How to Promote Healthy Living - Profitably

According to the Global Wellness Institute (GWI), ‘wellness’ is a modern term with ancient roots. As a modern concept, wellness has gained currency since the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when the writings and leadership of an informal network of physicians and thinkers largely shaped the way we conceptualise and talk about wellness today. In recent years, more people around the world have begun to recognise the importance of health and wellness – a trend which has seen the value of the industry increase year-on-year. None more so than millennials.

Millennials (those born from 1981 to 1996) are prioritising health and wellness more than any generation before them. In fact, with the exception of family, millennials value health and wellness most. In a recent study conducted by Stanford Health, 79% of respondents said family was most important, followed by health and wellness at 53%. The growing obsession with health and wellness has given rise to a US$ 5,86 trillion industry (2024) with consumers spending more on products that improve their health, fitness, nutrition, appearance, sleep, and mindfulness than ever before. According to Precedence Research, the industry is projected to surpass US$ 9,36 trillion by 2033, expanding at a CAGR of 5.34% between 2024 to 2033.

This trend has spawned the rise of platforms that connect individuals with various health and wellness services and products from health, fitness and nutrition, to appearance, sleep, and mindfulness. Platform payments are a vital component of health and wellness platforms; they facilitate transactions between customers and service providers. Constructing a well-designed platform payments strategy is critical in ensuring that transactions are processed efficiently and profitably, but the tools to manage and optimise payments are not readily available. For most platforms, managing payments is a painful experience with resources dedicated to manually sifting through copious amounts of spreadsheets - and even then you may still find yourself in the dark. In this article, we'll explore how health and wellness platforms can leverage Revenew to transform and simplify how they manage platform payments.

Embedded Payments and Vertical SaaS

Health and wellness platforms have emerged as a response to the growing demand for accessible and convenient health and wellness services with the rise of smartphones, high-speed internet, and mobile apps making it easier for people to access health and wellness services from anywhere at any time. Over the last number of years, the health and wellness platform market has continued to grow and evolve. New platforms are constantly emerging, offering a wider range of services and catering to diverse needs. As technology advances and consumer preferences change, health and wellness platforms need to continually evolve if they are to maintain and grow their share of the market.

To satisfy these consumer preferences, there are a number of products/ services that health and wellness platforms offer from which they generate revenue. A primary source is subscription services, where users pay recurring fees for access to fitness classes, wellness programs, or exclusive content. Many other platforms we encounter also offer tele-health services, enabling remote consultations with health professionals, which has become increasingly popular and skyrocketed during the pandemic. Workshops and wellness programs focusing on nutrition, fitness, and mental health also contribute to revenue, appealing to many health-conscious consumers. We’re also seeing platforms monetise through digital products (eg. e-books, online courses, and meal plans tailored to specific needs). Affiliate marketing has become lucrative, allowing platforms to earn commissions by promoting related products or services, while corporate wellness partnerships offering tailored programs for businesses is also becoming increasingly popular. Another interesting lever we’re seeing health and wellness platforms pull is that of selling branded merchandise and health supplements directly through the platform - killing two birds with one stone: enhancing brand visibility while also adding another revenue layer.

Multiple revenue streams, however, are built up over time as platforms scale. Besides the revenue streams we’ve outline above, we’re seeing a boom in platforms who are monetising the payments their platform facilitates. Enter platform payments strategy. In recent years, there’s been an increase in API-based fintech solutions (like Stripe) that allow platforms to not only offer a variety of payment functionalities (e.g. online card acceptance, BNPL, etc.) to their growing customer base, but it also enables them to capture a portion of these economics (e.g. through margins). This has become an attractive lever for platforms to pull. In fact, PayPal Ventures reports that a number of vertical SaaS platforms are now generating more revenue from their embedded payments offerings than their core subscription products.

But monetising payments is not as simple as it may seem. The question around how you - as a health and wellness platform - ensure that you’re pricing in a way that makes sense for you and your customers often leaves those in charge of answering this question (often a CFO, VP of Payments or VP of Finance) baffled with the answer most often being “I don’t know”. From what we’ve seen at Revenew, platforms that have a deep understanding of their payments’ financial performance are best placed to maximise the financial upside from their embedded payments while retaining their customers through ensuring margins are fair and competitive. So, how do we get this place of enlightenment?

The Role of Revenew for Health and Wellness Platforms

As a heath and wellness platform, do you know your margin on every single payment? This is particularly important in the health and wellness sector, where clients often use diverse payment methods, including prepaid cards, health insurance plans, and corporate wellness benefits. These types of scenarios can introduce additional complexities and fees into your payment processing, making it crucial to have a detailed understanding of your margins. To simplify this, we’ve built Revenew and its suite of tools to empower health and wellness platforms with all of the insights, data, and knowledge they need to gain an in-depth understanding of their business to answer questions like:

• How many of my payments are loss-making? Why are they loss-making to begin with?
• Which customers are my most profitable/ least profitable?
• Which payment methods should I adjust to help me achieve my overall net margin goal?

Armed with this knowledge and the tools Revenew has built for its customers, platforms are able to easily implement intelligent pricing strategies and create advanced payment flows that cater to their unique needs without the need to do the heavy-lifting of building these capabilities in-house. Our mission is to help platforms level up their payments intelligence, boost margins and improve their operational efficiency with best-in-class tools designed especially for platforms.

Make Data-Driven Pricing Decisions

Using Revenew, health and wellness platforms can track key metrics such as revenue, margins, and processing fees in detail. Having these detailed insights into your wellness providers’ performance helps you get to grips with who is generating your platform the most revenue and what the impact on your bottom line would be were you to lose them. This enables you as the health and wellness platform to make more data-driven decisions around which providers to incentivise to increase engagement and drive loyalty.

• Gain real-time insights into payment trends: By understanding how your customers’ customers prefer to pay and how payment methods affect revenue, platforms can make informed decisions about which payment options to optimise for.
• Analyse margin health: Revenew’s analytics tools can flag transactions that fall below margin thresholds, allowing platforms to take corrective action quickly. We have seen platforms losing $100k+ p/a unknowingly due to loss making payments - making a tool like this invaluable.
• Monitor the impact of processing fees on overall margins: If you’re on IC++, getting a breakdown of all the fees charged can be a headache. Revenew provides these out of the box.

Simplified Payments Reporting

Managing payment data and processing fees can be complicated. Platforms need real-time access to consolidated reports on collections, margins, fees, payouts, chargebacks, and other key metrics which are not readily available today without a lot of manual leg-work. From what we’ve seen, platforms who are manually compiling this information are taking at least 10 minutes per payment (see our recent case-study with leading B2B fintech infrastructure business, Monite). This can have a significant impact on operational efficiency, and the cost implications can be crippling - especially where margins are already razor-thin. Revenew’s automated reporting tools helps platforms simplify this process, allowing them to focus on delivering exceptional experiences for their wellness providers rather than getting bogged down in cumbersome, time-consuming administrative tasks:

• By automating the reconciliation of interchange++ (IC++) fees, platforms can minimise the risk of human error in financial reporting.
• Streamlined processes mean less time spent on manual reporting, allowing staff to focus on automating repetitive tasks for hotels and drive customer engagement.
• Revenew provides detailed reports that give platforms a clear overview of their payment activities and associated fees, helping you to define and execute a successful payments strategy.

If you want to learn more about how Revenew has helped a leading health and wellness platform, Hapana, build out their tooling in order to offer gyms - and their customers - a best-in-class payments experience, check out this video with Hapana CEO and Founder, Jarron Aizen. For the full podcast episode, head here.

Complexity, Simplified

At Revenew, we understand how vital it is for platforms’ tools to be in-sync with one another. Our no-code integration capabilities make it simple for health and wellness platforms to incorporate its tools into their existing technology stack. This ensures that platforms have near-instant insight into their payments’ financial performance in a few clicks.

We’ve made it simple for platforms to connect Revenew with their existing payment processors, like Stripe or Adyen, to enable real-time data synchronisation and automated fee reconciliation. Our no-code integration makes it incredibly simple for platforms to sign up in less than 30 seconds. If you want to see how, check out this video.

A World of Endless Opportunities

Vertical software markets tend to have winner-take-most dynamics, where the vertical SaaS business that can best serve the needs of a specific industry is most likely to be the dominant vertical solution and can sell both software and financial solutions to their core customer base. Embedded payments have opened up a whole new world for health and wellness platforms, where we’re seeing a substantial portion of revenue being generated from financial services. As platforms incorporate financial services with their existing offerings, they not only increase revenue per customer (between 2-5x according to a16z), but they expose new opportunities in markets previously deemed too small, or not cost efficient to acquire customers, to be viable. As health and wellness platforms continue to evolve and expand, having an intimate understanding of your payments’ financial performance becomes a crucial component of your business’s viability and retaining customers.

By utilising Revenew’s detailed payment insights and intelligent pricing controls, platforms can significantly improve their financial performance while maintaining focus on delivering exceptional wellness experiences. In a landscape where competition is fierce and consumer preferences are rapidly changing, health and wellness platforms that embrace innovative payment strategies and diversify their revenue streams will be well-positioned for sustainable growth. If you’re a health and wellness platform and you would like to discuss how we can help level up your payments intelligence, boost your margins and improve your operational efficiency with best-in-class tools, reach out to us by visiting https://revenew.co/contact or send us an email at info@revenew.co.