Ben Stanway is co-founder and executive chair of Moneybox, the London, England, app that helps people save, invest and manage their pensions from as little as £1. A former investment analyst and stock picker, he co-founded the flower delivery company Bloom & Wild before starting Moneybox in 2016 with his old school friend Charlie Mortimer, and both businesses came from the same frustration with old-fashioned companies that took customers for granted.
School Friends and Stock Picking
He and Mortimer met as pupils at Charterhouse, the school in Surrey, England. He started his career in investing, working in Fidelity's investment division as an analyst and later as a partner at a hedge fund, where his job was picking stocks. That background taught him how professional money managers think, and also how little of that help reaches ordinary savers. "It's like having the choice between buying a Rolls Royce or no car at all," he has said of a market where the wealthiest 1% get plenty of advice and everyone else gets almost none.
A Battered Box of Flowers
His first business came from a bad delivery. He ordered a bunch of flowers for the woman who is now his wife, and they arrived in a battered box covered in ugly yellow stickers. "The box may as well have contained a multi-plug adapter - no care had gone into it," he has said. In 2013 he and Aron Gelbard started Bloom & Wild, an online florist that sends flowers in flat boxes that fit through a letterbox, so sending them is as easy as sending a card. Gelbard runs it as chief executive, and it became one of Britain's fastest growing tech companies.
Founding Moneybox
"I know these businesses sound very different, but I see similarities all the way through," he has said. "In both sectors, customers were having a bad experience, which was usually a result of the existing players being really old-fashioned and taking their customers for granted." In 2016 he and Mortimer launched Moneybox to make investing simple enough for beginners. Its best-known feature rounds up card spending to the nearest pound and invests the spare change, so a £2.80 coffee puts 20p into savings. The app later added Lifetime ISAs for first-time home buyers, stocks and shares ISAs, cash savings and pensions, including a tool to combine old workplace pension pots, which he wanted because many pension providers "send snail-mail letters written in financial jargon to old addresses."
From Start-up to Profit
He focused almost entirely on Moneybox once it took off, first as co-chief executive with Mortimer and later as executive chair. By the end of 2025 Moneybox had 1.7 million customers and about £19 billion in assets, it brought in £115.6 million of revenue for the year, and it made a profit before tax for the third year in a row. In July 2026 a sale of employee shares valued the company at about £800 million.
Both of his companies began with a container. One was a battered flower box covered in yellow stickers, the other the humble money box that gave his app its name. The stock picker who saw how little help reached ordinary savers now chairs a company with 1.7 million of them.
