Smart Pension raises €193 million
London-based digital workplace pension provider Smart Pension has announced that it is concluding a €193 million Series D funding led by Chrysalis Investments. The overall round will comprise €129 million of primary and €65 million of secondary equity.
The investment from Chrysalis, whose portfolio includes Klarna, Wise (formerly TransferWise), Starling Bank, The Hut Group, and Graphcore, as well as wefox, will see Smart further grow its retirement technology platform offering in the UK, the US, Australia, and the Middle East, with additional territories to follow including the Netherlands where the entire retirement system is moving to Defined Contribution (DC).
“Smart is an innovator and continues to establish itself as the leading retirement technology platform provider globally . In just a few years it has disrupted the retirement savings industry, working with some of the world’s most well-known financial services providers to create a better way to save toward retirement and access funds during retirement. The world has changed. Just as companies like Wise and Klarna add huge benefits to their users via best-in-class financial technology, Smart offers user experience and technology to transform retirement for savers around the world. What Smart has achieved in the last 12 months alone was a real catalyst for our support and we believe that together we can help Andrew and Will achieve their global ambitions.” – Richard Watts, Head of Strategy and Co-Manager of Chrysalis Investments.
According to the press release, Smart saw ‘enormous’ growth in 2020, with assets on the platform growing by more than 160% to almost €1.98bn and the successful rollouts of the Smart platform with Bank of Ireland’s insurance arm, New Ireland Assurance, and with Zurich and the Dubai International Financial Centre in the Middle East.
“Chrysalis Investments joins us at a really exciting time. Smart’s achievements over the last 12 months are [a] testament to our amazing team, and also to the incredible resilience of both our operating model and the Smart platform that we deploy for large financial institutions and national governments. With close to a million savers on our platform already, we now have straight-line visibility through to well over five million savers on the platform within the next 24 months. We are very excited to welcome Chrysalis as they really understand the global scale of our vision and opportunity. Chrysalis’s investment adviser, Jupiter Asset Management, is a prominent leader in UK investment and Chrysalis itself has an astonishing track record of backing Europe’s most successful tech businesses. We are delighted to join the Chrysalis portfolio. We are very focused on our core goal: offering the very best technology to improve the lives of retirement savers around the world. We also recognize that there are tremendous opportunities for us to cost-effectively deploy capital in M&A to bring members and assets onto our technology platform in the UK, the United States, and beyond and we will be pursuing such opportunities with the energy those markets’ retirement savers deserve.” – The co-founders of Smart, Andrew Evans, and Will Wynne.
The co-founders concluded: “The global retirement market is already a colossal $55trn of AUM. A huge wave of regulatory change is sweeping the globe, with governments shifting responsibility for retirement liabilities from their own balance sheet onto the mass market, via the workplace. Smart is the only proven, global, cloud-native retirement technology solution to this challenge. Smart is set to become the global operating system for retirement.”
