How has YuLife’s business developed through Covid-19?
We have grown our business by ten times during the pandemic. This is partly because more employers now realise how important life insurance is, and partly because it has made people throughout organisations understand the importance of wellbeing. Previously it was more HR people who were interested in wellbeing, but now that interest goes right up to chief executive level.
What will your new £50m funding round enable you to do?
This funding round is really going to help us grow – we have only been scratching the surface to date. Currently we are dealing with hundreds of companies and hundreds of thousands of employees – I am confident that this funding will help us to move that up to thousands of companies and millions of employees.
It will also help us to take our products to different sections of the market. Around 40 per cent of our customers have never had life insurance before.
The funding will also help us to internationalise what we do – we are currently looking at which new territories we can expand into and plan to take what we do overseas at some point next year.
What is your business split between direct and intermediated business?
The larger organisations we deal with tend to be intermediated. We do have a direct team that focuses on the SME market.
We currently work with a number of advisers, but not the whole market. We want to work with those advisers that understand our value proposition.
What success is the YuLife app having in engaging with employees and changing behaviour?
Around 65 per cent of employees download the app typically, and of those, around a third engage with the app every day. We have focused heavily on gamification, which really connects with people. We are constantly evolving it, adding leader boards to get people to increase their steps.
Some of our most exciting areas of success have been around mental health. We have had a high number of people engaging in mindfulness and meditation through the app. We have had cases of senior managers who have been unable to sleep for years because of stress, now sleeping well for the first time because they have been engaging with mindfulness because of the YuCoin incentive in the app.
We have recently hired a leading games designer. Lots of our hires have been from people with expertise outside of life insurance. I love enabling the bringing together of different areas of expertise.