Group Pension Schemes

A good quality pension scheme is often cited by employees as among the most important benefits of employment and as a reason to join one particular employer over another. Research commonly confirms our own experience that employees who elect to join the companies’ pension scheme tend to stay with their employer longer than those who don’t. A correctly structured group pension scheme will improve your success in both recruitment and retention of staff.

Group pension arrangements can be complicated though and many employers will be concerned to ensure that they don’t take on a financial headache, and indeed a future liability, when what they were trying to achieve was a benefit for their staff.

We can help you through the pensions maze and enable you to design and deploy a scheme that works well for your business and your staff.

We’ll talk you through the best ways of structuring your arrangement to promote particular kinds of staff behaviour.

We can also help you explore the most tax efficient ways of offering pension arrangements, through the increasingly popular use of salary exchange (sometimes known as salary sacrifice). While we are more than happy to engage with your staff on a 1:1 basis to explain salary exchange to them we have also developed an online salary exchange tool which enables employees to explore the issues in a more cost effective manner. It enables them to “try before you buy” and lets them look at the effect of certain scenario’s before they commit to altering their salaries. This system removes many of the potential headaches that cause employers concerns over the communication and contractual issues that surround effective salary exchange schemes.

. Many established employers have accumulated legacy schemes. These may have been appropriate at the time they were established but, due to the many changes in pension legislation and general market movements they may not be appropriate for either the employer or the employee today. We can help you cut through the jargon and legislation so you can identify the issues and look at the most appropriate solutions from managing out the risk and costs associated with final salary schemes to ensuring you are getting the most competitive pricing on your money purchase, group personal pension, or stakeholder schemes.