Jim Cusumano and the arithmetic of belonging

An accountant can tell you what a company spends on its people. The more awkward question is what the company allows those people to become. Jim Cusumano has spent a career close to both questions. His route runs from an accounting degree at Pace University and a start at Deloitte to the chief executive’s office at Brighton Health Plan Solutions. Along the way, the definition of a business asset acquired a few more human features.

The revealing relationship is with Julie Bank, Brighton’s chief people officer. They have worked together for more than 20 years. Bank describes an early Cusumano, then CFO, who regarded HR chiefly as an expense. A working partnership took about five years to form. By 2025, they were meeting daily, welcoming new hires together and celebrating employees’ promotions. That is a fairly substantial revision to the spreadsheet.

Bank’s account gives this career its interesting turn: a senior executive changed his view of another discipline because a colleague demonstrated its contribution to the business. Projects became joint work; conversations could accommodate disagreement. The resulting portrait is of a relationship built through repeated contact, with enough room for both people to have opinions. An executive partnership, like any other, needs something more useful than matching job titles.

Before the people questions, the numbers

Cusumano’s professional beginnings were in accounting. After Pace and Deloitte, he served as chief financial officer of National Healthcare Resources, a startup that reached $170 million in annual revenue during his tenure before its sale to Concentra Managed Care. His career includes membership in the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the New York State Society of CPAs. These are the credentials of someone trained to ask how a business works beneath its presentation.

At Brighton, his responsibilities span daily management, financial planning, performance reporting, human resources and risk management. His work has included ownership and debt reorganizations and efficiency reviews credited with $3 million in annual savings. Revenue nearly tripled during his time with the company. The figures describe separate achievements; they do not provide a year-by-year growth curve. What they do establish is a career with considerable responsibility for the machinery behind the business.

That background matters to the later people story. Hiring, promotion and retention belong in the same executive conversation as budgets and performance. Cusumano’s remit puts them there. The person responsible for financial reporting also has responsibility for human resources, a combination that makes the relationship between the two functions particularly concrete. A new recruit will eventually appear somewhere in the accounts. First, someone has to persuade that person to join.

The view from the other chair

In March 2025, Cusumano and Bank were named finalists for Transform’s Power Pair: Executive Partnership of the Year award. The recognition specifically concerned their cooperation on business strategy and talent acquisition. Bank also received a separate place in Ragan’s 2025 Top Women in HR class. The distinction is useful: her individual work was recognized alongside their joint work, preserving the contribution of each rather than dissolving both into an agreeable corporate photograph.

Their joint recognition also covered efforts to maintain employee engagement and productivity as work shifted online. In that setting, the practical business of keeping colleagues connected became part of executive leadership. It takes coordination between the people function and the person running the company to make that work a shared responsibility. The award was a finalist recognition, with the value here lying in the specific partnership it identified.

Brighton’s employee conversations offer a smaller, telling example of how its practices developed. An early Day of Understanding brought in outside speakers to discuss racism and individual experiences. Feedback prompted a change: a later event used internal speakers. Colleagues heard stories from people they already knew. Bank described the shift as a response to employees wanting more connection. The company had an event format it could repeat, then changed it after listening.

“I look forward to building on the foundation he has laid.”

Jim Cusumano, on succeeding Bruce Allen at ACS, June 2025

An interview is a two-way examination

Brighton’s recruitment work extends the people question to applicants who have yet to collect a salary. In November 2024, it won the WorkLlama Candidate Experience Award in the TIARA Talent Acquisition Awards. Its approach included tailoring candidate interactions through applicant tracking technology and asking applicants for feedback about communication, inclusion and cultural alignment. Even before a first day, the prospective employee had a view worth recording.

The company reported that, after introducing its culture-first recruitment strategy, offer acceptance increased by 20% and time-to-hire fell by 15%. Those are reported changes, rather than percentage-point movements or proof that a single intervention caused every result. They nevertheless put a business measure beside the recruitment philosophy. A hiring process can be courteous and still have to answer a fairly blunt question: did anyone actually accept the job?

The work had an earlier chapter. In December 2023, Brighton was a finalist for the TIARA myBasePay DE&I Award. Its hiring practices included broader job advertising, varied interview panels, participation in inclusive job fairs and structured interviews. Training extended to hiring managers. Employee surveys and focus groups informed the programs. The particulars matter because they locate inclusion inside decisions about who gets considered, who conducts an interview and how candidates are assessed.

Who gets the next opportunity?

In 2023, Brighton reported that 93% of its promotions went to women and minorities. It also shared workforce demographics and termination figures with its board. Those are company-wide results rather than personal trophies for Cusumano. They describe the organization he leads, and they place career opportunity within the information reaching its directors. Advancement, in this account, is something to count as well as something to celebrate.

In April 2025, Crain’s New York Business recognized Brighton as a Women-Forward Workplace. The company’s initiatives included training recruiters and hiring managers, widening recruitment channels and measuring progress. Cusumano connected attracting and retaining talent with welcoming different perspectives and supporting employees regardless of gender. The stated ambition has an everyday implication: a company has to make room for the people it has worked to recruit.

By November 2025, Brighton reported that nearly 40% of its open roles that year had been filled through internal promotions. Its average employee tenure was seven years. The figures accompanied recognition among City & State New York’s Top Workplaces. For an employee considering a future inside the business, an internal opening is a tangible possibility. It gives the phrase “career development” an address somewhere other than the training calendar.

The anonymous verdict

Another set of results came from people answering without their names attached. In January 2024, Brighton received an Inclusive Workplace designation for the second consecutive year from Best Companies Group and COLOR Magazine. The assessment used anonymous responses about belonging, culture and inclusion, independently analyzed. Cusumano welcomed the responses as evidence that the company’s efforts were having an effect. An anonymous survey gives employees a different channel from a meeting with the boss.

The company also received the USA Today and Energage Top Workplaces award for a third consecutive year in April 2025. That selection was based solely on employee feedback gathered during 2024. These recognitions have different organizers and assessment processes; each concerns the workplace rather than an award for the CEO personally. Together they show why the employee perspective has become a recurring part of Cusumano’s public account of the business.

In October 2024, Brighton’s BenefitsPRO Luminaries recognition focused on organizational leadership. Judges singled out onboarding, learning, mentorship, career development, recognition and engagement. The company then described a workforce of nearly 600 employees nationwide. That scale makes the list of practices consequential: welcoming someone, developing a manager and recognizing good work all have to happen beyond the chief executive’s own circle. A company cannot depend on everyone happening to know Jim.

Belonging, with a calendar attached

Brighton’s employee programs provide some of that structure. Its Ambassador program offers staff a way to participate in recruitment, onboarding, mentoring, employee groups, community work and Days of Understanding. Team chats are intended as short opportunities to connect. Volunteer time and donation matching sit beside the internal activities. These are organizational practices, and their relevance to Cusumano is that they give the workplace commitments he endorses somewhere to operate.

In December 2024, the company received a Gold TITAN Business Award for its diversity, equity and inclusion work. The approach emphasized respect for different backgrounds from recruitment through employment. There is a consistent subject across these recognitions: how a person experiences the company while entering it, working in it and looking for a next step. For the finance-trained executive, that adds a succession of human encounters to the usual accounts of organizational performance.

Two companies, one additional responsibility

On July 1, 2025, Cusumano added the CEO role at ACS Benefit Services while remaining Brighton’s chief executive. He succeeded Bruce Allen, whose retirement had been announced the previous month. ACS and Brighton joined forces through shared leadership and expertise within the CuraCor family. The arrangement kept the businesses legally and functionally intact, operating under their own brands. Shared leadership came with an explicit commitment to the continued identity of each organization.

Cusumano expressed a wish to continue building on Allen’s foundation. It was a modest description of succession: someone else had built something that deserved to be carried forward. The added role gives his career a new organizational setting for the same recurring responsibilities - managing performance, working with colleagues and deciding what deserves investment. An accountant’s education supplies one way of reading a company. Cusumano’s long partnership with Bank supplies another chair at the table.