How one man wants to shake up the pensions industry

Royden Greaves is looking to disrupt the way people think about their pensions

Planning for your retirement might not feel like the sexiest or most inspiring topic but, according to financial entrepreneur Royden Greaves, that’s because we’ve not been thinking about it in the right way. Whatever you want to do with your money, let that be your focus, suggests Greaves, who has launched Jarvis, a pensions app designed to simplify your finances. It’s all about providing information to help people achieve a sense of freedom, he believes.

Tell us a bit about your background, and what’s led you to the point in your career where you’ve decided to launch a pensions app

I was born in Montserrat in the eastern Caribbean. As a child, I was able to just play, without boundaries. That allowed me to be quite creative, and I’ve always been a dreamer.

I moved to the UK to do A-levels, and very quickly started understanding the differences in culture, and the horizons people have. In a tiny island with just 5,000 people, most things are not on your doorstep, so you have to dream and imagine and be creative with your thinking. When you come to a place where a lot of things are possible and you have a lot of resources on your doorstep, I felt that dream start to get reduced.

Studying for a Masters in engineering at Imperial College London taught me the importance of building longstanding relationships, and of just being aware of your circumstances and your environment. For me, education doesn’t mean going to a good school or getting a good degree; it means learning about the world around you, and understanding how to actually have a positive impact in that world; how to make a difference.

When I graduated, it was during the credit crunch, and my career path had been heading towards banking or finance. I interned at a couple of banks and realised that wasn’t for me. That’s how I got into wealth management. I knew people were concerned about their financial wellbeing: how their assets were doing, how much they should be saving, and how they should be cutting costs.

I had the opportunity to be part of building two wealth management companies. Working with people from many different backgrounds helped me understand how people think; the worries they have. And a common thread that links all the conversations I’ve had is that most people are in pursuit of freedom. Freedom to just be themselves; to do the things they want to do, when they want to do them.

In this society we’re trained to think that that isn’t linked to the term “retirement”. Very few of us are trained to think, say, if you’re really into having a nice holiday, you can focus your savings on having nice holidays every year. If you focus on having a nice meal… now, you may not be able to go out for a nice meal every single month, but you might be able to have a Michelin-starred meal once every six months.

I was thinking a Domino’s, but sure, we’ll go with a Michelin star!

McDonald’s is also good!

The key financial vehicle people in the UK use for retirement has been pensions. Traditionally you’d work for 40 years, and at the end of it your employer would just give you money for the rest of your life. Step forward to today and we might have a bit of pension, a bit of ISA, property, cash, inheritance… and figuring our way through that has become our responsibility.

So what we do at Jarvis is basically take the knowledge that one would get if you had a certain amount of money in the wealth management space, and make it more accessible to everyone. So we can all have our little world of freedom, and of financial independence.

It’s about knowing exactly when you’re on track to retire, based on what resources you have right now, and being able to change your future by being empowered with knowledge. “Right now if I save an extra £200 a month, here’s the difference it’s going to make in my life.” All the things that make this complicated, we look to simplify.

So what’s the core mission for the app?

What I want to help people achieve is to be free. We have plenty of freedom in the West, but very few of us are free within our minds to explore the things we want to do. How often do you hear people say, “If I had more money, this is what I would do,” or “I’m stuck in this job because of these reasons.” If we can give people more access to the information that the elite of society have access to, then we’re helping to reshape society. And then they will be the people who are solving the problems of tomorrow.

The creation of hope is a key thing we want to empower people with. Rather than being told, “You should save some more money,” what if we were to tell you, “Actually, save as much as you need to based on the lifestyle you want to live, so that extra money you can go and enjoy yourself now? That’s powerful information. The answer is not always “save more” – in some instances it could be “spend more”!

Like on holidays…

That’s it!

You approach finance really differently from other companies. Why do you think the pensions industry needs to be revolutionised, and how big a role do you think Jarvis is going to play within that?

One of the things I find most frustrating is dealing with legal documents that read like they’ve been written by people who lived 500 years ago. You have to decipher what they’re saying in normal English. And it’s the case in the financial world too. So, what if we just made this all make sense? What if we made it into language that we use now?

If you think about the whole concept of retirement and pensions, it’s just a bank account, really. Yes, you have rules around when you can access money, and tax matters, but if you boil it down, it’s a pot of cash that you can access at a point in the future in order to do the things you enjoy, as well as covering the essentials.

If we could use simple language, saying, “You’re earning some money and enjoying your life today; put a little bit into enjoying your life in a few days to come” – those days might be multiplied by years, but that’s exactly what it is. What we wanted to do was to build a solution that enables normal people like me and our target customers to be able to very quickly read something and completely get it.

Some things feel so complicated you don’t want to touch them because you’re scared you’ll get it wrong. There’s nothing to get wrong here, from a cash or savings or investment perspective. Yes, there are a lot of things that can complicate this world, but we’re trying to connect people to information that makes it one that all of us can easily understand.