The One With Peter Varga from Kyndryl: Why Global Benefits Administration Is Still Being Run on Spreadsheets

Benefits technology has been around for 15+ years. So why are global teams still managing admin in Excel?

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About the guest

Peter Varga,
EMEA Total Rewards Delivery Associate Director at Kyndryl

Peter Varga has 20 years of experience in HR Shared Services, with deep specialism in compensation, benefits, and payroll operations. His career spans in-house leadership roles across Citi, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Kyndryl, as well as two and a half years on the consulting side at Strada, where he developed a system-agnostic methodology specifically for benefit administration.

Summary

Peter joins Carl and David for a frank conversation on why global benefits administration is still, in most organisations, held together with spreadsheets and manual effort — and what it would actually take to fix that.

Topics on the table:

• Why benefits technology is underfunded compared to payroll and HRIS
• The maturity gap: benefits tech is 15 years old vs payroll's 30+
• The ROI threshold problem for smaller headcount markets
• Phased implementation vs full platform rollout
• The hidden complexity inside "benefits administration"
• AI's role in reducing implementation cost and time

00:00 — Benefits Is Where Payroll Fails

"Benefits is often the area where payroll fails. It is the area where things are, mistakes are made."

• Carl, VP of Benefits Design at Ben

00:10 — Nobody Has Time for Three-Month Implementations

"Benefits, policies, and everything is changing rapidly. Nobody has time to wait for three months to implement something as a new benefit."

• Peter

03:49 — Measuring Benefits Is Genuinely Hard

"It leads to the question of how do you measure benefits in the first place."

• Peter

09:22 — Companies Spend 10–30% of Payroll on Benefits and Manage It in Excel

"Companies are spending anywhere between 10 to 30% of payroll on these programmes, and yet they don't have systems — it's still being managed in spreadsheets."

• David

16:55 — The Phased Approach: Data Without the Bells and Whistles

"Use the big headcount ROI to fund a limited implementation for smaller markets."

• Peter

20:48 — 90% of Benefits Share the Same Processes

"90% of benefits can be described by a combination of the same underlying processes."

• Peter

31:04 — You Cannot Skip the Cataloguing Work

"You can't avoid the work of cataloguing it. If you don't have that piece right, you have no chance."

• Peter