U.S. Retirement & Benefits Partners
Innovating Benefits Administration for Today’s HR Challenges

The role and importance of comprehensive employee benefits alongside retirement planning has never been more important to keeping and attracting workers, and today’s hybrid environment makes providing these solutions more complex. Fast changing economic conditions and challenging employment landscapes have undeniably limited the ability of HR professionals to engage employees. That’s where U.S. Retirement & Benefits Partners and its unique service offerings can help.

U.S. Retirement & Benefits Partners (USRBP) is one of the nation’s largest independent, national financial services firms specializing in providing top-tier employee benefits and employer-sponsored retirement plans for educational, governmental, corporate, and non-profit employers. Founded by a group of industry experts, USRBP utilizes a strategic approach with clients, offering a single source solution for all their benefits, administration, compliance, and technology needs.

In an interview with Manage HR magazine, Megan Schneider, CEO of U.S. Retirement & Benefits Partners, shares her insights on how the company combines people and technology to deliver best-in-class employee benefits administration solutions to clients.

USRBP’s The BEACON - An Innovative, Customizable BenAdmin Solution for Employers

“At USRBP, we are always focused on embracing innovative technology solutions and building strategic partnerships with some of the nation’s leading benefits, retirement, and compliance firms to offer outstanding products and services to clients. To that end, we have designed a comprehensive benefits administration solution, The BEACON, that through intuitive design and robust functionality, ensures employees understand and receive the full value of their employer-provided benefits.

The BEACON platform was designed to give employers maximum flexibility to customize the enrollment experience to meet the varied needs of a diverse workforce. We designed our benefits administration platform with three available enrollment methods – online self-service portal with chat, face-to-face, and call center options to seamlessly meet all employee needs. We also focus on diversity and inclusion as core to our value which is why we designed our system to be fully bilingual, with the ability to switch to Spanish in a single click, and our call center is staffed with experts who can educate and enroll in dozens of languages.

Communicating important and meaningful benefits information can be challenging and time consuming for HR. The unparalleled communication capabilities in our BEACON platform eliminate that burden with built-in year-round targeted email and text messages. These messages are tailored to an employee’s goals and preferences, so they truly resonate with the employee, and provide the educational benefits information most important to them. There are videos and educational tools incorporated throughout the platform and financial wellness is provided for employee enrichment.

Many employees today are underinsured, so it’s important that they have protection for their families going into the future. Our BEACON BenAdmin platform comes with decisionsupport tools, such as protection portfolios, that are customized to an employer’s specific benefits offering. These protection portfolios help employees make educated selections of their health insurance, life insurance, and critical illness insurance, if applicable, by allowing the employee to compare a variety of scenarios and choose the option that best meets their needs.

Our highly customizable solution enables employers to engage employees in understanding the full value of their benefits and ensures a simplified end-to-end experience.

Simplifying through Single-Source Administration

Aspiring to serve as our clients’ most trusted partner, we always strive to provide the best experience for employers and their employees. This includes one system through which employees can elect their core benefits as well as important voluntary benefits. The employer’s voluntary benefit options are built into The BEACON, simplifying administration, and allowing employees to make all of their benefit elections in one place.

Bringing enhanced features for employees can make delivering a seamless enrollment experience more complex, so we have worked hard to ensure the implementation process is streamlined for HR. Our Benefits Administration Center of Excellence team handles the implementation process, including exporting and information gathering, case building and testing, communications, open enrollment, launch, and post-enrollment wrap-up. We always understand clients’ requirements first to ensure the system and the enrollment process best suit them.

Managing a paper-based enrollment can be overwhelming, time-consuming, and complex. We have a client that was doing just that, and it was a strain on their HR department. We introduced them to a truly digital experience using our benefits administration platform that seamlessly integrated with their core systems. Plus, our call center supported their employee enrollments, helping them make informed benefit elections. Aside from the HR representative’s job being made easier, they were thrilled with the simplicity of the process and all the added reporting, communication, and education features available to them and their employees.

As we continuously enhance our technology services and resources across our teams, we look to provide even more innovative and expanded solutions to clients in the coming years.”