Corporate Clients

We help businesses deliver best-in-class employee benefits

Our clients include businesses ranging from domestic SMEs to multinational corporations in the software, telecommunications, financial services, aircraft leasing, medical devices and hospitality sectors.

We help businesses deliver best-in-class employee benefits. We advise on and implement leading pension plan solutions for you as a business owner, and help you to ensure that your business is protected in the event of death/illness. We help your business to minimise tax, manage your cash and select and implement appropriate investments.

So, whatever your size or stage of development, we can help you to deliver an enriched employee experience, and help you to protect and maximise the value of your business.

Employee Benefits Services

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We help employers attract and maintain the right people for the right jobs by providing expert advice and services on appropriate employee benefits, including pension plans, life insurance plans and health insurance plans.

We currently advise a wide range of Irish-owned businesses and multinational corporations, and the steps in our advice and services typically include the following:

Understanding: we discuss your requirements and your objectives for your employees and the types of employee benefits you wish to provide. We provide you with examples of the types of employee benefits provided by employers in Ireland, based on statistical evidence and our own practical experiences. This process helps us both to understand your requirements, the options available, and what is actually feasible for you.
Options: we provide you with a number of suitable options, with detailed costings, for your consideration and for our discussion. We generally work with the leading insurance companies and the leading pension providers, in order to deliver market-leading options for your review, including suitable Occupational Pension Scheme (OPS) structures and Personal Retirement Savings Account (PRSA) structures.
Decision: at this stage, you will be in a position to decide on the specific employee benefits to be provided for your employees. We work with you in order to decide on the roll-out of the benefits to employees, the practical requirements to establish the benefits with the selected benefit providers, and the ongoing operation of the benefits.
Implementation: we take care of the implementation for you. We prepare and submit the paperwork for you and for your employees in order to set up the benefits. We provide information and briefing sessions for all employees, and we meet with each employee to discuss the benefits and their own requirements. Our role is to ensure that the ongoing implementation of the benefits operates in a seamless and consistent manner that minimises the time you need to spend in this area.
Evaluation: on an ongoing basis, we evaluate the implementation of the benefits from your perspective as an employer and from an individual employee perspective. At renewal each year, we check with other benefit providers to ensure that the costs of your benefits are in line with competitive market rates. We can adapt the benefits over time in line with your changing requirements and changes in the market.
Extra Service Included: as your chosen employee benefits advisor, as part of our services to you, we can provide personal financial planning information, advice and services for all your employees on a one-to-one basis, at no additional cost to you. We are available as a financial planning resource for your employees, which has proven to be a very useful and beneficial service for our existing employer clients and their employees.

For employers with existing benefits in place, we can undertake a review of these benefits and take over as the advisor, with a view to providing an improved service at similar or lower cost for you.

Executive Pension Planning

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We help business owners and key executives to select, implement and manage executive pension plan structures.

Business owners and key executives can benefit from “one-person” executive pension plans in order to have greater flexibility and control on the level of contributions paid into the pension plan and on the choice of investments in the plan, compared to a standard group pension plan structure (as typically used for groups of employees).

In some cases, tax-allowable pension contributions in excess of 200% of annual salary can be paid each year into a pension plan for the benefit of a business owner or key executive. Accordingly, suitable pension planning provides considerable scope to extract surplus profits, bonuses, etc in a tax-efficient manner, for the purposes of providing retirement benefits for such individuals. Retirement benefits can be accessed from as early as age 50 onwards, in certain circumstances.

A wide range of investment options are available, including investment funds from global and specialist investment managers, and investments in direct assets such as individual residential and commercial properties, listed company shares and other listed securities. A self-administered structure can be effected in order to provide the most flexibility for investment options – see our section on “Self-Administered Pension Schemes” for more information.

In addition to advising you on a suitable executive pension plan structure, we advise on the maximum level of pension contributions that can be paid into your plan, and we recommend investment options based on our extensive research of the options available. We work with you on ongoing basis to help ensure that your pension plan stays on track and help you to ensure that you are taking full advantage of the options and benefits available.

Corporate Deposit & Investment Advice

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We help you to manage the surplus cash in your business by helping you to select, implement and evaluate on an ongoing basis the best options available, including:

Cash deposits: we advise on market-leading deposit accounts from Irish and foreign banks, including interest-paying demand accounts.
Tax-efficient investment structures: we help you to select and implement tax-efficient structures to manage long-term investments for your business, to enable your business to defer taxes on investment income/gains for up to 8 years. In addition, the income/gains rolled-up in such structures is not subject to the close company tax surcharge on undistributed income.
Leading investment managers: we research a wide range of global and specialist investment managers in order to identify appropriate investment solutions for our clients.

Our advice is centred around your business requirements and circumstances, and we take the time to understand and to review your preferences, your business circumstances and objectives, your attitude to investment risk, and the existing financial arrangements in place for your business.

We work with you on an ongoing basis over the long-term, in order to help you to manage and to maximise the value of your business cash and investments, within a clear, concise and structured framework.

Shareholder & Keyperson Life Insurance Broker

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The death of a shareholder/partner or a key employee can have serious implications for businesses, and in some cases can threaten the continued existence of the business.

Life insurance can be structured and arranged in order to provide funds to purchase the share of a business from the estate of a deceased shareholder/partner, and to compensate a business for loss of profits or to cover business loans in the event of the death/illness of a key employee.

We help you to assess the financial impact of the death/illness of a shareholder/partner or a key employee, and advise on and implement a tax-efficient insurance structure for you at the lowest cost. In addition, we will review any existing life insurance cover you have in place.

As part of our services for our clients, we act as a broker for life insurance cover and we can arrange life insurance cover for our clients with the main life insurance companies in Ireland.

Examples of the insurance structures that we have arranged for business clients include:

Shareholder Cover: most shareholder and partnership agreements include provisions regarding the death of a shareholder/partner. Life cover can be effected on the lives of each shareholder/partner, in conjunction with a double-option buy-back agreement to enable the surviving shareholders/partners to compel the estate to sell the shares, and to enable the estate to compel the surviving shareholders/partners to buy-back the shares from the estate.This life cover can be structured in several ways, whereby the cost of the life cover can be paid by the business or paid by the individual shareholders/partners. The cost is not allowable for corporation tax or income tax relief. The proceeds can be exempt from tax, depending on the structure and provided certain conditions are met.
Specified illness cover can also be included with the life cover, which provides a lump sum payment in the event of a shareholder/partner having a specified illness.
Keyperson Cover: provides a lump sum payment to the business in the event of the death (or serious illness) of a key employee.The tax treatment of proceeds depends on the risk that the insurance covers, i.e. proceeds to cover loss of profits are generally treated as a revenue receipt and are taxed as revenue, whereas proceeds to cover loans are generally treated as a capital receipt that is exempt from capital gains tax.
The costs are generally not allowable for tax relief – however the costs of keyperson cover to cover loss of profits may be allowable provided certain conditions are met.