TCS helps NEST introduce a simple, intuitive, low cost digital platform to enable employers to provide workers access to a workplace pension scheme which facilitated over one million enrolments.
The Customer: NEST Corporation (National Employment Savings Trust) is a non-departmental public body (NDPB) that operates at arm's length from the UK government and is accountable to Parliament through the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
NEST was set up in 2010 as a defined contribution trust-based national workplace pension scheme. It enables employers to automatically enroll eligible workers in line with their duties under the UK Workplace Pension Reforms, which came into force from October 2012. It is expected to enroll between two to five million members by 2018 and grow into one of the largest workplace pension providers in the UK.
Business Challenge: The NEST scheme, created under the UK Pensions Act of 2008 to encourage workers to save for retirement, facilitates automatic enrolment into a workplace pension scheme to achieve this objective. Automatic enrolment, which requires employers to automatically enroll eligible workers into a qualifying workplace pension scheme starting in October 2012, presented a significant change in workplace pension provisioning. To meet the needs of low to moderate earners and help businesses of all sizes comply with the regulation, NEST needed to introduce a simple, intuitive and low cost digital platform.
The short timeline for introducing the digital platform was exacerbated by NEST's desire to test the scheme with voluntary employers well ahead of the regulations coming into effect.
TCS’ Solution: To address NEST's key objectives, we provide scheme administration services that include setting up the IT platform, infrastructure hosting, establishing operational processes for front and back office operations and overarching governance.
Our highly customizable, secure and scalable TCS Insurance BaNCS services is the heart of the solution. Readily customizable Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) products from leading vendors form the periphery of the solution.
Our solution supports all mainstream business processes including employer participation, enrolling members, collecting contributions, managing accounts, accessing savings and passing funds to the fund administrator.
The scheme, designed to enable self-service, provides the following benefits:
Operational efficiency: Our solution promotes paperless operations with a high level of e-enablement and 'Straight Through Processing' (STP). Processes are built on the 'one and done' principle, reducing the number of human touch points to a minimum, thereby keeping cost low.
Multi-channel delivery: We deliver the scheme predominantly over digital channels including a web portal, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or telephony, web chat, mail room, email and secure messaging, with a fall back capability of handling paper based interactions. A TCS managed contact centre handles both electronic and paper interactions.
Security and scalability: Our solution is scalable by design and can address volumes exceeding the projected two to five million members by 2018. We deliver scheme administration services from our ISO 27001 certified locations, the benchmark for information security.
Speed to market and flexibility: The solution's flexible architecture helped us launch the scheme to voluntary
employers in July 2011 and incorporate feedback in time for the automatic enrolment deadline of October 2012.
Business Benefits: As a solution partner, scheme administrator and business advisor, TCS has furthered the scheme's success. We have harnessed expertise from across the organization to help deliver and run the scheme seamlessly, while ensuring quality at optimum costs and by leveraging our strategic alliances with leading vendors.
By virtue of the scheme design, its customer centric approach coupled with a multi-channel strategy for scheme interaction NEST has been able to:
Realize a lower than envisaged opt-out rate, averaging at well below 10 percent
Complete the processing of over 97 percent of opt-outs over digital channels, which would have been a burden on employers, if not for the availability of online, telephony and IVR channels
Deliver over three million member communications and one million employer communications over electronic channels.
Resolve more than 40 percent of the calls to the contact center through IVR without any human intervention.