This article was originally published in Benefits Pro's Broker Innovation Lab.
Maxwell Health co-founders (and brothers), Veer and Vinay Gidwaney, do nothing halfway.
"I believe there are three areas where we face massive problems as a society: education, the environment, and health care,” said Veer Gidwaney, CEO and co-founder of Maxwell Health. "Vinay and I decided very early on that if we were going to dedicate our time and energy to something, we were going to work on solutions that impact people in a big way.”
Over 50% of the working population in the United States works for companies under 500 employees, and that number grows when expanded to include companies under 1,000, but technology solutions for companies of that size are limited. Plus, smaller companies generally don’t have the same dollars or resources to allocate to HR.
That disparity, paired with the fact that nearly every working American has to choose health benefits at least once a year, presented a massive opportunity to build technology that would greatly improve and streamline that experience. Maxwell Health was born.
Maxwell was founded in a converted apartment in Cambridge, MA with 14 people and a big goal: to transform healthcare in America. Nearly four years, 150 employees, and $70 million in venture capital funding later, Maxwell Health has made a name for themselves in benefits administration technology space, working with hundreds of the country’s top benefits consulting firms, tens of thousands of their clients, and hundreds of thousands of employees and their families.
In Healthcare, Disruption Alone Doesn’t Work
Employee benefits is a complicated industry, with complex workflows and a strict regulatory environment. While it is an industry ripe for change, and flush with opportunity, the disruption approach so popular in Silicon Valley is not an option in healthcare. There is too much at stake, and the penalties for making the wrong decisions are steep.
Maxwell decided that a disruptive business model was counterproductive, especially given the extensive expertise and longstanding relationships that benefits consulting firms and insurance carriers already have with business-owners and decision makers across the country. So, instead, Maxwell’s model leverages existing distribution channels to reach more employers through a trusted relationship instead of selling directly to employers.
Leveraging Existing Experience and Relationships
The selling and service environment has changed drastically for benefits consultants over the past few years. The ACA introduced new regulations to navigate, commissions from their sales exponentially decreased, and new competition from technology-forward companies forced them to rethink the way they run their business, service their clients, and survive in a highly competitive market.
Rather than displacing and disrupting this entity that provides so much value to so many small businesses that would have nowhere to turn otherwise, Maxwell saw an opportunity to help them evolve. Solving the existing problems and cumbersome processes for the gatekeepers to the insurance experience for most American families (benefits consultants) meant opening up a massive opportunity to do a lot of good for a lot of people, quickly.
Maxwell focuses helping benefits advisors re-frame their value proposition, build sustainable, repeatable strategies processes that can be implemented quickly, and empower their clients with technology to focus on what matters and automate what doesn’t. Most importantly, Maxwell focuses on making sure that employees understand the products they’re buying, and how to use them, and appreciate the investment their company has made to ensure that they’re healthy and happy
In order to help benefits consulting firms not only survive in a highly competitive market, but thrive, Maxwell recognized that they needed to completely revamp the way they go out to market. Benefits advisors must move beyond selling experience, compliance, and insurance policies in their messaging, that just isn’t differentiating. Maxwell provides an opportunity for brokers to lead with technology, co-branding both the platform as well as sales and marketing assets that reframed value propositions not only for the agency itself, but for the products and services they delivered.
Marketplace
Maxwell believes that small businesses deserve access to big benefits, but realized that Brokers needed to find some efficiencies in quoting and implementing ancillary plans and other services in order to make that sustainable for brokers. The Maxwell Marketplace is made up of industry-leading ancillary insurance plans and lifestyle products with low or no participation requirements, seamless integrations and competitive rates, so that brokers can easily integrate these offerings into benefit strategies, meaning more robust, stickier benefits strategies for their clients, and diversified revenue opportunities for them.
When benefits advisors win, so do American families
For Maxwell Health, transforming healthcare experiences for real people starts with transforming the way the gatekeepers to that experience - benefits advisors and HR teams - conceptualize and deliver benefits strategies. While the primary goal is to arm benefits advisors with the strategies and tools to win new business and scale their businesses effectively, Maxwell also helps benefits advisors with client retention and satisfaction, by continuously building and iterating on tools to empower HR teams to automate complicated workflows and offer best-in-class benefits to their employees, regardless of the size of their company. For employees, Maxwell helps make benefits decisions easy, both during enrollment and throughout the year.
Maxwell Health believes that when benefit advisors win, so do their clients and the families that they serve and protect.