Nest now has more than 100,000 participating members, it announced today. At an event for employers and advisers the auto-enrolment scheme operator welcomed 26 new employers, taking the number of large employers with the scheme to more than 300.

The new additions announced today include estate agent Countrywide plc, brewers Greene King, Random House publishing group, retailer H&M and the universities of Glasgow, Manchester and Southampton.

“Automatic-enrolment is now in full swing and Nest is playing a critical role for many employers,” said Nest chief executive Tim Jones. Long-term, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has estimated Nest will have two to five million members by the time auto-enrolment is fully implemented.

Jones said: “We will be catering for a broad range of employers, from large to small, across a wide range of sectors. Accordingly, we are continually evolving our services to meet the needs of all the employers we are working with.”

As part of its efforts, Nest has also announced a new website to help employers and advisers with automatic-enrolment that will go live next week, May 6. The site will offer advice for different sized organisations as the staging dates for smaller groups approach.

According to Jones its work with employers has shown auto-enrolment projects taking between six and 18 months to complete on average, with some taking more than two years. Employers have identified a number of key challenges such as integrating automatic enrolment with payroll, identifying which workers are eligible for automatic enrolment; dealing with enrolment issues where there’s a high turnover of staff and explaining what’s happening to their workers.

Jones said: “Employers of all sizes have told us that they worry about extra administration. But it’s the employers who’ve actually been through the process that have given us the clearest view of where the challenges of automatic-enrolment really lie.”

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