After enrollment closes, benefit leaders put real effort into keeping employees engaged, through educational campaigns, nudges, and reminders. However, for most benefit categories, engagement is episodic by design. Employees make their elections and coverage begins. Absent a qualifying event, there’s little reason to return until the following year.
Consumer health accounts, like Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs), Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs), and commuter benefits function differently.
Employees come back to these accounts without being asked. A child gets sick. A prescription changes mid-year. A procedure gets scheduled. Because these moments have real financial consequences for the employee, they are motivated to keep returning to the benefits experience year-round.
That kind of purposeful, unprompted engagement is rare, and with how difficult it is to earn sustained attention, it deserves to be treated as a strategic asset.
A category that has outgrown its original framing
The consumer health account conversation has historically stayed operationally focused, and for good reason. Contribution accuracy, eligibility, compliance, and claims processing are requirements that benefits teams manage with expertise. But the category has quietly moved beyond that framing.
By the end of 2024, more than 39 million HSAs held nearly $147 billion in assets — a scale that reflects how embedded these accounts have become in how employees manage their finances.
Consumer health accounts have become an important part of how employees manage household budgets, long-term savings, and financial decisions that extend far beyond enrollment season
For HSAs especially, the expectations have shifted. A growing number of employees aren’t just asking how to spend their balance; they want to know how to grow it, invest it, and fit it into a broader financial picture. Managed investing, self-directed options, and brokerage-style experiences are now part of modern HSA administration.
Yet despite growing interest in the investment opportunity, only about 10% of HSAs currently hold invested assets. That gap isn’t a lack of interest. It’s often a gap in experience.
What those moments are saying
Each time an employee checks a balance before scheduling care, thinks through a contribution change, or submits a reimbursement, something meaningful is happening. They’re engaged, not because HR prompted them, but because they have a real reason to be. That context is valuable and often underused.
Consider FSAs: EBRI’s analysis of more than 3.2 million accounts found that 85% of FSA holders took a distribution during the year — clear evidence of active, year-round engagement. Yet roughly half still forfeited funds, averaging $441. Employees are showing up but the experience isn’t always meeting them where they are.
The experience employees have in those moments matters. When a consumer health account sits outside the rest of the benefits program — separate login, vendor, and support path — the information an employee needs to feel confident is scattered. The payroll deductions funding the account live in one system. The plan paired with it lives in another. The balance they’re checking has no visible connection to either. Functionally, it works. But functionality and value aren’t the same thing, and the moments when employees are actively engaged with their healthcare finances are precisely when a benefits program has the most to offer.
The moments when employees are actively engaged with their healthcare finances are precisely when a benefits program has the most to offer.
What changes when it’s all in one place
Bringing consumer health accounts into the same experience changes those interactions.
When an employee can see their balance alongside their coverage and additional programs, the picture becomes clearer without any extra effort. They don’t have to piece together information across systems, and administrators don’t either. The data that informs decisions lives in a single benefits administration platform, and the experience employees have throughout the year reflects that cohesion.
That clarity builds confidence and drives employees to engage with their accounts more deliberately. They consider investment options they might have otherwise overlooked and make better use of funds designed to work in their favor. For benefits teams, consolidating vendors reduces coordination overhead and gives administrators a single source of truth rather than a collection of separate reports. For brokers and consultants, a simpler, more connected experience is a tangible and differentiated client outcome.
According to MetLife’s 2024 Employee Benefit Trends Study, 73% of employees say benefits integration is important to them. The expectation for a connected experience isn’t emerging; it’s already here.
Why annual enrollment is the right moment for
this conversation
Annual enrollment is a natural time to step back and evaluate not just the accounts employees choose, but the experience that surrounds them.
The honest question for many organizations is whether the current setup is positioned to capture the engagement these consumer health accounts already have. The accounts exist, and employees are returning to them. The potential value — for employees building financial confidence and for employers seeing stronger participation, tax efficiency, and easier administrative oversight — is real. What often stands between that potential and the actual outcome is an experience not originally designed for year-round engagement.
Annual enrollment is the moment to align employees’ benefits experience with the engagement that’s happening throughout the year.
Consumer health accounts sit at an unusual intersection of benefits administration, employee financial well-being, and genuine ongoing engagement. Bringing them into a connected benefits experience is how organizations start realizing the full value of a benefit employees already choose to return to. The engagement doesn’t need to be manufactured. It just needs somewhere worth going.
See what consumer health accounts look like inside a connected benefits experience. ➔ Request a demo