, the way I've seen fees going, you know, there's a lot more clarity around what a fee is to your pension provider. Whereas, you know, they just be very hidden thing. It'd be nice to actually see them all in one line and said, Okay, you can stay with Vanguard who can come to you guys or whoever it is, knowing that your fee structure is what it is. And I think it's not really a regulation thing. But I think it is about having had been an independent party that brings it together, as appropriate in the statute is independent. It's paid for by all the big providers, but it's run as a separate entity. And I think that's important too. So you can trust that it's not going to a bias, one provider. So great. I mean, it looks good. It looks like a great product. But if I hadn't already moved everything, I probably would be moving here to be honest. What is the what is? I mean, let's talk about a small business. You mentioned sort of 50 to 100. What about less than that sort of note 250? Are they worth coming into this? Or is it is it's absolutely their own thing?

Chris Eastwood 00:52:25
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we have those 400 clients, we have ranged from two employees all the way to 2000 employees. And so 50 to 500 is just where we're doing a lot of outreach at the moment. But we get a lot of inbound interest from business businesses who either have just hired their first employee or need to set up a pension scheme for the first time, or have 10 employees and have found dealing with nasty each each month, super painful. And so we help them switch, what we've just launched, or launching in the next few days, is this new platform that allows people employers to solve, to self serve and to onboard themselves and to manage their pension contributions. So once that's live, and that's, that's working, as I say, that should be by the end of by the end of this month, that should be sort of ready to go. Any business because you did from our website be able to set up their pension very, very quickly with Penfold. So and you know, will the doors will be open for for businesses of all size at that point. So that's quite exciting.

Ryan Purvis 00:53:32
Yeah, that sounds really good. Because I mean, that was one of the things I was looking at personally was was to set up my own, I think was an SSA s pension at one point, and then I looked at all that it's actually just too complicated. And I'm not assuming that's what you're doing users more, you know, black rock, or that it's going into a fund or funds mechanism. But even just even through that piece was was a lot of work to get kind of felt way too much. I'd rather just pay the person extra and recover your own pension. But it sounds like you're solving that problem as well, which is, which is great.

Chris Eastwood 00:54:10
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. It's, it's just, and the problem is a lot of these pension providers because of the race to the bottom on fees, and the old legacy sort of technology on which they operate, which is outsourced, they outsource the administration to third parties who outsource the technology to third parties. And they've tried to keep costs down, which means that there's very, very little kind of customer support, because they can't a business model. And we've sort of taken the opposite views that we want, we want a value for money fi that means that we can provide a great service, which means we have someone on the end of the phone that can help people with their questions, help them get set up, which is all enabled by technology, of course, but it shouldn't, it shouldn't be so difficult to set up a pension scheme for your for your company or ask a few questions about it. So that's kind of our our ethos.

Ryan Purvis 00:55:05
And this is totally off the off the wall. But I mean, in theory, you could if you have kids, you could start their pension early to if you wanted to. I mean, I don't know how, what would the the process is to get a national insurance number, but I mean, in theory, you just starting another pot, I mean, he had the junior Isa, which is, you know, as probably as good. But I was wondering if there wouldn't be a benefit to starting a pension really early. If it's different funds or not, and what your thoughts are just off the cuff thought.

Chris Eastwood 00:55:32
Yeah, I mean, I think it's, depending on the grocery use 1000 pounds at birth could be 80 grand at retirement because of the compound interest, which is sort of or x what it would be if you start when you're 20. So yeah, we call the child set. So as a set, self invested personal pension and I'm, and we're for our workplace clients, it's a group personal pension. We don't currently offer a child set, but we can do with a change, like change to our scheme rules that would allow any parent to set up a pension for their for their newborn, I think we've sort of the research you've done into it is that the ICER is probably more favoured in terms of the child's will be able to access it when they're when they leave home, rather than have to wait 50 or 60 years, which just feels a little bit far. But the compound interest is very powerful.

Ryan Purvis 00:56:24
Oh, sure. Look, I think you don't you don't do away with it with a child. I say, I mean that you keep that. But if you say that, like a 21 year old is your money, you know, by our study, wherever it is, you know, use the money as you as you can, but then you still have that pension pot that's going as well, that, and I think it was Tony Robbins that actually did a thing on this. He explained to his took it he was a storyteller about over an 18 year old, and his dad surrendered his airtight and if you if you were paid to do it for three years, and you put and I forget the numbers, this is say $300 a month for three years. And you put that in and I'll match you the 300. So you're putting in 600 for three years, something along the lines of if you put that in, you don't have to work or invest again, because that that'll just grow so quickly over the next 2030 years. To give you x x number, I forget what the numbers were. But it was like, Oh, that's a million bucks. Wow. That's a That's crazy to think about that. But it was something as simple as that. And if you do it from newborn, if you say 1000 pounds, you know, by the time you get to 60 It's a lot for nothing. Yeah, really?

Chris Eastwood 00:57:35
Yeah. So, which is how, you know, going back to the start of the conversation how I got into this whole thing? Yeah, super powerful.

Ryan Purvis 00:57:44
Yeah, if you've heard the story of the chessboard, where, yeah. Where the guy goes to the king and says, I will solve your problem. If you give me one piece of piece of rice for every In doubles, per square the chessboard, and then picking off the limit doesn't realise that that that exponentially. Exponential growth basically wipes him out, and his kids out of favour, because it's just a bigger, bigger number.

Chris Eastwood 00:58:07
think there'll be more grains of rice of their atoms in the universe or something?

Ryan Purvis 00:58:12
So exactly like they did. And Investec, who's got a presence here in the UK? And so that he that was one of the adverts. And it's always stuck with me. And I never understood at the time, but as you get older, you sort of understand these things a little bit better. Now, this is great. I'm looking at your platform. I think your website is great. I think it's really very clear. Which is good. Is there is if you want people to get in contact us directly. Do you want to go to the website? And what's the best way to to take this forward? If they interested? Yeah, they

Chris Eastwood 00:58:40
could do one of two things, go to our website, get penfold.com. So GT penfold.com. And then you can either if you're looking for if you're a business looking for a new pension scheme, you can get in touch with one of our sales team. They're all just if you've got a question, feel free to reach me on LinkedIn. So if you search Chris Eastwood, Penfold in LinkedIn, I should come up. Happy to answer any questions there. If you can't find the information on the website,

Ryan Purvis 00:59:07
great. Thank you very, very much for sharing this. And I wish you all the best for this. It's a an honourable initiative as well. And yeah, I'm interested when you as you release new stuff when it comes up, because I'll be keeping an eye.

Chris Eastwood 00:59:21
Perfect. Sounds good. Thanks very much for having me on the podcast

Ryan Purvis 00:59:24
Pleasure. Thanks, Chris. Have a good day.

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