London-based Smart Pension has secured £15 million in Series B funding from Stensrud family, the owner of Norwegian asset manager Skagen. This round also saw participation from existing investors, Tom Valentine, co-founder of Secret Escapes and renowned entrepreneur William Reeve. The funding brings the total funds raised by the firm to £25 million at a valuation of £65 million.
First reported by Sky News, Smart Pension will utilize funds to enable acceleration of the platform’s technological development. This, it believes, will fuel demand of people who are dissatisfied by their current pension administrators. It will also use the freshly-raised capital to expand overseas in the nations that are keen to turn to auto-enrolment in order to regulate the pension system.
The company works towards providing auto-enrolment solutions for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in order to facilitate management and compliance with the new pension regulation. Launched in 2015 to meet demand of companies ahead of the new rules launched by the government, under which, every employer must auto-enrol workers into a workplace pension scheme if they are work in the UK, aged at least 22 and earn more than £10,000.
Not only this, thousands of businesses have received warning letters from the Pensions Regulator which have failed to establish the new arrangements timely.
Smart Pension charges individual employees a fee worth 0.75% of their pension contributions while it is free for the employers. On the other hand, Nest, the Government-backed pensions service, charges employees 3.9% of their contributions. Andrew Evans, Smart Pension’s co-founder and CEO, had commented,
Like the government provider, Nest, we 100% guarantee to accept all employers and employees. We, however, differ hugely on funding. Nest recently reported it has spent nearly £600m to date and that it is currently forecast to cost the taxpayer over £1.2bn.
Prior to this, the firm had raised £3.3 million in Series A round of funding last year in June.
