#45 A nonprofit disrupting the finance sector in more ways than one, Sam Stubbs founder of Simplicity
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Sam Stubbs is the founder of non profit KiwiSaver fund Simplicity. A reformed investment banker and stockbroker his career also spans politics, philosophy and technology. His mission is to make the finance industry a force for good as a source of profit which he thinks can be achieved by companies embracing long term thinking, sustainability and full diversity. Sam Stubbs joined Purposely Podcast to share his founder story: What is Simplicity and what is its mission and vision? ‘We're a nonprofit fund manager. If you're overseas you might have heard of Vanguard… the vanguard of New Zealand… wouldn't be too far wrong. Our main aim is to give people dignity in retirement and how we do that is we give them choices. People who have choices in life have dignity. We run as a nonprofit fund manager, which charges the lowest fees and making people richer. Simplicity is a charity, a social enterprise, a nonprofit, a whole lot of things! We give 15% of the fees we do earn to charity. We've been running for almost five years now and we manage about $3 billion on behalf of over 60,000 members, in total we're giving away about $100,000 a month to charity, and making extremely good returns.’ The Kiwisaver scheme was the New Zealand waking up to the fact that its people owed more in debt than they had saved? ‘So it's about 14 years old now and when it started out and they didn't think it was going to be that popular. However it turned out to be wildly popular because the government gave everyone who joined $1,000 straight into their account. The vast majority of the population have now signed up to kiwisaver (voluntary pension scheme). In the first 14 years it's accumulated almost $80 billion, which for New Zealand is a lot of money. It will carry on growing and growing.’ Simplicity appears to run incredibly leanly, tell us about your set-up? ‘Yeah that’s correct, we have what we call a starvation mentality. So we never get used to having very much money because as soon as we are in danger of making money we lower our fees and we keep it really tight. Now that doesn't mean that we go stupid with it but it does mean that we have a really heavy emphasis on technology. So we spend a lot of money on that so we can automate as much as we can. We have 63 volunteers as well, people like lawyers, PR accountants, whole bunch of people who help us out because we're disrupting the financial services industry here. And also, you know, we're giving so much to charity, and we've given away over $2 million in their first five years’