How Thoropass Saved on Benefits Costs & Improved Its Variety of Offerings With Bennie
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Industry
Compliance, SaaS
Employees
194
Headquarters
New York, New York
HR Leader
Joe Bast
HR Challenge
Costly Benefits & Lack of Flexibility or Variety
Results
Cost Savings, Better Selection of Benefits & Perks
About Thoropass
Continuous Compliance Management in a Centralized Hub
Thoropass is a cloud platform that allows companies of various sizes to keep all their compliance policies and procedures in one place so that they can effortlessly pursue a variety of information security certifications and monitor their security posture. Customers can review their information at any time, maintain audit-ready status, and produce a compliance certificate on demand. While based in New York City, Thoropass is a distributed workforce, with employees in 24 states, Central America, South America, and the UK. The company currently has just under 200 employees and almost 1,000 customers.
Meet Joe Bast, VP of People & Operations
At Thoropass, Joe covers all of the People functions and leads a People team of eight. He oversees everything HR-related, from building an employment brand to recruiting, training, compensation, benefits, employee engagement, performance reviews, and everything around organizational design structuring. Joe also owns the operations function for the company (everything that the company does outside of finance that doesn’t face customers). This includes running the organization’s IT facilities, office management, compliance, logistics, and travel.
“I believe that the right people with the right tools can do a lot of great work. And so we lean pretty heavily on platforms and software systems that do a lot of heavy lifting.”
HR Challenges
Before working with Bennie, Thoropass was using a PEO to administer its compensation and benefits program.
However, the organization was expecting significant growth within the next year, and the PEO was starting to become very limited in what it could offer. Additionally, the PEO was getting more expensive, and there was a growing need from the finance team to cut what the company was spending on costs for employees. Part of that spending included benefits, but another part of it was the platforms being used. Joe needed to find a solution that could tackle two crucial challenges: savings on costs and improving the benefits available to employees.
“It was time. We needed to migrate from our PEO to be independent and start doing payroll and benefits directly.”
Managing benefits through a PEO was increasingly becoming a massive cost for Thoropass. As the organization continued to add headcount, it became a priority for Joe to find a solution that was more cost-effective but still maintained the quality needed.
While the PEO managed much of the administrative work, the employee experience of navigating benefits was clunky, inconvenient, and outdated. In addition, the insufficient support and lack of responsiveness from their support team was a point of frustration for Joe.
Having a distributed workforce meant that Thoropass needed a benefits program that had variety and could fit the needs of its diverse population. The current program didn’t allow for variety or flexibility to add additional offerings.
“We’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we’ve been able to offer our employees benefits like pet insurance and Citi Bike, commuter benefits, an HSA, and all these things they were asking for that we couldn’t do with our PEO.”
Bennie’s Job Duties
Better Healthcare Packages
“In what world can you be more cost-effective AND have more?”
A Better Customer & User Experience
“The most wonderful part of Bennie is the app.”
Bennie’s Employee & Employer Marketplaces
“The ability to add benefits that employees request is huge.”
Better Healthcare Packages
“In what world can you be more cost-effective AND have more?”
A Benefits Broker That Gets Its Customers the Best Options
Cost savings played a large part in Thoropass choosing to transition off a PEO. Bennie knew the criteria Joe was looking for and was able to develop a benefits program that worked for the People and Finance team while not compromising on the benefit needs of the employee population.
“Our benefit savings was upwards of almost $1 million, so that’s huge.”
As a result, Thoropass was able to enjoy significant cost savings while enjoying a much more customized package of benefits that allowed the organization to be competitive and tailor benefits to employees in different regions. The savings were not only seen within benefits but in the reduced amount of software and tools needed to get things done. Because of Bennie’s integration with Rippling, Joe could eliminate a handful of platforms that did things that Rippling could do in one.
“We’ve been able to save a ton of money on our benefits even as we added employees, which is great. Outside of just saving money on benefits, we’ve saved money on our software expenses too.”
With the PEO, Thoropass was limited by the medical, dental, and vision benefits it could choose. Now, as a direct provider, Joe can choose networks based on where employees are, which makes it easier for employees to get the quality care they need in their locations.
A Better Customer & User Experience
“The most wonderful part of Bennie is the app.”
Bennie’s Platform & Technology Made Benefits Easier to Use
“People can navigate the app quickly, and not just from an individual user standpoint - the ability for the People team to actually just redirect people to the app makes it so self-service.”
The Bennie app, which can be accessed via mobile phone or desktop, made benefits much easier to use. Employees no longer had to log on to different portals to find details about their different plans - everything was in one place. As a result, this significantly reduced the number of questions that Joe’s team received and alleviated the need for the People team to find the answers to these questions.
“Bennie can provide a lot of confidence that employees are not going to get slammed with a bad debt situation afterward and helps them make informed choices about who’s in network, who’s not, what type of specialists are available, and insurance companies just don’t provide that level of guidance or support.”
Ask Bennie
Ask Bennie, which is Bennie’s healthcare concierge within the app, allows employees to ask specific questions about their benefits and get help with more complex issues like billing mistakes and claims. Employees don’t have to try to resolve these issues on their own - they have an advocate who’s an expert in the industry to help them.
“They get an answer to the specific question they ask. They don’t get a link to a resource where they might be able to find the answer. And that’s huge.”
Bennie’s Employee & Employer Marketplaces
“The ability to add benefits that employees request is huge.”
Thoropass Can Now Provide a Variety of Ancillary Benefits from Trusted Partners
“It was the partnerships that made it easy. If I had to go out and scour the world for partners and then set up meetings and do the evaluations on my own, this would have been an even harder process.”
A major pain point Joe had with the PEO was that it didn’t have the capabilities to provide the type of non-traditional benefits that Thoropass employees were interested in - the PEO simply didn’t specialize in that or offer a robust selection of ancillary benefits. Because Bennie has an expansive network of marketplace partners, it was a simple process to add on benefits that were popular with employees, like pet insurance, commuter benefits, and mental health support.
“Being able to rely on a network of trusted partners made it very, very comfortable, and I was confident that we could do it smoothly. You know, I could have done it by sourcing all the other partners by myself, but it would have been a lot heavier lift and a lot more work, and I would have been less confident that we were getting the right partners.”
In addition to employer-sponsored ancillary benefits, employees also have access to a marketplace of voluntary benefits that they can purchase on their own at preferred rates. So, even if a program isn’t necessarily offered by the company, they can get that benefit on their own through Bennie’s partnerships.
Improving the Employee Experience Without Increasing Costs
High-Level Service & Support That Elevates What HR Can Accomplish
“User experience, selection of benefits, cost savings; all these things came together to be like, yeah, not only is this the right time, but this is the right partner.”
Company culture and values are incredibly important to Thoropass’s People team. This means that the services and products that they choose need to further their mission to provide a good employee experience that ultimately helps with retention. Bennie’s full-service support, network of partners, and platform all play a role in letting employees know that their People team has their backs because they invest in solutions that help support their wellbeing.
“It’s allowed us to keep a very lean People team that still is able to provide a full employee experience. So while my People team is still doing benefits and compensation directly, we’re able to do lots of things focused on culture, engagement, learning, and things that smaller People teams just don’t have time to do because they’re usually busy administering benefits. The Bennie App and services have enabled that to happen.”
Thoropass was able to get the results that they desired with their benefits program, more cost-effective benefits that aligned with the company culture and values. There is peace of mind and confidence that the People team can now have in knowing that their employees are in good hands when it comes to their benefits. Plus, Joe’s team can focus its time on other items rather than handling tedious manual work that typically comes along with traditional benefits management.
“Having Bennie as a partner lightens the load so you can focus on those other things because they have the benefits piece covered. So, in addition to saving you money and being able to rely on their partner network, you can put the benefits selection administration service a little bit on autopilot while you focus on doing all of those other things that are required of you as an employer.”