Q&A with Cole Craven of health care insurance planning firm Move Health
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In January, Evansville-based Move Health, a health care insurance planning firm, acquired San Francisco-based Caribou, a company with software that helps financial advisors plan for their clients’ current and future health care costs.
Cole Craven, Move Health’s head of growth, spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the company’s rapid growth and the Caribou acquisition.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about the origins of Move Health.
My two business partners, Drew Shockley and Josh Mushlock, and I have extensive backgrounds in the health insurance and Medicare space.
We started Move Health in 2023 to solve a unique problem that was outlined by my in-laws. They were 59 years old, and they wanted to retire to spend more time with their new grandchild. They sat down with a financial advisor who said, “The house is paid off. The kids are through college. You’re in a good spot financially to retire. Health insurance is the last thing you need to put into place.”
They asked their advisor, “How do I do that? Where do I go? How do I fix that problem? Can you give me an estimate of what it’s going to cost?” The advisor provided an estimate that was significantly higher than reality. Because current financial planning software doesn’t equip financial advisors with accurate health care cost data. And many times that’s what is keeping people from retiring early.
If you think about the main problems that an early retiree faces, they’re concerned about the longevity of their funds, and they’re concerned about health care. It’s always the top two or three concerns. How are they going to access it? Is it going to be expensive? What does it look like to enroll in it? What do they need to know? Can they get it with a pre-existing condition?
So we started Move Health to improve health care literacy for the 40 million Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 to solve the early retiree health insurance problem.
We do that by equipping financial advisors with accurate health care cost data and then also a team located in Evansville that’s licensed in 50 states to help guide those financial advisors’ clients through our process. Taking them through initial needs analysis all the way to enrollment and implementation of the strategy that we’ve laid out with them.
[The company] has expanded into helping all different types of clients of financial advisors. Clients who are small business owners, clients who are transitioning into a consultant role or a freelance role, clients of financial advisors who are turning 65 and need to understand what Medicare looks like for them. We guide them through that transition.
How has the company succeeded so far?
It feels as if we struck a nerve within the financial planning community and the fintech space. We thought for sure when we started brainstorming that someone else was already doing this at scale, and there wasn’t one. The successes we’ve celebrated so far are launching partnerships with advisors and their clients across the country. We now serve over a thousand financial advisors across the United States. We operate on a 50-state footprint.
The successes we’re most excited about are the client outcomes. We could talk about large partnerships that we’ve launched and enterprise relationships and things along those lines. But the successes that we cherish are when we get to help guide someone through health care planning which results in them being able to make their next move in life with confidence.
Whether that be making the transition to early retirement or getting to spend more time on hobbies or more time with family or making that transition to entrepreneurship that they’ve been holding off on because they didn’t know what health insurance looked like on the other side.
How has Move Health been challenged?
With our recent acquisition of Caribou, we are creating a market segment in the financial planning space. There’s estate planning, financial technologies for financial advisors, tax planning. We are creating a market segment which is health care planning. The challenge is making certain advisors understand the value of health care planning to their clients and creating publicity around what we are doing and how we do it.
Talk about the Caribou acquisition.
Caribou was likely our closest competitor. They have an incredible team that we get to now work alongside, and the software they have built will improve our client onboarding experience and the post-analysis information the advisor and client receive.
It’s an improvement to our services and a furthering of our commitment to serving financial advisors and their clients with best-in-class technology and white-glove, end-to-end experiences. It’s our commitment to making a better tech-enabled but human-driven solution for health care planning.
You told me Move Health plans to scale significantly this year. Can you elaborate?
We intend to scale to around 30 team members, predominantly within the Evansville area provided we can find the correct talent. We’re excited about continuing to grow in Evansville, and we’re scaling to meet demand. We’re lucky to be in a position where we have turned the corner from having to find customers and advisors to work with us. Now they are finding us, which is a great problem to have.
We’ve done significant advanced financial modeling to show us exactly where we plan to go and what we think is achievable in 2025. We are not venture capital or private equity backed. We are a self-funded fintech startup. That’s an important designator within the space. As we continue to scale and grow, we’re doing so in a way that is responsible and rising to meet the demand of our financial advisor partners who work with us.
What do people need to know about planning for health care insurance?
The important thing to know is that health insurance or Medicare is not a reason to delay your next big move in life. We see it time and time again where people are delaying retirement or starting a business or making the transition to Medicare or what have you because of health insurance. The reality of it is they fear what they don’t know.
We ultimately want to help people unlock their next move in life. Our name is intentional in helping people to move from one phase of life to another. Our perspective is don’t let [health insurance] be a blocker.
Health care planning is now becoming table stakes. It’s becoming something that clients expect, and they need their financial advisor to give them guidance in this space. It’s a great way to add value to the client experience as a financial advisor. You’re able to extend a solution to a problem that they are going to have whether you help them with it or not.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I was a transplant to Evansville. My wife was a North [High School] grad. We moved here and started integrating into the community. We are deeply involved, love Evansville and love growing here. There’s a commitment from Move Health to continue to grow in our hometown, which we’re excited about.