Penny, a fintech company based in Dublin, plans to enter the Spanish market next year following the recent launch of its online pensions product in Ireland.
Founded in 2024 by Lesley Tully, Penny currently employs four full-time staff members and has four additional contractors. Tully has invested €80,000 in the company so far.
“We provide digital pensions aimed at women. You can’t buy a pension end-to-end online, there’s a ping-pong process. With Penny, you can apply for your pension and get the entire process done within a day,” Tully told the Business Post.
“The biggest problem we’re trying to solve is why many women end up in poverty in retirement. Across the EU, women live on 40 per cent less than men in retirement.”
Penny has €5 million in assets under management (AUM), and its name is inspired by Penelope from Greek mythology, the steadfast wife of Odysseus. Tully, who studied the classics in her youth, saw strong parallels between Penelope’s resilience and the experiences of the women she aims to support.
Company Details
- Founded by: Lesley Tully in 2024
- Staff: 4
- Investment: €80,000
Tully was motivated to address the issue after seeing the challenges her aunt went through in accessing a state pension in her retirement.
“My aunt’s retirement broke my heart. She didn’t have enough PRSI stamps and she was put through three years of hell making her submit bank statements and ATM receipts. At the same time, I was doing a lot of research into consumer groups while working in Bank of Ireland,” she said.
“I found that 500,000 women at the time had no private pension, it has gone up since. Those two aspects came together and I decided to start a business to address it.”
Tully engaged in research and lots of it. She interviewed 800 women in person in Ireland to understand the issue.
“I used ethnography, which is a different type of research where I sat in their homes for an hour or two to really understand not just why they didn’t have pensions but what was going on in their lives,” she said.
“I took that research and expanded across the world, speaking with 3,000 women in seven different cities. All of that research was taken and put into the technology.”
Support from Enterprise Ireland played a key role in enabling Tully to take such a thorough approach to developing Penny. She said the agency’s help was particularly vital in getting the business up and running.
“We used innovation vouchers from Enterprise Ireland which gave us access to three PhD researchers based in the Nimbus Centre [in MTU Cork] and we worked to find what the most important insights were and what the product should look like,” Tully said.
“Enterprise Ireland has been very supportive with what we’re trying to do. It’s crucial money at that early pre-revenue stage. They’re eager now to introduce us to their offices in the markets we’re targeting.”
Tully expects to grow the full-time staff to 10 over the next year with plans to expand into Spain, Germany and Poland.
“We want to expand the team and be in at least one EU market by the end of next year, probably Spain. With sales, we want to be at €20 million AUM by the end of next year.”
Source: https://www.businesspost.ie/
