Emma Simon

Emma Simon links workplace pensions, employee benefits and financial regulation, reporting on how corporate and policy decisions impact workers’ savings and wellbeing. She is deputy editor at Corporate Adviser, where she covers finance stories focused on pension schemes, protection and the cost and design of workplace benefits.

Workplace pensions and retirement outcomes

A core strand of Simon’s coverage is workplace pensions and the systems that govern retirement outcomes. She reports on union and member responses to pension administration failures, including coverage of calls for government action over the Capita pension scandal, framing it as an “unprecedented” issue for scheme governance and saver confidence. She regularly follows how trustees and providers manage conflicts and responsibilities, as in her piece on trustee conflicts coming under the spotlight.

Her reporting tracks trends in retirement saving behaviour, such as the story on a million workers reducing pension payments during the cost-of-living crisis, showing how personal finances interact with long-term retirement planning. She covers investment strategy decisions within major schemes, including Nest committing £200m to venture capital in partnership with Schroders, and what these moves mean for diversification and member returns. Simon also writes on the expansion of fiduciary management businesses, for example Goldman Sachs growing its UK fiduciary management arm, highlighting how institutional investment services are evolving around occupational schemes.

Regulatory and legal frameworks around pensions are a recurring focus. She has reported on ECJ rulings that caps on Pension Protection Fund payments are unlawful, explaining implications for members relying on safety nets. Earlier pieces on master trusts, such as TPR authorising People’s Pension, Atlas and Cheviot master trusts, show her attention to structural changes in the pension market and authorisation regimes. She also covers calls by regulators to improve retirement outcomes on legacy pension products, following how supervisory bodies push providers to address historic shortcomings.

Employee benefits, protection and wellbeing

Simon devotes substantial coverage to the design and funding of employee benefits and workplace protection. Her reporting includes analysis that the cost of employee benefits is the biggest financial challenge for around two-thirds of businesses, underscoring how benefit spend sits alongside other corporate pressures. She reports on workplace protection and wellbeing research, such as the Corporate Adviser Workplace Protection & Wellbeing Report, which identified strong growth of cash plans and group life in 2025 as healthcare costs rise. These pieces link benefit mix and pricing to broader health cost inflation.

She writes about corporate healthcare provision and cost-sharing, including a corporate healthcare roundtable on “sharing the costs”, where employers, intermediaries and providers discuss sustainable approaches to funding health benefits. Her coverage of larger SMEs failing to promote wellbeing services shows an interest in not just the presence of benefits, but how they are communicated and used by employees. Through these stories she treats wellbeing as both a financial and organisational issue, exploring gaps between benefit availability and actual uptake.

Protection products and the “protection gap” feature in her work, with articles on regulators calling for more innovation to close this gap, and new ONS figures prompting calls for increased cover. She connects these themes to group risk offerings and employer responsibilities, presenting workplace protection as part of the wider financial safety net around employees.

Regulation, risk and market shocks

Simon frequently covers regulatory change and market risk, explaining how macro developments filter down to employers and pension schemes. She has reported on “no deal” Brexit scenarios that could wipe 25 per cent off the UK stock market according to MSCI, framing the potential impact on investment portfolios and funding positions. Her article on the Prudential Regulation Authority no longer requiring small UK insurers to produce an annual Solvency and Financial Condition Report shows her focus on how regulatory reporting burdens shift for smaller firms and insurers connected to workplace benefits.

Her stories on trustee conflicts and on regulatory calls for innovation around protection indicate a consistent interest in governance and oversight, not just product and price. She writes up legal and regulatory decisions with an emphasis on practical consequences, whether for pension trustees, insurers or employers funding benefit programmes.

Broader consumer and business coverage

Alongside her work at Corporate Adviser, Simon continues to operate as a freelance journalist, writing on a range of consumer issues that include money and finance, family, environmental topics and wider business subjects. This background in consumer-focused reporting informs her approach to institutional finance stories, which often foreground the impact on workers, savers and households rather than treating schemes purely as corporate structures. The mix of pension policy, workplace benefits and consumer money themes gives her coverage a consistent through-line: how financial systems and employer decisions shape everyday financial security.