Employee Benefits Brokers have worked side-by-side with payroll service providers, cooperating and combining their separate skill sets for the benefit of their business clients.
In recent years, as competition has tightened across the board and technology platforms (payroll, HRIS and employee benefits) merged, we have seen an increasing movement on the part of payroll service providers to offer services and products that have traditionally fallen under the purview of employee benefit brokers. Some payroll vendors have even started employee benefit divisions.
Payroll service providers in many cases bring the advantages of economies of scale and a seamless integration with payroll software currently in place. After all, it’s their program!
And so we are seeing payroll providers’ call on business owners to offer things like P&C coverage (workers compensation, business and umbrella coverage, and other basic programs) and employee benefit programs and insurance.
Insurance is much more than a matter of providing a quote. Insurance and benefits require a consultative approach, not a transactional “here’s your spreadsheet of quotes” approach. The most suitable plan for a business owner is rarely the cheapest. Insurance and benefits planning is a matter of using multiple insurance products and solutions in combination to protect the unique risk profile of the client – whether that client is a business, the business owner, or an employee and his or her family.
It’s a matter of core competencies. Payroll service providers are experts at efficiently moving dollars between accounts via sophisticated computer programs. The’re transactional and deal in very high volumes. But very few payroll providers are embedded within your organization, understand your particular culture and needs or understand your people like an experienced employee benefits broker.
By the time a typical insurance agent becomes a benefits broker with a sizeable business clientele, he or she has generally done hundreds, if not thousands, of detailed fact finders not just with business owners, but with workers just like your employees and families just like those of your employees – at the individual level.
He or she has asked them what happens if the breadwinner dies tomorrow? What happens if the breadwinner or a stay at home spouse becomes disabled tomorrow? How will college be funded? How will the healthy spouse, or a surviving parent, continue to work and manage child care and home duties at the same time?
He or she has met with a multitude of business owners, executives and partners to talk about executive level benefits, risk mitigation to their organization, cash-flow analysis and ways to manage your employee benefits budget to improve your bottom-line results.
There is nothing in any payroll company’s list of core competencies that is a substitute for what an employee benefits broker and consultant does best – protect your people and your business.
When you get that call that your teenager has had an accident and is in the hospital and your whole world comes to a grinding halt, who do you want on the other end of that phone? Do you want to call a customer service representative from your payroll provider who is “in the office but in internal meetings today” or the cell phone of your employee benefits broker who knows you, your family and has a personal interest in making sure everything is taken care of? When the chips are down and everything is in crisis that’s when your relationship with your employee benefits broker matters the most. At that point you need the experience and wisdom of a consultant who lives, eats and breathes insurance, not someone for whom insurance is merely a sideline to their core competency, payroll processing.
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