Game on: revolutionising insurance with a fun and well-being focused approach

Can insurance be a force for good?

According to Jaco Oosthuizen, YuLife co-founder and managing director of YuLife South Africa, not only is the answer “yes”, but it is something to which the industry should aspire.

“People don’t wake up in the morning and say, we’d love to engage with an insurance company. Normally, people only engage with their insurance company when something goes wrong. So, it’s either premium increases or claims, but we want to inspire life back into insurance and make insurance a fun thing to interact with,” Oosthuizen says.

The tech-driven financial services provider launched in South Africa in April. Founded in London in 2016, YuLife achieved rapid traction in the British insurance market through its flagship product, group life insurance. Its group risk protection includes everything that traditional group insurance policies do, but what makes them stand out globally is its award-winning well-being app, Yuniverse, and the high client engagement levels it racks up.

But more on that later.

Speaking during an InsureTalk webinar on 19 July, Oosthuizen said YuLife’s mission was to inspire life with insurance and to drive people to be financially, mentally, physically, and socially well.

“And not just to pay claims. That’s also something we want to do.”

Jumping straight into it, Oosthuizen said the world was in crisis.

“There is a global lifestyle crisis. Eighty percent of chronic diseases (according to the World Health Organization) are caused by lifestyle. So, it’s really about how do we get people to exercise more, eat better, drink less, and smoke less. There’s just a huge cost and burden on the economy.”

Then there is also a cost-of-living crisis. Research by the CHRO Global Leadership Board (composed of chief human resources officers, CHROs, from the world’s top companies) found that 75% of employees in South Africa report medium to high levels of financial stress.

Oosthuizen said it was no secret that Covid-19 had a hugely negative impact on the global economy.

“Plus, in South Africa we have our own specific problems around loadshedding, and so on.”

Mental health is another. The 2022 Mental State of the World report released this month scored South Africa among the lowest average Mental Health Quotient, with a score of nearly 20 aggregate points lower than the global average of 64. The report found that unaddressed mental health conditions were costing the economy R161 billion a year.

“They’ve (the researchers) got a continuum where they rank people from minus 200 to 200. Pre-Covid, the average of the world was at 90 out of 200. And now it’s at 64. And another interesting thing is they say that the young adult population has three to four times higher mental health issues than the parents. There’s been a deterioration in family and friendships. Social well-being is becoming a huge issue for the world.”

Managing the fallout

Besides being detrimental to people’s lives, these challenges also have a negative impact on the employer environment. A report by Occupational Care South Africa found that 15% of employees are absent on any given day, costing the economy R12bn to 16bn a year.

Lost labour productivity has a significant impact on businesses. The Floatpays State of Employee Wellbeing Barometer 2022 found that in South Africa, lost productive work time is 128 million days – costing R38bn, or about 2% of the country’s GDP.

A BCC report published in 2022 said the global market for insurance was valued at $9.8 trillion in 2021 and was estimated to grow from $5.6 trillion in 2022 to $9.8 trillion in 2027. Oosthuizen said the insurance industry’s high revenue placed it in a position to make a big difference to people’s lives.

“We fully believe in this concept called win-win economics. If you inspire someone to live a longer, healthier life, it’s good for them as an individual, but it’s also good for the community, for their company, for the family.”

He said the challenge was to create an ecosystem in insurance where everyone could benefit.

“Employer groups, they all struggle with this. Currently, employee benefits are an extremely boring subject. There is no engagement with the employee. They don’t know which insurance company they have their benefits with. The former well-being strategies are very fragmented. Corporate social responsibility and sustainability becomes almost a tick-box exercise.”

So how do you get employees to understand and engage with environmental, social, and corporate governance on a day-to-day basis?

Oosthuizen said that to find the answer to this question, they looked at other industries to see what they did to transform themselves. Two strategies stood out: fun and motivation.

Gamification

And what is more fun than gaming?

“I’m a big Candy Crush user. These games get quite addictive. People play them daily. So, we said, okay, how can we use this game technology to help people live a healthy and active lifestyle?”

The YuLife app enables employees to complete everyday wellness activities, such as walking, meditation, and cycling, to earn YuCoin, YuLife’s virtual well-being currency. Members can use their YuCoin to buy vouchers for groceries, data, fuel, clothing, and more from leading brands, or to improve the world through donating meals, planting trees, or cleaning the ocean. By incentivising healthy living, YuLife provides employers with a way to simultaneously boost retention rates, improve employees’ standard of living, and safeguard their loved ones’ financial future.

In addition to day-to-day well-being, YuLife provides critical well-being tools and services to further prevent illness, both mentally and physically. All employees with YuLife get access to a virtual GP service through Kena Health, counselling, and advice through ICAS, alongside access to multiple well-being apps, such as Meditopia and Fiit.

Oosthuizen explained that app engagement was measured through daily active over monthly active.

“Which sits at about 40% to 50% at the moment of monthly active users using our app daily. There’s no other insurance company in the world that has that type of engagement with the end consumer.”

He said that health needed to be looked at holistically, not just physical well-being but all the different components of wellness.

“And that’s one of the things that we strive to do. For example, mental health, there used to be a very bad stigma attached to that, but we believe that it should be transparent and that we should proactively look at all these aspects of people’s wellness.”

Well-being pays

A paper titled “Workplace well-being and firm performance”, published by Oxford University in May this year, looks at whether there is a business case for happiness.

Referencing the study during his talk, Oosthuizen said the research showed that if you had invested $1 000 in January in the top 100 companies ranked highest for well-being, your investment would have outperformed the S&P 500.

“That aligns so much with our philosophy. If you make the workforce, well, happy, then there would be higher performance and higher retention.”

Another interesting conclusion that came out of this paper, Oosthuizen said, was that across industries and companies, over time, well-being was proved to be an even more important predictor of company performance.

“It is critical for employers to focus on well-being. And as an insurance industry, we can have a massive impact on that. Healthy employees equal successful companies and create a win-win for the insurer, the company and the individual, and society at large. I really believe that as an industry, we have the ability to build the world we want to live in.”