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From Imperial Aerospace to Pension Fintech: Royden Greaves on Building Jarvis

Tuesday, 9 June 2026

Royden Greaves spent a decade watching the same pattern repeat itself: the wealthier you were, the better advice you got. Everyone else was largely left to figure it out alone. A background in aerospace engineering at Imperial College had trained him to question systems, and pensions, he realised, were a system badly in need of rebuilding. In 2024, he launched Jarvis, a “lifetime pension” designed to follow people through their entire working lives, regardless of how many jobs, contracts, or career pivots lie ahead. We sat down with Royden to hear how he got here, what he has learned, and where Jarvis is headed next.

  1. A decade in wealth management. What convinced you something was broken?

For years I watched people with real wealth get genuinely good advice and careful planning, while everyone else got almost nothing. The system was built around assets, not people. If you didn’t already have money, the industry wasn’t interested in helping you build it. What struck me most was how pensions punished the way people actually live and work. Change jobs a few times and you’d end up with a trail of forgotten pots, each quietly charging fees, none of them talking to each other. The people who needed help the most were the ones the system served the least. That gap is what stayed with me.

 

  1. From aerospace engineering at Imperial to finance. How does that early training still shape how you think?

More than I expected. Aerospace teaches you to think in systems, where everything is connected and a small flaw in one place can cascade through the whole thing. You learn to respect constraints, to test assumptions rather than trust them, and to design for the real world rather than the ideal one. Finance, and pensions especially, is full of legacy systems that nobody has properly questioned in decades. Engineering gave me the instinct to ask why something works the way it does, and the confidence to rebuild it from first principles if the answer is just “because it’s always been that way.”

 

  1. In a sentence or two, what is Jarvis and the “lifetime pension” idea?

Jarvis is a pension that follows you through your whole working life rather than being tied to a single employer. The idea of a lifetime pension is simple: one pot that stays with you no matter how many times you change jobs, go freelance, or work for yourself, so your retirement savings finally keep up with the way people actually work today.

 

  1. Why was making pensions feel familiar so central to the design?

Because the biggest barrier with pensions isn’t cost or returns, it’s that people feel shut out. The language is alienating, the statements are confusing, and most people have no idea what they actually have. If you can’t see it and don’t understand it, you can’t engage with it. We deliberately built something that feels like the banking apps people already use every day, where you can open it, instantly understand where you stand, and feel in control. Familiarity isn’t a cosmetic choice. It’s the thing that turns a pension from something people avoid into something they actually pay attention to.

 

  1. What do traditional providers get wrong about how people work now?

They still assume one person, one employer, one steady career. That model is decades out of date. People now move between jobs, contract, freelance, and run side businesses, often all in the same year. Traditional providers treat each of those as a separate event that creates a new, disconnected pot, which is how people end up losing track of their own money. The modern workforce isn’t an edge case anymore, it’s the mainstream. Pensions need to be built around the person, not the employer, and most of the industry simply hasn’t caught up to that reality.

 

  1. You raised £1.8m in seed funding in 2024. What did you learn about pitching and choosing investors?

On pitching, I learned that conviction matters more than polish. Investors aren’t really buying the deck, they’re buying whether you understand the problem more deeply than anyone else in the room. The clearer and more honest you are about what’s hard, the more they trust you on what’s possible. On choosing investors, I learned to treat it like hiring rather than fundraising. The money is the easy part. What you actually want is people who understand the space, who will still back you on the difficult days, and whose values line up with yours. The wrong investor with the right cheque can cost you far more than they put in.

 

  1. Best advice for someone thinking about leaving a stable job to start a business?

Don’t wait to feel ready, because you never will. But do go in with your eyes open. Understand that it will be harder and slower than you imagine, and make sure you genuinely care about the problem you’re solving, because that conviction is what carries you through the stretches when nothing is working. Practically, give yourself enough runway that fear isn’t making your decisions for you. Desperation is a terrible co-founder. The leap is real, but you can plan the landing.

 

  1. Where do you see Jarvis in the next few years?

The goal is for Jarvis to become the default home for your pension, the one place everything consolidates as you move through your working life. In the next few years that means reaching far more of the modern workforce, deepening the partnerships that bring people onto the platform, and continuing to make pensions something people genuinely understand rather than fear. Longer term, I want Jarvis to change the expectation entirely, so that a pension following you through life feels obvious rather than novel.

Quick-fire round

  1. Tea or coffee? Oolong tea, always.
  2. Early bird or night owl? Early bird.
  3. The app you open first in the morning? Honestly, my alarm. I’m working on it.
  4. Which has been your favourite country to visit? Hard to beat.

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