Why Benefits Remain One of HR’s Biggest Data Blind Spots
Employee benefits can be the second-biggest people cost, yet many global organisations cannot clearly see what they offer, what they spend, or what value each provider delivers.
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, I had an inspiring conversation with Chris Bruce, CEO and Co-Founder at Origin. He explains why fragmented policies, spreadsheets, and local systems have kept benefits out of strategic business conversations.
🎓 In this episode, Chris discusses:
Why one of the biggest people costs remains largely invisible, leaving leadership teams unable to make informed decisions about benefits.
How AI changes a 12.5-year manual challenge by turning thousands of policies, handbooks, and agreements into structured data.
Why benefits data must live inside daily workflows if organisations want it to remain accurate after the initial review.
What co-creating technology with multinational employers reveals that industry expertise alone cannot uncover.
How benefits can become a strategic workforce lever, supporting cost control, employee experience, expansion, compliance, and retention.
What if AI agents were not just another way to create more learning content?
What if the talent you need is already inside your organisation, but hidden in skills no one has mapped yet?
That is what 365Talents helps HR teams solve with AI-driven skills intelligence.
It helps organisations see the real skills their people already have, spot gaps, and turn that insight into workforce planning, internal mobility, and better career paths.
That is why 365Talents created the 2026 HR Skills Strategy Toolkit.
14 ready-to-use templates to help HR leaders build the business case, calculate ROI, evaluate vendors, define governance, and roll out a skills strategy that actually moves.
[01:00:00:02 - 01:02:47:20]
welcome to the show, my friend. How are you doing? Chris, I'm really well and very excited to be here. The Chris and Chris show. Simple. Do you go by Chris or do you like Christopher or is that only when you're in trouble? Yeah, I go by Chris, obviously my mother calls me Chris when I'm in trouble. But my name is Chris Bruce, and I don't know why it is, but over the last 10 years, increasingly I give emails from people addressing me as Bruce, even people I've known for many, many years. Really? You're doing such a mental slip, because it's Bruce, yeah. I don't know, because it's even people I've never met. Really? And I don't know whether it's my email is coming across as being Bruce, Chris, or something, but it's definitely, I've seen it's grown and grown over time. And it was never a problem for the first 20 years of my career, but the last 10, it's been pretty fun. Oh, first of all problems. First of all problems. Yeah, before we jump in, good to see you again. I'm super excited about having this episode with you, but I really wanna start with kind of the background and journey to where we are today, because I think it's super interesting, and obviously kind of the inspiration behind the current organization and the work you're doing. So tell everyone a little bit about your background and sort of journey to where we are now. Yeah, it's sort of, it's crazy to think about it. So go back to 1999 when I was 25, and I got in a taxi with, or like my boss of the company, I was at an employee benefits consultancy, was heading to a meeting. He needed someone to come and take notes. And so he grabbed me on his way out of the door. And in that taxi journey, we were talking about the dot com, boom, and how it's gonna change. He said to me, "Look, I think it's gonna change "the way that employee benefits are managed." And he's described this thing to me. And off the back of it, I then wrote a business plan and said to him, "I think there's something in it. "Will you, shall we start a company?" And much to my amazement, he did. And so the two of us went into business in 2000, started a company called Thompson's On-Home Benefits, and which then became Darwin. And to put things in perspective, when we set the company up, we had our first client was Suzelle Cakes and Wimbledon. They're still going, six employees. Love it. By the time the business was bought by Mercer, we were the biggest global Ben Adman provider outside of the US. We had an 80% market share, as well as being the biggest in Europe and the biggest in Asia. And we had the who's who of clients. So that was sort of the, I guess, the first major part of my career. And then things weren't very different. Love that. And then you sold it, and like all entrepreneurs, you couldn't help yourself when you jumped back in. Yeah, I never planned to.
[01:02:49:00 - 01:03:19:10]
I didn't plan to. So I stayed on with the report by Mercer, and it was a really good fit. You had like tech and broken consulting. And then, I did the classic thing of becoming an angel investor, whilst also being tech advisor to Mercer. And life was very good. And I had a good work-life balance. And then two things happened. I snapped my kiles, and yeah, not good, and AI.
[01:03:20:14 - 01:04:00:18]
I love that those are two very distinct things. Snap my kiles. How did you do that first and foremost? Skiing. Yeah, I was skiing. Of course, I just guessed. Of course, that's how you do that. I thought I was still 17 and a Red Bull racer. We all make that mistake. I'm an old man now as well. I used to break dance growing up, and I did a handstand a few weeks ago, and I'm still in pain. Oh, no. I'm not doing it. It doesn't work the same. (Laughs) Doesn't really give up. What was the moment for you though? You mentioned AI. What was the moment, the aha moment, where you were like, wow, there's an opportunity here. And there's an exciting enough opportunity for you to jump back in.
[01:04:02:05 - 01:04:53:11]
Yes, I think there were three things. I think the, I remember I really clearly, one of my four public companies showing me chat GBT, I guess, written really on, and showing how you could suddenly create a job description, and then you could ask it to create a job profile, and then you could ask it to list all the websites you should put on. I thought, this is cool. This is proper AI. This is something different. And then I had, I was driving across France, I had two of my kids in the car, both with their headphones in, and I was calling anyone that would pick up a phone to me, and one of the people I called was my old CTO and dear friend, Pete Craghill, and I started to think to Peter, how is AI gonna change our industry? And Pete Lipschy goes to me, well, I think, or we've submitted to the library, like, well, we can solve the biggest problem in global benefits, which is nobody knows how much they're spending,
[01:04:54:16 - 01:05:47:17]
what benefits they've got around the world, all of this stuff. And actually we could use AI to solve that. And then the third part of it was then we had a conversation with my wife. And I think the most important one, you just told her, finally, it was all worth it. I'm now gonna be more present. Yeah, and so we had a conversation to look at board, I kinda need to do something again, I want to build something, AI's here. And we agreed some grand rules. Okay. So three days a week. Okay. No evenings, no weekends, no travel, because you don't need to resume. And here we are two and a half years later, 50 million in funding a team of centipede people. And I'm in the UK one week a month. So I didn't quite stick to the promise I'd made. You're done well, you're done well. That was already bold.
[01:05:49:05 - 01:08:21:14]
Wow. So when people ask you about the organization now, like how do you describe, what is the problem you're solving? You mentioned it a little bit there, but if you could just sort of elaborate a little bit more on that. Chris, the intellect turned on you. So you're talking with CHROs all the time. Yes. And so when you're talking to them, like benefits, does it come up as a conversation? Yeah, we spoke about this before, right? Like I think, especially if you look at the US, like Europe and UK, not so much US, it's like the Wild West out there, so complex. Like even now, I still can't get my head around the US system as well. But part of the conversation obviously is around like, a lot of people, employees don't even know they have these tools or benefits in their business. And then when you try and talk about, we've always had this dream of creating like a personalized benefits experience, right? At scale, you just can't do it, right? And then AI is obviously similar to the way it's transforming learning, where you have a lot of personalized learning now. This is a huge moment for us to reimagine how we're approaching benefits in our organizations. And then you look at, to what you educated me on, I'd love to learn more about now, is the entire ecosystem around that, which I didn't realize how complex that was and what are the different incentives that are driving those companies and the different behaviors and outcomes that are from those, which you also love you to share with everyone that I was like, oh wow, that's why it's so complex because of the whole system, the way it's set up. So yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I'm seeing. It's kind of one of those problems that we've never, we've always been speaking about it. It's always been a challenge, but I feel like now AI is an opportunity to do this at scale with such a couple of so much data that we just couldn't do before, quite frankly. So I think the benefits is a perfect use case for AI because of how complex and how fragmented the data is. So like, I guess in a nutshell, if you're a CFO or a CO2, second biggest people cost is benefits. And yet you've got no visibility on actually what you're spending, where you're spending, how those costs are changing, what you're paying your different vendors and what they're actually doing for the work that you're paying them, where are you compliant or non-compliant. And, but ultimately more than anything, I go back, like it's, you've got this mega spend and that no one,
[01:08:22:15 - 01:09:22:14]
no one in the leadership team ever talked about because they can't talk about it because there's nothing they can do about it. So it's just seemed to be an embedded cost in the organization when actually it should be something which is a conversation that the CEO and the CHO are having around how can we use benefits to support our workforce strategy? How can we, we know that we're doubling down on this market over here. A whole load of people. How do we make our benefit package more attractive in this particular market? Or over here, we can see that we've actually got our medical costs are spiking. Why are they spiking? What can we do about it? And so an AI gives us the ability to pull all of the information in for the first time to build foundations, be able to ask these really critical and important questions. Yeah. If it's like the second biggest cost, why is no one solved? That's why they're not getting the attention.
[01:09:23:19 - 01:10:44:09]
Yeah, just no one's ever been able to. And this is why AI is good. I mean, generally this is why I came back in is now is such an exciting time to be building something because all of the things that held you back in the past, like I'm a product guy, I'm a tech builder. Everything that held you back in the past is now gone. You can think of things in a totally different way. So Chris, let's imagine that you were the CHO of the company got a hundred countries. You're probably on average got around 30 benefits per country. And so let's say that each one of those benefits has got four documents associated with it. So policy documents, employee handbooks, clicks bargaining agreements. And so you've maybe got 12,000 documents associated with those benefits. And so now you decide like, I want to get my arms around all this stuff. So I'm going to go and recruit someone who knows benefits in every market around the world. And also knows employment, insurances, contract law, all this stuff. You find unicorn employee, and then you sit them down with the task of reading through these 12,000 documents, pulling all of the relevant information out but into a structured database. It seemed it took them two hours to read each one of these documents. And some of these documents go on for like three, four, 500 pages long, that it would take around 12 and a half years
[01:10:46:08 - 01:11:07:00]
to pull that information together. So without that data together, you can't do anything about it. The beauty of AI is we can now take those 12,000 documents, absorb them, put them in structured database, put intelligence on top of it, and then build all the processes and workflows around to manage it. And we can do it super fast. Yeah, I was thinking while you were saying that,
[01:11:08:16 - 01:11:15:16]
one of the things that has come up recently, maybe you're getting the same question as well though, and it's a current challenge, right? How do you keep them up to date?
[01:11:16:16 - 01:11:50:02]
Yeah, so we knew from the very beginning, we had to both, it's gonna be one thing to build the data and put it in a structured database, but actually we had to live in the flow of work. And so for us, we built all the workflows and the renewal workflows, the workflows to keep all of the information up to date. So managing insurance policies, keep them up to date. But more than that, actually us knowing what is the medical inflation likely to be on something in advance? So you have to live in the flow of work, you have to be part of the workflow.
[01:11:51:17 - 01:12:32:08]
And you need policy reviews, you need them to happen in the platform. And that way, that is your source of truth of data. Yeah, that makes sense. One of the other areas I was thinking about, which again, just challenges that, my last conversation I just had a minute ago over, see what you were talking about is, what does this look like in the current ecosystem? Where does it live? Does it, how is it connecting to other systems and tools? What is the user experience of this? Yeah, so, again, like the beauty of where we are now is we've been able to reimagine everything. And so you're starting with a place to go.
[01:12:33:16 - 01:12:50:17]
And so for us, our focus was how do we get like insane adoption of the platform? And so we took a really slightly neutral approach, even though we're deep domain experts, we know benefits really well, we wanted to make sure that we were generally solving problems that our clients had. So two and a half years ago,
[01:12:52:00 - 01:14:29:24]
when I had this crazy idea with Pete, that we would go out to a load of multinationals and say to them, these are the problems that we think exist in the industry. Here is how we believe they can be solved with technology. Would you be interested in co-creating this technology with us? And why that was so important is only through co-creation can you understand actually what are the real problems that people are trying to solve on a day-to-day basis. I know benefits inside out, I have no benefit tech inside out, but I've never sat, I've never been a global head of benefits, or I've never been a local benefit manager in Singapore. And so when Pete and I had this initial discussion, we hoped that we could get one company of the initial 11 that we spoke to to say yes, much to our amazement, seven of them said yes to co-creating with us. And the eighth company was one of the super big tech companies, they were actually built their own version, they then a year later stopped and came on board. But it meant that we were actually building tech genuinely to solve people's, our clients' problems. And just in the, I was actually talking to Pete last night, over the last few days, I've had five corporate business reviews with clients. And what has amazed me is how passionate they are about the platform that we're building, because they're using it all day long. So they are, and they're seeing how they come up with ideas and problems, and they go, well, I needed to do this. And so they asked us and we build it. And we can obviously build things so quickly now that it becomes, it's their product, and it's their platform, a lot of them talk about it being their platform.
[01:14:31:06 - 01:15:34:20]
So it is, it's a combination of, I just clients, our clients, I use it, I'm loving using the platform, but then properly being embedded into the infrastructure. Yeah, I think that's so important. And the fact that you did that from the very beginning means that you're as intentional about building it around that philosophy, right? And I'm sure they gave you that feedback early on. I know an example you shared with me in the last conversation which made complete sense, is you recently announced the partnership with ServiceNow. And that's a perfect example, right, of embedding the tool in an existing workflow or an agent in an organization. It just makes so much sense. Maybe you could share a bit more about that. Yeah, so if you think about what we've done is we've got this, using AI to bring all of this information together, it's then being used by people in the business. The benefit professionals all day long. So they know that it's verified validated data. It stays up to date because we've got the renewals and policy reviews happening in the platform. And so last summer, we got fortunate enough to be introduced to ServiceNow. So we started to talk to ServiceNow about
[01:15:36:03 - 01:15:59:03]
our platform, what we were doing. They themselves became a client seeing they could solve their problems. And then we started, one thing that they sort of raised was that they saw how the number one question from employees that goes into ServiceNow is on benefits, leaves and allowances. And build also has the lowest resolution rate because the data is so fragmented.
[01:16:00:15 - 01:16:25:16]
And so what we announced about six weeks ago is a partnership with ServiceNow where if an employee now asks a question directly into now assist ServiceNow's AI, then it's our AI that then responds and answers the question. And so that's been huge and transformative for many of our clients. Yeah, and many of my, the companies that I chat to, they're huge service now.
[01:16:26:16 - 01:16:43:23]
They already live within you. Are you also planning to do similar things with like CoPilot as well? Yeah, we are. I think that would be huge. Yeah, we built it as an open standard to then build stuff in different areas. But we are, but we're also, there's a bunch of other stuff we'll be building with ServiceNow. And we are,
[01:16:45:19 - 01:17:49:10]
because we took decision very early on that we would be the benefit infrastructure we wouldn't be employed facing ourselves. And I actually enjoyed, I listened to your podcast this morning whilst walking my dogs around the park with Arun from Schneider Electric. Oh yeah. Yeah. And so much of what he said resonated with us in that he talked about like trying to simplify the amount of systems there are and trying to make the employee have to go to less place and all that stuff. And that's effectively what we're trying to do is to provide the consistent data to everybody who needs it. Yeah, I think there's a bold move by you because everyone's trying to be the front of house, right? Yeah, I think with their products and it's a tough battle right now, right now. And I'm seeing play out the fact that you work across all of those and you've designed it that way. I think is so smart. And it just allows you then just to plug in to whatever the existing tech stack looks like and those communication channels, it just makes so much sense. I mean, I don't know how you saw that ahead of time because people are now seeing the problem with that because they have so many tools
[01:17:51:20 - 01:18:12:05]
and want to be that the agent, the master agent, I don't know what you want to call it, of choice. So that was a very smart decision early on from you and the team. It's like looking at almost like the trend of benefits and if you look at sort of almost some of the things that have happened, we had 10 years ago, we had preventive wellbeing solutions coming out, loads of them.
[01:18:13:08 - 01:19:03:15]
And a lot of companies were looking at like, do these really help us? They make a difference. Then we had COVID and you had CFOs and CEOs standing up and we've got to look after our people and putting huge amounts into the mental health, financial wellbeing, physical health type solutions. And then post COVID, suddenly there was a realisation these things weren't being used or touched and the companies were going, well, we're not getting value from them, started turning off a lot. And so we knew when we were looking to build this that actually if you build something that isn't integrated into the employee experience, the existing employee experience, people aren't going to use it. And then the other thing we just saw is we knew there was going to be a battle between ServiceNow, Microsoft, and everybody else is going to try and fight for the front door and we felt their marketing budgets were bigger than ours.
[01:19:05:15 - 01:20:17:12]
Yeah, but they now have another problem though, right? Because none of them are playing nicely. So like they've created a bottleneck for themselves and I see the companies that are winning are the ones that are designed like yours that are working with and playing nicely across the whole ecosystem as well. So yeah, I think that makes sense. What does this mean for the future role of the benefits leader and their team and the way that they work, right? You think about the amount of hours that you've just taken off the board and manual work that people were doing. What does this mean now for the role of a benefits leader? I think I'd go back to the QVR conversation and how what I've seen from our clients already is that they talk about their freed up from the mundane. I could say it's a tough job. If you have a conversation with global benefit teams, it's a really tough job. They live in spreadsheet hell and they can get asked a simple question by the CHRO and the CHRO thinks should be a simple question and actually can take them two weeks to try and pull information together.
[01:20:20:02 - 01:21:17:19]
So actually what we really believe we're doing is we're freeing them up to do value add work. And if we go back to like the early conversation to make sure that that mega spend organizations have got is actually being spent really effectively. Yeah, talk a little bit more about that. What does the ROI look like? I know you can't mention specific companies, but what are some of the savings that you've seen or the ROI, what are you measuring? What does success look like? So you've got probably two extremes ending in between. So one end you've got organizations who are going, and we don't want to change the employee experience, but we just want to optimize the, we want to make sure that we've optimized the spend. So we're not going to change our benefits, but it may be that we've got like our intelligence very quickly shows an organization that they're paying for a global travel action policy, a retail travel action policy, a local travel action policy. And that is as a travel action policy built into the medical plan as well. And so just very quickly being able to go, right, there's all this duplication, triplication.
[01:21:18:21 - 01:22:15:08]
And actually we can just immediately cut out a lot that waste or it could be that you've got brokers who are ultimately the most brokers, their commissions are tied to premiums and premiums have been rising by 10, 15% a year for the last five years. So that means over a five year period, the amount of money that the broker is being paid has doubled. But often if you talk to people about, well, do you think the value has doubled? Well, no, it hasn't. So, okay, so let's look at actually what work they're doing and what is fair pay for them for the work that you want them to be done. And there's like, there's loads of stuff like that at just, and then you've got things like the service now being able to solve those employee tickets, case deflection and all things around that. Or one of our first plans where we're actually looking to move benefits from being managed in local countries to actually moving it into a shared service environment. And they couldn't do it without having
[01:22:16:20 - 01:22:26:18]
a source of truth of data. And so you get all of that stuff. At the other end, an organization we started working with earlier on this year, the CFO said to me,
[01:22:28:06 - 01:23:34:16]
look, at the moment we are, as an organization, we're delivering bad results to the street. And so we're having to let go of a lot of employees. We have grown through acquisitions over the last 40, 50 years. And nobody can explain to me why we provide the benefits that we do. And so the exercise that they, and they reckon they spend around 700 million non-US. And so the exercise that they're going through is looking at in every market, what are the legal requirements, what benefits have they got to provide legally due to statutory, mandatory and CBA, to collect bargaining agreements. And what then do they want to provide as a good employee globally, so a certain level of life cover. And then anything over and above that, then there has to be a business case as to why keep it, or they look to remove it. And they're looking to save around 10%. Wow, that's a huge transformation. Less of a technology transformation, more of a mindset shift, a cultural shift. Is that something you help clients with? Because I can imagine that part is huge. Just like...
[01:23:36:18 - 01:26:11:08]
(Laughs) Yeah, so we work with different consulting firms who will then actually make the recommendations and then from the change. Nice, yeah. But I'm gonna ask you again, like you're doing CRT raises all the time. And it's sense I get from CRT raises that they're focused on cost savings and AI transformation. Yeah, but also the fact that like, one thing you didn't mention in the ROI is that actually these benefits, in many cases, life changing. And many people don't even know about it, right? I heard a story, we do our weekly webinars and we do a lot around wellbeing, right? And the amount of stories that I could tell that both personally, professionally, and from our clients that I hear that, people like there was one around the CRT ROI and talking about that one around fertility treatment, right? And there was many, they realized that there was like, thousands of people didn't even know that they even had that as a benefit, right? And then there was a story, one of the CRT ROIs sharing that, they actually had a meetup recently where all of the new moms who benefited from that fertility and obviously got pregnant, came in and brought their babies into the office. Yeah. And had lunch together. And it was like, wow, somebody's been truly life changing and life saving actually, in some situations as well. The fact that they can ask an agent, get an instant answer, tailor to themselves, right? As well, to meet them where they're at without having to go to a manager or a leader, et cetera. That's the bit that they, of course the savings are important. Of course, everything you mentioned is massively important, but what does that mean for employee experience, employee retention, and also just being, a great place to work as well. So, I mean, I'd love to answer your question, but there's so much more that goes into it that people don't really talk about. But this is it, like to me, benefits speak to the culture of an organization. Yeah, exactly. And they speak to what do we care about? Beyond everything else, what are we willing to actually put our money behind and support with somebody? I had a client and this was in my previous life, so Ben Adman, and the organization bought our solution. But at the same time, they put in critical illness cover and health screening. And after they did it, he himself, the CHRO, had health screen, turned out that he had cancer.
[01:26:12:24 - 01:26:33:16]
He left work and was paid for by his critical illness cover. And I bumped into him walking down the beach on South Coast, the most random thing. He served with his wife and kids. And we hard-going to say hello and everything else. And then he goes to me, Chris, I'm celebrating 10 years since I had that diagnosis. Wow.
[01:26:35:01 - 01:27:58:06]
And like, so going back to what you said, that's the difference of benefits you can have in so many different ways. Yeah, no, you're right. And there's so many, I mean, we should have more time, but there's so many of those stories that I hear all the time, but the system is broken right now, the current system, and it's so complicated, so difficult. As an employee, it's also, and as a, you know, a benefit, it's so difficult to actually people to find this information and get access to reliable sources, up-to-date sources. And your point of like how complex that is when you look globally, and it's constantly evolving, right, and changing as well. And AI is an incredible tool, obviously, to be able to bring that to life, both from the data point of view, but also then adding in the organization individual context on top, which is a whole other level. Where do you see this moving kind of, I mean, you're early, one of the things that when we first spoke is I was like, when your team reached out, I was like, "Wow, I didn't even know there was anyone doing this work." Yeah. And I was amazed, because there isn't any other company out there that I know of. I know many of them that maybe is trying to start working on this. But for you looking forward, what are you most excited about and where you guys are heading next? So if I go back to what you just talked about and touched on, it's,
[01:27:59:10 - 01:28:13:16]
you can build this unless you've got very, very strong domain expertise, and you really understand benefits. And so for us, what we really focus on is building the foundational stuff. But the power of what AI will give us in the future,
[01:28:14:21 - 01:29:26:20]
or what it'll enable us to provide our plans with, is so exciting. And to me, it goes back to what you just had, which is how can benefits actually be a strategic lever for organizations? And so how can companies understand not where they should cut costs, not where they should just try and focus on spend, but actually how can they have a benefit strategy that is working for them as an organization and for their people? And so how do I know, how can I decide where to spend, like how much do I want to spend in the US? How much do I want to spend in Singapore? And why do I want to spend what I'm looking to spend? Yeah. And actually to have the data and the intelligence to be able to know that that money is delivering on the outcomes that we want as an organization. Yeah, for people listening right now, for those HR benefits leaders, there probably is some HR moments during this conversation for them, but also where would you recommend they start? It seems pretty, you know.
[01:29:28:21 - 01:29:31:15]
Yeah. Where to begin. Yeah.
[01:29:32:23 - 01:29:41:19]
I come from a world as though I've been putting been admin platforms into the world's biggest companies. And those projects could be like five year long. Exactly, yeah.
[01:29:42:23 - 01:29:47:17]
And so when Pete, my co friend and I sat down and like thought about what are we trying to build here?
[01:29:48:22 - 01:31:15:02]
And we came up with a set of different principles. And one of them was we wanted to build something that people could get really rapid speed to impact. And so it doesn't matter what the problem is in the organizations looking to solve for, whether it is really quick to put the data into the platform or we just take it from the providers or wherever, but to put the data into platform. And then immediately the data is there. And it's solving problems. And so we have a like traffic light system within our platform. So you're going from red in a country to green in a country with red being got nothing in there. Green is your fully live, but you can be at Amber and get a huge matter as the platform because you're already seeing information, you're using that information on a day to day basis. So it's definitely like our clients are going to get value within days of starting to work with us. So it's, and then they just build and build and build. And obviously once you put the data in once, you're then getting value from it for multiple different reasons. But do the clients, where they typically start? Like the, yeah. Change is for everyone. It depends on what they're looking for. So for some people it could be that they've got some M&A, in which case they'll focus on the countries where which are going to be impacted and the dates they need for it. Other people go to e-page transparency directed. They need policy documents. They need to understand if there's any discriminatory wording or,
[01:31:16:05 - 01:31:22:17]
and then, or others it could be the employer experience. So they need to load the right data, which is going to feed the employees.
[01:31:24:02 - 01:31:52:15]
And also others, they just want to get their arms around what they've got so they can start to optimize spend. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So we're talking months, not years. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I had a QBR, I had a QBR, to put things in perspective, I had one of the QBRs I called the VISV reviews. I just had an organization. They are around 35,000 employees across 40 countries and it took them three and a half months. Wow. Wow. That, yeah.
[01:31:53:17 - 01:31:54:20]
That's pretty incredible.
[01:31:56:19 - 01:32:01:13]
And I suppose, we could do another whole two episodes on this.
[01:32:03:16 - 01:32:12:01]
What haven't we spoke about or haven't we discussed that we should have? Hi, Chris, I'm going to ask you, I'm going to go back again to like your, your,
[01:32:13:12 - 01:32:23:00]
I guess when you're with a lot of some of the insights that you have in industry and when you're talking to people about transformation, what is it you think is holding people back from,
[01:32:24:12 - 01:32:53:24]
from being able to transform the operations of what they're doing? Yeah. I think it's back to what I said earlier, right? There's so much conversation around AI and technology. This is not an AI issue. This is a cultural transformation and mindset shift issue. This is bringing people on the journey with you, making sure that you've got everyone rowing in a direction. You're bringing in the business and HR as early as possible in the process as well. Oftentimes like HR is brought in too late
[01:32:55:03 - 01:33:52:08]
or the business vice versa is brought in too late into the process as well. I think there's definitely a lot of education across our line manager population as well because they're the ones really directly connected to your employees. So if we talk about benefits and I'm not asking them to be experts, but even signposting them and supporting them, like having, for example, I don't know if you do visit your clients, but for them to have maybe a dashboard that they can see as a manager, as a leader will be huge. I don't know if that's something you do right now, but like I can imagine how important that would be, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for us, for us the whole thing is like a Monday morning, your global head of benefits, you log into origin and you know what renewals are over to you. Exactly. It's a statutory change, what impacts it have on benefits, where we've got a benefit that isn't necessarily working for you and how do you turn it? And so how can you quickly turn it off and that plan happen?
[01:33:53:09 - 01:35:14:19]
So it's all, it's that whole thing to have transformation spreadsheet out of being in control. Yeah. I think also there's something around, like a lot of conversations I hear around benefits going beyond the employee, right? To their families, to their home, even their extended family, I'm seeing companies now. I think there's a lot there that I'm really excited about, that I'm seeing that many providers and companies are now providing, which is, which makes sense, right? That doesn't end in the confines of your wall, of the walls of your office as well. So that's something I'm excited about, I don't think people talk about enough and enough companies are exploring. Yeah. It's like the nine to five doesn't exist and Nord is, you as an individual, it's a family affair. Exactly. Like my daughter's here in the studio right now with me, she just came from school. She just popped in a second ago and I was chatting to her the other day and I was trying to explain what a nine to five was and she doesn't even understand the concept of work is a place you go to. Yeah. And I can imagine when she's older, I don't think that's even gonna exist. So she's like, wait a minute. So there was, you had to go to this building and be there from nine to five and then you leave and then you have a Saturday and Sunday and you're supposed to separate work, work from like, like just trying to, even as a seven year old trying to explain that to her. She's like, well, why would we do that, dad?
[01:35:16:06 - 01:35:18:12]
(Laughs) Because it makes, when you say it, it sounds crazy
[01:35:19:24 - 01:35:31:16]
as well, right? In the connected world. Yeah. And she's like, because she sees me at home, she sees me here, she sees me out. She doesn't understand that, the sort of traditional concept. And then I think that companies and benefits
[01:35:32:22 - 01:36:07:20]
are quite slow to evolve. Yeah. To catch up, if that makes sense. I think that's something you'll see an issue with to the more of the modern times and support that we need. Yeah, and Chris, like building on that, like you look at things like the magic of home, you should be able to talk to Amazon, to Amazon Alexa or Google Home and you should be able to ask the question about your benefits. Wow, you went deep. Interesting, wow. Fully interconnected. We see the place to it now. Yeah, you're right. You're not far away. Yeah.
[01:36:09:01 - 01:36:48:23]
It's true. I mean, I felt like that is where we're going. I was one of the first kind of podcasts to launch on Alexa and many, many, many, well, maybe like five, six years ago. And people were like, why the hell would people listen to your podcast on Alexa? Like ask Alexa to play the podcast. And I was like, yeah, that's where people are gonna go. They're gonna have one source. There's gonna be voice. It's frictionless, right? It's right there. I do it. I walk around my house. I have them all over the house. And then I just talk to my smart devices and then they give me what I need. So I'm with you. I feel like it will be, it's just how, I think just we're trying to figure out the entire ecosystem. You're seeing the same thing
[01:36:49:23 - 01:37:34:24]
in the consumer electronic space, right? Where you've got Apple intelligence and they're building their own marketplace. You've got open AI building their marketplace. You got Samsung building their marketplace as well. So everyone's trying to create a lot of mini ecosystems where I feel like the companies that are gonna dominate are the ones that play nicely with all of those. They integrate with all of those. And yeah, I mean, that's kind of what you're doing. You take that, you take that facility that you gave earlier on and actually like how great it is if after you've had the baby, if your Alexa is saying to you, congratulations, whatever else you want me to add to your child to your private medical plan.
[01:37:36:09 - 01:38:21:15]
And do you want to know what benefits you now get as a consequence of having a child and what leaves you get and what support we as a company provide to you? Yeah. And because it's already, it understands the employee lifecycle and the moments that matter that are mapped out, it can show up in those moments, right? Because it knows all of those things and it can be more predictive. And before you even, like you said, hey, by the way, are you aware that you have this or like, do you want to register this? Like you just said, like to be there as opposed to you having to go and seek this information. And I think that's also what's also gonna be excited, right? Getting nudges and reminders and stuff like that. That's gonna be really interesting to wear. Who wants to change in the baby's nappy?
[01:38:23:00 - 01:38:28:22]
Well, at least your hands free. So that's, so that works. Listen, before I let you go,
[01:38:30:21 - 01:39:27:10]
firstly, congratulations to you and the team on the journey so far. I know you've been in kind of like stealth mode, building amazing, I mean, not completely, but I love the fact that you started by working with those customers and co-creating the future together, which is amazing as well. And now you're kind of taking on more customers and growing, but I commend you and the team. I think this is such an important area, right? That is really not been solved or looked at for so long because it's so daunting for many reasons, so complex. And I'm just really excited about what's to come as well. So I appreciate you coming on the show. Where's the best place for people to reach out to you guys? Say hello, connect with you. What was it? Yeah, definitely. So email our website at dresesatoriginedbenefits.com or email me personally at chris.bruceatoriginedbenefits.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. Love that, and it's not Bruce.Chris, all right? No.
[01:39:28:21 - 01:39:37:06]
(Laughs) Here we get around. Yeah, well, listen, I appreciate you. Thanks for coming on the show. Oh, it's a real pleasure, great to have this opportunity. Thanks a lot.
Chris Bruce, CEO and Co-Founder at Origin.