Alliant Insurance Services has appointed Carissa Murray (pictured) as assistant vice president within its Employee Benefits Group, based in San Diego, effective July 2026. Murray will work with employers across the Western Region on workforce solutions covering employee benefits, human resources outsourcing, payroll, workers' compensation and compliance.
Murray joins from ADP, the publicly traded payroll and HR services company, where she spent nearly a decade in roles focused on professional employer organization advisory. Her most recent position was senior business consultant with ADP TotalSource, ADP's PEO division, a role she held from September 2021 until joining Alliant.
Kevin Overbey, president of Alliant Employee Benefits, said Murray brings a highly consultative approach to helping organizations make informed decisions about their workforce and benefits strategies. Murray holds a bachelor's degree from Northeastern University, where she graduated magna cum laude, and completed an international studies program at Bond University in Australia.
A professional employer organization serves as a co-employer for client businesses, taking on payroll administration, benefits delivery, workers' compensation and HR compliance under a shared employment structure. The PEO model gives smaller and mid-market employers access to benefit plan pricing that would otherwise require the headcount of a much larger company, because the PEO pools employees across many clients when negotiating with carriers and third-party administrators.
More than 230,000 US businesses currently operate through a PEO, employing a combined 4.5 million workers and generating approximately $372 billion in industry revenue, according to NAPEO research. California accounts for 11% of all PEO clients nationally - third behind Florida and Texas - reflecting the concentration of mid-market businesses in the state and the compliance complexity of California's employment law environment, which makes outsourced HR administration particularly attractive.
The reason PEO evaluation has moved up the agenda for mid-market employers is straightforward: healthcare costs. Aon projects a 9.5% increase in employer health costs for 2027, the fourth consecutive year of near double-digit trend, with average per-employee costs set to exceed $19,000. WTW's preview of its own 2027 survey data projects 11.1% cost growth for employers that take no corrective action. In that environment, mid-market employers are asking whether a PEO arrangement could deliver better benefits pricing than a standalone group plan - and increasingly, they are asking that question of their broker rather than independently.
The advisory skill Murray brings from ADP TotalSource is specific: not benefits design in isolation, but the evaluation of whether a PEO co-employment structure is the right vehicle for a given employer's size, workforce profile and compliance situation, and then the ongoing management of that relationship. That is a different capability from placing a group medical plan, and one that has historically sat outside most regional benefits practices.
Murray's appointment is the third Alliant Employee Benefits Group hire announced in four days, following the addition of Rick George in Fayetteville, Arkansas - who spent 38 years running benefits at J.B. Hunt Transport - and Rebecca Ellis in Denver. The pattern signals a deliberate effort to build employer-side advisory depth across Alliant's regional practices rather than adding headcount at the national level.
For mid-market employers in Southern California evaluating whether a PEO arrangement, a self-funded plan, or a fully insured group product best fits their cost situation heading into the 2027 renewal cycle, a specialist who has spent a decade on the PEO advisory side of that conversation is a materially different resource than a generalist benefits broker. That is the positioning Alliant is establishing with this hire.
