How Advances in HR Tech Make Flexible Employee Benefits Viable

With economic pressures, employee empowerment, and turnover both at all-time highs, benefit managers find themselves in a difficult position when attempting to find a way to make benefits meaningful on an individual level. However, and luckily for benefit managers, with advances in HR tech, there are new tools at their disposal in the form of spendable benefits cards made possible by embedded finance. And they might just be the solution.

INCREASED FLEXIBILITY WITH EMBEDDED FINANCE

Benefit managers fight an uphill battle. With many employees not taking advantage of the benefits available to them – whether because they are unaware or because they are not of interest or relevance to them – an overall lack of engagement can signal wider company culture issues. Failing to successfully engage employees with the benefits offered can harm a company’s overall performance. Hence, benefit managers are constantly searching for solutions that improve the return of investment on their programmes.

One emerging winner is the addition of payment cards to HR tech platforms in order to make flexible benefits spendable. While employers can go to their bank or various fintechs to set up payment cards programmes, the idea of pre-set access within the HR platform they already use is the killer feature made possible by embedded finance. Spend control systems offer benefits managers the ability to set benefits rules and budgets for employees that make existing allowances such as health and fitness more flexible and fair, and open up possibilities for a huge range of new benefits ideas such as wellness, learning, and work-from-home allowances. Because employees gain the freedom to pick the benefits they value most, a centralised system can achieve almost total personalisation – should the company opt for this. That degree of choice is key to accelerating adoption of benefits.