Master the Art of Lifecycle Management

Hi, everyone, and welcome. We are so glad you can join us today for this timely webinar on how Patra support can help you not only survive, but truly thrive through the busy season and beyond.

If you’re anything like Gwen and me, you probably noticed that q four seems to arrive earlier and earlier every year. And let’s be honest, when we say “Q4,” we really mean July through February. It’s no longer just a season. It is a marathon.

So coming from the agency side myself, I vividly remember those sweet spring months, the brief window when we could catch our breath, reset, and gear up for the next round, which is now coming.

Today, we’re going to talk about how Patra solutions can extend your capacity, ease the operational burden, and free your team up to focus on what matters most, delivering for your clients and growing your business.

So let’s dive in. And as always, our team will be monitoring the chat, so feel free to drop your questions in along the way.

So for those who do not know me, I’m the vice president of employee benefits here at Patra, and I have the privilege of working closely with our partners to develop innovative strategies that bring greater efficiency and scalability to their internal workflows.

I oversee all aspects of our employee benefits operations post sale, including both our US and international teams.

Over the past ten years at Patra, I’ve been focused on identifying and implementing new solutions that make a real impact for our clients.

Before joining Patra, I spent several years in HR and payroll and later transitioned into the broker world.

That experience has been invaluable, and it gives me a unique perspective when collaborating with our partners because I’ve lived the challenges we’re now solving together.

I’m truly excited to spend this time with you today, but I wouldn’t be able to fully capture the value we offer without my colleague and friend, Gwen Jacob. Gwen, would you mind sharing a little bit about your background?

Sure thing.

I’m Gwen Jacob, your go to employee benefit sales solution architect here at Patra.

I bring about two decades of hands on experience from the agency side, and I’ve covered everything from marketing and open enrollment to compliance and even sales. So I really have been in your shoes, and I’ve experienced the industry challenges and understand what it takes to run a successful benefits operation.

With a degree in insurance and risk management, a life and health producer license, and a senior HR certification, I like to use my industry experience to help our clients optimize, scale, and succeed through those Patra solutions that really can make a difference.

I really am excited to have the opportunity to show you how Patra can support your team, so let’s get started.

We’ll start with a quick look at our agenda so you know what to expect. And as mentioned, Jessica Caudle and I are your hosts for today’s session. We’ll be guiding the conversation and speaking from the experience that we bring to the table.

Next, we’ll give you a brief overview of Patra, who we are, and how we partner with organizations like yours to drive efficiency and scale.

We’ll dive into key trends that are shaping the 2025 benefits market, what’s changing, what’s emerging, and what to watch out for.

And following that, we’ll highlight some critical operational trends that organizations are today experiencing today, things that are impacting how the work gets done.

We’ll walk through how Patra simplifies the employee benefits life cycle, making it easier for your team and your clients every step of the way. And finally, we’ll open it up to question and answers, if anything that you may have, and we’d love to hear your insight.

So I think it’s important to start with a snapshot of Petra to illustrate who we are and emphasize our experience, longevity, and stability.

We are an insurance outsourcing provider dedicated solely to the insurance industry. We partner with insurance organizations across the US to provide varying levels of back office and account management support with the intent to help our clients mitigate risk, gain efficiencies, and capacity within their account management teams and provide infrastructure for scalable growth.

We will dig in into how we do that in just a moment.

But a couple of just general, facts. Patra is headquartered in El Dorado Hills, California. We launched in 2005 as a fully remote company, work from home before it was cool, if you will.

We were initially designed to provide print and mail services for agencies’ certificates of insurance.

That quickly led to Patra taking over the STIR issuance process as a whole. And over the last twenty years, we have continuously evolved and broadened our scope of services to support facets of the insurance, P&C, and EB ecosystems beyond brokers to include GAs, TPAs, and carriers.

We now have over six thousand employees in the US, Canada, Philippines, and India.

Two years ago, we took on private equity, and what that is allowing us to do now is reinvest in our business to best support you.

The services we offer across all Patra solutions are built to support the entire policy life cycle of each business unit within your organization, from P&C and EB to accounting and even corporate operations.

At Patra, we really do aim to help insurance organizations improve their margins, mitigate risks, and offer infrastructure for scale to accelerate your growth.

We do that by structuring our services in a way that provides a true end to end solution for our clients, Whether it’s taking on your back office insurance processing tasks, providing tools to increase your internal efficiencies, augmenting your operations with a virtual assistant, or providing full service licensed account management, Our solutions enable your teams to operate at the highest level of their job description.

So what are we hearing from the market?

Right now, everyone is exploring how to leverage technology and AI to drive greater efficiency across their organization.

At Patra, we’re making significant investments in AI development, particularly in the p and c space. While we recognize the need is just as strong in employee benefits, our approach there is slightly different.

We’re closely observing how AI is evolving and choosing to focus our energy on building strategic partnerships that enhance the human side of the work. Because no matter how powerful the technology becomes, we know there’s always going to be a need for humans behind it. To support this, we’ve been developing system specific standardized operating procedures excuse me, procedures designed to be one size fits most.

This allows our clients to seamlessly integrate both their technology and our people into their work flows. We’re also seeing continued momentum and m and a activity across the employee benefit space, especially over the past five years. And while that brings exciting growth, it can also create operational chaos.

Different teams using different processes, platforms, and standards, and that’s where we come in. Our team consults with you to build a program plan and standard operating procedure that can be adopted across all locations, improving efficiency, ensuring clear reporting, and streamlining operations without pulling your internal teams away from their priorities.

We also support data migrations to make that trans transition even smoother.

And, of course, we can’t ignore the elephant in the room. Insurance is expensive. With renewals coming in higher than ever, employers are getting creative to contain costs.

Many of those solutions shift more administrative work to the broker or general agency, adding pressure to already stretched teams. That’s where Patra becomes a game changer. We provide an affordable, scalable solution to take on those administrative burdens, keeping your cost down without compromising on service and quality.

We believe that employee benefits shouldn’t feel overwhelming.

It should be simplified.

We know this work isn’t limited to a single season. It’s a continuous year round cycle that demands consistency, accuracy, and adaptability.

That’s why Patra offers scalable support designed to grow with your organization.

Whether it’s open enrollment or midyear updates, our solutions help you reduce operational strain, improve your bottom line, and build a stronger, more resilient business, not just in your peak season, but all year long.

Let’s spend some time talking about some more specific pain points you may be experiencing, and I’m gonna ask Gwen to expand on how we can help.

As your organization grows, whether through organic growth, acquisition, or expanding services, your back office must scale with it. But scaling isn’t just about adding people. It’s about having the infrastructure to handle increased workload without sacrificing quality, speed, or client satisfaction. Many organizations find themselves bottlenecked, relying on outdated systems or manual processes that can’t keep pace with demand.

And how does Patra help? We bring scalable solutions through a combination of human capital and tech enabled services. Whether you need to support fifty groups or five hundred, we can flex with your needs.

During peak seasons, especially q four, many agencies experience blackout periods where internal capacity is maxed out. Teams are focused solely on renewals, leaving no bandwidth for new business, cross selling, or even client support. This isn’t just stressful. It’s also a missed revenue opportunity.

And how can Patra help? We provide year round support so your team doesn’t have to hit pause on growth or service during busy seasons. Our team picks up that administrative load, allowing your team to stay focused on what matters most.

When things get busy, quality can suffer. With tight timelines, amounting workloads, mistakes slip through, whether it’s eligibility errors, missing documents, or outdated plan designs. Unfortunately, these errors don’t just impact internal efficiency. They affect your client’s trust and could result in E and O exposure.

How does Patra help? Our processes include built in QA checkpoints and experienced teams that review work for accuracy.

The employee benefits industry is demanding, and burnout is real. High turnover, especially during or after peak season, can leave you understaffed and scrambling. Even when you hire a replacement, the training curve is steep and business continuity suffers.

We provide dedicated trained teams that integrate into your operations. That consistency reduces your dependency on internal staffing levels and helps maintain business continuity even during times of change.

In many organizations, especially those growing through m and a, there’s a lack of standardized process across teams, offices, or regions. This creates inefficiencies, confusion, and makes it nearly impossible to track performance or scale operations effectively.

Patra works with you to develop and implement standard operating procedures across your organization.

This really does help to create uniformity. It improves reporting, and it ensures that everyone is marching to the same feet.

Growth is a top priority, but it’s hard to focus on new business when you’re bogged down in the day to day. Without the capacity to manage existing business efficiently, growth can start to feel like a burden instead of a goal.

And how does Patra help? We absorb the heavy administrative tasks that your producers, account managers, and leadership can focus on those growth strategy, client relationships, and new opportunities.

The market is crowded, and standing out means offering more than just good customer service. Clients want fast responses, digital experiences, and proactive support. If your back office isn’t enabling that, you risk falling behind competitors who can.

And how does Patra help? By improving your speed, accuracy, and client facing responsiveness, we help you raise your service gain, giving you a competitive edge in a saturated market.

So let’s talk about what we call the easy road through the e b life cycle.

Patra breaks down the e b life cycle into five phases, and we offer customized layers of support for each one. However, for today’s discussion, we’ll highlight a few key services that are trending and have proven to greatly relieve our partners from the pain points that we’ve illustrated.

Let’s start with the renewal phase.

This is really where the foundation is laid for the upcoming plan year. It involves gathering accurate plan data, preparing detailed RFPs for the carrier market, and quoting plan options based on that data.

This is typically followed by spreadsheeting plan options and benchmarking to compare the current plan against industry standards.

The renewal phase is wrapped up by presenting plan options to employers for decision making, and it really is a critical time that sets the tone for the rest of the life cycle.

I wanna highlight spreadsheeting here. We know that spreadsheeting can be a major drain on your operations.

Trends show our partner benefit Our partners benefit from Patra through increased quoting volume capacity, consistent formatting, and faster turnaround time. Bring up your internal teams to focus on client strategy rather than administrative tasks.

As competition tightens and client expectations rise, using Patra’s spreadsheeting is becoming a key lever for efficiency and growth.

Patra has the capacity to handle the entire spreadsheeting process from scrubbing quotes and standardizing the data to building clean and accurate plan comparisons that are ready to present.

Patra produces high quality work delivered quickly and reliably with full customization to match your brand and format.

We also provide quality control and error checking for peace of mind.

The result is that it saves you hours of time per client per renewal.

It also eliminates spreadsheet errors and rework so you’re able to scale your capacity without adding headcount, and you’re also able to deliver a polished professional spreadsheet that your clients can trust. Not too bad.

Next, we have open enrollment.

We understand how demanding open enrollment can be for our partners. Tight deadlines, increased volume, and constant pressure to deliver a flawless experience for our client.

That’s where we come in. Patra can act as an extension of your team, providing scalable back office support specifically built for your organization.

Whether it’s building or renewing cases in your benefits administration system or processing elections, we follow your workflows, your systems, and your standards just like your internal team would.

Focusing on case bill.

Benefits administration case bill trends continue to shift towards greater efficiency, standardization, and faster deployment timeline, driven largely by increasing employer demand for seamless open enrollment and ongoing benefits administration.

Patra can be your partner to handle complex case builds, including carrier configuration, plan mapping, eligibility rules, and EDI setup.

Our partnership allows you to scale during peak seasons without compromising accuracy or speed.

Patra brings deep platform expertise across multiple systems. For example, Eaze, employee navigator, and b swift, as we are a vendor as we are vendor agnostic.

Patra also provides rigorous quality assurance and audit procedures along with a US based service associate that acts as your day to day contact for each build that is requested.

Moving to benefit guide.

Agencies are increasingly relying on Patra as a partner to create benefit guides, recognizing the efficiency, consistency, and scalability that we provide.

As guide production becomes more complex with customized branding and frequent regulatory updates, Patra helps to streamline the process through standardized templates, automated workflows, and quick turnaround times.

Partnering with Patra on this task ensures accuracy, speed, and consistency, especially during peak seasons like open enrollment.

Shifting this task will allow your internal team to focus more on strategy and client engagement rather than getting bogged down in production logistics.

And did I mention that Patra has a print shop?

For employers that are used to having paper guides in hand, we’re happy to print and deliver those high quality guides directly to their office on your behalf.

Next is the post renewal process.

The post renewal process for employee benefits really focuses on ensuring accuracy, compliance, and preparedness for the year ahead.

This phase begins with policy checking where carriers carrier issued policies that are reviewed against sold proposals or AMS systems to confirm coverage accuracy and to ensure that no discrepancies exist.

It also encompasses plan document retrieval, which involves the collection of SPDs and SDCs.

Enrollment audits are also conducted to reconcile enrollment between carrier systems, benefit administration platforms, and even payroll vendors, identifying any errors that we may excuse me, that may have occurred during the renewal and open enrollment period.

Lastly, wrap documents and ACA reporting are also processed for benefits compliance and employee distribution.

I’d like to point out that enrollment audit trends in the employee benefit space are shifting towards more frequent and proactive reviews with many agencies conducting audits quarterly and ahead of open enrollment to ensure election accuracy.

A growing focus is also being placed on dependent eligibility verification as employers aim to control costs and reduce compliance risk.

Integration with benefits administration systems is streamlining the process, allowing for faster identification of discrepancies between enrollment platforms and carrier records.

However, agencies are increasingly reaching out to Patra to handle manual and v lookup audits, leveraging our ability to replicate internal workflows while providing detailed reporting and actionable insights.

As compliance requirements tighten, enrollment audits have become a critical tool for maintaining data integrity and protecting both employers and employees. Ongoing management of employee benefits ensures compliance, accuracy, and continuity throughout the plan year. This includes a timely distribution of annual legal notices such as CHIP, COBRA, and Medicare part d, as well as the delivery of claims experience reports to support confirmation excuse me, to support informed plan evaluations and strategic planning.

Agencies must also manage enrollment confirmations to verify that employee elections are processed correctly while maintaining accurate eligibility through regular audits and updates.

Additionally, the ongoing submission of broker of record changes and termination processing helps keep carrier records aligned with employer and employee statuses, reducing service disruptions and maintaining plan integrity year round.

And the biggest time saver of them all goes to eligibility.

Employee benefits eligibility processing has increased increasingly shift towards automation and outsourcing as agencies strive for great accuracy, compliance, and efficiency.

A growing trend in the use of outsourcing partners like Patra is to handle time sensitive elections like new hire enrollments, qualifying life event, and termination.

By leveraging Patra in this space, you’re able to reduce manual errors, ensure consistent eligibility tracking across barrier various carrier systems, and free up internal teams to focus on strategic client engagement.

This approach also supports scalability, especially if you’re managing multiple employer groups or those experiencing rapid growth or acquisition activity.

We offer a hundred percent quality assurance on all requests processed.

As well, we make account managers feel at ease about taking the sensitive task off of their plate.

Even better, we take on the E and O, so if there is an error, we will stand behind our work.

Lastly, we land on administration.

Employee benefits administration encompasses a range of essential functions that support the operational backbone of an agency.

This includes regularly updating policies within the agency management system to ensure that all clients and carrier data is current and accurate.

Commission posting is another critical task involving the reconciliation and entry of carrier commission statements to maintain financial accuracy and ensure timely compensation.

Additionally, AMS system conversions play a vital role during mergers, acquisitions, or platform upgrades, requiring careful data mapping, cleansing, and migration to preserve historical records and maintain continuity.

These administrative functions collectively enhance efficiency, compliance, and client service across the agency.

Agencies are increasingly turning to Patra to manage AMS updates due to growing demands for data accuracy, efficiency, and scalability.

Trends show a shift towards standardized data entry protocols, especially for agencies involved in mergers and acquisitions where aligning formats across multiple offices is critical.

Patra is helping agencies stay on top of carrier changes by completing timely policy updates, processing commission entries, and converting legacy data into updated formats with consistency.

This outsourcing not only reduces internal workloads, but it also ensures that the AMS is audit ready and supports cleaner reporting and better decision making across the organization.

After all, the reporting that is generated from an AMS system is only as good as the data within it.

Thank you, Gwen. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what I like to call our a la carte on demand solutions, but maybe you’re struggling to make a specific book profitable. And we’ve got a solution for that as well. Patra Select is a comprehensive solution designed to help our agency efficiently manage and grow your small business accounts.

It seamlessly integrates with your existing operations by combining Patra’s proven six, excuse me, proven service delivery model with your agency’s unique approach. This managed service model offers flexible options for your small groups. So how do we do it? We’ll collaborate closely with you to identify a book of business suitable for transition to Patra for ongoing management.

A commission split will be assessed, guaranteeing you consistent profit while reducing the administrative burden on you and your team.

We’ll recruit and train the dedicated account manager specifically for this block of business that will be supported by our experienced offshore team. Behind the scenes, this team will complete tasks like processing eligibility, spreading plan design, creating annual legal notices, updating agency management systems, and the list goes on. Because your account managers have a team supporting them, they can operate at a higher capacity than traditional account managers while still cultivating strong personal relationships with each employer group.

Additionally, our account managers are incentivized to round out accounts and increase their book, allowing for additional revenue flow.

The offshore support remains invisible. The BOR remains with you. So from the group’s perspective, it’s a simple account manager change.

Alright. We’ve shared a lot of information with you, and we could probably do an all day seminar on all the ways we can support you. But we must leave time for q and a. So with that, I’ll open up the floor and ask if Tammy would share any questions we have received in the chat.

So one just came in. What systems do you work with? Gwen, you want me to take a swing at this and you can add to it? Perfect.

K. So we are system agnostic. Our goal is to be an extension of your, organization. So whatever systems you work in, we work in.

I can say based on the, our, current book, we are working in many, many systems and have a lot of experience, so it’s a great starting point when we go into implementation.

But, again, we’re operating, as an extension of you. So what you’re in, we’re in. Anything to add to that, Gwen?

I do a lot of discovery calls with prospects and clients, and I’ll tell you that I’m stumped whenever someone brings up a system that we maybe haven’t used before.

Because of our book of business, we have the opportunity to work in every different system, and we do have experience with most. So, yeah, I just wanna echo what you said. We’re vendor agnostic.

You know, if we just because we haven’t used the system doesn’t mean that we can’t.

We’re absolutely quick learners.

That’s great. Another question that came in is talking about implementation. What does that look like?

So once a contract is signed with Patra, a typical implementation on the employee benefit side takes anywhere from six to eight weeks. So, whenever you’re looking to sign up with us, you’d wanna make sure that you would reach out to us at least a hundred and twenty days in advance of what you would expect to be your go live date.

That six to eight week period, although we’re saying it’s implementation, it’s very light, on the side of our partners. So we typically say the bandwidth for any subject matter expert that would work on an implementation with us would be up to three hours per week. But we really like to take the heavy lift off of our partners.

We do have a lot of best practices that we look to implement.

And, of course, if you’re open to those, we will make recommendations on things that we can do to streamline your process and make it more efficient.

From an implementation standpoint in general, it typically involves you guys kind of letting us know what your process is. We’re creating standard operating procedures around those.

Our team typically takes about two weeks to train, on the standard operating procedures. And once you feel comfortable, we’ll pull the trigger and go live. When we say go live, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re taking all of the work a hundred percent unless you’d like for us to, but we are happy to do a ramp, of volume as well.

That’s great. And I would say, you know, we’ve talked a lot about acquisitions and the need for just overall standardization.

So, you know, we we’re kind of talking about individual services, lot of cases, we’re doing more of a holistic view of how we can really make a large impact.

And that may involve putting together a program plan with very you know, several services and where we do a ramp. And we work with you to really identify your availability and those subject matter experts that you have internally and work together to, develop a rollout plan for, for, you know, a a larger takeover if if that’s where the need is as well. So we love having these, collaborative discussions with you where we can come up with a customized approach to be able to support your business and what works for you.

Great point, Jess. Yeah. Thank you.

So what would you recommend, if we’re needing to migrate from Eaze over to employee navigator? How can Patra help me in that process?

Would you like me to take that one, Quinn, or are you gonna Sure. Okay.

So, yeah, this is a hot topic right now. It seems, you know, with the acquisition of Eaze, there is a lot of movement and, and some tight deadlines with that as well as sunset dates are coming out.

So if you need support with that, we do have, standard operating procedures, that have best employee navigator best practices embedded within them. So it’s something that we can get started with fairly quickly. We would go over those standard operating procedures with you and make any tweaks that are maybe customized to your business, and we can take those on. Our tech team, as we call them, who is handling, our case builds and EDI connectivity, is a hybrid approach with our US and Philippines teams.

We have, the ability to scale.

Obviously, there’s gonna be a high volume on the front end if you’re doing a full transfer from ease to employee navigator. So we would work with you on timelines, prioritizing, and so on and so forth and put together a plan that really works well for your business.

I think the key there is really just understanding your volumes, and what the expectations are as far as, like, transferring or migrating the business over to navigator. So just making sure that we’re all on the same page, with what the transition looks like, is really gonna be the key to success there.

And how long does a typical case build take?

As most of the folks on this call know, there is hard to predict because there are so many nuances.

Our standard turnaround time is ten days. We do have rush requests where we can speed that up a little bit.

So it will well, we would determine that on the front end and see what your requirements are internally and, build SLAs to accommodate for that. Of course, the biggest piece of it is really just gathering all the data. So that would be a big piece we would talk about on the front end. Are you sending us all the data? Do you want us to go out and retrieve it? Meaning, going into carrier sites or going into your agency management system or filing system to obtain that information.

If there is follow-up needed, whether it be with the carrier or the group, the account manager, how we wanna handle that. So we would work out all those pieces on the front end.

That ten day turnaround time, kicks in when we have all of the information. So, those are things, that may be specific to your organization.

We would wanna make sure that we, determine solutions for on the front end, and really give, good, timing expectations.

We also have multiple layers of quality assurance when it comes to case bills. So that ten day period includes the multiple layers of quality assurance that we, complete before we launch the site over and return it back to you.

That’s a really good point, and I’m glad you bring that up, Gwen. When we talk about multi quality assurance, our processors are highly trained. And, and many ban been admin systems, big one, again, employee navigator, you know, we’ll use that as an example, highly trained, to do the case builds themselves. Then we have a peer review phase, and then we have a final QA that, occurs on the US side. So like Gwen mentioned, there’s several steps along the way. And, again, we carry the E&O. So there’s constant communication.

But, again, we do all the heavy lifting. Our goal is just to send it to you for validation and it be, you know, a hundred percent ready to go to the group for open enrollment election period.

And you do have ten days if there’s any changes that you need to make. There’s ten days after we release the site to you, that we can go in and make changes before it’s officially turned over.

Okay. I think that wraps it up for all of our Q&A.

Excellent.

Well, Gwen and I truly enjoyed spending our afternoon sharing how Patrick can best support you during q four and beyond, and we’d love to schedule some time with you to discuss a more customized solution for your business. So please reach out to one or both of us, and we’ll be on, and also be on the lookout. We’ll be sending the, webinar recording as well as the slide deck. And thank you again for your time today.

Thank you.