Powerful returns from financial education as a core benefit

Established: 2010

Industry: Energy and utilities

No. of employees: 6,000

Introduction

Together with nudge, UK Power Networks took steps to progress financial education from a voluntary employee benefit to a core benefit. The team believe, that just like retirement provision, financial education is essential to their people’s financial futures. This change in strategy led to a significant improvement in benefit outcomes.

The challenge

UK Power Networks and nudge have been working together since 2017 and renewed the partnership in 2022 following a fresh look at their objectives that included: diversity and inclusion, accessibility, personalization, and employee engagement.

The solution

Following a retendering process UK Power Networks concluded that nudge continues to be the best partner to meet their objectives and is the market leader in financial education. It was after the retendering processes that UK Power Networks repositioned nudge as a core benefit to ensure it was inclusive and all employees, including their engineers out on the road, were benefiting from financial education.

When nudge became a core benefit, all other communications and activity aligned and streamlined with stronger results for both employees and the employer. For example, the team issued a ‘nudge’ (a personalized notification) to promote UK Power Networks’ annual Flex benefit window in March, leading to a 94% open rate (nudge benchmark of 30%) and 12.3% click through rate resulting in a boost in benefit uptake.

nudge works closely with the UK Power Networks team to use insights to evolve the employee benefit experience. nudge noticed a significant uptake in engagement with ‘borrowing’ and ‘debt’ interest in UK Power Networks’ nudgenomics (data and analytics dashboard). From this insight nudge and the UK Power Networks team set up a series of webinars to support, including an anonymous session for managing debt. There was good attendance of the live session, which was also shared as a recording for employees out on the road at the time. The programme was also underpinned with Mental Wealth First Aider training for 16 of the organisation’s Mental Health First Aiders to enable a sustainable ‘train the trainer’ approach to support their people going forward.