Pay Transparency Legislation - Reinsurance Consideration

While we as a company, support equality and fair pay in the workplace, we do not believe a prescriptive pay transparency policy is simple to implement in the Bermuda market like it might be elsewhere in the world. The Bermuda market is unique in that the majority of talent, particularly actuarial talent, is expatriate talent who move to Bermuda to take up these roles. In addition, companies like us who have less than 5 employees based in Bermuda are likely to be disproportionately impacted. We’d like to recommend that the Minister consider the following two points below before finalizing the pay transparency legislation:

• Limited Flexibility: We have employees from mainland US and Europe who all have different personal circumstances and tax circumstances. As a result, we require the flexibility to create renumeration packages to ensure working for us in Bermuda meets their personal, financial and tax needs. Therefore, standardizing salaries to ensure compliance or fairness makes it harder for small employers to offer customized, competitive packages to exceptional candidates. Which for small companies like us is extremely important as we rely on recruiting and retaining top talent.
• Talent turnover: Publishing precise pay scales allows competitors to easily identify (given the size of our team) and poach our staff by offering slightly higher compensation packages. Talent retention is a key risk we manage in Bermuda and we believe this proposed policy will make this risk harder to manage. The potential impact of this is that companies will resort to employing more staff in jurisdictions with less competitive talent markets and utilizing remote working. As a result, reducing the economic substance in Bermuda. We recommend that the minister considers allowing exemptions for smaller companies who will likely be impacted more severely by this proposed legislation.