If you've changed jobs four or five times, there's a good chance you have a workplace pension you couldn't name if asked. A few hundred pounds here, a few thousand there, sitting in workplace pension schemes with providers you dealt with once, at inductions you barely remember. Multiply that across the UK workforce and you get a genuinely large, genuinely boring problem - the kind that rarely makes headlines, but shapes what millions of people retire on.
When was the last time you actually checked where your old workplace pension went?
Romi Savova built a company on the answer to that exact question, PensionBee, which she founded in December 2014, exists to do one specific thing: find the workplace pension pots people have scattered across old employers and consolidate them into one place they can actually see.
From frustration to founding: pension consolidation as the pitch
Savova's own account of the founding is consistent across the interviews she's given: she tried to move her own workplace pension after leaving a previous job, found the process opaque, slow, and unresponsive, and eventually built the company she wished had existed.
Before PensionBee, her career ran through Goldman Sachs, then Morgan Stanley's investment banking division, then a corporate development role at Credit Benchmark which is a fairly conventional City trajectory that gave her the financial-services fluency to spot exactly where the pensions industry was failing ordinary savers.
"Lethargy will cost you money."— Romi Savova
It's a blunt way to describe the problem, and it's the whole thesis of the busines, most people don't lose money on their workplace pension through bad decisions, they lose it through inertia - old pots left in expensive legacy schemes, forgotten entirely, or never combined into something a person can actually track.
Was this always going to be a venture-backed growth story, or could it have stayed a smaller, calmer business?
It didn't stay small.
Savova was born in Bulgaria, raised in South Africa, studied at Emory University in the US, and later completed an MBA at Harvard Business School before finally settling in London. Co-founder Jonathan Lister Parsons came on as CTO.
By the late 2010s, the company's growth numbers were the kind that attract serious capital and serious losses alongside them, which the company was open about as it scaled, with revenue and assets under administration climbing sharply year over year, while annual losses grew in step, a fairly standard shape for a venture-backed fintech in growth mode.
Female founders and the 2021 listing
In April 2021, PensionBee listed on the London Stock Exchange's High Growth Segment at 165p a share, valuing the company at roughly £365m and raising close to £55m. It was a genuine milestone, and one worth putting in context rather than treating as routine, a research by AskTraders, reported by CityAM, found that of the 276 companies that listed on the London Stock Exchange between 2016 and 2020, only ten were led by a female CEO or founder and that female-led IPOs raised an average of £10m less than their male-led counterparts over the same period. PensionBee's listing sat right at the edge of that window, in a cohort where female founders were still a rarity rather than a norm.
"We are delighted with the strong support that we have received from institutional investors and our customers." — Romi Savova, on the day PensionBee's shares began trading
The part of the story most coverage skips
Here's where PensionBee's story gets more interesting than the version usually told. Most profiles stop at the bell-ringing. Few follow through on what happened to the business, or the stock, afterwards.
If the fundamentals are genuinely improving, why hasn't the market caught up, and does that say more about PensionBee, or about how the market treats UK fintech listings generally?
On the fundamentals, PensionBee has kept doing what it said it would: revenue has continued growing at a strong double-digit clip in its most recent full year, the company reached adjusted EBITDA breakeven, and it has pushed into the US market through a partnership with State Street, letting American savers roll old 401(k) plans into IRAs - a product built on the same core idea as the UK workplace pension consolidation model, applied to a different retirement system. Assets under administration have climbed past $10bn across a customer base of well over 300,000 people.
The share price tells a different story. PBEE has spent most of its life as a public company trading below its 165p issue price, dipping as low as 45.5p at its low point, and only briefly touching above the IPO level at its all-time high. A business that is, by most of the metrics it controls, executing well — sitting inside a stock that the market has been slow to reprice.
Is a company allowed to be a good business and a disappointing stock at the same time?
Is PensionBee good - what the reviews and the numbers actually say
It's a question worth answering plainly rather than dodging.
On the consumer side, PensionBee has built a large, genuinely engaged customer base - its Trustpilot page carries well over 13,000 reviews, a scale few UK workplace pension consolidation apps can match, and its core product does what it says: find scattered pots, combine them, make them visible in one place. On the business side, the fundamentals above speak for themselves. What the market has made of that combination is a separate, and genuinely open, question - one this piece isn't in a position to answer for you, only to lay out honestly.
What we'd still like to ask
There's a real, unresolved discrepancy in the public record over when PensionBee actually began: Companies House records incorporation in December 2014, but Savova has referred to 2015 as the founding year in at least two separate interviews. It's a small detail, but the kind worth asking about directly rather than picking a version.
We'd also like to ask her directly about the gap between the business's performance and the stock's - whether she sees that as a market problem, a communication problem, or simply the price of being an early UK fintech listing in a market still working out how to value them. And, given how rare her position still is, whether the "one of very few female founders to list in the UK" framing is one she thinks about, or one she's simply tired of being asked to comment on.
Editorial note
This piece draws on Companies House filings and existing interviews and reporting rather than a direct conversation with Romi Savova or PensionBee. We've reached out and would welcome the opportunity to update this piece with her direct response, particularly to the questions above.
Also read: How Alex Depledge Built Hassle.com Into a Sharing Economy Blueprint
Sources: Companies House (PensionBee Limited, company no. 09354862; PensionBee Group PLC, company no. 13172844); Forbes; Business Leader; CityAM; Good Money Guide; Pensions Age; TipRanks; stockanalysis.com; TradingView; Trustpilot; AskTraders research as reported by CityAM.
