Beyond Insurance: How Grupo Ageas Portugal Built a Preventive Health Ecosystem with VTEX Marketplace

In the highly traditional insurance industry, customer interactions have historically been reactive and transaction-based. Insurers typically communicate with their policyholders only during moments of friction, such as when a customer is sick, filing a claim, or renewing a policy. Grupo Ageas Portugal, through its leading health insurance brand Médis, recognized that to secure long-term loyalty and promote better health outcomes, they needed to break this cycle.

By partnering with VTEX, Grupo Ageas Portugal successfully bridged the gap between financial protection and daily wellness. They implemented a digital health ecosystem that not only drove massive customer engagement but also fostered powerful synergies with physical retail partners, proving that digital marketplace models can successfully expand the business boundaries of traditional financial institutions.

For decades, health insurance providers operated on a localized, reactive model. A health insurer's primary customer touchpoint was fundamentally tied to illness. As digital commerce and super-apps began reshaping consumer expectations worldwide, Grupo Ageas Portugal faced a significant strategic hurdle: how to transition a highly regulated, conservative insurance business into an active, everyday health partner.

• Reactive Engagement: Interaction with clients was limited to times of illness, creating a purely transactional and often negative association with the brand.
• Lack of Daily Touchpoints: The lack of everyday engagement prevented the brand from promoting preventive health, wellness, and lifestyle care.
• Ecosystem Orchestration: Building a comprehensive ecosystem of physical products, wellness programs, and clinical services required a platform that could seamlessly integrate third-party merchants without Ageas having to manage inventory or logistics.

"The Médis Marketplace was born out of Médis' desire to be in contact with its customers at a time when, until now, they were not. We used to contact the customer only when they were sick, and we wanted to change that. The marketplace was a way to do it."

— André Fortunato Pataco, eCommerce & Loyalty Manager, Grupo Ageas Portugal

To overcome these challenges, Grupo Ageas Portugal developed a strategy centered around a holistic health ecosystem. The goal was to build a continuous relationship with customers by offering a unified space for health products, wellness programs, and clinical services, accessible to both insurance policyholders and the general public.

To execute this vision, Ageas required a technology partner capable of handling complex integrations, scalable headless architecture, and multi-vendor orchestration. They selected VTEX for its native marketplace capabilities and API-first design, allowing them to construct a customized front-end while relying on a robust, enterprise-grade commerce back-end.

"Currently, 50% of everything sold on the internet goes through marketplaces, making this no longer just a sales strategy, but also a series of other opportunities. In the case of Ageas, they use the marketplace as a relationship strategy with their customer base, seeking to generate value and create new moments with that base."

— Thiago Borba, Director of Partners & Marketing (EMEA & APAC), VTEX

The implementation focused on creating a seamless, secure connection between the Médis digital health ecosystem and a curated network of health and wellness sellers. The solution relied heavily on VTEX's native marketplace engine and flexible APIs.

Rapid Multi-Vendor Onboarding

A critical component of the solution was VTEX's native marketplace architecture, which allowed Ageas to onboard third-party sellers quickly without complex middleware. This enabled Médis to scale its catalog to over 20,000 products across categories like health, wellness, pregnancy, fitness, and beauty.

Headless Integration with the Médis App

By utilizing VTEX's headless commerce capabilities, Ageas integrated the marketplace directly into the existing Médis mobile app and digital ecosystem. This allowed customers to browse products, use their "Virtual Wallet" for cashbacks, and access health programs in a single, unified interface.

Strategic Launch Partnerships

To ensure immediate catalog depth, VTEX connected Ageas with Grupo Nossa Farmácia, a long-time VTEX client and the largest pharmacy group in Portugal. This pre-existing integration allowed Médis to launch with thousands of trusted pharmaceutical and wellness products already active on day one, dramatically accelerating the project's time-to-market to just six to eight months.

"The native architecture in Marketplace is what allowed us to do all of this in a relatively agile way. In six to eight months from the decision, we were live. This was greatly facilitated by having partners already working with VTEX, such as Nossa Farmácia, who was an excellent launch partner and allowed us to have thousands of products live from the very start."

— André Fortunato Pataco, eCommerce & Loyalty Manager, Grupo Ageas Portugal

The launch of the Médis Marketplace yielded immediate, outstanding results for both Grupo Ageas Portugal and its retail partners, validating the power of collaborative digital ecosystems.

• Explosive Engagement Growth: Customer touchpoints increased by five to seven times throughout the year, shifting the brand relationship from reactive "sick-care" to proactive "wellness-care."
• Rapid User Adoption: Within the first year, the marketplace secured over 25,000 active users, creating a highly engaged digital community.
• Substantial Partner Benefits: The partnership generated a powerful new sales channel for sellers. The launch partner, Nossa Farmácia, saw its digital channel growth nearly double as a direct result of the integration.
• Comprehensive Product Catalog: The platform successfully scaled to over 20 sellers, offering customers a curated catalog of more than 20,000 health and wellness products.

"Clearly, I can make the perception that we managed to grow our channel by almost double. Therefore, this partnership has really generated a lot of increase in both the customer base and even the number of orders generated in that regard."

— Tiago Ferreira, Information Technology Director, Nossa Farmácia

The journey of Grupo Ageas Portugal demonstrates that digital transformation in the financial services sector is not merely about digitizing traditional policies, but about fundamentally expanding the business model. By integrating physical health products, digital wellness services, and insurance benefits into a single headless ecosystem, they transformed a reactive insurance brand into an active partner in daily health.

For a brand that celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2026, this pioneering approach has consolidated Ageas' position as a market leader. The group was recognized as the insurer with the best reputation in the Portuguese market in the Merco Companies and Leaders 2025 ranking, leading the sector in ESG and corporate responsibility.

Through strategic vision, the adoption of VTEX's native marketplace platform, and a commitment to ecosystem-driven growth, Grupo Ageas Portugal has set a global benchmark for the future of health insurance, showing that the best way to protect customers is to engage with them every single day.