Funds from this investment round will bolster Smart’s global expansion plans, building on the company’s strong performance in Europe, the US, Middle East and Asia. Proceeds from the funding round will also help finance near-term acquisitions and accelerate Smart’s investment in and distribution of its proprietary retirement savings technology platform, Keystone. The market-leading growth and profitability of its UK-based Smart Pension business is underpinned by the scalability of the Keystone platform.
Smart has experienced a period of exceptional growth, with group revenue of £67m in 2022, a 65% increase on the previous year. In February 2023, Smart was ranked among Europe’s fastest-growing companies by the Financial Times.
Smart today already has over £5.5 billion in Assets Under Management (AUM) on its platform and is expected to exceed £10bn by the end of June 2023 following this Series E funding. Growth has been driven by the accelerating global demand for modern, digital retirement savings technology, the success of Smart Pension in the UK and strategic M&A.
Established in 2014 by Andrew Evans and Will Wynne in the wake of the UK’s rollout of mandatory workplace pension auto-enrolment, Smart owns and operates one of “the big four” UK auto-enrolment master trusts, Smart Pension, serving more than one million savers and 70,000 employers.
The group’s ongoing and future success is underpinned by Keystone, the world’s first global, cloud-native, workplace retirement savings platform. Keystone provides all the infrastructure needed to deliver modern, digital retirement savings for governments and financial services partners around the world, supporting the wave of change currently transforming the $62 trillion AUM global pensions sector.
A successful technology export story for the UK, the platform already powers numerous retirement savings solutions around the world. These include an award-winning partnership with one of Ireland’s most well-known financial services institutions, pooled retirement solutions rolled out nationally across the US and a partnership with Zurich Workplace Solutions (Middle East), part of the Zurich Insurance Group, on the Dubai government workplace saving scheme.
As populations age and governments struggle with the high national debt and large fiscal deficits, the responsibility to save for retirement is increasingly being pushed, by regulation, onto individuals and employees via the workplace. To help them close the retirement savings gap, governments and large-scale financial institutions are leaning on Smart’s Keystone technology to ensure that people are saving more and are empowered to manage their money effectively. In pursuit of these crucial objectives, Keystone provides, at scale, a leap forward in digital experience, bringing the retirement savings sector in line with advanced technology sectors such as e-commerce and online banking.
