Evolutionary Awards 2025 – MyBento: evolutions in advice

Category: Evolutions in advice

Describe your evolution:

MyBento: Redefining Employee Benefits for South Africa’s SMEs

MyBento is a category-defining embedded finance platform that is transforming the employee benefits landscape in South Africa, starting with the segment that needs it most: small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

These businesses employ more than 60% of South Africa’s workforce, yet over 70% of them offer no employee benefits due to high costs, complexity, and administrative burden. At MyBento, we’ve reimagined the employee benefits experience with an integrated SaaS platform that is affordable, locally attuned, and digitally intuitive. Our technology simplifies benefit access, bridges the gap between employees and financial advisors, and reduces manual processes for brokers and HR professionals.

The result: a scalable, automated ecosystem that empowers people with tools for financial health, right where they get paid.

The Bigger Picture: Bridging Access, Equity, and Financial Wellbeing

The MyBento mission is rooted in addressing a systemic issue: South Africa’s benefits gap. Only 37% of working South Africans contribute to a retirement fund. The youth, SMEs, and lower-income employees are consistently underserved, even though financial stress is a top driver of poor mental health, absenteeism, and high staff turnover. Traditional brokers and product providers, focused on corporates, lack the tools and business models to serve SMEs efficiently.

MyBento fills this gap with a platform that combines: –

• Deep local payroll integration,
• Digitised onboarding journeys,
• Self-service employee access to benefits,
• Advisor visibility and automation of compliance and admin steps.

The Evolution: Digitising Employee-Centric Retirement Benefit Access

A recent innovation that exemplifies our evolutionary impact is the launch of our fully digitised Retirement Annuity (RA) onboarding experience. Traditionally, signing up a company for RAs involved paper forms, multiple email threads, HR bottlenecks, and advisor follow-ups, often taking 5+ weeks to onboard a group of employees.

With MyBento, the process now takes just 5 days. Here’s how:

• Employees receive a simple app-based invite and login.
• FICA/KYC documents can be uploaded or pulled from existing MyBento records.
• AI tools validate documents in real-time.
• Advisors are looped in when personalised advice is needed, never for admin queries.
• The system auto-fills application forms using existing HR and payroll data.
• The final application is digitally signed within the app, approved by the provider, and auto-synced to payroll.
• MyBento then auto-generates monthly contribution reports and delivers them to the broker and/or provider.

The Employee Experience: Empowerment Through Simplicity

For employees, this shift is transformational. Instead of being passive recipients of complex and often misunderstood benefits, they now:

• Understand their benefit options in plain language.
• See clear disclosures of platform and advice fees.
• Have access to a retirement calculator to make informed decisions.
• Upload documents and sign applications without printing, scanning or emailing.
• Get direct access to an advisor when needed.

This autonomy gives employees ownership of their financial wellbeing, while removing common frustrations like repeating document submissions or chasing HR for updates.

The Advisor and HR Experience: Admin Eliminated, Value Elevated

For financial advisors, MyBento eliminates the “noise”: those countless hours spent chasing forms, documents, or clarifications. Instead, they spend time where they add real value: helping individuals make smart financial choices. For HR, we remove the handholding traditionally required to run a benefits programme. What once needed hours of internal coordination and email management now runs on auto-pilot without sacrificing oversight or quality of delivery.

Led by Women, Built by Experts

MyBento is co-founded and co-led by Claudia Snyman, a seasoned entrepreneur with a decade of experience scaling tech and fintech ventures. As a women-led business with a diverse founding team blending expertise in fintech, UX, product, and systems architecture, MyBento presents an attractive solution to SME’s wanting to provide meaningful benefits to their employees.

Describe the impact your evolution has had in response to its identified challenges and targeted outcomes.

The impact of MyBento’s evolution has been meaningful, measurable, and multi-layered, touching every stakeholder in the employee benefits value chain.

For Employees: Empowerment and Access

• Reduced friction: Sign-up journeys that took weeks now take minutes.
• Increased participation: By demystifying benefits and streamlining access, we’ve seen a 90%+ completion rate for RA sign-ups.
• Improved financial literacy: Our built-in retirement calculator helps employees understand long-term value and affordability.
• Stress reduction: With fewer admin hurdles and better transparency, employees feel more in control and supported.

For Employers and HR Teams: Time Saved, Teams Retained

• Up to 60% reduction in admin hours for HR teams managing new benefit sign-ups.
• Improved employee retention and satisfaction as benefits become a seamless part of the employment experience.
• HR teams no longer act as intermediaries between employees and financial service providers—freeing them to focus on culture, not compliance.

For Brokers and Advisors: Better Use of Time and Skills

• Up to 80% reduction in admin hours spent on follow-ups and manual document checks.
• Advisors are brought into the process only when needed; no more time lost to chasing documents or fielding general admin queries.
• The MyBento system automates report generation, KYC document checks, and payroll interfacing, making SME clients more viable for brokers previously unable to service them at scale.

For South Africa’s Broader Ecosystem

• This shift isn’t just operational, it’s social. Every employee who gains access to a retirement fund or medical aid through MyBento takes a step toward long-term financial security, reducing household debt, and improving national economic resilience.
• A recent SME client onboarded 40 employees into retirement savings in just 5 days, a milestone that would have been nearly impossible under traditional systems.

By combining employee empowerment, advisor enablement, and HR automation, MyBento is actively evolving the employee benefits landscape, turning a historically broken process into a seamless, scalable, and inclusive system that improves outcomes for all.

Supporting Documentation >