Two Days, No Filter: Inside the Rippling Partner Advisory Board

Every year, Rippling invites a select group of the industry's sharpest benefits leaders to do something most vendors would never dare: tell us what's working, what could use improvements, and where we need to go. That's RPAB — the Rippling Partner Advisory Board — and this year's event was our best yet.

Eleven broker leaders from top firms across the country traveled to San Francisco for two days of deep-dive sessions, honest roundtables, and a dinner that proved Rippling knows how to host. Here's what went down.

Night One: Setting the Tone from the Top

The event opened with a candid welcome from Matt Plank, Rippling's Chief Revenue Officer. Before a single session slide was shown, the message was clear: this wasn't a dog-and-pony show. RPAB exists because broker feedback directly shapes what Rippling builds. The partners in that room have a seat at the table — not a seat in the audience.

Night one wrapped up at La Mar, perched above the Embarcadero with sweeping views of the Bay. The real conversations — the off-the-record ones — happened over ceviche and cocktails. By the time dinner ended, partners weren't just colleagues. They were collaborators.

Day Two: Keynote, Product, and the Real Work

Opening Keynote: Aly Wagner and Ryan Kaiser

Day two kicked off with a keynote from 2X Olympic gold medalist and Bay FC co-founder, Aly Wagner, and Ryan Kaiser that set the strategic context for everything that followed. The message: Rippling isn't playing catch-up. It's playing a different game entirely.

Rippling AI and Rippling Solutions

The AI strategy session, led by Rippling CPO Matt MacInnis, was one of the most energizing of the day. Rippling AI isn't separate from the platform — it's woven into the data infrastructure itself. The vision: give brokers, HR admins, and clients the ability to query across their entire Rippling instance, automate the tasks that eat up their week, and surface insights that used to require building dashboards and gathering data from separate systems.

The Rippling Solutions session tackled one of the biggest challenges brokers hear from clients: manual workflows and fragmented, bespoke processes cobbled together across multiple systems. Rippling Solutions is the answer. Where no purpose-built solution existed before, it fills the gap — replacing time-consuming manual processes and one-off workarounds with custom-built apps that live natively in the Rippling platform, creating a single source of truth without the overhead of managing disconnected systems.

For brokers, this expands the types of clients they can bring to Rippling—especially those in industries like healthcare, construction, and retail with complex tech stacks and specialized workflows.

Benefits Product Roadmap: Unfiltered and On Record

Rippling's benefits product team didn't hide behind a slide deck. They fielded live questions, took real-time feedback, and committed to follow-ups on the record. Partners dug into ICHRA, COBRA integrations, carrier EDI connections, OE configuration gaps, voluntary benefits, and LSA flexibility.

The sessions surfaced specific, actionable gaps — and specific, actionable roadmap items to address them. No generic "we hear you." Actual timelines. Actual owners.

EDI/API: “Make EDI Boring Again”

The EDI/API session may have had the most memorable line of the event — a rallying cry from the Rippling benefits ops team: "Make EDI Boring Again." The point? EDI should be an invisible infrastructure. When it works, nobody notices. When it doesn't, brokers get calls they don't want to get, and clients lose trust fast.

Partners were direct: they need better visibility into what files were sent, when, and why something is stalled. Rippling's team left with specific commitments around transparency, communication cadence, and improved tracker tooling.

The Roundtables: Where the Real Feedback Lives

The afternoon roundtables were the centerpiece of the day — structured conversations across various topics like customer experience, partner success, and follow up from the day's presentations. No presentations. Just partners talking openly about where things are working, where they aren't, and what they'd build if they were running the product team.

The themes that came up consistently:

• First payroll run is a trust-building moment — when it goes well, clients are believers

• Brokers want visibility into their clients' Rippling activity so they can be proactive rather than reactive

• Transparency on fees, renewals, and timelines matters more than most vendors realize

• Rippling's relationship model is a competitive differentiator — being able to say "we know how to make Rippling sing for you" is a real reason to recommend the platform

Why RPAB Matters

RPAB isn't a customer appreciation event. It's not a pitch. It's a working session — and the partners who attend come back with a real stake in what gets built.

The brokers who attended this year represent some of the most sophisticated benefits practices in the country. They came in with real questions, pushed back on real gaps, and left with real answers. That's the deal at RPAB. And it's why the broker leaders who've been through it keep coming back.

What comes next?

RPAB isn't where feedback goes to live — it's where it goes to get built. The action items from this year's sessions are already being tracked, prioritized, and owned. From billing reconciliation to EDI visibility to benefit class flexibility, the conversations in that room are already shaping the roadmap.

That's the point. That's always been the point.

If you're a broker partner who wants to be in that room next year — you know where to find us.

Interested in Rippling's broker partner program? Learn more about becoming a Rippling broker partner.

Rippling Channel Marketing | Broker Team