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When Newcastle Building Society chose a new benefits platform, one of the key consderations was to prioritise functionality.
Ben Thomas, head of reward at the building society, has been involved in choosing a number of benefits platforms over the years. “Keep [employees] front and centre when choosing a new platform,” he says. “It’s easy to get carried away by thinking too much about the technical detail and what the reporting functionality looks like. But really the success of the platform is about [employees’] adoption of it. So, choosing something that’s intuitive, straightforward and that you’re not going to have to do lots of training on is key.”
Being able to use a single, multifunctional platform is also useful. Thomas and his team chose provider Zest’s platform in April 2024 because it can offer flexible benefits within it and issue total reward statements, as well as posting discounts and information about other benefits and policies to Newcastle Building Society’s around 1,800 employees.
It is important that a benefits platform that is easy for the in-house team to use, adds Thomas. “One of the reasons I like our current platform is there’s the ability to make updates and changes to the platform quickly and easily, directly and in real time.”
Thomas recommends that employers carry out their own due diligence when selecting a benefits platform. To avoid any risk of falling foul of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), employers should scrutinise whether a platform uses any third parties to process data, and look at where the chosen benefits platform is storing information. “From our perspective, ideally this would be in the UK or within Europe,” says Thomas. “Storing data outside those regions is something we have to explore really closely within our due diligence process, because we want to protect our colleagues’ data.”
A platform that had a good grip of benefits complexities was also considered to be important, especially around technical subjects like salary sacrifice. “I’d want to understand how they understand salary sacrifice, and how they explain that to [employees],” says Thomas. “It is a technical subject; I’d want to see that they could express the cost of the benefits in an intuitive way, whereby it recognises [employees’] tax and national insurance (NI) and automatically takes them off. I’d also really want to explore that they understand salary sacrifice is a contractual change, and they’ve got the ability to record that in their system, because that’s important from a legal point of view.”
