The appearance of a US giant such as Hewlett Packard in the list of winners highlights the difficulties some multi-nationals can experience when providing pensions for workforces across a number of countries with differing financial cultures and addressing them.
Ana Salguero works on the scheme on behalf of Banco Sabadell – itself the number two-ranked provider of pension plans in Spain. “They have made huge changes in their plan in recent years, and this has involved a lot of work, in particular, communicating the changes to the workforce,” she points out. “Although they come from an Anglo-Saxon financial culture, many headquarters of multi-nationals want to be involved in the development of pension schemes in other countries such as Spain. Sometimes it can be difficult since although some of the newer asset classes such as hedge funds and private equity exist in Spain often they are not used extensively. In Spain employees are traditionally conservative with their investments.”
One of the major changes that the bank has helped Hewlett Packard with has been the introduction of a defined contribution (DC) scheme alongside the original defined benefit (DB) scheme, with the threshold for new employees to join the new scheme set at December 1992. “Members of the original DB scheme can join the new one, and obviously the company took the task of explaining the re-structuring to the scheme members very seriously. Consultants were employed and actuaries quantified service benefits. The implementation has been a huge success with many of the older employees opting for the scheme,” says Salguero.
As she points out, Hewlett Packard is a company that has a workforce which transfers within the group from company to company, but also from country to country. “If you have a DC scheme portability is much easier, and this is an incentive for some of the members to change. Most interesting for us has been the success of the transformation, and the acceptance and implementation of new products including a quantified pension scheme and a number of insurance plans. To have worked this changeover successfully in such a volatile economic climate which we have witnessed of late is a major achievement.”
Salguero says HP understands the importance of the national award. “They realise the comparison is with other major organisations, but I think we all agree that the awards encourage all of us working in the pensions industry across Europe to come together and attempt to influence the changes which are taking place.”

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