How many different insurance companies does your typical clientuse for their voluntary benefit offerings? Have you broughtin one carrier to provide all voluntary products? Have you broughtin several companies? And what does the number of carriers sayabout you?

There are many reasons an employer-client might have multiple voluntary carriers. If the broker haschanged over the years, each new broker might have had differentrelationships and preferred partners. In other cases, employers mayhave their own reasons for wanting certain coverages from certaincarriers. But the most likely reason is that the current brokerrecommended different carriers for different products.

Based on repeated surveys over the last decade, brokers whobring all voluntary products from a single company aredoing so to avoid administrative complexity or to maximizecommission potential. But given the administrative solutionsavailable today, these are not necessarily client-centricmotivations. And unless the broker really believes that one companycan be the best-of-breed in every voluntary product category andevery service offered, that may result in a suboptimal benefitstrategy for the client.

But things are changing, and as is often the case in ourbusiness, they are changing fast. Increasingly, brokers are movingfrom a one- or two-carrier strategy to a multi-carrier strategy,searching for the best products from the best carriers. By far, themost common reason brokers bring in a new carrier is that the “newcarrier offers better features”—a client-centric motivation.

And the evidence of this movement is flowing in.

Just four years ago, 79 percent of employers who offer voluntaryproducts used three or fewer carriers. Only 7 percent used morethan five carriers. In 2016, 53 percent of these employers usedthree or fewer carriers, and 17 percent used more than five.

This is a major shift in a short period of time. Employerclients have wider portfolios and are using more voluntary carriersto offer their employees better products and services. And thereare some nice side effects. Offering products from category leadersmakes it more challenging for a competitor trying to take over theaccount. Conversely, it is much simpler to replace a single carrieroffering five products than it is to replace five carriers.

This is a great sign for brokers, demonstrating that they arequickly becoming more knowledgeable about voluntary product optionsand more sophisticated about voluntary services in general. Andit's even better news for our employer-clients and employeecustomers. They are increasingly being offered best-of-breedproducts and services from a best-of-breed broker.