Drawing from his considerable experiences, Jasper's journey has been nothing short of remarkable. His previous role at Simply Business, where he spearheaded the digital transformation of business insurance for SMEs, served as a testament to his ability to transform seemingly complicated financial products into accessible and empowering solutions. Jasper, welcome. Thanks for thanks for giving out the time and joining us today. Yeah.

Thanks for having me. Quite an intro.

Absolutely. All all all completely correct as well. Sure sometimes it's harder to hear it when it's about yourself. But no.

Thank thank you very much. To kick us off, I'd like to go right back to the beginning of when you when you first joined PensionBee as a as a as a start up fintech start up. Can you explain what your what your remit is initially when you started? And and I'm am I right in saying that was pre launch?

Yeah. Yeah. So when I moved from Simply Business to PensionBee, there was no product.

So there were two cofounders, Romey Sifofa and Jonathan Lester Parsons.

They just got together themselves a few months before that. And they were looking for somebody who can help them to launch the solution as in finding your old pension pots and move them into one place in a way that consumers would understand who would take actions on. So, yeah, we were ending up in a room with five people and some seed funding and no line of code written. And coming from a background where you are working with quite a large team, because great those results you've mentioned, but actually, there's always a team working with you to achieve those results.

I ended up in a room that was twelve square meters, very, very kind of like on it onto each other, working on press releases, campaigns, everything, doing a million things Wow.

In one day.

Wow. Yeah. That's bold move after leaving, you know Yes. Relatively safety, shall we say, and jumping into hugely unknown.

I think I was in a relatively, I would say, safe position. But when I met Romy Saphofa for the first time, within five minutes, my first response was, why didn't I come up with this idea?

Right.

And that's always a really good starting point. Yes. Because then you think there is something really, really great about this particular problem she's trying to solve with Jonathan.

Yeah.

And I can see myself helping them to to to achieve the goals of PensionBee.

But taking a leap. Yeah. Into the deep. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite something.

And just for viewers and listeners to this was to give this some context for how long ago this was.

I joined PensionBee in September twenty fifteen.

Okay.

That was also the time I would say a lot of other financial fintech startups were starting to emerge. So you had Mondo, which is now Monzo, Revolut and all of them. And they were all kind of like, well, they're either a little bit further ahead or were they in the same stage. And I think it was a time where a lot of new of these companies were starting to come alive.

Right.

While a lot of them have disappeared and fortunately PensionPee hasn't.

Going back to you first came in, five of you sitting in a room, what was your kind of remit? So you came in as heading up the marketing side.

Yeah, I was the marketeer.

Okay.

And for us, was really important that we were building a product that was actually customers really wanted.

So having also input into the products that's been built by a few or five people, it's pretty obvious that you will have that input. But the main thing was, okay, here's a small amount of money. It's nothing compared that we can do today.

How can you market this product through things like a PR campaign or through a Facebook campaign or through an Instagram campaign or a pay per click campaign? All of those things. And can you test them as small as possible? And can you see, A, is there attraction?

Do you see that people actually like this and they start to sign up? Can you get the insight that how you're advertising it, proposition, does it actually resonate with the right type of customer? So I would say in the first year we were mainly not trying to grow as fast as possible, but actually trying to figure out can we acquire customers? Is there a problem?

And do we have the solution to solve? Which marketing channel can we use to attract those customers? And if so, is it the right type of customer? That was my first year.

I don't know if I'm if I'm jumping to conclusions here. So rein me back in if I've got this wrong. Are you saying that central marketing was all was also shaping the design of the product? Yeah. By seeing what resonated with the audience to see what would be features or benefits that would go into development?

Based on also the marketing could base you run, you start to receive some feedback as in does a campaign tank or does a campaign perform really well? Yeah. Why is that? Is it a message?

Is it a channel and so forth? So a lot of you are trying to figure out if what you thought would be a really great idea, a problem you want to solve and therefore you start or you launch a particular product. Does it resonate? It's one of the reasons I think that Romy and Jonathan got me on board from the start.

A lot of financial fintechs might actually get er on board much later on in the journey.

Yeah.

Actually having somebody in marketing on board from the start does really help. Yeah. And therefore you will you will also refine the products. I wouldn't say shape it completely, but that feedback really helps into the product builds.

I was mentioning before we before we came on air about that I've been consuming all of the content that is on your LinkedIn, which I'd thoroughly recommend listeners to go and look at if they want to get get more insight on this. There's a PowerPoint on there where you talk about using the content driven approach for this test and learn and it being social, being a great channel to do this presumably because of the immediacy of the feedback. But can you talk me through the kind of methodology that you put in place to to gather those insights?

I think first, really good to understand that pensions are not exciting. They're being perceived as exciting, I would say. I'm not, you know, you're not selling a Ferrari, so it's a pension product. And my background in commercial insurance, again, if you are supporting small business owners by providing them with small business insurance, they're not starting a small business because of the insurance.

Something they just have to buy. It's not an exciting thing. So how do you turn something that might be perceived as boring, complicated, difficult into something that's really exciting and really lights people up. I think that's a challenge and that's why you've got financial marketers.

I think that's our job. That's part of our job to get that right. So knowing from the start that selling pensions is not going to get your customers but empower people with the right information at the right moment in time on the channel they they use, that's probably going to be very powerful. Nobody's going to list nobody's going to read a thirty page booklet about pensions, but they will watch a two minute video about why pension consolidation is a good idea or why contributing X amount in the pension can give you that retirement you always want to have when you are retiring eventually.

So knowing that you can do something boring, it's also being nice and exciting and people will be switched on by that. That's really powerful. Then you will need to understand, okay, if I use that content and then use it on the right channels, So where people actually are, especially at the start and still today, but people are not on your website reading prospectus, but they are on their phones, on their commutes, and that's where you wanna be.

Yeah.

And get those two things right. Create the right content in the right moment in time and choose your channel wisely. I think that that is probably the way you wanna test your channels.

That term you used about the right content at the right moment in time, it takes me back that Google did a there's a lot of marketing collateral that Google themselves put out about moments that matter.

Is this something that you were thinking about in that sense of the right content for the moments that matter in the pensions purchase cycle? Is that what you're referring to?

When do people think about potentially bringing their old pensions together into a new online plan that they can manage on their device anytime, anywhere, excuse to plug in. But that's what we do. There will be moments in time where people are more like open to do that and take action. So for example, when they move jobs.

Yeah. And there are many ways you can target people who've just moved jobs when they buy a house, which you believe it. And then there's also like age group and I call it always the oh **** moment. It's usually around your fortieth birthday.

It's when you've had a couple of jobs already and probably your income has gone up and you think, oh gosh, it's only fifteen years before I can start taking that money out. How much do I have panic mode? So and there are ways where you can target consumers at that particular moment in time. So there are some of these moments, these key life decisions.

And as a as a for pension consolidation solution, that is probably a good place to start. And that's what we did.

A couple of things I just I just want to learn more about. You talked about the importance of creating a hook. What is that hook that you're referring to?

A great piece of content that actually resonates. Can you hook it on a news event? Is there a particular life moment you could hook it on? So I think for me, it's more around if you tell somebody twenty times, thou shall consolidate your old pensions, it probably will be forgotten. But if the hook is, well, if you consolidate your pensions, when you buy a house, X and Y will happen in your favor or in the news, alternate involvement will be extended. There's a bound to be etcetera. So whether it's news hopping or anything else, I think when you can find a good hook to hang your story on, it will stick with with the customer.

So it's essentially about creating using a hook to create a more powerful retrieval cue in order to stimulate that consumer to take action.

Yeah. In the early days, we also when you are small and and your budgets are limited, you're trying to get reach cut through. So for example, the pension industry is not particularly known of being innovative and cutting edge, especially when it comes to, for example, transferring your pension from your old provider to a new provider.

Sure.

And of course, that's what we do. And we've got a lot of data for each provider. We know how long it takes to transfer a pension, how long it takes for them to pick up the phone, etcetera, etcetera. If there is something then in the news that talks about it's so hard for pensions, for pension transfers. And if there is a news item that suggests twenty percent of pension providers still prefer paper transfer forms rather than electronic transfers, then I've got a perfect story. Yeah. To bring in to and say, well, this is our data and therefore the Robin Hood index was born.

Yeah.

And we're able to campaign and the index was published in newspapers.

Right. Fantastic.

So that's the kind of you becoming the news story.

Yeah. You're trying to. But it's the so I think news is usually a really good way of hanging your proposition on. Yeah.

Yeah. Test, learn, optimize, amplify. Now, this is absolutely central to the to the startup approach.

For for people working on lean budgets, this is completely critical, isn't it? Because ultimately, what we're trying to do as marketers is gain effectiveness and improve. Can you talk us through that, how you started that approach and how you, you know, the impact that started to have on the business?

And mentality doesn't matter how small or big you are. You still I think you still need to have that mentality. Otherwise you're just wasting money for the sake of it. When you are small, you've let's say you can only spend one hundred pounds on a particular Instagram campaign to see if you can actually get clicks or sign ups, have five or ten different variations and have hundred pounds from each variation.

And after a couple of hundred pounds you've spent, do you start to see a difference?

Is there a better click through rates? Is there a better sign up rates? At PensionBee, we've got our own data platform firmly built into the company. So I can see from ad from up from a particular paid keywords.

Not only do they actually click now, now I can see do they sign up? I can also see how many pension pots do they add? What's the way of the asset administration per customer? So how valuable is a customer?

We can relate it back and keyword level. So it does allow you to test with really small budgets, but you can start to see what's the actual impact. And therefore, when you then say things like optimize, well, for example, pension consolidation on a paid on a paid keywords is probably a good keyword to focus on. Yeah.

But is, for example, something like lost pension. Is that a good keywords? Well, actually you get a lot of clicks from lost pensions because everybody want to find their lost pensions.

Yeah. Yeah.

A lot of people don't want to consolidate.

Right. So that's what you then find out. Therefore you optimize. So within that paid search campaign, you might wanna devalue that keywords because you're not looking for that kind of customer.

Well, you are looking for somebody who types in consolidation pension. So I think that's the kind of optimization and you can do that on keywords, you can do it on creatives. In the early days when Instagram was our biggest acquisition channel, which we believe it's different these days. They would have easily five or ten different creatives inexpensively produced.

But according to our brand guidelines, stock video sometimes quickly testing is the consolidate my pensions versus be in control of your pension.

What do we see in terms of performance? That's what that means.

And what's interesting is you learn so much on the go. So when you then scale up because something does work you want to refine that and build on top of that kind of success. It does help you to understand it when you then scale up campaigns. At least you're doing it with some data, underfunded by data and understanding, okay, that's the kind of message that resonates with the right type of customer.

When you were in in the thick of this, doing this in that early stage, was it very much still as an like an always on constantly having content out in the marketplace? Or did you was it more campaign driven?

That's a very good question. I would say it's always been a mix of both. In the beginning, it probably would have been much more of an always on approach. So limited budgets, but your channels are always switched on.

Yeah. So you drip feed customers and especially at the start, you're mainly focusing on lower funnel campaigns, more conversion campaigns. Once you start to realize that those channels, you know, you can scale them up to a certain point and then saturation kicks in or it becomes more expensive to acquire those customers no matter what you do, no matter how much you test or refine. Then in our case, brand channels became more and more important.

And that's where more campaign led advertising can come in.

Yeah.

She can't be on having a mainstream television campaign all the time. So you particularly look at when do you want to run these campaigns for the long term. But also there are some moments in the year in financial services, as we all know, January, February, March and September and October, those are kind of like key months that people think about their finances. So maybe run those campaigns on top.

So I guess it's always been a bit of a combination. Today it is more and more campaign driven and less and less always on. Yeah. We are always on, but as a percentage of budget spent, would say campaigns are taking much more of a Preference.

A lovely segue into the next part that I want to move into, which is where, I guess, the next stage of the evolution that you've you've gone through with with PensionBee. You've mentioned it there, but I'm gonna just read out this line again from one of your this time from an article that exists on on PensionsBee's site. At any time in a company's growth cycle, especially for a a fintech company like PensionBee, there'll be a time where simply growing through digital channels isn't enough. Can you expand on what you mean by that step? You've you've started there already, but I think it's such an interesting point that I'd like to dive in.

Let's say you're able to spend five hundred thousand pounds to your marketing. Let's say that is your budget. For a mass market product like PensionBee, you can probably spend that very wisely on digital channels alone. So you can do many performance campaigns.

By the way, the whole performance and brand campaigns are quite like it's both these days. Like when you run a Facebook or you run a digital campaign, it's both really. But the emphasis will be a CPA driven. You could easily do that. So you build a bit of brands, you can acquire customs at scale, you could drive optimizations, you could bring down your CPA, you can easily do that.

But we had bigger ambitions because we are a mass market product and we wanna get a big share of the pension markets.

I mean big share, a couple of percentage points. I mean in our world that means a huge dealing with this So in order to achieve that, what you will find, you can't simply pump more money into those acquisition channels. I call it a drug addiction. Like you can't just keep injecting more money into a channel and think you get the same high or the same result.

Actually, you get diminished returns. Yeah. And that is because there are other there are other ways to supersize your brand, to build brand, to people start to know you more. So I think that's what I mean by that.

And we had a moment where we thought, Okay, we've got some great digital channels. We are able to invest in them.

But our CPA is creeping up.

And it wasn't the case of like, why is that panic button?

No, it was more about, okay, maybe it's now time. We've got a bigger budget now available to start taking our first leap into more brand led channels, higher up the funnel, start building brand awareness. Like brand awareness back in the day was like five percent. Now we're prone to brand awareness is fifty two percent.

So once you start investing more your brand channels, then the saturation points of your lower funnel channels will actually start to go up. So you can actually acquire more customers through those acquisition. You're widening your upper funnel. So you also hopefully, in our case we did widening your lower funnel.

Yeah.

So it's just increasing that point, that saturation point in those acquisition channels by using more brand. It's not rocket science, but I think a lot of people do not wanna take that point, do not know how to take that point or are being held back by decision makers in the organization to do that. Now fortunately at PensionBee, we didn't have that issue.

This is a fascinating story. Why is that? Why did you not have that issue?

Couple of reasons. First of all, I'm just being blessed with a great management team. Everybody is still there from the start. We are still there. It's unusual. Also, for a CMO to be in a role for more than three years is unusual. Yes.

Yeah.

So there is a huge amount of trust between the people and I can't do this without roaming our CEO or even our CFO. So that's that point that does really help. Second, from the start it was very obvious and it's a skill I learned from some great people at Simply Business like Alistair Docklers and Jason Stopp with the good news. You need to talk spreadsheets.

That's my translation. So what you're trying to do, can you translate it into something has a bottom line like do this and you achieve that? And at PensionBee, that journey has continued. And our management team probably comes from a financial background.

So instead of going against them, it was actually how can you help me to prove points that we need this? And that's happened. Yeah. So can you translate building a brand into what that means in terms of customer growth, in terms of your cost per acquisition, etc?

And the third point I would say is you can start small on brand channels. There's a kind of a myth that you have to go big in order to build a brand. Actually, you can't be further from the truth. You can start small.

So to give you an example, on television, we were spending quite a lot of money on television these days. But we started with fifty thousand pounds in twenty nineteen on a performance daytime TV campaign with a great agency back in the day we worked with.

We were buying spots all the day and I was able to see in our data sets if we saw any like effects isolating the white noise. So see what is the uplift? So we were buying sometimes fifty or one hundred pounds spots on like Dave plus one to see if we can actually get an uplift. So again, we started small.

We did saw uplifts, we could actually track conversions back. Now we all know that is just a small part of the story. There is the bigger long term piece that you can explain. But on the short term piece, we said, okay, what is the CPA we will expect as a direct response on that particular channel, knowing that it will probably be twice or three times higher than what we normally would expect on another acquisition channel.

And that's how we started. You do it for a few months and hey, guess what happened? We start to see conversions and over time that CPA started to slightly drop. So that's not fifty, but let's do one hundred ks a month, see what happens.

So you test and learn, you refine.

Those ads look very, very direct response. And, know, by the way, I'm proud of everything or two. But I would say we've got better examples these days, but that's absolutely fine.

Yeah. It served a purpose.

It served purpose. We did the same. And then you start to get to a point where you can't measure all of these individual things anymore because you're on TV all the time. Yeah.

And then you take the leap. But at least you take the leap from a much more comfortable place rather than I don't do TV. We're gonna do a half million pounds campaign in January because that's what my media agency told me what to do. Yeah.

And let's pray into all the conversion and marketing gods if I get some sort of results. And that's just not going to happen. You get stung and then a company says, let's not do that anymore. So I always would say with these things, if you can start small, do a billboards campaign in a particular region and then run a prompted brand to win study afterwards.

Can you see uplift? Yes or no? And take it from there.

What were the other brand channels that you activated in conjunction with the the daytime spots? I think just that.

Just that.

That's where you were. Yeah.

And if we did run other things, so we did have a billboards campaign and out of home campaign. At least you can work out what your baseline traffic is.

Yeah.

And then you can see these little peaks. So you can kind of see, do you see uplift? Now, a lot of people who watch this will think, wow, that's very performance like Brent as a Brent. Yes, it is. But this was a really good way for us to understand if our product is so good and our solution is so good that actually we get the response even if it's a click doesn't have to be a complete full blown pension transfer can also just be a click. Yeah. And then understand how that works.

Again, there's there's there's things that I'm fascinated there. It's that it's again evidence of how you take that test, learn, amplify methodology that you took from right beginning and start up days, and you're moving into the second phase. But Yeah. Same methodology.

Yes. Bigger budgets, but still informing every next step that you take. The other part that I'm is that both the great relationship that you've got with the with the wider team, but how you're you're building confidence within the management team to actually back moving from performance in into brand campaigns. And I think that is something that many viewers and and listeners will will struggle with.

Yeah. I wonder if there's any more that you can you can talk to us about how you actually take people on that journey because not everyone is gonna be blessed with team members as as as perhaps willing. So what is there anything you can share to as as as advice or support on that front?

Well, first of all, if your team is not supportive whatsoever, just leave.

Right.

I think that's like That sounds like the easiest solution, but if you If they don't believe in the work you do, it's probably time for another place. And that's why sometimes you see that to neuro certain roles, marketing roles like short. So that's I mean, that sounds like a very like weird thing to say, but that's probably for your own protection, a really good thing. You shouldn't be proving yourself. Yeah. But what you should be doing is prove to the business that a particular campaign, whether that's a brand campaign or a performance could pay you try to do, what are you trying to achieve?

How are you going to measure that?

Can you demonstrate something in a bottom line as aka a spreadsheet that's really helpful? Like, they don't believe from your blue eyes, they will believe what's in your projection and try to do it small. So I made mistakes, quite a few actually, if you ask my colleagues, the team, but also our CEOs, she will tell like, oh yeah, remember that. Of course we will never forget.

But it's okay because you've got to make mistakes in order to get right. So you can feel small and learn from it and then grow. I think the struggle that people often make is they want to go into big too soon. We made a mistake by going with on an outdoor campaign very early on in our process.

And actually that wasn't the right time to do that. And I've learned from that mistake, but it was a calculated mistake. It wasn't a particular region, so it wasn't too big. But so if you if you propose something, can you measure it?

Can you talk spreadsheets? It's really important. Can you do it small?

Can you do it small? And therefore if you then start to see some traction, you've got the confidence, you're building confidence. And they will notice that and they will sign off on the bigger piece. And that's I think the two things that I say are quite instrumental and you get the biggest non believer, I would say, of brand building for financial services on boards if you could do it like that.

Let's keep the conversation going, folks, for now in in into brand campaigns. We've started off with the, let's say, more direct response ads.

Again, I know, read read the articles about the development of, distinctive brand assets.

Fascinating approach again. It's all on the blog if anyone wants to see more information.

But talk to me about the the development of the bee, and then it's gonna lead us into the, I guess, the the higher end TV work that you're now doing.

We've got our own bee.

It's beautiful.

It's one of those things like from the start, not just me, but everybody at PensionBee. We've always been very, very keen on creating a brand, very distinctive brand that our customers can believe in. Can we make you pension confident? Can we excite you about pension?

It's a positive brand. It's a positive message compared to some of the drab you sometimes see on like, oh, if she do this, this will happen. So that was always very important for us that it's a positive message. We are giving you back control.

Aside from that message and your proposition, how do you add to that?

So you've got a pension bee. It is like bringing your your pension pots into your beehive. Guess what? Our online accounts go to beehive.

Our customer success manager, got your own dedicated customer success manager. That's by the way unheard of in the pension industry. Try to ring up a pension provider. Good luck with that.

It's like calling an airline for compensation. Our pickup rate is like twenty seconds. You get your own beekeeper.

It's your own dedicated beekeeper. It's your custom success manager and pension administrator and nectar collectors. From the start, that was kind of like how we and you think that might be funny or you might that might not be serious. You know what? People remember that.

Yeah. That's something that comes Exactly.

So don't be afraid of actually using that in building a branch you can believe in. The second thing is you can take it a step further. So yellow Unusual for pension company. So yellow. If you see our TV ad, you see is a golden filter in everything we do. It's that almost like that Kellogg's Corn Flakes morning breakfasty kind of feeling.

Right, right.

Everything we do on our heads, there is a yellowish flow of it. Again, it recognizes that using your own customers, you see is real customers. Wow.

And they always will wear something yellow that all of these little things I'm I'm really like, like, really, like, keen on making sure that all of these little bits have been followed through working with a fantastic ad agency on the side, by the way. And it's not just me.

It's it's again, it's still a team who makes it happen.

Yeah.

And we came to a point, can you believe in the B?

And that's when that's when the penny drops. We are like, can you believe in the B? And therefore we introduced RB animated pixel by pixel from an animation studio in Stockholm.

It's phenomenal.

It's absolutely expensive, but it is so worth it. And the B is now flying from customer to customer in our ads campaign, which we lost, well, over a year ago now and flying from customer to customer, reminding them that they can believe in the be. And again, it was a step change. Would we have done this from the start now?

But you built on it and you also you remain consistent.

There are some financial brands and I'm not mentioning any names here today that will have changed their brand identity quite a few times. And if you have to, you have like we've done a rebrand once our logo, etcetera. But you've got to stay consistent to reap the benefits of investing in the brands that your customer can believe in. And unfortunately a lot of brands keep changing their minds And it's it's detrimental to their success.

I do wonder if if that is also part of the the, you know, the the fact that you mentioned earlier that the longevity of you being in there as a CMO. People with the industry like to come in, put their stamp on things. You being there has given that consistency of individual running the ship. The bit, I guess, I'm fascinated about around the b is is the again, where we've moved to from start up methodology in in in marketing. Now we're at the point of where we're creating a high end distinctive brand asset. I mean, if you study Ehrenberg Bass, you know, distinctive brand assets is one of their key components that they talk about. So again, with the sophistication that we're moving into is fascinating.

Yeah. And also with that sophistication and maturity, so also does your customer base mature, which is also fascinating to see. In the beginning, when you are still small, you could still, I would say, make mistakes or you can still test and learn. And I mean, we had a whole different color scheme at one point that at the start because it was very much test and learn. But then you start to grow up as a brand. Our retention rate is ninety seven percent plus. So when people join, they don't leave.

And you start to learn a lot more from their customs. So we are growing up, but our customs are growing up too. I think that's when you get to a point when you get into this territory, knowing exactly what you wanna be, how you wanna be perceived. Also knowing how that actually helps us to acquire and increasingly retain customers. Yeah. And therefore the distinctive brand assets are absolutely key and it goes through your email signature all the way out to a TV ad. It has to it has to be.

Those retention rates sound that sounds like a very high number. Do you do you know what the the industry standard is in pensions?

That's a very good question. It will be lower. The reality is that pension is a very sticky product.

Okay.

So would you move your life savings to a startup? I wouldn't.

Yeah.

As a CMO, why would you I would say the floodgates are open, but it's a lot easier now because we matured and we're much more like bonafide established brands. We're not startup anymore. Are like a proper online pension provider. So it has become easier. But when people move, they don't tend to move next year back to another provider. It's not as buying home insurance. I would say it's probably stickier than switching bank accounts.

Yeah.

So once you are able to persuade people that actually you are the company, it makes them called pension confidence and they can build a happy retirement with pension. They got to do a really bad job to lose them. Yeah. But also we take it to a next level.

We try to keep delight in our customers when they sign up because the journey hasn't stopped when you consolidate. It's just starting. Yeah. Like lots of customers now need to take money out of their pension.

How do you do that? Yeah. How do you market that? How do you talk about that?

We wanna make sure that people see us as their main provider of choice rather than just a consolidation service. So will they consolidate all of their patch and pulse with us or just one or two on the side? So again, the journey is not, it's not ending. We're not, we haven't peaked.

Like, it's just starting, really.

I guess the word that that springs to mind is is built again, taking it back to the previous conversation around distinctive brand assets and the importance. It's it's building trust in in the consumers in in in mind. Yeah.

Pensions, part of the financial services industry, Edelman trust barometer, financial services have been consistently at the bottom of that. You're going against a grain, not just of financial services, but of a range you know, you're by the sounds of the results that you're getting, you're moving PensionBee right up into being highly trusted as a brand by its consumers, and I'm guessing that it's all of these components working together. That's a reflection. They're not there would there isn't a question in there. So where I'd like to move to now, just to keep keep us moving along, is staying in the bees theme. I think this is fantastic. I've I've I've been to the I've been to the clubhouse, but maybe you could talk to us about the evolution of of the bee and the and where you are now with with partnerships.

I think you are referring to our Brentford's partnership with Yes. So for people who are into football, the Brentford B's, pension B.

Your local team?

Yes, it is actually my local team. And although you probably will not believe it, it's not because of that. I did not make that connection.

Somebody at Brentford did. That happened just before lockdown. And they picked up the phone and they made the name Gimmick Association. And I wasn't really looking for sports sponsorship at the time because we were small.

We're talking about twenty nineteen. To maybe fifty people in the company and the budgets weren't there. And I had no idea what this actually costed. But I did find it quite interesting simply because I knew there's a couple of reasons why you would consider something like this.

One of them is, you know, Jasper, why don't you spend that money on a TV campaign? Or why don't you just pump it into paid search and get them get the customers through that way? Hopefully, customers will make rational decisions when they choose a new pension provider. But there's actually something else.

And that is, I've seen them on TV. I've seen them on the billboards. I've seen them on an LED boards. I've seen them on the sleeve or on the front of shirt or anything like that.

And people think, legit, they're not going away next year. That's it's like I wouldn't say to John Lewis in pensions, but it's like it's an embedded brand.

Yeah, I can trust that.

So they put trust in that. So for me, a sports sponsorship builds on that trust that it's that Gemma has a build and trust factor that I want to leverage as a brand. So that was something I had in my mind. But then Brentford, the story of Brentford is amazing. After seventy four years, they'd be promoted into the Premier League. Would you believe it?

I signed a contract a couple of weeks before they were promoted and then they moved and I was in Wembley when it actually happened and I saw that commercial team completely like celebrating. We did up our engagement as we get along. So as we were becoming more Brent confident, we've actually been increasing our engagement with them. Their story about being like the small kids like David Goliath kind of comparison and suddenly they're just like club using data, make that a limited budget, making getting amazing results.

I mean, they're currently somewhere in the top ten. Yeah. They ended in the top ten. They probably will end up in the top ten.

I hope so.

Yeah.

But it's quite amazing what they do. So we thought that's a great story. We kind of a pension be kind of David and Goliath. We kind of new kids on the block. The name gimmick is great. And also they are reinventing football.

You've been to the stadium before.

I've I've been to the old stadium. Right. Yeah. So I've seen where their transition from where they were. Yeah. I mean, they're all saying was I went into the office is is essentially like a shed on top of a stadium. So I've seen them go from there into coming, you know, arguably one of the top stadiums in in the UK.

But it's a very family orientated club. It's a very inclusive club. I think they were the most inclusive club three years in a row. Like, it's a different experience. Even the Times wrote an article about it recently this is how football should be. So for us, a brand being associated with a club like that is great. You've got that.

You've got the name gimmick. You've got the building trust factor. Then you need to look at, Okay, how much money do I put in versus what I get back? What's the media value? So I would say in a good sports sponsorship for every pound you put in, you get a couple of pounds hopefully back in media value. So maybe equivalent of me advertising on TV, billboards elsewhere.

I see.

Yeah. And if you then compare it against over the day for real TV and radio, suddenly again, you talk spreadsheets suddenly on the under the it makes sense. You go to your team and say, look, this is the opportunity I've got. We were able to test something very small with Brantford at start.

I'm not going to mention any numbers because they will absolutely lynch me if I would do that. But it was a very small amount. Yeah. And they were willing to do that.

And then we became more confident. We upped during the season. We upped it and then we ended up with sports sleeve sponsorship for the training kit and some and we did extra time sponsoring the extra time.

This year, for the next three years, we are official sleeve sponsor. That is quite a big commitment.

However, we didn't do that overnight.

So again, it's that build up from starting small. See what works. The word brand food comes up in your word clouding customer service. Prompted brand awareness amongst men has risen substantially more in the last year, which is an indicator because it's quite a men a lot of men will watch that sport. So we can see actually, okay, so it cuts through and then you can up your your activity. So it's been quite an interesting journey to be on.

Perhaps you can link this back the sponsorship into the into the higher end value TV advertising?

Yes. So we've had a sponsorship with them. I would say we weren't at the top of the sponsorship value yet. Every contracting sports will tell you, you have access to players like five minutes per year or whatever. Like they're very stupid. But Branford from the start said, look, we are just as new as you are in our world just like you are in your world.

Just tell us what you wanna do. Now I had an idea and by the way, the idea actually came originally from our ads agency, the builders arms. They're amazing people. They like their football.

So they always said, like, can we do something with Brantford? And I also woke up with like your best ideas happen when you want to go to sleep. Right. So you may have like a little black to put ideas.

So you write these things down. And we came up in an in a meeting like, well, how cool would it be if the bee would fly into the stadium and there is a couple sitting in the audience? This was Steve's idea from Builders Arms And the bee flies and the guy's on his phone looking at the suspension balance while the game is probably a little bit dead or whatever. And then he sees the bee and he's like, you know, he's confident.

That was his idea. So I said, okay, good luck with that, asking the club. And I did. And guess what?

They said like, sounds like a great idea.

Amazing.

We ended up with a drone above the stadium during a Premier League football match, which they have to ask Premier League because you can't just televise, film a live match. We got the Heathrow flight path. Like there's lots of things to contend with. I was sitting in the audience. I didn't have to do all of it, but I saw the team there filming and I saw the drone going up just outside of the stadium and I was absolutely like stress like, oh, wow. But then again, they did it. We had access to the football players and guess what?

They were there for an hour for us.

Amazing.

So all of these things fell into place. So that is a story I will never forget.

But the result was that we suddenly had a bee that drove that the bee, of course, animated into it. I'd be flying into the stadium.

And I think a lot of people thought, woah, this is this is Brentford or this is like this is big. And I think that's why that ad became quite successful in Cutthroat.

It's a fabulous ad.

And again, it's probably once in my lifetime.

I think as a CMO, there's a couple of things that happen in your in your career. I think having been able to work with a Premier League football club, what are the chances that you end up doing that? So for me, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

I love hearing this, how it's gone from start up to to this. I mean, it's and and this I guess this is is where do we go from here? It's it's, know, that it's like you say, Premier League football club, TV advertising, huge growth. What does the next couple of years look like for for you and pension be?

At the moment, they're still very much aligned. I mean, there is still something left in the tank, if I would say so. PensionBee will want to get to a million customers as soon as possible. That's that's what we want to do.

We want to become a major pension provider in the UK. It's a huge market. I feel we're just scratching the surface with everything we've done. So I think we still have something to give.

We want to be the pension specialist. We want to be your main provider of choice. So I think for, especially in marketing, there's a lot of things to test and learn how we're not persuading people, but we give people the ability to say, yeah, PensionBee is the right provider for you. So I think that's where we are.

Who knows if we stay, you know, we probably will explore other products, maybe other countries. But at the moment, we are very much focused on the UK because there's such an opportunity.

For me, it's I find it really interesting still to be quite very quite involved, not just in how we market the product to customers, but also what kind of products comes with it. So it's the crossover between marketing and products.

Call it product marketing or call it something else. It's a highly sought after skill set.

And this, I mean, this is the element that you talked about earlier about how the marketing's kind of shaped the product and you see still see this very much of PensionBee evolving.

Yeah. We can't sell a product that the customers don't want. No. So we've got to tell product that what whatever we do in our channel, it's not it ain't working. So is the product still okay? It's a good indicator aside from lots of other things like customer research. A good example was last year where aside from our main proposition, which is combining your old pensions, a lot of our customers said she want a little bit more say in terms of where my money is invested in.

And what's in the market at the moment is, in my opinion, a box ticking exercise generally. It's oh, it's ESG, tick tick. But actually, does it really is it really the case or is it just simply greenwashing? And consumers are rightly so a bit, like, wary if that's if that's happening. So we listen to our customers and that is customer research.

Right.

We ask one of our asset managers to build that product that wasn't there. BlackRock developed a fund that is exactly doing that scope pension impact. It's something that's I've not seen before in the pension markets. And then you test it and then you learn and then you run campaigns and see, can you actually do customers actually want this?

Does it actually hit the nerve of the consumer so they can take action? So even today we are following that approach and listening to what customers say, but also can we market this? Is there a market for it? Otherwise, why would you otherwise introduce it?

The research now that you're doing with your are you sitting down speaking directly focus group, traditional level market research? Or is it again the test and learn methodology by putting out content and ideas into the market and certain reactions? Both.

It's both. I mean, we've got a fantastic research team now that does customer qualitative and quantitative research with customers or non customers all the time.

When somebody leaves a feedback on our Trustpilot, whether it's a five star or a one star, it does happen of course in every company, it's actually on our company's Slack channel, everybody sees it. So we all see if we're doing something right, if we're doing something wrong. In our show and tell, our town hall, every first thing now, every first day, open with a customer interview and we listen to what those customers actually say. The whole company checks in. So I think it's getting keeping that customer really close to us because if they don't trust us anymore, then what are we doing it for? And then I guess there's a lot of test and learning. So we launched, we've launched a couple of products over the years that didn't work.

I'm not going to disclose which ones they are, but we did have some and they just simply didn't work. And then at least we've tried and tested and got feedback from customers. And sometimes you just have to say, nope, it's not working. Let's move on to the next big thing that we believe could really change.

Yeah.

Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you so much for sitting down with us sharing, sharing all this. There's so much knowledge there that you've gone on with your career. We could dive into any aspect of that.

We'd we'd we'd need a few more hours for the podcast to do that, but it's it's it's fascinating. For people listening that are are not CMOs of of of of a fast track fintech like like you are, What what would be the advice that you would you would give to perhaps someone more at the beginning of their career?

Well, first of when I joined BenchV, I wasn't a CMO, so I turned into one. And I think the the way I turned into one was marketing is such a fast moving practice. You can't be a specialist in everything. So you've got to be a sponge and soak up all the stuff that's knowledge that's come to come to you.

So get your teeth into something new, whether that is like understanding how TikTok could work for your brand or not, how brand building actually works for long term. So, you know, just acknowledge that you are not you can't know everything from the start, but the ability to learn and test things small, fail small, but also learn from it and then grow. I think that's really important. And the second piece of advice is I am a creative marketer from heart.

I am not a data man. And I think my boss will tell me exactly, yep, that exactly that's what it is. I like to dream. I like to think about brands and that that's really what drives me and solving a problem, etcetera.

I'm not very keen with spreadsheets, but it's the one thing I have to learn.

Speak the language of the boardroom.

Absolutely. Because they're not coming from marketing. If they are, you're lucky. They normally invest from investments, financial backgrounds, etcetera. So they want to see the numbers. And I wouldn't disagree with them now being with Ben should be for eight years. It's the way to do it.

Yeah. Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time, Jasper. Your story is inspirational. I've learned so much.

I'm sure our viewers have learned a lot as well. So thank you again. Thank you for listening today to The Growth Engine. If you enjoyed this episode and like to hear more, please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates or on www.hubagency.co.uk Thank you and see you next time.