History of Cushon and the Salvus Master Trust

It’s great to have you onboard and we look forward to helping you on your journey to a better financial future. And in a nutshell, that’s exactly what we’re about, making it easy for you to save for a future worth saving for. With no jargon or complexity and a great mobile app, saving with Cushon couldn’t be easier. 

And as a new customer of Cushon, it’s only right that we tell you a little bit about who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re going – after all we’re looking after your money and your financial future. 

Let’s start at the very beginning.  

2014

Cushon started life in 2014 when our CEO and Founder Ben Pollard went to open his own ISA, he was shocked at just how complicated it was and how little help there was out there to guide people through all the different options available. It just had to be easier. 

So, like all good entrepreneurs, Ben decided that it was time to change things. He wanted to give everyone the opportunity to get saving and investing in a straightforward and engaging way – and so Cushon was born. 

With initial backing from Unum, a Fortune 500 Company and one of the UK’s largest employee benefits providers, Ben formally launched the company in 2015 as SmarterInvestment and straight away our easy approach to saving and investing was welcomed by employers looking for a way to help their employees become more financially resilient.   

2017

Our approach was so successful, that even large employee benefit consultancy firms, who advise companies on savings and pensions for their employees, decided to launch our products to their own staff. In 2017, the global financial services company Aon, who has over 50,000 employees in 120 different countries, selected us as their UK strategic partner for financial wellbeing and workplace savings and this is when the business really took off.  

We then changed our name to Smarterly and set course to become the leading provider in workplace savings, helping people get better saving habits through the workplace. We started building on our previous success and very quickly started winning big blue-chip clients like Heineken, Paddy Power, Thomsons, Ovo Energy, Gattaca, Morgan Stanley and Siemens to name a few.  

2020

By 2020 we were making a difference to the financial lives of thousands of employees and were looking for the next challenge. Our focus landed on the pensions industry which, like the ISA sector back in 2014, was clearly ready for a digital transformation; we’d done this in the workplace savings space so why not for pensions? This is when we acquired the Salvus Master Trust and started on our journey into workplace pensions. We launched our brand-new app and changed our name to Cushon to be better reflect our mission to help people get comfortable with their savings, investments and pensions. 

January 2021

And so, we started changing the world of pensions. 

In January 2021, we hit the headlines when we launched the world’s first Net Zero pension. Our pension customers can now save for the retirement they deserve whilst helping to tackle climate change*. And we quickly followed this up with another industry first with our new portfolio of investments spread across listed bonds and equities and the largest multi asset private markets allocation, delivering impact across 100% of the portfolio, providing real social impact that savers can feel proud of. 

June 2021

In June 2021, we acquired the Workers Pension Trust, the largest pension provider in Northern Ireland and in 2022 we acquired the Creative Pension Trust making us the fifth largest master trust in the UK. We now have over 400,000 customers with over £1.7 billion worth of savings.  

So, that’s the story of Cushon in a nutshell. We’re proudly now one of the UK’s biggest pension and workplace savings providers on a mission to transform the industry and help our customers secure a better financial future. 

If you are new to Cushon and have received a letter or an email from us, let's get you connected with your pension.

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*Cushon's Net Zero Now Pension (with carbon offsets) has reached capacity. Our default fund, with reduced carbon, remains.

Article by

NatWest Cushon