RIBA Business supplier spotlight series with Corpad
In this RIBA Business Supplier Spotlight, we are joined by Stuart Stroud, Managing Director at Corpad Employee Benefits Limited, our Financial Guidance and Employee Benefits partner.
Stuart has been leading the Corpad Employee Benefits Limited business since April 2021 and brings over 32 years experience of supporting corporate clients with employee benefits arrangements and explains more about the services Corpad provides to RIBA Members, whether sole practitioners or practices.
Tell us more about Corpad.
Corpad Employee Benefits Limited was established with one main goal in mind, to provide a truly client led service to support clients of every size with delivering market leading employee benefits arrangements to their employees, which typically range from Financial and Health and Wellbeing services such as Workplace Pension Schemes, Group Private Medical Insurance, Group Life Assurance, Group Income Protection Insurance, and Key Person Protection Insurance.
Our ethos is to provide employee benefits that matter to your employees and support the ongoing engagement with employees and maximise appreciation of the benefits provided.
With the Corpad Group we provide support to both employers and employees through our employee benefits and regulated independent financial planning teams.
How can Corpad assist members?
For individuals, it is about understanding your current financial position and what you would like to achieve in the future. We work with you to establish a plan to help you achieve your objectives, then we help implement the plan. Once established, we regularly review the plan to make sure that you stay on track and as life throws up obstacles and challenges along the way, you are prepared for them and they do not prevent you from achieving your objectives.
This could be simply establishing a plan for future retirement and making sure that you have the resources to maintain the lifestyle that you want, or it can be much more involved looking at more complex arrangements and circumstances.
For employers, we provide proactive advice on providing the right employee benefits to suit your practice which are designed to support your business in attracting the best talent, retaining and motivating employees through offering a competitive employee benefits package. We support any employee benefits arrangement with regular engagement with your employees, ensuring that your employee benefits remain attractive and current to help your employees navigate their financial and wellbeing challenges.
How can you assist practices with their employee benefits?
Our service is designed to become an extension of your own practice. We proactively support to your employees through dedicated named points of contact, regularly present and remind employees of their employee benefits arrangements, and we are on hand to answer employees’ questions and concerns.
What are the current challenges that architects may face around financial planning for their future?
Solid financial planning builds on the key foundation of making sure that you and your family are looked after in the event of sickness or death. Once we know that you have the right cover in place in case anything goes wrong, we can then concentrate on achieving your longer-term financial goals.
Financial planning for businesses is not that different and - certainly for owner-managed businesses - the planning for the business and individual finances are often interwoven so it is key to understand the business issues and requirements as well as your personal ones.
What opportunities can you assist with?
Naturally, we will work with you at your pace and often clients will approach us with one issue they want to concentrate on and once we have dealt with that we can support their wider requirements.
For individuals, we can provide advice on retirement planning and pension consolidation.
For practices, there are so many opportunities where we can assist you to achieve a better outcome, be that improving employee benefits, salary exchange on pension contributions which ensure maximum tax efficiency for both employees and also generate a saving for the business or shareholder protection to key person cover to name a few.
There are lots of things that you can do to use your finances to improve both your business and employees, as well as your personal situation. Examples of areas that we can provide specialist support with are using pension funds to purchase business premises, which then means the rent that you pay for your business premises goes back into your pension fund rather than to a landlord.
Corpad Group are ideally placed to help and has set out how they can help support both you as an individual as well as your business.
In a series of interview-led articles, we provide an up-close and personal look into the portfolio of the products and services chosen to help support you in practice. Find out more about our Financial Guidance and Employee Benefits for sole practitioners and practices.
