Strategy & Market

Supplemental benefits have a distribution problem, and it isn’t where most carriers are looking. Across nearly every major voluntary benefit category — critical illness, accident, life, vision — large employers offer coverage at roughly one-and-a-half times the rate of small employers. That gap isn’t new. It isn’t closing on its own. And it’s happening while group voluntary sales, the industry’s primary growth engine, already concentrate 78% of total voluntary premium in the large-group channel that’s already covered.