As rising healthcare costs squeeze employer budgets and transparency rules sharpen scrutiny of broker compensation, the group benefits intermediary model is under mounting pressure to prove its worth - and MetLife's top US business executive says the broker community must evolve.
Ramy Tadros, regional president of MetLife's US Business and head of MetLife Holdings in New York, told Insurance Business Benefits that the most significant shift in the group benefits market is not in commission structures alone, but in what employers want from their brokers and advisors.
"What we're seeing is a change in customer expectations with respect to what brokers and intermediaries do," said Tadros, who oversees MetLife's Group Benefits business as well as Retirement & Income Solutions. "This is not just about 'help me find the best and cheapest coverage.' It's 'help me really think about the design of my benefit programs, help me think about the ROI of those programs in my context' - and no two employers are the same."
Tadros framed the challenge facing group benefits brokers across two distinct pressure points: a demand for deeper consultative expertise at the upper end of the market, and a relentless push for efficiency and cost transparency at the smaller employer end.
At the larger, more sophisticated end of the market, he said, brokers are being asked to bring data-driven insight to plan design decisions from workforce demographics to pharmacy cost trends, and increasingly to help employers bend the medical cost curve.
MetLife's 2026 US Employee Benefit Trends Study found that employers now cite controlling healthcare costs as their number one benefits objective, surpassing productivity, loyalty, and attracting new talent for the first time since 2022.
"The whole industry from an intermediary perspective is under a pressure to add more value from a consultative perspective, as well as a pressure from a price point perspective," Tadros said.
On compensation structure, he says that fee-based models dominate the upper market, while commission-based arrangements remain entrenched among smaller employers. "Typically, the more upmarket you go, the more these arrangements are fee-based versus commission-based," he said. "Downmarket is still a predominantly commission-based model, and I don't see that changing in the near term."
What MetLife is focused on, regardless of segment, is disclosure and transparency. "To the extent that there's any commission or any form of compensation being paid - whether it's to the broker or any of the technology platforms - we focus on disclosure and transparency very seriously," Tadros said. "That puts the customer and the employer in the driver's seat in terms of evaluating their intermediary relationships."
Tadros offered some of the most concrete examples yet from a major carrier on how artificial intelligence is restructuring workflow inside the group benefits market and what it means for how brokers spend their time.
He pointed first to MetLife's structured settlements business, where AI has eliminated 80 to 90 percent of the manual, paper-heavy processing work that previously consumed advisor time. The result, he said, is faster turnaround, faster speed to market, and advisors freed up for higher-value client conversations.
In the group benefits space, the transformation is equally significant and already at scale. MetLife covers approximately 50 million people and their dependents, and Tadros said the company is deploying AI-driven enrollment guidance that walks individual employees through personalized benefit selections in 10 to 15 minutes.
"Historically, that was done by sometimes boots on the ground - the person in the cafeteria, sometimes with a call center," he said. "We are now starting to do this with technology at scale." He said more than two million people will go through this AI-guided enrollment experience, receiving a personalized shopping list of benefit options based on their individual circumstances and what their employer offers.
For brokers, Tadros said the implication is that technology is already taking over the employee-level advisory function that many intermediaries also provided, allowing brokers to refocus on the employer-level plan design conversations where their expertise is harder to replicate.
Tadros used dental insurance to illustrate how data is elevating the quality of broker recommendations. Historically, he said, brokers compared dental plans based primarily on network size - the raw count of in-network dentists.
MetLife has now introduced a quality metric that measures which dentists in a network practice more preventive dentistry, driving better long-term health outcomes and lower claims costs. "Sophisticated brokers look at that and are starting to be more sophisticated in their advice of which dental carrier they should use," Tadros said. "Technology is playing a part in the advisory piece."
At the smaller employer end of the market, the technology shift is about speed and integration. A quoting and enrollment process that previously took three to four weeks of elapsed time and more than 50 hours of human effort, he said, can now happen near-instantaneously through application programming interface (API)-connected workflows between carriers and benefit administration platforms.
"If you're a broker, you need to get on the bandwagon," Tadros said. "You need to get the right carrier partners to integrate. And we're very focused on those integrations because we think that's going to drive volume."
Beyond market dynamics and technology, Tadros returned to what he described as the industry's underlying purpose - closing the protection gap.
"People aren't buying enough protection," he said. "It's not a category that people wake up wanting to purchase. They only realize they don't have it when they need it."
He argued that a lack of understanding about what coverage is available, why it matters, and what it costs is a root cause of underinsurance in the US workforce. Again, he points to technology as offering the clearest path to closing it.
MetLife's 2026 Employee Benefit Trends Study found that 83 percent of employees cite rising living expenses and medical costs as their top stressors, while financial confidence has fallen to its lowest level since 2012. That financial vulnerability, Tadros said, makes the stakes of closing the confusion gap higher than ever.
"As an industry - whether you're carriers or intermediaries - there's a societal need to close that protection gap," he said. "And we think the way to it is through closing that confusion gap. That's what I tell my nine-year-old when she asks me what I do for a living."
