About Aetas Workplace
Turning investment in people into
commercial return.
Every employer invests in people. Salaries, pensions, benefits, recruitment, training, management time. Very few know what that investment returns.
Aetas Workplace helps SME leaders measure that return, improve it, and prove it.
Our experience
An experienced, personal approach
I’m Matthew Steiner, Commercial Director of Aetas Workplace. For more than twenty years I’ve helped business owners and private clients make better financial decisions, combining financial planning with practical commercial consultancy to help organisations get more from their investment in people.
Most of that happened one conversation at a time, sitting with someone while they worked out what to do about a pension, a business sale, or a retirement that had arrived sooner than they’d planned.
After enough of those conversations, I noticed something that had nothing to do with the products people held.
Money worries don’t stay at home. They come into work as lost focus, avoidable absence, and good people leaving earlier than they meant to. Employers could feel it. Very few could see it. Almost none could put a number on it.
So I started Aetas Workplace.
Financial wellbeing is a commercial strategy, not an employee benefit. File it under benefits and it sits next to the cycle-to-work scheme, with a budget to match. Treat it as a performance question and you can measure it, act on it, and check afterwards whether it worked.
You’ll work with me directly. I run the conversations, write the recommendations, and stay involved while they’re put in place. You won’t be handed to an account manager once the proposal is signed.
I’ll also be straight with you. Every recommendation carries a commercial reason you can check. If the case isn’t there, I’ll say so. I’d rather give you the right answer than the profitable one.
One relationship, the right expertise
The people behind Aetas Workplace
Every engagement begins with me. Few business problems stay simple enough to end there, which is why you also have experienced financial planners and trusted specialist partners working alongside you.
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Daniel Cottam
Financial Planner
Delivers workplace financial education and one-to-one guidance for employees.
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Peter Rose APFS
Chartered Financial Planner and Pension Specialist
Brings the technical pensions expertise most benefits questions eventually need.
Some questions need regulated financial advice: a pension decision, retirement planning, someone’s wider finances. Your employees can get that through Aetas Wealth, which is authorised to give it. Aetas Workplace is a consultancy and does not.
That line is deliberate. It means workplace support and personal advice join up for your people, without either being sold as the other.
Then there is everything that sits outside financial advice altogether.
Improving performance in a smaller business rarely stays inside one subject. A retention problem turns out to be a management problem. A benefits question becomes an HR question. Financial pressure at home turns out to be a debt problem nobody had asked about.
Handled the usual way, you would find, brief and manage several suppliers yourself. That is real work, and it lands on a team with no room for it. Good intentions stall around month three.
The HONED partner network exists so that doesn’t happen. When the evidence points at leadership, coaching, HR or occupational wellbeing, we bring in someone who does that properly, with your approval, and we coordinate the delivery. Nothing is introduced because a partner is available. It is introduced because the diagnosis pointed at it.
You keep one relationship and one lead consultant. You reach specialist expertise when you need it, without paying to assemble it, manage it, or carry the risk of picking the wrong supplier. Our specialist partner network sets out how that works.
Why measurement comes first
Measuring what your people investment returns
That coordination only pays off if you can tell whether it worked, which is why one number sits at the centre of everything we do.
Return on Employee Investment is what your investment in people gives back, in pounds. Not a wellbeing score. Not a survey result. A commercial number you can put in front of anyone who asks what the spending achieved.
We take a baseline before changing anything. This matters more than it sounds. Without a starting point, any improvement is a claim rather than a finding, and claims are the first thing cut when budgets tighten.
So we agree which measures are practical in a business of your size, record where they stand today, and agree how we will judge progress. You see the method before you see the numbers.
Every recommendation then ties back to one of those measures. If we cannot say what a piece of work is meant to move, we have not thought about it hard enough to recommend it.
We are careful about what measurement can do. Working life has many moving parts, and we do not claim every outcome traces to a single cause. What we can show you is where you started, what changed, and what it was worth.
How ROEI works sets out the framework in full. The ROEI calculator gives you an indicative figure for your own organisation.
Where every engagement starts
How we work
Every engagement starts the same way: four short steps, light on your time, with full visibility at each point. We recommend, cost and commit to nothing until you have seen exactly what we propose and why.
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Step 1
Initial conversation
A short introductory call, with a brief questionnaire beforehand so we use the time well.
30 minutes · Video or phone
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Step 2
Discovery
A deeper conversation about where financial pressure may be affecting performance, and what support you already have.
45 minutes · Video or in person
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Step 3
Options
We look at options together, sized for your business and practical to put in place.
45 minutes · Video or in person
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Step 4
Proposal
A written proposal setting out what we recommend, what it costs, and what it should return. This is the first point at which we ask for a commitment.
Written · Reviewed together
Most clients reach the proposal step within four to six weeks, and there is no cost and no obligation before it. If you would rather start on your own, the employer diagnostic gives you a picture in about eight minutes.
Four ways we help
What we put in place
What follows the Review depends on what it found, usually some combination of these, starting with whatever pays back soonest.
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Benefits Review
We make sense of the pensions and benefits you already fund, and fix what underperforms. Savings often surface here (setting up salary exchange, or trimming fees that quietly erode a pension) before we spend a penny of yours.
Learn more →
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Financial Education
Workshops that help your people understand how their money works, and see the value of what you already provide. Confidential one-to-one guidance where it is needed.
Learn more →
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HONED
Everyday wellbeing services in one place, through independent partners, from saving for a first home to getting on top of debt. No additional employer cost, managed on your behalf.
Learn more →
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Advice, backed by Aetas Wealth
When an employee wants regulated advice on pensions, retirement or their wider finances, it is there through Aetas Wealth. Workplace support and personal advice, joined up, from one group.
Learn more →
The relationship after the first year
Why clients continue to work with us
The first Review tells you where you stand. What happens over the following years is where the return actually builds.
Businesses change. You take on twenty people, or lose a manager who held a team together. Priorities change. A year spent on retention looks different from a year spent on cost. And your people change, because someone who needed help with debt at 28 needs help with a mortgage at 34 and a pension at 50.
A programme designed once, for the business you used to be, quietly stops fitting. That is usually why wellbeing spending gets cut: not because it failed, but because nobody checked whether it still matched the organisation.
We stay alongside you instead. We revisit the baseline, look at what moved, and adjust what we recommend as your circumstances change. Some of that means stopping things that are no longer earning their place.
Over time that becomes something more useful than a supplier relationship. You get a consultancy that knows your business, your people and your numbers, and that can tell you plainly whether your investment in people is still returning what it should. That is the relationship we are trying to build, and it is why clients stay, not because anyone is locked in.
Our offices
Where to find us
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London
13 Hanover Square, MayfairLondon, W1S 1HN -
Norwich
Insight House, 7a Alkmaar WayNorwich International Business Park, NR6 6BF
Our regulatory position
How we are regulated
Aetas Workplace provides employee benefits, financial education and wellbeing services to employers. These services support financial understanding, engagement and resilience but do not constitute regulated financial advice. Where regulated advice is required, this is provided separately by Aetas Wealth, a trading style of Insight Financial Associates Limited, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (registration number 458421).
Book a Workplace Review
No obligation. No pressure. Just a conversation about whether we can improve your return on investment in your people.