Finance & Technology Research Centre’s Quality Analyser comparison tool has been updated to now identify which product providers will accept individual auto-enrolment cases.
This summer sees the third phase of auto-enrolment, where hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses are reaching their deadlines to comply.
Unprecedented numbers of employers are now staging, in a process that will continue until February 2018.
Many small employers will seek financial advice to ensure they choose the right scheme, so F&TRC has introduced new functionality to its workplace pension comparison tools, to assist advisers and their clients.
Individual employer specific reports can now be produced and the tool will also filter out providers that have scheme acceptance restrictions in place – which make them unsuitable for certain employers – to created a shortlist.
The firm argued that while many pension providers fiercely competed to win the pension schemes of larger scale businesses, for valid commercial reasons some of the same providers are now imposing limits and conditions that make them less attractive to some smaller and micro employers.
Ian McKenna, director of F&TRC, explained that this is where master trust, with simple value propositions might seem the obvious answer, although he added that equally a number of more traditional group pension providers are still offering high quality options to small employers.
“Our comparison system, driven by a huge amount of provider supplied propositional data, offers advisers a powerful research and due diligence service to help address what would otherwise be a very time consuming and perhaps daunting process.
“With the filter questions we’ve developed, Quality Analyser allows advisers to get to recommendation stage much quicker than they would otherwise be able to, significantly reducing the cost to advisers providing auto enrolment advice.”
The service can be accessed free of charge by adviser members of the Personal Finance Society, while bespoke versions are also available to larger firms.
peter.walker@ft.com
