I hope you had a relaxing time during the holidays, and that your 2020 is off to a great start.

January is usually a time for making resolutions. For us, other than being very busy, this month means reflecting on our last year at NHC, and how things have been growing at our company. You might have already noticed some of these changes, especially those of you who work closely with Andrew, our Director of Sales and New Business Development.

In this email, I want to share with you:

• What went well this past year?
• What didn't go so well this past year?
• The changes impacting you in 2020

Why go through this exercise?

At NHC we believe in transparency with our partners. We want to share with you our wins, temporary set-backs, and exciting new future developments.

WHAT WENT WELL?

We had a lot to celebrate this past year. Thanks to our advisor partners, 2019 was a record year with NHC growing by almost 30% over 2018. This allowed us to invest right back into our technology. Based on feedback from employees, the mobile app, ClaimSnap, was updated to allow users to upload receipts from their camera roll. We also enhanced our platform to allow:

• Copay on the spending account
• More customized LSA categories like RRSP and Charity Reimbursement
• Employee on-boarding emails for LifeHealth+, where our clients could edit the text to fit their company culture

Of course, the greatest reward has been hearing from advisors and clients alike. One of our advisors switched their own HSA to us and emailed Andrew the following, "Really slick… that was waaaay easier and faster than who I currently use."

WHAT DIDN'T GO WELL?

Our target to release a new online platform fell short as we had hoped to be up and running by November 2019. Delay was primarily due to a need to better understand our current data and how to smoothly migrate between systems.

We also didn’t want to simply launch a better-looking system — we wanted to bring our advisors a solution with considerably more features. This means our schedule has been pushed into the second quarter of 2020.

CHANGES IMPACTING YOU IN 2020

Here are new features we expect to announce this year:

• Cafeteria style plans (for example: full-time employees have gym memberships and fitness apparel coverage, part-time have only gym memberships).
• Different copay structures for different categories (for example: all employees receive 80% dental, 50% vision, 100% prescription drugs).
• Pre-authorized debit (PAD) for spending account funding.
• An advisor portal you can log into for your commission reporting.
• Better demo access to our new platform.

We hope you find these changes exciting; they were inspired by advisors like you. At NHC we are building plans you can proudly bring to your clients as top options.

So to contribute to our next round of development, send us an email and let us know what you’re still looking for. What would make you and your clients happy?

We look at all your feedback.

All the best in 2020

Dave Howard