We recently sat down with Brandon Weber, the co-founder and CEO of Nava Benefits, to get his thoughts on the state of the industry, the benefits trends he's watching, and the evolving role of the benefits advisor.

How did you get into the industry?

My background isn't in health care or benefits; it's in building high-growth technology companies that operate in heavily brokered industries. So I've got a long history of building technology that modernizes brokered industries, going all the way back to the early days of Zillow.

Brandon Weber, co-founder & CEO, Nava Benefits

I grew up in a blue collar environment in northern Alaska and was very close to people who were negatively impacted by the health care system, often going through medical bankruptcies or having to raise money for a surgery. As a result, I grew up with this sense that the health care system was just a really unsafe place that you should avoid at all costs. And that always stuck with me.

After having success with my last company, I decided that I wanted to focus my time on helping to solve a societal problem that impacts lots of folks. And for me, health care was that problem. That led me on the kind of walkabout through the health care system where I talked to every stakeholder I could, from insurance system CEOs, to digital health entrepreneurs, to HR leaders. What I learned was how important and how powerful the benefits broker is in guiding HR teams (the buyer of employer-sponsored health care for 155 million Americans) to either the right or the wrong solutions for their members. And so, I got really interested in the benefits broker as a change agent for good.

Where do you think the greatest opportunity for innovation is?

There are a couple of areas which I think are particularly ripe for innovation and that get me really excited about the future.

First off, when you talk to most benefits consultants or client managers and ask them about their day-to-day work serving HR teams, they'll share story after story of just how manual and inefficient their jobs are. For example, having to manually key in information from a census file to a carrier template or hand type medical plan information into a pitch deck. They will tell you about how much of their day is spent doing this kind of clerical work that's highly error-prone and adds zero value directly to the HR team or the members they serve.

We see a massive opportunity to streamline this clerical work by bringing modern workflow technology to brokers, client success folks, and benefit analysts who do the work. The goal is to help free up their time so they can focus on being more strategic and building deeper relationships with their clients and prospects. As a small example, just one such tool we've built has automated a manual carrier elections auditing process that took our account teams hundreds of hours a month to complete. The truth is that the industry is, in many ways, still using the same technology they were using 20 years ago and we believe that has to change to serve the modern employer.