Forty Years of Benefits Tech — and We Still Haven’t Solved the Real Problem

From drenched green suits and dial-up “online pensions”, to global platforms and ESG reports, the infrastructure around employee benefits has transformed. 

The outcomes have not. 

Employees still don’t understand what they have, finance still doesn’t know what it costs, and HR is still fighting for budget with arguments that don’t land. 

Reward leader Tony Nevin, now VP Reward EMEA at Aristocrat, argues that the industry’s obsession with treating platforms as the whole solution — rather than the infrastructure for a bigger solution — has masked a simpler, harder truth: until we treat benefits and pay as levers for value, not line items for admin, nothing changes.

The story that began with a green suit

It starts in a flat in Victoria, in the early days of what we now grandly call “benefits technology”.

Tony Nevin had gone for what he thought was a standard IFA job. It was tipping down with rain. He crossed the road, was promptly hit by a wave from a passing car, and arrived at the interview “absolutely drenched to the skin” in a green suit he still can’t quite explain.

Inside the flat were Michael and Chris — the founders of Thomsons, the business that would eventually become Darwin and then part of Mercer — and two other early employees. 

They watched this soggy young pension consultant walk in and, as Tony recalls, “they both kept coming out and looking at me and thinking it was very amusing. But I got the job. So that was the most important thing.”

He brought with him deep knowledge of Profund, then a pension administration platform. Thomsons at that point were focused on one thing: “online pensions”. How online they really were, he says diplomatically, “I won’t comment on. But it was online.”

Then Chris went to America, came back and said the sentence that would help define an industry: we should do flexible benefits.

What followed is familiar: the intake of smart grads who now hold senior roles across the sector; the early pitches to names like Avon and Chanel; the first big rollouts shifting spreadsheet schemes on to digital platforms; the conference circuits and HR cruises and EB Live stands.

What’s striking isn’t that the tech has moved on. It’s that the underlying problem Tony was trying to solve then is more or less the one we are still talking about now.

As he puts it, with many years’ distance: “The systems these days do their job. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be selling them. But without anything on top of that, you’re not really adding anything.”

The critique here isn’t of platforms themselves — modern platforms are essential — but of the idea that technology on its own can replace design, communication and behaviour change.

The Problem: benefits that don’t translate into value

You don’t need another lament about engagement rates on benefits portals. You live it.

What Tony is pointing to is subtler: a system that has gradually optimised for selling and running benefits, not for making them matter.

Two realities collide:

• HR and reward don’t truly own benefits. “People in reward, people in HR don’t understand benefits,” he says. “So you give them a platform; they have no idea what to do with it.” They know there is a cost. They don’t always know how much, or to what end.
• Finance doesn’t see the whole picture either. Tony describes sitting with CFOs whose working assumption is simply: “Benefits will go up this year by 10%, won’t they? And as a cost to us they’re 20%, aren’t they?” No one has an in-date figure for the total cost. Almost no one has a live view of what absence, churn or sickness are costing.

It’s little wonder that when governments start eyeing “easy wins” like salary sacrifice, pensions tax relief or the tax treatment of EVs, benefits are an expendable category rather than a strategic asset. 

The short-termism is frustrating — and, as Tony notes, usually regressive:

“It hits the lower earners. They’re the ones who pay the most National Insurance.”

Yet inside organisations, the same logic is reinforced. When budget pressure hits, the conversation circles around reducing administration costs or shaving premium spend, not around avoiding resignations, sick leave or reputational damage.

The most telling line in the whole conversation might be the simplest. Having moved from vendor to in-house, Tony says: “Going into being a practitioner, I realised how unimportant [benefits] are to a business. So I’ve made them important.”

That’s the crux. Benefits aren’t structurally important; they are made important, or not, by the way we frame, govern and measure them.

Why It Happens: the industry that fell in love with its own tools

There is a familiar story in HR tech: an advisory business builds a piece of software to make its work easier, then gradually becomes a software business that does less and less advisory.

In the early Thomsons days, Tony describes doing proper feasibility work, design documents, focus groups. Then came the move to a pure SaaS model:

“We had to keep selling and selling and selling and find a way to do that and repeat. We lost that consultancy side… we went just straight into the technology.”

The rest of the market followed. The result?

• Advisory hollowing-out. Feasibility studies, deep design work, and internal education became “nice to haves” rather than the core. In-house teams were given modern platforms with minimal strategic support on what to put on them or how to shape behaviours.
• Data deserts. When Tony started, “we had no data sources.” Today we have more — Gallup, PwC, Glassdoor scores, external benchmarking — but most organisations still don’t use them effectively. No one can convincingly say: “This is the current cost of absence, this is our voluntary turnover in key groups, this is what it’s doing to customer satisfaction.”
• Misaligned sales pitches. As a vendor, Tony freely admits they often sold to the wrong person: “We had lots and lots of meetings with HR people who got it, understood it, loved it. And we would never speak to them again. Because they didn’t have the influence or the ability to say yes.”

The tool was sold on features and UX, not on a business outcome that a CFO could own. And on the client side, benefits have been quietly relegated down the list of priorities; the second-highest people cost, rarely treated with second-highest attention.

Layer on top the broader policy environment — threatened salary sacrifice, squeezed tax incentives, rising healthcare costs — and you have a perfect excuse for inertia. 

Why invest more in a system you don’t fully understand, in a category the UK Treasury might erode?

A Different Way of Thinking: from line item to lever

What Tony offers is not a shiny new framework so much as a ruthless narrowing of purpose.

When his CEO asked him to define his role, he boiled 43 years into a single sentence:

“My job is to keep people happy, healthy and at work.”

It is strikingly simple. It is also a better starting point for a business case than most 40-slide decks.

Working back from that, a different way of organising benefits emerges:

1. Start with engagement and outcomes

The evidence base is not the problem. Gallup and others have spent years quantifying the link between engagement and absence, productivity and turnover. Tony’s approach to a CFO is telling: don’t promise the full “78% reduction in absence” headline; promise 10% and cost it carefully.

The ROI case then rests on concrete, internal numbers: what you spend today, what a modest shift in absence or attrition would be worth, and what specific benefits (or communication changes) you are proposing to get there.

That’s the hard numbers. But Tony is equally clear that storytelling makes the argument real.

He talks about a CEO who reacted more strongly to the fact that their fertility benefit had resulted in three employees having babies than to any line on an insurance saving. 

Or the colleague who used the new PMI scheme and discovered quickly that her condition was simple to treat:

“she said she would’ve had to wait six months to find out that what she thought she had, she hadn’t got.”

These aren’t soft metrics. They are the human face of risk, retention and reputation.

2. Build internal coalitions where it counts

Tony is blunt about who matters for sign-off: “I tend to always work with the right-hand person for the CFO. And I work very closely with the CPO.”

The pattern is consistent:

• With the CPO, you align on philosophy: what does “happy, healthy and at work” mean here? Which populations matter most? Where are the pain points?
• With finance, you anchor it in numbers they recognise: reduced PMI spend from simply phoning the insurer and explaining your plans (Tony did and got 5% off before any change), the cost of absence, the investment community’s growing interest in how you treat people under ESG disclosures.

And then, crucially, you tie benefits to things the CFO already cares about: carbon targets via EV schemes and solar support; customer satisfaction scores; Glassdoor ratings that influence candidates and investors.

3. Involve employees properly — and listen to the quiet ones

Perhaps the most old-fashioned bit of Tony’s practice is also the most radical: spend time with people.

With Heinz, he spent so many hours on the factory floor that “we actually had a higher take-up in the factories than head office.” He runs focus groups starting from the shop floor, not the exec team. He uses line managers as amplifiers, dragging them into benefit fairs and asking them to bring their teams.

And the composition of those groups matters: “You don’t want people that are vocal. You want people that are listened to.”

The exercise he runs is revealing. Two whiteboards.

“Could you write up the benefits, please?” At first, silence. Then a few tentative shouts. “Have we got that?” “No, we had that.”

Confusion, discovery, peer-to-peer explanation. It’s an education, not a show-and-tell.

That simple act does more to surface the gap between what you think you’ve communicated and what people have absorbed than any glossy portal video.

4. Design communication for real brains, not ideal users

This is where Tony’s lived experience of ADHD and neurodiversity becomes an asset rather than a private battle.

He only discovered he had ADHD when he went through his employer’s neurodiversity pathway. The diagnosis — “I got nine out of 10” — reframed not just his own working patterns but how he thought about employees more generally.

The rules of thumb he’s developed are instructive:

• No more than three steps. “People cannot get beyond three steps. I don’t know why.” If a director can’t complete a seven-step bike benefit journey, no one else will.
• Avoid colour coding that tricks people. Give someone a red “opt out” and a green “opt in” and they will hit the green regardless of intent. Design for clarity, not aesthetics.
• Multi-channel, bite-sized, repeated. “We tell them, we tell them again, we repeat it, then we remind them. You just do it in different ways, but you keep on the message.”
• Emails with one job. The benefit fair invitation that achieved an 80% read rate did so because it was ruthlessly constructed: one sentence at the top that “has to hit home”, no distracting links, a title that actually matters to the recipient.

Or as he puts it from the ADHD perspective: “I’m not gonna read a brochure. But if you tell me very briefly what that brochure says in a succinct way, I will listen to you.”

Complication & Reality: ageing, carers and the politics around you

Even the best-run benefits strategy operates in a messy world.

Demographic change is pushing needs in directions governments and employers have been slow to recognise. We talk regularly about childcare; far less about elder care, despite the fact that, as Tony notes, there are now more people caring for parents than for children in many markets.

“One in three people now have caring responsibilities of some description,” he says. The emotional and logistical load is huge. Yet employer support is patchy. Tony’s organisation has implemented services to support with the admin of elder care — navigating systems, arranging appointments — but this is still the exception, not the norm.

Meanwhile, public policy is moving in the opposite direction. Talk of cutting salary sacrifice, taxing electric cars more heavily, or failing to incentivise green home investments all make it harder to build coherent, affordable schemes. 

The immediate fiscal logic — “the government needs to save money” — trumps the longer-term benefits of a healthier, financially secure, lower-carbon workforce.

Then there is the reality of providers themselves. Tony is unsentimental:

“The bigger businesses in the UK are too big to come up with new ideas. They wait for them to come to market and then they buy them… they’re not agile enough. They’re quite clunky.”

All of which means that HR leaders are often caught between:

• Employees whose needs are shifting fast (neurodiversity, elder care, mental health);
• Governments whose incentives are unstable and often regressive; and
• Legacy providers whose innovation largely happens via acquisition, not design.

The temptation in that context is to retrench, do the bare minimum, run the annual cycles and hope the storm passes.

Closing: reclaiming the thinking from the tools

The image of that drenched green suit in a Victoria flat lingers because it captures a moment when the future of benefits felt open.

Flexible benefits, online enrolment, personalised portals — all of it represented a break from paternalistic, opaque schemes you signed up to once and never touched again. In many ways, that promise has been delivered. Most large employers now have the infrastructure early pioneers could only dream of.

And yet, here we are: still debating how to make the case to CFOs, still discovering that employees can’t name their benefits, still watching governments balance the books on the backs of lower earners’ NI.

If you are a senior HR or reward leader, that might be the most hopeful part of Tony Nevin’s story. The levers you need are within reach:

• You can decide to frame your role as keeping people happy, healthy and at work — and measure benefits against that.
• You can insist on knowing the real cost of benefits and the cost of not having them.
• You can build coalitions with finance, not just send them a slide deck once a year.
• You can design for real brains, not ideal users, and let employees themselves shape how benefits land.
• You can stop doing annual processes that don’t work simply because they are annual.

The benefits platforms will keep evolving. The policy environment will swing between incentives and clawbacks. Demographics will keep shifting. What matters is whether HR leaders choose to treat benefits and reward as something more than administration.

Friends with benefits, as the podcast title has it, only works if both sides get something meaningful from the relationship. Right now, too many employers and employees are still just awkward acquaintances, circling around the same conversations.

Perhaps the real act of leadership is to step away from the comfort of the cycle — platform launches, policy tweaks, annual reviews — and ask: in ten years’ time, what will we wish we’d been brave enough to stop doing?

Watch the full episode below