Cash Plan 1.0

Cash plans have been a staple of the UK healthcare market for decades, however there are some storm clouds growing on the horizon. The market today is driven by corporate sales, underpinned by employers paying part or all of a premium as a means of supporting the retention and welfare of their employees. Cash Plan providers face a number of challenges as evidenced by:

1. Lack of topline customer growth.
2. Brokers driving a price-led market coupled with high churn rates.
3. Claims to premium ratio of circa 70%, coupled with an operating expense ratio of circa 30% or more.
4. Slow adoption of digitisation and direct remittance of claims to practitioners.
5. Low interest rates and investment yields.
6. Reliance on reserve adjustments to evidence financial viability.

 

Non-insured benefits

A striking feature of the Cash Plan market is the heavy marketing reliance on non-insured benefits such as 24/7 GP access, mental health applications, and cash back on everyday health costs.

Consumer viewpoint

The best measure of how consumers feel about Cash Plans is the level of sales without broker or employer involvement (i.e. the direct to consumer channel). Since 2005, the size of this market has halved in size. In response, Cash Plan providers have reverted to delivering propositions that are a one size fits all, focusing on people over the age of 45 with families. Not surprisingly, this cohort are the biggest claimers, and they are also somewhat more tolerant of an analogue customer experience, which younger cohorts would reject. Despite the one size fits all approach, propositions are also complicated with a high amount of techical jargon, resulting in consumers being uncertain about what benefits they can expect, which does not bode well for growth.

NHS

The NHS has been a global benchmark for healthcare systems around the world. Consumers in the UK place a high degree of trust and reliance that the NHS will be there when they need healthcare. However in recent years, wait times for many procedures including dentistry have lengthened which should support growth in Cash Plan sales. Whilst not a direct relationship, other classes of insurance (e.g. pets, boilers, and gadgets) have seen double digit growth which begs the question as to why Cash Plan sales are not growing.

Cash Plan 2.0

There is an opportunity to build a new, self-insurance proposition that:

• attracts a younger audience whom have a strong interest in preventative healthcare.
• retains value-added benefits such as 24/7 GP access, and mental health applications.
• supports a broader range of health categories, including pet health.
• doesn't require or rely on an employer or a broker to sell.
• is digital first and never analogue.
• is simple / low complexity.
• has a sustainable revenue model.

Why clients would self-insure?

• They perceive themselves as low risk and therefore consider traditional health insurance premiums to be expensive for the benefits they expect to receive.
• 100% of savings are retained if medical care is not accessed.
• It can be used for procedures that are not covered by the NHS or Cash Plans.
• It is simple to understand. There are no complex rules or policy interpretations.

Client interface

The Pluto Platform offers a responsive mobile web app under your brand. Alternatively, you can use our api's to integrate Pluto funcionality into your existing mobile app.

Module comparison

Pluto Module	Cost Range	Age Segments	Procedure Types	Time Horizon
Lay-buy	£1000 - £10000	18 to 50	Elective, cosmetic, specific	12 months
Stash	£20 - £25000	18 to 70	All procedures, non-specific	36 months +
PayLater	£100 - £1000	18 to 35	Dentistry & Optomtery	Immediate

 

Enabling tech

VSPRY adopts Google's BeyondCorp zero trust enterprise security model which allows for single sign-on, access control policies, access proxy, and user- and device-based authentication and authorisation. The VSPRY tech stack has 5 inter-connected components:

• Core orchestrates all internal and external API calls, and manages access and security, and manages all software business logic.
• Financial multi-currency financial ledgers offering atomicity and concurrency, with virtually unlimited scale.
• Business product, process, business and customer management platform.
• Application layer uses a single codebase to deploy a natively compiled, multi-platform user interface.
• Warehouse offers a fully-managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis over petabytes of data.

Our USP

Our USP is that we make healthcare more accessible and affordable, by integrating healthcare funding solutions, healthcare record management, and healthcare marketplace technology, on a SaaS basis. For licensees of our technology, we remove the capital cost and project risk of building a similar solution internally which for many enterprises is outside of their area of expertise. We bring new sources of revenue, and deliver new customer experiences on a pay-per-user basis, enabling true retail healthcare.

Get in touch

Contact us via VSPRY CHAT or call Mark Hamson on +44 788 425 3641.