A strict fee-only corporate benefits consultancy. We eliminate every hidden carrier commission and contingent override — to protect corporate capital and the families covered by your plan.
For thirty years, the corporate benefits industry has operated under a suitability standard — a broker may sell you a plan that is merely appropriate, never the plan that is best for your company or its families. Most brokers are compensated by the carriers whose products they recommend. Their interests are aligned with premium growth, not with cost control or with your fiduciary duty under ERISA.
The CFO is left holding the risk, signing the plan document, and bearing personal exposure under §3(21) — while the broker collects an opaque percentage of the very premium the CFO is paying. This is not a service relationship. It is a structural conflict.
When your broker's revenue rises as your healthcare premiums rise, who is managing your corporate risk?
Carrier-paid commission, contingent overrides, placement compensation, and PBM rebates retained by TrueNorth in the trailing twelve months.
US stop-loss insurance market
The market most CFOs underwrite without independent counsel.
Private-sector workers on self-insured plans
Plan sponsors carry the ERISA risk personally on these designs.
Premium a traditional broker extracts as commission
The structural conflict, in a single percentage range.
Use this ledger as a checklist on your next broker review. Every row below is independently verifiable from public filings and contract text.
Each comparison row is keyboard-expandable; press Enter on a row to read the explanation.
Every engagement runs this sequence. No skipped diligence, no carrier-supplied numbers accepted without independent verification.
We ingest your 834 enrollment and 837 claims files. Independent of your current carrier's narrative — we want the raw exposure, not the renewal slide deck.
We unpack the bundled BUCA arrangement to expose where margin is hiding. Network discounts, admin fees, and stop-loss premium are isolated and benchmarked.
Our actuaries model stop-loss attachment points against your real claims volatility, not the carrier's quote sheet. The result is a defensible price for the risk you are actually taking.
Independent modeling sets the attachment point against the claim distribution — not the carrier's preferred risk corridor.
Net-of-commission RFPs to every viable stop-loss carrier. We do not steer to a single market and we do not accept placement compensation, so the procurement is genuinely competitive.
We sign your plan document as a §3(21) co-fiduciary. Quarterly audit reports follow — our compensation, your plan's performance, both on the same page.
No gating, no demo request, no sales call required. Every tool returns a defensible number and shows its work. Email capture happens only on the final report PDF.
Surface the hidden carrier commissions baked into your current plan in under 90 seconds.
Identify the silent marginRun a Monte Carlo on your claims volatility and see how attachment-point choices reshape your retention curve.
Trade premium for tail riskEight sharply-phrased questions return a 0–100 ERISA exposure score and a three-point action plan.
Defensible · Exposed · CriticalCompare your Per-Employee-Per-Year spend to the public KFF / Mercer band for your industry, region, and size.
See where you actually sitThe Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 obligates plan sponsors to evaluate the reasonableness of broker compensation in writing. ERISA §3(21) defines who is a fiduciary — and the case law makes clear that the CFO who signs the plan document carries that duty personally.
Lewandowski v. Johnson & Johnson opened a class-action front against plan sponsors who failed to monitor pharmacy spend. Carrier-paid brokers are legally barred from accepting §3(21) status — which means they are not next to you when it matters. We are.
Three of the five major carriers have quietly retreated from aggressive lasering for groups above 250 lives. The renewal language has not caught up.
The pleadings made spread pricing actionable. Most committees still do not have minutes that would survive discovery.
We borrow the discipline from the 401(k) side and translate it line-by-line to the welfare-plan context. Template included.
We will respond personally with a principal-level engagement plan, no junior analyst triage. The first conversation is a 30-minute working session — not a sales pitch.