How carriers can unite health, wealth and longevity: PwC

Health, wealth and longevity are deeply interconnected. Health goes beyond treatment of ailments to long-term well-being that enables longer lifespans. And, as people live longer and have active later years, they need financial resources to support them throughout retirement.

Yet most employers, insurers and financial advisors view health, wealth and longevity separately, and systemic fragmentation with disjointed experiences persists. Employers continue to struggle with cost, complexity and engagement. Carriers still operate within product and system silos that limit coordination and insight. The result is a system that leaves many struggling to maintain well-being and stability.

Carriers have the data and reach to simplify the customer experience in an integrated well-being model. But to succeed, they must go beyond just orchestrating products. They should provide customers a clear and comprehensive view of where they’re both secure and at risk, and how savings and coverages can protect them throughout life stages. Their most urgent task is to replace a patchwork of tools with unified platforms that provide real-time insight and proactive guidance, thereby promoting the customer trust so vital to long-term growth and retention.

Most employers, insurers, wealth managers and financial advisors view health, wealth and longevity separately, resulting in systemic fragmentation and disjointed experiences.

Drivers of change

Longstanding pain points, fragmented systems, rising costs and low savings necessitate structural change. There are several factors influencing and driving these developments.

Technological advancements have raised customer expectations. Fintech, healthtech, insurtech, and wellness innovations have raised consumer expectations for personalization. This includes real-time health and fitness data, customized health and well-being advice, and seamless digital connectivity across life stages, including job changes. There’s a meaningful opportunity for market shapers to provide bespoke, proactive well-being management that helps customers and advisors set and monitor financial, protection and health goals, anticipate risks, and engage with service providers on their own terms.

Leading carriers are responding by taking advantage of the connected data, automation and AI that drives real-time health, wealth and retirement convergence. This is enhancing their delivery of advice, planning and protection.

There’s a desire to understand how benefits connect and complement each other. A growing societal focus on preparedness, prevention and wellness—regardless of age—is exposing the limits of systems built for episodic treatment rather than lifelong well-being. And a diverse, mobile and multigenerational workforce that’s increasingly concerned with longevity prefers flexibility, simplicity and personalization. As a result, traditional employee benefits models are under strain as employers attempt to balance cost with the growing demand for holistic well-being support.

In response, employers and carriers are rethinking how they design, deliver and fund benefits, especially as technology reconfigures the job market and even the nature of work itself. There’s an opportunity to integrate income and protection strategies and make benefits portable across jobs and life stages. Programs are expanding to include mental health, caregiving and financial wellness, but disconnected systems limit their impact. Benefits accordingly should evolve from discrete offerings to unified, AI-enabled health and savings platforms that adjust to individual needs and life stages, and enhance engagement, efficiency and loyalty.

Well-being leaders will have more than just competitive products and pricing. They’ll shape how individuals understand, manage and sustain their well-being over a lifetime.

There’s a financial planning crisis. Traditional retirement scenarios based on linear careers and predictable timelines no longer reflect reality. Careers with one or two long-term employers that offer generous savings programs are now the exception, not the rule. At the same time, as longevity has increased, there’s a pressing need to save even more for retirement. Despite this, retirement plan participation and engagement remain uneven and only a fraction of the population has saved adequately for their later years.

Moreover, a considerable number of people find themselves having to care for children beyond college age or elderly relatives—and in many cases, both. This is often a financial strain, both in terms of outlay and lost income for those who serve as unpaid caregivers to family members.

As a result, there’s a greater need than ever for transparent, in-depth planning that integrates thoughtful and appropriate income and protection strategies. And this planning should extend beyond 401k plans and IRAs to HSAs, debt management, and increasingly diverse investment options. AI-powered planning tools can provide customers data-driven insights into lifetime income options, but employers, carriers and advisors can do much more to increase engagement and tap deeper into an underserved market.

Capital convergence is shaking up the market. Recent market entrants are providing perhaps the biggest impetus for new business and operating models. Private equity and institutional investors are channeling capital into areas where boundaries are already disappearing. These new owners and investors are capturing growth by integrating wealth and retirement, life and annuities, and group protection. This influx of capital is directly challenging established ways of doing business and creating competitive urgency for carriers to modernize faster and offer more customer-focused solutions.

New market entrants are challenging established ways of doing business, creating urgency for carriers to modernize and offer customer-focused solutions.

Defining the future leader

Integrating health, wealth, and longevity can reshape how carriers create and measure value. Traditional insurance models have typically viewed cost efficiency and customer experience as competing priorities. They’re actually mutually reinforcing.

Well-being leaders will have more than just competitive products and pricing. Their role will extend beyond underwriting and administration to shape how individuals understand, manage and sustain their well-being over a lifetime. They’ll serve as architects of intelligent, agentic partnerships and ecosystems that integrate health, benefits, retirement and wealth. Human expertise and empathy will combine with technology in real time to provide a seamless, personalized experience that improves lives.

Generative and agentic AI will help cut through complexity across domains to quickly generate potential solutions. Advisors and service teams will use this information as a starting point with customers and then work with them to determine coverage and service suitability depending on their life goals.

To maintain an edge, carriers will need to continuously learn to innovate, adapt and refine their products and services. Their infrastructure and data will need to enable speed, precision and flexibility across functions, from product design to underwriting to service. Customer interactions will generate data points that drive carrier action, creating a sustainable improvement loop.

Providing customers and channel partners an integrated view of health, wealth and longevity can increase customer and advisor engagement, leading to “stickier” products and services tied to a broader ecosystem.

Reimagining operations

To bring this transformation to life, carriers will need to fundamentally reimagine how they operate. The goal is not to make existing processes faster but to build an operating model designed for data optimization, collaboration and continuous learning.

From incremental improvement to reinvention: For years, modernization has meant automation or digitization within traditional workflows. This approach is inadequate. Carrier operations should support real-time decision-making and personalized experiences. Every function, from underwriting to claims, should contribute to a connected network that learns and adapts through data and AI. Efficiency, accuracy and agility should be interdependent capabilities that lower costs and improve user and customer experiences.
From silos to unified platforms: The elimination of silos can decrease friction and increase engagement. Greater engagement can create a virtuous cycle, with richer data and deeper insights that in turn enable more personalization and innovation. For carriers, the implications are significant. Data-driven, preventative models can help reduce claims and therefore payouts. Automation and AI can lower administrative costs. Unified platforms can simplify service, increase participation and build trust. Collectively, these changes can replace one-time transactions with lifetime relationships, turning well-being into a growth engine.
From APIs to agents: Integration is evolving from linking systems to connecting intelligence. AI agents can now perform tasks, share insights and interact across platforms and products. These agents have the potential to become the connective tissue for ecosystems, coordinating data, managing processes and supporting human decision-making. Small language models (SLMs) are making these capabilities more practical and controllable, enabling carriers to deploy AI responsibly within specialized processes and embed ongoing insights into every level of the operating model. Carriers whose systems and data can collaborate with these agents can deliver faster, smarter and more personalized service.
The human element in an intelligent system: Despite AI’s impacts, human judgment remains indispensable. The most effective operating models feature humans and machines in a complementary relationship. In this scenario, advisors, underwriters and service professionals shift from process execution to higher-value roles that include interpretation, relationship management and ethical guidance. AI can undertake routine processes, freeing people to focus on what technology cannot replicate: personal validation, trust and understanding.
Adaptive operations: Forward-looking carriers are already designing operations that can scale quickly and continuously evolve for strategic enablement of innovation and growth. Intelligent automation, with an ongoing feedback loop between human and machine learning, is streamlining billing, enrollment and claims, while cutting-edge data infrastructure is supporting compliance, transparency and actionable insight.

The most effective operating models feature humans and machines in a complementary relationship, where advisors, underwriters and service professionals shift from process execution to higher-value roles.

The path forward

Carriers’ reach across benefits, retirement and protection puts them in a strong position to connect experiences, coordinate ecosystems and redefine well-being. As you create your transformation roadmap, maintain a clear focus on the following strategic considerations.

Business models

Integrate health and financial well-being. Unify health, benefits, and financial programs into a single experience that serves people’s various needs throughout life. Holistic well-being products, platforms and partnerships can strengthen engagement, improve outcomes and unlock new growth opportunities.
Focus on prevention and resilience. Move from reactive service to proactive support. Use predictive analytics and behavioral insights to anticipate health and financial risks, encourage preventive action, and reduce long-term costs for both individuals and organizations.
Enable lifetime connection and portability. Portability builds continuity and loyalty, allowing individuals to maintain protection, savings and personalized support throughout their lifetime. Design solutions that move with people across employers, careers and life stages.

Operating models

Enable intelligent operations. The foundation for transformation is modernizing operations with intelligent automation and continuous learning. Adaptive systems can reduce cost, improve accuracy and enable innovation and adaptability as customer expectations change and technology advances.
Build digital-first experiences. AI and automation can help streamline enrollment, claims and service at scale while people can empathetically validate customer needs and product suitability. Create intuitive digital journeys that make every interaction quick and easy and embed responsible AI and trust-based practices across all operations.
Have the right data to deliver personalization. You need quality data to make the right decisions. Connect data across health, benefits, payroll and financial systems to create individualized experiences. Real-time analytics can tailor communications, enhance coverage and improve decision-making, building customer and policyholder trust in the process.
Build ecosystems that scale innovation. Carriers can’t realistically provide all the elements of a holistic offering. Open, connected ecosystems can accelerate product development and extend market reach. Collaborate with employers, tech partners and other potential partners to integrate offerings, develop and share insights and expand customer, user and partner access.

PwC's Josh Schwartz, Brad Denning and Claudia Ramos also contributed to this report.

The future of well-being