CEO Today UK Awards 2021

How has the pandemic affected the life and pensions sector and EQ Paymaster? At EQ Paymaster, we, fortunately, managed to remain resilient and ironically, the past 12+ months have been the busiest months of my career. We pay approximately a quarter of the UK’s pensioners, and during 2020, we were paying a large number of NHS payrolls, so our services have been critical over the past year. I’m extremely proud of our team for the tremendous work they’ve done during this time – all whilst adjusting to working from home. It has been a busy time for us and the past year has certainly taught us a lot about flexibility and adaptability. Our mission is to keep our services going so we can keep everyone who depends on us economically afloat. The nature of what we do means that we can’t afford to stop – we have 11 million pension scheme members and policyholders who rely on our services and we pay out 25 billion pounds worth of pension and annuity payments every year, so we have to do our best to keep going. As the CEO, how have you navigated the whole process of moving from the office to working from home? The most important thing during this process was to stay calm and focused. As the leader of an organisation, colleagues look up to you and I think it’s vital to show them that even during moments of mayhem, we have to compose ourselves and think clearly about what our key priorities are. During the process of switching to a remote working scenario, it was important to make decisions very quickly as our colleagues’ health depended on this. From the very beginning, as an organisation, we decided that our number-one priority is always going to be our staff’s welfare and we did everything we could to get them all home safely and ensure they have everything they needed to effectively work from their homes. Once this was done, we then moved to our second priority – ensuring that we’re fully focussed on the mission-critical payments we make. This was greatly appreciated by both our colleague-base and our customer-base, who felt protected from an economical point of view, and allowed the organisation to stay stable during these uncertain and stressful times. What are some of the lessons you’ll be taking with you in the post COVID-19 world? Fundamentally, we’ve learned that we can adapt to change very quickly and the one outcome of the pandemic that I am actually grateful for is the fact that this whole experience strengthened our bond both with our colleagues and customers. Leading remotely, over Zoom or Microsoft Teams, is certainly a challenge, but it has also provided us with the opportunity to speak more openly with our teams and clients about the challenges we’re facing as an organisation and how we plan to overcome them. It has allowed more people to ask more questions and has opened up a lot of topics for discussion that had never come up in the pre-pandemic world. Our client-base appreciated our efforts to continue helping them during this difficult period and our colleague-base appreciated the security and support they felt within the organisation. The past year has been so challenging in so many aspects, but in retrospect, it was a fantastic experience that taught us a lot and has helped us build an even stronger team! Thanks to the pandemic, we realised the importance of communication and openness and I believe that this helped us build a more resilient firm to take into the future. www. equiniti . com 41 CEO TODAY UNITED KINGDOM AWARDS 2021 Financial Services