“He told me on the phone — he lived in Germany — not to travel over to see him because he was fine, there was nothing wrong, and we’d just launched,” he recalls.
“Fortunately I went when I did, because three days after I left him he passed away. But despite the fact that he was incredibly weak when I saw him, he did a fist pump for me when I talked to him about the early successes we were having.”
Stevens posted about his father’s death on LinkedIn to thousands of views, angered by his experience with “poor design, bureaucracy and thoughtlessness” dealing with his father’s finances after his death.
“There are so many examples of it taking months, if not years, of individuals to be able to get their money from financial institutions,” Stevens says, but he had not expected his post detailing his own struggle after his father’s death to have resonated with so many people.
Of the £50bn in assets Stevens believes is lost, around 10 per cent sits in estates, which is hard for families to track down if they cannot find the deceased person’s paperwork.
“It shone a new light on this for me. It was always something we’d planned to do, to have the functionality built into Gretel whereby we could help particularly vulnerable people: families who had lost loved ones, vulnerable individuals who maybe had dementia,” he says. But his experience after his father’s death made it seem more urgent.
If the government’s dashboards project does forge ahead in its current shape and form, it will by its very nature become the solution for pensions, Stevens admits.
But Gretel’s saving grace will be its broader remit. “We have a much broader solution and help people engage much earlier than a pensions dashboard would. There’s absolutely space for us to coexist if the government continues going down the path that it’s going,” he says.
Strong appetite ‘to solve the problem today’
And there is still a strong appetite within the pensions industry to put their data with Gretel, Stevens adds, even if it is just in the short term until the dashboards is ready, because “they want to solve the problem today”.
However, the same may not hold true for similar services that focus only on pensions. “I wouldn’t want to say that they have a very limited lifespan, but I do think they will have to evolve in terms of what they do,” he warns.
