Aegon, Aviva, Royal London and Scottish Widows have all received gold medal ratings for their workplace pensions.
Financial research consultants, F&TRC, have compiled their annual ratings of both workplace pension and auto-enrolment products, designed to assist advisers and employers in their decision making process.
Each provider has been awarded either a gold, silver or bronze medal for both their overall proposition. These research also assesses each provider in nine key underlying sub-categories.
For workplace pensions sub-categories include investment and fund options, product offering and administation, record keeping and governance, online facilities, at retirement options, as well as AE functionality and processes.
By comparison the AE ratings solely focus on the quality of functionality of a provider’s offering in this space alone. This includes looking at its platform infrastructure, data ownership and protection, managing employer duties and premium collection.
The full list of gold, silver and bronze medal ratings for workplace pensions are given below.
F&TRC head of workplace research Jason Green says: “It is interesting to see how the results cluster various types of workplace pension provider.
“The granularity of research enables us to identify significant variation in the level of services provided by different types of workplace pension provider, with firms operating in the contract-based arena generally delivering richer support services. There is some evidence that where an organisation operates in both the contract and master trust space they make these additional services available for both types of arrangement.”
He adds: “These ratings are designed to provide insight for employers and advisers in order to help them understand the different operational capabilities and product features between various workplace pensions propositions.”
Bowman Pension Consulting adviser Mike Lacey says: “The annual ratings provide an overview of provider offerings and the quality analyser tool allows us to drill down into the finer detail and produce our own benchmarking reports as we now look to address the secondary AE market”
- Gold medal workplace pensions: Aegon Workplace ARC, Aegon Master Trust, Aviva Designer, Aviva MyMoney, Aviva MyMoney Master Trust, Royal London Scottish Widows
- Silver medal workplace pensions: Salvus Master Trust, Scottish Widows Master Trust, Scottish Widows GSIPP, The People’s Pension
- Bronze medal workplace pensions: Nest
F&TRC says both Standard Life and True Potential asked not to be rated while neither Legal & General nor Now: Pensions responded to the survey which formed part of this research.