Aegon and Aviva have picked up nine gold medals between them in FTRC’s 2018 annual product and operational ratings for workplace pensions and auto-enrolment (AE).
The financial research consultant said the ratings were designed to assist advisers and employers in their decision-making process, by showing which providers had the greatest strengths in different areas of their propositions.
This year’s ratings, it added, included “the largest provider participation to date”, benchmarking 12 separate pension solutions, from seven providers.
Other solutions gaining gold-medal recognition in the survey came from Royal London, Salvus and Scottish Widows. The People’s Pension and other offerings from Salvus and Scottish Widows gained silver medals while Nest was awarded bronze in both the workplace pension and AE categories.
According to FTRC, Standard Life and True Potential asked not to be rated this year while Legal & General and NOW: Pensions failed to respond to the survey.
FTRC head of workplace research Jason Green said: “As new auto-enrolment business is coming to an end, schemes that have been in place for the last six years will have accumulated sizable assets and will be attractive to other pension providers.”
He added: “The granularity of our 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.
“Our 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. We have created these ratings to help employers and advisers make the right decisions in choosing the correct pension provider for their members.”
Adviser priorities
In addition to an overall rating, the providers were rated in a number of sub-categories to reflect the areas advisers see as most important when comparing workplace pension propositions.
For workplace pensions, these included: product offering and administration; investment and fund options; record keeping and governance; scheme set-up; and communications.
For auto-enrolment, these included: proposition design and preparation service; platform infrastructure; data ownership and protection; member categorisation and reporting; and premium collection.
“The sub-categories analysed reflect the features selected and prioritised by advisers running thousands of online comparisons using FTRC’s Quality Analyser software,” said Green.
Adviser firms can access the full ratings and individual provider factsheets for free at www.advisersoftware.com