Now Charles McManus, co-founder of ClearBank and one of the most experienced builders of financial infrastructure in the UK, has joined Freedom as chairman in a major vote of confidence for the model and team.

At Chatsworth we work with founders and companies operating at the intersection of finance, policy and technology. 

What stood out about the Freedom project is not just the concept but the scale of the structural issue it is trying to address. It is a simple idea, but it speaks directly to one of the biggest structural problems in the UK pensions system.

The UK has built a vast retirement savings pool, but the leakage of assets at retirement has become one of the defining challenges of the modern pensions market.

When retirees want flexibility, whether to take tax-free cash, manage drawdown or simply access their money more easily, funds are often transferred out of pensions and into bank accounts. 

The numbers are staggering. Around £1 billion a day flows out of pension schemes as people begin to access their retirement income

At that point pension providers lose visibility and engagement with members, capital that could remain invested moves into cash, and the economics of the relationship move to the banking system.

Freedom is building infrastructure designed to allow pension providers to offer banking-style access to retirement savings while the money itself remains invested. 

The platform sits between pension providers and their members and allows retirees to spend, withdraw and manage money directly from their pension through cards, wallets and digital payments. The key point is that the assets do not have to leave the pension wrapper to do this. 

In practical terms it allows pensions to behave much more like modern financial accounts.

For retirees that means easier access to money and greater flexibility without necessarily sacrificing the benefits of remaining invested. For pension providers it means they can retain the relationship with members throughout retirement rather than losing them at the point of decumulation.

And for the wider system it could help keep more long term capital inside the pension ecosystem.

The timing is also significant. Regulation and policy are increasingly focused on improving outcomes for people navigating retirement without financial advice. 

Investment Pathways, Consumer Duty and the broader discussion around guided retirement all point in the same direction. The industry needs better infrastructure for the decumulation phase.

Freedom’s will build the payments and banking layer that sits underneath pension providers, enabling them to offer these capabilities under their own brands. 

Decumulation remains the weakest part of the retirement journey in the UK.

If the next phase of fintech focuses on solving that problem, the infrastructure behind retirement may become one of the most important areas of financial innovation in the coming years.