Sanlam ramping up integration of ‘wealth and health’ strategy

Johannesburg - Sanlam, Africa's largest financial services group, plans to enhance its healthcare offerings over the next 12 months in a process that integrates healthcare planning into clients' needs for comprehensive financial advice across the dimensions of wealth and health.

"Our ambition is to offer a more integrated, accessible financial and healthcare ecosystem that supports the full financial wellbeing of the people and communities we serve," says Kanyisa Mkhize, Chief Executive Officer of Sanlam Corporate.

"We remain deeply committed to helping our customers live with confidence through savings and investment products and ensuring they are sufficiently healthy to enjoy the rewards of their efforts. We want to embed health solutions as an integral part of our comprehensive financial services offering to both our retail and institutional clients." 

Mkhize says this strategy leverages: 

• Sanlam's employee benefit and risk insurance products to create bundled, bespoke health-financial solutions that enhance employee wellness and productivity, reduce the burden of disease and effectively reduce insurance claims costs; and
• Digital and rewards capabilities to drive client engagement and wellness-linked behavioural change.

The Sanlam healthcare approach further aims to integrate a client's need for health-related risk and savings policies with medical aid requirements in a manner that achieves an appropriate balance between longer term financial needs and more immediate health considerations.

The Group sees considerable potential among its 6-million individual clients many of whom may have a disparate collection of individual policies taken up over years.

Mkhize notes that Medscheme, as the healthcare platform within the group, has played a pivotal enabling role in developing this strategy. 

"Medscheme, with over 3-million lives touched, remains a leader in managed care and health risk management, providing key capabilities, predictable healthcare costs, utilisation control, and risk management both to Sanlam and to our partner medical aid schemes. 

"Medscheme is at the forefront of exploring new approaches and solutions that leverage its extensive clinical know-how and key strategic partnerships to expanding access to quality healthcare in a cost effective manner," she says.

Mkhize states further that Medscheme continues to enjoy the full support of the Sanlam Group in delivering affordable, high-quality healthcare related services to its clients, going on to say that Sanlam has noted the litigation currently underway with Bonitas over alleged predetermined outcomes in four RFP processes.

"The verifiable evidence of the value provided by Medscheme to Bonitas over decades should speak for itself," says Mkhize. She pointed to several examples of this value:

• Through Medscheme's innovative health risk management solutions, the administrator reversed more than R400 million in losses on key Bonitas options through targeted interventions that changed the financial trajectory of those plans. This supported the scheme's solvency recovery to a projected 35.8% in 2025 through disciplined, evidence-based care models;
• Medscheme delivered R221 million in additional savings in 2025 on the scheme's loss-making options; and
• Medscheme handled 1.35 million queries without a single breach of service level agreements. 

"This performance is in line with the long-established drive of the Sanlam Group to deliver tangible value to clients. It is critical that these medical scheme members continue to be protected, that due process is followed, and that any concerns about governance and fairness in procurement processes are properly and independently examined before decisions affecting members become irreversible," says Mkhize.