Friends with Benefits: Episode 5 — The One with Benefits Leader Mark: Global Rollouts, AI Caution, and Why Engagement Is a Design Problem
About the guest
Mark is a globally experienced benefits leader who’s spent his career working across broking, consulting, and in-house roles at some of the world’s most complex organisations. Most recently, he led the global rollout of a benefits platform for a 30,000+ employee company operating in over 50 countries. This included harmonising processes, navigating region-specific compliance, and designing an engagement strategy that accounted for both local nuance and global consistency.
He’s worked on the ground in APAC, EMEA, and the Americas, giving him a unique perspective on what it takes to design benefits that scale while still feeling personal. Whether it’s rolling out tech, bridging gaps between strategy and operations, or rethinking how we measure engagement, Mark brings clarity, precision, and deep lived experience to the table.
Summary
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In Episode 5 of Friends with Benefits, David sits down with global benefits leader Mark for a sharp and honest look at what it really takes to roll out benefits tech across markets and why engagement is often more of a design problem than a comms one.
With deep experience across broking, consulting, and in-house leadership roles, Mark shares the hard lessons behind global harmonisation, the limits of AI in HR, and why most engagement strategies fail before they start. If you're tired of big promises and low adoption, this episode is your blueprint for doing it differently.
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Topics on the table:
- The real reason global benefits platforms fail to engage
- Why personalisation in benefits still lags behind consumer tech
- How to design engagement into your rollout—not bolt it on later
- The difference between centralisation and harmonisation (and why it matters)
- Why your 40th country deserves more attention than your first
- Where AI fits—and where it absolutely doesn’t—in benefits
- Balancing local autonomy with global consistency
- Lessons from leading a 50-country platform implementation
- What benefits leaders can learn from product managers
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00:00 – Getting into Benefits
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"Like most people, I didn’t plan to work in benefits. I kind of fell into it after a career in pro cycling and finance."
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03:50 – Health Benefits Are Underused
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"34% of British workers don’t use their health benefits—and that doesn’t surprise me."
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08:15 – Benefits Are Designed, Not Just Delivered
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"You need universal design principles before you scale. Most programs are built backwards."
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10:45 – The Local vs. Global Trap
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"No one ever thinks about the 40th country. Everyone obsesses over the first or second."
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17:20 – Post-Launch is the Real Work
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"Tech rollouts are the start, not the end. That’s when engagement really begins."
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"We plan for launch, but forget to plan for the next 6 or 12 months."
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21:50 – Measuring Impact
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"The truest testament to benefits is an employee experience story not just a utilisation stat."
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24:40 – The Personalisation Gap
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"Amazon’s been personalising for decades. We still haven’t cracked it in benefits."
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36:00 – The Marketing Mindset
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"Benefits engagement is a marketing job. It’s about storytelling, not just information."
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43:50 – AI, Structure & Scale
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"GenAI helped us go from 15 to 27 countries in one year. But only because we got the data right."
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47:10 – Benefits Confession
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"My biggest regret? Not having the guts to sunset irrelevant benefits sooner."
Listen to the podcast on Spotify, Youtube, Apple Podcast.
