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– Service focuses on helping PE firms identify risks and opportunities in their target companies’ workplace pensions and employee benefits packages so they fully understand the associated costs of doing the deal
– Full lifecycle support from acquisition analysis to post-completion harmonisation and ongoing governance through to exit, allowing value creation to be quantified and delivered, and risks to be identified and mitigated.
– Wren Sterling has worked with several PE firms recently to harmonise portfolio schemes and create a template for future acquisitions
Wren Sterling, the leading national financial planning firm and workplace benefits consultancy has launched a new service designed to help private equity investors analyse risks and opportunities in workplace pension schemes and employee benefits packages.
Its Private Equity Services (Due Diligence & Post Completion) has been created on the back of rising demand from acquisitive businesses that need specialist support to help them streamline their portfolio companies’ workplace schemes. Initially, work was done in the post-completion phase once an issue had been identified, but Wren Sterling’s Due Diligence service is designed to identify issues and bring in solutions upstream.
Austin Hutchinson, Financial Planning Director at Wren Sterling said: “Workplace pensions and benefits can be a tough area to analyse if you’re not immersed in that world every day. Wren Sterling’s Workplace team is. We instinctively know what fair value looks like for our clients based on our daily interactions with product providers. We can quickly spot administrative errors or regulatory failings and importantly, fix them.
“However, the real value we offer PE firms, their portfolio businesses, and other acquiring firms, is making sense of the details. We pull out and compare the different pensions and benefits in place, identifying opportunities that can make a meaningful difference to capital value and the employee value proposition of target firms.”
Post-completion, Wren Sterling has been working with firms to implement changes and put a scalable, repeatable process in place.
Sarah Herd, Head of Workplace at Wren Sterling added: “We’ve experienced a real spike in demand for our services from the PE industry in recent years. Building through acquisition is an exciting growth story for everyone involved but it can leave a patchwork quilt of workplace pension schemes and benefits to manage.
“It can also create huge disparity between employees in the same organisation, so we work alongside HR Directors and consultants to harmonise benefits, going to market to secure the best prices and staying on hand to support future acquisition and integration projects.”
Initial due diligence services:
Pension Market Review & Alignment
An assessment of potential value creation arising from a market review and consolidation of existing schemes.
Salary Exchange Implementation
An assessment on each target / acquired entity to ascertain the cost savings and value creation from the implementation of salary exchange, with the objective to align and streamline where appropriate.
Group Risk Review & Alignment
An assessment of existing schemes to identify: potential cost synergies via consolidation into the acquisition group, the best possible outcomes for members, and where benefits may be aligned across all entities leading to a single scalable solution.
Post-completion services
Audit
Typically, we start with a pension scheme audit. Then we present our findings and recommendations, which includes suggested next steps for bringing schemes together.
Project planning
We support clients through the project, liaising with the chosen scheme provider and helping to manage its implementation and communication to affected employees.
Governance
We’re also support clients with ongoing scheme governance. This is an important regulatory duty, and we help trustees across the UK to discharge their duties.
For more information about Wren Sterling’s Private Equity Services, please visit: