Most employers spend more on employee benefits every year. Costs go up. Complexity goes up. But outcomes? They stay flat.

Healthcare, retirement, and HR technology are typically managed in separate silos, by separate teams, with separate vendors and separate goals. That fragmentation is not just inefficient. It is expensive. Conflicting incentives, redundant effort, and missed leverage quietly erode the value of every dollar spent.

The real issue is not that any single piece is broken. It is that the pieces were never designed to work together.

Where the Misalignment Lives

Here is what we see across mid-market employers navigating this challenge:

Healthcare and benefits decisions happen in isolation. Group health insurance plan design, funding strategy, and contribution structures get evaluated without visibility into how they affect retirement participation, employee behavior, or total cost of risk. Leadership ends up reactive instead of intentional, making high-impact decisions without clean data or coordination.

Retirement plans underperform without costing more. Participation stays flat. Savings rates lag. Financial stress shows up in absenteeism, turnover, and productivity loss. But the fixes are often behavioral and structural, not financial. Smart plan design (auto-features, targeted education, and nudges) can move the needle without increasing employer cost.

HR technology creates friction instead of eliminating it. Organizations invest in platforms and tools that promise efficiency, then watch adoption stall. Features exist, but value does not materialize. System sprawl compounds the problem, with data trapped in disconnected platforms that cannot support the decisions leadership needs to make.

The common thread: these are not three separate problems. They are one problem viewed from three angles.

A Session Built to Connect the Dots

On Thursday, March 19th from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. Central Time, we are hosting a live virtual executive briefing designed to address this head-on.

Benefits Optimization: Align Insurance, Retirement, and Technology to Reduce Cost and Complexity brings together three practitioners who each operate in a different part of this system, and who see firsthand where misalignment creates unnecessary cost and friction.

Healthcare and Benefits Optimization

Blake Erickson, DSP Insurance Services

Where employers overspend and why it is rarely visible. How plan design and funding decisions materially impact cost and risk. And critically, where healthcare decisions break down when they are not aligned with HR, finance, and retirement strategy.

Retirement Optimization

Michael Edward Sparrow, CFEd, WealthWave

Improving participation and savings outcomes without increasing employer cost or complexity. Smart plan design, behavior change, and aligning retirement strategy with total rewards and retention.

HRIS Optimization

Nick Munagian, Paylocity

Moving beyond payroll to system-level operational efficiency. Reducing system sprawl, improving adoption and employee experience, and using HR data to support leadership decision-making (without adding more tools).

What You Will Walk Away With

In under an hour, you will leave with:

• A framework for optimizing benefits holistically, not piecemeal
• Clear examples of what actually drives savings and engagement
• Practical ideas you can evaluate immediately, with no vendor pressure

This is not a product pitch. It is a focused conversation about where the leverage actually lives when you stop managing healthcare, retirement, and technology as three separate line items.

We have explored how AI is reshaping benefits strategy and how evolving regulations like mental health parity compliance add complexity to plan management. This session takes the next step: showing how to align the moving parts into a coordinated system.

Who Should Attend

This session is built for the people making or influencing benefits decisions at mid-market organizations:

• HR Leaders managing cost, complexity, and employee expectations
• CFOs seeking predictability, control, and ROI from benefits spend
• CHROs responsible for total rewards and workforce strategy
• Business owners and operations leaders who want benefits to work harder without working them harder

Reserve Your Seat

Date: Thursday, March 19, 2026
Time: 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. Central Time
Format: Live virtual session via Zoom

Register here to reserve your spot.

Questions ahead of the session? Reach out to the DSP team directly.