Pension Bee founder’s £135m stake
THE founder of Pension Bee will be sitting on shares worth £135m when her company lists on the stock market next month.
Romi Savova, 35, is hoping the firm will float at a value of £300m, setting a multi-millionpound price tag on her 45pc stake.
Pension Bee, which runs a smartphone app that lets people consolidate their pension savings into one pot and manage them digitally, confirmed it was pushing ahead with its initial public offering (IPO) in April.
It hopes to raise £55m from selling new shares, to ramp up its expansion.
Savova said: ‘Becoming a publicly traded company has long been part of our strategy to be the best universal online pension provider. There is a significant growth opportunity for Pension Bee, as a result of the acceleration of the shift to digital, the frequency of individuals moving jobs and the increased duration of working life.’
Former Goldman Sachs banker Savova came up with the idea for the firm when she struggled to move her own pension pot after switching jobs. She and her co-founder Jonathan Lister Parsons, who is the chief technology officer, will not sell any of their shares during the IPO.
Smaller investors may sell up to £5m of their stock, Pension Bee said. It is offering its customers a chance to invest through Primary Bid, a company which allows small investors to get involved in IPOs. So far more than 9,000 people have registered to participate.
Pension Bee has 130,000 active customers and manages £1.5bn of pension savings.
Mother-of-two Savova was born in Bulgaria and raised in South Africa and received an MBA from Harvard. While running Pension Bee, she has written online about the difficulties female entrepreneurs face when trying to balance family life with work.
The company believes 40m pension pots, including those of the self-employed and workers with ‘dormant’ savings from previous jobs, could benefit from consolidation.