Legal & General has auto enrolled over a half a million new members (525,000) into company pension schemes since staging commenced in October last year. The numbers are well ahead of expectations and take the total number of pension scheme members administered by the company past the 1 million mark.
Many of the companies choosing Legal & General for their Automatic Enrolment (AE) process had their staging dates early in the process, and many had existing pension assets they wished to consolidate. As a result the influx of new schemes has driven AUA on the Legal & General WorkSave platform to £7.9bn (end Q3 2013) – up 49% on the first 9 months of 2012 (£5.3bn).
The higher than expected numbers are due to lower than anticipated opt out rates, particularly among younger employees (i.e. those under the age of 30), which are well below Dept. for Work and Pensions original assumptions.
John Pollock, Legal & General Assurance Society CEO said: “We have delivered a low cost, effective AE process and this is being well received by employers and employees alike. Passing our half a million milestone is a major contribution to the nation's longer term savings' needs as well as a significant percentage of the TPR's registration data for numbers auto enrolled to date.
To have delivered such large scale in what is a relatively short time in the pension world reflects the robustness of our WorkSave platform. Clients completing AE already range from among the largest employers to companies with around 250 eligible staff members.
We will be forging ahead with auto enrolment for SMEs over the coming months as we prepare for the next phase of staging in 2014. Our investment in straight through processing and online tools means we are well positioned to deal with this and deliver our 0.5% price promise to all new AE default scheme members.”
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