In the benefits technology space, effective solutions start by tackling deployment challenges head-on. By blending health benefits expertise with strong engineering, top platforms offer tools that simplify every part of ICHRA, from planning and compliance to enrollment. The goal is to reshape the benefits landscape, making personalized and sustainable solutions accessible to all.
In a recent episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business show, Ben spoke with Brandy Thompson, CEO and founder of Benefitbay, a groundbreaking company that’s revolutionizing employee health benefits.
Through a modern healthcare approach known as ICHRA (Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements), Benefitbay allows employees to purchase individual health plans while still reaping the tax advantages typically associated with group insurance policies.
Brandy Thompson’s pathway into the HR tech space came from an unconventional angle. With a robust background in accounting, she scaled the professional ladder quickly from staff accountant to controller. However, her practical involvement in the HR components of various businesses sparked an interest that couldn’t be ignored.
Upon pursuing her master’s degree, Brandy supplemented her financial expertise with formal HR training, earning SHRM certifications that cemented her skill set in both domains. This powerful combination of accounting accuracy and HR empathy provided her with unique insights into the shortcomings of traditional health benefits systems, spurring the creation of Benefitbay.
ICHRA, a healthcare model implemented since 2020, forms the backbone of Benefitbay’s offerings. This model allows employers to allocate a defined contribution towards employee health plans, ensuring fairness, compliance, and financial efficiency. The problem was that navigating the maze of individual health plans and maintaining compliance with ERISA and other regulatory mandates was a daunting challenge for many organizations. Benefitbay steps in to resolve these complexities, providing seamless integration and administration while empowering employees with choice.
One of the core advantages of ICHRA, as implemented through Benefitbay, is its ability to save both employers and employees significant sums of money. By pricing health insurance on an individual basis considering variables like age and location, rather than a general population standard, Benefitbay can offer more competitive rates. Additionally, it tackles the inherent inefficiency in traditional group plans, where one-size-fits-all solutions often result in overprice premiums without meeting individual needs.
Benefitbay operates exclusively through the broker channel, seeing brokers as essential partners rather than competition. This strategy ensures that brokers are equipped with the tools they need to efficiently quote ICRA plans, while also minimizing administrative burdens. Unlike competitors that often sideline brokers or create administrative headaches, Benefitbay offers brokers a seamless, integrated platform to better serve their clients.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Brandy and Ben talked about:
- The challenges of managing employee healthcare benefits.
- The advantages of modern, flexible healthcare solutions like ICHRA.
- What sets Benefitbay apart, including its ICHRA model, strong customer focus, and broker partnerships.
- The vital role brokers play in Benefitbay’s success by helping navigate the complexities of healthcare.
- Brandy’s strategic approach to marketing and growth, offering valuable insights for other leaders.
- The importance of customer success and service in maintaining Benefitbay’s competitive edge.
- And much more!
Thanks, Brandy!
Websites: www.benefitbay.com
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandy-thompson-24389536/
Brandy (Burch) Thompson, CEO and Founder of Benefitbay
You can find the podcast on all the main podcast players.
Episode Transcript
Ben [00:00:00]:
Hello. Thanks for joining me again. Great to have you along, and I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation with Brandy Burch. Brandy is a fascinating person. She’s the founder and CEO of a very cool business called Benefit Bay. And Benefit Bay leverages a new modern approach to health care called ICRA to allow employees to purchase individual health plans while maintaining the tax advantages of a group insurance policy. I’m keen to get into this and and learn about the growth of the business. But firstly, Brandy, thank you very much for joining me today.
Brandy Burch [00:00:28]:
Thanks for having me, Ben.
Ben [00:00:29]:
Yeah. And, yeah, whereabouts are you based?
Brandy Burch [00:00:32]:
I’m in Kansas City on the Missouri side. Go Chiefs.
Ben [00:00:35]:
Go Chiefs. Yeah. I was watching the quarterback show. Great show. But your team is remote. Is that right?
Brandy Burch [00:00:40]:
My team is remote. Yes. We’re fully remote, and we’re located in 18 different states across the US.
Ben [00:00:46]:
Wow. Nicely done. Yeah. Nicely done. So yeah. I wanna get into Benefit Bay, but do you wanna set things up for us as to your background? Because you don’t necessarily come from an HR or HR tech background. You’re more from the financial management side of things which is interesting and probably better for creating a business proposition that matches the needs of people I think. So yeah, do you wanna just set us up and then we’ll get into why you created Benefit Bay?
Brandy Burch [00:01:09]:
Yeah. My background’s in accounting, and I really took a traditional route out of school, staff accountant through controller. And when I went back to get my master’s degree, I focused a bit on that HR piece. And it was because in the smaller businesses or medium sized businesses, I often had an HR component or managed benefits or something that touched performance management, and HR was always the piece that was in that gray area of financial leadership and operating that helped me be successful or pull from that toolkit. So it wasn’t until 2015 that I really had formal HR training, and then I took my SHRM certifications. But what led me to be in the HR tech space was really that passion for benefits and individuals making choice, and then combining my financial leadership had in acumen there for speed to quote and financial pieces of the Fintech side of individual payments, but exposing them on a group channel for the employer because we know everyone wants to look at the overall population and not drowned by administration. Right? So when you have a moving team, you could drowned in administration if you don’t have the right tools.
Ben [00:02:20]:
Absolutely. Definitely. You know, as you’re describing that move from the finance to incorporating some the HR learnings in your studies, I had a little flashback to 1, I was involved in a business turnaround project. And I set up a program where we went around training the leaders and the supervisors in this business. I would look after the HR side, the management of process controls and stuff. And then I had the CFO coming in and we’re educating them on PNLs and cost management because money was just pouring through this business. Didn’t need to be. Yeah.
Ben [00:02:46]:
So but you’re teaming up. It was great to get the yin and yang or something. I’m not sure how you’d phrase it, but it’s a great combination to have. So it was smart that you did that.
Brandy Burch [00:02:55]:
Yeah. I think so. I think it’s the differentiator of Abunk’s great CFOs and COOs is that they understand that human capital piece. Yeah.
Ben [00:03:03]:
Yeah. So then Benefit Bay, tell us more about the product and who it serves.
Brandy Burch [00:03:08]:
Yeah. The product is really servicing brokers, employers, and their benefits eligible employees. It’s focused around individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements, which are known as ICRA. And that really brings defined contribution to the market, allowing employers to set a defined bucket of dollars that’s fair and equitable, that meets a certain level of compliance regulation for benefits. It is an ERISA capable benefit. So you have all those additional compliance items, 10.95 reporting and PCORI fees. So we solve all of that difficulty for an employer, but we also give a broker a speed to market quoting capability tools so that they can use it as their sales CRM. We wanna make sure that ICRA is quoted at every table or every renewal conversation because it could save the employees and the employer money while bringing individual choice.
Brandy Burch [00:04:03]:
So we wanna make sure that quote is on every table when they look at their benefits each year.
Ben [00:04:08]:
Got it. So how could it help them save money?
Brandy Burch [00:04:12]:
Helps them save money because when you price an individual’s health insurance based on their age and their ZIP code and you don’t expose a broad network or a broad diverse population to have to fit in one box, then a carrier is not having to say, how do I price the risk of all 50 US states with all varying networks, with all varying ages, with different demographics and socioeconomic statuses? And so traditionally, they’re underwriting a higher price when people are located all over the United States. When you go into individual coverage, you have purchasing power within your geographic region, which unlocks additional carriers. We know in the US, there’s more narrow networks like Kaiser Permanente or Geisinger that or Connecticut that may matter in those locations to the human seated there. But if you’re seated in Massachusetts, you can’t use one of those products. So you need to be able to shop where your buying power is. It allows you to unlock a more favorably cost program for you and your family. What employers have had to do though is find something that will cover everyone
Ben [00:05:19]:
Yeah.
Brandy Burch [00:05:19]:
Even if it didn’t fit the nuances or allow access to care in specific areas, they had to do that. And so it priced them more expensive. In addition, in individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements, Medicare eligible go to Medicare, and then they’re able to lock additional products around of supplemental cases of products to have a really premium product, but not drive the cost up for a 28 year old on a program because they’re 65. So it’s really about aggregating risk and the risk becomes more tolerable in an individual product. And so the pricing is least expensive.
Ben [00:05:57]:
And so your company, a large employer can go via the broker or direct. Is that right?
Brandy Burch [00:06:03]:
So a lot of my competitors do do direct. We are a specifically a go to market through the broker channel. We believe the broker should be evaluating that entire employer population against self insurance, against individual coverage, health reimbursement arrangements, against other products that could matter to them. And in addition, we want them evaluating the ancillary products year after year. And so we’re not really in the consulting business. We’re more on the technical healthcare tech, Fintech side of the business and we help support the broker. There are competitors that do go direct to employer, however.
Ben [00:06:36]:
So then does that mean you can connect in the back end of other software programs or is that something that’s in the roadmap? Is that
Brandy Burch [00:06:43]:
Yeah. We do have, one to many with the majority of the HRIS systems that are out there in the payroll systems. There’s a few once in a while that we don’t have that we come across in the sales cycle, but we do have the majority of those for the back end and the front end. We know that HR has got a lot of challenges. They’re dealing with a large moving populations and so they’re bringing on ads and terms from a recruiting platform. They don’t wanna go in and then have to enter something in Benefit Bay. So we have that front end capabilities, and then on the back end, we have the capability to write back to payroll.
Ben [00:07:15]:
And then in terms of getting the word out there about the business, you’re mainly going through the brokers then. So it’s pretty crowded market. They’re gonna be pitched ideas all the time for different approaches, benefits, etcetera. What’s your approach? A, to get in front of them and, b, to get your message through that benefit bay is the way to go?
Brandy Burch [00:07:33]:
Yeah. We really lean on that financial and benefit acumen. And so as a team, we weren’t technology start up founders. We were people who had serviced this space or sat in the buying side of this space. So I think what we lean on is our relationships. I’ve purchased from brokers my entire career as an operator. And then additionally, some of our team has came from other technical platforms that we’re servicing large ancillary carriers, large medical carriers, or that we’re servicing brokers through quoting tools for group benefits. And so what we’ve done is brought together a a group of experts built a really good program that for the ecosystem services it really well, and I think that that’s where we differentiate.
Brandy Burch [00:08:17]:
A lot of people have came in and said, look, I’m gonna disrupt the broker. I’m gonna knock them out. You know, I’m gonna come in and steal their business. I’m gonna build a relationship with the employer, and I’m gonna deploy these individual products. They didn’t solve for all the ancillary products. They didn’t solve for the integrations. They actually create a lot of administrative lift for that employer, and the employer quickly realizes the value of their broker and goes back. So what we do is we really focus on being that partner of the broker.
Brandy Burch [00:08:43]:
We focus on knowing that ICRA doesn’t fit at every table. So how do we help you ensure that you’re reviewing it? And when it does, you’re bringing it to the conversation and how do we do that quickly so that we don’t drown a broker firm in administration. So that’s where we build our value, and I think that that’s what’s allowed us to differentiate in the market. It hasn’t been tough to navigate brokers for us. I think because there is a solution they need, and the quoting individual products is impossible outside of a toolset. It’s a slow spreadsheet. You gotta request a quote, wait for it to come back to you. And then if your client changes their mind, you’ve gotta say, oh, pivot the quote.
Brandy Burch [00:09:22]:
Yeah. They don’t wanna do that. So having that tool in the front has allowed us to really get to the table.
Ben [00:09:27]:
Nice. And then in terms of practical ways of getting in touch with them, is it just straight up business development, sending the messages and LinkedIn things, or is it ads? How are you doing that?
Brandy Burch [00:09:37]:
Yeah. We haven’t had a large budget to be Google adding or out there really with business development reps. So what we have done is we’ve concentrated on thought leadership in the market. So educating brokers on what ICRA is, where it sits at the table, and then having a conversation with them after that talk. We do the same thing with employers, and we encourage them to ask their broker about ICRA. And that’s how we’re nurturing the overall ecosystem. Sales is not something that I ever did in my past, and I like to more build the relationship rather than try to just offer them, you know, gift cards and try to get a demo. We just don’t see our value there.
Brandy Burch [00:10:14]:
Our value is in thought leadership and our value is in helping them consult their client. And so as we help them do that or talk about cases live or demonstrate real examples, that’s allowed us to make that sale happen fairly organically and that’s the way Benefit Bay has grown.
Ben [00:10:32]:
And what kind of thought leadership have you been doing? Is that speeches, written stuff? How have you delivered that?
Brandy Burch [00:10:36]:
We’ve been doing CFO leadership councils. We’ve been doing HR, you know, either local chapters or larger chapters. We’ve been doing National Association of Brokers for individual products. We’ve been educating those various channels by what can and can’t happen. And fairly agnostically, we don’t have a loyalty to any channel. We just wanna get out there, spread the news. This is a new regulation that passed in 2020. We wanna get rid of all the this numbers.
Brandy Burch [00:11:04]:
Right? And the things and the rumors that people hear and help them to understand where it really fits and where it doesn’t, and give them some of that data so that they can then think about benefit they in the future. Like, they didn’t try to sell to me. They didn’t drive me crazy. But I do have this case I wanna go talk to them about, and that’s how we’ve nurtured the market.
Ben [00:11:22]:
Oh, that’s handy. Yeah. So for other businesses in other fields where there isn’t necessarily change or new legislation, sometimes hard to work some sort of angle. But where there are new regulations in place, it’s look, you gotta do it. So
Brandy Burch [00:11:33]:
Yeah. And there’s a lot of benefits and compliance executives at companies that want to stay on the top of this information. So going in and leading one of those sessions immediately gets your brand out there and and gets name awareness, and that’s what we’ve done.
Ben [00:11:47]:
I’ll leave the marketing bit in a second, but curious to ask you as a former accountant, CFO, those types of roles. Now that you’re a CEO, how do you manage or measure your marketing efforts and your business growth efforts? Do you have a a dashboard you use? You know, do you report on things differently that maybe an HR person would do it in a different way?
Brandy Burch [00:12:08]:
Yeah. I mean, we do look at leads and prospects and we do try to calculate a return on investment of a specific program. So if a referral says, I saw you speak at SHRM, you know, we’ll track it back to that.
Ben [00:12:23]:
Love it.
Brandy Burch [00:12:24]:
More we do track our actual brokers and how well they’re doing from the moment they sell with us because we wanna know where is our value? Do we actually deliver value? Are they able to gain market share? And so I don’t know if someone wasn’t a finance person, they may not be looking at their expansion revenue numbers as detailed as I do, because I wanna know that broker becomes our sales channel, and I wanna know how well are they doing selling in the market, how well is our platform helping them win these cases. And I also wanna know if they ever get disrupted, right, if they’ve lost their broker of record to someone else, like, how did that happen? So I’m more researching how great of a partner are we being to the broker. And I think we really differentiate there because most of our competitors will play in both lanes. They don’t pick a lane. They’ll service a broker sometimes. They’ll go direct employer sometimes. They’ll cut the broker out sometimes. So if you stay really tried and true that the broker is our sales arm, and we want their tools to help them do business, and we want them to do business transparently.
Brandy Burch [00:13:29]:
So we want that employer to know how much this cost them, how much the other plan would cost them, who’s getting paid what dollars, where are they flowing to. And so I’m always really excited about that. I’m excited about the customer staying with the brokers for a long period of time because that means Benefit Bank is doing a great job servicing both the broker and the employer. So those are the stats I look at because if we’re doing a great job as a business, we’re gonna get referred. And referral business comes a lot faster than trying to go out there and pound the pavement.
Ben [00:13:58]:
Absolutely. So So, yeah, there’s so much gold in that answer. Thank you for that, Brandy. So for people listening to this, it’s about tracking your numbers, but also following those numbers through not just on activities like leads or demos or things like that, but through to the actual return on investment whether that’s revenue generated. And also, over time, I’m guessing that you’ll start to see a picture form that some brokers will bring in lots more small fish, let’s say, and then the others might take time, but then they land a whale. But you don’t know that until you’ve been running that for a time. And then you also mentioned something that was very interesting that was not just who’s doing well and who’s not doing well, but how can you help them? How can you support them better with that? That’s more information or resources or training. So that’s a really great lesson for people to take away.
Ben [00:14:40]:
Not just measure your 80 20. Who’s bringing the big bucks, but how can you help the others improve and scale? Would that be a fair summary?
Brandy Burch [00:14:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a fair summary. We care about our broker succeeding in the market. Yeah. We care about them not being underceded from someone else. So we wanna make sure that they have the tools they needed and that we’re doing a great job and that we’re servicing it well. And I think that is the other differentiator we actually service.
Brandy Burch [00:15:03]:
A lot of our technology providers in this space are just a SaaS program and this SaaS program is not allowed to have customer success people helping you be successful or people answering the phones. I mean, we have actual phone numbers in our signatures and you can call a human. Sure, you can chat and you can look at articles in a true SaaS model, but we’re also here servicing this business because it’s the only way it’s gonna be a great experience in the market and it’s gonna continue to adopt. So unfavorable topic for a finance person to say, but I believe in service and I believe in servicing well so that it’s much harder to go get a new customer than to service the one you already have.
Ben [00:15:38]:
Absolutely.
Brandy Burch [00:15:40]:
I think that that’s another key nugget that a lot of people miss out on because they’ve got the luxury of a lot of money to market in the market and just to gobble up market share. They may not retain it though, but they’ll hit the next metric to get the next big check. It’s something that sustains for a year or 2, but it’s not sustainable long term because it’s a churn and burn type of model.
Ben [00:15:59]:
Yeah. It’s really good advice. So the avoid the shiny objects in drove of, oh, let’s go get more customers and clients without necessarily looking after the ones we’ve got. I remember a business director saying, look, if we just stopped bringing new customers and just looked after the ones we’ve got better, we’d be making way more money, much more profitable. So yeah. It’s Yeah.
Brandy Burch [00:16:17]:
I’ve been a CFO in a company that I was brought into to evaluate. And they were putting on a ton of new customers, but they were leaking so many customers and churn on the back end. So they really weren’t growing year over year. And that’s really if you’re in a not very big market or industry, it’s it’s not sustainable. You will literally hit a wall. Right? If you could show them the numbers of what you’re losing out the back end, what you’re gaining on the front end, you will eventually just churn the market. Right? And people aren’t going to come back.
Ben [00:16:46]:
Yeah. The reputation will damage.
Brandy Burch [00:16:48]:
Lesson focus on fixing whatever’s broken before you continue to grow on. And I think it’s probably been the most disheartening thing in our industry. We take over a lot of competitors groups. They’ve not been serviced well. The employers have made the courageous decision to go to individual coverage and allow their humans to choose, and then their humans haven’t been taken care of. And that’s not something I want our industry doing, and I wanna call to action for everyone to get better because we’re not gonna get to the market change that we want to improve US Health Care with Choice if we’re doing it bad. So if we’re doing it poorly or if employers are having to switch vendors, and all of that is painful. Right? I’d rather take a new customer than take one that’s been unhappy in this market and having to turn that reputation around.
Brandy Burch [00:17:38]:
We do it. It’s just a lot heavier lift and a lack of trust from that customer the moment they come in because they’ve had a bad experience. So I think that in a lot of industries, we see this happen. Right? There’s all these startups, all this money, and people just throw something together and turn it live. And then there’s all the fallout that happens.
Ben [00:17:59]:
Absolutely. Yep. And that’s gonna be done properly. And a rising tide lifts all boats. If everyone’s doing things the right way, it helps everybody.
Brandy Burch [00:18:05]:
Long as we’re all rising it and we’re not our boats don’t have holes in them and
Ben [00:18:09]:
Fix those leaky holes. Exactly. Brandy, Benefit Bay sounds amazing and you’re doing such a great job. So thank you very much for sharing the story. If people wanna learn with you, if they’re a broker themselves or a consultant or an employer and they wanna learn more, what should they do next?
Brandy Burch [00:18:23]:
Yeah. They should really go to sales at benefitbay.com if they wanna learn more as a broker. If they’re an employer and just want to have some education around what does individual choice look like, what are some case studies, just hit benefitbay.com as a website. If you wanna learn more about me, I’m, you know, a female CEO who does things nontraditionally, have came up the ranks nontraditionally. Just follow me on LinkedIn, Brandy Birch, b u r c h. And I think we will improve US healthcare. It’s gonna be a slow turn. It’s a cruise ship.
Brandy Burch [00:18:52]:
It’s not gonna turn on a dime, but we are going to improve it with choice and with consumer decisions.
Ben [00:18:58]:
Good for you and amazing job you’ve done so far. So all the best for you and the business in the future.
Brandy Burch [00:19:02]:
Thank you so much, Ben. Thanks for having me.
About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast
In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.
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