Building financial resilience together. Guidance for employers.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm delighted to welcome you all to this webinar on how we can build financial resilience together. This is a quarterly series of webinars aiming to cover a variety of topics that we hope you find beneficial. And at the end of today's session, we'll send you an e-mail which will ask you for suggestions on what you'd find useful to hear about in future webinars. I'd really appreciate if you could take the time to fill that out because we really want to shape the information in these webinars just to be as relevant and helpful to you as possible.

We'll also follow up with some of the useful resources we covered today and a link to today's recording and the slides. So you can revisit it whenever you need to.

So let's get started.

Firstly, I wanted to introduce myself and the team that are here to speak to you today. So I'm Alana Brown, Head of Employer Marketing, responsible for employer and employee communications and engagement. I'm joined by Rory Marsh, our Workplace Pension Director, who's responsible for our workplace pensions offering here at Royal London. Also, Jamie Forlan, Senior Proposition Lead, who is leading on the development of our customer guidance proposition. And Ross Wilson, a Customer Service Consultant who specialises in workplace pension servicing.

So what is it that we're going to cover today?

We're going to talk about the importance of building your employees financial wellbeing and resilience. We’ll provide an overview of our financial wellbeing service and how this supports you and your employees. I'll talk to you about how you can use our readymade communications to engage your employees and will end with Q and A session which will include the answers to some of the questions that you have submitted in advance.

So, to get started, I'll hand over to you please, Rory.

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Alana and hi everyone. It's really good to be here with you. So I'm sure we all love a themed week and it's World Wellbeing Week at the end of the month. So it feels like the perfect time to be chatting about this - the work that we can do together to build the financial resilience of your employees.

As a mutual Royal London is owned by our customers. And if you have your pension scheme with us, that includes you and your employees, that means that building the financial resilience of our workplace customers, your employees, is really central to what we're about. It’s what motivates us and it informs everything we do.

And that's why we think you can be confident in two things.

Firstly, in our commitment to help your employees directly. Helping them understand their financial situation, make good decisions for their long term financial needs.

Secondly, in our commitment to support you as an employer, provide really compelling benefits and tools that your employees will value and that really make a difference.

So let's get into it.

Firstly, let's chat about what the problem is that we're trying to solve and how are we able to help. Well, some of our research that we've done recently makes pretty sober reading, unfortunately. But, there are reasons to be optimistic and reasons to believe that we really can make a difference. Here are a few snippets from our research which may help frame the opportunity for us to collectively help.

Now, firstly, we know sorting out your finances can be an anxiety inducing activity. I think I'm the same at times with mine. And indeed, 36% of people we surveyed said as much. And for me, it really underlines the job we have to do in supporting customers, not just with the pounds and pence aspects of the long term savings, but also the peace of mind and encouragement we can give employees to make confident decisions to help build their long term resilience.

But we cannot also ignore the factors outside our control that impact people's long term finances. One in three people surveyed confirmed that increased costs had impacted their ability to save for retirement or alter their retirement plans. Now that's not good news typically, but it is an opportunity for us to help employees navigate through cost of living challenges. We can help them balance their financial needs of today as well as the financial needs of tomorrow.

We do also know there is a mismatch in what people would like as a retirement income and what they're on track to achieve. Now, there's always a bit of a health warning here. It's always risky to look just at averages. But I think in this case it's helpful to give the size of the typical retirement income gap.

From our research, the average pension saver hopes to retire on a retirement income of something in the order of £49,000 a year, including the State Pension. But by our calculations, a typical saver is more likely to achieve a retirement income of something like £37,000. That's the £12,000 gap that we've got on screen.
Unless we can help them build up that retirement pot before they need it as a retirement income.

But all isn't lost. We know that employees really value their pension from their employer. They trust you, the employer, and they trust us, the pension provider, to help them. And in fact, when we asked customers to rank the most important benefits, they look for when applying for a new job, survey respondents ranked the workplace pension second highest. And that's second only to salary. I guess we're probably all the same, that's probably the benefit we look at first when we're looking at those job specs.

But pension comes ahead of things like flexible working, hybrid working, bonus eligibility. So it's really valued. The need to help is there. And the door is open for us to help.

Let's break down what that help could look like a little bit more specifically then. So when we think about this, we think we've got four jobs to do - directly for your employees and in partnership with you.

Firstly, we need to help your employees get engaged. Now, that's easier said than done. That's a pretty rare commodity in this day and age. There's so much demand on our attention and time. I've maybe got the same bad social media habits that a lot of us have. Which can be a bit of a distraction, but it's vital that we help your employees make that good long term financial decision at the right time for them. We've got to get them engaged to start on that journey.

When they are engaged, we’ve then got to be great at providing the guidance to help them identify what decisions are right for them. Help them, help themselves work out what's going to work for them and their families.

Then it's really all about getting out the way. Let's make it as easy as possible for employees to act on those decisions.

And then, crucially, we know from our insight it's often the impact you can have as the employer, with our support, that makes the biggest difference. You know your colleagues the best. You're present in their daily lives. You have that strong relationship and sense of trust with them. So when we think about what we can do, one of the key things for us is being a great partner for you - sharing insight we have on your employees and providing you with the toolkit that makes it really easy for you to take action.

So with those jobs in mind, let me briefly share the specific ways Royal London looks to help your employees. Whether that's directly or through partnership with you.

Now, there's a lot on the screen. There's too much detail to cover just now, but let me pull out a few key areas. And if you would like that further detail, please do visit our employer website or speak to your Royal London contact.

But to pick out a few pieces on the slide; well we look to engage employees in a whole range of ways. I'm sure you can imagine using different channels because one size doesn't fit all. Our lives would be a lot easier if that was the case.But we do find that employee onboarding, that moment, that experience, is a crucial moment that matters, and it helps them make really good decisions if we get this right, right at the outset for their long term savings.

That's the reason we've recently revamped what we call our digital welcome journey. That's a highly personalised journey that encourages new joiners to your business, and therefore new customers to Royal London, if you have your scheme with us, to really get set up for success.

One of the early calls to action that we make through that journey is to download our mobile app. That's because it's really highly rated and we know that employees that use it feel more confident and are more likely to take those positive actions.

Once your employees are up and running, we offer a range of digital support through our financial wellbeing service, a lot of the components of which you can see in the circles, on the chart, on the slide here. I’ll not go into those details right now. I'm not going to steal Jamie's thunder, I'll let him talk you through what that all means and show you a little bit of what that service can provide.

If we turn then to some of the other ways that we're looking to help. As I say, we want to be a really good partner for you and we want to offer a really great range of ways to support you, get your employees engaged, start them making those good long term decisions.

And it's our communications toolkit, which is the one stop shop for all of our support materials we offer you. And we can work with you to design bespoke communication plans that really make the most of that opportunity. Including typically one of the times and ways we find that you can have the most impact, is by piggybacking off those seasonal events. Whether it's helping people around tax year end or making a bit of noise about people engaging with their pensions during Pension Tracing Day.

We've also found, for example, that video content, whether that's short form social media videos or longer form webinars, is really increasingly an effective channel to engage employees. And that goes right across the generations, right across people's life stages. That's one of the reasons we're really ramping up our existing webinar programme and we love to work with employers to do some bespoke work in that space.

Last but by no means least, is the extra support we aim to provide employees as they head towards and into retirement.

We think that what you do with your retirement savings is one of the most complex and important financial decisions you'll have to make. That goes for all of us. So we really want to be as helpful as possible in helping those individuals that are approaching retirement, make really well informed decisions that are right for them and their families. So that means, alongside our people led support, via our customer service teams, our client relationship managers, our marketing experts - a lot of that retirement support is in the form of digital guidance offered via our financial wellbeing service.

So that's my queue, without further ado, to hand over to Jamie. He'll delve into more details about the service, how it works, what it can offer both you and your employees, and how to access it. Over to you, Jamie.

Thanks, Rory. And hi everyone, it's great to be here.

So as Rory was highlighting earlier, providing support and guidance to build your employees financial resilience is something we deeply care about as a customer-owned mutual. And our financial wellbeing service is at the heart of our offering - as a key component of our workplace pension proposition.

So what actually is it? Well, our financial wellbeing service is a digitally led experience which we've designed to help our scheme members, and your employees, have a healthy relationship with money, look at their full financial picture and take the right action to improve their financial wellbeing based on their personal needs.

For me, our financial wellbeing service is characterised by five key features.

Firstly, it's a holistic service, providing practical tips and guidance across nine key themes ranging from managing debt and budgeting, all the way through to retirement planning and later life care.

Crucially, it's product agnostic, which means it's not about flogging products or services to your employees. It's about supporting them to improve their financial wellbeing based on their own unique circumstances.

Secondly, it's personalised as users are presented with the bespoke dashboard which contains bitesize content and recommended tasks most relevant to them, based on what they tell us.

Thirdly, it's interactive as the service contains a whole range of articles, videos and interactive tools to better engage employees and help them make more informed financial decisions.

It’s also very insightful as the data and insight we can see at an aggregated level can be used to inform future developments to the service, and it can also be shared with you, to help inform your thinking around your employees financial wellbeing as an employer.

And finally our financial wellbeing service is available at no extra cost to both you and your employees as part of your Royal London workplace pension scheme.

So that's our financial wellbeing service at a glance, but how does it work? Well, employees can access the financial wellbeing service either through our mobile app or by logging into our online service.

Once they're in, they'll be encouraged to complete a simple Financial Health Check, which is a chat style questionnaire that gives them a score out of 100 and then powers their personalised dashboard with recommended tasks based on their unique financial needs.

I actually have a bit of history with the Financial Health Check because when I started completing it, I was feeling quietly confident given my background. But I was very quickly humbled because it highlighted to me that I hadn't put a will in place, which was especially important because I'd recently become a parent to two young girls. But in the sleep deprived haze of young parent life, I just hadn't thought about it. And in that respect, it's a great tool for identifying those blind spots in your financial wellbeing which need addressing.

So once they've completed the Financial Health Check, employees can unlock more content as they work their way through their recommended tasks. And in addition to this, they can also discover the ‘Money Mindset’, which is a questionnaire which helps employees explore how they feel about their finances. And provides hints and tips to improve their financial confidence, which we know is such an important part of financial wellbeing.

Importantly, users can continue to return to the service as well. Either by the mobile app or online service, as it's a living and breathing experience that we've intentionally designed to be revisited.

So that's how the financial wellbeing service works. But what is it telling us? Well, here's a flavour of some of the insights that we're seeing from over 33,000 customers who have used the service so far.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, younger employees aged in the starting out life stage have the lowest average financial wellbeing score on average and need the most support. And topics like ‘Investing for the future’, ‘Protecting your world’ and ‘Saving into a pension’ are the top financial wellbeing focus areas across all employees using the service.

Slightly worryingly, 70% of customers using our pension contribution tool aren't on target to enjoy the retirement lifestyle they're hoping for. But on a slightly more positive note, 61% of users going through our Financial Health Check do have some money left over each month, which they could potentially save.

And just to finish off, our state benefits calculator within the financial wellbeing service, which helps users check if they're missing out on any state benefits has identified a whopping £16 million worth of unclaimed annual benefits.

So let's now watch this short video, which really brings to life the user experience within our financial wellbeing service. And then I'll pass over to Alana to cover our employer communications toolkit, which we've designed to make it easy for you to both promote this service and support your employees to build their financial resilience more broadly.

It can be difficult to know when and how you should spend and save your money. Our financial wellbeing service is designed to help you with all money-related matters by providing engaging and personalised guidance that's most relevant to you and your financial needs.

Whether you need support with reducing your bills, guidance on building your savings or where you should start with buying your first home, our financial wellbeing service is there to lend a helping hand.

It's easy to get started, simply access the service by logging in to your Royal London online service account, if it’s your first login you just need to register on the Royal London website, or head to the tools section of the Royal London mobile app. If you're not registered yet, you'll just need your plan number to hand.

The first time you log in, you'll need to complete the financial health check, an interactive chat that helps to build a holistic picture of your finances. Simply answer a series of multiple choice questions about your finances - including your spending, borrowing, and saving and we'll calculate your financial wellbeing score.

Based on your answers and score, the service creates a personalised dashboard with a range of tailored topics to help you better understand your finances. You'll be presented with the most relevant topics for your personal circumstances, each topic is then broken into easily manageable chunks so you can read at your own pace.

So, what can you do on the service? You can read engaging articles and guides and watch videos on the topics that matter to you, including planning for retirement, building up your savings and managing debt.

You'll also have access to a number of interactive tools, like our retirement options calculator so you can visualise what life might look like when you reach retirement. And our free benefits calculator, which checks over 30 different benefits available in the UK, to see if you're entitled to any of the billions of pounds of government benefits that go unclaimed each year.

The service is designed around you and your needs, so if your circumstances change, you can take the financial health check again to update your score and evolve your dashboard and tasks to improve your ongoing financial future.

Log in to online service or the Royal London mobile app to access your financial wellbeing service today and start to take control of your finances.

Thank you, Jamie. So there's a communication toolkit available to you on your dedicated Royal London employer website. Rory mentioned some key jobs to be done, one engaging your employees and two, us helping you as their trusted employer to do this. And that really is what the toolkit does.

So there's a range of different media available that you can choose what suits your business. So for example, there's e-mail templates and videos that you can send out.

There's digital banners that you could add to your intranet if you have one. And we're still seeing our posters and leaflets be really well used. So for example, posters around coffee machines, locker rooms, staff rooms or leaflets are being used as desk drops, put into letters and pay slips. And I even heard of one of our employers printing out the leaflets and putting them behind the windscreen wipers of the service vehicles of her staff. So hopefully there is a format in there that suits you.

There's a range of topics, so you can choose what is important to you at any time, and I'll just share my screen and jump into the toolkit. But before I do, I just wanted to draw your attention to our mailbox on the screen; employermarketing@royallondon.com. And just to say, if you ever have any feedback, if you feel that there's anything missing from the toolkit, please do drop us a note because we want to continually enhance this to make sure it works for you and your people.

So if you haven't used our toolkit before, I shall show you where to find it.

When you're on the employer website, on the home page, the easiest way to access the toolkit is through this button here. And this will bring you to all of the ready-made campaign material that you can use to talk to your employees.

The top four boxes here are actually our most commonly used campaigns. So you might want to start with general pension awareness, helping your employees understand how their pension works. You might want to introduce the mobile app, getting your employees logged in, looking at their plan value, where it's invested and using the tools like the one that we've just seen today. They might want to think about any other pensions and if it's right for them transferring into their Royal London pension and I will go in to look at the financial wellbeing material.

Just to say the list goes on, whether it's salary exchange you want to talk about or another, really common one, is encouraging your employees to nominate or update their beneficiaries.

So as we're talking about financial wellbeing today, we'll look at some of the material available here.

I mentioned e-mail templates. So you can use the wording in here to e-mail your employees to promote the financial wellbeing service we've just looked at, or the Financial Health Check component. Or there's lots of emails in here if you'd rather focus on the retirement planners that we have available for example.

There's posters, so if you just click here, you're able to download and print one of our posters. I really like this one because it is about the free financial wellbeing service, but it also has that QR code for your employees just to really easily scan and get straight in to download the mobile app.

There's the banners, there's a two sided leaflet which just contains a bit more information than our posters. And here you can actually share the video that we've just watched. Simply by, you can copy and paste this URL here and share that with your employees. And as Rory's mentioned, we're seeing, sort of, short videos resonate really well with a lot of our members.

The pages often talk about, you know, next best topics and I really would encourage you to have a look around the toolkit. Think about the topics that might be important to you, and even earmark some of the campaigns for the future. You might want to sort of start building up a communication plan for yourself because we do find that that ongoing drum beat of communication really does help to boost member engagement.

So we are going to move on to the Q and A section. But firstly I just wanted to also show you our help centre here. There is quick links to lots of helpful guides, but I'll just go on to the homepage of our help centre. And the reason I wanted to show you this is because after our last webinar, and some of the questions that you submitted in advance, were around using your online dashboard. And we've just recently added a new section here with ‘how to’ videos to help you with this.

So if you ever have any queries on any of the tasks you're trying to complete, I would suggest you come in here and have a look at some of our helpful ‘how to’ videos. So there's one around making contributions, if it's adding new workers, completing those tasks on your dashboard, assessing your workforce, payroll updates, managing the workforce and also telling us about leavers. So, it is a really good first port of call for any support that you may need.

OK. So with that, we are also going to move into the Q and A section now, starting with the questions that we've seen today and there is a few on financial wellbeing. So I thought we'd come to you for these, Jamie. You talked about the health check score. So what is the typical or average score you're seeing coming through our Financial Health Check?

Oh, good question. So we see a wide range of scores as you'd expect. The average score we see across scheme members is about 63 out of 100. I'd say actually, yeah, relatively positive. I've had a similar score myself, but also potential room for improvement.

Great. And another one, so what happens if employees change job or they stop paying in?

Yeah okay. Yeah, so in short, nothing. So the financial wellbeing service is a sort of always on component of our workplace proposition. So long as the person remains a customer of Royal London, they will continue to have access to our financial wellbeing service.

Brilliant. And what's the most common way you're seeing employees using the service?

Yeah. So the most popular accessory is very much our mobile app. That's where we can see the most traction and I guess maybe tying in with what you were saying earlier, Alana, just kind of highlights the importance of promoting the mobile app. It's another reason to download Royal London's mobile app. But on top of that, where we see real traction, irrespective of channel, is actually when we're really utilising your voice as an employer and working in partnership to promote these services. So again, I would encourage you all to utilise the great employer communications toolkit, which Alana has just highlighted. Because that's where we really drive employee engagement, utilising those sorts of materials and working in partnership to do that.

Yeah, no, I would agree. I was speaking to our Communication Specialist in the team and she was saying that she would often encourage our employers to start with a bit the mobile app promotion campaign, get people into the app and a couple of months later, she likes to follow up with FinWell specifically as a reminder for those that haven't downloaded it, but also reason to get back in and visit the app. So that's interesting, that's the way we see people accessing it.

OK, we've had another really good question I think, especially because we've talked about the communications that we at Royal London send to employees if we have  their e-mail addresses. So Ross I was hoping you could help when employers are asking, how do they provide us with employees e-mail addresses?

Yeah. Thanks, Alana. Again, a very good question, because ideally it's important to provide us with your employers e-mail addresses. Whether it's when you add a new member to the scheme or when you update the dashboard using the update worker tool. If you need any help with adding new workers or using the update worker tool, you can utilise our ‘How to add workers to a scheme’ video and ‘Managing your workforce’ video held on the online service dashboard video web page, which Alana kindly shared the details earlier. And we'll also share link in the e-mail that follows this webinar.

I'll also point out by providing an e-mail address for new scheme members, it means any members who have agreed to receive marketing from us will get a wider digital offering of communications, helping them to stay up to date with their pension. For example, they'll receive a video pension statement, be included in our monthly employee newsletter, the Pelican Post, and be the first to hear about any developments like our newly launched pension welcome webinars. And specifically for new scheme members, they'll also receive our automated welcome emails.

It's really just another way to engage your employees with their pension and help them value the benefit that you're providing as the employer.Brilliant.

No, I would definitely echo the benefits you pulled out there, especially the welcome journey with that new webinar that we're inviting your members to just to find out straight from the start, more about how their pension works and

how they can get the most out of it.

Great. Well now I thought we would cover some of the questions you submitted in advance and the key topics there were around submitting contributions, re-enrolment and opting out. Again, I think this will be for yourself, Ross.

So if I'm not using salary exchange, how should I be deducting employee contributions?

OK, so if you're not using salary exchange, you'll be using what's known as relief at source for pension deductions. So what that means is Royal London will apply 20% tax relief to any employee contribution. So essentially your contribution submission should always take account of this. The easiest way to calculate the employee contribution to be paid is to remember, you as the employer only need to pay 80%.

So I'll explain further on that.

As the employer, you deduct tax from the employees taxable UK earnings as normal.
Then you'll deduct the debt or also known as the Basic Rate tax pension contribution. But remember this is from the after tax pay and this is the contribution that you'll upload to the dashboard each month. Royal London will then gross up the pension contribution for basic tax rate and claim the 20% tax relief direct from HM Revenue and Customs, or more commonly known as HMRC.

It's also so important to make sure that under this method you're deducting employee contributions from after tax pay. If you're using this method and deduct them from the pre-tax pay, this will result unfortunately in the member receiving tax relief twice - once from you and then again when Royal London applies them to their plan.

So you can see how mistakes can happen. That's why it's crucial that employee contributions are deducted correctly so that tax relief is only applied once and avoids you having to repay any excess tax relief claimed on employee contributions.

Lastly, I'll just point out that for employees who pay higher or additional rate tax, i.e. above the 20% relief, they need to claim any additional tax relief direct from HMRC through their Self Assessment tax return. And also for employees who aren't eligible for tax relief they'll contribute the full amount from their monthly pay.

Thanks, Ross. That's really helpful. And we're continuing with the topic of contribution monitoring. So what should I provide when submitting my monthly contribution schedule and I'm asked for ‘earnings in the contribution period’?

Yeah. So basically the information that we need is a workers pensionable earnings for the relevant contribution period. This should be the earnings that you've used to calculate the contribution based on your schemes definition of pensionable pay. So for example, if the definition of pensionable pay is qualifying earnings, you'll need to exclude earnings below the earnings limit as well as, if relevant, remembering not to include any earnings above the upper earnings limit.

If using salary exchange for contributions, you'll need to provide us with the workers pre-salary exchange pensionable earnings.

OK. And another one is, we pay monthly contributions by Direct Debit. What is the deadline to submit the contribution schedule by?

OK. Thanks, Alana. Yeah. So the deadline to submit the contribution, making sure the funds are received by the 22nd of the month following the deduction. For example, May payroll deduction should be paid to the provider by the 22nd of June.
Following that, depending on weekends or bank holidays, this will impact what date the contribution schedule should be processed. Generally speaking, if you aim for the 16th or 17th of the following month to process the contribution this would allow for weekends and bank holidays.

I'll just touch on when you make contributions by Direct Debit, the contributions are invested on the date that we received the payment. So if you submit a contribution, for example, on the 20th of the month and it's due to be collected on the 25th, the money will be invested on the collection date and that's what'll show on the members policies.

And it's also worth pointing out, that when you make contributions by Direct Debit, you as the employer are in direct control of when the payments collected as the system lets you set the contribution collection date between three to ten days in the future of your contribution submission.

If you think you need further guidance on how to process these monthly contributions, you can again, utilise our dashboard videos. By having a look at our dashboard video web page, which again Alana shared earlier and will also be shared in emails following the webinar.

Brilliant. And so how long is it after the contributions are submitted that the employees can see it in their own accounts?

So in short, payments will usually show on the employees plans within 24 hours of the payment being collected from your bank. But again, it'll always reflect the original paid date.

OK. So we're moving on to the re-enrolment and opt outs questions now. So for employees re-enrolled automatically but they actually want to opt out, can they do that within the same month so that we don't have to pay deductions?

Yeah. So on that point, the only time when you do not deduct a contribution for a re-enrolled employee is when you've received a valid opt out notice before the payroll has run for the pay period that contributions restart from.

It's important to remember a valid opt out notice has to be in writing and received by you within the opt out window.

So on the flip side of that, when you are choosing your re-enrolment date, you should take your payroll cut off into account.

OK. And lastly, is it true that an employee can opt out of the pension scheme directly using the Royal London website and if so, how would the employer be notified?

Yeah, again, so touching on my previous point. So it is easy for employees to opt out. We do offer an online or telephone opt out service again, which is included in our joining packs for automatic enrolment schemes. Our dashboard will flag any opt outs through the tasks on payroll update tabs. You'll always be notified. Again, if you're unsure our video ‘Updating your payroll’ held on the dashboard video page will help guide you through this.

Brilliant. Well, sounds like the videos are going to help with a lot of the questions that we received. So that's really great. Well brilliant. Thank you for that Ross. And thanks, Rory and Jamie for sharing your insights and the tools that we have available to help employees.

So we really hope you found this valuable and please do share any feedback in the follow up emails around how we can continue to support you with your workplace pension and your employees with their financial wellbeing.

Thank you.

Thanks everyone.

Thanks everyone.

Thank you.