What happened at PensionBee in 2017?

Last week marked the third anniversary of PensionBee. What started out as an idea in 2014 is now a team of 29…

Or perhaps even 30, if you include our robot Armie.

This year has been massive in the progress of PensionBee, so with 2017 coming to a close I thought I’d share some of the highlights. Here’s what’s happened in the past 12 months.

Our first billboard campaign hits Brighton

Back in January, we brought together five happy customers to be the stars of our billboard campaign. We chose customers rathers than actors as you’re at the heart of everything we do at PensionBee - a big thanks to Juan, Lynn, David, Stu and Lucy!

Building Britain’s best pension

Key to keeping customers like Lucy happy is a first-rate pension product, so another focus of 2017 was to bring you lots of brand new features. Here’s some of our biggest releases of the past 12 months, driven entirely by your feedback:

• Our eco-friendly Future World Plan
• A new history chart to track fund performance
• A fairer fee structure
• Direct Debit contributions
• And last but not least, our improved drawdown service which we released this week!

The feedback to these new features has been really helpful and inspiring, so please do tell us what else you’d like to see. It helps us build a better product.

I highly recommend @pensionbee, great experience so far, and a climate-friendly fund: https://t.co/raaTaSIe5v
_{— James Smith 💾 (@Floppy)}

We also won some great awards and partnered with some of the biggest names in fintech. Plus, back in August, we changed our address…

PensionBee gets its own HQ

Our first office was a tiny room just off Borough High Street.

And after several moves around that coworking space, come this summer we were at full capacity. That’s why in August we decided to up sticks and take our growing team to Southwark Street.

Just three months on, it’s safe to say we’re already running out of desk space! But thankfully we have a very resourceful team…

Robin Hood strikes again

At around the same time of the office move we released our Robin Hood Index - just to make things extra hectic!

Spurred on by the success of the previous year’s campaign we decided to dig through the data again, examining annual charges, exit fees and transfer times. It’s fair to say a few providers were left red-faced when the research was released, with The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and Business Insider all covering the story.

We’ll continue to press providers publicly until they’re forced to change.

PensionBee partners with State Street

And finally, perhaps the biggest news of the year came earlier this month. After several months of negotiations State Street took a minority stake in PensionBee, becoming the largest external shareholder in the company. They’ve supported us right from the start - their Tracker fund was one of our first three plans - and we’re really excited to see what the future holds for the relationship.

Thank you for all of your support this year! Merry Christmas from everyone at PensionBee.

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