Tackling the pension payroll challenge

Restarting our year round events for EBCs and pension scheme advisers this spring gave us a welcome opportunity to reconnect with familiar faces across the community – and to share how we’re continuing to evolve the employer and member experience. 

Member engagement remains a major focus. Our pension app continues to open the way for people who want to better understand and manage their pension, with more than 330,000 app registrations last year. New tools and personalised support are helping members stay connected and make better informed decisions about their retirement savings. 

But member engagement is only one part of the story. For employers, operational efficiency matters just as much – especially when it comes to payroll and data management. 
 

Strengthening pension administration 

Employers need pension administration to run smoothly, with minimal friction and maximum reliability. The monthly payroll process is one of the most critical components. When it works well, it becomes invisible. When it doesn’t, it can create rework, delays, and potential risk. 

While 84% of employers say they’re satisfied with their current payroll process, up to 16% still encounter issues.* Most are caused by something deceptively simple: incomplete or inaccurate data such as missing or incorrect postcodes, mislabelled fields, or inconsistencies in Excel templates. For large pension schemes, even small errors can quickly become significant. 

Payroll integration – where an employer’s system connects directly to a provider’s platform – automates the entire process, saving time and reducing rework. It removes the need for manual uploads and eliminates validation issues via our data translation tool. We translate a lot of common mistakes but data integrity coming in is super important. 

We’ve been pioneering this with some of our very largest pension schemes which have more complex needs and are also comfortable investing in a system at their end that makes things easier and more secure using a software interface, validating data quickly and effortlessly.  

New joiners and member changes are automatically updated, and reports are generated showing any records that need attention so that employers know what to do, and when.  

Importantly, governance and compliance are improved with employers having a clear and accurate view of member contributions and in control of pension data. 
 

Real world impact 

The feedback we’ve had from two of our clients with large and complex arrangements using payroll integration with us shows how it can make a tangible difference. One 25,000member scheme has seen its monthly validation queries cut from around 2,500 to fewer than 40. It’s been a successful transformation for both the employer and administration teams. 

For an even larger scheme with more than 100,000 members, we’re working closely with the payroll provider to refine the integration build, ensuring the system delivers both resilience and scalability. 

Payroll integration won’t be the answer for every scheme or employer, as many smaller or simpler arrangements already have robust processes that run efficiently. In those cases, there’s no reason to invest in a system they don’t need – however, where the fit is right such as large and changing populations, the potential gains are hard to ignore.  

For employers with more complex needs, payroll integration is already proving its value, driven not by hype but by the real world need for accuracy, reliability and simplicity to genuinely lighten the load. 

*Source: Employer NPS survey 2025 results (Net Promoter Survey)