Moneyway FlexiBen – Employee Benefits Awards 2010

Employee benefits magazine announced the winners of the 2010 Employee Benefits Awards at a ceremony held in London, on the 25th June.  There were 100 finalists and only 21 winners, with four of these being Edenred’s clients.  A further three clients were runners up to the award and two reached the finalist stage.

Winners were recognised for the best reward and benefits strategies among employers in the UK:

Moneyway, with the FlexiBen programme, won the ‘Most effective use of a voluntary benefits plan (Sponsored by Personal Group) award, with Edenred being their provider. 

This entrant was the outright winner because it got its voluntary benefits exactly right for its budget, employee profile and business objectives. 

This small banking company has 180 staff who are largely on salaries of £14,000 a year, and most have been there for fewer than three years. The ethos is that “first and foremost we are a bank, but one with a great personality”, with the understanding that there is a link between happy staff and happy customers, and happy customers mean commercial success. Moneyway clearly understood its business limitations and parameters, so linked its voluntary benefits into the broader HR strategy to achieve success. 

The challenge was to explain the benefits of using salary sacrifice to obtain voluntary benefits to make pay go further. Rather than having HR, consultants or managers explain this concept, the firm introduced a character call FlexiBen, which it felt would appeal to the Generation Y audience. This small, rubber figure had his own, highly popular Facebook page and ‘tweets’ on Twitter, as well as communicating via more traditional media. FlexiBen has now achieved cult status among staff. There are also benefits champions (Flexerts) in each department, helping the firm to elicit new ideas on how to promote the voluntary benefits. 

Voluntary benefits include: buying and selling holidays, health and wellbeing assessments, health cash plan, medical and dental insurance, childcare vouchers, bikes-to-work scheme, group personal pension, and give-as-you-earn. Staff rewards are given via the website as vouchers.

Now 36% of staff use voluntary benefits. The cost of running the scheme was £5,600 and, overall, Moneyway has saved £41,000 through using salary sacrifice – a return on investment of 728%.