Scaling Employee Benefits

Our benefits card had already proved it could move real money for small and medium businesses in Europe. The next question: could the same interface handle the rest of the Spanish benefits market? Health insurance, childcare, wellness, training. None of those use a card.

I designed all four categories from scratch. Each one has its own payment method, its own legal rules, and its own pace of adoption. Building them as four separate products would have meant four teams and four stories for sales to learn. That was not going to work.

Three problems at once.

Missing categories. We had no healthcare or wellness options, even though health insurance showed up in the top three of every employee survey we ran.

Messy integrations. Each non-card benefit meant a different external partner, each with their own way of working, their own compliance rules, and their own feelings about co-branding.

Competitors moving faster. Others were already using healthcare as a reason for companies to stay. Every contract renewal became a risk we could not defend.

Same interface, different payment methods underneath.

The HR manager would always see the same spending tab, the same report, the same approval flow. Employees would always see the same list of benefits. What changed underneath was the supplier and how the money moved, not what people saw on screen.

If we got this right, sales could sell everything as one product. And HR would not have to learn four new ways of working.

Health Insurance shipped first. Most Spanish companies do not renew their policies until year-end, so we let them add whatever they already had to the platform without forcing a switch. That gave us the listing page and a natural path to sell: when renewal came around, we could offer better pricing through PIB Group, Mercer, and Marsh.

Childcare ran through a partner called Roiwards. Employees requested it from the benefits section and got redirected to Roiwards for the regulated part. Roiwards handled enrollment, payments to the daycare centres, and the tax deduction paperwork.

Training was the safest bet because we already had a training feature inside the product. We just showed the existing course catalogue inside Benefits and connected it to pre-tax pay so employees could pay for courses before tax.

Wellness sat on top of Wellhub, a gym and wellness membership service. Companies already using Wellhub got more visibility inside Factorial, which increased usage, which kept them on Wellhub. Companies that were not on it got better pricing than they could negotiate alone.

Under all four, the same spending tab collected every euro. HR exported once a month, sent the file to their accountant, and payroll picked it up automatically.

Most of the design work here was in the admin setup, not in what employees see. How you shape the configuration form is what decides whether you ship one product or ten.

The other big decision was language. Spanish tax rules about salary sacrifice are surprisingly hostile to read. The temptation is to copy the legal text straight into the interface. Instead, we rewrote it in plain language. Compliance approved it and the legal jargon disappeared from the screens.

Four categories live in Spain in under six months. All of them running through the same spending tab.

25% more employees started using the new services in the first quarter. More people started finding the rest of the benefits section too.

What started as a card product became a benefits platform with five payment methods. Other teams across the company began using the same patterns we built.

Configuration is a design problem. The hardest screen on this project was the one HR never sees: the one ops uses to add a new partner.

Partner integrations are design negotiations. Each provider had their own brand, their own tone, their own redirect rules. Making them fit inside Factorial without breaking their contracts was a design problem dressed up as a legal one.

Trust adds up across categories. The first benefit a company tries predicts how many they add over the next year. Getting category one right is the only marketing the next four need.