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BenefitPoint, an employee benefits infrastructure company headquartered in San Francisco, is one of the first business-to-business solutions offering online service for insurance brokers, providing them with the opportunity to eliminate paper, track client data, and save time and money. The company, co-founded by Kurt de Grosz and Brian Bair, has gained popularity among brokers, insurance carriers, and employers since its inception in 1999 as a more efficient way of handling group health and benefits business.
As brokers themselves, de Grosz and Bair understood what brokers were experiencing in regard to the lack of infrastructure in the industry. Their awareness of this problem lead to the creation of BenefitPoint. The company was created not to disintermediate the broker, says de Grosz, but to focus on empowering the brokers, something that BenefitPoint was able to do by bringing e-commerce efficiency into the brokers' back office.
According to de Grosz and Bair, because brokers and consultants have not had the Internet-based tools available to create efficiencies, improve communications and recognize new sources of revenue, it has been difficult for brokers and consultants to maximize their value as strategic benefits advisors to their clients. Before this, the broker industry had previously been marked by long sales cycles, redundant data entry and challenges in customer service.
Bair and de Grosz say BenefitPoint is a way to provide access to additional products and services, and enables brokers to build stronger relationships with employers, employees and carriers.
Once brokers log on to BenefitPoint with a password (at www.benefitpoint.com), they will be given the opportunity to organize their data and run their entire business electronically. The site is secure with encryption for screens that enable information changes to be made.
Bair and de Grosz note that the ability to manage customer data throughout the entire life cycle is appealing to brokers, who will be able to perform client management; benefits procurement; benefits enrollment; benefits eligibility and billing; and worksite marketing. Other Internet-based solutions similar to BenefitPoint may simply target pieces of what the broker may do, called point solutions, instead of targeting the business as a whole, says de Grosz.
But according to Bair, these solutions may only focus on commodity insurance products or limited segments of the industry, such as the small group market, employee communications or benefits. These solutions may put the broker in a situation in which they must go to several different services rather than one. "BenefitPoint is delivering an industrial strength system that brokers of any size can leverage for their entire book of business," adds Bair.
By using Benefit point, some major insurance brokers expect to achieve 15 percent to 25 percent in productivity gains, according de Grosz and Bair. Jim Durkin, president of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., a leading brokerage, made this statement about his company and its relationship with BenefitPoint: "Ultimately, BenefitPoint will enable us to increase revenues, lower costs, and improve customer satisfaction and retention." Other major brokerages that have chosen to use BenefitPoint for their benefits business include ABD Insurance and Financial Services, Keenan and Associates, Palmer & Cay, and Summit Global Partners.
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