Tuesday 10 September 2024 6:00 am | Updated: Monday 09 September 2024 6:52 pm

Meet the fintech boss transforming pensions from a puzzle into a clear plan

SME Correspondent

Royden Greaves, CEO and founder of Jarvis

Royden Greaves meets Jennifer Sieg to discuss how his company, Jarvis, is revolutionising retirement savings with an educational approach to pension planning, in a fast-evolving financial landscape.

Saving for retirement can seem like an irrelevant task for some, especially for those who struggle to visualise what could possibly be so important some 20, 30, or 40 years from now.

Entrepreneur Royden Greaves spotted this growing trend of reluctance while spending over a decade working in wealth management, which led him to wonder what more could be done to help workers of all ages invest in their futures.

The answer Greaves was looking for was found within his idea for a new kind of lifetime pension scheme, with a bit of an educational spin.

Greaves, 39, founded Jarvis – a London-based pension fintech – in 2022 on a mission to empower UK workers to know exactly when (and how) they can retire.

Jarvis, which includes an educational platform in the form of a mobile app and its flagship ‘Jarvis Lifetime Pension’ scheme, launched just last month.

It has since collaborated with partners such as payroll firm Liquid Friday, insurance broker Qdos Contractor, and workplace solutions company Sonovate.

It also recently raised £1.8m in seed funding in a round co-led by Ascension VC and Cornerstone VC.

“We’re now able to help the millions of employees out there who have pensions actually understand what they mean,” Greaves says with a smile.

How (and why) it works

The Jarvis Lifetime Pension scheme is designed to include multiple ‘jars’ of offerings, including a workplace and personal pension all in one place.

It is accompanied by an interactive app that allows users to track, predict, calculate and summarise current and future cost-of-living trends, tax rates and inflation.

“It will combine all your old pensions into one so you could track everything, but what it will also do is give you the ability to have an understanding of the type of lifestyle you can live,” Greaves says.

The UK government’s decision to introduce automatic enrollment for pension schemes was just one step in the right direction when it comes to streamlining the process of saving for retirement, Greaves adds.

But research has also highlighted that there is now some £26.6bn of unclaimed pension money currently sitting in lost UK pension accounts.

“Let’s face the fact that over 80 per cent of people who have been auto-enrolled into a pension are still in that pension,” Greaves says.

He adds: “Imagine if they now knew what that money meant, what they could do with it, how you could plan [and] the type of freedom you can have in the future?

“That £26bn problem of lost pensions… we [Jarvis] can actually start helping to solve that, because then you don’t end up with another lost account that you forgot about because you didn’t even know you had it in the first place.”

Ahead of the curve

Employment trends across the world are constantly changing, Greaves says, especially now that more than 50 per cent of the global workforce is estimated to be self-employed by 2028.

If the government wants to continue to keep up with this new way of living, Greave says “legislation is going to eventually need to change to start adapting to that new way of living”.

That means figuring out the most effective way to include self-employed, freelancers and contractors in workplace pension schemes.

As a starting point, Jarvis has committed to offering a new planning tool for self-employed people in order to cater to the growing needs of this demographic.

“Those individuals who are self-employed, who go out every day to find a new job, find a new contract, to pay for themselves, feed their families, their future matters as well,” Greave adds.

“Giving a level playing field for everyone who participates surely should be something that we should be focused on.”

What’s next?

The power of curiosity will forever lead to a natural evolution of innovation.

For Greaves, asking “what if” is one of the most valuable qualities an entrepreneur can have on the hunt for success.

“The innovations that we have today and the things that we hold to be just normal were, once upon a time, impossible,” he says.

“To start exploring a little bit more with curiosity [and asking] why is it impossible [and] coming up with little nuances of answers to start answering that… that’s what will make the United Kingdom as a country made up the forefront of global economic growth.”

With a handful of well-known pension providers already dominating the market, including the likes of Nest, Smart Pension, Cushon or even Scottish Widows, innovation can be hard.

But by championing Jarvis’ focus on the interactive understanding and educational aspect of its offerings, Greaves seems pretty confident that adoption will be far from an issue.

“There will always be resistance to change in anything in life, but as it relates to the adoption of Jarvis, for all the companies that we’re focused on speaking to, those companies are warmly welcoming what Jarvis is doing and where it’s going, because companies want to do the right thing for their employees,” Greaves adds.

“Companies want to actually help to make people’s lives better, but having an easy, simplified way to do so is sometimes that gap and Jarvis is a bridge to get to the other side.”