Winning the Asian Human Capital Leadership Award: CXA's Journey and Learnings

When I was running Mercer’s employee benefits, clients from all 14 APAC countries complained to me about their biggest pain point of escalating costs due to worsening employee health.

After figuring out how to solve this using technology, I repeatedly tried for 5 years to convince NY HQ to invest $10M in Asia. But they wouldn’t, so I finally left to build it on my own. 

Little did I realize that the $10M would come from me -- I ended up investing my family’s entire savings of $5M and signed a personal guarantee for another $5M loan to build the technology and to acquire an SME broker. 

The whole time, I thought about Molly, my most demanding HR client, who nagged me about how her insurance premiums were doubling every 3 years as her middle-aged factory workers had chronic diseases. How only the healthy attended her wellness activities, whereas the sedentary and obese never showed. And how despite all the money she spent, she couldn’t see the link between her wellness efforts and her insurance premiums!

She was the first of many HRs to say to me: you’re my broker – why can't you help me fix this?

So my idea was simple: rather than waiting for employees to get sick and hospitalized to benefit from insurance, why not shift part of that insurance money into early detection and disease prevention? 

We began by capturing employees’ health data – blood tests, lifestyles, claims and activities. Each employee gets a “health age” vs their real age and can visualize the impact of their lifestyles on their faces. So the more bad habits they have, the worse their faces look! Women freak out since they look just like their mothers – which inspired many to start exercising.

Each employee gets a personal recommendation on ways to get healthier and a wallet to choose what’s best. Employees who do their health screening, lose weight, stop smoking, or improve their diabetes can be rewarded with more dollars.

HR gets the anonymized data and tools they need to offer targeted interventions, attacking their highest cost claims, addressing Molly’s diabetic factory workers.

Our brokers use that data to negotiate reduced premiums from insurers. 

Molly, of course, demanded that we do this without adding work for her HR team – so we consolidated all her vendors onto one platform capturing data at the source, and eliminated the paperwork between her company, their employees, insurers and all her providers.

And since Molly’s such a tough negotiator, like every other HR – our flex and wellness platform comes for free when CXA is appointed as the broker. 

I made this sound easy, but I can tell you that building a company like this is HARD.

Not only were we building a tech start-up from scratch, but we had to simultaneously transform the SME broker I had acquired. You can imagine the clash of civilizations as we integrated two completely different cultures.

I knew we wouldn’t make it unless we moved fast – speed was our biggest advantage competing head-on against the giants Mercer, Aon & Towers.

We needed great people, but many were fearful of joining a start-up.

So we told our story at industry conferences to build our brand, sharing our vision for a healthier and more engaged workplace.

Our vision helped us attract employees who wanted to make an impact combatting Asia’s chronic disease burden.

To retain this hard-won talent, we offered growth and leadership opportunities. We created agile, cross-functional teams, allowing our engineers to work closely with business people. Our Gen Ys loved being able to see how their work directly led to the company’s success. They were also motivated by being able to move much faster than they could in big companies.

To prepare people to succeed in these growth roles, we built the CXA Academy, which offers a combination of soft and technical skills training, alongside insurance & healthcare knowledge. According to the Ministry of Manpower, our start-up provides 30% more training than the huge MNCs.

We moved Sarah, a high potential employee from the SME back office to a technology role on-boarding new clients onto our platform. From there, she was promoted to a client-facing role, all within 3 years. She received coaching and training, and is now training others to follow in her footsteps.

Now 3 years since launching, we’ve managed to lure 75 stars and 550 clients from Mercer, Aon and Towers, but also attracted talented engineers, data scientists and business people from the top companies and schools.

We’ve opened additional offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and soon KL with brokerage licenses in 10 countries across Asia.

We are now valued at $US 100M, after receiving an additional $US33M of venture cash from the Singapore’s Economic Development Board, BCG’s B Capital with Eduardo Saverin, Philips Healthcare and NSI.

What are my learnings from this journey?

First, this award is a recognition of what happens when you put the best people in the right environment. An environment that encourages innovation. An environment that allows them to strive, to grow and to succeed.

We attract high potentials because our vision to build the future of employee benefits in Asia for Asia means something. And the reason why it resonates with so many who work in this industry, is because while the traditional firms talk about innovation, we are focused on delivering real outcomes for our clients.

And when you create such an environment, you attract the right type of clients, who want real improvements in workplace health and engagement.

On behalf of CXA’s great team of individuals with this shared vision, I accept this award and thank the Ministry of Manpower, the Human Capital Leadership Institute and the esteemed judges for the recognition.