News

3 mins

We’re changing. We think it’s for the best.

  •  By
  •  Murray Humphrey

We've got a fresh new look. Here's why we did it.

As you will no doubt know thanks to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, everything is constantly in flux. “You’ll never step in the same river twice,” the wise old goat said in around 500BC.

Around 2000 years later he was followed by the noted twentieth century pop star (and sometime philosopher) David Bowie, who spoke of ‘the stream of warm impermanence’ before unleashing the catchy and stuttery chorus that was ‘Ch-ch-changes’.

So it is with us: we’re changing.

When Penfold launched in 2018, we started offering pensions to the self-employed. It was always the intention to offer workplace pensions, but we started selling direct to consumers precisely because we wanted to build the best product we possibly could.

We wanted to avoid falling into the trap of doing what every other pension provider has done: building a product that prioritises solving problems for businesses while ignoring the needs of end users.

By initially going directly to the people who needed us the most, we knew that we could iterate to build the best product for our customers, and scale up into workplace pensions from there. We would also discover the skills we needed in our team along the way and grow to accommodate them.

We’ve figured a lot of stuff out in the four years since then. When we started offering workplace pensions to the 69% of working-age private sector employees saving into a defined contribution pension, we discovered decision makers needed different things from us.

They needed to know about tax hacks like salary sacrifice to help their staff with cost of living pressures. They wanted to understand how good we are at onboarding their people with a new pension. They had a bunch of questions about how transferring their workplace pension to us might be done efficiently and with a minimum amount of stress.

So because we know a lot more about what our customers want and need, we feel a bit more grown up and capable than we were back in 2018. And we wanted our website to reflect that.

Our new website

There’s now a dedicated section for the professionals overseeing their workplace pension, be they an HR Lead, Head of Finance or Accountant. We haven’t forgotten our individual users either.

More importantly, we needed our new website to reflect our mission of helping everyone to adopt healthy savings habits for their retirement. Pensions can feel like a chore, or boring, or too complicated. If they do, everyone’s going to be worse off in later life. We’re trying to change that.

We want pensions to feel easy to use so that people engage with them. We want people to feel calm, in control and confident about saving for their future. If you’ve used our pension, you’ll know what we mean. If you haven’t, check out how it feels here?

So our website needed to reflect that. All the answers you need, in places where they can be found easily, and written in a way that everyone can understand. We hope you like our new look.

A photo of Murray Humphrey

Murray Humphrey

Penfold