Scaling Employee Benefits

After the card-first MVP proved that a benefits platform could move real money for European SMBs, the next question was bigger: could the same surface absorb the rest of the Spanish benefits market, the part that has nothing to do with a card.

I led the end-to-end design of four new non-card categories: Health Insurance, Childcare, Wellness, and Trainings. Each of these has its own rails, its own legal envelope, and its own activation curve. Shipping them as four separate products would have meant four separate teams, four separate stories for sales, four separate dead ends for HR.

Three things had to be solved at the same time.

Portfolio gap. We had no healthcare or wellness coverage at a moment when health insurance ranked top three on every employee survey we ran.

Integration complexity. Each non-card benefit had a different external partner with a different operational model, a different compliance bar, and a different willingness to be co-branded.

Competitive pressure. Competitors were already positioning healthcare as a retention lever, which turned every renewal into a churn risk we were not equipped to defend.

Keep the spend management mental model. Swap the rails.

The HR admin would always see the same Spending tab, the same exporter, the same approval surface. The employee would always see the same inbox of benefits. What would change underneath was the supplier and the payment mechanic, not the user-facing model.

If we got this right, sales could pitch the whole portfolio as a single product, and HR would not have to learn four new operating playbooks.

Health Insurance went out as an MVP first. Most Spanish companies do not renew their policies until year-end, so we let them list whatever they already had on the platform without forcing a provider change. That gave us the listing surface and a clean upsell path: when renewal approached, we contacted them with better pricing through PIB Group and Mercer and Marsh.

Childcare partnered with Roiwards. Employees requested childcare from the Benefits Hub, then got redirected into Roiwards for the regulated part. Roiwards handled enrollment, payment to the centers, and the paperwork the company needed for the tax deduction.

Trainings was the lowest-risk one because we already had an internal Trainings app. We exposed the existing catalogue inside Benefits and tied it to salary sacrifice, so employees could pay for courses pre-tax.

Wellness layered on top of Wellhub. Companies that were already on Wellhub got higher visibility inside Factorial, which improved their internal utilisation, which kept them on Wellhub. Companies that were not got better pricing than they could negotiate on their own.

Underneath all four, the same Spending tab ate every euro. HR managers exported once a month, sent the export to the bookkeeper, and the payroll write-back happened automatically.

Most of the design work on this project was in the configuration layer, not the customer-facing surface. The shape of the admin form is what decides whether you ship one product or ten.

The other big call was language. Spanish tax rules around salary sacrifice and benefit in kind are surprisingly user-hostile, and the temptation to translate the regulation directly into UI is strong. We rewrote the regulation into the editor's voice. The compliance team validated, and the legal copy disappeared from the screens.

Four categories launched in the Spanish market in under six months, with the unified Spending tab absorbing all of them.

Engagement on the new services landed at +25% within the first quarter of release, and the discovery rate of the broader Benefits Hub climbed in parallel.

The catalog turned from a card product with one rail into a benefits platform with five, and the spin-off conversations with Banking and IT Management started to use the same operational primitives.

Configuration is a design surface. The hardest UI on this project was the one HR never sees, the one ops uses to onboard a new partner.

Partnerships are design negotiations. Each provider had a brand, a tone, and a redirection policy. Getting them to live inside the Factorial shell without breaking their own contractual constraints was a graphic design problem disguised as a legal one.

Trust compounds across categories. The first benefit a company adopts predicts how many they add in the next twelve months. The activation surface for category one is the only marketing the next four need.