The Amazon of life and wellbeing
Paul Oudenhoven — CEO Wellness (Prudential International)
As Digital Insurance Group we have the privilege to talk to and work with leading insurers and love to learn from their experience while adding our technological solutions and views. In this series we share the views of some outstanding people in the life and health insurance market. We ask them about how they embrace life& wellbeing as an insurance company and how they look ahead.
This week we talk to Prudential International who set up Wellness. A player and interview close to our heart as DIG has been part of the journey implementing and launching Vitality in Argentina and Brazil. Happy to share the story!
Wellness has been set up as a separate entity, as Prudential International has made the strategic and ambitious decision to give clients a clear value upfront instead of (only) at the end. To this end, PII moved into a partnership with Discovery, offering the Vitality platform and loyalty system. This means Wellness kicked off with Vitality to offer physical relevance, but the vision is clear that it is more than that. Ultimately Wellness sees three aspects: physical, mental and financial.
The idea behind the Vitality offering is that they are generating tools to change behaviour. Paul explains there are people that live healthy but that there is even a bigger group of people that want to live healthy but need tools to change their behaviour. Some just need an extra nudge.
Paul mentions the Vitality program and thus the way Wellness has been set up evolves around behavioral economics, so that consumers can indeed change their behaviour. Paul mentions a few examples, e.g. on how they reward healthy behaviour in different ways: some instantly, some more mid-term, and some long term. Think premium discounts, discount on wearables, instant rewards like coffees or gym access). Paul is convinced the combination of the three in the end works best.
Wellness/ Prudential launched the Vitality offering 1.5 years ago in March 2020. At the start of what we now know is the pandemic. So, when asking Paul about the first results, he shares that so far, the statistics and benchmarks are quite stable. He mentions this being a big benefit of working with a company like Vitality that has had years of experience and numerous data points. For Wellness it means gathering and adjusting the program. For two reasons. First, to make sure that people get more and more engaged. A simple example is that we saw that an onboarding call makes people more engaged in the program: we explain what will happen, make sure they understand. And second, to make sure we get a clear ROI and can be confident on an actuarial level in the long term.
Also Paul agrees with McKinsey’s research that clients are willing to share data in order to get discounts and services. “Especially health is one of the spaces where people are willing to open. You need to be clear of the benefits: monetary value and rewards”. Prudential and Wellness do add a personal choice: “we have the policy that the customer can decide with whom he wants the data to be shared. You can easily review and adapt”. Paul is convinced we are just at the starting point of this; it starts to explode now and companies need to determine what value they can add.
Wellness focusses on two things: prevent and cure. They are strongest in prevention, making people be heathier. It is also the most interesting for partners. However, there is more tech available on the cure side. Digital curing capabilities, like digital doctors and e-pharma. He is trying to determine what adds value most, evaluate and see how to ingrate this.
Prudential and Wellness see no strategic advantage of doing it all internally. It is hard to come up with something innovative, so Wellness has chosen for a strategy to orchestrate what exists. Go for the ones that fit and have intelligent values and then helping them grow. Wellness aims to be the leader of the ecosystem and generate most value. Usually they add volume, size and negotiation power.
The Amazon of wellbeing
In Paul’s view, the borders between industries become blurry. Especially in Health and Life it is very blurred. Everyone is targeted at growing old in a healthy way. In his view it is and will be key not to be a product factory but to be king in customer relationships; the rest will follow. This sounds easy but is a huge step for insurers, not to think about the product but about the customer relation and their broader concerns on health, life and finances. Paul predicts the winners of tomorrow are the ones that take holistic approach today. Who will be the Amazon of this space?
