Introducing Benefit Builder: Launch custom benefit offerings with the help of templates

When you build landing pages, newsletters, or presentations, you likely leverage templates to do high-quality work quickly. Today, we're excited to offer that same ability for health spending benefits with our Benefit Builder.

With Benefit Builder, you can assign a benefit template to multiple employers to quickly book and enroll them—without sending a multitude of service tickets to your platform technology provider. And with the configuration flexibility of benefit templates, you can define and create every possible version of a health spending benefit to truly customize for each client’s needs. Today, a benefit plan designer can log in to the Benefit Builder and design 64 unique health spending benefit programs before lunch:

• A general health FSA program for 25 employers whose commitment to reducing the use of plastics means they only want virtual cards.
• A limited-purpose FSA program for 11 employers who have found that a carryover is more valuable to their employees than a grace period.
• A dependent care FSA for 13 employers with 13 unique plan periods.
• A wellness program (LSA) for 15 employers that allows for member spending at fitness centers with a 30-day grace period.

If your sales team can sell it, you can build it with the Benefit Builder. With this flexibility, you can quickly expand your health spending benefit offering and sell and implement employers with less runaround.

Benefit Builder unlocks the power of First Dollar's Health Wallet platform by equipping benefit plan designers with an easy-to-use tool for quickly customizing and offering health spending benefits—FSAs, HRAs, HSAs, LSAs, supplementals, rewards, and more. Let's look at how administrators and plan designers use the Benefit Builder to launch and customize their health spending benefit programs and why it matters. 

Design custom plans fast with templates

Does the new client want to include a custom run-out period for their FSA program? Does another client want to have a custom grace period? With the ability to configure templates, Benefit Builder enables you to adjust benefit programs to meet clients' needs on your own without jumping through hoops. 

We’re introducing benefit templates to help our partners quickly design, issue, and renew their benefit programs. With templates, administrators can create custom plans without re-issuing cards or filing a ticket. That’s just one more way we’re giving administrators the self-service tools they need. - Gabby Staton, First Dollar Senior Product Designer

The Benefit Builder puts benefit plan designers in control of benefit design. You can adjust the following program settings:

• What cards are offered (virtual, physical, both, neither)
• How claims are managed (claims submission, receipt requirements, run-out period)
• Program funding (partner-funded, employer-funded)
• Funding details and limits (account funding limits, initial account funding, ad-hoc funding)

Book and enroll new employer groups with less pain

The implementation clock starts ticking when a new client signs their service level agreement (SLA). When will the new program kick-off? When will members receive access to their benefit funds?

Traditionally, implementation has been painful for administrators, requiring the filing of multiple tickets or emails to third parties. With Benefit Builder, administrators assign benefit templates to prospective clients, simplifying the process. Consider the following:

• An employer wants to offer their employees your Health & Wellness LSA. Yay! Log in to your Health Wallet Manager, go to the Benefit Builder, assign your Health & Wellness LSA template to the participating organization, and then select "Create new benefit offering."
• Twenty clients want to offer their employees your General Health FSA. A bigger yay! Log in to your Health Wallet Manager, go to the Benefit Builder, assign your General Health FSA template to the participating organizations, and then select "Create new benefit offering." That's it!

Delayed timelines frustrate employers, administrators, and the members who depend on these benefits. We want to simplify offering and using health spending benefits, and Benefit Builder helps us meet that mission with a simplified process for creating new benefit offerings. - Erin Barley, First Dollar Senior Product Manager

Here's how to create a new benefit offering by assigning a benefit template to a client:

• Step 1: Select “Create Offering”
• Step 2: Add plan start date
• Step 3: Assign participating organization
• Step 4: Create new benefit offering 
• Step 5: Do a celebratory dance. We suggest the shimmy.

It's that easy to create a new benefit offering. (Doing the shimmy might be harder for some of you.)

Decoupling card distribution from benefit design

Traditionally conversations regarding the design of health spending benefit programs have looked like the following:

• Employer: "I want to offer our health spending benefit program with this updated setting."
• Partner: "Ok, I would love to help. Let me talk to our platform technology provider."
• Technology Provider: "Ok, we'll need to first re-issue all member cards."

The attachment of card issuance to benefit issuance has resulted in benefit updates being tied to high costs, environmental waste, member confusion, and unnecessary barriers.

By decoupling benefit design from cards, First Dollar's Benefit Builder offers software-defined benefits, not card-defined benefits. This enables partners to quickly and efficiently make needed updates. 

Use Benefit Builder to build every health spending benefit powered by the First Dollar Benefit Suite

Benefit Builder enables organizations to quickly design custom plans and book and enroll new employer clients with less implementation pain. This self-service tool can be used for every health spending benefit powered on our platform today: 

• Pre-tax accounts: Commuter programs, Flexible Spending Account (FSA), Dependent Care FSA, General Health FSA, Limited Purpose FSA, Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA), Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Supplemental benefits: Dental, Flex, Hearing, Vision, Rewards, etc.‍
• Lifestyle benefits: Fertility, Mental Health, Remote Work, Wellness