EvolveMyRetirement® is developed and operated by Okinawa Zest Limited. OkinawaZest™ is fully independent, not tied to the sales of any financial products and does not provide financial advice. The company was founded by Nick May, an experienced IT architect and software developer. Nick built a successful career working with multinational companies, delivering mission-critical systems in, a highly experienced IT architect and software developer. Nick built a successful career working with multinational companies, delivering mission-critical applications including in banking, accountancy, insurance and financial trading.
During his earlier career, he became acutely aware of the many problems surrounding retirement planning. Although he was contributing his pension, he had little confidence in whether it was enough, too much, or what kind of retirement it might support. He searched in vain for a software tool that could answer these questions for him. He put together sophisticated spreadsheets, but even these were of necessity over-simplified, and making changes often introduced errors.
In his spare time, Nick began designing what his ideal tool should look like and how it should work. The idea of EvolveMyRetirement® was born. Not only would it need a sophisticated financial model, but it should also handle uncertainty, and have the ability to run Monte Carlo Simulations. But that still wasn’t enough. It also needed a way to explore many possible strategy settings without endless trial and error. Solving this required a method capable of searching through thousands of combinations under uncertainty. This led to the use of a Genetic Algorithm.
In early 2014, Nick founded Okinawa Zest™. The name was inspired by Okinawa, a Japanese island known for having one of the world’s highest proportions of healthy centenarians. EvolveMyRetirement® aims to help people plan for a long, ‘zestful’ retirement – hence the company name. A talented development team built the online tool from the ground up, and it was launched at the end of 2014. Since then it has been enhanced many times, and has a loyal and growing following.
