DC consultancy for charities

Barnett Waddingham helps a number of its charity and not for profit (NFP) clients with their defined contribution (DC) pension arrangements.   

We can help you to design a new DC scheme that matches your culture and values, or to review an existing DC arrangement to ensure that it remains suitable for you and your employees.

We are a true independent consultant and not tied to any provider, vehicle, product, ideology or platform.

Our advice is always in the best interests of our clients and we strive to offer value for money and a cost effective service without compromising on service levels.

Our size, structure, and efficiency enable us to offer competitive fees whilst focusing on what is best for you. We are happy to keep our services light to suit your needs or to deliver a service that compliments those that a charity or NFP organisations may already receive from other third parties.

DC governance

GEM will enable you to identify the key cohorts across your employees and assess the make-up of the workforce based on age, affluence, location, job type and membership status.

Using GEM, we can help you forecast members’ benefits, benchmark contribution rates and provide further evidence to shape your thoughts on effective governance, investment and engagement strategies.

Our governance reviews are also designed to highlight all of the key information about your DC scheme and will draw attention to the following key areas that we believe to be important:

DC engagement

Communications to employees is an integral part of DC pensions and we are finding that many organisations are looking at how to engage with their employees to ensure they take positive action in relation to their pension arrangements and wider benefits/reward package. 

We can help deliver your DC engagement strategy using a combination of materials including annual pension newsletters, member joiner packs, employee workshops / presentations, webinars and pre-retirement courses.  This will allow you to promote education and key messages to employees around pension’s taxation issues, employee wellbeing and wider financial education (including shorter-term issues such as debt repayment, budgeting and short/medium-term saving).

DC consultancy

With the pensions environment constantly changing, we need to be responsive and innovative for our clients. Our team has won a number of awards and we have provided an overview of our other services and a summary of our DC consultancy approach below:

• analytical approach to understand your corporate risk and membership needs
• governance aimed at improving member outcomes and value for money
• bring knowledge, experience and market expertise
• strong, independent relationship with leading DC providers
• DC technical research
• Strength in depth with flexible support from over 40 DC specialists

Our DC consultancy approach extends beyond governance and engagement to other areas such as: mergers and acquisitions, scheme design changes, salary sacrifice, benchmarking, review of legacy schemes and AVC arrangements, consolidation, bulk transfers and wind-up of old pension schemes.