Episode 22 with Rob Grubka, CEO of Health Solutions at Voya Financial – How to Bridge Health Benefits With Wealth Decisions

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Beyond the Challenge is a podcast where executives in the insurance and financial services industry share their insights and experiences. Hosts Kevin and Sandy Dougherty talk with today’s top business leaders about what keeps them up at night and the biggest opportunity organizations can capitalize on today. We encourage you to listen, share, and subscribe to our program.

Kevin and Sandy Dougherty each have over 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services, corporate leadership, and executive search. They’re the owners of Global Corporate Solutions and Global Corporate Leaders. Global Corporate Solutions partners with organizations to gain efficiencies and contain costs. Global Corporate Leaders partners with organizations to enhance and evaluate talent.

Beyond the Challenge podcast is sponsored by Exactuals, perfecting payments and the data driving them.

Welcome to Beyond the Challenge. Here are your hosts, Kevin and Sandy.

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Kevin: Today we’re talking with Rob Grubka, CEO, Health Solutions at Voya Financial, about the trends, challenges, and opportunities he sees for the insurance industry. Rob, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the insurance industry?

Rob: Sure, and great to see you. The quick story is I decided to go down the actuarial science path, if you can imagine someone coming out of high school figuring out that they wanted to go do that and had a little support, maybe a lot of support from my dad and sort of friends of the family that illuminated a little bit of what the career was all about, what getting the degree in actuarial science meant, and have the good fortune to do a summer internship at Nationwide Insurance which turned into a full-time job at Nationwide and so spent a number of years there. But, for me, I really appreciated and liked the idea of, you know, marrying together math and business and also being involved in an industry that, you know, at the end of the day, is trying to be there and do good things for people when they need the help. That just always resonated and appealed to me so sort of the intellectual side as well as the, you know, doing something that felt like it mattered was what got me down this path. And from actuarial science, I sort of rode that wave and did a number of different things, number of different jobs. I can assure you, I didn’t have a path at the start that ended up with me in a CEO role so somehow I cobbled together that path and sit here in front of you today.

Sandy: Thanks, Rob. All sectors face challenges, but for group health solutions, the list seems especially long. Many carriers seem to be struggling to stay relevant while others are embracing new technology, reimagining product design, and developing strategic partnerships. From your experience, how can voluntary employee benefit providers embrace innovation and transformation to improve performance and drive long-term growth?

Rob: So, I’d really start with the customer in mind here. And so, you know, when I think about what we as an industry and, in particular, the voluntary and supplemental health products, you know, they’re not overly well understood. When you think about, again, the impact that the product can have at a time when someone really needs the help and support, I think, for myself and, hopefully, for the industry, we can find ways to better engage with, better educate consumers. Certainly a lot of that will be supported by technology and digital engagement, but a lot of it also is sort of in the healthcare ecosystem and benefit ecosystem. There’s an awful lot of products available today. There’s a number of ways that people elect or find out about the products. How do we start to bring that together and do it in a more holistic way and, ultimately, help people make decisions that they feel confident in and understand why they checked the box or didn’t check the box in the enrollment process? And, I think, you know, as you do the step back in the proliferation of benefits at the workplace, you know, on average, there’s about 17 decisions people are making at enrollment time and when you throw retirement in there, maybe it’s 18 or more, and so that whole dynamic of the amount of choice, amount of decisions that are there for the customer, how do we engage them in that better, to me, I think is sort of the home base, true north, so to speak, of where the industry needs to really focus our time and attention. I think that naturally leads to innovation and technology and finding ways to more deeply engage, and not just at enrollment time. I think that’s a little bit of, you know, what we’re all trying to do as an industry is what’s ongoing engagement look like? How does that work? How do we be effective at that? Because it’s one thing to elect benefits, it’s another thing to then know how to use them and get value from them. And, again, when people are making a lot of decisions at one point in time, it’s pretty easy to forget that, you know, 15th choice or that 16th choice and how do we, as an industry, help support them as those decisions that they made, you know, turn into opportunities to, you know, address a risk or address an issue that they’ve got and, generally, it’s at a time of crisis and a time of need that’s extraordinary, and I think that, to me, is a great motivator for everybody in the industry.

Sandy: Rob, many carriers are carrying a lot of tech debt right now. How is Voya handling tech debt and investing in the new technology?

Rob: Yeah, so our stories may be a little bit different and many of my peers are gonna have, you know, 10 products, a dozen products that they may be going to market with. One of the things that we made a deliberate choice around was what are the products that we carry and it wasn’t about how many we carry, it was about carrying the right products, and so our portfolio of solutions is a little bit more narrow and focused than many. So, the benefit of that is, you know, we have a little bit less need for a plethora of products supported by maybe a plethora of different admin technology platforms. And so, for us, we’ve got most of our products on one platform, you know? Our stop loss product is a little bit different and unique, more oriented towards the employer and so that’s a separate, integrated platform in and of itself. So, for us, we’ve got I think a little bit cleaner environment and then, you know, the way we’ve done it is one bite at a time. Even though it’s one, there’s still a lot of sort of peripheral systems that connect with and leverage that one particular admin platform. So, for us, it’s been all about, you know, priorities and needs and continuous investment versus how much can we spend over three years and let’s make it as much as possible and then thereby making it as hard as possible to execute well and effectively. So, we’ve had a little bit more of “go slow to go fast” approach, just continuous investment in the platform and trying to find ways to, you know, not just address the technology piece of it but also the process side and what are we doing to ensure that we got good process and then if it takes tech investment after that, to make it all work, we’ll certainly do that. But I think we have a little bit different story than maybe some in the industry but I do think, you know, we all can fall prey to trying to do it all on one bite and that’s something that I think we’ve all probably experienced enough of bad outcomes doing it that way so we’ve taken a little bit different approach.

Kevin: Rob, what is the biggest challenge facing the employee benefit providers today?

Rob: There’s probably a bunch of them. Pandemic might be one but we’ll maybe set that one aside for now. I think this probably comes back to the prior question a little bit is how do we engage? How do we be there and support our end customer? Obviously, we’ve got a lot of other people to keep in mind, from, you know, the broker consultants that’s important to the process or other technology players that we need to integrate with to make it all work, but I think that engagement of the consumer is really the big problem for us to solve. How often are consumers actually recognizing, you know, the end company providing their life insurance or their disability insurance or you pick the coverage, you know, I don’t know that they always know. I’d be kind of surprised if they did. And so I think there’s this element of, okay, how do we take what is, again, a lot of decisions, a lot of choice and turn that into something that they perceive as valuable, which is why employers are making these things available. They do a lot of work to support having those products, you know, within their benefit offering. It’s not trivial, it’s not easy. They put a lot of time and thought into it and, in many cases, a lot of money. So, how do we have that whole experience start to come together in a more holistic way? You know, again, there’s a lot of different product providers involved in that and I think part of it is just really how do we integrate things better together.

Kevin: What do you see as the biggest opportunity for the voluntary employee benefits providers over the next three to five years? 

Rob: Well, look, I think when it comes to opportunity, you know, I keep going back to how do we help the employee feel more confident and get value out of the products, but the other part of it is it’s a relatively underutilized product in a lot of ways and so, you know, how do we help, again, through that education, through that engagement, help them understand the value of the products. They’re not particularly expensive and so, when you break it down, the value is there, especially, again, if you go through something that’s — you’re in crisis mode, whatever that means to you as an individual, I think the product should be utilized and elected a lot more. Now, that may sound self-serving but, ultimately, if we’re doing a good job, delivering value and, again, being there, when people need us, I think they’re gonna feel like they got a really good payoff for the benefit premium that they spend. So I’m excited about how do we make things simpler, you know? When you think a lot of times about voluntary products, again, there’s a lot of them even in, you know, what Voya offers today, there’s sort of three products that support critical illness or hospital indemnity, you know, those sorts of things, there’s different silos of products and maybe there’s a different way to build those products that they’re less confusing or it’s not three separate versions of something that may feel to a consumer like, “Well, these are different shades of colors but they’re still sort of the same shade.” They don’t necessarily look and feel all that different to them. And so that ability to bring the story together, have it feel more connected, have them understand the value, and how do we simplify this? How do we make it easier for people to make those up-front decisions? How do we make the claims experience easier? To me, those are the things that get me really excited about the future and how the industry can continue to evolve.

Sandy: What is your opinion about the future of regulation and compliance for voluntary benefits?

Rob: Probably like most things in insurance, it feels like it’s always evolving and changing. The focus on these products, I think, is only gonna continue to grow from a regulatory perspective. Again, when something may feel confusing or difficult to educate people on, it naturally is gonna have the curiosity element with regulators of, you know, are we doing it right? Are we doing the right things? Are we creating the right disclosure? Are we, you know, creating the right selling environment? Are we making sure that the value is there to protect, you know, in their minds, how do they protect the consumer? And so I think from that dynamic, I would just expect, as the industry grows and the number of competitors grows, it’s generally a recipe for more interest and more curiosity from a regulator standpoint. The good thing is, you know, companies that have been in this space for a long time are very comfortable working with the regulators and, again, at the end of the day, we should be aligned about doing what’s right for the consumer. There will be plenty of different views about, you know, how to do that best. The how part of all of this can be, you know, certainly subject to different points of view and different perspective but I don’t think that’s necessarily an unhealthy thing either. Again, I think this is an industry that should grow and with that growth comes responsibility and I think we can be good partners with regulators as we move forward.

Sandy: And personally, I’d like to see a summary of all those disclosure pages ’cause nobody reads that stuff, but that’s just me. How do you bridge health insurance with wealth decisions into the same conversation?

Rob: Yeah, it’s — and I’ll speak very much from a Voya perspective on this one. As a leader in the retirement business, you know, we’ve got north of 50,000 employers that we work with and millions of end customers that we support from a retirement wealth perspective and we see a great opportunity, back to earlier point around just the number of decisions that employees are making. We see a real need for what has been, you know, historically distinct and separate enrollment experiences and education experiences. How do we bring those together and have it feel more cohesive? At the end of the day, the benefit choices that people make are related. At some point, they’ve only got so much money that they can spend and put into different benefit decisions and there’s gonna be tradeoffs and, again, as you think about retirement, an example of something that goes on quite frequently is whether it’s loans or hardship withdrawals from the retirement savings that someone has, maybe a third of the time our data tells us that’s driven by medical issues that came up, you know, and may run out of places to tap into savings to maybe pay those medical bills and that’s a real issue today. And so, as we think about the interconnectivity on decisions that employees have to make, certainly at the point of enrollment, there’s education that can be provided and tradeoffs that can be presented. So, for instance, HSAs have grown in popularity over the last number of years as high deductible health plans have grown. And, you know, there’s a great savings element to health savings accounts and not all people know that. Some people think about them as much like, you know, what they were introduced to before was the flexible spending account and, “Hey, don’t forget to use all that money that you put in your flexible spending account,” and a lot of that translated over to people’s understanding of HSA products and solutions and so there’s a savings element there that is incredibly valuable to the employee as they think about healthcare spend and expense in retirement. And that’s usually a big driver of what people tell people to save for retirement is like, “Max it out, do as much as you can, and here’s why you do it because you’ve got medical costs, you’ve got the trips you want to take, the living that you need to do,” and all those things that come with it and are people thinking about the balance of saving in one place versus the other? And so we see a really great opportunity to bring together the enrollment conversation into one place. And how do we, again, help represent and present those tradeoffs and have people understand how these decisions work together we see as a really great opportunity to differentiate and really add value to the employee and the decisions that they’re making and I think employers are interested in, again, how do we simplify this? How do we have people, their employees, have the perceived value that they know is there but may not always come through when you have very distinct and separate experiences around enrollment and the education that gets delivered and how.

Sandy: How is Voya handling diversity and inclusion at the corporate level? 

Rob: Well, it’s a priority and it starts at the board level and our CEO and what they’ve done. You know, Voya, evolved as a public company after separating from ING and, you know, the benefit of doing that was Rod Martin, our CEO, had the benefit of building a board from scratch and so, as he did that, diversity, whether it be female or people of color, at the board level has been just a real win for the organization, a real message to our customers and partners of what’s important to us around diversity, equity, and inclusion. And, certainly, the last couple years and being here in Minneapolis and the things that we experienced just to underscore the expectation that employees have of a company and, you know, the type of company that they wanna be a part of, I think diversity, equity, inclusion is just foundational anymore, it’s not an option of doing it or not doing it, it is how do we do it? How do we do it effectively? So, as I said, at the board level and then that translates into, you know, our executive committee and the diversity there that has been expected and it just continues to cascade inside the organization and needs to come both top down as well as bottom up. Some of the issues certainly in insurance, you know, people of color, has been a challenge since I’ve been involved in the industry. It’s still a challenge. So some of these problems aren’t necessarily quick to solve and so I think there’s a, you know, just a need for a consistent and differentiated approach to how do we get people interested in the insurance industry and how do we recruit differently, how do we train differently, how do we support growth in the company and across the industry to do a better job attracting people of color. It is the issue we face. When you look at the mix of female versus male, I think that’s a better story but not a perfect story. But certainly people of color is an area where we’ve gotta just double our efforts and probably continue to double down for the years to come to help change the dynamic of where people are coming from, how they’re getting into the industry, and then how do we support their growth and development as we think about their future.

Kevin: Rob, what type of strategic partnerships do you see working the best for carriers? 

Rob: Well, maybe the easy thing is alignment. Again, maybe come back to something I keep going back to which is, you know, how are we delivering better for customers and employees at the workplace. And so, you know, the ecosystem of whether it’s product providers or its technology players that are involved and supporting the workplace, it is certainly, you know, a complicated environment to work well in and I think, in a helpful way, technology is only gonna enable that to work better. We’ve gotten away from, you know, moving paper around between, you know, our inside businesses or between companies to sharing data, sharing files and you’ve got things like API technology that has merged over the last few years that I think the industry is trying to embrace. The workplace benefits world has been one where we’re probably been short on standardization of how data gets shared and what gets shared and how does it gets shared and how do you do that in thoughtful and protected ways. Obviously, we’re dealing with lots of sensitive information and, you know, there’s rules and regulations about some of the sharing but the how part of it, I think, is gonna continue to evolve, and, as an industry, you know, there’s efforts underway with LIMRA to bring some standardization around the benefits, you know, sort of the non-retirement benefits world. There’s a bit more headway that’s been made in the retirement business, I think, on this front over a number of years but I think we’ve got a lot as an industry that we can go at and do differently.

Kevin: Rob, what is the best decision you made that had a positive impact on your career? 

Rob: Best decision. Thankfully, I’ve made a couple probably good decisions, I don’t know if I’ll get to the best one, but maybe being a little bit generic with it, you know, I’ve changed companies, sometimes by my decision, sometimes times with the help of my prior employer and then I’ve had the benefit, you know, as being an actuary early in my career, of just moving around and seeing different parts of the company. You know, I was certainly helped to do that early in my career but, as time went on, I think I just always valued the opportunity to try something different, do something different, you know, see something new, bring different perspective but not be scared of it. You know, I certainly could have maybe done things that didn’t work out, fortunately, you know, I had the wherewithal to, you know, jump into different situations and teams or even business lines that has just made me I think a better leader, a better decision maker, more thoughtful about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it and try to find ways to bring different perspective to any of those new roles that I took. So that willingness to change and take a little bit of risk in my career wasn’t a straight line, as I joked about earlier, and it wasn’t always destined to end where I’m sitting today and I’m sure, you know, with plenty of more working years in front of me, there’s plenty of change to continue to come, but going into those things, you know, with a sense of being confident in what I was, what I could do, and how I could find ways to add value without necessarily knowing all that day 1 is something that I think has just served me well over time.

Kevin: What advice would you give to someone looking to get into the insurance industry?

Rob: I think, you know, make sure you know why you’re doing it. You know, I think anymore, people wanna have that sense of purpose about the jobs that they’re in and “Why am I here and what am I trying to get out of it and what is the impact that I can have?” I think that’s a beautiful thing about the insurance industry and, you know, again, touching people and being there when they need us is generally a big part of the story that has always stuck with me and resonated with me on a personal level. And, you know, again, probably that willingness to have different perspective, different experiences, and being open to trying different things. I think insurance, there’s so many different ways to evolve a career in the insurance industry and, again, as I alluded to before, the marrying of, you know, technical skills, technical ability in a business environment, and then, ultimately, finding your way to connect with the marketplace and the consumer and the customer in that process to me has always been really the exciting thing about it and, hopefully, it will be exciting thing for other people to think about. And it’s a place that I’ve felt challenged. I’ve also felt rewarded for taking on those challenges and a willingness to work hard and learn and come at things with a different perspective and, like every other industry anymore, it’s so tech enabled and technology is so important. I think you can really bring, you know, sort of get and gather really cool, interesting perspective that may serve you well outside the industry at some point if that’s where you wanna go. I think it’s a great training ground for being just really thoughtful decision makers and marry together a lot of different disciplines, which I think is really neat.

Sandy: Rob, thank you for your time today. It’s been great to hear your insights on how employee benefits providers can stay relevant and the opportunities you see for the industry over the next few years. Thank you very much.

Rob: Thank you, Kevin, Sandy, it was a pleasure.

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