There are lots of accomplishments I’m proud of here at Lively. In 2016, my friend Alex Cyriac and I started this company to help every day people have a better HSA experience. Our mission sums it up pretty well — inspire people to confidently embrace a healthy future. However, I’m excited to share that Lively recently hit a huge milestone: We now have over $1 billion in HSA assets on our platform. A huge number, yes, but one that is meaningful to us, and our account holders, for a few different reasons. As our co-founder and COO it tells me that we’ve earned our account holders’ trust and are serving them well. It also confirms that the only way to do this job right is to focus on the end user experience.

What $1 billion in HSA assets means to us

When I first got the news that Lively had reached this goal, my first thought was how proud I felt for our team and what we’ve built. And while it wasn’t necessarily unexpected (we’ve been growing for quite some time), I still felt the magnitude of it — especially when I think about how far we’d come. During Lively’s early days, Alex and I served as the first two support representatives, actively engaging with our first 1,000 account holders. We’ve gotten where we are now through a lot of hard work, and by proving a lot of people wrong.

When we started Lively, HSAs were a little over 15 years old. There was a ton of competition when we came on the scene: Some were direct competitors; others were tangentially competing through third-party administrators. Just about everyone was using the same playbook to compete for assets, which was pursuing the employer market.

It was difficult to carve out our own path, but we decided to focus on the direct-to-consumer market at first. Existing players in the HSA space saw what we were doing and essentially said that no one could be successful using those tactics. Up to that point, it just wasn’t how things were done. But what the industry didn’t see yet was that there was a tremendous end-user desire to have a better product — so that’s what we built. The word spread early on, and that was our first hook into the HSA market.

We learned quickly that we could accumulate a decent amount of assets on our platform by serving account holders who had opened HSAs elsewhere, but were unhappy with the subpar experience. Our competitors outdated tech, checked-out incumbent providers, and high fees were no longer meeting their needs. Our hypothesis proved to be true: When people have their first experience with us, that’s usually enough to boost their confidence and bring their HSA assets to Lively.

Lively took off from there. We created our own niche and organically moved into the employer market because we’d already connected with HR administrators and benefits consultants on an individual level. We've been able to leverage those early victories on our current path, which is to go head-to-head with other benefits solutions providers and work with benefits brokers and enterprise-level employers to offer their clients and employees the best HSA experience out there.

Our account holders remain our number one priority

Accumulating assets is important, but it isn’t everything. We’re equally dedicated to providing a superior HSA product at a fair cost. We understand how critical that is to our long-term staying power. The reason we got into this business is to make fundamental changes to how the American consumer can interact with their healthcare dollars. Step one of that is ensuring that the consumer can keep as much of their own dollars as possible without getting nickel and dimed.

One of the things I’m most proud of about hitting that $1 billion in assets is that our users have saved more than $10 million in fees that they otherwise would have paid to other providers. Our account holders are always at the center of our decision-making process. They’re the ones who will benefit by us being around for a very long time.

As we continue to grow, I want to ensure that we’re not stopping short of making the kind of long-term impact Alex and I envision. I feel we’re one of the few companies to really focus on helping Americans build a healthy future. I can’t help but think if the industry really cared about them, they wouldn’t have neglected them during the first 15 years HSAs were on the market. At Lively, we feel there's a responsibility to go further. We can easily see $1 billion in assets turning into $2 billion, $5 billion, and so on, but we don't want to simply accumulate assets. It’s imperative that we maintain the trust of every Lively user and support their journey to healthcare savings.

That’s why Lively HSAs are extremely easy to access and use. Call us crazy, but we believe that managing your HSA should be that simple. You’re invited to explore our platform and see for yourself!