Want free healthcare or petrol with your job? Kiwi overhauls employee benefits platform to ditch clunky reimbursements

Extraordinary’s CEO and founder, Steve Zinsli.

Reimbursing is cumbersome. Ask anyone who’s moved cities for work and as they’re biting their nails weeks later gets told by the person in accounts, “The wheels move slowly here”. Or ask Steve Zinsli.

He thinks the way companies reimburse is often so bad, he set up his own platform.

“Reimbursements are lame.”

His company HealthNow is rebranding today as Extraordinary. It lets companies provide employees with a debit card they can spend in real-time on a variety of benefits.

He says the Extraordinary platform lets companies support workers with immediate needs, such as public transport rides and healthcare.

Zinsli, who started HealthNow in Auckland in 2021, says more than 100 companies are on the platform now, with about 12,500 active cardholders.

With a background in podiatry, Zinsli started HealthNow after considering ways to improve healthcare reimbursement.

“Initially, it was all about making healthcare more affordable.”

But now a more complex range of benefits was available.

The rebrand today is partly a response to what the company calls growing customer demand to make rewarding employees more flexible.

Zinsli says companies can tailor their own Extraordinary plan. Most will likely exclude gambling, nicotine, weapons or booze from the benefits.

But many, he says, will include healthcare and transport benefits.

After all, healthy employees who get to work on time are probably of some use to their employers.

“What you’re actually saying is: We care about your health, we care about public transport, we care about your family, we care about you,” he says.

“What you’re able to do as an organisation is tell all these different stories, in your own way.”

The average spending cap is about $500 a person a year, he says.

The payment cards can only be spent on goods and services the employer allows.

Extraordinary makes its money from an account fee Zinsli calls “super-modest” at about $5 per employee. But when big organisations sign on, the economies of scale they bring could reduce the fee.

He says Steel & Tube, ASB and Booth Logistics are among customers who have already partnered with HealthNow.

The cards are currently co-branded debit cards and Zinsli aims to get virtual payment systems up soon.

Where employers already have deals with healthcare providers, Zinsli says Extraordinary doesn’t have to displace those deals, because it potentially offers a much wider range of benefits.

Zinsli said since HealthNow launched, he’d seen how the platform could solve a broader list of problems and simplify quite complex processes for customers.

For now, he’s focused on Australasia.

Zinsli aims to have 40,000 end users on Extraordinary within two years, and eventually reach 3 million users.

Changing workplace trends

Jason Ennor, MyHR New Zealand co-founder and co-chief executive, said since the Covid-19 pandemic arrived many companies had shifted their attitudes on employee health and welfare.

“Since 2020, we’ve seen a real shift on wellness and well-being.”

He said broadly speaking, people now talked more openly about previously taboo employment relations topics and the role of companies in looking after staff outside of work.

Ennor said that shift inspired diverse reactions, with some people, and especially older workers, thinking companies had gone too far in indulging work from home or other new trends.

But he said others felt it was logical to acknowledge “issues outside work will directly affect your work performance, your engagement at work”.

Ennor said there was also much more widespread discussion now about employee assistance programmes (EAPs), especially at small and medium-sized New Zealand businesses.