Willis Towers Watson has renamed its exchange business to broaden its focus, giving it a new consumer-facing brand name of Via Benefits.
The change took place in mid-November. The firm’s OneExchange and Acclaris businesses are now known as Benefits Delivery and Administration (BDA) internally and Via Benefits to customers.
The BDA segment combines Willis Towers Watson’s administration, benefit accounts and exchange offerings for North American employers and plan sponsors, as well as Acclaris, a SaaS based-technology service for consumer-driven healthcare and reimbursement accounts.
The news is just a change in branding and does not represent a fundamental change in products or how Willis Towers Watson will conduct business, explains Kevin House, managing director of WTW in Detroit.
Using the term private benefit exchange in branding was “limiting in terms of what we do,” he explains, and the firm wanted to make sure it was “not self-limiting ourselves with our clients.”
It was limiting, he adds, because the firm’s internal business name was exchange solutions, but that encompassed everything form a completely customizable benefits administration platform for clients to an off-the-shelf private exchange.
“Having that underneath ‘exchange solutions’ didn’t fit because we do everything from an exchange to traditional health and welfare and then also support pensions,” he adds. “From a business … perspective, clearly that was a limiting theme and we wanted to get away from that and change [focus] to benefits delivery and administration.”
