Benefits technology firm Zest has partnered with Newcastle Building Society to meet increased demand for more flexible and personalised benefits.
The society’s 1,750 employees can choose and flex benefits relevant to their personal situation via the platform. Since the tie-up 11 percent of employees have increased their pension contributions, boosting the average contribution to 4 percent.
The building society wanted to move to Zest’s system to give employees greater visibility of their benefits and to encourage them to review what they had more regularly. This includes encouraging colleagues to actively review their pension contributions.
In tandem with the new platform, the society increased its employee benefits by launching a new colleague mortgage benefit. This offers a competitive mortgage provided through the society. It has been popular so far and more than 5 percent of colleagues have signed up for it in the past six months.
Newcastle Building Society said that 87 percent of colleagues logged into the benefits platform in the first three weeks, and 99 percent have logged in over the past six months.
Zest’s platform also provides insight to help employers understand which benefits are working for which colleagues, allowing them to tailor benefits for different groups to increase their usefulness and ultimately, take up.
Matt Russell, CEO at Zest, said: “Partnering with Newcastle Building Society has already empowered hundreds of their colleagues to increase their retirement savings by making it simpler than ever to engage with their benefits packages. Employers are increasingly looking for new ways to meet the differing needs of their employees and need an intuitive, easy-to-use platform that delivers enhanced value and supports firms to offer personalised benefits without requiring huge resources to administer.”
Ben Thomas, head of reward at Newcastle Building Society, said: “Providing colleagues with their benefits in one place, on our colleague reward platform provided by Zest, has been a step change for reward. The new platform has allowed us to make it clear and simple to colleagues what their reward package is, through features such as our total reward statements. The platform has also made it simple for colleagues to make changes and take control of their benefits. Features such as ‘single sign on’ direct into the platform and direct integrations with other services, including our colleague recognition portal, have made it really easy for colleagues to access the information they need quickly and easily.”
