Nick has been at NEST for over seven years and during his tenure membership to the pension scheme has grown by three forty four percent and assets under management have grown by over sixteen hundred percent. That really is extraordinary growth. I have to say I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Welcome to the Growth Engine podcast. Nick, thank you for joining us today.

To kick us off, could you give us a bit of background to NEST for any listeners that aren't aren't familiar with the business?

Sure. So NEST really started with the Pensions Act two thousand and eight, which was all about the provision of retirement within the UK NEST was set up as an auto enrolment pension scheme in response to employers having to onboard employees as a pension, so it was a legal thing that they had to do, and there was a staging period for this to occur. So since its inception, it's been a bit of a success story. It has thirty three billion assets under management, it has twelve point five million members, and it has, a million employers. And around now, it's taking in around just under five hundred million contributions, a month. So it's quite big.

That's phenomenal, isn't it? I mean, it's it was a growth story that is just a remarkable business that must come with its own challenges as well.

Yeah, definitely. And there are all sorts of things attached to that because it was set up by the government, it's a public corporation and so it has certain restrictions in place on how it operates, but also it has this enormous scale.

NEST is really a, well it has a public service obligation, so it's required to take any employer whether it's profitable or not, that's not the concern, it just has to take an employer that wants to use them for their pension scheme.

The speed of growth of that Scott, so I was looking through some of the numbers and it's it's currently twelve and a half million twelve and a half million assets under management thirty three billion. Last year, to give it context of speed of growth, it was twenty four billion assets under management and eleven million members. That twelve month growth, that's just phenomenal. What drives that level of growth?

The first response to that is towards the end of this period where employers had to onboard their employees into a pension scheme, there was obviously quite a lot of incentive to do that by the time the deadline came up, because it was a legal requirement. So you had all these employers in the UK looking for a pension scheme to do this with.

So if you were an employer and you had perhaps a small company, or let's say you were McDonald's and you had part of your workforce was rather transient and was perhaps, you know, the students who were doing SATHY job, for example. Sure. They weren't bringing in a lot of income per se. So to go to a pension company and say, look, I want to use you as a pension company. They might have said, well, we're not sure that you're entirely profitable for us or there's certain criteria we want you to meet.

I see.

So where could they go? Well, because NEST had this public service obligation to take any employer, they could turn to Nest.

And so that part of this scale thing where you suddenly got all these employers, all these members, all these contributions.

But they didn't quite fit in anyone else's box, they went to Nest.

Not necessarily so. And then on top of that, you've got the investment performance. So the target for, in general, for Nest investments is to meet CPI plus three percent. Right. So if you think about that and you think about when it started, so thirteen years ago, you've got this compound effect of contributions coming in and it just growing exponentially. That's sort of like the beginning part that I think set that in train.

I think the second part around that is just its overall operation and performance. So for the last five years running, Nest has received a five star rating from the de facto workplace pensions body, de facto does a lot of ratings for various things. And that's around its government, its value for money, how it operates.

If we take the investment arm of NES, that's recently been authorised by the FCA to provide guidance advice to the NES Corporation. So all these things culminate in a good operation. So you start to get proof points in your product, you can pass on to your customers.

And then I think the third point to make, which is where it's incredibly unusual, is that it doesn't have shareholders.

Right.

So everything that Nest does is in the interest and for the benefit of its members. So it has completely different perspective around that operation.

That last point there is, I guess, different from perhaps some of the places that you've worked at before. How does that impact your day to day role?

That's a really interesting question because it is very different. I think Nest as a workplace is quite unique in that there's an element of what you might call public civil service type way of operating. You've then got a lot of what you might think as sort of the financial services sector or investment banking type people.

And then you've got people with skills from across all kinds of backgrounds.

That I think is very powerful. When you put that together, you get the most amazing thought process, inputs into things that perhaps you wouldn't normally have got. And certainly I could see that difference from when I worked previously, let's say at an investment bank or biotech. The thinking was quite different. Nest is very customer centric.

And what I've noticed in a lot of marketing roles is that often what a marketing team or body want to do is communicate something to a customer. We want you to know this.

Nest is very much about what does the customer want to know? How are they going to imbibe that information? What's their perspective?

Right. Right.

So and because of that, has quite a strong research element to what it does to kind of surface that stuff.

Can you give me an example to kind of illustrate how it uses that, perhaps the research element of what you're what you do? Sounds like that that the research is very much grounded within the DNA of the company that that shapes the way it starts to deliver.

So is there anything you can expand on to Yes.

So Nest has a unit called NEST Insight, which is effectively a think tank, which works with academics and across the country to surface information around how people save in the UK. Okay. Specifically for pensions. So there's a lot of information around that. And we also have insight teams for campaigns that we might do.

So if we about the premise of NEST, which is really this idea of inertia, it's behavioural economics.

And the idea behind inertia is can we change behaviour without somebody having to do anything? I mean, do we change the behaviour by them not doing anything? So if we think back to when all this started, when you had to get people into these pension schemes, you might have given them a choice and said, well, you can opt in. It's your choice.

If you're twenty and you start work and somebody says, oh, do you want to pay this much into your pension scheme? Particularly now, once you've got cost of living crisis and all those kind of things happening, might be inclined to say, well, no, don't want to do that.

And you can't think that far ahead to when you might retire. So for me, I'll when I'm sixty seven, that's when I get to the state retirement age. You can't think when you're in your twenties, what that looks like naturally enough, that's really difficult.

So if you invent a behaviour where somebody like that doesn't have to do anything, so by default they're opted into a pension scheme, they might not know that much about it, but they're just there. In terms of our mandate, which our mission is to help millions enjoy a better retirement, we're serving that because they're actually accumulating money into this pension scheme So it's around that idea of inertia. And a lot of that came from this research that was done in the early days. Things might be slightly not different, that it works, but there are probably other things that you'd want to do now as the world changes and things develop.

So certainly when that concept was started, I think there was a thinking that people would, forty percent of people would opt out, it'll never work. And in fact, it was only ten percent of people that opted out. That's remarkable, did work. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's probably a rarity that's on such a scale that something like that was developed in the Yes, it's phenomenal.

And thinking of, I mean, there's, you read about pensions and retirements, maybe this is because I'm at the age where I haven't quite saved as much as I would have liked into my pension pot. But you read about the impending pension retirement crisis that is heading the UK's way. I don't know if the UK is alone in this. I imagine that it's not. But that is that is that something that the Nest considers of of how do we put products in place to kind of reduce the crisis that's coming the country's way?

Yeah, I mean, goes back to its mission to help people enjoy a better retirement. And I think it's something like one in three in the working population has an S pension.

So our members of that, that's within our interest to give them the best possible financial well-being that we can. So that's, yeah, absolutely. That ties into our whole brand, what we're about and what we're aiming to do.

I think the fact that there's only ten percent that opted out is fantastic because if you've got people entering into the workforce, is that number still broadly?

I think it's relatively steady state. I mean, are various things that are happening now. So you've got trends in things like transfers. So you've got a lot of companies that are starting up and can see that other pension companies have got all these people with a pension scheme and perhaps they want to move their pension elsewhere. Yeah. And so that's a bit of competition, if you like, idea that some people can transfer out of NEST or any other pension.

We don't have shareholders, for us it's not about financial gain, it's about, is that in the best interest of that member to do that? There's a slightly different angle, but that's now coming up and that might affect, if you think about that one in three in the UK, Yeah. That might affect those sorts of outcomes. Yeah.

When you get to the state retirement age, I can't remember the exact figure now, but it's something like ten, just over ten thousand pounds I think it's ten thousand four hundred pounds So if you think now what you earn and you think, let's say you retire, I don't know, but might be sixty seven. Yeah. Is that going be enough for you to live off? Yeah.

Or you're going to have the lifestyle that you want. Yeah.

So you do need to have, in my view, you need to have this extra support.

I think the fact that the dialogue is much more like when I was entering into the workforce, the pension was lasting on my mind and I kick myself now. And of course, I've got one of those friends that is like the most important thing and it was just, and now, you know, it really, you see the difference. And so I think what Nest is doing is performing a fabulous service. And I'm, yeah, I wish I could rewind the clock.

It's never too late. It's never too late. I mean, pensions are really complex. They are really difficult.

You know, they're not easy things to understand. And when NEST was set up, part of its premise was these eight golden rules of communication. Right. So one of the things that it wanted to do was it didn't want to come across as saying, you must have a pension.

So we've said, you know, later in life, it would be useful to have good financial well-being, but we're not here to tell you, you know, you've got a choice So how do you, how do you position that in your communications? How do you work that out? So one of the things they said, well, instead of telling you what to do, actually, did you know it's your right? You're entitled to that.

You're entitled to that pension or well-being later in life, however you want to determine it. And that puts the customer at the centre of what it And that makes them feel more connected, more confident and in control. So those three value, that's in our communications, that's what we use. And there was a lot of study done on the use of language.

I mean, I get letters now where the financial jargon, unless you're from that world, you know that stuff, it's really difficult. It's really hard to understand. So putting it into plain English is always the number one priority, because you know, how do people understand this?

When I was looking at Nest's site, and I did mention this to you when spoke previously, I thought that the tone of voice and the way that the communications are laid out, the information on the site is so clear, it's so easy to answer, and I actually thought it's fabulous. I did a lot of research for another client within investments. We had to interview savers who weren't investing to find out why they weren't investing, And I think this is based on a stat that there was something like three point three trillion pounds sitting in UK bank accounts actually losing money. Why why not putting into investments?

And the overriding argument was when I go on to these, websites, the language is impenetrable. I just it makes me feel stupid. When I read this stuff, I don't understand it. It makes me feel stupid and I recoil from it.

If you're a business, having potential clients recoil from your communications is not a good place to be. And Nest, when you look at that, and any listeners, I'd urge you, any marketers, I'd urge you to go and have a look. Is it the you've clearly put a lot of thought into really stripping that back just to make it as simple and easy to understand and penetrable.

There is, I mean we have teams that work on this, you also have a compliance element as well.

There's, I mean, there's a balance to be met, so sometimes you have to convey something that's very technical. Will always put it into plain English. That's what people understand, that's what's going to work. There's always that level of how much can you say before somebody starts to switch off, because often putting things in plain language or spelling things out effectively using more words.

And one of the things we notice in communications, if they get very wordy, because we're not used to reading so much copy now in email campaigns or on websites and so on, you may start to lose people. So there's always a content design element to the communication and also a UX element. So we might do some email campaigns and we might want to test how those work with the subject lines, what resonates, perhaps with the creative as well. At one point, we did a test with the visuals.

We're very lucky that we have a member panel. So we've got an insight team that works with us and have this panel of our customers, and we can put things out there and test them.

So at one point, and this is really a typical sort of marketing thing to do, I think, we were thinking, well, okay, we need to show images of people enjoying themselves in retirement. Such a positive thing, great. So we brought these pictures together and we found these images of people having a holiday and they were on the beach and all this kind stuff. We put it out to the panel and all the stuff that we thought was gonna work really well, they couldn't stand.

They didn't like it. And they said, you know, that's not my, gonna be my retirement. Yeah. Now that may be because of financial issues, or maybe that's just not where their interest lay, but the point was that we as marketers had an idea in our heads that we thought would work it was complete rubbish.

And it's all to do with context as well, the message we're trying to convey, but certainly other things such as a sort of a nature scene with a pathway resonated a bit more than some of those other images I was talking about.

Ultimate nirvana with it was that people wanted to see themselves in how you were talking to, because that's what they resonate with. Of course, of With twelve point five million members, that's difficult.

And you need quite a lot of technology to be able to tailor those communications. But we do know, and that's also from the Nest Insight sort of think tank that we were talking about earlier, which set up with the inertia concept, that those people that are proactive in making their decisions tend to be more committed when they look at their finances, more likely to have a better financial outcome, better financial well-being.

Just let me just make sure I understand that. So when you say people that are more proactive, meaning people that are more proactive in taking the decisions about their financial future? Decisions in general. Okay.

So again, it's just that behaviour thing.

Okay.

And then it correlates to when they look at their finances, they're more likely to then say, okay, well, maybe I need to increase my contributions.

Got it.

So there's a lovely test. I really like this one where, you know, get coffee stamps.

Yes. Yeah.

When you go to Kevin, get the coffee.

So let's say you've got a stamp card and it's got eight stamps in it. And you know that if you get another two stamps, you're gonna get free coffee.

Well, there was a test done that showed if you've got eight stamps, psychologically, you've got a trigger that says, I need to complete the card. I've only got two left. Yeah. So I need to complete the card.

And then on top of that, oh, and I get free coffee. Yeah. So if you think of the coffee shop, they're getting ten coffees and they only had to pay for one coffee themselves, right? So that psychology of behaviour can be a really big influencer, the think feel part of it.

Yes, yeah, yeah. I was reading about, I forget the name of this, I was reading about this effect. I think it's the same one. And it's it's a if if, if a user can see the distance that they have to achieving their goal, then they're more likely to complete it.

And it starts off in in the old days when old days. I'm gonna show my age now. But when you used to load up computer games with cassettes, there used to be this progress bar that used to slowly crawl up. But it you it kinda kept you watching, like, glued to this, and why are you hearing this awful kind of noise in in the background?

Modern day version of that is Uber showing you the car on its way to meet you. It's gonna be six minutes till your driver gets here. It's to stop you from going, and, you know, I'll get a bus. And it's all of these things, and it's incredible how much you realize that and you start spotting it all around you and it works, it's fantastic.

So imagine if you went back in time and you mentioned, you know, had I done more with my pension, let's say when you're in your twenties and somebody said to you put in an extra twenty five quid a month, what that would be now? So it's how you do that, I mean it's difficult, but it's looking at those behavioural things I think, which is really key.

Yeah, what a fascinating role to be doing this and being able to impact twelve point five million individuals.

I'm very lucky, I work with a fantastic member engagement team, a fantastic employer engagement team. So together we come out with these fantastic communications that really do start to turn the dial. And I think the future for Nest is very bright.

Can you expand on that? What are you looking there to improve? Again, presumably, as you said at the beginning of this conversation, customer experience is central to everything. So what elements in particular are you looking to kind of improve?

So it's a very interesting question, as we mentioned this idea of inertia and we know that inertia works, but we also said if you're somebody that's able to make decisions, and you can make decisions around finances, that might give you a better financial well-being.

So awareness is probably a key thing. And I said that, it was about one in three of the working population have an S pension.

But the initial immediate response to Nest as a brand is actually quite low.

Right.

And I think that's because it hasn't been needed, we haven't needed to do that. But if we want to support people in providing guidance and making them feel that they're in control of that financial well-being and their future and their retirement, we need to think slightly differently about how we do that now.

So looking at how as a brand, we can become more trusted than we are at the moment, perhaps. Looking as a brand where we can reach the sweet spot where somebody says, look, I don't need to look elsewhere. I'm really comfortable with Nest because it's doing everything I need it to do. And I feel confident about that. I'm okay with that. At the moment, it's probably hard for some of our members to even know that Nest is, because, know, if you get onboarded, I don't know, ten years ago to an employer, you might not remember, you might not have all that in your So I think that's probably a direction that will be looked at.

It's a unique brand. It's a unique business. Most organizations, brand awareness is is something they need in order to to reach, you know, the the growth. You've you've got a completely different trajectory as a as a brand and business, and that you had an exponential growth. And now you're kind of like starting to think from a brand awareness point of view that you you that that's almost like a second tier piece for you, isn't it? Do you see where you see where I'm getting? It's almost like reverse from a a a perhaps many of your competitors.

Yeah, mean, I suppose you react to the environment around you as well. So Nest is relatively new. I mean, it's thirteen years, so in ten years, you know, we'll have to see how everything looks. I think it's forecast at the end of the next decade that NES is expected to have something like a hundred billion assets under management.

So it also comes with enormous responsibility. Yeah. So there's a lot to do. Although we've said we've got these things like inertia and we want to increase awareness, it might sound like we don't need to do anything.

I don't think that's the case. That's not in the interest of people that are saving with NES. We need to do as much as we can, and it might also include things like our investment strategy as well. So I think NES was one of the first pension schemes to withdraw from tobacco investments, for And there were two reasons for that, think one just as a long term investment, was it good?

Yeah. I think it was deemed that it wasn't going to be as successful as other investments might be. Then the second one is it has quite a strong environmental take on its investments at Nest. It's also very strong on environmental and social governance and how companies run.

You report on number of active versus inactive members as well, presumably that is a number as well that you want to be stimulating and making sure as part of the mandate trying to make sure that people are active within their savings but presumably keeping customers as I would imagine that you have competition that is trying to win some of your clients as well and presumably retaining them must be part of your objectives.

Yes, so I mean you're always going to get this high number of contributions coming in. Yeah. I think it's something like fifty five percent of our membership is under the age of forty.

So, you know, depending on the circumstances, but they might decide to retire at state age. So you've got all that time of that pension growth so they might be, depending on their awareness of NEST and pension schemes in general, they might be taken in by an advert for another pension company saying, transfer to us, you know, Sure. We operate like this, or we, you know, we've got these things.

So having that awareness part and that brand loyalty and that brand trust is actually really crucial. We want to make sure that's an interest of the member. So if you transfer to another pension scheme, it might be that the charges are higher than they are at Nest, so is that to your benefit? It might be that the investment returns historically haven't been as strong, or perhaps they invest in things that aren't attuned to your lifestyle, your values.

So there are lots of things around that. So could NES continue because it's got all these contracts? Yes. But it wants to do the best that it can.

So I think it's absolutely crucial that it does the best it can for its members and that means building up its brand awareness.

Yep and I think there's also something there which is empowering your members to be educated enough so that they can make those decisions and be exactly the point. Ask themselves the questions. Well, should I be comparing fees or, you know, it could again, it's I don't mean this disrespectfully. It's not rocket science, is it? But you've got to you've got to understand that, if there's a service and you've got different providers, things are going to stack up in different ways. If you can have an informed decision to be able to say, okay, I'm going to choose one provider over another one. If you can empower your members to be asking the right type of questions, they can make that decision for themselves.

Yeah. I mean, I would argue we'd never, we'd probably never say that. I mean, I'd say some people it might be rocket science and quite rightly so. The average salary for people at Nest is, I think it's between twenty and twenty two and a half thousand, something like that is the average salary. So a lot of those, if you think people that are on that salary and you think they've got to pay rent, they've got to pay bills, all those kinds of things, then that's not that much money to play with to say, oh, look at what your future might be and you could go and do this.

Is probably unlikely that they will have a retirement where, you know, they're going to the south of France every summer and having these fantastic holidays. I mean, might, they've got big incomes.

What about making sure that they've got enough to- maintain a lifestyle?

Right. Have you got the wherewithal to be able to make those decisions even at that, because whatever that cost value is to you personally, that's in relation to you and what's gonna work for you. You're absolutely right, getting informed and making the right decisions is absolutely crucial, but it's still relatively new. The idea of pensions, the complexity around, I mean, most people won't know, for example, that they're effectively investors, they've got investments, right?

Yeah. That's not because you've got, well, most pensions now define contribution and define benefit was based on the final salary scheme, but a lot of people won't understand that. And actually if you were with a pension scheme like Ness, where it's got this enormous scale, you can influence what companies see. You've got voting rights.

Ness got voting rights to say, well, actually we're not happy that your board is made up of white men, know, fifty or something like that. So it's, there are a lot of messages, lots of things to consider, but at the end of the day, probably for most people, it's just, have I got some savings to live off? Am I going to be okay?

Average investors, members of NEST, how regularly are you communicating with them? Can you communicate to them individually?

It also to do with the GDPR and whether they give us consent to market to them or not.

We have a mandate to provide guidance to our members. So if that guidance is around, I don't know, for example, nominating a beneficiary, for example, then you're allowed to do that. That's In terms of just sending out emails about any kind of activity at Nest, those campaigns are quite measured. So we might send, for example, three hundred thousand emails out.

We might say, we might get an open rate of say two hundred and fifty thousand, something like that, which is relatively high. So we're careful about how we communicate because members will also get operational communications as well. Okay. And it's again about that relationship and that awareness of Nest of when the email comes in or what they see.

So you've got all the channels, like social media stuff. Yeah. And you've got the website, but it's interesting that it's not like a bank account. So your employer puts you into this, right?

Yeah. So you might never look at it. It's depending on again, thing about how active you are. We've talked a little bit about test and learn.

Is there more that we want to dive into on that? So on test and learn, there's that example where we might say, out three hundred thousand emails. Yeah. And I think one of the really powerful things about where you've got scale is from that first ten thousand battery emails you send, you could try sending, I don't know, ten different subject lines.

You could try sending different creatives.

When you see the trend come back from that ten thousand, that's the email that you then want to send to your two hundred and ninety thousand that you've got left over.

And I think there's a real concern in marketing circles that if you know something works, just keep doing it and not trying another way. But actually if you see that something doesn't work so well, that's quite useful because keep that in your back pocket and you know that those elements for any future campaign in the context of what you're doing, aren't going to operate very well. So testing and learning all the time is really pivotal. So you know, it's the UX thing that people do with websites, of course, and you're constantly developing and creating a website. It's the same with your communications. I think financial services are perhaps more wary of doing that kind of thing, but I think it definitely pays dividends.

When we last spoke, we talked about test and learn methodology, but specifically remember you talking about cyber fraud and what you've learned around that with test and learn. Can you expand on that for me?

Yes. So cyber fraud is obviously very prevalent and there's a lot of it about particularly scammers who want to get hold of people's pension pots.

So it's a really big thing.

And obviously that comes in the form of an email mostly to people like phishing, that kind of thing.

What we found with emails that we did was there were certain elements that we needed to keep consistent around the design of the email, which related to the website. So people had trust that it was Nest. A lot of emails that you do, you often want to have just one call to action because it's simple. You don't want to give people choice because then they might not click on anything. And you've also got learned habits with emails. So when people open an email, particularly on the phone, they see a subject line, they might skim the content, they see the button, they just naturally click on the button, because that's what they've learned to do. So if you put all that together, you need a really clean communication.

So if you're consistently sending those emails, you want to keep consistent visual elements and the way that you speak the same. But what we also found is that you can have ancillary information with an email. So that might be towards the bottom of the email where you talk about phishing or cybercrime, and then you link out to a web page that talks more about it. You might also back that up with social media.

So when you have your visual identity that you're using with these communications, you keep it consistent across all the channels. And then it just builds up this body of evidence. So it's legitimate because it's everywhere. That's what I'm seeing.

That's what I recognise. I know it's bona fide.

When it's from a cyber fraud perspective, do you do if you do make changes, do you see like an influx of inquiries coming in saying, I'm not sure if this is right or do you do you get that?

I mean, we do get queries.

We have a service team that takes queries And it does happen. It doesn't happen that often, I believe.

So from the we mentioned that we might send three hundred thousand emails, for example. I mean, you'll always get queries around logging in, that kind of stuff, but nothing too specific around cybercrime. So we think that that's working and that's doing its job.

Yeah. And I imagine, again, with the mandates that you have going forward over the by the end of the decade, the cyber crime is going to become an issue that you're increasingly dealing with.

Is there any steps that you can talk about to mitigate those risks?

I can only say that we are particularly hot on information security within the organisation. I mean, just internally how we work, let alone externally. I don't know of any initial changes that are going to occur. I only know that it's at the forefront of what we do, ensuring that our members' POTS are safe and secure.

It's a moving beast, isn't it, Cyber security. We we've we have updates from our info security team, and it's it's yeah. It's mind boggling. And I think it's something that as marketers working in financial services, it I I suspect in the future it will it will start to impact our world within the communications that we have to put out because it's definitely not going away.

Anyway, that's just a personal viewpoint. I appreciate you probably can't say more from this perspective. Coming back again to the those those phenomenal growth targets.

Brendan McAfferty anticipates reaching a hundred billion by the end of the decade.

From a marketing perspective, what are the elements that are going to contribute to reaching that target?

Certainly in how we communicate with members, so the ease of managing that pension scheme and how you're going to interact with the product. So they have full cost that they're going to develop an app, which will do that. Right.

There's a digital transformation programme that's going to look at how we are set up. And again, that's around enablers. So from a marketing point of view, I think personalised communications, we ought to do that, but we could do it to a greater extent with a new technical infrastructure in place. And that will be crucial. And then bringing in this idea of the brand again, and the idea of trust with Nest, we go to that one in three of the UK that has a pension of the working population, has a pension of Nest. You want NES to become a household name, like BBC or something like So I think there are a lot of exciting challenges to make that happen.

And I think our immediate strategy will be around what that transformation does and how we grow that awareness in a positive way for our members.

That sounds an exciting couple of years that you've got ahead of you to start designing what that looks and feels like. What's the support team look like around you that you have to help you go on that journey?

So I think we're incredibly lucky where we are. So we have a team of designers, content writers, we have project managers, we have service team people. We mentioned we had this excellent member engagement team, an excellent employer engagement team. So this is based within the corporation.

And then we have a scheme administrator. And the scheme administrator's effectively doing the technical bit of processing the contributions into the pot, mostly that part of the So the corporation itself is relatively small in comparison. So I think we're roughly three fifty employees, something like that. But the Nest experience part of the corporation is one of the bigger parts and that's really the engine in getting the communications out to our members.

Right, right. I'm going to throw in a slightly curveball question here and this is based upon another conversation I've had with a guest that's coming, onto the podcast next. So, perhaps you can help me, prepare for that.

In your career, you've worked at different types of organizations within marketing. I'm I and and when we started to have a a pre call with this other with this other guest, The conversation started to go around how marketing in financial services can be different to marketing in other industries. We spoke about the difference between FMCG, and I know you haven't worked in FMCG, but just out of interest, how do you see the role of marketing perhaps in compared to other industries that you that you have worked in?

The emphasis on data led marketing is really coming to the fore. And in previous roles, there was a lot more emphasis around what looked good.

Yeah.

Less around quite knowing how a customer or the person you've marketed to imbibed that what they've really thought of it. Because you have to do the research to know that.

I think in some of the financial institutions where I've worked before, there's also a lot of money and there was relationships that are already there. So the level of marketing required, I think much of it was reputational as much as whether it was actually required to increase a profit or onboard someone. So it is very different. I remember where I'm now, there aren't shareholders. There's a slightly different emphasis on what you do, but the data part of it, I mean, even looking at how creative works, that wasn't something that, you know, ten years ago was being mentioned to the degree in which I'm seeing it where I work now. So I think that, I mean, people always say marketing is about data and, you know, most people have got CRM and that kind of stuff, but this think and feel behind it and having data with proof points around it, think is the really essential bit that is coming out.

From listening to you, it seems to be, is that, and I don't know if this is too broad a brushstrokes, but it seems that it's very data driven, the marketing at NEST, but combined with the behavioural psychology aspects, and it seems that it's the meeting of those two. Is that a?

Yeah, think that's about right.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

Yeah. Okay, that's good. That gives me some prep for the next You've done a varied role within your career.

I'm I'm interested to know what's what what's a useful piece of wisdom that you've heard or, some learning that perhaps a mentor or you've you've read somewhere that that you use as part of your day to day that helps you be a better marketer? Is there anything you could share with us?

There is. It's more around leadership, but your leadership in marketing or communications, whatever you want to call it. And there's a book that's called, and I'm gonna use a rude word now. Okay. And it's called No ******** Leadership. It's by Chris Hirsch. And Chris Hirsch used to work in advertising.

And so there are lots of relevant stories around what he experienced at work, and what he thinks now about how you achieve your strategy. So just how do you get there?

And I think it's having, you you can have strength and conviction, but if you're in a financial institution or you're working somewhere where that's difficult to implement, how do you go about it? And marketing always has so many views. Right. You know, there are many, you know, you go to board and they'll have a view. Everybody will have a view. They may be right, or it might be slightly off key from what you know. So again, that data, however small it is, I think is really, really pivotal.

Yes.

I mean, Google didn't become as successful as it is without knowing what people were searching for, right?

And then that's it. So I think even small nuggets can help you with the evidence. But I think that's probably one of the key things that I've learned is, you know your stuff, you've got some evidence to back it up. Or if you don't have the evidence, test and learn it. And it's okay if it doesn't work, because you've just learned that that doesn't work and not to use it again.

Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for giving us all your insights and sharing your wisdom from a remarkable story, the growth story of NEST. I wish you and all your colleagues all the best in reaching your mind focusing targets for the end of two thousand thirty. Thank you. Thank you. Today, we discussed leveraging the role of inertia to the precise art of test and learn methodology.

Nick also shed light on the brand's accessibility and trust building efforts, highlighting the significance of a clear tone of voice and purposeful communications.

Reflecting on today's discussion, key takeaway remains in the challenging world of financial marketing authenticity is paramount.

I'm grateful to Nick for sharing his wisdom and expertise. Thank you for listening today to The Growth Engine. If you enjoyed this episode and like to hear more, please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates or on www.hubagency.co.uk Thank you and see you next time.