Employee sat smiling in an office
Dec 2022 | Credit Decisions | Data Insights

As the cost-of-living crisis intensifies, businesses are implementing solutions to support the financial wellbeing of their employees across the UK

We recently sponsored the CIPP Chartered Institute of Payroll and Pension Professionals National Payroll Week, a week which looks at the impact the payroll industry has in the UK through the collection of income tax and National Insurance; especially when you consider the £345billion* paid to the government through income tax and national insurance contributions.

As part of this sponsorship, we joined the CIPP on a webinar around the importance of Payroll functions within an organisation, the future of payroll and its effect on the financial wellbeing of employees.

Watch the webinar above now >

Empower your employees

We launched Work Reportâ„¢ in November last year with the mission to simplify the often time consuming and confusing credit application process by automating the sharing of payslip data – with an employee’s consent. An innovation that also saves Payroll and HR functions hours of time and resource handling and processing requests from employees to share their payroll data, for example during a mortgage application.

Our recent acquisition of cloud payslip provider PayDashboard, allows us to further help employees manage their financial well-being.

Taking a holistic approach to financial wellbeing

Often the first port of call for employee pay and tax queries, Payroll has elevated its status from being the nexus between HR and Finance to the strategic – and very crucial – purveyor of employee financial guidance solutions. As such, payroll professionals are frequently finding themselves working alongside HR on these initiatives, from concept to completion.

Although HR and Payroll are the primary functions involved in the development and rollout of these solutions, ensuring related departments and stakeholders are aligned from the beginning is essential in guaranteeing that employee wellbeing initiatives have every chance of succeeding.

Gabby Wickes (Experian’s Global Wellbeing Lead) and Kelly Blake (Experian’s Payroll Operations Manager UK&I) joined Policy Officer, Mat Akrigg on the webinar for a Q&A session on the importance of employee financial wellbeing support at Experian and the significance of cross-departmental alignment. View the webinar on-demand above.

Some key takeaways from the webinar include:

  • The current cost-of-living crisis is the biggest challenge in terms of employee support
  • Higher earners are not immune to the crisis
  • It’s important to approach wellbeing solutions holistically
  • Employees will be scrutinising their payslips and their deductions more than usual – yet many find it challenging to understand their payslips
  • Payroll as a stakeholder – what’s involved when the addition of benefits affects net pay, and the importance of being as efficient as possible during the implementation process

*Based on income tax and national insurance contributions as shown on HMRC tax receipts and National Insurance contributions for the UK.