Jason Murphy & Ali Adam, Co-founders, Chest

Today we're delighted to speak with both Jason and Ali, co-founders of Chest, the modern pension app designed for Millennials and Gen Z. After discovering first-hand that they were on track for worryingly low retirement incomes despite years of contributions, these two Chartered Accountants decided to tackle the UK's pension undersaving crisis head-on, turning everyday spending into retirement savings through cashback from over 120 brands.

My questions are in bold - over to you Jason and Ali:

Who are you and what's your background?

We're Ali and Jason, co-founders of Chest. We are both Chartered Accountants who have each spent over a decade working in professional services in London.

We came up with the idea for Chest when we realised we were experiencing the pension undersaving crisis first-hand.

Like millions of other young people, we'd largely ignored our pensions, assuming that auto-enrolment had us covered. With 8% of our salary going directly into our workplace pensions. We thought this was generous and would be enough.

It wasn't until our parents started approaching retirement and we looked at their pensions that we took a closer look at our own. What we found shocked us. Despite years of contributions from us and our employers, we were still on track for a worryingly low income in retirement. We quickly realised we weren't alone - nearly 15 million people in the UK, roughly half the working population, are under saving for retirement.

For Gen Z the picture is even bleaker, with a recent Legal & General study predicting that people in their 20s today face an average income shortfall in retirement of over £25,000 a year.

Realising the scale of the problem - both socially and economically - we decided to do something about it.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

Jason: Like any start-up, responsibilities can be a bit blurry, but I tend to take the lead on product and marketing. From thinking through product changes to creating content and running marketing experiments, anything really which involves the customer experience.

Ali: You could say I do all of the unsexy stuff! Managing our relationships with partners, fundraising, operations and managing our regulatory responsibilities.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

Chest is a pension app built for millennials and Gen Z. We're on a mission to close the retirement savings gap by making pensions simple, engaging, and automatic - without asking anyone to sacrifice their lifestyle.

The challenge we're solving is that young people know they should be saving more for retirement, but they genuinely can't afford to. Between rent, student loans, and trying to get on the property ladder, there's no spare cash left for saving for the future.

Instead of lecturing people to save more from money they don't have, we've built a smarter route in.

Chest turns everyday spending into pension contributions through cashback from over 120 brand partners - names people already shop with like Tesco, Uber, Deliveroo, and Starbucks. When you shop through Chest, a percentage of their spend goes straight into their pension. And because pension contributions attract tax relief, that cashback is effectively boosted by up to 25% - making our effective rates market-leading.

On top of cashback, we've built a suite of other tools to increase user interest, experience and engagement in pension savings - such as automated saving rules, like round-ups, so users can build their pension in the background without thinking about it. Our Chest Score gamifies the user experience to add an extra dose of fun and information with a personalised pension health rating that gives users a clear picture of where they stand and what they can do to improve.

Our revenue model is commission-based: we earn a share of the cashback generated through our brand partnerships, plus a small platform fee on assets under management. The more our users engage, the more we all benefit - the incentives are genuinely aligned.

The early market reaction has given us a lot of confidence. We've built a waitlist of over 2,000 young people, and our Chest Champions community is growing steadily with users who are genuinely excited about what we're building.

For a product category that's traditionally seen as boring, that level of organic enthusiasm tells us we're onto something.

Tell us how you are funded?

We bootstrapped initially in order to prototype our product and start building our brand. We then raised a £380k friends & family round in May 2025.

We have used this funding to build the product, integrate with a number of other fintechs to build out our infrastructure, automate back-end processing, obtain regulatory permissions, start developing our brand presence and build the foundations of our community. We've achieved a lot already and are now raising funds for a pre-seed round which will enable us to launch publicly, fund the initial growth of our user base, and further develop our community.

What's the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?

Ali: Jason and I lived together in our twenties - introduced by a mutual friend who also shared the house and, as it happens, became one of our first investors. We were just two regular working guys in our early thirties who'd never once looked at our pensions. We knew the theory - start early, compound interest, all that - but we'd never actually bothered to check.

That changed when my parents approached retirement. They asked for my help, and for the first time I was exposed to just how complex retirement savings really are. That sent me down a rabbit hole into my own pension, and I was genuinely shocked. I'd been paying in 8% - the default workplace contribution - and had almost nothing to show for years of work. The worst part? I wasn't an outlier. After digging into the data, I found that 15 million people in the UK are under saving for retirement. The system is basically set up for people to sleepwalk into a shortfall.

I knew something had to change, so I called Jason.

Jason: I'd caught the entrepreneurial bug during Covid. I'd been trying to get healthier, but found myself drowning in supplements and direct debits, so formulated a mega all-in-one multivitamin alongside my day job. It didn't work out, but it taught me the big lessons fast: sell before you build, listen obsessively, and never assume you know everything about the customer. I also realised I love taking something overcomplicated and making it simple. So when Ali explained the pension problem, I was hooked.

Ali: Our take is pretty straightforward. We know young people have a contribution gap and find the way pensions are structured and communicated difficult to digest and frankly boring. Yet we also know they can't afford to save more and really care about having enough money. There are just too many competing priorities in your twenties and thirties, from paying the rent bills to holidays and saving to buy a house.

From the start we knew we wanted to build things differently, no boring and complex communications and no lecturing about saving more from money they don't have. Chest is about making things simpler; helping people to save without sacrificing anything else. We do this by turning cashback and rewards from spending they're already doing into pension contributions. And we're making the whole experience actually engaging, because if pensions fail to engage, then people will keep ignoring them.

Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?

Our core audience is working millennials and Gen Z - broadly 22 to 40-year-olds who are earning, spending, and building their lives, but not yet seriously engaged with their pensions. They're not financially illiterate; they're financially overwhelmed. They know they should be doing more for retirement, but the existing tools don't speak their language and don't fit their reality.

Within that, we see three key segments:

• First, the "pension-curious" - young professionals who want to do the right thing but find the current pension landscape too confusing and jargon-heavy to engage with.
• Second, the "cashback-savvy" - people who are already using rewards and cashback apps, but don't realise that spending power could be working harder for their future.
• And third, the "gig and freelance economy" - people without workplace pensions altogether, for whom Chest may be the easiest on-ramp to retirement saving they've ever had.

On revenue, we operate a commission model. We earn a percentage of the cashback generated through our 120+ brand partnerships, and we charge a small annual platform fee on assets under management.

Crucially, the user never pays for cashback - the brands fund it as a customer acquisition cost. So our interests and our users' interests are genuinely aligned: the more they engage, the more they save, and the more sustainable our business becomes.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

We'd redesign how regulation works for early-stage fintechs that are innovating within existing frameworks.

To be clear, we're not anti-regulation - far from it. We're building a pension product that people can trust with their retirement savings. Robust regulation is a big part of what makes that trust possible. In many ways, the rigour of the UK's regulatory framework is reassuring - it sets a high bar, and rightly so.

But there's a difference between high standards and high barriers to entry. We're not building a completely new financial model. Pensions are one of the most established and regulated products in financial services. Yet because we're doing it in a new way we've had to navigate the same regulatory overhead as if we were inventing something from scratch. In our first year alone, we spent close to £80k on regulation-related costs. For a pre-seed startup, that's a significant cost.

The FCA Sandbox is a good initiative, but it's there for firms facing genuine regulatory uncertainty – and not every fintech qualifies or needs it. For companies like ours, building within existing frameworks, there's no shortcut. You're looking at the same authorisation processes, the same legal costs, the same compliance build-out as the big established players.

The challenge is getting the balance right - maintaining the standards that protect consumers while ensuring the cost and complexity of getting to market don't end up stifling the very innovation that could help solve problems like the pension under saving crisis nor slow the ambitious growth ambitions that will ultimately help the British economy.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

The pension engagement problem is your problem too, and we should be solving it together.

Every major pension provider in the UK is sitting on millions of disengaged members who set and forget at 8%. That's bad for your customers and, ultimately, it's bad for your business. Disengaged members don't consolidate, don't increase contributions, and don't stick around when a better offer comes along.

What we're building at Chest isn't designed to take members away from you. It's designed to do what you haven't been able to - make a 28-year-old care more about their pension. We're turning apathy into engagement, and we're doing it by meeting young people where they are: in their spending habits, on their phones, in a language they understand.

The smartest large players will see fintechs like us as a distribution channel. We can be the front door that brings younger savers into the pensions ecosystem and gets them actively engaged with their retirement for the first time. The alternative is waiting for a generation to hit 50 years of age and panic - and by then, it's too late to fix.

So our message is simple: let's work together, because the status quo isn't working for anyone.

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

Sifted is our go-to for European fintech and startup news - they strike the right balance between depth and accessibility, and their coverage of funding rounds and regulatory shifts is consistently ahead of the curve. For a more UK-focused lens, Soapbox is great for keeping a pulse on the domestic scene.

We listen to the Fintech Insider podcast most weeks, and then beyond that, the FT's FTAdviser is excellent for pension-specific news and regulatory developments. When you're building in the pensions space, knowing what the FCA, DWP, and TPR are thinking is non-negotiable.

Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

• Samantha Rosenberg, Co-founder & COO of Belong - Samantha's background as a behavioural economist means she really gets why people struggle to make good long-term financial decisions - and she's building Belong to change that, helping millennials move beyond low-yield savings accounts and into long-term investing. We're big fans of how she thinks about present bias and designing products that work with human behaviour rather than against it. It's a different product to ours, but the underlying challenge is the same - getting people to prioritise their future selves - and it's great to see someone tackling it so thoughtfully.
• Funmi Olufunwa, Founder of Hoops Finance - Funmi is a lawyer turned financial educator who's on a mission to make money talk simple and jargon-free. Funmi does amazing work delivering workshops in schools, workplaces, and online, and even recently gave evidence at a Treasury Select Committee hearing alongside Martin Lewis. Her 'no judgement, no jargon' approach is exactly the energy the industry needs more of.
• Nina Mohanty, CEO & Co-founder of Bloom Money - We love Nina's story of how she first-hand saw how traditional financial services failed communities around her, so founded Bloom Money to solve this problem and digitise the trusted savings circles that immigrant communities have relied on for generations. We really like how Nina's built a platform based on how people actually behave and manage money, rather than forcing them to adapt. This really resonates with us and is also what we're trying to achieve with Chest and the pension saving issue.

What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?

• GoCardless - we use them for open banking and payment collection at Chest and have had a great experience working with them. Their product just works and everyone we've worked with at GoCardless has shown energy and enthusiasm for the work we're doing together - which is exactly what you need when you're building and integrating at pace.
• Quai Digital - handle of the operation and administration of the Chest pension via digital investment infrastructure. They work side by side with us day to day, and their customer-first mindset has been invaluable as we build out the product.
• Round Treasury - an all-in-one treasury platform for startups. When you're managing a small pot of funding carefully, having visibility and control over your cash in one place is a game-changer.

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

2mins - a free financial education app that turns topics like pensions, investing and property into bite-sized games. It's basically Duolingo for your finances. Given that our own research shows 28% of Gen Z and millennials want more financial guidance on pensions, apps like 2mins are doing really important work in making that education accessible and actually fun. We're big fans.

Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

We'll deliberately leave AI off this list - because it's the obvious answer and everyone's saying it. Here are a few other things we think are really interesting.

• First, the rise of embedded financial outcomes. There's been talk of embedded finance for years, but most of it has been about putting payments or lending into non-financial apps. The next wave will be about embedding financial outcomes into everyday behaviour. That's exactly what we're doing at Chest - turning spending into saving, without the user having to change anything about their life. I think we'll see this pattern extend into areas like insurance, emergency funds, and other forms of investing, where the financial product recedes into the background and the focus is on the outcome.
• Second, the battle for financial education - and who gets to provide it. Gen Z are learning about money from TikTok and Instagram; not from their bank or their employer. The rise of financial influencers has been genuinely positive in many ways - they've democratized access to information and made investing accessible to audiences that traditional finance never reached. But it's still largely unregulated, and the FCA is likely to take an increasing interest in what's being said, by whom, and with what credentials. The fintechs and creators that get ahead of this - by providing genuinely responsible, engaging education - will be well positioned. The ones that don't could face a reckoning.
• Third, the shift from generic guidance to targeted support. The advice/guidance boundary has been one of the biggest constraints in UK financial services for years - firms are terrified of crossing the line into regulated advice, so they default to giving everyone the same bland, generic information that can often hinder, rather than help, consumer decision-making. But the FCA's development of targeted support as a distinct category - sitting between generic guidance and full regulated advice - is likely to be transformative. It means firms can narrow down the options relevant to a customer based on their characteristics and circumstances, without triggering a personal recommendation. For us, that could mean helping a 26-year-old understand which steps are most relevant to improving their pension outlook based on factors like their age and contribution level, rather than just showing them a graph and hoping for the best.

The thread running through all of this is that the winners in fintech over the next few years won't be the ones with the most features - they'll be the ones that help improve people's financial security with the least amount of friction.

Many thanks to Jason and Ali for taking the time to share their insights with us. You can learn more about Chest on their website.