Providing a pension aligned with Attest’s company values

Attest is a consumer research platform that makes it simple and fast to access customer insight from your target audiences and at scale. Their platform uses machine learning and artificial intelligence applications to improve data quality and analysis. Ultimately, this helps clients make better decisions.

Founded in London in 2015, the company has raised $85 million in funding to date and just opened an office in New York.

Attest’s challenge

Attest were struggling with their previous provider - the ‘out of the box’ solution just wasn’t suitable for a larger organisation and as their headcount was rapidly increasing, it was time to rethink their pension scheme.

The team also found the Nest experience clunky and basic pension functionality like automated tax relief and salary sacrifice weren’t on offer. Higher earners were having to complete their own tax returns, which wasn’t sustainable as the business grew.

Penfold's solution

Attest were looking for an efficient, tech solution to their pension provider that aligned with their values. The finance team were accustomed to using a suite of tech-enabled tools to drive efficiencies and the contrast between these and the Nest product was stark.

Coming across Penfold, they were impressed with the transparent fee structure and the app-based employee experience which enabled the team to have full visibility over how their pension was performing and where it was invested. It also enabled a much better ‘self-serve’ culture which was key to creating a more efficient pension process for the HR and Finance teams.

As part of the onboarding process, Penfold ran a series of ‘Pensions 101’ workshops with the Attest team to introduce the key aspects of their new pension as well as provide information on how they can plan towards a comfortable retirement. Topics covered include how much you should be saving, whether a pension transfer is a good idea and an explanation of how salary sacrifice can save you money.

“The response from the team has been overwhelmingly positive since the switchover to Penfold. The onboarding session run by the Penfold team had strong attendance and was followed up with lots of questions on the dedicated Slack channel. It’s great to see the wider team engaging with such an important benefit.”

Pension set up:

• 5% employee, 3% employer contributions
• Contributions calculated on Total Earnings
• Salary Sacrifice - Default for everyone (employees can opt out)

The results

The team is now on ‘total earnings’ instead of ‘qualifying earnings’ and salary sacrifice is the default with an option to opt out.

The Attest team now has access to multiple investment options, including a sustainable and shariah fund, which was a key consideration for choosing a new provider.

Strong engagement from the team at the onboarding workshop and in the Penfold <> Attest slack channel.

Overwhelmingly positive feedback across the team demonstrated by these engagement stats:

• 20% of Attest’s team have logged into the Penfold app.
• 46% of Attest’s team have requested a pension transfer to Penfold.