Now that Open Enrollment and ACA seasons are behind us, I wanted to provide key updates to our partners and brokers and discuss our 2025 priorities. As we approach the two-year anniversary of the Ease acquisition, our teams have been working hard to build parity between Ease and Employee Navigator. In 2024, our development team completed over 1,800 development items, the vast majority of which were related to Ease parity. Our commitment to providing the most scalable and robust benefits administration product in the market for brokers and partners remains stronger than ever. As we head into 2025, I’d like to share updates on Employee Navigator, highlight upcoming software enhancements, and provide further details on the Ease migration to ensure our customers have a clear understanding of our priorities.
Business Updates:
- Open Enrollment Success: This year’s Open Enrollment period went smoothly with no system issues. Daily logins consistently exceeded 100,000 for employees, and for the first time, Employee Navigator saw over 100,000 unique HR user logins in December.
- ACA Growth: ACA volume increased by 15% this year, surpassing 2.5 million forms as of February 28th 2025.
- Expanding our Marketplace: Our commitment to building an agnostic marketplace remains strong, with the goal of delivering Fortune 500-level benefits to businesses of all sizes. In 2024, we added 45 new marketplace partners, and we anticipate adding 50+ in 2025. Additionally, our integration with UKG’s Ready Payroll will be available for bureaus to license starting in April. Our pipeline for 2025 is excellent as brokers continue to tell partners they won’t sell their product unless it’s integrated with Employee Navigator.
- AI Enhancements: Beta testing is underway for our new AI Support Assistant on Employee Navigator. Unlike traditional models, every AI-generated response is audited by our team, and source materials are continuously refined to improve accuracy and provide quality responses. We have some exciting AI-driven initiatives planned for 2025.
- Financial Strength: Employee Navigator is well positioned financially for 2025. We remain profitable and continue to invest in both personnel and software, ensuring long-term stability and innovation for our broker and carrier partners.
Ease Migration and Parity Updates
- Ease Migration & Parity Progress: Brokers with eligible groups on Ease can start migrating those groups to Employee Navigator today. You can see which groups are eligible by going into Ease > Employee Navigator Migration > Readiness= Ready. Core development work on major enhancements within Employee Navigator for Ease migration and feature parity are largely complete. Customers can expect a significant number of major software releases between now and June 30.
- Feature Parity & Migration Progress: At a recent trade show, a broker jokingly questioned whether Employee Navigator would ever incorporate key Ease features and whether Ease would ultimately be sunset. The answer to both is a firm “Yes”. Our priority remains ensuring brokers can trust us when it comes to quality software. Some Ease features, such as Forms, have required significant infrastructure changes within Employee Navigator. The most time-intensive project was developing the migration tool to transfer data between the two systems. Most of the features have been added to Employee Navigator, and our team’s focus is on transferring the data to minimize the work brokers need to complete when migrating their clients.
- Sunsetting the Ease Platform: Employee Navigator still plans to sunset the Ease platform; however, development projects supporting parity and migration have taken longer than planned. The initial target was to have all groups migrated by December 31, 2025, but we will likely not meet this goal. Our recommendation for Ease brokers is to continue adding new groups to Ease through June 2025 if you feel Ease is the best system for a client. We will provide further updates on timeframes for moving all companies off Ease in July as no official date has been set for sunsetting Ease. As a part of the eventual transition to Employee Navigator brokers should expect that new groups will no longer be able to be built on Ease sometime in the 2nd half of 2025. This will occur only after all key Ease features are available in Employee Navigator including forms and improved support for GA’s. I want to reiterate that our goal has always been to minimize disruption for brokers and their customers. We will ensure brokers have ample time to migrate customers to Employee Navigator.
- Migration Tool Performance: Our team has made significant progress on the migration tool and is on the verge of significantly expanding the range of supported plans. Approximately 30 brokers have successfully used the migration tool, which takes around five minutes per company. Notably, one broker has migrated 66 companies without any support from Employee Navigator.
- Feature Completion Status: As of February 2025, over 70% of the features identified for parity have been released in Employee Navigator.
- Training of Ease Users: Ease brokers should expect more details regarding broker and HR training services we will provide to brokers that aren’t familiar with Employee Navigator. We recognize some brokers are apprehensive about learning a new system and we will continue to invest in training services to get all brokers up to speed. Our training team has begun working on updates to our training program including a comprehensive series of short videos detailing each step needed to build, activate enrollment, support eligibility maintenance and renew. In addition to the videos, our team is developing a Learning Management System (LMS) resource where brokers can understand the rationale behind the features. We also plan to conduct 2 to 3 in-person training classes across the U.S.
Upcoming Software Enhancements
- Forms: Support for Medical, Dental, and Vision forms will be released in the second quarter. Employee Navigator’s extensive list of Ancillary, COBRA, and FSA integrations, along with the growing number of Medical, Dental and Vision integrations, eliminates the need for paper forms for these benefits. Work on the ‘new hire forms’ is complete, and we are currently finalizing the ‘change forms’ along with the software brokers need to support their operations.
- Support Partners Invitations: A significant portion of this work has been completed, enabling brokers to invite their Support Partners (GAs, builders, enrollers, etc.) into their Employee Navigator license. Feedback from Beta users has been positive. Currently, two gaps remain in development: the aggregated partner wall and aggregated reporting. Support Partners can start licensing with Employee Navigator once the aggregated wall is complete, which is expected in early Q2. This is one of our top priorities because we understand brokers rely on these partners to assist with their technology investments. We are committed to ensuring brokers can easily work with any of their partners on Employee Navigator for case builds, eligibility management, and other broker services.
- GA Rate Library: Ease supported eight custom ACA rate libraries managed by General Agents. This will be available in Employee Navigator in Q2. As a reminder, Ideon’s ACA rate library is currently available in Employee Navigator at no charge.
- Agency Management System (AMS) Integrations: Infrastructure to host APIs to support AMS and enhanced quoting integrations is complete. We are finalizing testing with a few select partners, with a general release expected mid-Q2. AMS providers interested in integrating should begin the contracting process now.
- Syncing of Classes for Payroll Integration: Beta testing for syncing “Employee Navigator classes” with payroll classes as part of payroll integrations is progressing well. We expect the general release with ADP to occur within the next two months. Following this, other payroll systems will have the opportunity to upgrade their connections.
- Broker Licensing Fees: In January, we completed re-contracting for all carriers integrated with Ease and Employee Navigator and are now focusing on broker re-contracting. Our goal is to keep the broker fees affordable. Currently, our lowest-cost option starts at $630 per month per agency. The updated pricing will provide more affordable options for smaller brokers, while also offering flexibility to accommodate growth as brokers add more groups to Employee Navigator. Legacy Employee Navigator users will see an increase for the first time in almost ten years as we transition to a per user pricing model, where each broker user pays a monthly fee per user in Employee Navigator. This change is slated to take effect with renewals starting on July 1st. Employee Navigator has already begun transitioning most national brokers to this new per-user model. Brokers with many users will see a greater increase, while brokers with fewer users will experience smaller increases. Brokers will not be charged for 3rd party users (GA’s builders, carriers, etc.) that help them manage Employee Navigator. The new pricing will continue to have different fees for standard and premier users. Most Ease brokers will see a minimal impact, with some experiencing a decrease in costs. Our long-term goal is to continue providing affordable products to brokers, brokers should not expect significant fee increases from Employee Navigator.
- Agency Change Request Policy: It is a common occurrence for companies to change brokerages whether it results from the sale of an agency or a BOR change requested by a company. Historically, the new broker had to rebuild companies on their license because of a system limitation which prevented companies from being moved from one broker to another. There has also been some reluctance by a small percentage of brokers to give up companies to other brokers. As a result, companies have dealt with the loss of historical data including enrollment, demographic, documents, records of completed employee tasks and other HRIS data. This loss of data increases a company’s liability when they lose their digital paper trail. Employee Navigator is an HRIS system that employers rely on to manage their day-to-day responsibilities. Additionally, APIs continue to reduce the amount of time it take to build a company from days to hours. As such, when a broker refuses to transfer a company’s historical data, it not only casts a negative light on the incumbent broker, but it is also a disservice to HR, and it damages Employee Navigator’s reputation. At the end of the day, it’s not Employee Navigator or an insurance broker’s data; it’s the employer’s data. If the incumbent broker declines to transfer the case via the self-service tool, Employee Navigator will move the group upon written request. The only exception to this policy is if the incumbent brokerage has a prior written agreement in place with the company which explicitly states that all data is owned by the licensee and/or brokerage and the company’s data cannot be obtained by the employer if the relationship between those parties is terminated. Brokers who maliciously change data may be subject to non-renewal by Employee Navigator. Our industry is fluid and the pendulum swings both ways so remember this policy will be applied when your firm wins a BOR too.
Additional Software Updates
Recently completed
- Enhanced the ability for companies to be moved from one broker to another due to BOR changes or administrative changes.
- Added support for hearing plans.
- Partner-invited Enrollers now have access to Custom Fields for assisting employees with enrollment.
- A new setting is available that allows users with the Team Admin permission to add and manage other users, with the same location.
- Minor Life Event fixes following our major 2024 software release.
Upcoming change
- Enhancements to provide details on the delivery of emails: Note this may require an update to your email whitelisting, so be sure to read the recent release notes.
Final Thoughts
Finally, we are nearing completion of the business and software enhancements necessary to support the migration from Ease to Employee Navigator. Your feedback has been invaluable through this process. Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions, comments or suggestions. This is your software, and we work for you.
George Reese
CEO
