When Eleanor Vermeer joined Helio Group as Head of People, the first thing on her desk was the pension contract. It was fourteen years old, signed by someone who had retired before anyone she now worked with had been hired.
Helio is an industrial manufacturer. 832 employees across three Antwerp sites. The pension, on paper, was generous: 3.2% of gross, employer-paid, Branch 21. The problem wasn't the line item. The problem was that none of the 832 people could tell you what it actually was.
The problem hiding in the broker letter.
Every February, Helio's broker sent a four-page letter to each employee. It listed their reserve, the insurer's technical return for the year, and a projected balance at age 67.
Eleanor pulled the engagement data. Of 832 employees, 34 had opened the digital version in the previous year. Of those 34, the average time on page was 47 seconds.
34 people. Out of 832. We were paying €2.1M a year for a benefit our team couldn't be bothered to look at.
The contract had three deeper problems she hadn't seen in the audit. The AUM fee was 0.92%, invisible to members but compounding for thirty-plus years. The portfolio was 100% Belgian government bonds and insurer-balance-sheet products, returning less than inflation since 2018. And the broker took an annual commission of 0.4% of gross premium that nobody on Eleanor's team had ever surfaced internally.
What the switchover actually looked like.
Eleanor met Warren in March, signed in early April, and Helio went live shortly after. The work landed with Warren, not with her team.
The plan ran in three movements. Warren handled the FSMA notification and the broker handover. Helio's HR team picked the launch window, prepared a 200-word internal note, and chose three teams to onboard first as pilots. Communications went out by department, with the site lead's photo on the email rather than Eleanor's. A small editorial choice that doubled open rates.
- 01
Pilot, then wave.
Three teams went first. Their feedback shaped the second wave's onboarding copy and the AI prompt library before anyone else saw it.
- 02
Site lead as the face.
Activation emails came from the local site manager, not from corporate HR. Open rates doubled. So did week-one logins.
- 03
Decoded payslip in week 1.
Warren's payslip view was set as the first thing new members saw. By week 4, 78% of Helio's team had opened it at least twice.
- 04
One quarterly readout.
The board now sees adoption by team, by quarter. The CFO gets the same line item, with a chart.
What it bought for the next thirty years.
Six months after launch, weekly active members sat at 78%. Member NPS came in at +62, up 58 points from the last engagement survey. The broker commission, the AUM drag, the insurer balance-sheet exposure. Gone.
Eleanor's next board readout took fifteen minutes. The pension, for the first time in fourteen years, was a line item the executive committee asked questions about, and the answers were on a dashboard, by team, in real time.
It's not a 'pension thing' anymore. It's the benefit our recruiters lead with in the second interview.
Modeled forward on Helio's contribution path, the move from a 0.92% AUM to a flat €20/member/month adds roughly €48,200 of additional retirement capitalto a 32-year-old engineer's balance at age 67, compared to the legacy contract. Multiplied across 832 employees, that's the kind of number that ends up in the next manifesto.