House of Fraser has closed its defined benefit (DB) pension scheme to future accrual and launched a group personal pension (GPP) plan in preparation for auto-enrolment.
The GPP will be provided by Aviva. Johnson Fleming will manage the scheme’s administration, governance reporting and auto-enrolment compliance through its platform inform equip.
The GPP, which was launched in July, will be rolled out over several months. Members of the closed DB pension scheme have been invited to join first, followed by members of the stakeholder scheme. The final group will be the rest of the employee population, which the department store intends to enrol ahead of its staging date in April 2013.
Suzanne Willshire, pensions manager at House of Fraser, said: “We wanted to ensure our strong brand and values are instilled through the pension scheme, and worked with the communications team at Johnson Fleming to create bespoke literature and engaging launch campaign materials.
“We have also developed a bespoke pension microsite to enable all employees to manage their retirement planning online and included group presentations and individual meetings as part of our structured communications plan.
“Ensuring the same scheme could be used for all employees was very important to us for several reasons; not least to reflect our work-as-one-team value.”
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