The One With Peter Varga: Why Global Benefits Admin Is Still Running on Spreadsheets

Companies spend 10–30% of payroll on benefits. Most of them manage it in Excel.In this episode of Friends With Benefits, Carl and David sit down with Peter Varga — EMEA Total Rewards Delivery Associate Director at Kyndryl — to talk about why global benefits administration is still structurally underfunded, and what it actually takes to change that.Peter has 20 years in HR Shared Services. He built one of the first international benefits admin teams, catalogued 1,600 benefit plans across EMEA, APAC and LATAM at Citi, and developed a system-agnostic methodology for benefits transformation at Strada. He knows this space in a way most people don't.In this conversation:→ Why benefits technology always loses the budget fight against payroll→ The maturity gap: benefits tech is ~15 years old. Payroll is 30+→ Why implementing only for large headcount countries defeats the purpose→ The phased approach that gets you data without the bells and whistles→ What "benefits administration" actually contains — and why it's harder than it looks→ Why 90% of benefits globally share the same underlying processes→ How falling implementation costs could change the ROI calculation for smaller markets→ The cataloguing work you cannot skip before any technology goes liveFriends With Benefits is the essential podcast for Reward and Benefits leaders. New episodes every fortnight.🎧 Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube so you never miss an episode.Timestamps:00:00 Benefits is where payroll fails00:10 Why implementations take three months when they shouldn't01:18 Peter's background and 20 years in the space03:00 CIPD research: why companies don't measure benefits against their own objectives07:00 Why benefits is always the smaller fish in the systems ecosystem09:22 Companies spend 10–30% of payroll on benefits and manage it in spreadsheets13:15 Why global rollouts fail when they only cover the big countries16:55 The phased approach: data in the system without the bells and whistles20:04 What benefits administration actually contains20:48 The 90% rule: most benefits share the same underlying processes23:18 Terminology vs process — why "group life" and "death in service" are the same thing25:47 How AI could push implementation costs down significantly30:52 Practical steps for a global benefits transformation34:28 Peter's hot take