Cara Mackay builds sheds in Perth
You may find this distasteful. But I know that it’s how many small business owners feel about having to deal with workplace pension providers. AE for them is a tax and AE providers an extension of HMRC’s assault on them for trying to build businesses.
If you think that it’s easy for a small business to deal with Nest (relative to Starling or Revolut) then you don’t run for a small business locked in to Nest. Please don’t think that because it has £40bn of saver’s money , that People’s Pension is well loved by the employers that use it. Relative to what came before it may be working well but it is not universally loved, nor is any workplace pension , nor will CDC pensions for that matter. Small businesses smoulder with indignation that they are an extension of Government’s plan not to support people though a state pension and national insurance.
They may not matter to large pension providers, but to suppose they don’t exist is to live in lah lah land, I wish that Cara’s voice could be heard at events such as this one held this week by an offshoot of Phoenix.
Standard Life is just down the road from Perth in Edinburgh but…
Comments not on Phoenix but on Cara Mackay’s comments
Some see this as an opportunity to sell their wares, but I think most of us react most warmly to the later comments. Auto-enrolment is bad news for small businesses and no-one speaks for them.
There are some good automatic enrolment management systems that do the heavy lifting for you, alternatively depending on what payroll software is used, it may very well integrate with your pension provider! Having dealt with these systems on the daily for years, I’ve managed to make some sense of it all. Feel free to get in touch, happy to help!
You might want to chat with Boring Money Insights to find out how to cut through the bureaucracy and nonsense
Hi Cara You seem stressed. Just tell them all where to stick it!!! I get monthly letters of “you have been reported to the pensions regulator” by Nest Pensions, have well over 500 emails in their stupid portal that im not going to open individually, and never missed a payment. Same stress here. They are all useless.
Nest is actually the most PAINFUL and horrendous system on the planet.
I don’t have a strong view on the topic you wrote about, however I wanted to say I found it refreshing to read your post on LinkedIn. I particularly enjoyed the expressive tone (aka swearing) and the fact that you actually are representing a real reaction. At a time when almost every other LinkedIn post seems to be so contrived, manufactured, or just plain “did not happen” your post brought a smile to my face. Thanks 👍
I am not against auto-enrolment. I have operated it for the companies I’ve run. But it has it’s dark side. I have a few stories I could tell (but won’t). The providers who do the AE job aren’t trying to cause small businesses trouble. Being big and spending their time congratulating themselves, they have forgotten the pain of their dark side.
