Tillit is a carefully curated, Do-It-Yourself investment platform for personal investors who want to invest in funds, investment trusts and ETFs. We currently offer Stocks and Shares ISAs and General Investment Accounts, and we are planning to launch Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs) later this year.
Our mission is to empower and inspire more people to make better investment decisions with their long-term savings. We give investors the tools, the funds and the insights to support them to invest long-term with confidence and conviction, effortlessly.
Tillit means ‘trust’ in Swedish. Trust is fundamental to what we do and it underpins everything from our culture, to the relationships we hope to build with our customers over decades to come.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
Before Tillit, I spent eight years at Baillie Gifford, where I was the Co-manager of the Japanese Smaller Companies Fund and Deputy Manager of Shin Nippon Investment Trust.
The idea for Tillit came from a personal pain I experienced. I was trying to invest my savings using existing platforms, but I realised the tools and information needed to make good long-term investment decisions simply weren’t accessible, especially compared to the access institutional investors have.
On one end there are robo-advisers which can be a good starting point for novice investors, but you don’t have control over what you invest in, and on the other end are the fund supermarkets with an overwhelming amount of investment choice and lacking information, and a digital experience that was more frustrating than helpful.
I realised there was a gap in the market to help personal investors like me, who want to be in control of my investments and know what I am investing in, but I also don’t want to spend hours picking the funds. And I was also craving a platform that was genuinely enjoyable to use, more human and less utilitarian. And this is what we are trying to create with Tillit.
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What do you think makes this company unique?
I would like to think there are many things that make Tillit unique, from the platform design to our exceptional customer support. But I will focus on the three elements our customers love, which are the curation of funds, the qualitative information we provide to help our customers make investment decisions and the general ease of use.
Curation
There are over 4,000 funds available to UK investors. Choice is good, but too much choice can have unintended consequences on our behaviour. To pick the right funds out of those is incredibly time consuming and overwhelming, so much so that many people don’t even bother and simply don’t make a decision at all.
Tillit aims to solve this choice paralysis by offering a curated universe of funds, investment trusts and ETFs which have been selected based on our unique manifesto and a huge amount of industry experience of managing and selecting funds. Our Fund Selection and Investment Committee have over 100 years of cumulative experience in fund management and selection, and they whittle thousands of funds down to what they believe are the ~100 best-in-class. In short, we focus on quality over quantity, but without sacrificing choice.
The good news is that unlike Michelin starred restaurants investors can start investing from £1 and the simple platform fee reduces every year, regardless of how much they have invested on Tillit (fund fees also apply).
Qualitative information
We do extensive research and ongoing due diligence on all the funds available on the platform to make sure that they are and continue to be the right funds for the platform. Some of this research forms the basis of one of our most popular sections on the platform, the ‘Tillit view’, which you can find for every fund, investment trust and ETF on the platform.
This is a succinct fund description in plain English, which helps the customer understand what the fund is trying to achieve, key risks, why it might be suitable for them, etc. The purpose is to support our customers to make informed investment decisions so that they can invest in what they know, with confidence and conviction. We want to tell the story of the fund in a digestible, transparent, and engaging way so that it easy to find the right funds for you, depending on your circumstances, interests or goals.
Ease of use
Tillit has been designed with a mission to delight and support customers. The platform encourages discovery, learning and engagement. Our customers can search and filter funds in dynamic ways, such as by searching for company names (e.g. Apple) to find funds that are invested in that company, or by applying unique filters for sustainable investing, or D&I options such as ‘At least one female fund manager’. The platform can also be used across devices – from mobile to tablet to desktop so that the customer can use Tillit whenever, wherever they are.
How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
It really is incredible what we have achieved in the last couple of years. We launched to the public in November 2021 and in February this year we were awarded the Boring Money Award for ‘Best New Investment Platform 2022’. We have also been shortlisted for several other awards (winners being announced later in the year).
The strong validation from our early customers has attracted considerable investment – to date, we have raised large pre-seed and seed funding rounds, totalling £4.6m, and we were selected one of the top 10 seed FinTech deals in the UK in Q1 2022.
We are backed by experienced venture capitalists, Techstart Ventures, and industry heavyweights, including ex-Baillie Gifford Partner, Patrick Edwardson, veteran Fund Manager Sarah Whitley, Co-Head of the Schroder Global Value Team, Nick Kirrage, amongst others.
I am also incredibly humbled by the stellar group of advisers we have, including Senior Directors and Leaders from Funding Circle, Bloom & Wild, and Seedrs.
Our team has also doubled every year and we are a collective of driven individuals from all walks of life with experience in everything from asset management to design, who’ve worked in early-stage startups and billion-dollar companies.
What can we hope to see from Tillit in the future?
Tillit is still at the beginning of our journey. We have an ambitious Road Map ahead with the aim to transform the way people invest. The focus for the rest of 2022 is on broadening access to the platform and range of wrappers as well as further enhancing the customer experience through new, exciting features and content. Watch this space!
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