Hi Jon! What does your role cover?

As Chief Growth Officer my main focus is on developing and driving a sustainable strategy for growth, through both sales and service. Bluecrest has grown massively since its foundation in 2012 and now serves hundreds of thousands of people across the UK and Ireland. There is huge demand for preventative health services right now, from both individuals and companies, and we’re aiming to rise to meet that need by innovating, maintaining our high clinical standards - and creating value for customers, clients and stakeholders. In particular, we’re looking to build on the development of our new corporate arm, bringing on board new businesses, both directly and through intermediaries.

Why is there so much demand?

With the best will in the world, the NHS is struggling to treat people, to the point where individuals and businesses are actively looking for alternative support. It certainly doesn’t have the resources to do the prevention bit on top of that – which creates this catch 22. Because as people live and work for longer and get more illnesses, more pressure is piled on. Taking action to avoid preventable illnesses is a critical part of the solution, and very much a new frontier.

It's one I’m very happy to be working on. Like most of us at Bluecrest, I believe passionately in preventative health - and I believe it’s crucial for the country as we move forwards. We have to start doing more to look after our own health proactively - and we have to start now. For me, intermediaries are crucial partners in getting that message through to a huge number of organisations and individuals - and that’s incredibly important. I feel so passionately about this that I’d rather see businesses go with a competitor than do nothing on preventative health! We’ve all got a vested interest in this, and as a business it’s our mission to get people talking about prevention.

So if that’s the mission, what’s the vision for Bluecrest Wellness?

Our vision for individuals is for health assessments to become like going to the dentist. You get checked up as a hygiene factor – and the outcome you’re looking for is to hopefully be told everything is okay and they’ll see you again next year. It’s all about what we call health confidence – which can look different for different people.

Our vision for businesses is to help them help ALL their people live and work with that health confidence - and in doing so to support their business goals, growth and development.

What makes Bluecrest Wellness different from other health assessment providers?

Our superpowers are clinical excellence, great value, and accessibility. From a corporate perspective, we’ve taken traditional health assessments and made them work beyond the c-suite, as an affordable and valuable option for entire workforces.

The way we deliver our assessments through a UK-wide network of clinics is unique in the market. It’s not hours in a hospital with a private consultant, it’s 30 minutes at a convenient location usually 20 minutes from someone’s home or workplace. It’s with a professional health assessment specialist, with the option of a virtual conversation with a doctor a few days later - when the digital test results are back for discussion.

That accessibility is solving not only the take-up issue for many businesses, but their health data deficit - because we’re also sharing the anonymised, aggregated data which can drive health and wellbeing strategies.

And our clinical standards are well recognised in the market, and trusted by big-name intermediaries and well-recognised businesses.

What are your priorities over the next few months?

Customer service. We pride ourselves on the way we look after our customers, and we’ve recently bought together all of our customer services teams so we can deliver even better support, especially to intermediaries and businesses. We’ll be continuing to embed that over the coming months.

Great customer service is the cornerstone of any successful business, and its impact extends far beyond the immediate interaction with an end customer. We know it’s also key in our relationship with intermediaries, too. When intermediaries know they can rely on us for a great product and for outstanding customer service to support it, they’re more likely to feel confident in our partnership, and keep recommending us to their clients.

How do you work with intermediaries?

It’s been a key focus for us in the last 18 months, with the appointment of Jason Morris as our Head of Intermediaries. As a result we’ve more than doubled the amount of new business from companies in the last 12 months, with a 418% increase in revenue through intermediaries during 2023.

We very much recognise that intermediaries play a crucial role right across the customer lifecycle, providing invaluable advice and support for businesses and end consumers. It’s our job to help them help clients, and that means we can tailor our services to what’s needed.

We can support businesses directly in terms of set-up and education, or work with the intermediary to provide end-user communications and marketing which can be white-labelled or duel branded. We also make sure we work alongside other providers, including legacy health check providers, PMI or EAP services, and that we have great relationships and interfaces with benefits platforms too.

What’s feedback from intermediaries like?

We’re really proud of the relationships we’ve developed, how well our partners now understand our service proposition, how keen they are to introduce it to clients, and how many clients renew, increase or swap to Bluecrest from their traditional providers.

Again, it’s all about being seen to add that value, and being seen to be that safe pair of hands.

What challenges are intermediaries facing?

Right now it’s something of a perfect storm. And businesses are having different (and difficult) conversations with their benefits advisors.

Because the pressure on health services is so acute and demand for treatment solutions such as PMI so high, it’s increasing claims incidences - and costs are driving up premiums. Employers are increasingly using most or all of their budget to maintain the status quo - often only for senior managers – or they’re starting to look for wider and better value options. That’s where we come in.

We’ve got a workforce-wide solution that focuses on preventative health – keeping people well and businesses healthy. In the short term it allows employers to take proactive steps to understand more about their health risks, as a starting point for change. In the longer term, we believe that a focus on prevention, backed up with simple but effective action, will ensure treatment interventions take place earlier, are more effective and actually can help manage claims costs - making other benefits like PMI more manageable.

What else is new that intermediaries need to know about?

There’s lots of new things coming up and going on, including further development of our customer portal (called My Wellness) and our mobile app - which aims to make access to health information and trends over time easy to read and understand.

We have a refurbishment programme underway, too. While most of our 2,500 clinics pop up in 450 locations across the UK, we also have 7 static centres in high-demand areas, and we’re particularly proud of our new flagship centre in London, Thanet House. It’s also one of the locations where we’ll be trialling extended opening hours – again targeting business and aiming to support working people.

Last year saw a 60% increase in the on-site health assessment days we delivered for companies at their convenience, and we’ll be continuing to ramp up that provision over the coming months. For home workers and those struggling to attend an assessment, our team of online health coaches will also be boosting use and take-up our home health tests.

Meanwhile, we’re looking at how else we can add value to our packages, help empower businesses with data, and help people live and work with health confidence.

Keep watching this space.