Interview with Freedom’s CEO: Retirement-as-a-Service
Date: 12 May 2026
Author: Guillem Ribas i Pérez
Guillem Ribas i Pérez, final Year Law Undergraduate of the University of Girona, Spain successfully completed his 3 months internship at FINTECH Circle. We were delighted by Guillem’s research and interview with the fintech founder and CEO of Freedom, David Brown. Please read the complete interview below:
Please tell me more about your startup and what problem you are trying to solve?
Freedom operates in the retirement market, specifically at the point when members access their pension funds — what the industry calls decumulation. This is becoming a major issue for pension providers because it leads to a loss of assets under management and serious retention problems.
In the UK alone, the pension market is worth nearly £4 trillion, yet around £1 billion leaves pension funds every day and moves into retail banks. The reason is simple: once people reach retirement, they need their money to become usable. Pension funds have not been built to make that easy, so people move their money elsewhere. That is the problem we are solving.
What made you realise that this problem is big and that you are capable of solving it?
I actually came across it by looking at pension access from the transactional side. At first, I thought the issue was simply a transactional one of how people accessed their pensions. But the deeper I looked, the clearer it became that this friction caused a much larger industry problem: poor member retention. Because pension access is not straightforward or meaningful, many people withdraw more money than they need and move it into their bank accounts.
That hurts pension providers. When I spoke to providers, the same themes kept coming up: poor retention, low trust, and weak engagement despite heavy investment in digital tools. Banks approach this differently. They engage customers with their money, which builds trust and keeps assets with them. My view was that pension providers needed to reverse their thinking: make pension money more usable, build trust, and retention will follow. To do that, they need infrastructure they do not currently have.
Trust is the hardest currency in finance. How does a young startup earn it in an industry dominated by large companies and institutions whose brands firms might have used for decades?
Startups are often the ones that create real change because they can move faster and are less constrained. We have seen that in many industries. But that does not mean they replace established brands.
In our case, Freedom is the infrastructure and the pension provider remains the trusted brand. People have often been saving with that provider for 30 years. I see what we are doing for pensions as similar to what Visa did for banking: the infrastructure enables the experience, but the institution remains the face of the relationship.
What does the relationship between fintech startups and traditional banks actually look like from where you sit — competition, collaboration, or something more complicated?
In retirement, I see banks as direct competitors to pension providers. Most retail banks have high-net-worth offerings, which means they are trying to attract the very assets pension providers are trying to keep. What struck me early on was how unusual this industry is: pension providers spend decades accumulating someone’s savings, only to send both the member and the money to a competitor at retirement.
That happens because they lack the infrastructure banks have to make money usable. If that changes, I think the role of the retail bank in retirement becomes far less necessary. Once someone retires, their pension effectively becomes their income, so arguably the pension provider should become the primary financial relationship.
AI is reshaping financial services fast. Where do you think the real transformation is happening?
AI can affect every part of financial services, from KYC and AML to asset management and investment strategy. But in retirement, where I see the greatest potential is in helping people make better decisions with their money. For example, someone might want to withdraw £100,000 to buy a Porsche, but doing that in one go could trigger a 50% income tax bill. AI could help suggest a more efficient way.
At the other end of the market, someone with a £30,000 pension pot might want to cash it all out because it feels like a lifeline. But if they are receiving government benefits, that withdrawal could cancel those benefits. AI could help them understand that and suggest a better approach, such as drawing a smaller monthly amount.
Retirement is often a frightening shift because people lose the support structures they had during employment — payroll, HR, financial guidance. AI can provide a layer of safety, security, and reassurance at that point.
The LEGALTECH Book published by FINTECH Circle asked years ago where liability lies when technology gets it wrong. Now that AI is making real financial decisions, do you think we’ve answered that question yet — or are we still building faster than regulation can follow?
I think it goes beyond just a regulatory question, becoming a fundamental legal one. If a person gets it wrong, you sue the firm. If an algorithm gets it wrong, I believe the same principle should apply: the firm that deployed the technology remains responsible. But we are still in the early days.
The law works through precedent, and AI is creating situations that have not yet fully been tested. There are early cases in the US beginning to explore these questions, but the legal framework is still catching up.
Regulation is often blamed for slowing innovation down — but could stricter rules in fintech actually be a competitive advantage for startups that get it right?
Regulation exists for a reason: it is a safeguard. In financial services — especially pensions — that safeguard is essential because people’s livelihoods are at stake. If you remove it, you end up in a dangerous place. Does regulation slow things down? Sometimes it does.
We have felt that frustration ourselves. But if you are holding people’s retirement savings, then systems and processes have to be safe. In that sense, regulation is not just a hurdle; it is a filter, and a necessary one. In retirement, people have one pension pot. If it is gone, it is gone.
What’s been your biggest challenge so far, and what did it teach you?
My biggest challenge has been personal, not professional. It has been making sure the people I love are safe and supported, and making sure I have the time to be present for them as they grow. That, more than business, has been the real challenge so far.
What do you know now about the fintech world that you wish you’d known when you started?
Patience. I have learned that patience is a virtue in fintech. I want everything done tomorrow, but it does not work that way. Engineers, developers, regulators — none of it moves that quickly. The biggest lesson for me has been learning patience, even though it does not come naturally.
Beyond the product and the business — what do you actually want to change about the way people relate to money?
There is no single answer because people’s relationship with money varies enormously. Some do not have enough; others have more than enough. What we want to do is build the foundations for a new market, which we call “retirement as a service.”
Retirement brings a range of needs that existing systems do not properly address. People may need access to money, they may want to keep working for a purpose, they may have assets but no cash, or they may be thinking about inheritance. These are all retirement issues, and we want to build the infrastructure that allows products and services to address them properly.
Finally, what is your vision for your startup? What would you like to achieve in the next 3 years?
Our vision is to become the decumulation infrastructure for the pension industry. We believe the industry itself should own that infrastructure. That is why we want pension providers not only as clients, but also as investors — applying a collaborative model similar to how banks owned Visa Europe.
If we can achieve that, then we can take the model beyond the UK. We see the UK as a proof of concept: a place to show how the pension industry can become more like a bank in retirement. Because that’s what we think they should be: a bank for retirement. Once that model is proven, it can be applied globally, because decumulation is not just a UK problem. It exists in almost every Western country with lump-sum pension systems.
Guillem Ribas i Pérez, Intern of FINTECH Circle
David Brown, Founder & CEO of Freedom
