What you can do to improve your employees’ income in retirement

South Africans are not saving enough for retirement – but there are ways employers could help to boost their pension. Here’s how.

By Mark van Dijk

CORPORATE

DO GREAT THINGS EVERY DAY

One of the most hard-hitting moments of the 2022 Old Mutual SuperFund Summit was a short video clip of Old Mutual Corporate’s Social Experiment. Eight typical South African families were each asked to fill a trolley with their monthly grocery shop. They didn’t know that the price of the groceries had been inflated to reflect what they would cost when they retired. When each family arrived at the till, their budget had been revised to their projected income at retirement. They had to decide what to keep and what to return to the shelves.

Seeing this play out on film brought home just how unprepared most South Africans are for their retirement, and how unaware they are of how that will affect their standard of living.

“The statistics that get mentioned – that only 6% of us can retire comfortably – can be quite abstract,” says Malusi Ndlovu, Director: Large Enterprise Market at Old Mutual Corporate. “When you bring it down to the level of a real family, of a working professional who is 10 or 20 years from retirement who’s looking at a basket of groceries that they cannot afford… that’s when the message really lands.”

THE ROLE PLAYERS DETERMINING A RETIREMENT FUND’S PERFORMANCE

There are a number of parties involved in everyone’s retirement journey. “There’s the individual or employee who is contributing to their retirement fund; the employer who has some decision rights around how much is contributed; and the provider of the retirement fund, for instance, Old Mutual Corporate,” Ndlovu explains.

“Our job, as provider of the retirement fund, is to ensure people can replace their incomes when they are ready to retire or are no longer able to work. It’s not enough for us to design solutions that can achieve that in theory. We must play an active

role in helping people to understand and use the products which will allow them to get the right retirement outcomes.”

Employers play an equally vital role when it comes to maximising their employees’ retirement income. Here Ndlovu points to the six levers that are pivotal to achieving successful retirement outcomes: contributions; the gap between your pensionable salary and cost to company; the investment strategy; preservation; what you do with your savings at retirement; and your retirement age.

In addition to these three role players, the managing committee or trustees also have their part to play in maximising the investment outcomes of a retirement fund. This checklist of nine questions for retirement fund trustees is a handy reminder of what they can do to further boost members’ income in retirement.

HOW EMPLOYERS COULD HELP TO BOOST WORKERS’ RETIREMENT SAVINGS

Employers can help by offering employees greater flexibility. “In the past, most employers would choose a default contribution category that every employee then contributed to. That meant that everyone contributed the same percentage of their salary each month,’ Ndlovu explains. “But that’s not enough.”

“Employers must make the effort to make more contribution categories available. Members can get a tax deduction on up to 27% or a rand

cap, and every employer should look at their retirement funding structure to allow them the flexibility to take advantage of this. If someone wants to and is able to make that salary sacrifice and contribute more towards their retirement, they will then be able to do so.”

The next step is educating staff about the different options to help them understand what’s available and how their choices could significantly affect their retirement outcome. For example, if you were to retire at 65, Old Mutual’s actuaries recommend having at least nine times your annual salary invested if you’re a man, and 10 times that amount if you’re a woman. This means that a man earning R100 000 per annum will need R900 000 on the day they retire, and a woman R1 million.

Once fund members understand this, they can make the right choices and ask the right questions of their employer – and if necessary, ask for changes if the options they need are not available to them.

For retirement funds and employers alike, empowering and enabling fund members is the first step towards improving South Africans’ quality of life in retirement. “Remember those three role players,” Ndlovu concludes. “There’s the fund, the employee and the employer. Through their decisions, each can make the situation better or worse – but ultimately, it’s the employee who has to live with the outcome.”

This article originally appeared on the Old Mutual Corporate Resource Hub.Visit: oldmutual.co.za/mindspace

For more information on the Old Mututal Corporate Social Experiment, visit: www.oldmutual.co.za/superfundpower

CYBEREASON

ACHIEVES 100% PREVENTION, VISIBILITY AND REAL-TIME PROTECTION

BRANDON ROCHAT

Cybereason, the XDR company, has announced that the results of round four of the ATT&CK Evaluations conducted by MITRE Engenuity affirm the superior prevention and detection capabilities of the AI-driven Cybereason XDR Platform.

Cybereason achieved perfect scores in nearly every aspect of the evaluations, including 100% Prevention - detecting and preventing 100% of the 9 different attack sequences evaluated for both Windows and Linux. The company also achieved 100% Visibility by exposing 100% of the 109 different attack behaviours evaluated for both Windows and Linux. It also showed 100% Real-Time Protection with zero delayed detections.

Furthermore, Cybereason showed 99% Analytical Coverage with detections mapped back to the key ATT&CK techniques evaluated. It also required Minimal Configuration, Cybereason delivered out-of-the-box protection with minimal configuration changes required.

CYBEREASON DELIVERS END ATTACKS AT THE ENDPOINT

Only the AI-driven Cybereason XDR Platform provides planetary-scale data ingestion, operationcentric MalOp detection, and predictive response.

SCHEDULE A DEMO TODAY and benefit from an operation-centric approach

Cybereason and Google Cloud are dedicated to teaming with Defenders to end cyber attacks from endpoints to the enterprise to everywhere. Schedule a demo today to see how your organisation can benefit from an operation-centric approach to security.

Round 4 of the ATT&CK Evaluations highlights the efficacy of our NGAV and EDR capabilities in protecting against sophisticated attack techniques from threat actors like Sandworm and Wizard Spider.

In addition, the Cybereason XDR Platform delivers AIdriven prevention, detection and predictive response protection that identifies and blocks advanced threats at the earliest stages of an attack.

The results from all four years of the ATT&CK Evaluations highlight how the Cybereason solutions map directly to the ATT&CK framework to deliver unparalleled detection of advanced threat actor Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). The superior out-of-the-box efficacy that the AI-driven Cybereason XDR Platform delivers means there is little need for solution configuration changes at deployment. Organisations can immediately benefit from exceptional real-time prevention and detection capabilities, automated and one-click predictive response options to stop the most advanced cyberattacks.

Cybereason Sales Director for Africa, Brandon Rochat, points to what the MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation Results Mean to the Enterprise. “Organisations are increasingly mapping their threat detection strategies to the ATT&CK framework.” “This provides a common language for Defenders to understand the range of techniques adversaries can use to gain initial access, escalate privileges, steal account credentials, move laterally in the targeted network, and ultimately to exfiltrate sensitive data or disrupt critical business operations,” he explains.

The MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations reveal how vendors approach the same challenges in reducing the time required to identify, understand and respond to malicious actions before material damage occurs.

Rochat believes the results highlight the effectiveness of Cybereason under realworld conditions because the AI-driven Cybereason XDR Platform identifies attacks earlier by correlating behavioural telemetry across the entire network, including the broad range of device types, user identities, application suites, cloud workloads and more.

“The Cybereason MalOp reduces mean time to detection and response (MTTD and MTTR) by immediately providing the complete attack story from root cause without the need for complex queries. Cybereason delivers actionable detections and predictive response across all measured MITRE ATT&CK evaluation categories without inundating analysts with a barrage of uncorrelated alerts,” he adds.

CYBERSECURITY SOLUTIONS THAT ARE BUILT FOR SPEED AND EFFICACY

CYBEREASON

PERFECT SCORES:

Cybereason achieved 100% Prevention of attack sequences evaluated for both Windows and Linux.

Cybereason CEO and Co-Founder Lior Div says these results validate the superior detection and protection capabilities that Cybereason delivers against the most complex attack sequences. “The ATT&CK framework is the go-to standard for assessing solution efficacy today.”

“We are proud of both our outstanding performance in all four years of the evaluations, and of our ongoing collaboration with MITRE CTID to further improve detection based on the most subtle of attacker behaviours. This is how we begin to defend forward as a community, stop relying so much on reactive approaches and take the fight to the adversary through behaviouroriented predictive response,” he says. Cybereason also collaborates with MITRE Centre for ThreatInformed Defence (CTID) on the Attack Flow Project, which seeks to develop a common data format for describing sequences of adversary behaviour in order to improve defensive capabilities.

The goal of the Attack Flow Project is to generate a machine-readable representation of a sequence of attacker actions and context along with specific descriptive attributes of those actions and assets composed of five main objects: the flow itself, a list of actions, a list of assets, a list of knowledge properties, and a list of causal relationships between the actions and assets. Cybereason joined the Centre as a Research Participant to conduct research and development to support further evolution of the MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK framework. Cybereason and the Centre work to provide Defenders with a deep understanding of adversary tradecraft and advances in the development of countermeasures for prevention, detection and response to complex threats.

“ CYBEREASON”

CYBEREASON

a privately held international company headquartered in Boston with customers in more than 40 countries.

“RESPOND FASTER TO EMERGING THREATS.

“Defenders often have to track adversary techniques individually, meaning they can only focus on one specific activity at a time, but adversaries use complex sequences in their attack flows to hide in the network seams and avoid detection until it’s too late,” said Sam Curry, Cybereason CSO.

“Being able to understand the context and correlations across those sequences by chaining together the otherwise disparate Indicators of Behaviour (IOBs), allows Defenders to surface complex attacks earlier in the attack sequence and creates the opportunity to respond faster as threats are emerging,” Curry explains.

Cybereason is dedicated to teaming with Defenders to end attacks across the enterprise to anywhere the battle is taking place. Contact us today to learn how your organization can benefit from an operationcentric approach through the AI-driven Cybereason XDR Platform.