Client Success Story: Arriva

I’m Ian Kirk, I’m Arriva’s group pensions manager.  

Arrive provides, essentially public transport to passengers within the UK and mainland Europe. From my own perspective, my focus is in the UK. 

The group pensions team is a team of 2. We have about 12,000 / 13,000 members in the plan. 

What were the main challenges Arriva faced regarding employee’s financial wellbeing before implementing a strategy? 

The biggest problem was that, because of the nature of the business we’re in, a lot of our workers are frontline workers. So the easiest case is bus drivers- they’re out on the roads a lot of the time, irregular shifts so there’s no consistency on what their working pattern actually is. The vast majority of our employees don’t have work email addresses so it’s very difficult to communicate with them, especially communicate directly with them. 

What were the primary objectives of the financial wellbeing strategy and why was it important to address these specific objectives? 

Our key objective was really just to start from ground 0 up. People didn’t even know that they were in a pension scheme at times. So we needed to make sure they knew they were in a scheme, knew what the scheme was and got to know the standard life brand, because that was their provider. Then its understanding and valuing what the company is contributing to that scheme. And then what they could do to enhance their retirement outcomes. 

Can you describe the multi-channel strategy implemented by Arriva and Standard Life? 

So our story really began in 2019, through working with Standard Life we were aware we had visit days from Standard Life reps to come into our sites to help educate people, provide Q&A, guidance that kind of thing. We then hit Covid, so going into sites just wasn’t possible. I suppose what covid allowed us to do was, covid meant that people in depots were starting to talk to each other on things like Whatsapp, we were getting new communication channels developing quite naturally, so that was our starting point so avenues were opening and we were could hammer home the message that we were coming and people would be ready for us to come. So that was really the starting point and that was around 2022. Further down the line the UK bus business needed to do something about communicating with staff so invested in an app called blink. Blink is very much like a workplace Facebook. So that’s where we would say ‘Tottenham garage, we’re coming so see you in 2 months’ time,’ and have regular boosts of that post so its always coming to the top of the stream. That was a game changer for us because we then, didn’t really need those email addresses anymore, people were using blink day to day just for working purposes and therefore we had that accessibility straight away.  

What improvements did you observe in employee engagement with the pension scheme and financial tools?  

The improvements were just huge, that we witnessed, so taking a simple case- so within the Standard Life app, people can nominate beneficiaries, and we have stats that standard life provide us on that. Back in 2022, I think it was something like 8% of our membership had actually nominated a beneficiary, now we’re into the 30%’s. In terms of registrations on the app, huge increase again, you know we’re now at the sort of 40% registrations. Within the microsite itself, 60% registrations, and it’s all regular logins. When we introduced the microsite onto the blink app, we quickly saw 1000’s and 1000’s of logins coming in on a daily basis which we just didn’t have. So we could see that there’s appetite from our employees to use and understand their pensions. So everything was just on the upward trend. 

How did the Standard Life app support your employees?  

I think the Standard Life app’s great, having used other financial/pensions apps I think it’s the best app that I’ve used. It’s really easy to use, very clear and does everything we need it to do. What we see with our staff, is that, I think there was a bit of nervousness about it- we have a wide range of employees in terms of age so the younger members, they’re fine with it, they can log on fine, but once you start to get into the 40yr old/50 yrs old there’s a bit of hesitancy to register, to log on, but once their in, its just there and a lot of them have banking apps so it’s no different to that. Very simple and just very effective and I think the app itself is brilliant, really really good.  

What role did in-person events play in engaging employees and how important is it to have standard life support the ongoing depots visit throughout the year?   

In terms of impact, I don’t think we’d be where we are now without the site visits. F2f is key to enhancing what we’re providing for our members. Just being able to show people what to do first hand, do it for them even, to help them get logged in. It’s just huge. It’s made such a big difference for them to be able to do what they want to do. Making sure that they have their pensions housekeeping in order. And make them feel happy and comfortable with what they’ve got. I think it’s really important Standard Life come on-site visits with us. Employees can see their pension provider on their home turf, ask them direct questions so they’re not just coming to the company, asking for help I think it just again enhances the experience for the members and also that bit of trust and faith you know, Standard Life are recognised as pensions people, the experts, so hearing things first hand from a Standard Life representative makes such a difference.