Holding Ourselves Accountable with the Nava Performance Guarantee

"I honestly have no idea how much my broker makes."

I hear this time and time again from HR leaders, and it always surprises me given the critical importance of the employer-broker relationship and the fact that health benefits is now one of the largest (and fastest growing) checks an employer writes every year.

As an HR leader, you rely on your broker to craft a benefits plan that supports the best interests of you and your employees, and yet, you often don't know how much that broker gets paid or by whom. We think that's odd, and it's an example of an underlying bug in the broader healthcare system that touches everything from knee surgeries to your prescriptions: a fundamental lack of transparency about what things cost. This is out of step with every other major industry you deal with and it's a problem to be solved.

Don't get me wrong, in wading through the complexity of healthcare to build benefits plans, brokers perform an invaluable service on behalf of their clients, and should earn a fair fee for their work. We wouldn't have started Nava if we didn't believe this. But, when we looked at the traditional model, we saw the lack of transparency and accountability often led to conflicts of interest, poor service, and plan recommendations that weren't always in the best interest of employers or their employees. We also saw the opposite: when a broker's interests were more aligned with the employer's, they consistently delivered better benefit solutions at a lower cost. Alignment is key to driving better outcomes for employers and employees. And so we asked ourselves, how might we build transparency and accountability into every client relationship we have?

We believe that aligning Nava's interests with those of our employer clients will lead to better benefits and lower costs, which drives satisfaction and supports our long-term mission of bringing high-quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans.

Our solution is the Nava Performance Guarantee, the industry's first money-back performance guarantee. The Nava Performance Guarantee provides 100% fee transparency, and we make our fees contingent on client satisfaction. Put simply, if at the end of the year you believe we've materially failed to deliver on our plan for the year, you can fire us and we'll return the fee. It's that simple.

Are we crazy? I don't think so - we're deeply confident in the value of our offering. Working with Nava means you receive a personalized 48-point benefit service plan that ensures we're aligned throughout the year. We report on the performance of each innovative tool we deploy to your employees. And we review progress against the goals we've set at each quarterly business review with your team. By aligning our compensation with your satisfaction, you can be confident that we'll work hard throughout the year to deliver on our promises.

And this isn't something we're only offering to select customers or unveiling once we're deep in negotiations as a tactic to win business. Our goal is to have this in place with every Nava Benefits customer right from the beginning. We believe that aligning Nava's interests with those of our employer clients will lead to better benefits and lower costs, which drives satisfaction and supports our long-term mission of bringing high-quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans.

To our knowledge, we're the first brokerage to do something like this. But we hope we're not the last. In fact, we'd be ecstatic if the Nava Performance Guarantee inspires a broader shift towards transparency and accountability for the industry as a whole. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so if you're reading this from a computer issued by a traditional brokerage firm, you have our permission to copy us.

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