Called Smart Pension, the master trust proposition has no up front fees or ongoing charges for employers, and promises a set-up process that takes minutes.
The proposition, which owns the URL www.autoenrolment.co.uk, has been set up with £1.5m investment backing from leading British-based tech and finance entrepreneurs, including investor and entrepreneur William Reeve, who was behind Lovefilm, Graze.com and Zoopla, and Amy Nauiokas, formerly CEO of Barclay Stockbrokers.
Smart Pension is a London-based start-up founded in 2014 by Andrew Evans, former head of Lloyds Banking Group’s wealth portfolio, and his Will Wynne, a former banker and CEO of online florist Arena Flowers.
The Smart Pension Master Trust board includes Claire Altman from Capital Cranfield Trustees, Paul Kebson and Jamie Smith, chair of UK SPA. Assets are managed by Lewis Capital Management, currently using funds from L&G. Employees pay an AMC of 0.75 per cent.
Evans says: “Reports have shown that the set up can be time consuming and our research indicates that small companies want to avoid at all cost wasting time on laborious, inefficient and complicated auto enrolment procedures. This could be a huge problem for SMEs, especially with penalties issued for any delay. Smart Pension was designed to take away this headache, and provide a fantastic solution to what could be seen as a big problem for SMEs.”
Wynne says: “We have built Smart Pension’s advanced auto enrolment platform from the ground up, avoiding any of the limitations of incumbent platforms. We have leveraged modern technologies to make for a frictionless experience as well as integrated leading UK technology partners into our flow, with the sole purpose of helping UK businesses meet their legal obligations quickly, easily and securely. Our platform was designed to be highly intuitive and quicker than anything else in the market, importing data feeds automatically and cutting out the complicated manual checking and paperwork that hold up old fashioned paper- based processes.”
