The company behind EvolveMyRetirement® is Okinawa Zest Limited. OkinawaZest™ is fully independent, not tied to the sales of any financial products or advice. Our company's founder and Managing Director is Nick May, 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 associated with the financial side of retirement planning. Although he was funding his pension plan, he had no real confidence whether it was enough or too much, or what kind of retirement he was saving for. 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 worked out 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 uncertainly, and have the ability to run Monte Carlo Simulations. But even this wouldn't be enough. It also needed a method for optimising the chosen strategy without endless trial and error. Optimisation in the face of uncertainty was the hardest problem to solve, and the solution included the use of a Genetic Algorithm.
At the start of 2014 Nick took the plunge and formed the company, naming it OkinawaZest™. Okinawa is a Japanese island, and the place in the world having the biggest proportion of healthy centenarians. The EvolveMyRetirement® tool helps anyone plan for a ‘zestful’ retirement, hopefully to a ripe old age: hence the company name. A talented development team built the online tool from the ground up. It was launched at the end of 2014. Since then it has been enhanced many times, and has a loyal and growing following.
