We are continuing to evolve our response to COVID-19 as the situation develops. In order to maintain our highest levels of service for all clients, and to ensure minimum risk to the wellbeing of our staff, we have decided that from Tuesday 17 March, our staff will work remotely.
All non-essential business travel has also been cancelled.
Impact of Office Closures
In order to ensure that we can continue to operate our business normally, we have taken the following steps:
- All mail will be redirected to our Belfast office.
- A very small team will attend the office in Belfast (or Glasgow if Belfast became unavailable) by walking or driving to work.
- Any relevant correspondence for onward digital processing and outgoing post will be dealt with by this team.
- The quickest way to contact our teams will be using telephone or email.
Technology to Support Home Working
Our business has been essentially paperless since 2009. Our IT infrastructure is entirely cloud based so we have no physical servers. We use a combination of Microsoft online software (e.g. Office 365) and applications hosted on Microsoft Azure. Our telephony is on Microsoft Teams and is fully cloud based.
Our main pensions administration software Mantle is hosted on the Google Compute and Amazon Web Services cloud platforms.
This means that we are able to fully support all services to our clients including administration, actuarial, pensions payroll, treasury and investment management services as normal.
Wellbeing of our Members of Staff
We remain committed to helping our members of staff through this period, and ensuring that we minimise the risk of them catching the virus.
Using Microsoft Teams for managing remote meetings with and without video allows us to continue to interact closely together and with our clients.
We will be holding weekly all staff briefings, and maintaining regular communication within and between teams supported by Microsoft Teams.
Our Business Continuity Planning team continues to monitor the situation, meeting twice a week, and communicating with our wider team regularly.
Communication
We will continue to update you on our preparedness, the fluctuations in investment markets and the general position on your pension scheme as the situation develops.
Please do continue to contact us as normal if you have any questions at all.