Along with healthcare savings accounts, wellness rewards programs that employers offer their workers are a fast-rising option more companies are offering in healthcare coverage. It’s growing enough to be a $2.7 billion market by 2013, with 51 percent of 500-plus employee firms urging their employees to get—and stay—healthy, through gym discounts or incentives to get check-ups or quit smoking.
Banks and vendors who already focus on supporting health savings accounts may think this provides an added service opportunity. But Celent doesn’t think so. In its new report, Celent opines it is “highly unlikely” that banks could expand outside their core competency to be a wellness program data integrator. “The only morsel left in the wellness reward ecosystem is the actual reward itself—in terms of what banks could offer,” through prepaid cards or HSA contributions management, the report states. “Coming at the tail end of the wellness program cycle, reward fulfillment is relegated to commodity status,” and not a recipe for growth, it continues. Banks should be “wary” of fronting heavy resources into general purpose prepaid cards for programs that carry a don’t support deposit growth and can’t be transferred to a customer’s deposit accounts – a key difference from HSAs.
Banks can, however, “further enhance their support of HSA contribution rewards by subscribing to the belief of the value-add of information,” according to the report. “This could be done by joining forces with major wellness program vendors to integrate HSA data into those vendors' web portals. This would also allow banks to retain clients, bolster healthcare positioning, and cross-sell other bank products.”
