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Source: Guiide
Scottish fintech Guiide has undertaken another round of funding for further innovations based on its retirement planning platform.
The past year has seen Guiide grow from offering an online free consumer site only to providing bespoke versions of its platform to master trusts, employers, financial advisers.
These licences have provided Guiide with its first significant revenue. Adding to this, this new additional funding round will allow it to develop its existing propositions further.
Primarily the funding will be used to develop Guiide+, an extension to its free online pension modelling tools. One key feature, the Dashboard and Track function, will be the first fully holistic retirement dashboard, allowing users to include live pension pots values, along with non pension savings and income all in one place. There are so many potential sources of retirement income now, that focussing solely on pension pots is no longer valid for many retirees.
Users can then continually assess whether their plan remains on track, both before and after retirement. Other features of Guiide+ will include help on benefit entitlements, switching drawdown funds for guaranteed annuity income within a plan and making users aware of the tax consequences of taking lump sums.
The Dashboard and Tracking function of Guiide+ will provide key support for future development of Guiide.auto. This aims to be a pension product with an automated pension pot withdrawal plan. This plan is designed, in conjunction with all other sources of income, to provide the total after tax income required and last throughout retirement. This will reduce one of the key risks for pension savers using, or planning to use, the pension freedoms without advice.
Previous funding was used to develop Guiide DB. A separate solution available only via defined benefit schemes. Early adopting schemes with around 10,000 members are now using the Guiide DB service. Guiide’s aim is to make this the default option for trustees not appointing an adviser directly, with a goal to increase members with access to the Guiide DB service to at least 50,000 by the end of 2022.
Guide DB offers trustees of schemes a safe harbour for any of their members who may be considering a transfer from their scheme.
Free to use for schemes and members, Guiide DB educates members on the advice process, the FCAs views on suitability for transfers and then allows them to determine themselves if taking costly transfer advice is the right choice. If so, it directs them to a panel of experienced specialist transfer advisers, vetted and overseen by an independent governance committee.
It has become clear that leaving defined benefit members considering a transfer, which can often appear a life changing amount of money, to find their own advice is no longer a viable option. This is highlighted by the continued prevalence of scam red flags and high profile cases of poor member outcomes, such as the transfers from the British Steel Pension Scheme, where members were left to find their own advice.
Founder of Guiide Kevin Hollister stated “Our continued goal is to simplify the word “pensions”, for as many savers as possible, helping them understand how to get the best retirement outcome and protecting them against bad outcomes at no cost to them and the recent funding round will support Guiide to achieve this goal”.
Financial Services
