The company behind MyBento

A South African employee benefits and workplace platform, built in Cape Town for the employers who have to run benefits without a benefits team.

Why we built it

We were startup founders before this. When we wanted to offer our own employees a proper benefits package and sat down to design one ourselves, we found out how genuinely hard it is. We assumed somebody must already have solved this. Nobody had. That is where MyBento started.

The thing we kept coming back to is when the decision happens. Once a salary has landed in someone's account, an employee who wants to put something into a retirement annuity, or improve their medical aid, has to go and arrange it themselves. Most people never get round to it. Not because they do not want to, but because of the friction between deciding and doing.

At the payslip moment, before the money is paid out, that same decision takes a minute. You can see what it costs, see what it does to your take home pay, and get advice from someone qualified before you commit. The employer does not have to fund any of it to make it possible. They just have to make it available.

That is the whole idea, and it is why MyBento is a people business before it is a software one. Improving a company's workforce by improving the lives of the people in it, and doing it at the one moment when acting is easy.

What MyBento does

MyBento is an online employee leave, wellness, remuneration and benefits management platform. It brings benefits administration, leave, reimbursements, payslips and wellness into a single place that employees manage themselves, rather than through a queue of requests to whoever handles HR.

We are provider agnostic. Existing benefits stay, and existing brokers and advisors can be brought onto the platform rather than replaced. Their profile, contact details and fees are published inside MyBento, so employees can deal with them directly.

MyBento integrates with SimplePay, Deel Local Payroll (previously PaySpace) and Labournet Payroll (previously Psiber), and with Xero for expense claims. Employers who do not use one of these can still run MyBento in an offline mode that reports changes to payroll administrators before each cut-off.

Who we work with

Being provider agnostic only means something if you can see who that includes. These are the providers our clients' employees hold products with through MyBento today.

Medical aid, gap cover and health insurance
Discovery, Momentum, Stratum Benefits
Retirement and savings
Sygnia, Acravest, Allan Gray, Gryphon
Life, disability and group cover
Sanlam, Momentum, Discovery, Old Mutual, Capital Alliance (Liberty Group Risk)
Wellness, counselling and advice
Lyra, Ollie Health, Strove, Hello Doctor, Zoie Health, EasyDoc
Pet insurance
Fursure

This list is not fixed. We add providers where a client needs one we do not yet work with, and an employer arriving with benefits already in place can keep them: existing products can move across to our brokers, or the existing broker can be brought onto the platform instead.

What MyBento is not

MyBento is not a payroll system. It is the layer your team actually touches, and it syncs the changes that matter back to the payroll system you already run. In our own words, from our FAQs:

MyBento is the user interface that brings your employee experience and benefits offering to life for your team. We integrate with your payroll system to sync any payslip impacting changes to payroll.

It also does not replace an outsourced payroll provider. Where a client uses one, MyBento works alongside them and digitises parts of what they already do.

Who MyBento is for

South African employers, from small teams up to substantial companies. When we say SME we mean it broadly: plenty of our clients are not small.

If you already offer benefits, that is often the best fit rather than a reason not to call. At that point the difficulty is rarely choosing benefits, it is administering them: enrolments, plan changes, contribution updates, new starters, leavers, and the reconciliation sitting behind all of it. That is the work MyBento takes over. Employees manage their own plans, change a contribution or update cover themselves, instead of every change routing through one person in HR.

Existing products can move across to our brokers, and an existing broker or advisor can be brought onto the platform instead. Some of the clients we have made the biggest difference to already had a benefits programme running when they came to us.

MyBento is sold to employers rather than to individuals. If you have come here looking for benefits for yourself, your employer is the place to start.

What we take on

The part customers do not see is most of the work. Onboarding the employer, getting them set up with each provider, running the application process, providing financial advice through our brokers, closing the loop back to the employee so they know where things stand, and updating payroll automatically so none of it has to be re-keyed.

The reaction we hear most often is some version of "this is exactly what we needed" - usually at the point someone realises they do not have to contribute toward benefits in order to offer them.

Recognition

Where our work has been recognised by people other than us.

MyBento is also backed by Next176, and our approach to flexible benefits has been covered by The Open Letter.

The company

MyBento is the trading name of Bento Technologies (Pty) Ltd, a South African private company founded in 2020 and registered as 2020/929401/07. We are based at 15 Howe Street, Cape Town, 7925.

The company was founded by four people: Claudia Snyman, Dennis Williams, Ross Horak and Bryn Divey. Claudia Snyman and Dennis Williams serve as the company's directors.

MyBento is a Juristic Representative of Approach Administration (Pty) Ltd, an authorised Financial Services Provider whose licence is FSP 23579. That arrangement is what allows us to provide intermediary services: helping employers and their employees enter into or amend agreements with financial services providers, whether directly or through a broker.

MyBento and other companies named "Bento"

MyBento (mybento.net) is a South African employee benefits platform, the trading name of Bento Technologies (Pty) Ltd in Cape Town. Several unrelated products share the name "Bento". MyBento is not affiliated with any of them:

  • Bento.me, link-in-bio pages
  • BentoBox (getbento.com), restaurant websites and ordering, United States
  • BentoML, machine learning model serving
  • Bento for Business, corporate expense cards, United States

MyBento serves South African employers only. If you are looking for employee benefits administration for a South African business, you are in the right place.

Talk to us

Book a demo and we will show you what MyBento looks like with your team and your benefits in it.

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