Nuala O’Donnell

I’m Nuala O’Donnell, and I am a senior official for the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation in Belfast.

The INTO has been working with Platinum since the start, for almost 20 years, and I have been working with Jonny for that time. They provide information for our members about their retirement benefits and their pension. We are prohibited from providing this information to our members, so Platinum provides a service that we cannot provide ourselves.

The service that Platinum provides gives our members financial advice that they otherwise would not be able to obtain. It’s a service that explains their pensions to them, which, as pensions have become more complicated, particularly in the public sector, helps them to understand what they are receiving, when they are receiving it, and what they can do at different times within their pension life.

One of the things Platinum provides for us is webinars for our members; these include pre-retirement webinars and mid-career financial advice. We discovered during lockdown that our members really enjoy webinars because they can take in the information and ask questions without anybody else in the room or the environment knowing who is asking the questions. So, while it may seem like a silly question to them and they might have been embarrassed to ask it in seminars, they really do enjoy the webinars, and the numbers attending just exploded when we started doing webinars.

It’s very important to us at INTO that we work with a firm that has the specialist knowledge and pension and financial advice that our teachers need. It is very specific, and we have to be able to trust who we are giving our members to. Platinum provides that for us and has done so for years.

Another aspect of the service Platinum provides is that our members get a free one-to-one session with a financial consultant, which is critical because every member’s pension, teaching lifetime, service, and circumstances will be different. Therefore, they require that individual time to look at what the best options are for them.

The feedback we have received from members about both the webinars and the one-to-one sessions that they have is fantastic. Platinum receives glowing references from our members. Their financial consultants understand our members and explain things well, instilling confidence. So, we couldn’t be happier, and our members are the same.

The best thing for us about working with Platinum is that we have trust and confidence that the information, advice, and support that they are providing to our members is specific to teachers in Northern Ireland and will give them the information they require at a critical time in their career.

I would recommend Platinum to other similar organisations because of the level of detail and confidence that we have in them, the trust that is there, how they have worked with us in the past, and the feedback we have received from our members.