How better benefits helped Cuvva become a talent magnet

Cuvva is the leading flexible car insurance provider, making cars way more accessible for everyone, with policies starting from just one hour.  Over 900,000+ drivers are sharing cars through the Cuvva app daily.

Cuvva partnered with Penfold to help them engage and retain employees through a pension program. Their goal? To make pensions as effortless for their team as they've made car insurance for their users.

We spoke to Alex Gordon-Perkins, People Lead at Cuvva, on how Penfold has helped them over the past couple of years.

Cuvva's challenge

Cuvva is determined to create an amazing place to work, to attract superstars to their team and ensure the happiness of their existing employees.

Ensuring the team feels valued and has solid benefits is a key priority for Cuvva. One of which is making it super-simple for people to understand their pensions better.

“Traditionally, money is deducted from people's pay, and it goes off into the abyss, into some pension pot somewhere. Who knows how much is in there? Or how much is needed to stash away for retirement? And what does your saved-up nest egg really mean in terms of the pension you'll have to live on?,” said Alex.

Before teaming up with Penfold, Alex said that dealing with pension providers felt like being stuck in a time warp – clunky systems, baffling paperwork, loads of admin, and nothing making sense. Most of all, it was extremely time-consuming.

Time is an extremely limited resource for HR leads (especially in a startup). There are a lot of admin and regulations to keep abreast of, and that's on top of trying to spend time with your team and foster the human connections that make a workplace feel like a place you'd actually want to work at.

The solution

“Penfold is dramatically better than anything we've worked with before and has helped me by removing all of the admin that comes with pensions. ‘Saving time’ is one of the key benefits that encourages me to recommend it to others,” said Alex.

“It's fully integrated with our payroll software. And the team at Penfold deals with everything. So if there are any opt-outs, employee queries, any questions about regulations or what some pension jargon means, the Penfold team are available, accessible, and give clear answers in plain, easy-to-understand language that saves me from spending hours Googling things,” he said.

Alex cites another huge benefit of Penfold being that it is app-based: “A tool people can actually access and engage with, giving them the information to answer their questions.”

The app enables people to immediately get total visibility of their life after work and to clearly see how much has been saved, how much is forecast, and how to increase or decrease monthly payments. They can quickly see how much money they will actually need when they’re retired.

The Penfold team also translated complex jargon into simple language for his team.

“They were able to just make it make sense,” Alex said, describing how the Penfold team had gone into Cuvva’s office and presented on financial wellbeing, pensions and planning for the future.

“Our team was just in awe of the information they were getting. It was like nothing they'd ever heard before.”

The Results

“Penfold's been a huge success at Cuvva, with 88% of the company logging into the app to view their pensions,” Alex reports, adding that many have been using the calculator tool to change contributions and save for later life.

Because of the easy-to-understand information provided by Penfold, employees at Cuvva are engaging with their pensions, changing their contributions, choosing the pension plan they prefer and utilising salary sacrifice.

He credits the app for being incredibly easy to use – it means no more paper trail to manage and having to phone helplines and be on hold for hours.

“It presents itself in a really accessible, easy way where our employees can log in, see what they want to see, get the information they need and contact the team at Penfold if they need to.

Penfold is one of the tools I just could not live without” concludes Alex.