The 'broker of the future' - A Q&A with Brandon Weber

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.

This internal tooling and broker enablement is where we’re making a significant investment with our product and engineering teams. It’s not sexy, but it’s a massive lever to deliver more value for our teams and clients at scale.

The second big opportunity for innovation in benefits brokerage is to reorient focus around supporting employees and their families through their benefits journey. Traditionally, brokers have been focused on “how can I keep my HR team happy and make sure the CFO doesn’t get me fired?” And as a result, they’ve often taken far less ownership over how well an employee and their family did at choosing and using their benefits.

I’m constantly blown away by how stale and useless many open enrollment presentations are. It’s like we’re still in 1995. The benefits materials that you get after the presentation — in many cases a 50-page PDF — also look like they’re from the 1990s. No one in their right mind would want to use them (myself included). Moreover, you can’t access this information on your phone and have to go on a corporate intranet page that most people forget about. And, what if an employee has a question like, “I just got a confusing medical bill; what do I do now?” None of these issues are really addressed by the traditional benefits broker.

We believe there’s a huge opportunity to take more ownership of the benefits experience of the employee and their family to help them make better benefits decisions. Which makes sense because it’s the employees who the HR team are designing their benefits for and employees are the ones spending the money on claims!

How do you see the role of the benefits broker expanding / changing over the next three years?

For employers with under 500 employees, HR teams are already lean and are being asked to do more with less. They often have HR teams of only one or two people whose expertise is in areas such as talent development and people operations. They often have less expertise in health care and benefits and that’s where brokers are being challenged to help more.

As a result, their benefits broker needs to evolve into an outsourced “benefits department” role and take over the back office tasks and guide employers and their employees through all aspects of their benefits. For instance, they’ll help HR develop a benefits-renewal strategy, guide employees to the best decisions regarding their benefits and manage member support, while also managing all the nitty gritty behind-the-scenes work such as filings, compliance and auditing.

What role does a broker have in employee education? And how is that changing?

I think brokers play a huge role. We design the benefits plans, educate employees at enrollment, and are often asked to support them when they run into problems. Moving forward, I see the need to completely reimagine how employees and their families are guided through their benefits journey. For employees, health benefits end up being the on-ramp to the health care system. And one of the biggest opportunities to “fix health care” is to give employees and their families access to knowledge and support so they can make better decisions. This includes educating them on what their benefits options are and how to choose the right ones for their specific family needs. We believe this is central to the role of the modern advisor.

And, as employees begin to use their benefits, brokers should be prepared to provide additional help. In some cases, doing so might actually include helping them pick a doctor or find a mental health provider. This vision for the broker of the future will be fulfilled through a combination of really great, user-friendly technology that makes it easy for us to meet employees where they want to be met — whether via text, phone, email, or chat — paired with great expertise from the broker. In this new world, brokers will be able to educate employers and employees on their benefits as a consequence of working extremely closely with the vendors and the carriers that they’re doing business with.

Contrast this vision  with the broker of decades past, who might check in with you a few times a year to discuss your renewal, make sure you don’t leave, but provide little else in the way of support for the member.

What role do you see DEI playing in the future of the industry?

We think DEI will play a huge role over the next five years for a couple of reasons. As we all know, our industry tends to skew older, white and male. We simply aren’t very diverse. Meanwhile, the employers we serve have wildly diverse populations and needs. It’s hard to develop a health care strategy for people if you don’t intimately understand what they’re going through, whether that be the parents of six children or a single mother. This is one of the reasons why we made the decision  to build a diverse benefits brokerage — to reflect the diversity of the organizations  we serve.

Also, our industry has a recruiting problem. Young folks just don’t want to work for traditional organizations that feel out of touch with the dynamics and needs of their generation.

We think this is a huge challenge for the industry as today’s leaders age into retirement. The good news is that I think we can make this shift, particularly if we reframe the profession away from one that simply helps you purchase health insurance to one that helps buyers of health care deliver better outcomes for employees and their families and do so affordably. We think that’s an extremely exciting mission that can attract really talented people from places and backgrounds who have never considered working in the benefits industry.

A lot has been written lately about the emergence of the “niche benefit.” What are niche benefits and why do you think they’re gaining traction?

There’s been an explosion of new benefits categories over the past few years, ranging from mental health services, to child-caregiving solutions, fertility benefits and pet insurance. And the list goes on. I think this rapid expansion of categories reflects the wide array of needs represented by a diverse population of employees across the country. Medical, dental, vision and perhaps some disability coverage aren’t enough when you’re trying to support the needs of employees who come from very different life circumstances and backgrounds.

The downside of offering all of these benefits, however, is “point-solution fatigue.” This is where employers, in their desire to satisfy the particular needs of their employees, are incurring more cost. With the way business models are built around benefits, employers are forced to pay for their entire population for each benefit offered. Moreover, employers have found that when they run a program with a wide variety of benefits, many of those benefits get little utilization. For instance, there might only be one or two people in the entire organization who use an elder-care service. So, if you have a benefit that only 3% of your employees use and you’re paying for 100% of your population to have access to it, the ROI feels quite low.

This is one of the most frustrating things that HR teams have to deal with every year; what I call the “impossible choice.” Do I choose fertility benefits this year or do I choose a fitness benefit? That’s really tough, because HR is guaranteed to frustrate a portion of their population. It’s a dynamic which has created a real conundrum for HR teams in building plans: “how do we support those diverse needs without breaking the bank?”

So, what’s the solution?

We think there will be a lot of innovation moving from the current one-size-fits-all benefits paradigm to an era of “personalized benefits.” In five years, HR people won’t have to choose which benefits to offer. In the new world of personalized benefits, employers will allocate a certain amount of money to each employee and let them decide which benefits they want.

With this model, employers will see a much higher utilization rate on their benefits because employees will inevitably choose only those benefits that they’ll actually use. Luckily, there are some really great vendors out there that are attacking this problem. We think this approach will be a true “win” for everyone involved.