Sanlam Employee Benefits has been the industry leader in collecting and sharing employee benefits survey information and data since 1981, and we look forward to sharing the results of this year’s Benchmark Survey at the Sanlam Benchmark 2018 in May.
Benchmark Survey 2018 once again includes a survey of 100 principal officers of stand-alone retirement funds administered by a broad spectrum of administrators, and the survey is once again conducted by independent research house BDRC.
Given the vital importance and topicality of the default regulations that must be implemented by all South African retirement funds by no later than 1 March 2019, we have naturally included fairly detailed survey questions pertaining to this topic. We look forward to sharing these results at Sanlam Benchmark 2018.
I believe we can aid our own SEB-administered retirement funds clients by also surveying how these clients are progressing as regards this new legislation, and invite you to complete the following survey in this regard (and to invite other key stakeholders on your retirement fund to also complete the survey).
Click here for the survey.
The survey should take no longer than 20 minutes to complete!
Participation in this survey is entirely voluntary, but we believe it will be very useful client feedback and serves a number of purposes:
- It provides a litmus test of how successfully or otherwise our clients are progressing as regards implementing this new legislation.
- It could be insightful and fun to contrast the results with the wider industry findings of Sanlam Benchmark 2018 (the survey questions are similar but not identical to those been put to principal officers via BDRC).
- It will help us identify areas where our clients need more help and support.
- It could be a useful tool for retirement funds themselves to assess the thinking of, for example, the entire board of trustees, and we can share results for your retirement fund with you on a request basis including how your fund’s results compare to all other funds we administer (this is one reason we request the name of the retirement fund as part of this survey).
- Another reason we request the name of the retirement fund is so we can analyse the results across all funds without bias towards a particular fund (i.e. we can appropriately adjust our analyses in cases where there are multiple survey responses per fund).
The survey has been prepared in good faith, and will only be successful if our SEB-administered retirement fund stakeholders participate in numbers and take the time to answer all questions to the best of their abilities. We do believe the findings will be of value to our clients, and we issue this survey in good faith for the purposes as set out above. In preparing this survey, we have been cognisant to keep it fairly simple and to ensure it should be fairly quick to complete.
If you represent more than one retirement fund administered by SEB, you are very welcome to submit a separate response per retirement fund as very possibly quite a few answers will differ as no two retirement funds are identical.
We invite all our SEB-administered retirement fund clients (represented by trustees, principal officers, consultants and other stakeholders) to complete the survey by no later than Friday 13 April 2018, and we trust it will help both SEB’s and your retirement fund’s thinking as regards this important new legislation.
We look forward to sharing this survey’s results with you once analysed (and fund specific survey results will not be published so you should have no fears regarding confidentiality issues). I also look forward to seeing you at the forthcoming Sanlam Benchmark 2018 which for us is in important platform to share with our clients our current thinking as regards the default regulations and what needs to be done.
With thanks and kind regards,
David Gluckman