Introduction

Thousands of years back, Romans created the first pension plan for their soldiers which is still used today by many organizations. When we hear about pensions, we feel confused, complicated and ancient. In Last 10 years alone, more than 28 million Indians have entered the retirement phase with zero or insufficient pension. Even today, 87% of India’s workforce is not covered under any government pension or retirement savings scheme. 

In the next 30 years, 186 million Indians will enter retirement without enough pension savings. With the rise in life expectancy, health expenses and insufficient support from the government, there is a need to re-imagine pensions for the 21st century. PensionBox is building India’s first digital pension app to digitize pensions and empower millions to secure their retirement with the right pension. Users can create their personalised digital pension plan within minutes to track pension savings, contribute and withdraw pension online. 

Unlike traditional pension plans sold by Insurance companies that lack transparency and flexibility, PensionBox gives its users flexibility to make changes in their plan anytime. It is a cloud-based, AI-enabled technology platform which provides a simple, flexible, transparent, and a secure way of retirement plafnning. Because it is paperless, instant and online, it allows its users to top up or change or pause their saving frequency at any time without any penalties. It is a low-cost subscription-based fee-only model. They have launched a beta product recently with 500 early users.

They are building PensionBox at speed with high engagement from the early users community and will reach 1,00,000 users by June 2022.

Where it all started

In early 2021, When founders Kuldeep and Shivam were planning for their parent’s retirement during the pandemic, they observed there is a gap in the Indian market where it’s difficult to track one’s pension. As they looked deeper, they realized that they were not alone in this, millions of Indians don’t have a retirement or pension plan in place. The entire research process took around 3 months wherein they rolled out a survey to understand the demographics, savings plan, perception about pension to understand the market viability. Post this they realized that the problem is big enough to solve. Kuldeep and Shivam started this venture for millions of Indian workforce who can plan their retirement well in time. 

Market Opportunity 

Their target users are 80 million Indian workforce working in the private & freelance sector and ready to contribute an average of 80,000 every year for pension savings. They want to start early with their users to have high lifetime value from the early 30s to the post-retirement phase. Today, India’s total pension savings are at $ 280 billion with annual growth of 32.91% and is expected to hit $ 1 Trillion by 2025.

100X.VC Thesis

This sector is totally untapped in India while we have seen businesses address this in other developed economies. The FinTech sector is expected to target the pension market soon.  Having had experience in the same, founders have a clear understanding why and how India should and can leverage this offering to create stickiness. Financial planning has evolved and is fast growing in 2021 and PensionBox is offering the next platform for multiple age groups to start preparing for retirement. 100X believes PensionBox can be a category leader.

Conclusion

The team has relevant experience to execute their plans and we are confident that the team will scale up the business. We wish them all the best