The Convex success story: Building a modern benefits experience for a global workforce

The challenge

Building on a strong offering to improve visibility and access

“We are really fortunate here at Convex to already have some great core employee benefits prior to implementing OneHub. We make sure that we treat all our employees the same across the different countries, ensuring those benefits are comparable.

A couple of the ones I’d probably call out is family private medical cover, for all employees in all locations. We have an annual health screening for employees, no matter their job level – that’s Convex funded. We offer 10 days of backup care, so that’s childcare, elderly care, and last year we launched pet care as part of that as well. We have a lease car scheme, which is really popular, and about 10% of our UK employee base now have a lease car through that scheme. That’s been going about a year and a half, coming on two years now. And we offer a £1,300 wellbeing allowance, or equivalent, in each country that employees can spend throughout the year on their wellbeing. They can do that monthly, or they can take that whole amount and spend it as one lump sum.

However, despite already offering some great benefits, one of the issues we were finding was employees accessing the benefits that we offered – knowing what benefits they had in place, and what core benefits they had that Convex already funded. Things like Group Life Insurance, or Group Income Protection, what pension contributions they have. And for employees that have been here for a while, they would have to either ask or go into their payslips to look at things like that.

So [the main challenge] was accessibility of all benefits we offered… But we also wanted to put a portal in place so we could build, iterate, and continue to offer more to our employees.”

Streamlining admin and data management

“From an admin perspective, every month (prior to going live with OneHub), my HR operations teams were manually providing employee data to our different employee benefits partners; whether that’s for private medical insurance, group life insurance, group income protection, or to Bright Horizons for the care days, or our healthcare assessment partners.

So, lots of different data sets were being cut with different requirements – like how the data was imported, the format it was being sent across in – every single month and being sent to different partners to accommodate new starters, changes in employment, and leavers. At last count, I think we did 21 different cuts of data each month.”

The solution

Centralizing benefits in one platform

“We decided we needed a benefits portal, but we didn’t want it to just be a benefits portal. We already had a discount and cashback site in the UK that employees readily used – we’re looking at launching one hopefully in the US later this year – but we wanted to pull that into the portal as well.

We also wanted to provide a Total Reward Statement (TRS) for all employees in all countries. So, we went to market to have a look at who was out there that could deliver us a portal, a platform, a system, with all of that capability.”

Automating and reducing admin burden

“OneHub has helped reduce the time it took to process data and the risk around it. As we’ve gone through this journey [implementing OneHub], month to month, we have now automated the payroll files from a benefits perspective.

The platform now delivers a payroll file for us in the UK that we can provide straight to our payroll provider. The portal has nearly eliminated the need for [manual data sharing with benefit providers]. There’s one or two instances where those partners aren’t part of the platform from a core benefit perspective that we still do the work manually for, but it’s taken our data cuts from 21 to two.”

Expanding benefits and flexibility

“We wanted the platform launch not just to be able to say, ‘here’s what we already offer, and now you can access it in one place’, but actually deliver more salary sacrifice options, more flexibility and choice to employees. As part of that, we launched a number of new benefits.

A really popular one is travel insurance. We piggybacked on our existing company travel insurance policy and improved it so that employees could use it for personal use.

Through salary sacrifice, employees can now purchase the health screening benefit for their partners. The two benefits of that are they’re getting the corporate rate, and they’re also able to pay it off over 12 months, there’s not that lump sum of say £800 to £1,000 going out their bank account.

Another new salary sacrifice option we added was will writing, and we also introduced critical illness and partner life assurance cover.

The biggest success is our dental cover, which we’ve launched as an employer funded benefit for the employee, with the option that employees can utilize salary sacrifice to add their dependents. That’s gone down really, really well.”

Supporting new joiners from day one

“Convex have a great onboarding tool and we partner with a company called Enborder. We have built a number of different workflows depending on the level people are coming in at, the job role they’re coming in to do, or their notice period. And within that, we’ve been able to position information about Convex and what to expect when you’re starting here.

And more recently, we’ve added in all the new benefits we’ve now launched and information on what employees will have access to from day one – and that’s really important to Convex. Yes, we do have probation periods, but all our benefits are applied from the first day of employment for employees. So, whether that’s the 10 days backup care, the annual health assessment – they will have access to all of those from day one – and they will have the opportunity to learn what all of those benefits are during their onboarding into Convex.”

Results

High engagement at launch

“We launched the benefits platform in the UK only. The TRS was all countries.

In terms of some of the high-level stats in the UK, we had  90% of employees access the portal during the annual enrollment window (we opened the portal up for the first time in December for three weeks so everything would be effective from 1st of January).

We had 60% of our employees submit at least one benefit, with over 330 benefits submitted by our UK employees.

57% of employees have accessed their TRS across all locations.

In the UK, just under 30% of employees are actively using the discount and cashback portal.”

What’s it been like working with Benifex?

“Working with Benifex has been great. Throughout the implementation of the portal, through scoping, through testing, the team have been readily available to come on site. We are predominantly an office-based company, and although Benifex are remote and work from anywhere, we were engaging with people in the team up in Manchester, down in Southampton. We had some of the Benifex team come on site with us during those critical deliveries to support us, to guide us through some of that process, right up to the launch event.

We had an evening at the Convex Arms and a couple of the Benifex team came along to promote the portal, talk through all the new benefits, TRS, and what that will look like in terms of the annual enrollment window.

They also went a bit further and made contact with a number of our existing and new benefit partners and brought some of those along to support the launch event.”

Looking ahead: Scaling and evolving

“So, what’s next? We already had a planned phase two benefits launch, which we’ll do somewhere in Q2 of 2025. The project team are currently building a number of other benefits for us in the platform that we’ll launch in April, May, June time. We’ll then continue to work with Benifex and other external partners to look at what other benefits we can launch as part of our annual enrollment window in December.

Looking ahead, we’d really like to harmonize the platform across all the countries that we’re in. I think we have to be realistic in terms of our employee numbers in some of those countries. But we’ve built the portal in a way that if we can find some employee benefits offerings or salary sacrifice options in some of those countries, in particular in Luxembourg and the US, we will be able to drop those in and have that transactional element of those benefits for our employees in that location.”