Benefits Guru’s 2024 workplace pension and auto-enrolment ratings reveal strong pensions market

In what has turned out to be a record year for gold awards, the latest Benefits Guru ratings have demonstrated the strength of the pensions market.

Today, Benefits Guru announces its tenth annual Workplace Pensions and Auto Enrolment ratings following Pension Awareness week. This year’s ratings have a record number of overall gold awards, which demonstrates the industry’s strength within the pensions market.

Benefits Guru’s analysis has over 12,000 data points, and each year it includes ten categories of special interest or relevance. The annual ratings are designed to assist advisers and employers in their decision-making process and highlight which providers perform strongest in different areas of their pension propositions.

Jason Green, Chief Commercial Officer at Benefits Guru commented; “We structure our ratings to not only give an overall score, but also rate the ten underlying categories. The industry benchmark is now so high, but the real detail of each provider’s strengths is shown at the individual category level. We need to look beyond the overall score and drill into the detail which has a very diverse set of results, showing the different strengths across provider offerings.”

Nine providers have been awarded overall gold awards across 24  product offerings. This includes a new entry for Aegon’s TargetPlan GPP offering.

Standard Life’s Group Flexible Retirement Plan was the only offering  to achieve a clean sweep of overall gold awards, and underlying gold awards in all sub-categories across both the Workplace Pension and Auto-Enrolment Ratings. 

In addition to benchmarking against existing criteria, such as member app & portals and auto-enrolment functionality, this year saw the introduction of additional benchmarking criteria. These included At Retirement Member Support, in which all providers achieved a gold rating and Understanding Scheme & Member Outcomes, which saw only eight providers receiving gold awards out of the ten providers rated. The ratings also looked at measuring Member Engagement, which saw more diverse scoring among providers.

An area that saw weaker performance among some providers this year was the Member Engagement benchmark with only five providers achieving a gold rating.

Cushon, Nest and The People’s Partnership asked to not be included in this year’s rating.

Jason Green further added“This year’s exceptional scores reflect how providers are constantly developing and improving their offerings to ensure the best outcomes for their members.

“The overall standard is very high, which reflects the number of gold awards this year, but it is important to look at subcategories because of the nuances that define the pensions sector.  It’s due to these nuances that the Benefits Guru Workplace Pensions and Auto-Enrolment Ratings analyses over 12,000 data points, to best equip advisers and employers with the knowledge to select the most appropriate scheme for members.”

The full ratings can be found at BenefitsGuru.co.uk – FTRC’s insights information site for advisers, employers and providers in the workplace pensions market.

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