By Shruti Menon Seeboo
At the Africa Pensions and Retirement Summit in Mauritius, Jo Smeed, Occupational Pension & Savings Executive at the Sovereign Group, brought a refreshingly practical perspective to a conversation that has, over the course of the week, ranged across the future of pillar one national pension systems. Her focus, by contrast, was firmly on pillar two: the occupational pensions and savings plans that employers can offer their staff, and the role that auto-enrolment can play in helping populations work towards financial independence.
“We’re going to discuss auto-enrolment,” she told delegates, framing it not simply as a technical reform but as a shift in responsibility. Auto-enrolment, she explained, is “about facilitating your population to work towards financial independence” by “taking some of the responsibility of the government and putting it firmly on the shoulders of employers and employees” — giving people choice, and the ability to diversify away from reliance on the national pension alone.
Smeed, who has spent 25 years helping employers attract and retain staff while delivering on their duty of care, opened with what she called the good news and the bad news. The good news, she said, is that “we’re all living longer,” thanks to medical innovation and greater access to healthcare — meaning people will be fitter and more active for longer, with retirement expectations that look nothing like those of previous generations. The bad news, however, is that “we’re going to be working a lot longer,” with national retirement ages in the West already pushing towards 70 and beyond. The retirement people aspire to will cost more, she warned, and national pensions alone will struggle to provide a living income across longer lifespans. Her message was that the sooner populations begin saving, the more they benefit from what she called “the three superpowers” — time, compound interest, and dollar cost averaging.
Much of her talk drew a sharp contrast between demographic trends in the West and in Africa. In Western Europe and the UK, she described an “inverted demographic triangle”: the baby boomer generation, who entered the workforce young and retired at 65 with a life expectancy of around 70 to 72, have now mostly retired — but today’s retirees, including Generation X, are living into their mid-eighties and beyond. “It’s pushed out from a 75 retirement age,” she said, “and the government has to find a guaranteed income now for over 20 years.” Compounding the problem, falling birth rates and the realities of twenty-first century working life — people entering the workforce later, taking career breaks, or working overseas — mean less income tax to support those guarantees. “It’s going to be a real problem for the West,” she said, “which is why they’ve introduced auto-enrolment.”
Africa’s position, she argued, is fundamentally different — and far more favourable. With a young population and the advantages of digital innovation, she suggested that governments “don’t necessarily have to put auto-enrolment on the too-hard pile.” Instead, she said, the continent has the opportunity for “over 30 years of regular investment, which would be an absolute superpower” in working towards financial security.
To illustrate what successful auto-enrolment can look like in practice, Smeed turned to two island case studies — fitting, she noted, given the audience was gathered on an island themselves. Both Guernsey and St Helena set out with the same objectives: to prevent pensioner poverty and facilitate financial independence. But they took markedly different routes to get there.
Guernsey, she explained, went for “full fat auto-enrolment,” mandated by law, with tax relief on contributions and a 30 per cent tax-free lump sum as an additional incentive. The scheme, called Your Island Pension, followed a phased introduction modelled on the UK’s experience — starting with larger employers, who were assumed to have the HR capacity to cope, before extending to smaller and then micro-employers. Contributions were phased in gradually too: employer contributions rising from 1 per cent of total salary to 3.5 per cent over nine years, and employee contributions rising from 1 per cent to 6.5 per cent, with a combined 10 per cent target by 2032. There were “fines for compliance, so there was a carrot and a bit of a stick,” and crucially, employees were automatically enrolled — relying, as Smeed put it, “on apathy, which has proven to work extremely well in other auto-enrolment countries,” since people generally had to make a deliberate effort to opt out, and most simply stayed in.
On the investment side, Guernsey’s scheme kept things deliberately simple at launch. A life cycle strategy serves as the default, automatically de-risking as members approach state pension age — which varies depending on when someone was born — while still allowing individuals to bring that date forward or push it back, with the strategy realigning accordingly. “It’s almost like invest and forget,” Smeed said. A self-select range of just five funds was made available for those who wanted more choice, with plans to expand the investment selection gradually “now that people are coming to terms with what a pension is and they’re not as frightened anymore.”
The road to launch was a long one. Sovereign was selected two years ahead of the launch date, giving time to build a project team and, notably, to reach out to NEST in the UK for guidance. “I think pension companies do want to help people learn from the lessons that they’ve had,” Smeed said, describing how Sovereign deliberately adopted a different tone from government communications. “The government went out with a hard voice. This is what we’re doing, as an employer you must comply, otherwise there will be consequences. Whereas Sovereign went out with a softer voice — we know it’s scary, don’t worry, we can help you, it’s going to be alright.”
A soft launch six months ahead of the July 2024 go-live allowed the team to test processes, refine messaging, and gather testimonials from early adopters that could be shared with the wider community. By the scheme’s first anniversary in January 2025, Sovereign had published data on the numbers of employers and employees who had joined and the value of contributions, and ran a customer survey that returned a 95 per cent approval rating. “Now we’re into BAU,” Smeed said — business as usual — with the messaging shifting from compliance towards encouraging people to contribute more than the minimum.
St Helena’s approach looked quite different. Adoption there was voluntary, and aimed at individuals rather than mandated at employer level — “so that makes it quite difficult, but it’s slowly working and we’re building up momentum,” Smeed said. The scheme features an employer-employee match with a minimum annual contribution, and fees — initially 1 per cent of assets under management, covering everything from trust administration to investment and income drawdown — are paid by the employee, dropping to 0.65 per cent as fund values grow. Because participation is voluntary, the investment range is broader than Guernsey’s, offering a life cycle default, a “healthy invest” option allowing members to choose a risk level rather than a retirement date, and a self-select range for those wanting to build their own portfolios. The scheme, developed with government from 2023 and launched in 2025, is, in Smeed’s words, “a smaller scheme, so much easier to implement.”
Reflecting on what underpins success in either model, Smeed pointed to evidence from OECD countries that have introduced auto-enrolment: “strong governance, early stakeholder coordination and operational readiness” come up again and again. For Your Island Pension, this meant establishing a project team with an overarching steering committee, broken down into five working groups covering technical alignment and governance, systems integration and testing, communications, investment strategy, and business readiness. The business readiness team, she noted, was put in place before launch specifically so they would be experienced and ready: “you have to start with a really strong and positive experience and then it will roll out to get that trust through the community.”
Understanding the different stakeholders mattered enormously. Employers wanted simplicity — and because employees bore the fees, employers’ main new cost was the monthly contributions themselves. Employees, automatically opted in and defaulted into the minimum contribution and default fund, responded well: “We’ve hardly had any opt-outs, which is great news,” Smeed said. “Everybody knows that they need to save for a pension. But you know, life’s busy, and you don’t get round to it. So actually, if somebody gives you a scheme, takes the money out of your account, and invests it for you, you’re like, great.” The third group — “super users” such as payroll companies and large employers — were brought on board early, with API integration reducing friction for everyone involved.
Communication had to span as many as five or six generations, each with very different needs. For younger, digitally fluent groups, Sovereign found that attention spans were short — “for a Gen Z, the attention span is about less than two minutes” — leading to snappy testimonial videos, tutorials, and social media content. Older members, by contrast, wanted holistic educational material, decision trees, and checklists. To bridge these differences, the team created five personas and tested every communication against them, asking, as Smeed put it, “would Johan, who was profile number one, would he be able to understand that? Would Edith on number five, would they be able to understand that?” The starting assumption throughout, she said, was “that everybody knew nothing” — beginning with the most basic questions, such as what a pension is and why it matters, before building up gradually. A financial wellness portal was also introduced to help build broader financial literacy around budgeting, asset allocation, and protection from identity fraud — “that’s the power of auto-enrolment,” she said.
Throughout the process, Sovereign drew heavily on NEST’s experience in the UK — including, Smeed noted with evident appreciation, the involvement of NEST’s former chief executive, Helen Dean, who sits on the Your Island Pension governance committee. “She lives and breathes pensions,” Smeed said, “and she brought a lot of experience and expertise which we were grateful for.” Every process was tested rigorously before launch, administrators and customer service teams were trained early, and workshops following the soft launch fed directly into refinements to procedures and messaging.
On the practical question of data submission, Smeed described how Sovereign worked with Guernsey’s existing government submission software, Returns Creator, adding a pension element so that employers — many of whom were already using the platform for tax and social security submissions — simply had to “add an extra column for pension” and the data would flow through automatically. For smaller and micro-employers, she stressed, this mattered enormously: “it could be their spouse doing a weekly payroll on their kitchen table while they’re feeding the kids… they just want something that they can understand and get the job done and move on with life.” Working with payroll providers in the same way ensured clean, timely data — something Smeed credited again to lessons learned from NEST.
Drawing the comparison between the two schemes together, Smeed was clear about what drives higher adoption. “The adoption on the Guernsey scheme is much higher,” she said, attributing this largely to mandation by law. “I think people do want to invest in their future. They just need somebody to help them do it.” Tax relief, she added, is “a nice to have” — everyone likes getting something for free — while employer contributions amount to a straightforward incentive: “if somebody says, I’ll give you 20 pounds if you give me 10 pounds, nobody would say no, and that’s what pension is.” Automatic opt-in, requiring effort to leave rather than to join, rounded out her list of success factors, alongside achievable timescales, robust governance that can be clearly communicated, proper resourcing, simple language free of acronyms and technical jargon, and timely, reliable administration.
Her final point was about evolution. “Digital innovation has taken us” a long way already, she said, and innovation cycles are only getting shorter — meaning that even a highly successful scheme cannot afford to “stand on our laurels.” She also reflected on how the international pensions landscape has changed over her career: where 25 years ago in Africa, international plans were largely the preserve of multinationals, NGOs, and expatriate employees, today fintech companies, renewable energy firms, and international schools are increasingly seeking international savings solutions of their own.
Smeed’s closing message to delegates was direct. “Africa has a huge opportunity to learn from the lessons of the West,” she said — a young population, widespread smartphone access, and generations of workers who are increasingly aware of the need for financial independence all make the continent, in her words, “perfect timing” for auto-enrolment. “We do have a blueprint for auto-enrolment,” she said, noting that Sovereign is already in discussion with other governments and open to working with strategic partners. She left the room with a saying she clearly believes applies as much to nations as to individuals: “the best time to start a pension is 20 years ago. And this is your 20 years ago now.”
