When it comes to buying, selling, and even managing employee benefits, an old adage hits too close to home: the only consistency is inconsistency. Today’s processes are not only entirely manual, but also managed through siloed systems. This is especially true when you’re placing insurance coverage.
If you’re new to the industry, here’s a quick overview: Most employers work with a broker to put together their employee benefits program. These programs can include medical, dental, vision, and other health and wellness offerings. To provide their employer clients the best options, brokers collect spreadsheets of employee demographic data and PDFs of policy documents to send to insurance companies. Insurance companies review each document, reach out to brokers for missing details (somehow something is always missing), and put together quotes for the upcoming year’s plan. Quotes come in as extensive, text-based documents, which brokers review to manually copy important insights into another spreadsheet to help their clients choose the best plan.
The whole process is hyper-customized, time-consuming, and error-prone. And it takes place throughout the year, as benefits are renewed or new options are explored. Having spent almost ten years selling insurance, I know the headaches firsthand. Brokers and carriers are in a constant state of busy—doing more, yet accomplishing less; experiencing frustration and burn out. At ThreeFlow, we call this the productivity gap. What’s been missing is a meaningful way for brokers and carriers to collaborate; a way to enable them to be more efficient, effective, and ultimately productive.
We believe that the right solution can address this productivity gap and pull the industry forward. We built the first Benefit Placement System (BPS), a new category of enterprise software for brokers and carriers, to do just that. A BPS enables brokers and carriers to manage the entire placement process in one shared system. To be successful, a BPS must have three core features:
- Purpose-built. There’s so much nuance in our industry. This is especially true in the mid-to-large market, where custom underwriting is required on every client. An effective BPS accounts for the specific workflows and dynamic relationships across stakeholders—brokers, carriers, third-parties, and the client.
- Supports the entire placement process. Whether collecting a renewal or marketing for new business, a BPS addresses end-to-end needs: from data collection to underwriting review and client presentation to implementation.
- Serves as a true shared system. A BPS is one system that provides real-time, shared visibility and enables brokers and carriers to deliver the best possible outcomes for their mutual clients.
ThreeFlow is proud to be leading the way in this new category. Our team has the expertise needed to build and support a BPS. We’re creating the product and delivering the experience we wish we had as former underwriters, brokers, and sales reps. With ThreeFlow, brokers and carriers can drive better outcomes because they can finally get into the details of benefits strategy.
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