I want to tell you something we have been excited about for a long time. Optiml is coming to the UK.

I am Max Jessome, one of the co-founders. I usually write about the maths of retirement, the trade-offs, the timing decisions that quietly cost people thousands. Today I get to write about something different: a beginning.

Where we started

Optiml began in Canada, at a kitchen table, with a spreadsheet. My parents sat down with an adviser to plan their retirement and walked away with a printed report that read like a black box. My father, an engineer, could not retire on blind trust, so he built his own model. That model became the thing our family actually understood. It also revealed a gap that millions of people fall into: the tools to plan your own retirement properly simply did not exist.

So we built them. Optiml launched in Canada in September 2024, and since then more than 150,000 Canadian retirement plans have been built on the platform. Those are Canadian numbers, from a Canadian product, and I mention them for one reason: to be honest about the track record we are bringing with us. We have proven the approach at home.

Why the UK, and why now

The short answer is that you asked.

We have heard genuine, repeated demand from people in the UK who want exactly what we built in Canada, applied to their system. The UK and Canada are close allies with a shared instinct for doing the sensible thing carefully, and that made the UK the logical next home for Optiml. When we looked at where to go first, the decision made itself.

There is one thing I will not do, and that is pretend the UK product already exists or already has UK users. It does not, and it does not. What we are doing is rebuilding the engine from the ground up around the UK system: SIPPs (Self-Invested Personal Pensions), workplace and defined benefit pensions, ISAs (Individual Savings Accounts) including the Lifetime ISA, the State Pension, and HMRC's rules. A Canadian tool with the labels swapped would be worse than useless. So we are doing the real work.

What Optiml actually does

Optiml is retirement-planning software. It models your whole retirement horizon, across your pensions, ISAs, and the State Pension, and builds a tax-efficient plan you control at every step. Change your retirement age, your spending, or when you claim the State Pension, and you see the impact ripple across your lifetime plan in seconds.

A few things it is deliberately not:

• It is not a robo-adviser. It does not manage your money.
• It is not an investment platform. It does not recommend specific funds, products, or providers.
• It is not a static plan that goes stale the day life changes.

What it is, is a way to see the maths for yourself. Should you draw from your SIPP or your ISA first? What does deferring the State Pension actually do to your lifetime tax bill? How does the 60% Personal Allowance taper between £100,000 and £125,140 affect the year you retire? These are the kinds of questions Optiml is built to model on your own numbers, so the answer is yours and not a stranger's rule of thumb. As with any plan that touches investments, the value of investments can fall as well as rise.

Join us from the start

Here is where you come in. The waitlist is genuinely the front door of this, not a marketing list, and there are three reasons to join it.

• Get the updates first. We will share development progress as we build, honestly, including what is working and what is taking longer than we hoped.
• Send us feature requests. The best ideas we have ever shipped came from users telling us what their real situation needed. Tell us what the UK version has to get right.
• Help shape it. Founding members are part of the story from day one, and we will look after the people who backed us early.

We have watched Canadians take real control of their retirement with this platform, and I cannot wait to bring that same feeling here. Building something for a new country is a privilege, and doing it with you in the room from the beginning is the whole point.

Retirement planning is not about the software. It is about walking into your future already knowing the maths is on your side.

Welcome to Optiml UK. Let's build it together.