In a Weavr survey of 250 UK benefits managers, 50% said they are on the lookout for new software in the next year.
Employee benefits systems typically must satisfy two very different sets of needs:.
- To offer employees more meaningful choice in the benefits available to them.
- To give employers enough control to stop the system from being abused.
And of course, it has to do all this on a reasonable budget that’s often being squeezed.
But this is putting benefits managers between a rock and a hard place – expectations of employees on one side, the pressures of the organisation on the other. And when the squeeze gets too tight, it sets benefits managers and HR leaders clawing in search of a new platform or tool – one that might be able to do what yesterday’s couldn’t.
So if you’re a product manager of a HR or benefits platform, here’s what you need to know in 2025.
The criteria you may already be aware of
There are more than a few reasons why benefits managers are seeking out new technology, so it’ll help to put them into two different buckets:
- Chronic needs that have built up over time and finally bubbled over.
- Acute needs that have flared in response to a new situation or development.
Chronic needs
New ways to offer competitive value. Benefits and perks are supposed to be one of a company’s most potent tools when it comes to hiring and retaining talent.
Innovative ways to improve engagement and sentiment. After gathering employee feedback, if benefits managers find out their benefits just aren’t getting used, they’ll look for a platform that offers more than marginal differences. 51% told us they want the addition of innovative or unique perks or rewards in a benefits package
Tool consolidation. Nobody loves when a software ecosystem gets too bloated. It might be that benefits managers are tired of swapping between different platforms to manage different services, or that IT or HR management are asking why they need 10 different apps to manage everyone’s benefits. So begins the search for something more streamlined…
Acute needs
Perks for multiple regions. If the company is expanding into a new country – or maybe they’ve taken on a bunch of new remote, global workers – they might find the benefits they have in their home country don’t fit for everyone, and need a new system that supports their new region as well.
New benefits themes. Over time, the company’s benefits priorities have changed. There might be a push from leadership to include more wellness and green initiative perks, or maybe they need better fertility and childcare benefits to keep in line with legislation.
Reasonable cost. Under financial pressure, the benefits manager might have to shrink down the company’s benefits offering. Now, they no longer need a system that offers expensive private healthcare, for example, and they’re in the market for one that can do a smaller-scale dental and online GP service instead.
The overarching criteria benefits managers need to hit most
In our survey of benefits managers, we found three key elements are the desire of almost every benefits manager:
- Choice
- Control
- Convenience
They want to give more relevant choice to employees – so they can offer options for people in different regions and make benefits seem like they’re worth redeeming.
On the other side of the equation, they want to make sure that the company still has logical control over how benefits allowances are spent by employees.
And for the benefits managers themselves, they want a system that’s convenient and even delightful to oversee and add to. They will be the main or maybe sole administrators of the platform, and they’ll need to know they can keep innovating with the toolset in years to come.
To do all this, benefits managers are aware they need a new mechanism for benefits.
60% say they would value employee spend cards. These are cards that make designated company funds spendable – on themed allowances – to employees holding a physical card.
The new criteria benefits managers are looking for:
Spend cards: The power to give employees a physical or virtual card (ideally company-branded) they can use with the same ease as a personal card. The difference is it’s funded via company benefits allowances, not coming out of employees’ private pockets.
Allotted virtual budgets per employee: A convenient way to create new themes, such as wellness, learning, or leisure, for which benefits managers can assign employees allowances.
Spend controls: Clear and simple spending controls for the cards – such as limiting a fitness and wellbeing card to merchants who sell sports equipment or offer fitness classes. Since no set of rules is once-and-done, benefits managers also need a way to review real-world spend patterns and add or refine spend controls any time they like.
So how can SaaS platforms meet this new criteria?
In the past, offering spend cards with custom spend rules would have required a benefits or HR platform to reinvent themselves as a fintech – searching for dozens of different tech and banking partners, integrating complex payment infrastructure and building an expert in-house compliance team.
But with the embedded finance solution from Weavr, they can instead become embedders and use a ready-made, compliant solution that just works.
HR and benefits platforms can plug a preassembled tech stack straight into their existing software and start offering controlled spend cards to employers and their benefits managers. They can then toggle spend rules and update allowances easily, and finally give HR and benefits leaders a system that delivers for everyone. Meanwhile, all of the necessary compliance is handled by our team, so embedders don’t have to become red tape experts to get started.
If you want to learn more about how embedded finance can help supercharge benefits and rewards platforms, read about how spendable benefits can unlock employee adoption, or take a look at our research paper on what benefits managers need from their software tools.
