Admiral Group provides tools to help staff manage financial concerns

Admiral Group

Insurance group Admiral offers its employees financial education through its Ministry of Money programme.

The Ministry of Money, represented by a green pig, is designed to be a humorous way to get more serious messages across to the workforce. Admiral also runs a Ministry of Health to focus on health and wellbeing, and a Ministry of Fun, which organises events across the organisation.

Admiral works with Jelf Employee Benefits to provide financial wellbeing presentations to employees on subjects including pensions, ‘know your benefits’, and approaching retirement. Admiral also distributed a spending diary to help employees manage their daily spending.

Admiral also offers two savings schemes that evolved from a Christmas savings club. It partnered with Cardiff and Vale Credit Union and Barclays to give employees the opportunity to save with either scheme through payroll, and have access to their savings at any point in the year. Additionally, the employer pays for initial advice from an onsite financial adviser on any issue other than pensions, and a legal clinic once a month.

Richard Thorne, head of HR policy and complex case management at Admiral Group, says: “The idea of doing [this] is to let people make their plans in work time so they’re not distracted from their job. If something’s on site, it’s easy to get to, there are no physical barriers to getting there. It means that people can hopefully alleviate their concerns as quickly as possible.

“We try to offer as many routes as possible to people to try and promote their financial wellbeing and planning.

“Even if people present to work, if they’ve got worries about money on their mind, they will be distracted from doing a good job, so it’s our job to try and make it as easy as possible for them. We can’t fix their financial worries for them, that is their responsibility, but the more tools we can put into the toolkit for them to choose from to either get out of trouble, prevent it from happening or make the right choices is better for us.”