In today’s digital-first world, employee benefits carriers face rising pressure to modernize their core systems to drive innovation, operational efficiency, and service excellence. Employers and employees now expect agile, tech-enabled experiences with flexible benefit options, personalized service, actionable insights, high levels of automation, real-time reporting, and seamless ecosystem connectivity.
Legacy systems, however, remain a major obstacle and create growing risks in key areas:
- Slow Product Rollouts: Outdated systems delay new offerings, making it difficult to keep pace with workforce needs.
- High Maintenance Costs: Up to 70% of IT budgets are spent maintaining legacy systems and technical debt, leaving little room for innovation.
- Poor Employer & Employee Experience: Limited digital tools, siloed data, and slow processes result in dissatisfaction and churn.
- Regulatory Vulnerability: Legacy systems struggle with compliance updates, creating legal and operational risk.
What today’s employers and employees now consider non-negotiable:
- Flexible, customizable benefit offerings tailored to diverse workforces
- Rapid deployment of absence, wellness, mental health, and DEI initiatives
- Real-time analytics and utilization insights
- Mobile-first, consumer-grade user experiences
- Proactive compliance and robust data protection
The Case for a Modern Employee Benefits Platform
Modernizing has never been easier or faster. A purpose-built employee benefits platform can go live very rapidly – in less than six months. Carriers willing to move away from outdated processes and adopt an industry-standard, best-practice platform can use this as a true business transformation journey.
So many carriers are starting to ask, ‘why are we doing it this way?’ The answer is usually ‘because we always do it this way or the system dictates that we do it this way’! A modern core employee benefits platform is the opportunity to say ‘okay, lets simplify it, automate it, or stop doing it’!
At FINEOS, we’ve invested deeply for many years in employee benefits knowledge and technology. FINEOS AdminSuite is now the market-leading and proven platform, quote-to-claim, that delivers fast ROI with minimal upfront investment. It enables carriers to:
- Launch and scale benefit products and services faster
- Automate service requests, claims, onboarding, and reporting
- Improve data quality and leverage embedded AI for automation and compliance
- Deliver employer and employee experiences that meet today’s digital expectations
Bottom Line
Modernization isn’t just about replacing old technology. It’s about transformative and rapid business change. The payoff includes protecting and growing market share, strengthening employer and broker relationships, and future-proofing business operations. The longer carriers delay, the greater the market, operational, financial, and reputational risks.
The time to modernize is now.
