For the 5th year, Corporate Adviser has run a survey of how well commercial pension providers live up to the expectations of advisers who help employers and their staff with their workplace pension, I do not use the word “member”, because some providers offer contracts and not membership of multi-employer master trusts.
Advisers means more than financial advisers. Much of the heavy lifting to get employer clients onboarded to auto-enrolment was carried out by accountants who didn’t need to be regulated to make their choice.
Most have kept their clients in the original choice and most advisers have remained on the unregulated side of the distinction above.
It’s a very skilled business getting this right and hats off to Corporate Adviser. Their technique is to measure the importance of chosen “service factors”.
There is consistency here with pension advisers appreciating the quality of admin exceeding all other standards , being challenged only by staff expertise and slightly above communication with members. These are all measures of the quality offered to savers.
What is not scoring to the same extent are the factors that make life easier for advisers. The ease of use of technology is more important than support for employers and staff branded for the adviser. Least important is respect for the adviser.
What interests me is that the investment results for members are not measured. Corporate Adviser , through its Capadata service, pays a lot of attention to performance, but it is surprising that the standard of investments has no impact on service standards, something to learn there about what makes for importance for advisers. In a world of investment consultancy – things would be quite different.
Congratulations to Royal London for the quality given to members , Aviva is now joining Royal London and has top place , but Royal London has most consistently been “5 star”.
There is a wide range in quality from Standard Life – at the top of the four star having been five star last year and Aegon, showing a considerable falling in results since last year.
There are four Scottish Life Companies here – Aegon is weakest, Royal London the strongest, Standard Life and Scottish Widows sit in between.
We do not see Aon, Mercer and Willis Towers Watson bothering with this service though they all offer workplace pensions. I am sorry about that, but can understand why. These firms are basically offering a service to their clients and it is unlikely that advisers will offer a service to employers who have already chosen one.
The final group of providers are commercial organisations who aren’t Scottish but are mostly improving. There are two newcomers, TPT – who have made it clear they want to become a CDC provider and the asset manager SEI. It’s good to see them taking advisers seriously.
What’s not so good is to see how poorly Nest, NOW and Cushon do, clearly not taking advisers very seriously. It’s disrespectful to the employers who engage with the advisers. NOW is now owned by an adviser (Mercer) which makes for another useless performance. albeit there’s a big rise in performance. NOW’s advisers tend to be accountants who were responsible for most of NOW’s appointments. They have been most appallingly let down.
My guess is that the research being done by Corporate Adviser is going to be treasured by organisations doing due diligence on workplace pensions up for being purchased (and consolidated). Corporate Adviser offer the information that I have drawn down and repeated on this blog but the commercially sensitive information should rightly be at a price.
