Uncommon Benefit Partners is an independent health & welfare benefits consulting firm for self-funded employers. Founded in 2024 out of MIT, headquartered in Boston.
Uncommon came from a simple observation: benefit risk is unsustainable, costs keep climbing, regulations grow more onerous, and trust is hard to build. Our founder and CEO Neil Larson developed the thesis for Uncommon at MIT, after years working in nearly every seat in the industry. Uncommon is his answer — a firm built to restore alignment, transparency, and accountability to employee benefits. Today, that thesis shapes how we work with every client.
Uncommon Benefit Partners always work on a flat fee, and never take any money from carriers or vendors.
No backend deals with carriers or vendors. The only money flowing into the firm comes from the employers we work for. We always work on a flat fee, so if we save you more money than expected, we still make the same amount. The math we publish never has to be defended against a competing relationship. Because we’re independent, we can be transparent, and we can push our vision of transparency forward for our clients.
Employer benefit costs have grown roughly 6% a year per employee while brokers and carriers profit from backend dealing and a reporting framework that’s structurally blind to most of the dollars in play. We hold your partners accountable by surfacing missed opportunities, revealing the arrangements standard reporting conceals, and giving your committee the evidence to push back on incentive structures that haven’t served the employer in years.
We anchor every finding in data we can verify, your 5500 filings, your carrier statements, your plan documents, plus public disclosures and industry benchmarks where they’re useful. Any claim that ships in a report can be traced to its source on the page; anything that can’t be sourced doesn’t ship.
Our internal tooling ingests Form 5500 filings, compares vendor contracts, and surfaces anomalies across years of carrier statements within hours of receiving them. Reconstructions that take incumbent firms months take us a day, not because we’re clever, but because we built the firm around the tooling instead of bolting it on.
A human reviews every step. The AI does the ingestion, the contract comparisons, and the math. The insights and the decisions are ours, and one of us signs off at every stage before anything leaves the firm. AI does the grunt work; we do the thinking.
Two decades in benefits, from every seat that touches the dollar. MIT Sloan MBA. Former CSO at Benefit Science (acquired). Credentialed actuary at Aon and Gallagher. Former Head of Benefits at JBS. Founded Uncommon on the conviction the industry needs transparency.
Leads the CTR carrier and vendor outreach. Cross-functional analyst across client engagements, healthcare data, plan optimization, benchmarking and the AI tooling that powers every Commission Transparency Report.
Neil’s career has run through every major position in benefits. He has priced the risk as an actuary, built an analytics platform as a CSO, and sat in the buyer’s chair as the Head of Benefits for a Fortune 500 company. The conclusions he reached from each seat are why Uncommon exists.
Pricing, valuation, and consulting actuary at two global brokerages.
Ran the benefits function from the buyer’s seat. Sat through the renewals and the carrier pitches with a fiduciary line item to defend.
Built the analytics platform behind employer-side benefits oversight.
Built the firm out of MIT to fix what every seat had made obvious: the industry needs an advisor who is transparent and accountable.
Built on top of our expertise and experience. Every plan we work on gets shaped around its own filings, its own vendor stack, and the specific questions the committee is actually trying to answer. Every engagement is tailored to fit what you actually need.
