A company set up to help job-hoppers consolidate their pension pots on a single platform burnt through £25 million in the past year but is confident of breaking even, by one measure at least, this year.
PensionBee, which floated in London in April last year with a market value of £365 million, said that it would “reach adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortisation and marketing costs profitability by December, assuming relative market stability across the year”.
The company reported a near doubling of losses before tax from £13.5 million to £25 million in 2021 as it spent £12.9 million on marketing, including a TV advertising campaign, to scale up its prospective customer base.
Registered customers, prospective clients who have started the sign-up process, grew by 63 per cent to 658,000. Invested customers, those who have transferred hard assets to the platform, were up by 70 per cent to 117,000.
Revenues rose 103 per cent to £12.8 million. Assets under administration grew by 91 per cent to £2.59 billion. Romi Savova, 36, founder and chief executive, said that the company was on track to deliver against targets set at the time of its flotation, while its revenue growth was ahead of guidance.
Advertisement
The average worker can expect to work for 11 employers during their career, giving them the headache of having to juggle as many defined contribution pots.
PensionBee aims to do the work of organising transfers-out to its own platform, which then puts customer money in simple tracker investment products. It charges an annual fee, usually of between 0.5 and 0.75 per cent.
PensionBee raised £55 million of fresh capital in the flotation and said its cash pile stood at £44 million by the year-end. The shares were priced at 165p in the float and closed yesterday at 140¾p, down ½p.
Savova is lobbying ministers to introduce a pensions switch guarantee, a system that would penalise pension companies that are slow in executing transfers-out.
This can take as long as six months and should only take ten days, she said.
