Monday April 7th, 2025 – John Smith’s Home
John looked around his apartment, pleased to be home after his six month EuroGoogle contract to provide social marketing and e-spin for their new EU brand launch, which provided full term relocation along with the standard regional health benefits and credit to his Marketing Guild umbrella benefits plan. He had heard in one of the planning sessions that EuroGoogle will embrace the French benefit credit system for 3 years and then give the current employees the option of remaining a freelance micro-corporation covered under the French Social Welfare program or roll onto the global “Google Forever, Benefits for Life” program.
John is excited about his next project where he is on a half year, 60% utilization assignment to work with the East Benefits Exchange messaging campaign to support their AI Version 2.0 Auto-Exchange Benefit Selection program. Version 1.0 was very popular with employers trying to provide an easy employee benefit selection process until employees realized the AI was actually minimizing claims by not recommending benefits that the individual was actually likely to use. After a total software rewrite, V2 is ready to be deployed with a strict margin limitation algorithm to ensure customer focus.
John’s job is to make the consumer comfortable that the AI will act in the best interest of the consumer despite the Agent’s Union’s lobbying and advertising campaign. East Benefits’ bigger concern about Auto-Exchange is the several Kickstarter project’s Virtual Personal Assistants, (VPAs), designed to optimize the value of any transaction made including health and welfare benefits, bypassing Auto-Exchange.
John’s holo-watch pinged once and his VPA projected a list of projects that matched John’s skill set, available time and mood, to help him get to the 80% utilization target he set for himself.
…………….
Scenario planning exercises help us look at possible futures and find key points that help us plan for the future. While this particular work and employee benefits market scenario will probably never come to pass as stated, there are some important points to consider in our planning assumptions:
- Consumer technology is changing the balance of power between insurer, employer and employee as new capabilities become incredibly affordable and government regulation continues to make information about regulated products and services more available.
- The social contract between employer and employee is changing dramatically as employers move from the mid-20th century “employee for life model” to the late 20th century “source labor for better margin globally model.” In reaction, the free-lance/micro-corporation model provides more security and control of their own welfare and will continue to grow.
- Insurers that serve the group, voluntary and individual market need to prepare for a radical change in the insurer/employer/employee relationship triangle, including the need for benefit plans to survive changes in funding contributors and government welfare models.
At FINEOS, we recognize our core insurance solutions need to have data models and omni-channel communication strategies designed to support products and business models that have not been employed yet. FINEOS works with both public and private sector insurers around the world with our FINEOS Claims solution, giving us insight into a wide variety of business models and care plans. In building FINEOS Billing and Policy as part of our AdminSuite solution, we are using that insight to design and build a comprehensive and long lasting Life, Accident and Health insurance core solution for our customers.
