Benchmarking is a powerful tool, enabling plan sponsors to compare their benefits offerings against competitors and keep an eye on pricing in the industry. However, most benchmarking data tends to skew toward larger businesses, leaving small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to extrapolate results.
Until now. Benefits Alliance (BA), a network of independent benefits advisory firms across Canada, recently launched BAiQ, a benchmarking tool tailor-made for SMEs. BAiQ allows SMEs to compare coverage offerings across industry sectors, company sizes and geographic regions. Its initial focus is on life insurance, health and dental benefits, with work underway to include group retirement plans.
“We’ve come up with a platform that is going to become the industry go-to. It’s going to be very accurate because we’ve built a front-end that actually lifts coverage details out of the benefits booklet and populates the database,” says Chris Gory, President of Orchard Benefits, Toronto, a member firm of BA. “I’m excited to see where we’ll be able to go with this.”
BAiQ is also carrier-neutral since the data is sourced through benefits advisors, who work with multiple insurance carriers. The data is initially coming from BA’s members, which serve more than 13,000 SMEs across Canada. All data is anonymized and audited by a third-party security firm.
The long-range goal is direct data input from insurers. “The goal is to connect to the carriers so we can get real-time benchmarking,” says Gory.
Armed with this critical information, employers will be able to make informed decisions about which benefits to offer to be competitive within their sector. And it will help employers better achieve the balance between cost management and employee attraction and retention.
“You always hear from employees: ‘We want this, we want that,’” says Gory. “Now the employer will be able to say, ‘Based on the companies within BAiQ, this is what other companies in our industry are offering.’”
On the one hand, the employer will know if their offerings are overly generous compared to competitors, and can consider reducing their spend. On the other hand, “it’s a great way to be proactive if they have more money in their benefits budget because they can add on coverage, if that’s what other people in the industry are doing,” he says.
To start, access to BAiQ is limited to plan sponsors working with benefits advisors that are members of BA. To find out more, speak with your benefits advisor.