TFA Benefits: Empowering Brokers through TFA Edge

Stacy Viles, Senior Vice President

For brokers and consultants in the healthcare insurance domain, success is no longer achievable by just interpreting regulations and shopping benefits annually. Today, success requires these core services to adapt with the continually shifting industry paradigms and more prominently, having a digital solution to undergird and strengthen business processes. The delivery of employee benefits has become much more arduous, time consuming, and litigious. From this starting point, Virginia Beach-based TFA Benefits has created software that moves these concerns from issues to opportunities.

TFA Benefits’ state-of-the-art tool called TFA Edge allows a broker to work through the life cycle of employee benefits. From quoting to presentation and open enrollment to compliance, TFA Edge consolidates all business processes under a single system which results in increased accuracy and enhanced productivity.

With this tool, brokers can cut down enrollment time, track prospects, store client information, and connect directly with healthcare.gov. TFA Edge has direct connectivity to the Federal Marketplace for individual health insurance. Individual enrollments can be completed within 10 minutes without verifying identity or phoning the marketplace. For employee group coverage, a broker is able to produce multiple quotes using a single census, virtually instantaneously. In addition to health insurance, a broker can also quote life, DI, vision, dental, and identity theft coverage by simply checking a selection box. After choosing the most suitable and cost-optimized plans from the quotes produced, a broker can create an Employee Benefit/ Enrollment website with all the appropriate compliance documentation automatically selected by the software.

Richard Herzberg, President

The offering further enables brokers to choose from various employee contribution strategies to optimize the benefit/cost relationship for the employer. They can offer clients higher levels of service as what in the past would have taken hours to craft, can now be accomplished in a matter of minutes.

Over the years, the firm has established partnerships with several technology vendors to appropriately address the needs of its clients and tailor the solutions to cater to their specific needs. “If a client needs something which we are not able to offer, we work with our vendor partners or with our web developers to create the solution ourselves,” mentions Richard Herzberg, President of TFA Benefits.

“Few clients fully comprehend the laws and the potential for litigation that comes with failure to comply. This is the area where we excel. With the help of our compliance team, we have designed our solutions with an emphasis on compliance,” he adds. Speaking about his firm’s strength in providing compliance assistance, he mentions one prospective customer (headquartered in Germany) that was weighing whether to work with TFA Benefits or a national brokerage company which they felt would have the international expertise a European company would need. “While I agreed the national brokerage company may have a better understanding on international law, I doubted they would have a better solution overall for compliance, so I simply asked; How do you plan to confirm offers of coverage and SBC distribution? When we explained our solution, the prospect posed the same question to the national firm and when they didn’t get a satisfactory answer, they quickly became our client,” proudly mentions Herzberg. SVP of TFA Benefits, Stacy Viles adds, “Depending on the client’s needs, we either prepare electronic copies of all documents for a client's renewal or help them build a compliance website where the documents can be housed.”

Owing to its market-presence spanning over three decades, TFA Benefits understands how technology can shape businesses and thus keeps an eye on the changing regulatory trends to remain agile in assisting clients to adapt to compliance standards. “It is an exciting time to be in the business. And we are committed to constantly deliver solutions in a cost-effective manner that will benefit our clients and help them gain a competitive edge in the market,” concludes Herzberg.