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Dmitry Kaminskiy is a co-founder and managing partner of Deep Knowledge Group — a consortium of commercial and non-profit organizations active on many fronts in the realm of DeepTech and Frontier Technologies.
As the pace longevity industrialization continues to speed up and its scope grows, longevity is increasingly recognized as a key driver for both citizen and corporate relocation. Individuals, companies, and investors alike will seek out territories that best support the optimization of their health and wealth, as well as regions with established longevity industry ecosystems that facilitate the growth of companies and their products, services, and supply chains.
Three specific categories of longevity relocation are at the center of this trend, and longevity-focused ecosystems will continue to be magnets that attract human and financial capital in future. Promisingly, the fundamental components necessary for the entrenchment of this trend are already in place.
In a previous essay, I described how the predominant trend of ‘age-friendly cities’ focused on elderly care and comfortable retirement will be offset by the rise of ‘longevity-friendly cities’; a trend covered comprehensively in my forthcoming book, Longevity Politics. Pro-longevity cities are characterized by governmental efforts to create local longevity ecosystems and industries capable of sustaining policies seeking to optimize population ‘healthspan’ (the period of life free from age-related disease and dysfunction). They also support life-long productivity, enjoyment, economic participation, and social activity.
We are beginning to see ‘pro-longevity cities’ arise as governments adopt pro-longevity, rather than pro-aging, stances. As the global megatrend of longevity industrialization continues, alongside the widespread shift to prevention-based medical treatment, we can expect even more pro-longevity cities to emerge.
NEOM is a USD 500 billion smart city currently in development in the Tabuk Province of northwestern Saudi Arabia. NEOM is combined with ‘The Line,’ a series of smaller smart cities stretching across the country. The project explicitly includes ‘Rejuvenation’ as one of its seven pillars, describing the intent to “multiply mental and physical health benefits of our seniors” and “transform aging into healthy longevity”. Each of its seven guiding principles mentions positive impacts on quality of life to accommodate its seniors, and the socio-economic challenges of aging populations.
The creation of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven smart cities that establish HealthTech, preventive medicine, and other constituent biomedical drivers is an emerging trend, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa region, and we can expect many other self-described ‘longevity HealthTech havens’ to appear in coming years.
I have previously described how longevity industrialization, accelerated by developments in the longevity financial industry, in particular, drives the recognition of ‘health as new wealth’ and longevity as a new asset class. We will see ‘health havens’ overtake the legacy trend of ‘wealth havens’ for ultra-high net worth individuals, who will increasingly demand longer wealthspans to match proportionately longer healthspans.
Such individuals are also seeking out territories capable of sustaining their health and wealth optimization, providing access to the best medical (namely, HealthTech) and non-biomedical (namely, AgeTech, WealthTech, and InvestTech) services possible for this purpose. As more companies begin to develop integrated AgeTech, WealthTech, and HealthTech solutions, today’s tax and wealth havens will eventually be overtaken by tomorrow’s ‘age–health–wealth havens’.
Investors are likely to favor areas fostering local ‘longevity financial industry hubs,’ a concept I first predicted in 2020 and describe in detail in my forthcoming book, Longevity Financial Industry.
In July 2021, India’s International Financial Services Centres Authority announced plans to develop a ‘global longevity finance hub’ in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City). India’s finance ministry has stated that the committee developing the project’s roadmap will include leaders from the entire longevity finance ecosystem including banking, insurance, wealth management, FinTech, legal, compliance, and management consultancy.
The hub will seek to create an integrated ecosystem of wealth management, health, insurance, and other investment products, to meet the challenges and the opportunities of India’s silver generation. It will be located in the country’s first operational Smart City. India's FinTech ecosystem has seen tremendous growth over the past five years, and today India is ranked among the top five FinTech investment destinations, having garnered a reputation for customer-centric innovation and global collaboration.
Given their declarations of plans to develop longevity finance hubs, we will see more territories making concerted efforts to create such hubs, with Switzerland being a prime example. These ecosystems will leverage intersections between longevity-focused financial technology sectors to galvanize the continued growth and stability of the global longevity industry. They will also promote the influx of foreign capital and longevity industry assets and enable the extension of their citizens’ and residents’ wealthspans.
As longevity emerges as a key driver for individual relocation, we will also see it become a major driver for corporate relocation. Over the next decade, the rise of definitive full-scope longevity industry hubs will lead to intense competition between cities and nations. Countries will seek to attract key longevity companies, entrepreneurs, scientists, and investors to bolster their local industry ecosystems. Increasing numbers of industry stakeholders will choose to relocate to take advantage of greater levels of governmental support, and to access higher density, more efficient, and more populous longevity industry supply chains, networks, and ecosystems.
In 2019, Manchester’s municipality made ‘healthy aging’ a key component of its Local Industrial Strategy, effectively becoming the first local government in the world to launch a longevity industrial strategy. As outlined in a survey of the region’s local longevity industry assets conducted by Aging Analytics Agency and commissioned by MIDAS (the inward investment arm of the Greater Manchester Area Combined Authority) the region is home to 237 longevity companies with total funding of GBP 4 billion. This consists of 108 investors that have made investments across 16 distinct industry subsectors. The most prominent of these sectors include AgeTech, P4 Medicine, Diagnostics, FinTech, InsurTech, and AI for Longevity.
Manchester is not alone, as several other key cities are becoming local longevity industry hubs. Boston in the USA is a frontrunner, with some calling it the ‘Silicon Valley of Longevity’ due to its high density of local longevity-focused companies, incubators, and networks. We can expect to see several other such hubs emerge over the next decade, leveraging a mix of button-up ecosystemic incentives, top-down governmental initiatives, and support mechanisms to attract key longevity industry talent.
Across health, wealth, and industry ecosystems, we are already seeing the necessary prerequisites emerge for longevity as a key driver for relocation. In some cases, this takes the form of government-funded Smart Cities, putting longevity at the forefront of their incentives and infrastructural guiding principles. In others it can be seen in self-described ‘longevity finance hubs’ seeking to leverage synergies between financial, investment, technology, and health sectors to neutralize the challenges and capture the opportunities of rapidly aging populations. In others still, it is evident in the formation of explicit local industrial strategies to support and develop local longevity industries for the mutual benefit of their residents, citizens, and economies.
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