The employee benefits industry is on the edge of a fundamental shift and most brokers aren’t ready for it.
ICHRA, the Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Account, is changing the way employers fund health insurance. Instead of choosing a group plan on behalf of their employees, employers can now give workers a monthly stipend and let them shop for their own coverage in the individual marketplace. It sounds simple. The operational reality for benefits brokers is anything but simple. That’s why ForgeXRM built BenefitsBridge – CRM for Health Insurance Brokers — and why we partnered with Joe Markland.
Joe Markland is the Co-Founder and President of Enrichly HR and one of the most forward-thinking voices in the personalized benefits space. He started in the benefits business in 1986, moved into benefits technology in 2001, and launched Enrichly HR in August 2019 — just two months after the ICHRA executive order was signed. He has been building in this space longer than almost anyone.
Together, Enrichly and ForgeXRM are offering brokers a complete ICHRA system: Enrichly’splatform handles the employee-facing benefits election experience, and BenefitsBridge handles everything on the broker’s side — client management, individual policy tracking, workflow automation, and the data infrastructure brokers need to service individuals at scale. No outsourcing. No throwing work over the wall. The broker stays central to the relationship.
We sat down with Joe to talk about what ICHRA is, why it matters, and what brokers who ignore it stand to lose. His answers are direct, experienced, and worth reading carefully.
What Is ICHRA? A Benefits Broker’s Introduction to Individual Coverage HRAs
Joe Markland: ICHRA stands for the Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Account, and it matters because the healthcare system is broken, and one of the root causes is that we really don’t have true consumer markets. We’re probably the only country in the world where, when people choose insurance, they have someone other than themselves choosing it — in this case, the employer.
Prior to January 2020, the only way to get insurance pre-tax was through your employer. The employer would buy a plan and charge employees, maybe 10, 20, 30, or 40% of the premium, and that amount would be pre-tax. But if an individual were to buy health insurance on their own, it’s post-tax. That’s somewhat counterproductive, because the federal government wants everyone to be insured, yet gives preferential tax treatment depending on how you buy it.
What ICHRA did was make it possible for an employer, rather than purchasing insurance for employees, to give people a monthly stipend. Employees can then buy whatever they want on the individual marketplace. It’s really the first move by the government to create an incentive for consumers to increase participation in the individual marketplace.
Why ICHRA Creates an Operational Challenge for Benefits Brokers
Joe Markland: ICHRA is operationally challenging for brokers because the entire industry has been built around a completely different model, one where the employer sits at the center of every decision, and that model is now changing. The employer making decisions for employees, the employees leaning on the employer for education, the broker providing options to the employer — that’s the ecosystem that’s been in place for decades, and every broker’s internal infrastructure has been built to support it.
The example I always use: if I’m a broker servicing a 200-person firm, and that firm offers one or two plans from a single carrier, I’m servicing the employer — one HR contact, one benefits contact. But with ICHRA, if I have 200 people buying 200 different plans, I now have to service the consumer directly. I have 200 different clients, not just one. That is a huge structural change for the average benefits organization.
Individual Health Plan Guidance: Why It’s Now a Core Broker Responsibility
Joe Markland: Individual plan guidance is now a core broker responsibility because, for the first time, employees are making their own health insurance decisions and those decisions are deeply personal financial ones, not just insurance ones. When an employer chooses a group plan, let’s say it costs $1,000 and they charge the employee $300. The employer pays $700, the employee pays $300 — and that’s that. Now, with ICHRA, the employer gives the employee a $700 stipend and says, “Buy whatever you want.” My 29-year-old daughter doesn’t have to be on the same plan as me. She has different needs.
Now that the employee is in control of the spending, what they buy for health insurance is no longer independent of other financial pressures in their life. If I’m getting $700, I could choose a plan for $800 and only spend $100 out of pocket instead of the $300 I would have spent under the employer’s plan. If I don’t have an emergency fund, if I have college debt, if I have credit card debt at 29% interest — do I choose a lower deductible, or do I buy a higher-deductible plan and pay off my credit card first? It becomes a very personal financial decision versus just an insurance decision.
On top of that, in the individual marketplace employees may have 50 plans to choose from, possibly for the first time in their life. The thought process behind that choice is completely different from picking between one or two employer options. Brokers who want to serve these clients well have to be equipped to guide them through something genuinely new.
How Enrichly Simplifies Access to Qualified Plans and Personalized Benefits
Joe Markland: Enrichly simplifies the ICHRA process by giving employees a clear, guided platform to make their benefits elections and by helping employers and brokers set up the right contribution model from the start. In the group insurance world, the employer generally charges one price for all employees regardless of age. The individual market is age-rated, with rates varying by a factor of 3 to 1 between the youngest and oldest enrollees. We help the employer set up a contribution model that is equitable across all ages, and we build that into our system.
Employees log in, enter their demographics, their own age, plus spouses and kids, see how much money they’re getting, and then we present all the plans available in the individual market so they can pick.
But here’s where it goes beyond just insurance selection. We allow employees, if the employer chooses, to allocate any remaining funds to other things. If I get $700 and find a plan for $600, can I put that extra $100 into a health savings account? Can I use it to buy a wellness app, or put it toward an emergency fund? I believe ICHRA is the catalyst for moving to a truly personalized benefits program, not just a different way to choose health insurance.
ICHRA CRM for Benefits Brokers: How BenefitsBridge Manages Individual Clients at Scale
Joe Markland: BenefitsBridge is essential for brokers in the ICHRA market because it gives them the CRM infrastructure they need to manage hundreds of individual client relationships, something no traditional broker system was built to do. The customer is now 200 individuals, not one employer or benefits department. That’s a fundamentally different data challenge — 200 individuals with 200 different plans, 200 different employer contributions and premiums.
BenefitsBridge has developed all the components a broker needs to service those 200 individuals instead of just the employer. A good example: if you have all that data in the system, BenefitsBridge will know which individuals are about to turn 65. Part of ICHRA allows ICHRA dollars to subsidize Medicare, which means it becomes incumbent on the broker to proactively reach out to that employee and say, “In a few months you’re eligible for Medicare. You can leave your individual plan, and we’ll help you get set up.” That kind of proactive, automated service delivery is only possible when you have the right system underneath it.
Recognizing that the individual is now your customer, and having the tools to act on that, is what separates brokers who will thrive in this market from those who won’t.
Have Any Other Systems Been Built Specifically for ICHRA Client Management?
Joe Markland: No, I have not seen any other systems designed specifically to help an insurance broker service consumers making individual purchases through ICHRA. That gap is a big part of why we partnered with Ryan Plourde at ForgeXRM. They had already built an employee benefits version of a Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM system (called BenefitsBridge), and ICHRA is an employee benefits product. Modernizing that system to accommodate it is very valuable to a broker and important to service delivery.
Why Microsoft Power Platform Is the Right Foundation for ICHRA Technology
Joe Markland: Building on Microsoft Power Platform matters for brokers because it puts the full power of enterprise-grade AI, automation, and data management directly in their hands — and in this business, knowing your individual clients deeply is everything. If someone enrolls in individual insurance and has a conversation with their broker, and that broker uses the Copilot AI agent that integrates with Microsoft CRM, the system learns more about that individual with every interaction. Getting a modern system that continuously improves service delivery, because you’re getting to know your customer better and better, that’s going to be table stakes across many industries, and it’s already true in this one.
Microsoft is one of the leaders in developing AI capabilities, and putting that power in the hands of a benefits broker is genuinely valuable. If you’re thinking about who’s going to win the AI race, the companies already there with a lot of capital and a lot of customers are probably the favorites. Betting on Microsoft is a good idea.
Security, Governance, and Scalability: Why They’re Non-Negotiable in the ICHRA Business
Joe Markland: Security, governance, and scalability are all imperative in the ICHRA business and building on Microsoft’s platform is a meaningful answer to all three.
Security: When you’re managing individual clients, you’re handling social security numbers, email addresses, and personal health data. That’s sensitive information that demands enterprise-grade protection. Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure is built to protect exactly this kind of data at scale, and Azure Active Directory adds another layer, giving brokers centralized identity and access management so that only the right people inside a brokerage can access the right client data. For a broker moving from managing one employer relationship to managing hundreds of individual ones, that kind of controlled, auditable access isn’t just nice to have — it’s essential.
Scalability: Dealing with 200 individuals versus one organization requires operational efficiency to the nth degree. Microsoft’s Power Platform was built for exactly this kind of automation and scale. Power Automate handles repetitive workflows — renewal reminders, eligibility updates, Medicare aging alerts — without anyone on the broker’s team having to manage them manually. Power BI gives brokers real-time visibility into their book of business across hundreds of individual clients. And because it’s all built on the same platform, everything talks to everything. Brokers using BenefitsBridge can handle volume that would be impossible to manage any other way.
Governance: Where does the buck stop? It’s the broker’s promise to the employer and to the individual: we are the go-to people, the buck stops here. That employer is entrusting the broker on that promise, and the individual is trusting the broker on that promise. Having a system built on one of the most trusted and rigorously maintained technology platforms in the world helps secure and guarantee that promise. It’s not just a technology decision, it’s a professional credibility decision.
The Future of ICHRA: What Benefits Brokers Should Be Preparing For
Joe Markland: ICHRA is just the beginning of a much larger shift in American healthcare, one that is moving deliberately and with real momentum in Washington. I believe there is a genuine desire to get the employer out of the middle of health insurance entirely. We are the only country in the world where someone other than the consumer buys health insurance on their behalf, and that’s increasingly seen as a problem worth fixing.
Because of subsidies through the exchanges, it’s in the best interest of federal and state governments to have competitive individual insurance marketplaces. There’s a desire to move more working people into that marketplace. The individual insurance marketplace cannot be a dumping ground for bad risks. It needs healthy, working-age people to stabilize it.
What I expect to come next is what I’d call the ICSA. This is where the purchase of an individual policy becomes a pre-tax expense under a health savings account. There are also 8 or 10 states right now that have passed or are considering legislation to give employers a tax credit to move small groups of fewer than 50 employees from the traditional group market to the individual marketplace. Working people are generally younger and healthier than non-working people, so getting more of them into the individual market creates a more stable, more competitive marketplace and ultimately reduces the subsidies governments need to provide.
Employers want out of the risk business too. It’s a misplaced responsibility. Consumers want choice and portability, so their insurance follows them from job to job. ICHRA is the first move away from employer-based insurance, and I expect the laws will continue to make it more favorable to go to the individual marketplace.
How the Shift to Individual Health Insurance Will Change the Benefits Broker Business Model
Joe Markland: The shift to individual health insurance will significantly change the benefitsbroker’s business model across both revenue and operations, and brokers who aren’t preparing now will feel it hard. The financial model for a group insurance broker averages around $30 to $40 per employee per month. That number may be lower in the individual marketplace. More importantly, their entire internal service structure is built around helping an employer control costs, through wellness programs, captives and self-insurance. That infrastructure is designed to service the employer. When the model flips, both the financial and service models change, which ripples through the entire organization — staffing, roles, processes, everything.
It is a major, major change. And it is a threat they shouldn’t ignore. We don’t get a vote on where the markets go, and the appetite in Washington is clearly moving toward getting employers out of the middle. That is a real risk for any traditional employee benefits firm that’s not preparing now.
What Does the Enrichly and BenefitsBridge Combination Offer That Nothing Else Does?
Joe Markland: The Enrichly and BenefitsBridge combination solves two problems no other system addresses together — keeping the broker central to the client relationship, and going beyond ICHRA to deliver a truly personalized benefits program.
On the first point: in today’s ICHRA market, most brokers are throwing the service over the wall to some other company that becomes the de facto ICHRA administrator. We think it’s very important that a broker does not outsource brokering to another vendor. By combining our systems the employee makes their benefits election in Enrichly’s platform, and that data transfers directly into BenefitsBridge for the broker’s service delivery. We connect the front-end employee experience with the back-end broker management. That enables the broker to be in the business without having to outsource it.
On the second point: it’s bigger than ICHRA. It’s allowing that employee to allocate funds to other things. That could be an HSA, an emergency fund, a wellness app, telehealth, whatever. Soit’s not only getting the broker into the ICHRA business, it’s enabling them to build a more modern, more personalized benefits program. And I don’t believe that automated combination exists anywhere else.
What Are Brokers Saying When They See This New ICHRA Technology System?
Joe Markland: The most consistent feedback we hear is that we’ve anticipated exactly what brokers need, often before they knew they needed it. When we bring this to brokers, the reaction is, “Wow, I didn’t think of that.” They get into the ICHRA business and start helping people with individual insurance, but the majority of them haven’t taken on the full ownership responsibility of managing 200 individual client relationships. Most brokers aren’t thinking that far ahead yet.
When we show them what’s coming, the light bulb goes on. “Oh, we’ve got to really be in this business.” Ryan and I have always worked that way, anticipating the broker’s needs as the market changes. I think of it like buying an iPhone. I know the next version is going to be good because I trust Apple. When brokers partner with us, they know we’re looking around the corner. The next version of what we build is going to make sure they stay ahead of the pack.
Any Final Message for Benefits Brokers?
Joe Markland: My message to every benefits broker is this: take this change seriously, because it will have a huge impact on your business. The market is moving whether you are ready or not.
Ready to See BenefitsBridge in Action?
If you’re a benefits broker thinking about what ICHRA means for your business, or looking for ways to streamline agency operations and grow in the individual health insurance market, BenefitsBridge from ForgeXRM can help.
Contact ForgeXRM to learn how BenefitsBridge can get you into the ICHRA business without starting from scratch.
Learn more about BenefitsBridge.
The post ICHRA Technology for Benefits Brokers: ForgeXRM Interview with Industry Expert Joe Markland of Enrichly appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.