We released the Carrot Card in 2019 as a new way for customers and members to pay for fertility and family-forming healthcare. I’m thrilled to share that today we’re taking it one step further. Carrot members can now access multiple categories of funds on the same card, which means employers can customize plan designs by journey type such as adoption, infertility, gestational surrogacy, and more.
Carrot empowers HR leaders by simplifying every aspect of administrative burden: taxability, security, fraud prevention, international financial regulatory burdens, and more. Employers and health plans can utilize this first-of-its-kind technology to design plans that are clearer and more inclusive while also guarding against low-quality providers and poor health outcomes.
How we got here: Serving critical gaps for customers and members
Historically, fertility healthcare payments were clunky and inconvenient at best. At worst, they were impossible for same-sex couples, single intending parents, pregnant people, and so many more to access care. In addressing these gaps, Carrot has set the bar with the most flexible, inclusive, and ecosystem-integrated fertility healthcare payments platform for employers and health plans. Carrot is on track to process more than $500 million in fertility and family-forming claims in the next year. And as the global leader in fertility benefits, Carrot’s platform processes and adjudicates these claims in 47 different currencies including the U.S. dollar, Japanese yen, euro, and Indian rupee — with more coming soon.
Why does this matter so much? For me, Carrot speaks to deeply held values of expanding access to each individual’s definition of family. By nine years old, I was homeless and on my own. I spent the next decade bouncing through seven foster homes, trying and failing to find a family. As a young man, the hardest part of coming to terms with being gay was struggling to accept what I thought was a difficult truth: I would never form a family of my own.
Today, I have a wonderful home, loving husband, and the opportunity to pursue parenthood in ways my younger self would have never imagined. My husband and I are exploring gestational surrogacy and weighing that against my interest in cross-border adoption from my home country of New Zealand. I want all of these possibilities — and more — to be available to everyone, dispelling the damaging myth that LGBTQ+ people can’t have families. A dynamic payments platform helps to make this possible.
Hundreds of customers have told us that they love the Carrot payments platform because it makes it simple for global employers to deliver fertility benefits in the most flexible and inclusive way. The volume of activity supported by the platform grows exponentially each year. This is a testament to employers and health plans that have prioritized fertility as a core part of the healthcare stack at work.
The future of fertility healthcare & family-forming payments
A single Carrot Card can support every fertility healthcare journey, for every member, globally. What does this mean for members like me?
Carrot members will receive a personalized Carrot Plan, which includes access to emotional support, clinical navigation experts, premium content, and unlimited 1:1 access to legal and medical experts. They can also order their Carrot Card, available as a physical or digital wallet card, which is configured with their employer’s custom plan designs. Their Card could be set up with three categories — for example, $10,000 for adoption, $50,000 for gestational surrogacy, and $20,000 for comprehensive, high-quality IVF care — or it could have one financial amount for all care, depending on their employer’s plan.
Instead of paying out-of-pocket for critical parts of care then waiting to be reimbursed weeks or months later, members can use the Carrot Card to pay for the full spectrum of care and legal services according to their employer’s custom plan designs. Employers are able to track and manage budgets with more transparency and reliability while members get a seamless, elevated, and inclusive experience during one of the most important healthcare engagements of their lives.
I’m thrilled that Carrot continues to advance the capabilities of our payments technology on behalf of customers and members. Carrot is a home for your employees to define and pursue fertility care and family-forming in their own way, just as I continue to do.
James Wong is Chief Product Officer at Carrot Fertility. Prior to Carrot, James has been a product leader with deep experience scaling tech-enabled services across multiple healthcare verticals including behavioral health (Lyra Health), biopharma (Aktana), and genomics (Genome Medical). He also held several roles at the Boston Consulting Group and BCG Digital Ventures. James holds a bachelor’s degree in mechatronics from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
