Auto Enrolment - Employer charges

With such dramatic increases in companies staging, the auto enrolment/workplace pensions market place is having to evolve; fast!

To give you an idea of the scale of change:

Quarter 4 2015: 16,100 firms due to stage

Quarter 1 2016: 110,000 firms due to stage

Furthermore, around 900,000 employers who are being brought into auto-enrolment only have one or two workers. Concerns have been raised that many of these employers will have little or no previous pensions experience. The Government recently launched an awareness drive aimed at smaller employers featuring "Workie" (the big purple monster).

It feels to us like the market place as a whole has recognised this and is trying hard to adapt and improve the propositions available to employers. 

For the market to do this successfully it needs to develop solutions that can cope with the influx of employers staging, employer fees have to be brought in to enable this. 

Now Pensions has received a lot of press for having a consultation to introduction a month charge for employers and Pensions Pension have announced the introduction of a £500 set-up fee. There are no figures yet but NEST ask employers, when setting up a scheme, how they would pay a fee if they were to introduce one. This seems like a strong indication where they are going. Many of the private providers charge too, Standard Life for example charge small firms £100 per month. 

Automation of the process as much as possible increases the numbers a provider can support and minimises the burden on the employer. Hopefully more solutions and more automation will mean that all 1,800,000 staging in the next few years can do so with as little stress as possible. 

At Parsonage we have tried to achieve this and to bring a better solution to the market:

• Simple and clear 

• Great fund management

• Cost effective 

• Highly automated