What is the one thing that is common between an individual’s gym membership, a diet app, and a yoga instructor? People flock to them in an attempt to protect their health. For any individual, it is a fundamental desire to maintain a healthy lifestyle and protect oneself from health related issues. However, while steps like eating better and exercising consistently can help people maintain a healthy lifestyle, they might not necessarily keep all diseases at bay. And, this is where health insurance plays a very important role.
What is Health Insurance and why does everyone need it?
If there is a medical emergency, there will inevitably be costs that will be incurred in order to address the medical emergency. A good health insurance policy can cover, either partially or entirely, these medical expenses, thereby mitigating the financial impact of an illness or disease. In a day and age when medical costs are escalating while people are becoming increasingly susceptible to lifestyle related diseases, a health insurance policy becomes a must. The bottom line is that adequate health insurance can help mitigate the impact of untoward health developments by ensuring that individuals have sufficient funds to seek the right medical assistance.
Before purchasing a health insurance policy, one should be aware of the different types of health insurance policies currently available in the market. These include:
Individual health insurance: A health insurance policy that can cover an individual and his / her spouse, children, and parents.
Family floater health insurance: This type of health insurance policy covers the individual and the family members under a single policy and everybody shares the sum insured amount.
Senior citizen health insurance: This is a health plan that is specifically designed keeping in mind the medical needs and requirements of senior citizens.
Critical illness insurance: This health policy helps individual cover the costs of critical illnesses like cancer, stroke, heart diseases, etc.
Group health insurance: This health insurance policy can be purchased by a group manager or an employer for a large number of individuals.
However, despite being widely aware of the many benefits of health insurance many people don’t actually purchase health insurance. Even if they do purchase health insurance, it might not provide adequate cover or even the right cover. There are many factors that attribute to this under-penetration of health insurance. However, the two primary ones are lack of awareness and limited access. The thing about health insurance is that people don’t really think about it unless they need it. And even if they think about it, the onerous process of purchasing it compels them to postpone the purchase decision.
Buying Health Insurance should be easy
Now, as a diet app or a fitness centre, you are already helping people on their health and fitness journey. However, is there a way that you could enhance your value proposition and create stickiness with your customers? There definitely is.
The simple solution lies in embedded health insurance. Let’s assume that you are a fitness centre. What does the typical journey of a client look like?
A client approaches you for membership. As an added value proposition, you offer curated services that include creating a customised fitness plan keeping in mind the client’s weight, height, and medical history. You ask the client a bunch of questions ranging from past and current ailments to dietary habits. Then, based on the clients’ requirements, you create a fitness plan that is a mix of cardio and strength training. Now, there is no denying the fact that the fitness industry is highly competitive. To stay ahead of the curve, in addition to creating a customised exercise plan you also offer access to a dietician. The client is happy with the service offering.
But there is more to that you can offer. In general, people only think about health when they are either availing of medical facilities or fitness facilities. Thus, inevitably, this is also the only time that they might think about health insurance. For example, when a person is investing in a gym membership, he or she might think about purchasing health insurance as well. This is the moment of truth for the customer. Will the customer make the effort to find an advisor/reach out to an insurance company or will he/she simply postpone the purchase decision since the need is not imminent?
In most cases, it would be the latter. And this is where you can embed yourself deeper into the customers’ journey by offering health insurance.
Health Insurance Embedded in your Product
Traditionally, insurance companies court customers and then wait for them to reach out and purchase insurance. Embedded insurance completely flips this around by allowing insurance companies to reach customers at their point of need and also enabling customers to purchase insurance in a seamless and efficient manner. These days, most young individuals might not be able to tell you the name of an insurance company that they can trust. But they can certainly tell you the name of their favourite gym, diet app, or wellness guru. If the insurance is available at these points, then wouldn’t it become easy to buy health insurance?
Let us see how embedded insurance achieves this. Embedded Insurance allows third-party product or service providers, for example, a fitness club or a diet app, to offer customers an insurance policy at the point of sale. This is enabled by leveraging technology that abstracts the insurance functionality and lows them to seamlessly integrate or embed insurance solutions into their offerings either as an add-on (complementary or at a nominal cost) or as a native component. Embedded insurance can add value to all stakeholders in the insurance ecosystem as it enables access to more affordable, relevant, and personalised risk mitigation products. Thus, whether you are buying a gym membership or subscribing to a diet plan, buying health insurance with your preferred service provider becomes simple and seamless.
And, the Turtlefin API is powering this entire ecosystem through a simple plug-and-play solution that optimally leverages technology to enable retailers to offer insurance solutions. However, it is not merely transactional in nature. It can go a step further to support both customers and retailers in several ways through data analytics that allows for customisation. This API meets all the requirements of its digital outreach and helps to create a benchmark with the optimal usage of the right digital tools. If you are a fitness institute, gym, or diet app, or any health-related business, then you can enhance your customers’ journey and attract loyal customers by offering insurance as a value add solution to your customers. And the best part is that you can easily do this with Turtlefin’s embedded insurance solution.
It is time that the way insurance is bought and sold in this country changes, and Turtlefin can help orchestrate this change.