Ben Towers MBE: why employee benefits need more than just another HR platform

Ben Towers MBE has spent much of his career asking the same question: why are so many industries still doing things the hard way? It is the thinking that has taken him from launching businesses as a teenager to advising entrepreneurs and building technology companies. Today, as founder of employee benefits platform Happl, he is applying that same mindset to a sector he believes has been left behind.

“The employee benefits space is ridiculously under-innovated,” he says, without hesitation. For Ben, entrepreneurship was never about the title. What mattered to him was having the space to create things that genuinely help people out.

“What really excited me about entrepreneurship was being the master of your own destiny. You are never given anything. You have to build everything yourself, but you also get to build it exactly how you want. For me, it has always come down to making a difference.”

He does not define entrepreneurship by funding rounds or scaling metrics; he defines it by problem-solving. “An entrepreneurial mindset is really about how you think through problems and solve them. You can take that way of thinking into an industry that genuinely makes a difference and build something people actually need.”

Seeing friends and family struggle with mental health made him want to help, but he quickly realised he was not going to do that as a clinician. “I thought, ‘I am not a doctor, so I cannot help with treatment.’ But I started looking at where companies were already investing in employee wellbeing.” That search uncovered an industry spending billions on employee benefits while relying on processes that, in many cases, had not evolved for years.

“I realised around 15 to 20% of payroll is already spent on benefits. The opportunity was not to spend more money, it was to digitise the whole process, make it more efficient and ultimately direct more of that investment towards supporting employees.”

That is where Happl began. Rather than simply offering another benefits platform, Ben wants Happl to become the infrastructure behind how businesses manage benefits altogether. “We are creating the operating system for employee benefits. Everything from how companies choose benefits and roll them out, right through to enrolment, payroll, compliance and how employees actually interact with those benefits.”

The need only grows as businesses expand internationally. “Suddenly you are dealing with different providers, different tax systems, different compliance rules and different payroll requirements in every country. It becomes incredibly complicated.”

Happl’s job, he says, is to remove that complexity without creating more work for HR teams. AI plays a huge part in that vision, but Ben is careful not to present AI as a silver bullet.

“The biggest misconception is that businesses think they can install an AI platform and carry on exactly as they always have,” he explains. “You have got to give AI room to adapt. That might mean removing some benefits, introducing others and allowing the platform to personalise support around each individual. Otherwise you never really unlock the value.”

For Ben, AI is not about replacing HR professionals. “For me, the most exciting thing about AI in the HR space is that it allows HR practitioners and leaders to get back to the real reason they got into HR: to help people become the best they can be.”

Ironically, building cutting-edge technology has meant working around some very old technology. “As a tech founder, you want to go at 100 miles an hour launching great features, but you always have to be aware that the industry sometimes needs to go through its own journey before it is ready for new technology.”

For a founder who naturally wants to move quickly, that has required a different approach. “We spent a lot of time building different AI agents and flows to cater for the fact that most vendors do not have an API. We use different agents to cover that, to send emails, make phone calls and handle tasks, which means the admin work is still being done by the technology rather than by people.”

It also forced Ben to rethink one of the assumptions many founders make when entering an established market. “I probably underestimated just how unique and nuanced the benefits industry is. You cannot just walk into a sector and assume technology alone will fix everything. You have to understand how it really works first.”

The same openness shapes how he leads the business. Unlike many founders, Ben never climbed a traditional corporate ladder. “I have never really worked for somebody else, so I have never had a leadership blueprint to copy.”

Instead, he has learnt by surrounding himself with experienced people and being willing to listen. “I am not an experienced leader in the traditional sense, but that does not stop you becoming a good one. You learn from people around you, take the best ideas and keep improving.”

Inside Happl, regular conversations matter just as much as technology. “I want everyone having weekly or fortnightly one-to-ones with their managers to keep the pulse on what matters.”

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