Employee benefits provider, Zest, is partnering with Newcastle Building Society, one of the UK’s largest building societies, to meet employee demand for more flexible and personalised benefits.
Having joined the Zest benefits platform, Newcastle Building Society can provide visibility to its employees of all their benefits and encourage them to review these on a regular basis. The move also enables it to support its colleagues in actively reviewing their pension contributions.
Since launch, over 11 per cent of colleagues have increased their pension contributions with an average contribution of four per cent of salary, exceeding expectations.
In conjunction with launching the new benefits platform Newcastle Building Society sought to increase its benefits offering and launched several new benefits including a new Colleague Mortgage benefit, which provides colleagues with a competitive mortgage provided through the Society, proving popular with over five per cent of colleagues already signed up to this benefit over the past six months.
The partnership will enable Newcastle Building Society colleagues to access benefits all in one place through Zest’s platform and help them when selecting benefits, enhancing value for money and boosting competitiveness when attracting new talent.
Matt Russell, CEO of Zest, commented: “Partnering with Newcastle Building Society has already empowered hundreds of their colleagues to increase their retirement savings by making it simpler than ever to engage with their benefits packages. Employers are increasingly looking for new ways to meet the differing needs of their employees and need an intuitive, easy-to-use platform that delivers enhanced value and supports firms to offer personalised benefits without requiring huge resource to administer.”
The partnership also provides additional insight to help employers understand which benefits are working for which colleagues, enabling them to tailor benefits for different groups to increase their usefulness and ultimately, take up by colleagues.
Helping employees ‘take control of their benefits’
Newcastle Building Society saw 87 per cent of colleagues log into the benefits platform in the first three weeks, and 99 per cent of colleagues have logged in over the past six months.
Ben Thomas, head of rewards at Newcastle Building Society, also said: “Providing colleagues with their benefits in one place, on our Colleague Reward platform provided by Zest, has been a step change for Reward at Newcastle Building Society.
“The new platform has allowed us to make it clear and simple to colleagues what their Reward package is, through features such as our total reward statements. The platform has also made it simple for colleagues to make changes and take control of their benefits. Features such as ‘single sign-on’ direct into the platform and direct integrations with other services, including our Colleague Recognition portal, have made it really easy for colleagues to access the information they need quickly and easily.”
Newcastle Building Society is the latest addition to Zest’s client base across the UK, as employers increasingly look for ways to improve their offering and stand out against other employers in what is a competitive employee market.
Across Zest’s customer base, there has been a five per cent increase on employee engagement compared to the same period March in 2023, and a 50 per cent increase of people accessing the platform for the first time.
