It’s been 6 years since I started AgeWage with Chris Sier and Ritesh Singhania. On June 30th we closed our accounts and I’m pleased to announce that for the first time, we made a profit of £155,000. In the overall context of UK financial services , this may not register as a seismic achievement , but we have consistently invested over our lifetime, spent a year in the FCA sandbox and pioneered new practices to measure performance which will deliver value over time.

Right now, we are investing again , developing an application that integrates online quotes for pensions and annuities which helps people work out how much of their retirement wealth they want as a wage in later age.

Sadly, our original management team did not last long, Chris and Ritesh decided to start ClearGlass , a great success and took the tech team with them. Luckily we had a plan B in patient shareholders and we have rebuilt to deliver software as a service to an underserved market.

Our next challenge is to reward out patient shareholders and I hope to have an announcement on that early next year. We are not a unicorn, but we are a well run business with a strong order book. Enough of the corporate puff.

We have set our sights on helping Edi Truell’s Pension SuperHaven provide pensions to hundreds of thousands  of savers. I had originally pinned our hopes on creating pooling for pensions using the weight of money accumulating in master trusts, but this is proving commercially difficult. A financial model has yet to emerge to support this endeavour. As in Australia, there is not great appetite amongst the master trust funders to run savings on into the spending phase of a whole of life pension. Those who have the capital can see only risk and expense from the CDC regulations.

By contrast, the guidelines emerging from negotiations between the would be superfunds and the Pension Regulator have resulted in a working model that is attracting capital to pensions. Pension SuperHaven is a capital backed pension that admits individual savers as well as groups of DB members. It provides an age-wage, we’re on our way.

Of course , only a zealot would deny people the freedom to spend their pot as they like and we are working on an AI algorithm that explains back to savers the split between pension, cash and investment best suits them. We are keen to leave the solutions people choose to others, we are interested in helping people decide the split between the pathways recognising that annuities, drawdown and cashing out all have their place. For smaller pots we are keen to promote ideas such as Arun Muralidhar’s selfies.

Are we adopting a commercial position or simply becoming a test bed for innovation? It is the conundrum that has dogged us since outset. We rely on the acumen of our partners and we are grateful to successful organisations we have grown with. Pension Bee, Retirement Line, innovative employers such as SUEZ and helpful regulators have allowed us time and money to develop products that help people make good decisions. Many of the master trusts, especially Cushon, Smart,  and Scottish Widows have adopted out value for money metrics. Thanks too to the IGCs of Scottish Widows, Royal London and Virgin Money.

But my biggest thanks are to our shareholders, our management team and contractors and to our advisers, in particular Dr Con Keating, John Quinlivan, John Mather and Ros Altmann.

My frustration is to do with data and in particular data sharing. AgeWage could do so much more if anonymised data was made available at the request of members, employers and even trustees. If we are to properly understand value for money, it mus be through member data, not  the constructs of fund managers and analysts. I fear that the dashboards will not achieve their potential so long as the transparency of what member data tells us, is denied to the owners of that data.

There is much that can be done and will be done in time. The saver needs to be able to understand their performance , not just that of the fund manager. We can extract the achieved net performance of large groups of savers by analysing the outcomes of members relative to inputs and the great win will be when we can provide VFM metrics as effectively in decumulation as in accumulation. Right now, the data is with the large SIPPs and until we can properly analyse the data collected by the FCA in its retirement income survey , we will not be able to compare the success of drawdown with annuities and pensions. When we do, then we will have done what AgeWage set out to do.

I think we are five years away from that and I hope that I will still be in charge of this fine company in 2030 to deliver the next installment of this story.