Like many people, I dutifully pay into my pension every month, and every year my financial adviser tells me how it’s performing.

But I don’t really know much about what my quality of life is likely to be when retirement eventually rolls around.

Jarvis is attempting to answer that question with its own pension and an accompanying app that aims to help people take control of actively planning for their ideal retirement. Full details below.

– Martin

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Jarvis wants to let modern workers know what their retirement will look like

The world has evolved, but pensions haven’t kept up, leaving a huge knowledge gap for people who should understand a lot more about what their retirement will look like. 

That’s the thinking behind Jarvis, a startup offering its own pensions along with an app designed to help customers understand exactly where they’re up to, and easily make changes so they can achieve the kind of retirement they want.

“In the past, people knew exactly when they would retire, they knew exactly how much money they were going to get. Skip forward into the modern era, and those questions are no longer easy to answer,” says Jarvis founder Royden Greaves.

The Jarvis pension

Jarvis’ product has two parts. The first is the Jarvis pension itself, which has been created with modern working patterns in mind. It offers a personal ‘jar’, and a workplace ‘jar’, meaning users can manage a workplace pension and personal contributions in the same place.

Greaves says this makes it easy for users to switch between being employed and self-employed–something that is increasingly common–without needing to change their pension. 

And assuming all the companies a person works for over time use Jarvis, all their pension contributions from each employer get paid into one account.

That’s a big assumption right now, but it’s a bold bet on the future direction of the company. And even if an individual who uses Jarvis ends up with other workplace pensions, they can eventually consolidate those funds into their Jarvis pension via the app that forms a core part of the offering.

The Jarvis app

The app offers the ability to see how close you are to your retirement goals and easily manage your pension. 

You can set a budget for your ideal retirement, plan a joint retirement with your partner, consolidate old pensions you might have from past employers, adjust your investment risk profile, and other things that are usually difficult to handle with a traditional pension.

“The decisions that we make on a day-to-day basis about how we live, what we do, a lot of it is driven by our thoughts of the future or thoughts of the present,” says Greaves. 

“So Jarvis enables someone to have an understanding of ‘I'm doing okay, I can enjoy today even more than right now’, or ‘I need to think more seriously about putting away something very small that will have a big impact in the future’.”

More than just basing your retirement planning on your pension itself, Jarvis uses information about savings, property, your spouse, and such like too.

Greaves explains that it also pulls in broader data such as the cost of living, tax rates, and inflation. He says the idea is to make the personal impact of these macroeconomic factors easy to understand without having to go to an expensive financial adviser.

He says that while this technology could be applied to other financial use cases, Jarvis is starting with the UK pension market because it's a large market that has grown significantly in recent years due to the introduction of auto-enrolment into workplace pensions.

The story so far

Greaves has a background in wealth management. He says that over his 15 years in the financial sector, he realised that what matters about money is people and very human needs. 

No matter what an individual might want from their future, ‘am I going to be okay?’ is a common concern everyone has about their finances, he suggests.

And that thinking underpinned his founding of Jarvis in 2022. Having already launched in beta, the startup is gearing up to launch its full product in the coming weeks.

Greaves says Jarvis will be rolled out gradually.

“It's really important that we approach the UK market in a very phased way…. we want to make sure that our customer support and our overall product development and innovation stays in line with our internal expectations.”

He adds that a key priority and route to growth over the next 12 months will be integrating Jarvis with the wider ecosystem of companies that relate to pensions. Greaves says the startup has developed an API that will allow the likes of payroll companies to upload data to Jarvis, offering automatic reconciliation with individuals’ payroll data.

The startup will begin by targeting self-employed people who lack the support infrastructure of an employer to handle pension administration themselves.

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