Behind-the-scenes of Ciphr’s successful expansion into the benefits arena

Welcome back to my blog. It’s been a while since my last one, because my team and I have been wholly focused on crucial product and service improvements we’re planning for our customers for 2025. I’ll give you a sneak peek of all that later on.

But first, I want to share news of our latest acquisition: Avantus Employee Benefits . I’m thrilled to welcome the whole Avantus team, led ably by Philip Curtis , to the Ciphr family.

Not only are they a brilliant team with a brilliant product, but our customers have told us time and time again that they want to be able to buy a benefits solution from us. In fact, at our most recent Customer Advisory Group (CAG) session this autumn, it was the second-most requested feature. This acquisition is evidence that, yet again, we’re listening to – and delivering on – what our customers want from us.

Benefits packages are a crucial part of organisations’ employee value propositions (EVP) and, therefore, how they attract, retain, and reward their people. With benefits now part of our offering, we can deliver everything that our customers need to support their people, at every stage of the employee lifecycle.

When it comes to expanding into a new product or service area, there’s always that debate between buy or build.

Is it better to buy, or acquire, a suitable business – one that has deep knowledge of that product area, an established customer base (and profit record), and has ambitions to grow?

Or would that investment be better spent on devoting more engineering time to developing new products in-house – ones that are tailor-made to complement your existing software?

As with so many things in business, there’s no definitive answer. Every business, and every situation, is unique. For us, in this case, at this time, buying in the expertise was the right decision. It was the quickest route to market, and we didn’t have the internal knowledge?to build the product ourselves. Instead, we’re focusing on what we do well – building more effective, more insightful analytics functionality, which we’ll be rolling out in Q1 next year. Look out for more news in the new year.

Any successful acquisition rests on building strong, trusting relationships. We’ve done that with Avantus over the past seven months, and I’m delighted that it’s finally come to fruition.

Relationships are also critical in welcoming the employees of an acquired business into the wider parent company. This is my 14th merger or acquisition, so I know a bit about how to make the process run smoothly. But, even with all my previous experience, I’ve been impressed by Philip’s (Avantus’ CEO) prioritisation of the wellbeing of his people above all else.

He choreographed the support and activities of the first week with them top of mind, with a highly detailed onboarding plan that brings together both parties to give Avantus’s people the information, support, and emotional space they need to acclimatise to this news. It really does take a huge amount of work across the board – from our finance, people and ELT teams to the senior leaders of Avantus – to make any acquisition a success. A big and sincere thanks to all those involved, and for putting Avantus’s people at the heart of all our efforts.

I’m so excited about what it’s store for Ciphr next year – for our people, and for our customers. In 2023, we spent time really listening to our customers and fully understanding their needs. So we knew what our priorities were when we started changing the business. This year, 2024, was all about building. Building new products and enhancements to our existing solutions. And building the internal structures and processes we needed to deliver to our customers what we’d promised.

2025 is all about delivering. Delivering on our promises. And delivering market-leading – even, market-changing – solutions that amplify the impact of HR teams and power-up payroll departments. It’s going to be another exciting 12 months ahead for Ciphr, so watch this space.

What are your goals for next year? How do you anticipate the HR and payroll landscape will shift in the next 12 months? Drop me a message below – I’d love to hear your views.