Tyler Hoffman
MILL BAY – Tyler Hoffman, Principal of OnPoint Benefits Inc., believes he can save business owners up to 18 per cent on their employee benefits programs.
How? It starts with conducting an assessment of their clients’ current plan. OnPoint has discovered something they call “wastage”, which drives the cost of those plans upward.
“Wastage can start as soon as the plan is designed,” Hoffman observes. “If everyone has the same coverage, this wastage that nobody wants has an opportunity to be born. So firstly, we design benefit plans align with their needs – demographics, competitiveness, employee health, etc. – so that the plan is part of a strategy, as opposed to a product to be consumed, or not consumed by staff.”
For example, a construction company who needs to keep their framers healthy is going to have a different plan design than an office full of engineers.
“Yet so many times, advisors crank out the same plan designs which achieves nothing,” he notes. “We leverage software to benchmark plans to see how they stack up against their industry peers in the local area, and track the performance on the claims and premiums that are being paid. We take a lot of the risk out of benefit plans, as we tend to not move clients around from carrier to carrier, if at all.”
Hoffman notes that employee benefit premium wastage occurs as the plans creep further away from the claims being created.
“This gap is pure profit for insurance companies, and it’s impacting the majority of group benefit programs in Canada,” he explains. “This overspending is a result of advisors and brokers not monitoring the plans consistently enough, or designing the plan correctly in the first place. Often an advisor’s book of business becomes too large to manage.”
Hoffman views productivity as being a pillar of the service OnPoint provides.
“The most overlooked expense in benefit programs is the time and money to administer them,” he states. “All of our client services are paperless, and we never use the carriers digital onboarding tool. Instead, we provide our clients with a proprietary benefits administration portal that can synchronize with payroll and HRIS systems. This removes mundane data entry and repetitive tasks completely, and typically, 18% is a common savings that is achieved.”
Looking ahead, Hoffman states that demand for mental health well-being is increasing after two years of Covid restrictions and the resulting isolation.
“We’re getting a lot of calls around EAP programs, counselling and virtual health,” he says. “I encourage organizations to look at what they need their mental wellbeing support to do, and focus on the need first. Then find a program that fits their budget.”
