Employees struggling with manual healthcare claims and employers with rising costs due to worsening employee health can look forward to a rosier future. With an e-wallet by CXA Group, founded by Rosaline Chow in 2013, users can shift treatment spend to prevention and wellness programmes easily. Chow has bagged numerous industry accolades such as Woman Leader of the Year at the Asia Insurance Review Awards 2018.
Personalise your health and wellness e-wallet
“CXA provides a personalised platform, an employer-funded e-wallet for employees to redeploy existing company insurance spend into early disease detection, wellness and prevention. Our platform allows employees to increase the flex dollars in their e-wallets by freeing up spousal or integrated shield coverage that duplicates medical insurance provided by the employer or by selling annual leave or rice (in the Philippines), and housing, transport or recreation allowances.”
To launch this platform, Chow pumped in $10 million, half of which she loaned
“At my previous company, which helps companies manage costs, risks and employee benefits, I dealt with MNC clients from 14 countries, all complaining about rising costs of healthcare, one-size-fits-all benefits not meeting the needs of their multi-generational workforce, and burdensome administration. We figured out how to resolve these and I built business cases to request for $10 million for the technology but could not get approval for the funding. After growing revenues in Asia Pacific by 800 percent over eight years, my global CEO and my boss, the global healthcare leader, were fired. I knew I would be next. So I quit to start CXA Group in 2013, investing $5 million of my life savings and another $5 million from a personal loan in it.”
CXA’s e-wallet reaches out to 500 corporate clients and 766,000 users across 20 countries
“We were not without initial struggles. We did not automate our brokerage acquisition’s paper-based medical claims processing at first and lost clients. Most of our experienced talent didn’t join us until we were valued at $100 million. To overcome the financial challenges, we eliminated contractors, factored our invoices and had our leaders go unpaid for months until we raised new funds. To enable our clients cost savings of up to 25 percent, we automated end-to-end processes for customers, eliminated middlemen such as TPAs, brokers and agents by aggregating medical services and related providers on our platform and got volume discounts. Our client retention rate improved from 70 to 93 percent. Banks now white-label the CXA platform for their corporate clients. And we have raised $58 million in funding.”
She helps effect change by utilising unused flex dollars for charity
“Recently, we asked ourselves how we can empower companies to help change the world. Last December, we decided to partner the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre to launch the first round of the Collective Good initiative where unused flex dollars at the end of the policy year are donated to local charities, including those for children with special needs. The response has been super-positive! Even before it launched, Grab, CDL, Rehau and Sumifru agreed to join, allowing their employees to sweep unused dollars from their e-wallets to charity.”
This story is part of a series on Singapore’s modern visionaries. To read others in the series, click here.
This story first appeared in the January/February issue of A Magazine.