Workplace pension provider Smart Pension has seen the number of employers transferring in from other schemes double in the first few months of 2018.
Claire Altman, Smart Pension's head of financial services, said the provider achieved more transfers in January, in both volume and value terms, than in the whole of 2017.
She said: "We also have a significant pipeline of enquiries. We are looking at a 100 per cent increase in 2018 compared to 2017."
Smart Pension co-founder and managing director, Will Wynne, revealed the provider, with almost half a million members, wasn’t predicting such an increase.
He said: "We weren’t expecting that, but employers and their advisers are telling us that they’ve simply had enough of the badly-built, time-intensive platforms they originally chose and they want to switch to a platform that’s been purpose-built for workplace pensions, using the latest technology."
Ms Altman told FTAdviser one of the reasons for employers choosing the provider was its use of technology.
Smart Pension members are now able to use Amazon's Echo family of home hub smart speaker devices to ask several questions about their savings, and make changes to their pension contributions.
Soon, the provider will also launch its own app, Ms Altman revealed.
The last companies to join auto-enrolment had to do so by 1 February, the end of the staging period.
Government-backed workplace pension scheme the National Employment Savings Trust (Nest), for example, saw a record of more than 8,350 new employer sign-ups in the last week of January.
Auto-enrolment providers are now getting ready for the increase of minimum pension contributions, which are currently set at 2 per cent – 1 per cent each for employer and employee.
This will increase to 5 per cent in April, with the employee paying 3 per cent.
One year later, it will increase again to 8 per cent, with the worker paying 5 per cent.
A total of £17bn a year will be going into workplace pensions by 2019 to 2020 because of auto-enrolment.
maria.espadinha@ft.com
