ModrinumAbout
Set up in 2018 to do the half of the job nobody was doing
When people hear "employee benefits" they hear insurance broking: place the group policy, argue the premium down, send a renewal reminder. That is a real trade and there are people in Kolkata who do it well. It is also about a fortnight of work a year. The other fifty weeks are administrative, and in 2018 there was almost nobody selling those fifty weeks as a service. Modrinum exists to sell exactly that, and nothing else.
Founded, and privately held since.
People, across the operations, claims and client servicing desks.
One office, Salt Lake City, Kolkata. No franchise network.
Employers served in Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati and Pune.
How the firm is organised
Three desks, each with its own discipline, sitting in one room so a question crosses in a conversation rather than an email.
Benefits operations holds the member master. This is Excel work of the unglamorous kind: reconciling six hundred rows of additions and deletions against the payroll register, validating dependant records, catching a date of birth that would fail two years from now, issuing e-cards. When people say benefits administration is boring, this is the desk they mean, and it is the one that decides whether the rest of the year works.
Claims works the phone and the file. Pre-authorisations, query letters, deficiency closure, escalation to the insurer's corporate servicing team when a third-party administrator has stopped moving. Everyone on this desk has handled group mediclaim claims before, either at a TPA, a broker or a corporate HR desk, and speaks Bengali and English with Hindi useful for hospitals outside the state.
Client servicing and analytics owns the relationship and the numbers. Eight to ten employer accounts each, quarterly utilisation reviews presented to HR heads, renewal data prepared sixty days out, and the reporting itself built from TPA dumps where one hospital appears under four spellings and has to be cleaned before it can be counted.
How we are paid
A fee from the employer — either per covered employee per month or a fixed annual retainer, agreed in advance and not indexed to premium.
We take no commission or fee from insurers or third-party administrators for administering your scheme. That matters in a specific way: when we tell you a deduction was wrongly applied, or that one insurer's wording is worse than a cheaper competitor's, there is no arrangement behind the advice.
We also do not hold client premium funds at any point.
What we learned the hard way
In our second year the claims desk closed forty-one pre-authorisation follow-ups in a week, and twelve of them needed the same document: a legible note from the treating doctor stating the date of first diagnosis. We had been waiting for the TPA to ask for it. Now it is attached at intimation, before anyone asks. That single change moved median settlement from nine days to four. Almost everything we do well started as an irritation somebody bothered to count.
How we work
Fixed dates over good intentions
The endorsement file goes on the same day each month whether or not it is convenient. Ad hoc endorsements are the single largest cause of the "my wife isn't on the policy" call in month three.
Explain before, not after
Sub-limits belong in the enrolment communication, in language people read, not in a policy wording nobody opens. Ticket volume falls long before cover needs revising.
Count the recurring annoyance
If the same deficiency appears three times on an account, the fix is upstream. We change what goes in at intimation rather than getting faster at replying.
The employee hears from us
Outcomes, deductions and rejections are explained by the desk that handled the claim, in plain language, not relayed through an HR manager who does not know the answer either.
Report the awkward number
Where the claim register and the insurer's statement disagree, we resolve the difference rather than publishing the friendlier figure. Every pack states its own basis on the front page.
Say what we do not do
No tax advice, no underwriting, no premium handling, no clinical detail to HR. Scope creep in this trade produces silence at the moment it matters.
Where we work
Our office is in Block EP, Sector V, Salt Lake City — the same stretch of Kolkata where most of our clients' back offices and IT operations sit, which means a floor session or a claim visit is a short drive rather than a plan.
Beyond the city we administer schemes for employers with sites in Rajarhat and New Town, manufacturing units towards Dankuni and Howrah, and offices in Bhubaneswar, Guwahati and Pune. Client servicing managers travel to those locations for quarterly reviews and enrolment sessions. Guwahati in particular has taught us to plan enrolment around genuine travel time rather than a calendar invitation.
Employers we serve are mostly between 150 and 1,200 covered lives: IT services firms, manufacturing companies, hospitals, and a number of mid-sized professional services businesses where HR is two or three people carrying everything.
Working here
We hire for patience with detail more than for a pedigree. The Excel test in our operations interview asks a candidate to find the errors in six hundred rows of dependant data, and freshers who genuinely do well on it get hired alongside people with three years of experience.
Roles we recruit for regularly: Claims Coordinator for group health, Benefits Operations Executive, Client Servicing Manager for employee benefits, and Benefits Data Analyst. The analyst role asks for SQL and advanced Excel and, more importantly, the willingness to clean a TPA claim dump where the same nursing home appears under four spellings.
Applications go to careers@modrinum.com with the role in the subject line. We reply to everyone, including the people we do not take forward.
Come and see the desk
If you are within reach of Sector V, the most useful hour you can spend is sitting with our claims coordinators while they work an afternoon of open files. It tells you more about whether this suits you than a presentation would.