Search Data from Brokers Highlights Most Popular Benefits | Wellable Weekly Podcast

Name: Search Data from Brokers Highlights Most Popular Benefits | Wellable Weekly Podcast
Uploaded: 2026-03-18T12:58:14-04:00
Channel: Wellable
Description: Wellable Weekly's first ever guest, BenefitPitch founder Dave Kerrigan, shares what 20,000 benefit professionals are actually searching for, what categories are ripe for disruption, and two bold predictions on GLP-1s and ICHRAs.

Estimated reading time: 21 minutes

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In this special episode of Wellable Weekly, Nick sits down with Dave Kerrigan, CEO and founder of BenefitPitch, for the podcast’s first ever guest appearance. Drawing on 2025 search data from more than 20,000 benefit professionals across the BenefitPitch platform, Dave breaks down what employers and brokers are actually looking for, which benefit categories keep coming up year after year, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for innovation. The episode closes with two predictions: one bullish on the long-term reach of GLP-1s, and one contrarian take on ICHRA enrollment projections.

Short on time? Here are the key takeaways:

Pet insurance and pet services ranked 4th among all benefit searches on BenefitPitch in 2025, signaling it is approaching must-have status for employers focused on recruitment and retention
EAP services topped the list with over 1,600 searches, while COBRA and financial tax-advantage accounts like HSAs and FSAs ranked second and third
Categories like COBRA, ACA compliance, and benefits administration keep getting searched year after year, which Dave argues signals an opportunity for disruption rather than satisfaction with existing solutions
Wellness and well-being remains a consistently high-searched category across years, but faces growing cost scrutiny and point solution fatigue, driving demand for streamlined offerings
GLP-1s are likely to expand well beyond weight loss into addiction, behavioral health, and other categories
Dave is bearish on ICHRA enrollment projections, arguing that adverse risk selection could cause individual market premiums to outpace employer contributions over time

Episode Summary

BenefitPitch is a marketplace and vendor management platform used by more than 20,000 benefit professionals across the United States. Brokers and benefit consultants use it to search across 400-plus benefit categories, find and vet vendors, and manage relationships on behalf of their employer clients. By aggregating that search data, BenefitPitch gets a uniquely data-driven view of what the benefits industry is actually focused on at any given time, separate from what conferences are talking about or what trade publications are covering. Dave and his team publish that data annually, and the 2025 edition was released around the Super Bowl with a football-themed creative wrapper that Nick describes as genuinely worth downloading for the entertainment value alone.

Dave organizes the top search categories into three buckets: the ones that are expected and unsurprising, the ones that are genuinely unexpected, and the ones that make you raise an eyebrow. The eyebrow-raiser for 2025 is pet services, which ranked fourth overall with just under 1,000 searches. Pet insurance, pet care, and related services have quietly become a near-staple benefit, particularly for employers trying to attract younger workers who, as Dave notes, treat pets as family members and spend accordingly. A backup care company Dave spoke with reported that a meaningful percentage of their backup care requests were for pets rather than children, which he describes as a mind-blower that perfectly captures where this category has gone.

The top three are more traditional. EAP services led with over 1,600 searches, COBRA came in second with over 1,300, and financial tax-advantage accounts like HSAs, FSAs, and HRAs ranked third with over 1,200. Nick finds COBRA particularly surprising, given that it is one of the most commoditized benefits in existence. Dave’s read is that the continued high search volume for COBRA, ACA compliance, and benefits administration points not to satisfaction but to opportunity. These categories have been around for decades, they are administratively complex, and the user experience has largely not kept up. Dave’s argument is that they keep getting searched because employers and brokers know something better should exist, even if they haven’t found it yet. He draws a parallel to leave management, which had a similar profile until new technology vendors entered the space and elevated the whole category.

Wellness and well-being lands in the breakout section of the report, consistently appearing in the top 20 to 25 most searched categories across years. Dave and Nick agree that the category is not going anywhere, but it faces two converging pressures: growing CFO scrutiny around ROI, and point solution fatigue, with employers and brokers asking whether three or four separate wellness vendors can be consolidated into something more streamlined. Nick shares that Wellable has been working with Tufts Medical on a federally funded study of wellness ROI and notes how genuinely difficult it is to measure, given the volume of confounding variables involved. Dave’s take is that the question may be shifting from ROI to return on value, and that the employers who stay in the category will be the ones who find smarter ways to consolidate and engage.

Other breakout categories include ICHRAs, cancer care, and caregiving. Cancer care has seen rising search interest in part because of the surge in cancer diagnoses following the period during which many people skipped routine screenings. Caregiving has carried forward from COVID-era pressures, compounded by a generational shift in which younger workers expect it as a standard offering, and sandwich-generation employees like Dave himself are managing childcare and elder care simultaneously.

The episode closes with two predictions from Dave. On GLP-1s, he is firmly bullish, arguing that the current conversation is too narrowly focused on weight loss. FDA approvals for GLP-1s are expected to expand into addiction treatment, including smoking, gambling, and potentially social media addiction, among other categories. Dave’s view is that the long tail of this drug class is not being fully appreciated, and that employers who are only thinking about GLP-1s as a weight loss cost center are missing a much bigger picture. Nick echoes this, noting that if AI were not dominating business news, GLP-1s would be the top story, and that their near-term societal impact may exceed that of AI.

On ICHRAs, Dave takes a more cautious stance. His concern is adverse risk selection: the employers most likely to move employees to an ICHRA are the ones facing unsustainable group premium increases, meaning the individual market would be disproportionately flooded with higher-risk enrollees. Over time, that dynamic could cause individual market premiums to outpace what employers are contributing, shifting more cost onto employees and undermining the product’s appeal. He is not predicting ICHRAs will fail, but he expects enrollment numbers to land well below the more optimistic projections currently circulating. Nick takes the other side, arguing that even a tempered growth rate still represents a compelling market, and that for small employers in particular, the choice and simplicity argument for ICHRAs remains genuinely attractive.

Meet Our Guest: Dave Kerrigan

Dave Kerrigan is the Founder & CEO of BenefitPitch, the leading platform connecting benefit professionals with world class vendors and solution providers. It is used by more than 20,000 benefit professionals across some of the top benefit firms in the United States as a vendor and knowledge management system. Designed to help bridge the gap between vendors and benefit professionals, there are more than 1,100 vendors that have created profiles on the BenefitPitch marketplace. BenefitPitch is expanding into the health plan space as well.

Dave also consults at the intersection of innovation and employee benefits as the Founder and Managing Director at Sante Nasc, LLC, a business consulting firm where he works with benefit firms on innovation related topics and events as well as with vendors and solution partners looking to grow their presence in the employer benefits space.

He is a regular speaker, moderator, and panelist at health care conferences and events in the benefits space. Some of his past speaking engagements have included The Council’s Employee Benefits Leadership Forum conference, Assurex Global’s annual benefits conference, HRE’s Health & Benefits Leadership Conference, and many virtual/online events.

Dave has a strong background in health care and benefits, having worked at Willis Towers Watson, Buck Consultants, Optum, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. He also served on the leadership team of the Massachusetts Health Connector (public exchange under the ACA) where he led the SHOP (small group) strategy.

Dave volunteers time with TiE Boston’s ScaleUp program (a startup accelerator program in the Boston area) and is a mentor and judge for MassChallenge Health Tech (a digital health incubator), an advisor for Plug and Play Tech Center, and is a mentor for BrokerTech Ventures. He also serves on the Ambassador’s Council of a not-for-profit organization called Social Capital Inc. which focuses on strengthening community bonds.

Dave lives in the Boston area with his wife and two daughters and is an avid runner.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is BenefitPitch and how does it work?

BenefitPitch is a marketplace and vendor management platform that connects benefit vendors with brokers, consultants, and HR professionals. Vendors create detailed profiles across more than 400 benefit categories, and over 20,000 benefit professionals use the platform to search for solutions, vet vendors, and manage relationships on behalf of their employer clients. BenefitPitch aggregates search data across the platform to identify trends in what the benefits industry is actively looking for.

What were the most searched benefit categories in 2025?

According to BenefitPitch’s 2025 annual report, the top searched categories were EAP services with over 1,600 searches, COBRA with over 1,300, financial tax-advantage accounts like HSAs and FSAs with over 1,200, and pet services just under 1,000. Behavioral health, benefit administration, ACA compliance, leave management, and caregiving also ranked in the top 10.

Why is pet insurance becoming a mainstream employee benefit?

Pet ownership surged during COVID, and younger generations in particular are spending significant disposable income on pet care, pet insurance, and related services. For employers competing for talent, pet benefits have moved from a nice-to-have perk to something candidates actively ask about. Dave Kerrigan describes it as approaching must-have status, similar to how gym reimbursements became standard over the past decade.

Why does COBRA keep ranking so highly in benefit searches?

Dave’s interpretation is that the continued high search volume for COBRA and similarly commoditized categories like ACA compliance and benefits administration reflects opportunity rather than satisfaction. These services are administratively complex, the user experience has not kept pace with modern expectations, and employers and brokers keep searching because they sense something better should exist. He draws a parallel to leave management, which had a similar profile before new technology vendors elevated the category.

What could the future of GLP-1 benefits hold?

Dave is bullish on the long-term reach of GLP-1 medications, arguing that the current conversation is too narrowly focused on weight loss. FDA approvals are expected to expand the drug class into addiction treatment and other categories, including smoking cessation, gambling addiction, and potentially social media addiction. His view is that employers thinking about GLP-1s only as a weight loss cost center are significantly underestimating how broadly this drug class will affect benefits strategy over the next several years.

What could the future of GLP-1s hold for employers and benefits brokers?

The current conversation around GLP-1s is almost entirely focused on weight loss, but Dave Kerrigan argues that framing is far too narrow. FDA approvals are expected to expand the drug class into addiction treatment, including smoking cessation, gambling addiction, and potentially social media addiction, among other categories. For employers and brokers, this means GLP-1s are likely to evolve from a weight management line item into a much broader and more complex benefits consideration. The cost and coverage decisions being made today may look very different in three to five years as the approved use cases multiply.

What are ICHRAs and how do they work?

An ICHRA, or Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement, is an employer-funded benefit that gives each employee a fixed monthly dollar amount to purchase their own health insurance on the individual market rather than enrolling in a company-sponsored group plan. Employers set a contribution amount, employees use it to buy whatever plan works best for them on their state exchange, and if the cost of their chosen plan exceeds the contribution, they pay the difference out of pocket. The appeal for employers is straightforward: predictable fixed costs, reduced ACA compliance burden, and no need to select and administer a group plan. The appeal for employees is choice, the ability to pick a plan that fits their individual health needs and budget rather than being limited to whatever the employer has selected. ICHRAs are particularly attractive to smaller employers who lack the scale to negotiate favorable group rates or the HR resources to manage a complex benefits program.

Full Episode Transcript

Nick: Welcome to the Wellable Weekly Podcast. I usually open by saying we discuss topics at the intersection of technology, health, and wellbeing, and I introduce my colleague Geoff. But this is a very unique episode. For the first time ever, we have a guest on the podcast. Our guest is Dave Kerrigan. Many of you may already know him. Dave, how’s it going?

Dave: I’m doing great, Nick, how are you?

Nick: Not too bad. Another cold day in Boston. We got a tease last week, 70s, people walking around in shorts like they’d never seen the sun. Back into the 20s next week apparently.

Dave: Nick, I’m just north of Boston and on Thursday morning I wore shorts when I went running.

Nick: Okay, preaching to the choir. For those who don’t know Dave, he is the CEO and founder of BenefitPitch. What BenefitPitch does gives him and his team access to data that is genuinely informative about the industry we operate in. In short, it allows vendors like Wellable, and I think you now have over a thousand vendors on the platform, to create profiles, and it allows brokers and benefit professionals, over 20,000 of them, to use BenefitPitch to identify appropriate resources and navigate options on behalf of their employer clients. Is that a fair description?

Dave: Fair description, yes. The only thing I’d add is that for our benefit professional users, we built a vendor management system around it. As a former broker myself, it is genuinely hard to keep track of all the vendors out there. Using BenefitPitch, a benefit broker or consultant can search a category, find vendors, learn if they’re pre-approved or have passed security protocols for their brokerage firm’s IT department, things like that. A little easier for everyone to come together, for brokers to find vendors and for solutions to get found.

Nick: One of the things I love about your report, which we’ll get into, is that it’s a very data-driven way to identify what’s hot in our benefits space. And you did something creative with the release, right around the Super Bowl, so the whole theme is football-related. Every description has a gridiron reference. I’m not doing it justice, but it’s really well done. Kudos to you and your team. We’ll put a link in the show notes so everyone can download the full report, because we can’t cover everything today.

Dave: Kelsey and Arthur on my marketing team do an amazing job pulling this together, along with Susan, Maria, and the rest of the crew. They ask me which theme I want, I review the final product, and that’s about it. They do all the work in the middle. This is the first of many of these reports we’ve done, and they’re always designed to be informative and fun, because if you can’t have a little fun in our industry, I think we’re doing it wrong.

Nick: So the report captures the top search terms across the BenefitPitch portal. These 20,000 benefit professionals are searching the platform when a client comes in and says, hey, I’m interested in EAP solutions, and by virtue of the frequency of those searches, you get a sense of what’s popular, what’s gaining momentum, what’s declining. Any context on how the report is compiled before we get into the data?

Dave: Sure. The BenefitPitch site is a marketplace where vendors create in-depth profiles covering their contact information, products and services, pricing, group size they serve, and any other information a broker or employer might need. We license it to benefit firms as a vendor management system, and they roll it out nationally across all offices. So there are 20,000-plus benefit professionals doing on average 8,500 searches a month across all sorts of categories. We’ve pre-created 400-plus categories, and vendors select a handful to describe their products and services. We then aggregate all the search data across whatever time period we want, quarterly, monthly, year over year. Today’s report covers 2025 search data, released around the Super Bowl.

Nick: 400 categories. That alone crystallizes how broad the HR benefits space is. If you’re an HR generalist, you’re potentially considering 400 different categories at any given time. The overwhelm is real. So let’s dive in. What struck you as interesting or unique when you looked at this data?

Dave: I’ll frame it in three buckets. First, regular services that are mainstays and keep getting searched. Second, the ones you’d expect to be there and they are. Third, the ones that make you chuckle or raise your eyebrow. I’ll go in reverse order. The eyebrow-raiser, and this one cracks me up every time: pet services. Pet insurance, pet care, paternity leave for pets. It is a regularly highly searched category on BenefitPitch. I talked to a company in the backup care space that said a meaningful percentage of their backup care requests are for pets, not children. Which just floored me.

Nick: Unbelievable. And it jumped to the fourth spot in your 2025 data, right? You think about all the core benefits people are evaluating and pet services is the fourth most searched category. I actually saw a headline recently about pet grooming being a boom market right now, growing double digits, both boutique shops and large chains expanding across the country.

Dave: COVID powered a lot of it. People were locked down, they got pets. Disposable income is being spent on pets in a serious way. And I’d say it’s almost entered that must-have territory for employers trying to attract and retain talent. It’s not a cost-saving benefit. You’re not going to lower your premium by offering pet insurance. But people who are job searching and have pets are going to ask about it.

Nick: Totally. And what I found interesting is that the third most searched category was financial tax-advantage accounts, HSAs, FSAs, HRAs. Looking at pet services next to that, it reminded me of the concept of the K-shaped economy, where some people are doing really well and some are not. Pet services is the quintessential disposable income benefit. Tax-advantage accounts feel more like employers saying, how do we help employees manage their financial health without necessarily paying them more.

Dave: Two sides of that coin. On the generational side, younger workers may be living paycheck to paycheck with a decent paycheck, but they’ve chosen to spend it on things like pet services and food delivery. Those are staples of the generation. That needs to be paired with education around credit, student loan debt, and retirement savings, which is a very different conversation for someone entering the workforce versus someone like me in their 50s. The other side is that the big beautiful bill had favorable pieces for tax-advantage accounts, so organizations trying to stay current are actively asking their brokers to look at this. That’s driving ongoing search volume.

Nick: The other two that jumped out were EAP services at number one and COBRA at number two. COBRA was a genuine shock to me, and then I went back to the 2024 data and it was top of the list there too. Every company has a COBRA vendor. It’s about as plain vanilla as it gets. Why are so many brokers being asked by clients to think about a new one?

Dave: That’s exactly the point I want to make. EAP, behavioral health, leave management, those being highly searched makes complete sense. They’re growing, they should be there. But COBRA, ACA compliance, benefits administration, those surprised me. And as a former benefit consultant, the only conclusion I can draw is that these categories are ripe for disruption. If a vendor is doing their job well, you’re not shopping that category every year. You do a market check every three to five years out of fiduciary responsibility. The fact that these are being searched constantly tells me people are not satisfied. There’s more to be done. Leave management is the example of what can happen when innovators step in. New technology vendors came in, elevated the category, and now it’s a hot space. I think COBRA, ACA compliance, and Benadmin are sitting in that same position.

Nick: That’s a great point. And sometimes the innovation is just the wrapper, right? Clean UI, guided steps, easy data entry. The back office can stay complex, but the HR experience gets dramatically simplified. On leave management specifically, we operate in Massachusetts and California, two states with incredibly complex and ever-changing leave laws. A vendor that stays on top of that adds real value just by keeping you current.

Dave: Exactly. And the complexity in those categories, leave management, COBRA, ACA, is actually the barrier that makes disruption harder but also more valuable when it happens. You can’t come in overnight and fix COBRA. You need to deeply understand the industry. But that’s also why the opportunity is real for someone who does.

Nick: One more question before predictions: any commentary on the breakout categories in the report, the ones that didn’t make the top 10 but are worth watching?

Dave: ICHRAs, cancer care, caregiving, and wellness and wellbeing. Cancer care is there for a painful reason: the uptick in cancer diagnoses, including in younger people, that followed the period when many people skipped routine screenings during COVID. For an employer, cancer is one of the most difficult situations to manage, both from a human perspective and from a cost and productivity standpoint. Caregiving carried forward from COVID and has been amplified by generational expectations and the sandwich generation dynamic, people like me managing both kids and elderly parents simultaneously. And wellness and wellbeing is always in that top 20 to 25 range. It’s not going anywhere, but the scrutiny around ROI and point solution fatigue is real. The question employers and brokers are increasingly asking is: do I need three or four separate wellness vendors, or is there a consolidated solution that covers the spectrum more efficiently?

Nick: That ROI question is one we’ve grappled with directly. We’ve been working with Tufts Medical on a federally funded study with a couple of Boston employers, and we’re currently in the process of submitting findings for publication. The challenge is the volume of confounding variables makes it nearly impossible to isolate the true value. And the cost of even attempting to measure it properly may not be worth it. It’s an age-old problem in this space.

Dave: The category is also enormous. Wearables, walking challenges, online fitness, food and nutrition, reimbursements, it all rolls up under wellness and wellbeing. There are so many subcategories. And the question of whether you consolidate vendors or keep point solutions is something every HR and benefits team is wrestling with right now, especially with CFOs asking them to do more with less.

Nick: Alright, predictions. Two from you: one confident, one contrarian.

Dave: I’ll start with the confident one. GLP-1s. And I want to be clear: I think we are looking at this too narrowly. Everyone is focused on weight loss right now, the pharmaceutical companies, the cost discussions, the dependency questions. But the reach of GLP-1s is going to expand into categories we are not fully appreciating yet. The FDA is testing approvals for addiction treatment, smoking, gambling, online gambling, social media addiction. The long tail of this drug class is enormous. Employers who are only thinking about GLP-1s as a weight loss line item in their pharmacy spend are going to be caught off guard by how broadly this technology evolves. I am very confident this is not going anywhere, and it is going to be a much bigger deal than the current conversation suggests.

Nick: Couldn’t agree more. Jeff and I did our first GLP-1 episode a few weeks ago and we were genuinely surprised we had gone that long on a weekly podcast without covering it. If AI weren’t consuming every inch of business news right now, I think GLP-1s would be the top story. I’ve said on the record that in the next 12 to 24 months, GLP-1s may have a bigger visible impact on society than AI. Not in the long run, but in the near term, the ripple effects into addiction, into airline fuel costs, into consumer behavior, are already starting to show up.

Dave: AI is coming too. I won’t go deep on it, but the wall is coming and it is going to fundamentally change everything. We are in the very early days.

Nick: Agreed. And your contrarian prediction?

Dave: ICHRAs. And I want to be clear: I’m not saying ICHRAs are bad or going away. They’re not. But I am more bearish than the market on enrollment projections. Here’s why. The employers most likely to move employees to an ICHRA are the ones with unsustainable group premium increases, the ones with bad risk. When those employers move their people into the individual market, they are flooding that market with adverse risk. What does that do to premiums in the individual market? It drives them up. Over time, premiums in that risk pool will outpace what employers are contributing, which means employees will have to make up the difference out of pocket. That is kicking the can down the road, and it is a structural problem that does not get talked about enough. I think enrollment numbers will land well below what some of the more optimistic projections are suggesting.

Nick: I’ll take the other side, respectfully. I think even a tempered version of ICHRA growth still represents a compelling market. Every growth market overestimates the short-term opportunity, but that does not mean the long-term trajectory is wrong. And for a small employer with 40 people, trying to offer a single group plan that satisfies everyone, the simplicity and choice argument for ICHRAs is genuinely attractive, even if it comes with tradeoffs. The risk selection issue is real, but I wonder how much of it is mitigated when you’re a small, fully-insured employer who is already essentially a price-taker anyway.

Dave: Fair point. And if the carriers decide to compete aggressively in the individual consumer market, to get better at pricing individual risk, my prediction may not hold. It really depends on how the health plans respond. If they lean in, the enrollment numbers could track closer to what the pundits are saying. If they don’t, the adverse selection problem will slow things down considerably.

Nick: We’ll see. Dave, thank you again for being our first ever guest. You set the bar high and I appreciate your time. Thanks everyone for listening. Like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and have a great week.