Benefits brokers who master the art of holistic, consultative conversations with plan sponsors are sitting on one of the biggest growth opportunities in the group benefits industry today.
That’s a key takeaway from Tony Greene, President of NFP Executive Benefits in New York, speaking to Insurance Business Benefits, following the release of NFP's latest executive benefits research.
Greene says that the industry is undergoing a fundamental shift that is redefining who "executive benefits" are actually for and demanding a more sophisticated approach from the brokers who place them.
Greene's first challenge is to the terminology that still frames much of the market.
"I take issue frequently with the term ‘executive benefits’ because that is a 30-year-old term," he said. "Now we're really talking about the highly comped employee group."
In practice, that means employees earning somewhere between $175,000 and $225,000 in total compensation; a cohort that is growing fast as employers recognize that their most valuable people are not always sitting in the C-suite.
The core problem for this group, Greene explained, is structural: under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), there is a hard cap on what an individual can contribute to a 401(k) each year. For someone earning well above that threshold, the math simply does not work.
"Most financial planners will tell you, you need to put about 15 percent of your income away to get to successful retirement," Greene said. "So in this world, if all you have is a 401(k), you need an additional savings vehicle."
Non-qualified deferred compensation plans – which sit outside ERISA's contribution limits and allow pre-tax deferrals distributed at a set future date – are increasingly the answer, Greene said, and they are rapidly moving from the Fortune 500 into the mid-market.
NFP's research found that 49 percent of organizations say their executive benefits fall short on flexibility, with demand expanding well beyond the traditional executive population.
Greene sees two forces driving that pressure simultaneously: the so-called silver tsunami of Baby Boomers retiring en masse before the end of 2030, and a smaller Gen X cohort behind them that employers are desperate to retain.
"As the baby boomers move out, there's not as big a population to fill those seats," he said. "So the folks that are good are becoming incredibly important."
The most sophisticated employers, Greene argued, are beginning to think about benefits not as a single stack applied uniformly across a workforce, but as a set of tools calibrated to where employees actually are in their lives.
A 40-year-old with school-age children has different priorities from a 55-year-old eyeing retirement in a decade – and both are different again from a 25-year-old high-performing engineer.
"If you've seen one executive benefits program, you've seen exactly one," Greene said. "Every company is a little different. The facts and circumstances drive it."
When working with a client whose senior cohort was approaching "deaccumulation" – the phase of drawing down retirement assets rather than building them – Greene identified that taxes were the dominant concern.
Rather than redesigning the benefits package or increasing spend, his team restructured an existing bonus pool using a Section 162 bonus plan, which allows employers to pay life insurance premiums on behalf of selected executives as a tax-deductible business expense, to create tax-efficient distributions at retirement.
"We presented it to a group of 30 executives and almost universally – yeah, I'll take that one," he said. "We didn't spend any more money."
For a younger cohort, the calculus shifts entirely. A non-qualified deferred compensation plan with an in-service distribution account, for example, can function as a powerful college-savings vehicle for employees in their 40s – allowing pre-tax dollars to be directed toward tuition costs at a future date.
"That's really great because you can have an in-service distribution account that you can't have anywhere else," Greene said. "But that goes back to education."
NFP's 2026 research flagged education as a critical gap: employees often do not know what flexibility already exists within their benefits.
Greene said he recently sat down with a long-standing client and pointed out that a specific cohort in their workforce – identifiable through census data by age band – almost certainly had college-bound children and was not being told the non-qualified plan could help.
"They're like, oh yeah, we hadn't thought about that," he said.
Greene is highly enthusiastic about the role of benefits brokers in this evolving landscape.
The opportunity, he argued, is not simply to sell new products – it is to reposition as a trusted strategic partner at the highest level of a client organization.
"The opportunity for the benefits broker to enhance their relationship with their plan sponsors has never been higher because they sit in a trusted position," he said. "They're delivering one of the most important and costly things that a company does."
The starting point, Greene said, is learning to ask better questions. "They need to learn how to have a more holistic conversation with their plan sponsor, with their client about – hey, what are your actual business issues? Because once you get past payroll and sometimes real estate, benefits are the third biggest spend for almost every organization."
That conversation, he said, should connect directly to business outcomes. NFP's research identified retention of key employees as the single highest priority for employers.
"If you've got a revolving door in your key employees, your growth is going to stagnate because you're constantly retraining," Greene said. Brokers who can frame executive and highly compensated employee benefits as a retention and succession tool – rather than a compliance or compensation line item – are the ones who will move up what Greene calls the "trusted advisor ladder."
"It's not that they need to become experts in any of this. What they need to become is a knowledgeable person around – hey, you should be thinking about this," he said. From there, brokers can either expand their own capabilities or partner with specialist firms. "I think both models are going to be wildly successful," Greene said.
The pitch to plan sponsors, he added, works best when it is frictionless. "The less friction you create with a new idea, the higher velocity you're going to get it deployed."
Greene identified long-term care as one of the most active conversations NFP is having with plan sponsors right now and one that he believes is routinely mishandled by leaving it to open enrollment.
"It's a complex product and it's very important. You want people to be able to sit and think about it, not be looking at whether they buy prepaid legal services and pet insurance and all the other things that you do during open enrollment."
Running the conversation off-cycle, Greene said, produces measurably better uptake and he believes it constitutes a genuine social good. "Everybody needs to be thinking about that particular time in their life."
Longevity is a key part of that framing. Actuarial assumptions are shifting and life insurance policies are now often written with mortality coverage extending to age 120, a figure that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
The downstream planning implications – for retirement income, healthcare, and long-term care coverage alike – are substantial, and Greene argued that advisors who start those conversations with clients in their 50s, while there is still meaningful runway to act, are delivering disproportionate value.
He also urged brokers and their clients to review what they are offering to ensure it meets the needs of employees.
"Don't be afraid to ask the open-ended question – are your benefits at this level for this group operating the way you want them to? Are you getting the benefit that you want? Do people understand what they have access to?"
"Let's continue to be consultative," he said. "And let's continue to maybe ask some questions that make us a little uncomfortable because we may not know the answer. But once we get the answer, let's get to work and figure out how to best solve for it."
