Communicating Financial Wellness Across Borders

September 30, 2026 Communicating Financial Wellness Across Borders: Core Tenets for Global Employers

A team of business professionals collaborating during a meeting

Global Benefits Communication

Communicating Financial Wellness Across Borders

Core tenets for global employers, drawn from original research and interviews with Financial Finesse strategists

Financial Wellness

Think Tank™

Key Takeaways

Financial wellness benefits close a measurable gap between employees who understand what support is available to them and employees who do not. Extending that support across a global workforce adds a second layer of work on top of the strategy that already applies within a single market.

Awareness GapRoughly four in ten employees do not know what benefits their employer offers, even though two in three employees who report financial stress say it affects their ability to concentrate at work.¹
Defined OutcomesFinancial wellness communication performs best when every message is deliberate, built to serve a specific outcome tied to the program’s broader goals, rather than sent only to mark that something went out.
Point-of-Need TimingIn Financial Finesse client data, a retirement webcast promoted broadly across a workforce drew a 5.6 percent attendance rate, while comparable content timed for employees over 50 facing a voluntary separation decision drew 72.4 percent.
Local SubstanceA message that works in one country rarely transfers unchanged. Local resources, channels, and cultural norms around money change what a message should say, not only how it is translated.
Relevance Over VolumeThe employers seeing the strongest results are not sending more messages. They are sending more relevant ones, built with local partners and tested against real usage data.

Section 01 The Case for Global Communication

Financial stress follows employees across every market an organization operates in. In a global survey of 38,000 working adults across 35 countries, the cost of living and inflation ranked as the most commonly reported stressor, cited by 64 percent of respondents, followed by concern about the broader economy at 60 percent.¹ Among employees who reported financial stress, two in three said it affected their ability to concentrate at work, a link that gives employers a direct business reason to help manage it.¹

Despite that incentive, awareness remains a persistent barrier. Roughly four in ten employees report they do not know what benefits their employer currently offers, a gap present regardless of how much an organization has invested in the underlying program.¹ The gap carries a measurable cost. Employees who say their employer supports their financial wellness report meaningfully higher job satisfaction than employees who do not: 52 percent say they are very or extremely satisfied with their job, compared with 34 percent among employees without that support.¹

Awareness Gap

4 in 10

employees do not know what benefits their employer offers

Job Satisfaction

52% vs. 34%

satisfaction among employees with employer support for financial wellness, vs. without

Productivity Link

2 in 3

stressed employees say it affects their ability to concentrate at work

These findings point to a specific constraint. In many organizations, the limiting factor is not the benefit itself but whether employees ever hear about it in a way that resonates. Financial Finesse strategists rely on a consistent set of tenets to close that gap, first within a single market and then across a global workforce.

Section 02 Universal Tenets: Five that Work Everywhere

Before geography enters the conversation, a set of foundational practices determines whether financial wellness communication succeeds in any single market. Laura Stamps, Financial Finesse’s Director of Program Development and Engagement Strategies, and Jennifer O’Brien, Client Marketing Director, describe five tenets that hold regardless of where an employer operates.

Communicate With a Defined Outcome in Mind

Financial wellness communication works best when every message is deliberate: built to serve a specific outcome tied to the program’s broader goals, rather than sent only to mark that something went out. A broad, one-size-fits-all announcement, such as introducing a new digital hub to the entire workforce, can still be worthwhile, but it should be judged against modest expectations. A message built around a specific outcome, such as encouraging enrollment in a debt paydown program among employees carrying high-interest debt, is a different kind of effort and should be judged against a narrower, more specific goal.

“The most effective communications are intentional and aligned with your strategic goals. Before you begin, be clear on what you expect from your campaign, so every effort works toward a defined outcome rather than communicating without real purpose.”

Laura Stamps, Director of Program Development and Engagement Strategies, Financial Finesse

Financial Finesse strategists frame this as a distinction between reach and depth. A broad message can raise general awareness across an entire workforce, and it is reasonable to expect a modest response from it. A message meant to drive a specific action needs to be targeted to the people that action is relevant to, and delivered when it is relevant to them.

Example

Generic Outreach

Webcast Attendance Rate

5.6%

Retirement-focused webcast, standard content promoted broadly to the entire workforce

Point-of-Need Communication

Webcast Attendance Rate

72.4%

Comparable retirement content, customized and timed for employees over 50 facing a voluntary separation decision

Financial Finesse client data shows what that targeting is worth: a retirement-focused webcast promoted broadly across a workforce drew a 5.6 percent attendance rate, while a webcast on comparable retirement content, built for and timed to employees over 50 facing a voluntary separation decision, drew a 72.4 percent attendance rate, nearly 13 times higher. The gap reflected timing and relevance, not a difference in content quality.

The same discipline applies to the goal itself. Financial Finesse strategists point to employers who define a specific outcome, such as reducing financial stress by helping employees exit high-interest debt, and then evaluate every related communication against that outcome rather than against general engagement metrics.

Be Data-Informed

Financial wellness communication also improves when it is built on three categories of data: who the workforce is, where employees sit, and how they have already responded to past outreach. Demographic data identifies who needs help and with what. Engagement data shows which channels and messages have worked before. Financial behavior data, such as retirement contribution rates and loan activity, shows whether a campaign changed what employees actually did.

Audit Before You Build

Before recommending a new communication channel, the more reliable first step is asking what channels already exist and what has already worked. Employers vary widely in what is available to them: some rely on physical worksites and posters, others use QR codes, email, or SMS. Skipping that discovery step means guessing at what will land, a risk that applies equally whether the workforce sits in a single office or across multiple countries.

Make It Human, Not Corporate

Corporate framing tends to produce corporate answers. Financial Finesse strategists describe consistently better results when conversations, including with HR partners themselves, start from real circumstances rather than benefits terminology.

“People often do not know what matters to them until you ask on a human level. Otherwise, you only get corporate answers.”

Laura Stamps, Director of Program Development and Engagement Strategies, Financial Finesse

The same principle applies to employees. A message anchored in a recognizable moment, the cost of groceries, a medical bill, a child heading back to school, tends to land more effectively than a message framed only around plan mechanics.

Choose Creative Partners, Not Order-Takers

A financial wellness vendor that only executes requests, sending a prewritten email when asked, differs meaningfully from a partner that helps design the underlying communication strategy.

“A good partner takes the lift off the communications piece, so an employer does not have to feel like it is building the strategy alone.”

Jennifer O’Brien, Client Marketing Director, Financial Finesse

That distinction matters even more once an organization begins operating across borders.

Section 03 The Global Layer: Five Considerations at Scale

The five tenets above do not change when an organization goes global. What changes is the layer of nuance required to apply them consistently across markets that differ in culture, available resources, and communication norms.

Localize Substance, Not Only Language

“Localization is always going to be important. There is no case in which localization is not a factor.”

Laura Stamps, Director of Program Development and Engagement Strategies, Financial Finesse

In practice, this points to a two-tier model. A single company-wide goal, such as ensuring every employee has an up-to-date beneficiary designation by a set date, can carry one consistent campaign across every market. What changes beneath that shared goal is the framing. In one country, the same campaign might emphasize efficiency and being a prepared, responsible employee. In another, the more effective framing centers on family obligation and protecting loved ones. The company-wide objective stays the same, even as the reason an employee should care about it changes by market.

Localize the Practical Landscape Too

Culture is not the only local variable. What already exists for employees in a given country shapes what a campaign should reference. In the United Kingdom, for example, workers may become eligible around age fifty for a free session with an independent financial adviser, a detail Financial Finesse’s UK-based coaches flagged as directly relevant to campaign timing. Channel preferences, imagery, and color also vary enough by market that a single global template rarely performs as well as one adapted to local expectations.

Draw on Local Coaches, Not a Single Global Contact

Communication planned entirely from a single global point of contact tends to feel like an afterthought to employees in the markets that contact does not live in, according to Financial Finesse strategists. Involving local coaches or planners in shaping the message itself, its timing, and its framing, rather than bringing them in only to translate a plan built elsewhere, changes how that communication is received on the ground.

“Leading coaches across so many different countries has taught me that people’s instincts around money shift more by culture and life experience than most global strategies account for. Decades of deflation in Japan taught a generation to delay purchases rather than make them. In parts of Latin America, a history of currency devaluations and retirement plan nationalizations has taught many people to avoid saving and investing. Those instincts rarely show up in a global campaign brief, and only become visible in the actual conversation.”

Doug Spencer, CFP®, Senior Financial Planner/Global Coaching Manager, Financial Finesse

Balance Local Input With Outside Creative Thinking

Local HR partners understand what is normal in their market, but that familiarity can also narrow their thinking to what has already been tried. Financial Finesse strategists describe pairing local partners, who validate cultural fit and flag missteps, with outside creative input that pushes a campaign beyond routine formats. The balance matters: a campaign designed entirely from outside a market risks a cultural misstep, while one designed entirely from inside it risks repeating the same limited playbook.

Recalibrate the Human Tone by Culture

The human-centered approach to messaging described earlier in this report does not travel automatically. Financial Finesse strategists note that even within the United States, treating financial wellness as a personal, human topic rather than a corporate one is a relatively recent shift. Whether that same tone will land in another market depends on local norms around discussing money and personal circumstances openly, and should be tested rather than assumed.

Conclusion

Asked what one change would most improve how global employers communicate this benefit, Laura Stamps pointed to deployment rather than investment. Most organizations already commit budget to a financial wellness benefit. The larger opportunity lies in how that investment gets deployed: beyond email and posters, and into the intersections between financial wellness and other organizational functions and vendor relationships.

Stamps described that intersection as one of the most underused communication strategies available to global employers, and one with meaningful room to grow as more organizations communicate financial wellness benefits across borders.

References

1.Fidelity International. The Fidelity Global Financial Wellness Report 2026. February 2026.

2.Stamps, Laura, Jennifer O’Brien, and Doug Spencer. Interviews and correspondence with Scott Stark. Financial Finesse, August 28 and September 11, 2026.

Build or Buy: What It Costs to Create a Financial Wellness Benefit

September 25, 2026 Build or Buy: What It Costs to Create a Financial Wellness Benefit

Employer Strategy

Build or Buy: What It Costs to Create a Financial Wellness Benefit

What employer sourcing data, replication cost research, and organizational learning theory indicate for large employers and retirement plan providers weighing the decision.

Financial Wellness

Think Tank™

Key Takeaways

Most large employers have settled the question of whether to offer financial wellness support. The open question is how to source it. This report examines what building a program internally would cost, how long it would take, and what expertise it would require.

HOW PROGRAMS GET BUILTEmployers rarely build alone. Among those with a financial wellness strategy or developing one, 87 percent had outside help building it, and 66 percent used a dedicated financial wellness vendor, up from 47 percent in 2020.1
WHAT IT COSTSBuilding an enterprise-scale platform is estimated at $21 million to $38 million in product and content development, derived from disclosed venture funding for workplace financial wellness platforms and published software industry research and development benchmarks.3, 4, 5
HOW LONG IT TAKESTime is the more binding constraint. None of the workplace financial wellness platforms with public funding histories reached maturity in under a decade, and several were still raising capital in their eleventh and twelfth years.3
THE REAL BARRIERThe deeper barrier is expertise, not budget. In about one in seven cases studied, copying an established product cost as much as or more than the original development, and in a substantial share of those the reason was know-how the original developer had accumulated over years and never published.2
EVEN SPECIALISTS BUYEven dedicated providers buy capability rather than build it. One venture-funded provider that had raised roughly $70 million acquired another company in 2023 to close a gap in its own workplace financial education, then made a second acquisition to add estate planning.3
RETIREMENT PLAN PROVIDERSA provider begins with more of the infrastructure in place than an employer does, though what remains to build is the expensive part. Plan sponsors are meanwhile going elsewhere, with nearly half having a financial wellness program and 13 percent saying it comes through their retirement plan.8

Section 01 What Is Being Built

Financial wellness benefits can mean many different things. EBRI’s employer survey tracks 16 distinct offerings under that heading. They differ in how they are delivered, what they cost, and what regulation applies to them.1 A cost estimate averaged across all 16 describes nothing an employer would actually build.

This report examines one of them, the workplace financial wellness program. A program of this kind gives employees one-on-one guidance from credentialed professionals, certified financial planners in the United States or locally recognized equivalents in other countries, who make no product recommendations. It adds technology-delivered support available at any hour, an assessment that produces a personalized action plan, plus interactive tools for major life events. The program connects to the benefits an employer already offers, so employees find what is available to them. It also covers program design, employee communications, and measurement of results. Employers put their priority here. The three offerings most often named as a company’s single highest priority are financial planning education, personalized financial coaching, and personalized credit or debt management coaching. Together they account for 42 percent of responses.1

Section 02 How Employers Are Sourcing Programs

Among employers that have a strategy for improving employee financial wellness or are developing one, 87 percent had outside help building it.1 The most common source was a dedicated financial wellness vendor at 66 percent, followed by benefits consultants at 59 percent and retirement plan providers at 40 percent.1 Fifty-nine percent said their own company was involved as well. Employers are not handing the work to a vendor so much as adding outside expertise to their own.

The share citing a dedicated financial wellness vendor rose from 47 percent in 2020 to 66 percent in 2025, while the share citing their own company stayed close to 60 percent.1 Designing a program with no outside help is now uncommon.

Outside help

87%

Of employers with a financial wellness strategy, or developing one, had outside help building it1

Vendor reliance

66%

Cited a dedicated financial wellness vendor, up from 47 percent in 20201

Who Helps Design the Financial Wellness Strategy

Share citing each source, among employers with a strategy or developing one, 2020 to 2025

Financial wellness vendor The company itself

Source: Employee Benefit Research Institute, 2025.1 Respondents are benefits decision makers at companies with 500 or more employees that were at least interested in offering financial wellness programs, and could select more than one source. Figures cover employers with a financial wellness strategy or developing one. Sample sizes differ by wave: n=250 in 2020, n=250 in 2022, n=262 in 2024, and n=406 in 2025.1

Section 03 What Building It Yourself Would Cost

Building costs more than most internal estimates assume. Edwin Mansfield and colleagues studied what it costs to copy an established product, looking at 48 new products across a variety of industries.2 On average, copying ran about 65 percent of the original developer’s cost and about 70 percent of the original development time.2 In all but one case the copying firm got no help from the original developer, which is the position an employer is in when it builds without a provider’s cooperation.2

The averages hide a lot of variation. In roughly half the cases the cost ratio came in either below 0.40 or above 0.90, and in about one seventh of cases copying cost as much as or more than building from scratch.2 The time ratio varied as widely, and in some cases copying took longer than the original work.2 For planning purposes, 65 percent is the number to work from, with the caveat that half the cases landed well above or below it.

To make use of these findings, we need to look at what building these programs actually costs. Disclosed venture funding for workplace financial wellness platforms is a reasonable starting point. Three platforms built for large enterprise workforces each raised on the order of $70 million or more.3 Capital raised is not the same as development cost, because venture funding also pays for sales, marketing, and overhead. Benchmarks from software companies that have gone public put research and development at roughly 26 to 30 percent of operating expense.4 Survey data on private software companies shows that venture-backed firms spend more on both research and development and customer acquisition than self-funded ones, another reason to treat capital raised as a ceiling.5 Applying a conservative 30 to 50 percent to those totals gives an estimated $21 million to $38 million to develop a program of this kind from nothing. This is an estimate built on public disclosures and industry benchmarks, not a verified figure. It is also cumulative spend across a build period measured in years rather than an annual budget line, and it buys a starting point rather than a finished program.

What an in-house build does and does not include

An employer can skip

Customer acquisition
Sales and marketing
Multi-tenant architecture
White-labeling and cross-client reporting

An employer still has to build

The content library, and every update to it
Coach recruitment, training, and supervision
The technology platform and its integrations
Compliance review and the education-advice boundary
Program design, communications, and measurement

The estimate above already removes the left column, which is why 30 to 50 percent of capital raised is used rather than the full total. The right column is what remains, and unlike a provider, an employer cannot spread any of it across other clients.

Development

$21–38M

Estimated product and content development for an enterprise-scale platform, cumulative over roughly a decade3, 4, 5

Time to maturity

10+ yrs

No platform with a public funding history reached maturity in less than a decade3

Replication

65%

Average share of an original developer’s cost borne by an imitator, with half of cases falling below 0.40 or above 0.902

Financial Finesse’s own experience building and maintaining a financial coaching platform over more than two decades is consistent with development costs in this range, and with a timeline measured in years rather than budget cycles.7

Time is the bigger obstacle. None of the platforms with public funding histories reached maturity in less than ten years, and several were still raising money in their eleventh and twelfth years.3 These were companies that did nothing else, with specialist staff and money raised for this one purpose. An employer building a program alongside its existing benefits work has no reason to go faster. Few benefits plans look ten years ahead, and few of the leaders who would approve the project will still be in the role when it finishes.

The companies building these platforms have reached the same conclusion. One venture-funded provider that had raised roughly $70 million, at a $400 million valuation, bought another company in 2023 to fill a gap in its own workplace financial education, then bought a second one months later to add estate planning.3 This was a firm whose only business was this product, with money and specialists on hand, and it decided twice that buying beat building.

Section 04 What Building Requires

Cost is only half of the decision. The other half is capability, which internal estimates usually leave out.

Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal called this absorptive capacity: an organization’s ability to see the value in outside expertise, take it in, and put it to use.6 It is the related know-how a team has built up over years of work, which is what lets it judge and use something new. It builds slowly, and it cannot be bought quickly.6

A financial wellness program runs on behavioral finance, coaching methodology, and a clear grasp of where financial education ends and regulated advice begins. Benefits teams are usually strong in plan design, vendor management, and compliance. Few have comparable depth in the three disciplines a program depends on. A team without that background can still build a program, but it is more likely to build one that does not work.

Expertise most benefits teams hold

Built through years of benefits administration

Plan design and benefits architecture. Vendor selection and management. Regulatory compliance across an existing benefits portfolio. Employee communications at scale.

Expertise an effective program requires

Accumulated in a different discipline entirely

Behavioral finance and the drivers of financial decision making. Coaching methodology that produces measured change. The regulatory boundary separating financial education from regulated advice.

Mansfield found the same thing. Where copying cost as much as building from scratch, it was not because the copy was better. In a substantial share of those cases the original developer knew more: it had built up specialized experience with related products that never appeared in any patent and that outsiders could not easily get hold of.2 That is absorptive capacity, described nine years before Cohen and Levinthal gave it a name.

Two other findings apply directly to financial wellness. Copying cost more when less of the original spending had gone to research and more had gone to building the product and getting it to market, because research results become visible to outsiders while the build work has to be done over.2 And products that needed regulatory approval cost about 31 percentage points more to copy.2 A financial wellness program is mostly build rather than research, and it runs up against the line between education and advice. Both put it at the expensive end of Mansfield’s range.

Section 05 Commitment, and the Case for Building

Choosing a provider does not take the employer out of the work. A program gets results when the organization commits to it, promotes the resources to its people, and gives them time and encouragement to use them. A good provider supplies the harder part, a tested program and the guidance to launch and run it. The commitment still has to come from the employer.

When building makes sense

Building internally is the right call for a narrow set of organizations. It fits a company that has the right mix of expertise across personal finance, employee benefits, and software development, and that can keep paying for those people to maintain and update the platform over the long term. A financial wellness program is never finished. Content needs updating, compliance needs review, and the technology needs investment as employee needs and regulations change.

For an organization without that expertise, the research offers no discount for replication, and the full estimated range of $21 million to $38 million or more should be expected.2, 3 An organization that already has deep expertise in all three areas may get closer to the 65 percent average, which puts development at roughly $14 million to $25 million, because it starts with the know-how Mansfield identified as the reason copying costs run high.2, 3 Two things pull against that lower figure. It comes from an average with wide variation, and every financial wellness program carries the regulatory exposure that raised copying costs in his data.

Without the expertise

$21–38M or more

No replication discount applies. An employer working outside its core competence should expect the full estimated development range, or above it.2, 3

With aligned expertise

$14–25M

Reflects the average imitation ratio, available only to an organization already holding the technical base across personal finance, employee benefits, and platform development.2, 3

That combination of expertise is rarer than it looks. Knowing financial products is not the same as giving unbiased guidance across a whole benefits package, and neither one covers the coaching methodology that produces measurable results. The survey data gives a rough sense of how rare it is. Finance and insurance firms made up 34 percent of respondents, double the next largest industry, so the employers best equipped to build were well represented among those who went to an outside vendor instead.1

Keeping a program running is harder than launching one. Several of the platforms with public funding histories were bought by larger firms instead of reaching scale on their own, and others stalled after early rounds.3 These were companies whose only business was this product.

Section 06 For Retirement Plan Providers and Advisors

Retirement plan providers are active in this category. Among employers that have a financial wellness strategy or are developing one, 40 percent say a retirement plan provider helped design it. More say a dedicated financial wellness vendor did, at 66 percent.1 A separate survey of plan sponsors shows the same split from the other direction. Nearly half had a financial wellness program in place, but only 13 percent said it came through their retirement plan.8 Most of the employers who have one got it somewhere else. Every employer with a plan already has a provider, so this is not a matter of employers lacking the relationship. They have it, and they are still going elsewhere. That leaves plan providers and advisors with a decision of their own, whether to build a program to offer plan sponsors or to license one built elsewhere.

Plan providers already have some of the infrastructure a program needs. Multi-tenant systems, cross-sponsor reporting, and sponsor relationships exist because running a recordkeeping business requires them. A vendor starting out has to build all of that. A plan provider does not. The parts still missing are the expensive ones. Building something that already exists saves the cost of working out what to build, but not the cost of building it.2

Coaching is the clearest case. A recordkeeping system serves another sponsor at almost no added cost, because software scales without adding staff. Coaching does not work that way. Every additional participant who wants a session needs someone qualified to deliver it, so the cost grows with the number of people, not the number of clients. The decade-long timelines still apply.3

A six-part test for an existing offering

One-to-one guidance from credentialed professionals who make no product recommendations, available to every participant
Technology-delivered support available at any hour
An assessment that produces a personalized action plan for each participant
Interactive tools and life-event resources
Integration across each sponsor’s own benefits set, not the retirement plan alone
Program design, employee communications, and measurement of results for each sponsor

A provider delivering all six to every sponsor it serves is already running a program of this kind, and the cost analysis in this report does not apply to it. Where an item is missing, or reaches only some sponsors, that is what a build would have to add.

Plan providers face the same decision employers do, with a head start on the parts that were never the hard ones. What is left is the coaching, the content, and the compliance work, and those take years to build and people to run.

The Bottom Line

For nearly every organization weighing this, financial wellness is a valuable benefit rather than a source of competitive advantage. The workable rule is to build what is core to the business and buy what is not. That holds equally for an employer building for its own workforce and for a retirement plan provider building for its sponsors, though a provider starts with more of the infrastructure already in place.

Building can make sense when all of these hold

The organization already has deep expertise in personal finance, employee benefits, and software development
It can fund content updates, compliance review, and technology investment for as long as the program runs, not only through launch
A timeline measured in years fits its planning horizon
The program sits close enough to the core business to justify that sustained investment

Buying is the better fit when any of these hold

The expertise sits outside what the organization does
Budget authority covers a project but not an indefinite operating commitment
The benefit is needed sooner than a build could deliver it
Financial wellness matters to the people it would serve but is not a source of competitive advantage

An established program carries a development cost that has already been absorbed, estimated in the tens of millions of dollars over a timeline measured in years, along with the accumulated expertise that determines whether a program changes behavior. That leaves the organization free to focus on the part no vendor can supply, which is a real commitment to the financial health of the people it serves. Anyone weighing a build estimate against a purchase has a straightforward next step. Ask a specialist provider’s consulting team what the same capability costs to buy, and compare the two figures.

References

Funding figures cited in this report are drawn from publicly disclosed venture financing rounds and are presented as order-of-magnitude estimates. Development cost figures are Financial Finesse estimates derived from those disclosures and published software industry operating expense benchmarks, not verified company financial statements. Reference 7 draws on Financial Finesse proprietary data; the underlying figures are held internally and are not disclosed here. Mansfield, Schwartz, and Wagner examined manufactured product innovations in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and electronics and machinery; their ratios are applied here as the closest available empirical benchmark for replication cost rather than as a direct measure of software and services development.

1Spiegel, Jake, and Bridget Bearden. “2025 EBRI Financial Wellbeing Employer Survey: Focusing on the Bottom Line Continues.” EBRI Issue Brief, no. 648. Washington, DC: Employee Benefit Research Institute, December 11, 2025. Multi-year figures drawn from the accompanying 2025 Financial Wellbeing Symposium presentation, Question 105. Accessed September 3, 2026. Financial Finesse is among the organizations that provided funding for this survey.

2Mansfield, Edwin, Mark Schwartz, and Samuel Wagner. “Imitation Costs and Patents: An Empirical Study.” The Economic Journal 91, no. 364 (1981): 907–918.

3Financial Finesse compilation of publicly disclosed venture financing rounds, acquisitions, and company announcements for workplace financial wellness providers, drawn from company press releases and venture capital databases. Accessed September 3, 2026.

4Blossom Street Ventures. “Percent of SaaS Revenue for R&D, S&M, COGS, and G&A.” Analysis of software companies completing initial public offerings since October 2017. Accessed September 3, 2026.

5SaaS Capital. 2026 Spending Benchmarks for Private B2B SaaS Companies. Accessed September 3, 2026.

6Cohen, Wesley M., and Daniel A. Levinthal. “Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation.” Administrative Science Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1990): 128–152.

7ProprietaryFinancial Finesse Financial Wellness Think Tank™, internal review of the company’s own platform development and maintenance history, 1999 to 2026. Underlying figures are not published.

8Newport, an Ascensus company. Compensation, Retirement, and Benefits Trends Report, 2025/2026 Edition: Executive Summary. October 2025. Based on responses from 594 organizations; roughly three quarters have fewer than 250 employees and less than $50 million in annual revenue. Accessed September 3, 2026.

Employer ROI Calculator

September 03, 2026 Financial Wellness Benefit ROI Calculator | Financial Finesse

ROI Calculator | 2026

Financial Wellness Benefits

Employer ROI Calculator

Estimate the potential annual cost savings of a financial wellness benefit across seven cost categories, based on your organization’s size, income profile, and workforce characteristics.

First Prize SOA Call for Essays

Financial Wellness

Think Tank™

01 Your Organization

Enter your organization’s data below. All figures are used only in your browser to calculate an estimate and are not transmitted or stored anywhere.

Employee Count

Median Annual Income or Hourly Rate

Enter either an annual salary or an hourly rate, and select which one applies.

% of Employees Age 55+

Share of your workforce approaching retirement age.

Annual Turnover Rate (%)

Defaults to 11.4%, estimated per the source model’s own method (40 ÷ 3.5 years BLS median private-sector employee tenure). Replace with your organization’s actual rate if known.

% of Employees Using Mental Health Benefits

Includes EAP counseling, therapy or teletherapy programs, and other employer-sponsored mental health support. See methodology below.

02 Estimated Annual Savings

Total Estimated Annual ROI

Illustrative projection based on the inputs provided and the improvement assumptions described in Section 3.

These figures are illustrative projections modeled from third-party research and Financial Finesse program data. Actual results depend on program design, employee engagement, and organizational context. They are not a guarantee of savings.

Click the button, or press Ctrl+P (Windows) / Cmd+P (Mac), then choose “Save as PDF” as the destination. Some browser security settings block the button; the keyboard shortcut always works.

03 Sources & Methodology ▾

This calculator models seven cost-saving categories associated with financial wellness benefits: wage garnishment processing, FSA/HSA administration, absenteeism, healthcare cost trend, delayed retirement, turnover, and mental health-related costs. Garnishment, FSA/HSA, and healthcare savings scale with employee count using fixed per-employee benchmarks; the remaining categories also incorporate the income, retirement, quit rate, and mental health usage figures provided above.

How we define “mental health-related costs”
In this calculator, mental health-related costs refer specifically to lost productivity and missed workdays linked to unaddressed stress, anxiety, depression, and other psychological distress. The $5,000-per-employee benchmark comes from a national study of the general working population, not Financial Finesse client data.

Why this doesn’t double-count savings: Healthcare spending and turnover costs linked to mental health are already captured in the Healthcare Cost Trend and Turnover categories above, using separate benchmarks. This category is limited to the lost-workday/productivity impact only, so it does not re-count savings claimed elsewhere in the model.

Because most employers can’t measure how many employees are experiencing psychological distress, this calculator uses utilization of mental health benefits (EAP counseling, therapy or teletherapy programs, mental health apps, etc.) as a practical stand-in for that population. Employees who use these benefits are a subset of everyone who could be struggling, so this approach is intentionally conservative — it is more likely to understate potential savings than overstate them.

1.Delayed retirement cost basis. Financial Finesse Think Tank internal analysis.Proprietary Research

2.Turnover cost benchmark. “More Than You Think: The Cost of Employee Turnover,” GrowthForce.

3.Mental health cost benchmark. National Safety Council and NORC at the University of Chicago, “Mental Health Cost Calculator” (2021), based on 2015–2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health data; as reported in “Mental distress costs employers $5,000 per worker each year,” Business Insurance.

4.Wage garnishment, FSA/HSA, and healthcare cost trend figures are internal Financial Finesse Think Tank estimates. No external source is cited for these three categories in the underlying model.

5.Default annual turnover rate (11.4%) is estimated as 40 ÷ median private-sector employee tenure, per the source model’s own guidance, using U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Employee Tenure data (3.5 years, January 2024, the most recent available release).

6.Mental health definition and workplace context. Center for Workplace Mental Health, American Psychiatric Association Foundation.

7.This calculator is built on the model presented in Gregory Ward, “Calculating ROI: Measuring the Benefits of Workplace Financial Wellness,” which won First Prize among the essays submitted to the Society of Actuaries’ Call for Essays.

Making the Most of Open Enrollment

September 01, 2026 Making the Most of Open Enrollment | Financial Finesse

White Paper | 2026

For Financial Finesse Clients

Making the Most of Open Enrollment

A look at the value already being created for employees during open enrollment, and where the opportunity goes further.

Financial Wellness

Think Tank™

Overview

Executive Summary

Open enrollment, the window each year when employees make their benefits selections, gives employees more reason to engage with their benefits than any other point in the year, and Financial Finesse’s Financial Wellness Think Tank™ data shows they respond accordingly. Webcast attendance climbs sixfold, coaching calls nearly seven times, and use of its online financial wellness hub more than doubles, all compared with the rest of the year.¹ For clients already offering Financial Finesse, that surge is a genuine opportunity: many of the employees showing up during open enrollment are engaging with the benefit for the first time, and the guidance they receive measurably eases the financial stress that so often accompanies benefits decisions.

This report explores how that opportunity takes shape in practice: the scale of engagement already underway, the value employees find in the program whether they attend a webcast or work directly with a coach, and the added reach that on-site delivery offers for employees who are not sitting at a desk.

rise in webcast attendance during open enrollment vs. the rest of the year

6.8x

rise in employees calling a financial coach during open enrollment

2.5x

rise in online financial wellness hub usage during open enrollment

01 — Meeting Employees Where They Are

The Case for On-Site Delivery

Webcasts and coaching cover most of the workforce, but not every employee sits at a computer during the day. Two client examples illustrate the value of extending the benefit on-site, through both individual and group sessions.

Distribution Centers

2.2x

A large healthcare employer sent coaches to lead open enrollment workshops in person at its distribution centers. Engagement was 2.2 times higher than with online-only delivery.¹

Targeted On-Site Coaching

3.5x

A separate company targeted its open enrollment efforts on locations experiencing significant benefits changes. Coaching utilization at those locations was 3.5 times higher during open enrollment than during the rest of the year.¹

On-site delivery, whether in one-on-one sessions or group workshops, extends the reach of open enrollment communication to employees who are less likely to engage through a screen. On-site coaching is worth considering for groups that are particularly difficult to engage online, or that are experiencing a significant change to their benefits.

02 — The Opportunity

Engagement Already Exists

What makes this surge valuable is that it is not a one-time fluke. It repeats every year across the client base, which means clients can plan around it with confidence. Employees do not simply need to be reminded that Financial Finesse exists during open enrollment; they actively seek it out, whether that means logging into the online hub, attending a webcast, or picking up the phone to talk with a coach. Clients that lean into that existing momentum, promoting the program more heavily during this window rather than spreading communication evenly across the year, are working with employee behavior rather than against it.

03 — The On-Ramp

A Great Opportunity to Reach New Users

Open enrollment does more than intensify engagement among employees already familiar with Financial Finesse. It also draws a disproportionate share of employees who are engaging with the benefit for the first time. Thirty-three percent of employees who attend an open enrollment-focused webcast are engaging with the financial wellness benefit for the first time, compared with 22 percent for webcasts on other topics throughout the year, roughly one and a half times the rate.¹ Open enrollment, in other words, is a great opportunity to reach employees who might not otherwise engage with their benefit at all.

33%

of OE webcast attendees are engaging with the benefit for the first time

22%

first-time engagement rate for webcasts on other topics, year-round

For many employees, that first touch does not end there. Thirty-two percent of employees who first engaged with Financial Finesse through an open enrollment webcast have already re-engaged with the benefit in less than a year, through another webcast, a coaching session, or the online hub, and likely more as the rest of that year plays out.¹ For a meaningful share of the workforce, open enrollment is the reason they started using a benefit that might otherwise have gone untouched.

32%

of first-time OE webcast attendees have already re-engaged with the benefit in less than a year

04 — Strong Results

Employees Leave Prepared and Satisfied

Whether an employee attends a webcast or works directly with a coach, the response is strong.

96%

of OE webcast attendees say they feel better prepared to make a financial decision¹

98%

of OE webcast attendees say Financial Finesse is an important part of their benefits package¹

That satisfaction carries through into the numbers Financial Finesse tracks for loyalty: open enrollment webcasts carry a net promoter score of 87, and individual coaching sessions booked during open enrollment carry a net promoter score of 94.¹ For context, a Net Promoter Score is generally considered good above 20 and excellent above 70 on the standard scale used across industries.² Financial services firms see a typical median score of 60 and an excellent score starting around 78.³ Both of the scores Financial Finesse sees during open enrollment sit well above those thresholds.

net promoter score for open enrollment webcasts

net promoter score for individual coaching sessions during open enrollment

05 — The Human Impact

Reduced Financial Stress

The value of open enrollment engagement extends beyond usage figures. Employees who attend an open enrollment benefits event report a measurable decline in financial stress. Financial Finesse’s Financial Wellness Think Tank™ data shows a 40 percent net decrease in the number of employees reporting overwhelming or high financial stress after attending an open enrollment event, alongside a 36 percent net decrease among returning users overall.¹ Both figures point to just how effective these engagements are at easing the stress that so often surrounds financial decisions.

40%

net decrease in employees reporting high or overwhelming financial stress

36%

net decrease in financial stress among returning users, year-round

Attendees describe this effect in their own words. Comments collected from open enrollment webcast attendees point to the same theme: clarity in place of confusion, and calm in place of stress.¹

Anita was engaging and made things easy to understand, made me feel smart, not stressed and enthusiastic about benefits.

Anita was well informed and provided much needed clarity regarding the change in benefits, along with their cost comparison.

Benefits were explained in easy to understand terms and helped me know what is available and would be useful for me to use.

Extremely tailored to me and presented in an easy-to-understand format. This stuff is confusing, so it was nice to have it broken down for us.

For me being relatively new to the US, it was very helpful to understand the differences in various health plans.

It helped me look at medical plans in ways other than least coming out of paycheck.

Overview of benefits available and how to discern what will serve me best.

Very useful information, helps me understand and maximize my benefits.

06 — Recommendations

Getting More From the Benefit You Already Have

Promote the program as a whole

Webcasts and coaching each earn strong satisfaction scores during open enrollment. Communicating the full range of support available lets employees engage in the way that suits them best.

Treat open enrollment as an acquisition moment

Because a disproportionate share of first-time users engage during this window, promotion aimed at employees who have never used the benefit deserves as much attention as reminders sent to existing users.

Extend delivery on-site where it counts most

On-site coaching is worth considering for groups that are particularly difficult to engage online, or that are experiencing a significant change to their benefits. In-person group and individual sessions during open enrollment produce engagement gains that virtual delivery alone does not reach.

Conclusion

Open enrollment is already a highpoint for engagement. The opportunity in front of most clients is to make fuller use of the moment: promoting the full range of program support, and extending delivery on-site where the workforce is not sitting at a desk.

Financial Finesse’s data suggests the return on that effort compounds. Thirty-two percent of employees who first engaged with the benefit during open enrollment have already re-engaged with it in less than a year, and that figure is likely a floor, since some have not yet reached a full year since their first engagement. Either way, it is engagement that, for many of them, may not have happened at all without that open enrollment moment.¹

References

Data cited throughout this report is drawn from Financial Finesse’s Financial Wellness Think Tank™, including engagement records across webcasts, financial coaching sessions, and the online financial wellness hub, together with post-engagement survey responses collected from open enrollment participants across Financial Finesse’s client base. Company examples are drawn from anonymized client engagements and are not attributable to any single named organization. Net Promoter Score benchmarks are drawn from independent third-party industry research and are cited separately from Financial Finesse’s own data.

Financial Finesse Financial Wellness Think Tank™. 2026. “Open Enrollment Engagement and Financial Stress Outcomes.” Internal analysis. El Segundo, CA.Proprietary Research

SurveyMonkey. 2025. “What Is a Good Net Promoter Score (NPS)?” SurveyMonkey Curiosity at Work. Accessed August 13, 2026.

Resonate CX. 2026. “NPS Benchmarks: What Is a Good Score by Industry.” Resonate CX Blog. Accessed August 13, 2026.

The Power of Pairing Financial Coaching and Your EAP

June 18, 2026

Employee assistance programs have been a staple of employer benefit packages for decades. They offer confidential counseling, mental health support, substance abuse resources, and referrals to community services. For many employees navigating crisis moments, an EAP is a genuine lifeline. And yet, despite their availability, EAP utilization rates remain stubbornly low, typically ranging from 3 to 6 percent of eligible employees in any given year. Most employees who could benefit from the program never use it.

That utilization gap is worth examining carefully, because it points to something important about how employees experience stress and seek help. But it also points to a broader question that HR leaders should be asking: in a workforce where financial stress is the single most pervasive source of anxiety, is an EAP alone sufficient to meaningfully improve employee wellbeing? The answer, supported by a growing body of research, is no. And the solution is not to replace the EAP. It is to pair it with something that addresses the root cause the EAP was never designed to treat.

What EAPs do well, and where they stop

EAPs are built to help employees manage the psychological and emotional dimensions of stress. A skilled EAP counselor can help an employee develop coping strategies, process anxiety, navigate a difficult relationship, or find treatment for a substance use disorder. These are meaningful, important services.

What an EAP counselor is not equipped to do is help an employee build a budget, eliminate high-interest debt, optimize their benefits elections, or create a retirement savings plan. When the source of an employee’s anxiety is a $4,000 credit card bill, a student loan in default, or a complete absence of emergency savings, emotional coping strategies can provide temporary relief. They cannot resolve the underlying problem. The stress returns, often with compounding intensity, because the financial circumstances that created it remain unchanged.

This is the fundamental limitation of relying on an EAP as the primary response to workforce financial stress. It treats the symptom while leaving the cause unaddressed.

Financial stress is not a financial literacy problem

It is tempting to assume that what financially stressed employees need is information and resources like financial worksheets, webinars, articles on budgeting basics, or access to estate planning documents. Many EAPs include exactly these kinds of general financial resources in their offerings, and some employers point to this as evidence that financial wellness is already covered.

Financial Wellness Think Tank™ research tells a different story. General financial education resources, however well designed, rarely produce the behavior change that moves employees from financial distress to financial stability. What does produce that change is personalized, one-on-one engagement with a credentialed financial professional who understands the employee’s specific situation, asks the right questions, and helps them build a plan they actually feel capable of executing.

The distinction matters because financial stress is not primarily an information deficit. Employees generally know they should have an emergency fund. They know high-interest debt is harmful. They know they should be saving more for retirement. What prevents them from acting is a complex combination of competing financial pressures, emotional avoidance, limited bandwidth, and a lack of confidence that improvement is actually possible for them specifically. That combination is not resolved by access to a resource library. It is resolved by a trusted, credentialed coach who helps the employee see a clear path forward and holds the emotional space for the conversation.

The reinforcing loop: when both programs work together

The most compelling argument for pairing financial coaching with an EAP is not additive. It is multiplicative. These two programs, when offered together, create a reinforcing cycle of wellbeing that neither can generate alone.

Financial stress is one of the most significant drivers of the anxiety, depression, and emotional overwhelm that EAPs are designed to address. Research from the National Safety Council and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that employees experiencing mental distress cost employers nearly $5,000 per person annually in lost work days alone.[1] A meaningful portion of that mental distress has financial stress at its root. When financial coaching reduces the financial pressure an employee is carrying, it directly reduces the psychological burden that the EAP is working to treat. The EAP counselor’s work becomes more effective because the underlying stressor is being addressed simultaneously.

The flow also runs in the other direction. An employee who is struggling with anxiety or depression often lacks the mental and emotional bandwidth to engage productively with their financial situation. Financial decisions require cognitive clarity, a capacity for future thinking, and the ability to tolerate discomfort. These are precisely the capacities that mental distress erodes. An EAP that helps an employee stabilize their mental health creates the psychological conditions under which financial coaching is most effective. The employee can engage more fully, retain guidance more readily, and take action more consistently.

What emerges is a reinforcing loop. Reduced financial stress supports better mental health. Better mental health creates the capacity to improve financial behavior. Improved financial behavior further reduces stress. The cycle, once initiated, is self-sustaining. And its benefits extend beyond financial and mental health into physical health as well, since chronic stress is a well-documented driver of cardiovascular disease, immune suppression, and a range of stress-related conditions that drive up employer healthcare costs.

This is what it means for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. An EAP and a financial coaching program operating in parallel, with employees able to access both as their needs require, produce outcomes that neither program produces in isolation.

Why EAP utilization matters

The persistently low utilization rates of EAP programs deserve attention in this context. When fewer than 1 in 20 employees engages with an EAP in a given year, it is reasonable to ask whether the program is reaching the employees who need it most. The answer is frequently no.

Employees experiencing the greatest financial and emotional distress are often the least likely to seek help proactively. Stigma, skepticism, and the overwhelming nature of the distress itself create barriers to engagement. Financial coaching, when delivered as an employer-paid benefit with strong program communication and easy access, tends to reach employees earlier in their distress cycle, before crisis sets in, and across a much broader range of the workforce. Financial Wellness Think Tank™ data consistently shows that employees engage with financial coaching around concrete, immediate questions: how to handle a specific debt, how to optimize a benefits election, how to start saving when money feels tight. These entry points are far less stigmatized than seeking mental health support, and they create a relationship of trust that can open the door to broader conversations about stress and wellbeing.

In this sense, a well-utilized financial coaching program can also function as a point of connection for employees who might eventually benefit from EAP services but would not have sought them out independently. The two programs, properly communicated together, can expand the reach of the entire wellbeing benefit ecosystem.

The complete picture of employee wellbeing

HR leaders who are serious about improving workforce wellbeing are increasingly recognizing that financial health, mental health, and physical health are not separate domains. They are deeply interconnected dimensions of the same person, and they respond to intervention in interconnected ways.

An EAP that operates without a financial coaching partner is addressing emotional and psychological distress without access to one of its most prevalent causes. A financial coaching program that operates without an EAP is helping employees build financial stability without a support structure for the emotional weight that financial stress carries. Together, they form something closer to a complete response to the full complexity of employee wellbeing.

Financial Finesse’s coaching model is built with this integration in mind. CFP® professionals who coach employees are trained in both financial and emotional intelligence, meaning they recognize when a financial conversation is also a mental health conversation, and they know how to hold that space while connecting employees to the appropriate support. That human dimension of the coaching relationship is what makes the pairing with an EAP so natural and so effective.

Offering an EAP is a meaningful commitment to employee wellbeing. But it is not enough on its own, particularly in a workforce where financial stress is the dominant source of anxiety for a significant portion of employees. The employers who will see the greatest return on their wellbeing investments are those who recognize that financial coaching and EAP services are not competing line items in a benefits budget. They are complementary pillars of a wellbeing strategy that addresses the whole employee, and whose combined impact is measurably greater than either program can deliver alone.

This analysis draws on Financial Finesse Think Tank™ research and published data from the National Safety Council, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and industry benchmarks on EAP utilization and workforce wellbeing. The Financial Wellness Think Tank™ is the research division of Financial Finesse, the leading independent global provider of unbiased financial coaching as an employee benefit.

[1] As reported by Business Insurance Online.

What Is the Difference Between a Financial Coach and a Financial Advisor?

May 29, 2026

A financial coach helps people understand their finances, build better money habits, and make informed decisions across all areas of their financial life. A financial advisor typically manages investments and builds wealth strategies for people who already have assets to grow. Both serve important roles, but they operate at different stages of the financial journey and are often most powerful when they work together as part of a broader financial wellness ecosystem.

Why HR leaders should understand this distinction

When evaluating financial wellness benefits, the coach versus advisor question comes up often. Many employees have never worked with either. Others assume these roles are interchangeable. HR leaders who can articulate the difference clearly are better positioned to match the right benefit to the right employee need, and to explain the business value of financial coaching to leadership and benefits committees.

The short version: financial coaching is a benefit designed for everyone. Financial advice is typically offered as a service for those already managing significant wealth.

What a financial coach does

A financial coach helps employees navigate the full range of financial questions and decisions they face throughout their lives. This includes understanding how to build a budget, pay down debt, establish an emergency fund, make sense of employee benefits, plan for retirement, and protect their family with the right insurance coverage.

The coaching relationship is educational and empowering by design. A coach does not make decisions for the employee. Instead, the coach helps the employee understand their options, build financial confidence, and develop the habits and knowledge to make sound decisions on their own over time.

In a workplace financial wellness benefit, coaches are typically CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® (CFP®) professionals or their in-country equivalents. CFP professionals hold one of the most rigorous and respected credentials in financial services, covering financial planning, tax, insurance, retirement, and estate planning. At Financial Finesse, for example, every coach is a CFP® professional (or in-country equivalent), meaning employees receive expert guidance regardless of their income level, financial situation, or the complexity of their situation.

Critically, financial coaches are an employer-paid benefit, have no products to sell, and no commissions to earn. Their only job is to help the employee. This makes financial coaching one of the only truly unbiased sources of financial guidance most employees will ever have access to.

What a financial advisor does

A financial advisor focuses primarily on managing and growing wealth. This typically involves creating an investment strategy, managing a portfolio, and helping clients plan for major wealth-related milestones such as retirement drawdown, estate planning, and tax optimization on investments.

Financial advisors operate under a range of compensation models. Some charge a flat fee for their services. Some earn commissions on financial products they recommend. Others charge a percentage of the assets they manage, often referred to as an AUM (assets under management) fee. Understanding how an advisor is compensated matters because it can influence the recommendations they make.

Financial advisors are well suited for people who have accumulated meaningful assets and need ongoing investment management and sophisticated planning. Most financial advisors also have minimum asset thresholds, which can make their services inaccessible to employees who are still building their financial foundation.

Why they are not competing, but complementary

The most important thing for HR leaders to understand is that financial coaches and financial advisors serve different needs at different stages of an employee’s financial life, and the strongest financial wellness ecosystems include both.

Think of it as a progression. Financial coaching meets employees where they are, often before they have significant assets to manage. A coach helps an employee get their cash flow under control, build emergency savings, pay off high-interest debt, and start saving for retirement. Over time, as that employee builds wealth, they may reach a point where a financial advisor makes sense.

In this way, a financial wellness benefit that includes strong coaching does not compete with financial advisors. It creates better clients for them. Employees who arrive at a financial advisor already financially literate, with no high-interest debt and a clear sense of their goals, are in a far stronger position than those who arrive without that foundation.

What this means for benefits design

When an HR leader is evaluating financial wellness programs, the key question is not “should we offer coaching or advisory services?” The better question is: “What does the majority of our workforce actually need right now?”

For most employee populations, the answer is financial coaching. Research consistently shows that financial stress is widespread across all income levels, and that most employees lack basic financial literacy, emergency savings, and confidence in their financial decisions. Financial coaching addresses this directly, at scale, and at no cost to the employee.

For higher-income segments of the workforce, such as executives or senior professionals with complex compensation, an advisor referral network or supplemental advisory benefit may also be appropriate.

The gold standard is a benefit that provides every employee with access to a credentialed financial coach as a starting point, with a pathway to connect with more specialized resources, including financial advisors, when the employee’s needs evolve.

FAQs

Is a financial coach the same as a financial advisor?

No. A financial coach focuses on education, financial decision-making, and building a strong financial foundation. A financial advisor focuses on managing investments and growing wealth. Both serve important roles, but they operate at different stages of the financial journey.

Do financial coaches manage money or investments?

No. Financial coaches provide guidance and education to help employees make their own informed financial decisions. They do not manage portfolios or direct investments on behalf of clients.

Are financial coaches unbiased?

When coaching is delivered as an employer-paid benefit, yes. Coaches in a financial wellness program like Financial Finesse have no products to sell and no commissions to earn, which makes their guidance genuinely objective.

Do employees need a certain income level to work with a financial coach?

No. Financial coaching as an employee benefit is available to all employees regardless of income, savings level, or financial situation. This is one of the most significant differences from traditional financial advisory services, which often require minimum asset thresholds.

Can an employee work with both a financial coach and a financial advisor?

Yes, and for many employees this is the ideal approach. A coach helps build the financial foundation. As wealth grows, an advisor can take on investment management and sophisticated planning. The two roles complement each other.

Financial Finesse is the leading independent global provider of unbiased financial coaching as an employee benefit, driving measurable improvements in employee financial wellness and proven employer ROI. Employees receive unlimited access to CFP® professionals and AI-powered guidance that expands reach and personalization with trusted human oversight at every step.

What Do Financial Wellness Programs Include?

May 29, 2026

A financial wellness program helps employees build a stable financial foundation, reach long-term financial goals, and maximize the value of their compensation and benefits. At its core, it provides access to credentialed financial coaches, personalized guidance for real-life financial decisions, and practical tools—often including AI-powered coaching, financial calculators, and trusted educational content—to help employees take action. The most effective programs address both financial resilience, which is the ability to absorb financial shocks, and financial security, which is the ability to grow and thrive financially over time.

The two goals of a financial wellness program

A well-designed financial wellness program works on two levels simultaneously: helping employees withstand financial setbacks and helping them build toward lasting security.

Financial resilience: the foundation

Financial resilience means an employee can absorb unexpected financial shocks without falling into a crisis. Financially resilient employees have positive cash flow, a meaningful emergency savings cushion, either no high-interest debt or a clear plan to eliminate it, and manageable levels of financial stress.

Without this foundation in place, longer-term financial goals are nearly impossible to pursue. A coaching program that skips this layer and jumps straight to investment planning is putting the cart before the horse.

Financial security: the next level

Once resilience is established, the program shifts focus to financial security. This means having adequate savings to reach meaningful financial goals and appropriate insurance coverage to protect assets and loved ones.

Financial security looks different for every employee. For one person it means funding a child’s education. For another it means retiring at 62. For another it means buying a home. A strong program meets employees where they are rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.

What guidance looks like inside a financial wellness program

The guidance component of a financial wellness program answers the financial questions employees are actually asking. Questions like:

“How much should I have in an emergency fund?”
“Should I pay off debt or invest in my 401(k) first?”
“Am I taking advantage of all the benefits my employer offers?”
“When can I realistically retire?”

This guidance should come from credentialed coaches, such as Certified Financial Planner® (CFP®) professionals, who are trained to help employees understand their options and feel confident acting on them. When available and appropriate, live coaching should be coupled with well‑vetted AI‑powered coaching. Programs offered through Financial Finesse, for example, provide unlimited access to unbiased CFP® professional financial coaches (or in‑country equivalents) who combine financial expertise with emotional intelligence, as well as Aimee, a safe AI‑powered coach.

What solutions a financial wellness program includes

Guidance alone is not enough. Employees need resources to act on the coaching they receive. The solutions layer of a financial wellness program connects employees to tools and programs that help them execute. These solutions typically span several categories:

Cash and debt management: Resources for budgeting, managing cash flow, credit counseling, and structured plans for eliminating high-interest debt, including credit card debt and personal loans.
Savings programs: Emergency savings tools designed to help employees build a financial cushion, often integrated directly with payroll for automated contributions.
Student loan assistance: Programs that help employees navigate repayment options, refinancing decisions, and employer-sponsored student loan contribution benefits.
Retirement planning: Support for maximizing 401(k) contributions, understanding employer match structures, and planning for a sustainable retirement income.
Healthcare savings: Guidance on Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), and how to use these tools to reduce out-of-pocket healthcare costs.
Insurance and protection: Help evaluating life, disability, and supplemental insurance coverage to ensure employees are adequately protected, along with identity theft protection resources.
Tax planning: Year-round guidance on tax-smart financial decisions, not just tax filing support.
Family and housing support: Resources covering dependent care benefits, childcare savings accounts, and guidance on major decisions like homebuying.

These solutions are not a checklist. What matters most is that employees receive guidance from a credentialed coach who helps them understand which solutions apply to their specific situation, and then connects them to the right tools to take action.

How the program is delivered matters

The most effective financial wellness programs are employer-paid benefits, meaning there is no cost to the employee at the point of use. When employees have to pay out of pocket to access financial coaching, utilization drops sharply, and the employees who need help most are often the ones least likely to reach out.

Delivery should be flexible. Employees need to access coaching on their schedule, through their preferred channel, whether that is a phone call, chat, or digital self-service. Multilingual and global delivery matters for employers with distributed workforces.

AI-powered tools are increasingly part of well-designed programs, helping scale access and personalization. Financial Finesse pairs AI-powered guidance with certified human coaches, so employees benefit from both the empathy, motivation, and judgment of a credentialed professional and the reach of technology.

FAQs:

What is the main goal of a financial wellness program?

To help employees build financial resilience, meaning the ability to handle financial shocks, and financial security, meaning the ability to reach long-term financial goals.

Who delivers the guidance in a financial wellness program?

Guidance should come from unbiased credentialed professionals such as CFP® professionals who have expertise in both financial planning and the emotional dimensions of financial stress and, when available and appropriate, well‑vetted AI‑powered coaching tools.

Is a financial wellness program just about retirement savings?

No. While retirement planning is an important component, a comprehensive program also addresses emergency savings, debt management, insurance, tax planning, healthcare savings, and other financial priorities employees face at every life stage.

How is a financial wellness benefit different from a financial advisor?

A financial advisor typically manages investments on behalf of clients and may have minimum asset requirements. A financial wellness benefit is an employer-paid resource available to all employees, focused on unbiased coaching and guidance across a broad range of financial topics rather than investment management.

Think Tank Bulletin: Student Loan Debt on the Workforce

March 21, 2023

Currently, an estimated 43.5 million Americans carry over $1.7 trillion in student loan debt—an average of over $37,500 per…

What’s it really like to work with a financial coach?

March 11, 2021

Until they’ve tried it, your employees will never know; and not knowing may be keeping them from engaging with a benefit that could literally change their lives.

Nearly 2 in 3 adults (64%) say that money is a significant source of stress in their life

We know that Americans are dealing with significant levels of financial stress, in many cases exacerbated by COVID-19. According to the American Psychological Association, “Nearly 2 in 3 adults (64%) say that money is a significant source of stress in their life, and around half of adults (52%) say they have experienced negative financial impacts due to the pandemic.”^[1]

We also know that talking with a financial coach can improve financial stress levels considerably. For example, the percentage of financially suffering employees (i.e., those with an initial financial wellness score of less than 3.0) with high or overwhelming levels of financial stress fell from 70% to 41% after talking with a financial coach as part of their financial wellness benefit.

So how can we get employees ‘over the hump’ of not knowing and get them comfortable enough to call a coach? I asked our coaching team which myths or misconceptions they believe may be holding employees back. Allow me to bust them.

Myth #1 – A financial coach will try to sell me something.
While many financial professionals are compensated for selling financial products, this is not the case at Financial Finesse. Our company is independent and not affiliated with any other financial institution and our coaches do not sell or manage any financial assets.

Myth #2 – A financial coach will judge me or talk over my head.
Fear of judgment is universal, which is why we seek coaches that have first-hand experience with common financial challenges and screen for empathy and emotional intelligence (EQ).

Fear of judgment is universal

Our coaches are motivated by helping employees make progress, no matter what their starting point. In every conversation, they aim to make financial concepts easier to understand and to build rapport. To get a sense of who is on the other end of the line, employees can “meet” our coaches here.

Myth #3 – A financial coach is not trained to deal with my problems.
Some may think their issues are too simple to merit a call or too complex for us to help. Our coaches address the full range—from fundamentals to complex topics—every day. If an employee needs advice (we provide coaching only), for example on taxes or investing, we can help them find someone through objective screening—we do not have a referral network or any affiliation with any providers.

Myth #4 – A financial coach expects me to have my finances in order before we speak.
Our coaches are happy to help employees get started—no prep work required. We hope the first call is not the last. That’s why we encourage employees to reach out to get the ball rolling.

Myth #5 – A financial coach will share my information with my employer.
This one simply isn’t true. Our coaches adhere to a strict code of confidentiality and never share any information with employers as it relates to their employees’ financial health.

Myth #6 – A financial coach can only discuss benefits offered by my employer.
While our coaches often help employees get the most out of their benefits, they are by no means limited to benefits-related questions. They can help with any financial concern.

We know that the more employees interact with our coaches the more their financial wellbeing improves, but getting first-time users started can be a challenge. By understanding their concerns, you can develop a communication strategy to address them head-on, encouraging engagement and changing lives—a win-win for any organization.

^[1] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2020/report-october

Q&A with Financial Finesse CEO, Liz Davidson

May 06, 2020

Financial Finesse’s 2019 Year in Review Research Study & The Impact of a New Normal Post COVID-19

View the entire COVID-19 best practices abstract “The Impact of a New Normal” here.

1. Question: What were the most significant takeaways from the 2019 Year in Review report?

Answer: For this year’s report we looked at how engagement in online, group, and individual learning sessions influence change in financial wellness as measured by the Financial Finesse Financial Wellness Score. The results were astounding.

Employees that engaged in group learning improved their financial wellness score on average 1.11 points, 40% higher than the 0.79-point average improvement by those that engaged exclusively online. But it was the employees that followed the best practice model and engaged in all three forms of learning that topped them all, improving their financial wellness score on average 1.44 points, outperforming group learners by 31% and online-only learners by 83%.

This improvement in financial wellness also translated into improvement in benefit participation. Employees that engaged in the best practice model had a 43% higher retirement plan deferral rate and an 81% higher annual contribution to a health savings or flexible spending account than employees that only engaged online.

We also found that the greatest net improvement—which is the difference between improvement by those that engaged in the best practice model and those that engaged exclusively online—occurred among employees with the lowest levels of financial health. What is even more remarkable is the speed of improvement. Financially stressed employees exhibited the greatest degree of improvement in the shortest amount of time across all levels of engagement.

2. Question: What can employers leverage from the 2019 Year in Review report to help employees navigate the financial impacts of COVID-19?

Answer: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing signs of increasing financial stress associated with the stock market and U.S. economy manifesting itself as a lack of trust in sources of financial guidance and concern for not reaching future financial goals. When considering the relationship between physical health, workplace productivity, and financial stress, this should have employers’ attention. The good news for employers is that the best practice model yields the greatest improvement in financial wellness for the most financially stressed employees in the least amount of time. These results could not have come at a better moment in history.

As the pandemic persists, we expect to see a shift toward lower levels of financial health across the global workforce. Given the strong relationship between financial health and employment cost, we encourage employers to focus their COVID-19 efforts on providing financial resources and support to their most financially stressed populations first. This population can be defined through a workforce financial wellness assessment, a demographic analysis, or by measuring financial stress metrics such as retirement plan leakage, garnishment, or benefit utilization. Once the at-risk population is defined, consider offering ongoing financial coaching delivered through a multi-channel model if possible.

3. Question: What drives the trend of end-users in the lowest tiers of financial health exhibiting the greatest level of improvement in the shortest amount of time?

Answer: The emotional courage it takes to confront serious financial issues is significant. Finances still remain taboo, especially for those who are struggling financially, and there’s often a sense of shame or helplessness they have to overcome. The best practices model is well suited to mitigate that, because it is set up to reduce barriers as a financial wellness benefit that can be accessed however employees feel most comfortable, and then migrate to ongoing financial coaching when they are ready. The message they get is “We are all in this together. Everyone has financial challenges. You are not alone and there is nothing to be ashamed of.” That alone makes a huge difference.

Then when you consider the small wins in finding ways to reduce expenses by getting better deals on essential items, get credit relief or lower interest rates, begin the process of starting an emergency fund, can make a huge difference to financial stability, it makes sense that those who struggle most would improve the most with a model that provides unlimited financial coaching through multiple channels.

4. Question: On average, which aspects of an employee’s financial wellness improved the most under the best practices model?

Answer: On average, employees that engaged in the best-practice model for five or more years showed a 1.59-point improvement (on a 10-point scale) in financial wellness score. The greatest net difference between improvement among employees who engaged exclusively online and those that engaged in the best practice model occurred in the areas of retirement planning and investing. Employees that engaged in all forms of learning also had a 43% higher retirement plan deferral rate and an 81% higher annual contribution to an HSA or healthcare FSA than employees that engaged exclusively online. They were also more likely to have a handle on cash flow, have an emergency fund, pay bills on time, be comfortable with debt, and pay off credit card balances in full.

5. Question: How do you anticipate COVID-19 may alter the traditional compensation and benefits structure most workplaces have become accustomed to? Do you anticipate a potential or temporary decrease or suspension of benefits like 401(k) matching, PTO, etc., as employers explore potential cost-savings strategies to avoid having to layoff or furlough employees?

Answer: Many employers are considering any practical cost-saving measures to stay afloat during this crisis. However, rather than decreasing or suspending benefits that impact some, I believe we will see a strategic refocus of attention and funds, where available, towards benefits thought to be more flexible and impactful across the board, like HSA’s for example.

That said, I believe COVID-19 will cause a major mind shift in how we think about employee benefits, in line with human-centered design principles, where the focus shifts from the benefits themselves to the employee’s individual financial needs, integrating benefits in a way that best meets their financial security. This includes:

Increased personalization of benefits so each employee can design their own benefits package that best meets their needs, with the help of digital and phone based financial wellness platforms that guide them through the decision-making process.

Increased focus overall on workplace financial wellness as an employee benefit. Employers are actively looking for support in helping their employees through COVID-19 financially and I believe these efforts will quickly morph into a much deeper commitment to financial wellness as a standalone benefit. Our business more than doubled in Q1 2020 vs. Q1 last year and is only gaining momentum as more employers look for proven and cost-effective strategies to help promote their employees’ wellbeing and financial security.

6. Question: According to PayScale, the gender pay gap has improved 7% since 2015. Why do you think the gender gap in financial wellness continued to widen for women in 2019 despite a narrowing of the gender pay gap over the last several years?

Answer: Historically, the gender gap tends to widen in periods of economic expansion and narrow in periods of economic contraction. This has held true throughout the duration of our research. Based on the data, men tend to be more confident and aggressive in their investment strategies during bull markets, which puts them in a better position financially at the time, but also creates more risk in the event of a market downturn. Women, on the other hand, tend to be more conservative, but also more resilient and take a more active role in managing their finances in a down market. Since 2019 was a strong year for the market and economy overall, the gender gap widened. We fully expect it to narrow post-COVID-19. Please note, the narrowing is not necessary a good thing as it represents the “gap” not “absolute” financial wellness. In tough economic times, both men and women tend to regress financially, women just regress at a slower pace.

7. Question: How are employees planning to utilize their COVID-19 economic stimulus checks?

Answer: As part of our ongoing COVID-19 relief efforts, Financial Finesse hosts weekly webcasts aimed at helping employees navigate the day-to-day financial changes and decisions we’re all facing. In order to make these webcasts as relevant as possible, we created a follow-up survey and shared it with the thousands of employees who attended. One of the questions we asked was “What do you plan to do with your stimulus check?” Surprisingly, the majority of respondents that received a payment (47%) plan to put it toward an emergency fund. Only one in five (20%) indicated using it to cover immediate essential expenses. While there is no such thing as good news when it comes to COVID-19, we were excited to see most employees proactively saving their stimulus check versus reactively relying on it to cover immediate essential expenses.

VIDEO: How to Help Your Employees Through the COVID-19 Financial Crisis

March 25, 2020

Your Company Just Launched A Financial Wellness Program. Is It The Real Thing Or Just A Sales Pitch?

March 17, 2019

How can employees determine if what’s being marketed as a ‘financial wellness program” is a real benefit which offers unbiased guidance and coaching, or a sales pitch of financial products or services?

Considering A Financial Wellness Program For Your Employees? Make Sure You Ask These Questions First.

March 03, 2019

These are the first three questions every employer considering financial wellness should ask prospective vendors in order to fully protect their employees and set their programs up for success.

Financial Life Planning at Work: How Financial Mentorship of Younger Employees Leads to Improved Retirement Preparedness

August 22, 2018

Employers that offer financial coaching and mentorship to their early career employees are more likely to help them achieve their life goals and enjoy financially healthier lives.

Workplace Financial Wellness Programs: Frequently Asked Questions

February 08, 2017

Liz Davidson, founder and CEO of Financial Finesse, answers some of the most common questions about workplace financial wellness programs, such as how to have an impact on every employee generation present in the workforce; where fintech tools fit into your program; how to decipher between financial wellness programs and financial education programs; and more.

Workplace Financial Wellness Programs: Best Practices Guide

February 08, 2017

Our best practices guide for workplace financial wellness programs defines what it means to be financially well, and what constitutes a workplace financial wellness program to help employers avoid ‘bait and switch’ providers who are marketing themselves as financial wellness providers when in reality, they are aiming to sell employees a financial product or service. This guide aims to set industry standards around financial wellness programs in the workplace.

Integrating Employee Benefits Into Workplace Financial Wellness

October 24, 2016

Employees Say Benefits Drive Their Engagement with Their Employer, But The Vast Majority Don’t Maximize The Benefits They Have

Employees who understand, maximize and appreciate the value of their employee benefits are happier at work and more productive and engaged. This isn’t just a guess — the research agrees. Per SHRM’s 2016 Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement Survey, 84 percent of employees indicated that their benefits were critical to their financial wellbeing, and 60 percent said that benefit were a key factor in their decision to join or stay at a company. Yet, most admit not fully understanding the benefits they have and virtually all are not fully maximizing them— accidentally leaving money on the table each year, not even realizing it. Based on our own research working with hundreds of thousands of employees over the years, many are leaving upwards of a million dollars on the table by not maximizing the benefits they have — and instead using that money for “nice to have” purchases that decline in value or going outside their employer to invest in more expensive financial products and services which often don’t have the same tax advantages. In some cases, employees are actually paying out of pocket for benefits the company would otherwise fully or partially subsidize, such as gym memberships, daycare, commuter benefits, legal support, tuition or continuing education reimbursement or relocation expenses. The list goes on.

Even Benefits Managers Don’t Understand Their Entire Benefit Offering

When we work with benefits managers to integrate all employee benefits into their financial wellness program, the most common refrain we hear is, “I didn’t know we had that benefit!” If that’s sometimes the sentiment of those who manage benefits for a living, imagine how employees in the field must feel. Imagine how differently they might feel if they knew all the company was providing them and could take full advantage of every benefit that truly provided a benefit to them personally.

Because of this disconnect, it is absolutely critical your workforce financial wellness program should integrate all benefits so that employees recognize their benefits are a critical part of their financial wellness and have guidance as to how to maximize them as part of their overall financial plan. This helps employees understand where to go to find resources and the role each benefit plays in their financial lives.

It also should be used as the key vehicle to help employees manage benefits changes, so they minimize the impact to their finances and even manage to find ways to make the change work to their advantage.

The Most Successful Employers Offer Employees Unlimited Personalized Guidance On Their Benefits

The most successful benefits planning programs — which help employees maximize their benefits based on their own personal financial situation — employ a “concierge” strategy where the employee has access, both online, through a mobile app, over the phone, and in person, to their own personal financial coach who can help them make the right decisions for their life situation and goals. As a best practice to reach a large number of employees in a deeply personalized the coaching should meet the following criteria:

The coaching should be delivered by a separate vendor not one of your benefits providers. The vendor you choose should be free from any conflicts of interests associated with employees using certain benefits over others. In addition, the vendor should have deep financial planning expertise as well as a long track record for helping employees integrate benefits into their overall financial plans. In other words, their core business should be centered on providing this kind of personal guidance around benefits, entirely customized to each of their client’s specific benefits offerings. With the complexity of benefits these days, it’s not enough to have someone who specializes in one or two benefits; the reality is that each employee has different financial needs and any coach they work with needs to help them identify and effectively manage all the benefits that meet their needs.
The company you retain for the coaching should not provide financial advice or sell financial services — both have serious legal risks to the company and potentially to you personally (if you are part of the investment committee who oversees the retirement plan, for example). Guidance is the sweet spot here. The right partner will guide employees and work with them to develop the right strategy, not make decisions for them. The result is better for employees; they learn how valuable their benefits really are and go into all decisions fully informed of the pros and cons. Not to mention, they gain knowledge to become more adept at managing their benefits over time.
The company should be familiar with ALL benefits you have available—not just retirement or health, but all voluntary benefits, all work-life benefits, all perks, and all tools, resources, apps, and vendors who provide any sort of education or communication around the benefits. Without this knowledge, you only solve part of the problem and employees lose out on key benefits that could be life changing based on their specific needs.

Managing Benefits Changes

Benefits changes are a fact of life today, whether they are for cost-savings reasons, to add more value, flexibility or support to employees, or simply to simplify or streamline a benefits offering to make it easier for employees to manage. Unfortunately, even good changes can add yet another thing for an employee to understand and act upon, and most major changes transition more costs to employees, adding to their financial stress.

If you handle benefits planning through the process described above, benefits changes become much easier to manage, because employees automatically have a coach to turn to in order to make the right decisions for their situation.

However, in virtually all cases, best in class employers do more than simply leverage their existing coaching. Without broad-based communications and education around the changes, and multiple touch points to ensure that all employees affected are aware of the change, it’s easy for important decisions to “fall through the cracks.” Your financial wellness provider should help you proactively communicate and educate employees around all changes —consulting around all aspects of the change management process, producing materials, videos, and tools as needed to help employees navigate the change, and delivering webcasts and workshops to all those affected by the change. They should also provide you with full reporting of employee engagement in these different communications and education campaigns, both for legal documentation but also so you understand what type of communication resonated the most for the purpose of designing future campaigns.

Among the most common changes that require this level of communication and education–

Changing healthcare plan to a HDHP and HSA;
Compensation changes;
Offering early retirement or another severance program;
Terminating or freezing a benefit, such as a defined benefit plan or retiree health; and
Integrating employee benefit communications after a merger or acquisition.

One last note

Benefits and personal finances are complicated and highly personal. Beware of any vendor who presents a one size fits all solution that is “turnkey” and “highly scalable”. While their solution may fit into part of a larger strategy, they are typically not set up to provide the level of customization you need to address either employee benefits planning or communication of benefits changes. Your employees care much more about their financial security than any singular benefit you provide. Your ability to bridge the gap between the myriad of benefits and the strategy they need to employ to become financially secure by maximizing these benefits is what matters most. The days of siloed benefits offerings and floods of email announcements on different benefits options are over. It’s now about what it always should have been — the employee who you want to benefit in the first place.

How to Actually Change Employee Financial Behaviors

October 19, 2016

What motivates employees to take action to improve their financial health? The single most important part of providing a financial wellness program is motivating lasting changes to the way employees manage their finances. Without doing this, you won’t be able to meet the objectives for the program, including cost savings from an increase in benefits participation and retirement preparedness, reduction in plan leakage, absenteeism, wage garnishments, health care and workers’ compensation costs.

The key? Deliver a workplace financial wellness program that is rooted in the fundamentals of behavioral finance.

Understanding Behavioral Finance

Behavioral finance is the study of why people make irrational financial decisions. Why do we do things with our money that we do? Here’s what we’ve found that has the most impact on employee financial wellbeing:

Willpower is naturally limited According to the American Psychological Association, willpower can be depleted. Your financial wellness program should make it more likely that employees will actually act on the decisions they make. This includes making decisions easy to implement, like a 1-click enrollment in auto escalation of retirement plan contributions. Create a single sign-on so other benefits providers are accessible from your online financial learning center.

Decision fatigue We also get tired of making decisions. Social psychologist Sheela Iyengar estimates that we make at least 70 decisions per day. Providing your education earlier in the day when employees have not yet made many difficult decisions will make it easier for them to act on what they learn.

People are More Emotional than Rational Biases in financial behavior are common. At one point or another, we are all likely to do things like be overconfident, get attached to a reference point that is no longer valid, have clearer views in hindsight, look for confirmation of our opinions, follow the herd and overreact to recent events. Financial education and coaching from an unbiased planner – someone with no ulterior motive to sell financial products or services – helps employees recognize and deal with behavioral biases.

The Financial Behavior Change Model

Financial behavior change can’t be forced, but it can be facilitated. Studies show that if a financial coach knows when an employee is ready to change a certain financial behavior, they can customize their coaching or education to facilitate that change (see one academic study here). The principles of financial behavior change are that it must:

Be employee driven:
Create small wins;
Motivate and encourage;
Stay free of judgment;
Offer accountability;
Measure accomplishments; and
Build a pattern of success.

Financial Coaching Is What Helps Get Employees “Unstuck”

Per the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), younger employees in particular expect to access information about wellness programs on their computers and smartphones. It’s the interaction with a financial coach, however, that changes employee financial behavior. According to Financial Finesse’s 2015 Year in Review research, while technology was helpful in increasing employee awareness of their financial vulnerabilities, online interactions alone did not improve employee financial wellness. The more an employee interacts with a financial coach, the more progress they are likely to make. Online only users nationally in 2015 had an average Financial Wellness Score of 4.8 (on a ten scale), while repeat users of workplace financial wellness programs had an average score of 5.7. An incremental increase in financial wellness could save a large company millions from reduced costs of absenteeism and wage garnishments, tax savings from increased HSA and FSA participation and health care savings.

How To Design a Highly Effective Workplace Financial Wellness Program

October 19, 2016

What’s the best way to design a workplace financial wellness program? At their core, effective programs meet the strategic needs of your business. Key areas that drive the creation of workplace financial wellness programs are:

Attracting and retaining talented employees;
Employee financial stress, which costs your organization in areas like higher health care costs, absenteeism and workers’ compensation;
Benefits changes, such as a new high deductible health care plan or changes in an employer-sponsored pension;
Merger or acquisition;
Initiative to build a stronger company culture, increasing productivity and engagement; and
Rising costs of delayed retirements.

According to a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report, “a financially capable workforce is more satisfied, more engaged, and more productive for their employers.” That’s why 93 percent of companies surveyed in a 2015 Aon Hewitt report are likely to create or broaden their efforts on financial wellness.

Determine the Right Approach for Your Workforce

Workplace financial wellness offerings can range from highly effective, comprehensive solutions fully integrated with company benefits to online-only tools or programs that address specific employee populations. There are three broad approaches:

Benefits-Based Approach A workplace financial wellness benefit can be the one benefit that pulls all the other benefits together, increasing employee understanding, use and appreciation of their value. In particular, when your strategic goals are to engage employees, reduce financial stress, encourage benefits appreciation and realize measurable cost savings by reducing financial stress or benefits appreciation, the best solution is making financial wellness an ongoing employee benefit available to all employees. The foundation of a benefits-based approach to financial wellness is ongoing guidance and coaching that promotes behavior change. Depending on workforce needs, this includes some combination of workshops, webcasts, one to one coaching (telephone, in-person, or both) and online learning.

The benefits-based approach embeds financial wellness into your company culture and establishes your company as a partner in employees’ financial security. This is a powerful contribution to your recruiting brand. Over time, research shows a benefits-based approach can provide significant ROI for a large company.

Program-Based Approach The program-based approach can be a good fit for companies who may not have a strategic need for workplace financial wellness as a benefit offered to all employees, but have a need for support for specific employee populations. Typical employee populations to address with a targeted financial wellness program include pre-retirees, employees offered early retirement, recent college graduates and employees who have requested a retirement plan loan or received a wage garnishment. Companies may also choose to target executives by offering them an unbiased review of their financial plan by an experienced financial planner.

Tool-Based Approach Financial wellness websites and apps are generally used as tools in a more comprehensive program. There are some circumstances where a tool-based approach on its own may be a fit: when you are looking for a lower cost solution to check the box, when you have a very specific issue you want to address— such as helping parents navigate the college planning process, refinancing student loans for employees, offering employees in plan advice to help them better manage their 401(k) investments, or decision making tools that help them select the right health care plan during open enrollment. The right tools can make an impact here, provided you are working with a best in class provider and your population truly needs the service. However, they don’t generally make an enduring impact on overall employee financial wellness, retirement preparedness, or even benefits satisfaction. To do that, a holistic approach is needed. This is why employers are increasingly folding these tools into fully integrated financial wellness programs that utilize a “concierge” service approach where employees are directed to the right tools and benefits based on their needs, while working with a counselor that can help them continually improve their finances over time.

Understand What Your Employees Really Need

Everything starts with data. Once you have decided on whether to implement a benefits-based, program-based or tool-based program based on your strategic needs, you still need to validate the needs of the employees you are trying to reach with the program. There’s nothing worse than spending a large amount of time and money to launch a new program, only to discover that you could have spent half that amount and gotten much more appreciation and utilization from employees who actually needed a completely different service.

For example, you may think student loan debt is a major issue looking at your population— but what if the bigger issue is not knowing how to effectively budget to pay off the debts? You can help provide loan consolidation support for employees in this scenario but the effect will be marginal, as their foundational habits around how they manage their money won’t change. Similarly, in plan advice can be great— but it’s more expensive than target date funds and if employees who rely on their retirement plan as their sole investment vehicle choose in-plan advice thinking it will provide them with a bullet proof investment strategy when a cheaper target date fund would serve essentially the same purpose, you may have actually exposed yourself to legal liability down the road when they realize the extra fees were not justified for their situation.

Why A Workforce Financial Wellness Assessment™ is a “Must Have” Before Making Any Decisions on What To Offer Employees

The only way to truly understand what employees need, whether you are looking to add tools, programs, or a holistic benefit is to better understand their finances, in a confidential, non-invasive way. The best way to do this is to provide them with access to an online financial wellness assessment which they can use to get a snapshot of their personal financial wellness and key next steps to take to improve their finances, including a Financial Wellness Score™ they can use as a gauge to track their progress. Employees take five minutes, answer non-invasive questions about their financial habits, behaviors, and decisions they’ve made — without any account information collected — and you get an aggregated Workforce Financial Wellness Assessment™ detailing the following:

Overall financial wellness broken down by age, income, gender, location, and job classification.

Most pressing needs for each group— from money management to investing, saving for college, protecting their income and assets, retirement planning, etc.

Specific areas within each of these categories that are the most concerning so you can pinpoint which services are best for which population. For example, if 93 percent of those 45-54 are managing their money well and have their debt under control and investing sufficiently for retirement, but most have children and no life insurance and poor college planning strategies, those are the areas to focus on. Conversely, if employees just starting out aren’t even aware of how basic benefits work, but actually have the free cash flow to be able to invest more money into benefits that are important to their future— there may be a need for financial mentorship programs that help them adjust to “real life” and fully maximize benefits they may not even be aware they have available.

Making the Case for Workplace Financial Wellness

October 19, 2016

The American workplace is constantly changing. At one time, people generally stayed with one employer throughout their entire career and then retired with a gold watch and a big pension until they passed away. Then over the last 25 years, employers increasingly shifted from those traditional defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans which left the control, and the risk, in the hands of employees who were often ill-equipped and unprepared for that responsibility. From 1980 to 2008, the percentage of private employees with a defined benefit pension fell almost in half from 38 percent to 20 percent, while the percentage with only a defined contribution plan rose from 8 percent to 31 percent.

This trend isn’t limited to retirement benefits. More recently, we’ve seen a shift toward consumer-driven health care plans that place more risk and responsibility for healthcare spending on employees as well. According to a Willis Towers Watson/NBGH survey last year, 86 percent of employers were considering offering a consumer-driven health care plan this year, and over a third were planning to make it the only available option.

The workplace is beginning to go through another evolution in which employers become more than just a source of pay and benefits. As employees bear more of the responsibility for their financial wellbeing, employers are increasingly finding it to be in their best interest to help their employees advance their total financial wellbeing. For example, 93 percent of companies surveyed in a 2015 Aon Hewitt report are likely to create or broaden their efforts on financial wellness in a manner that extends beyond retirement decisions. Employees appreciate it too, as 81 percent in a TIAA survey reported that they trust financial information offered by their employer. There are several reasons that help explain this trend:

Greater need for benefits appreciation

It’s a lot easier to understand the value of a pension or a comprehensive medical plan that the employer pays for than a 401(k) or an HSA that the employees may be solely responsible for funding, or at least share responsibility. A financial wellness program can help employees understand, utilize, and more fully appreciate these benefits. In turn, this can help employers recruit and retain talent.

Rising financial stress

A 2016 survey by Bank of America Merrill Lynch revealed an increase in the percentage of Americans reporting financial stress to 60 percent, up from 50 percent in 2013. In fact, our 2016 Financial Stress Research found that one in four employees reported financial stress that was “high,” or “overwhelming” – levels that could be considered unmanageable. According to an AP/AOL health poll, high levels of financial stress are correlated with higher occurrences of headaches, insomnia, high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, muscle tension, and severe anxiety and depression. Those experiencing high levels of stress also experience more relationship and substance abuse issues. There’s a rising awareness among employers that this stress can have a negative impact on a company’s bottom line due to factors like higher health care costs, absenteeism, lost productivity, and on-the-job accidents. For example, our most recent study of one Fortune 100 healthcare company calculated that employer healthcare costs associated with employees who used the company’s financial wellness program actually decreased by 4.5 percent, while the costs associated with employees who never used the program increased by 19.4 percent

Delayed retirement

In addition to suffering greater financial stress, Americans are increasingly delaying their retirement. A 2014 Gallup poll found that the average retirement age rose from 60 to 62. Many employees continue to work because they are underprepared or they don’t know if they are prepared to retire. 69 percent of Boomer employees do not believe or do not know if they have enough money to live comfortably to age 85, according to a Bankers Life Center for a Secure Retirement^® study. This delayed retirement trend may only accelerate with the potential of future cuts in Medicare and Social Security and lower investment returns due to relatively low interest rates and high stock valuations. Employees who would like to retire but delay could cost their employer $10,000 to $50,000 for each year they work past normal retirement age due to higher health care costs and salaries versus younger employees who would have otherwise taken their place. This doesn’t include the cost of lower employee morale/productivity and higher turnover of high performing employees who aren’t advancing.

One of the biggest contributors to delayed retirement is not saving enough. However, financial wellness programs can make a difference by not only educating employees on the need to save more, but also helping them learn the basic money management skills to come up with the money to save. Our 2015 Year in Review Research showed a direct correlation between average 401(k) deferral rates and the number of interactions employees had with their financial wellness program. Those with only one interaction averaged less than a 6 percent deferral rate, while those with 5 or more interactions had an average 11 percent deferral rate, almost twice as much. Our research also shows that repeat users had an 88 percent improvement in the percentage on track for retirement.

Another factor is how well the employees invest the retirement money they save. However, our research found that only 46 percent of male employees and 36 percent of female employees felt confident in their investments. A workplace financial wellness program can help employees understand their investment options and make the right choices for themselves.

Other costs of poor financial wellness

Our recently released ROI Special Report also found a direct relationship between an employee’s financial wellness and their average annual cost to the employer from other factors like absenteeism, garnishments, and payroll taxes. The study found that those with the lowest Financial Wellness Score™ of 0 to 2 cost an average of $198 per employee while those with the highest scores of 9 to 10 actually saved $143 per employee per year. Increasing the median financial wellness score of a 100,000 employee company from a 4-5 would save over $433,000 in decreased garnishment costs, over $682,000 in payroll tax savings from increased usage of flex spending/HSAs, and over $4 million in reduced absenteeism. Increasing the median from a 4 to a 6 would save over $886,000 in garnishments, $1.7 million in flex spending/HSAs, and over $8.5 million in absenteeism.

Employers used to bear the risk and burden of providing for the health and retirement security of their employees. As that burden has shifted onto employees, employers are finding themselves in a new role. The American workplace has become more than just a place to earn money — it’s now a place to learn how to make the best use of that money.