Tontine Trust - Europe's leading lifetime income pensions platform

What a perfect pension looks like? TontineTrust

Pensions just went 'Back to the Future'

The OECD now advises its 37 member countries to make risk-sharing tontine (🔈 tonn-teen) pensions mandatory by default for the following reasons:

Tontines enable higher incomes in retirement, and
Tontines solve a retiree's risk of running out of money in old age.

In addition, tontines have proven immensely popular since 1653 because members can also expect their income to rise faster than inflation.

We are the world's first modern tontine pensions institution and our fully digital tontine platform now helps savers, employers and governments to upgrade their pensions to the OECD recommended level.

We are the world's first 'RetireTech'

Since 2017 we have been researching how to use technology to solve what Nobel Prize Winner Bill Sharpe described as "the nastiest hardest problem in finance" which is:

How quickly can I spend my savings in retirement without ever facing the risk of running out of money in old age?

After three years of research and development, TontineTrust is now bringing the solution to savers and partners through our award-winning platform which issues and operates tontine pensions.

My Tontine App is a PEPPs as a service digital platform for retirement savings, create your tailor-made pension

We are both a pensions firm and a technology platform

Based primarily in Ireland, TontineTrust now employs 20 people and is setting a new benchmark for trust in pensions by using state-of-the art technology to enable simple, safe, low-fee lifetime retirement incomes.

Following the launch of the MyTontine Pension, our PEPPs-as-a-Service platform will enable tontine pensions to be offered by governments and other organisations.

Why we did this

When you reach retirement, you go from saving to spending.

According to research, almost 40% of retirees will live into their 90s and then face a very high risk that they will run out of money.

With 'running out' now being the #1 fear in retirement, further research suggests that 84% of savers would prefer to swap their savings for a lifetime income.

In recent years, some savers bought annuities. However, with the advent of ultra-low interest rates, the OECD now advises that they are no longer the best option. It recommends that savers should automatically join tontines as they solve the risk of living longer by sharing that risk with others.

Better yet, not only do tontines offer a simpler and more affordable monthly income for life that rises over time but members can also expect their income to rise faster than inflation.

The simple answer

A retiree would never risk their whole retirement portfolio on the performance of a single investment. However, many currently risk their entire plan on predicting how long they will live.

In both cases, the retiree dramatically lowers their risk through diversification, i.e. spreading their investment risk and their longevity risk.

For 400 years, savers have loved how tontines solve their risk of living longer and eliminate the nagging fear that their money will eventually run out.

Joining a tontine pension means that you can relax and enjoy your hard-earned retirement.

How It Works

What do the experts say?

TontineTrust and tontines are receiving more and more endorsements from financial scholars, institutions and the financial media

A tontine resembles a simple low-fee annuity with lifetime payments. Yet unlike an annuity….a tontine can pay a higher yield because of its relative simplicity of structure.

Love the idea of tontines. They solve so many problems for retirees. These guys are bringing them back... super interesting.

Mortality credits enable investors to earn a type of guaranteed “alpha” not available in any other asset class. As you age and your mortality (risk) increases (e.g. 10% at age 80) then you are effectively earning this as a rate of return.

Tontines pose less risk to members than conventional annuities since there is no contractual obligation on payout, no counter-party risk and no need for insurance-company reserves.

Considered as a life-cycle asset, [a tontine] proved to be an excellent investment, earning a rate of return substantially in excess of that generally available on other assets.

(Annuities) are relatively expensive because their issuers must hold a large capital buffer. Retired people tend not to like them as they pay a low rate. Tontines are simple to understand and could be much less costly than annuities because the risks are not taken onto the balance-sheet of an insurer.

You get thrown 30-, 40-, 50-page documents explaining some kind of annuity using this particular background, and 12 different kinds of investments that feed into it, and your eyes gloss. By comparison…the tontine is unbelievably simple — you can explain it in two pages.

The Tontine: A 17th Century Solution to a 21st Century Problem...What is insurance except a pool of people coming together to share risks? What better product for our era than a crowd-sourced, peer-to-peer, sharing economy life insurance solution.

Interviews & Videos

Real Vision TV's Max Wiethe interviews Dean

Real Vision - Meet the Experts: Can Tontines Fix the Retirement Crisis?

The OECD talks up the advantages of Tontines

The OECD Head of Pensions talks about Tontines in the context of their recent Future of Pensions Report guidance given to their 37 member countries.

Webinar: Transforming Europe's Occupational Pensions

With the OECD calling for tontine style pensions to become mandatory, we explain the advantages

TontineTrust in the News

MallowStreet.com: Are tontines the solution to the decumulation conundrum?

Catherine Donnelly, associate professor at Heriot-Watt University and a fellow at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, is a proponent of the vehicles. “Anyone who works on them says, ‘Why wouldn’t you be offering them?’” she says. Tontines address the issue of people not knowing when they will die whilst also not being interested in buying annuities – something referred to as the ‘annuity puzzle’, says Donnelly.

Forbes.com: Fintech's Answer To The Global Retirement Crisis

Fintech innovators (TontineTrust) have the multi-trillion-dollar global retirement income market in their sights. ... Tontines can never become underfunded!... Consumer choice is good for society. Let’s bring tontines back, better than ever.

IPE.com: Irish fintech company prepares PEPP move

Tontine Trust has partnered with Dutch consultancy Westerbrink to help with the planned launch of the product and with expanding to markets beyond Ireland, where the fintech company aims to launch its pan-European product first.

Why accept a drawdown account when you can create your own tailor-made pension?

Our Digital Pension Platform enables regular consumers to create their own bespoke 'DIY' pensions and to know with extremely high precision what their level of lifetime income in retirement will be.

Our soon to be launched Pension Calculator will enable you to understand & compare your various retirement savings options.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant

We are active advocates for absolute transparency in financial services & pensions.

When you trust your life savings to a financial institution, you are entitled to know exactly where and how the monies are invested and what fees are being charged.

Our aim is to become the safest & most trusted pension firm in the world and a key part of our strategy is to ensure that our members have absolute transparency over the inner workings of our pension products.

As a consumer, this is the least you should expect in the 21st Century.