8 minute read
Technology Changing The Industry
By Heather & Trevor Garbers
The impact of technology on the employee benefits industry has contributed to our significant growth in the marketplace, expanded our reach, and grown our impact. To quote Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
To help us gauge where we are today as an industry, and where we are going, we have interviewed leaders at a couple of AI-driven service providers to learn how they are helping to shape the future, Pauline Roteta (PR), CFA, CFP® is the Founder & CEO of Pasito and Yvonne Daugherty (YD) is the Global Head of Industries at Ushur.
You provide a unique solution in the marketplace - please tell us more about your services.
Pauline - Pasito is the leading digital provider of decision support, segmented engagement, and employee support for the voluntary insurance industry. Leveraging health plan data, API connections to HR systems, and proprietary AI models, Pasito helps carriers and consultants educate every employee year-round about the personal benefits of supplemental coverage.
Through our unique engagement approach, Pasito successfully increases employees’ knowledge of voluntary insurance, which leads to higher participation and helps employees get more value from these benefits. We do this by taking a marketing approach to benefits. We leverage an individual’s demographic, enrollment, and behavioral data; to deliver relevant text, email, and content campaigns throughout the year. For example, women in their 30s learn why hospital indemnity and disability insurance are a must, while men in their 50s hear about LTC, critical illness, and catch-up contributions for retirement. Our personalized year-round education builds awareness ahead of enrollment and increases retention and lifetime value of voluntary elections.
During enrollment, our decision support sends every employee a recommendation. Employees and spouses can refine their recommendations with powerful tools that import health plan data, project medical expenses, and calculate the payout from voluntary coverage.
Our AI also eliminates busy work for consultants, enabling them to spend more time growing their book of business. Our broker features include: an AI benefits guide generator, central inbox and AI copilot for employee questions, and FAQ generator. In essence, Pasito is an AI benefits counselor. We can work alongside enrollment firms to help them reach more employees, support cases that don’t offer access to 1:1 counselors, or provide ongoing support after an initial launch.
Yvonne - The voluntary benefits space is often challenged by a lack of effective, secure digital communication channels to augment traditional live on and offline channels for communications with employer groups, brokers and employees. Ushur solves for this need by enabling supplemental and voluntary benefits carriers to automate end-to-end engagements. The Ushur platform empowers organizations to automate customer and broker engagements end to end, with purpose-built AI and machine learning for two-way conversations, email triage, intelligent document processing and data file transformation.
Our no-code platform and built-in enterprise level security makes it easy to quickly launch workflows that are HIPAA-secure, PCI-compliant, and HITRUST-certified. With verticalized large language models (LLMs) to increase accuracy, Ushur is widely trusted for transforming the voluntary benefits customer experience while improving operational efficiency.
Why did you decide to create a solution for the benefits marketplace?
Yvonne - The core thesis of Ushur’s inception was that the world has evolved, and consumers of regulated industries like insurance have evolved in terms of how they want to engage. The benefits market is experiencing transformational change with stakeholders looking for digitalization and AI-powered solutions to meet these goals, while also delivering data security for the exchange of sensitive data. Successful group benefits companies are focusing on driving significant operational efficiencies and better customer experiences despite the challenges they face, such as delivering a timely quote for all requests for proposal (RFP) during the busy season.
AI-powered automation technology can help streamline engagements across numerous channels – including phone, email, and text – to help benefits providers improve response times, reduce manual processing, and elevate the customer experience.
Pauline - Pasito was founded after a family member went into debt from a hospital visit. Despite having a good job and the “best” medical plan, my relative was blindsided by a medical bill that could have been covered by voluntary insurance. This is not an isolated event Health plans continuously cover less at higher cost, and no longer shield families from medical debt.
As a Certified Financial Planner® and engineer, I knew there was a better way to do benefits. By leveraging data, AI, and financial planning principles, companies can deliver a better benefits experience, while getting more families the coverage they deserve.
While we are leaps and bounds ahead of where we were 10 years ago with regards to technology in the benefits industry, we are still behind many other industries (ie. auto / home insurance, online shopping). What are barriers in our marketplace to achieving the same level of innovation?
Pauline - The benefits industry faces several unique challenges that slow down innovation, including:
Intermediated Market: This market is fascinating because of the number of opinions and incentives that technology must appeal to In most other markets, developers have direct access to one user type and build for that user. In benefits, we have carriers, vendors, brokers, consultants, enrollers, HR teams, finance teams, employees and dependents. When feedback is intermediated, a lot can get lost in translation and innovation slows down. We’ve worked hard to stay focused on our north star: improving the employee experience.
Legacy Systems: Incumbents have outdated infrastructure, which sets off a vicious cycle. The best engineers want to work on the latest tech stack and build not repair. Without attracting the best talent, it’s hard for incumbents to innovate and transition to new technology. Incumbents can get to the market faster and access the best talent by partnering with innovative partners that are unencumbered by legacy technology.
Yvonne - One barrier we see in the benefits industry is the ability to automate communications that are interactive and deliver data security for the exchange of sensitive information. More and more, employer groups, brokers and employees are expecting a shift to the digital self-service experience they are now accustomed to. Thankfully, advances in AI are bringing the benefits industry up to speed. For example, a delayed response to inbound quote requests can led to a missed opportunity and leave a poor first impression.
What if you could take the high-volume RFP quote intake process, and dramatically reduce response times, live agent operational burden and costs with AI? This is now possible with AI solutions that enable carriers to automatically classify and route incoming RFP requests, extract data, evaluate for completeness, and respond to the sender to request missing data–all within seconds.
What can or should brokers and/or carriers be doing now to prepare for the future?
Yvonne - Data quality and cleanliness have an outsize impact on the effectiveness of automation solutions in any industry, and carriers can plan for the future by preparing and curating their data now. Not only are compliant and governed data stores a top priority and business differentiator for carriers, but they also benefit the brokers and admins who engage with this sensitive data on a daily basis.
Pauline - I attended a dinner recently with the CHROs of the largest employers on the East Coast. The topic of conversation: AI in HR. The dinner guests agreed on very little except three things: (1) HR is facing intense budget cuts, (2) employees expect "consumer grade" tech in the workplace, and (3) if they don’t start at least experimenting with AI now, they will be pushed out by a new CHRO that does. AI is the only way to deliver a personalized employee experience at a lower cost, and carriers and brokers that embrace this new wave of technology will be rewarded by CHROs desperate for solutions to make their days and teams more efficient.
Yvonne is the Global Head of Industries for Ushur and serves as the bridge between the Ushur team and the market to ensure alignment with evolving trends, regulations and requirements. She is also Ushur’s subject matter expert for customer engagement and activation best practices, working with clients to implement more effective omnichannel B2B and B2C communication.
Pauline was a Senior Investor and Portfolio Manager at BlackRock where she led private equity investments and developed risk analytics for private market investments. Pauline graduated from Vanderbilt University's School of Engineering, she's a Fulbright Scholar and a proud member of the Latinx community.
