Fintech provider Smart has completed its latest £165m funding round, with a £75m investment from Chrysalis Investments.
The pensions company, which runs the Smart Pension Master Trust, says this funding will allow it to strengthen its retirement technology platform and expand into new global markets.
Chrysalis Investments has led Smart’s ‘Series D’ funding round. The overall round will comprise £110m of primary and £55m of secondary equity.
Previously Smart has attracted investment from Legal & General, J.P. Morgan, the Link Group, Barclays and Natixis Investment Managers.
Chrysalis invests in a number of start-up technology firms with its portfolio including Klarna, Wise (formerly TransferWise) Starling Bank, The Hut Group and Graphcore.
Smart already offers its pension platform in the UK, US, Australia and the Middle East. It says this funding will allow it to grow its proposition in these regions and allow it to add additional territories in due course.
Smart has seen rapid growth in recent years, with assets on the platform growing by more than 160 per cent to £1.8bn in 2020. Over the last year it has rolled ous of the Smart platform with Bank of Ireland’s insurance arm, New Ireland Assurance, and with global insurance giant Zurich and the Dubai International Financial Centre in the Middle East.
Co-founders of Smart, Andrew Evans and Will Wynne, said that the company now has close to 1m savers on its platform and now has “straight line visibility” to obtaining five million savers within the next 24 months.
They said: “We are very excited to welcome Chrysalis as they really understand the global scale of our vision and opportunity.
“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 recognise 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.”
They added: “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.
“Our Platform-as-a-Service model powered by our single global retirement technology platform is perfect for financial services companies and governments trying to get to grips with delivering for their members and citizens as they save for retirement and beyond.”
They added that Smart had ambitions to become “the global operating system for retirement.”
Richard Watts, head of strategy and co-manager of Chrysalis Investments adds: “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.”
