For the seventh year, the monitoring of the market of Corporate Welfare (WA) support service providers continues. The study, launched in 2018, is edited by Luca Pesenti, Associate Professor of General Sociology at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, and Giovanni Scansani, an expert in corporate welfare and published in collaboration with ALTIS Università Cattolica.
Some of the main findings from the research:
- The "quota 100" reached by the market is now consolidated. Since 2020, the year in which the number of active operators was exceeded, it has not fallen below this quantitative threshold. In the years following 2020, only small changes (positive or negative) were recorded, although this dynamic shows a limited acceleration in 2024 as a result of a more marked (compared to the past) process of replacing outgoing operators with new players entering the WA Plan management services sector.
- The 2024 census thus shows the presence of 108 Providers (+4 compared to 2023). As in 2023, there is a certain dynamism in and out of the market: the positive balance was determined by the exit from the market of 4 Providers (in addition to the 8 that exited last year) offset by the entry of 8 new "hybrid" or "reseller" competitors (in addition to the 9 in 2023). In just two years, therefore, we have recorded 12 outgoing and 17 incoming providers, signaling the existence of significant competition and (as we will see) also positive signs of innovation.
- One of the most striking data is linked to the disengagement of the Third Sector: from 2021 to 2024, the non-profit entities engaged as Providers ("pure" or "hybrid") have halved (from 10 to 5) and in the last year alone, as many as 3 have left the market. This is a strong sign of the difficulty of this type of company in dealing with a market with respect to which they do not seem fully equipped to withstand competitive and business-to-business logic.
- A second very important signal affecting the cluster of "pure" Providers is given by the fact that, for the first time, no new entries can be registered in this category and indeed we are facing an unprecedented (albeit limited) contraction in their overall number (-2 vs. 2023).
The 2024 monitoring, much awaited by operators in the sector, provides a conceptual framework, shows the development of the aforementioned trends and analyses, among other aspects, the historical trend and the territorial distribution of providers. A brief but effective overview to understand a sector, that of corporate welfare, that is anything but static.