Overview
One of the ten largest U.S. banks with 1,500 branches and over 40,000 employees had a company-wide charge to automate internal processes and establish a best practices environment for human resources.

Problem
The bank faced several challenges related to their benefits offerings. Rising benefits costs were significantly increasing the employees' share of the burden. While the bank offered pre-tax commuter and health programs to help employees better absorb these extra costs, the programs experienced extremely low employee participation rates. In addition, these programs were time intensive for the company to maintain.

The bank needed to streamline the processes around their benefits and offer programs that would be embraced by their employees.

Solution
After conducting an internal audit of best practices and an extensive vendor evaluation, the bank selected WageWorks as the best-in-class provider of employer-sponsored programs to administer the bank's pre-tax commuter and health care benefits.

The bank implemented WageWorks Commuter Program, which offers national public transportation, vanpool and parking options with automatic online management and home delivery for transit pass and voucher fulfillment.

WageWorks' health and dependent care solution provided the bank's employees a simple enrollment process, online access to their spending accounts, and a convenient Health Care Card, allowing employees to pay directly from their spending accounts at the point of purchase.

The Commuter and Health Care programs used employee data exchange protocols, which gave employees the added convenience of signing up through the bank's existing online benefits enrollment system.

Results
In its first year with the WageWorks Commuter Program, the bank increased participation by almost 15 percent, and flexible spending account participation more than doubled. Not only did participation rise, but so did the amount employees contributed to their accounts. With more employees using more of their benefits to reduce their costs, employee satisfaction with benefits increased despite overall decline in the benefits environment. Both programs delivered increased FICA savings for the bank.