Top Employee Financial Wellness Platforms — August 2020

Pricing varies. Some vendors offer a flat per-employee-per-month fee, some charge implementation or integration fees, some make money by cross-selling various financial products like debt-refi. Some solutions can be free while others charge as much as $20 per-employee-per-month. Be sure to talk about pricing during your demo.

If you’re concerned about pricing because your budget for this is small or nonexistent, there are some creative ways to make it work. The first is to find a solution that’s low-cost. Or, you could shift budget dollars. Survey your employees to see which benefits they care least about or look at usage data to see which ones are under-utilized. For example, if only 1 or 2% of your workforce is using an existing tuition reimbursement plan, shift those budgeted dollars to financial wellness.

At the end of each year, instead of reimbursing employees for their accrued and unused PTO, give them the option to put those dollars towards their student loans, for example.

Whatever the case may be, one thing is clear: if budget issues are stopping you from creating a financial wellness program, you can — and should — find a way to make it work.

As we mentioned previously, your financial wellness program should be designed with your specific workforce in mind. In other words, what do your employees need to improve their overall financial health? 

In addition to the use-cases we outlined above, there are other features you can expect from a financial wellness provider. Let’s take a look:

• Financial advisor/counseling: Many vendors offer licensed financial coaches to provide 1-on-1 financial guidance to your employees. This could involve everything from financial education to personalized budgeting help to saving plan recommendations and more.
• Employee access via mobile: Many platforms have mobile apps so employees can access their benefits portal more easily and/or on-the-go.
• Link to bank and brokerage accounts: Allow your employees to get a holistic view of their finances by letting them link to their existing bank and investment accounts from their benefits portal. 
• Financial education: In addition to counseling services, your financial wellness program could also include literature, presentations and/or workshops all aimed at increasing your employees’ financial literacy.‍
• Employee accountability: Want to make sure your employees actually use the financial tools you’re thinking about investing in? Look for vendors that have customer success teams — such teams are designed to keep employees engaged and help you measure ROI.

Before investing in any tool, make sure to book demos so you can actually see how everything works. And be prepared to lead each demo so that you come away fully understanding which tool will benefit your company the most. 

How to get to this decision depends on the questions you ask during the demo. To get you started, we compiled the following lists of general questions to ask on any demo as well as those more specific to financial wellness. 

General questions:

• How will this solution fit into the rest of my tech stack? What integrations do I need?
• How will others in the organization use this solution?
• What are the key features I want to ask about?
• What are the things that would make me nervous about buying this sort of solution?
• How does pricing work?
• What implementation guidelines do they suggest?
  

Financial Wellness questions:

• How often do employees engage with your platform on average?
• How do companies evangelize this program internally?
• How do companies allocate budget to match employee contributions to student debt repayment, 401(k)s, etc.?
• Are there tax breaks out company can take advantage of with this program?
• What are the regulatory risks I need to be aware of?
• What are the key issues you see employees struggling with financially?
• Can you walk me through how employees use this platform? Is it mobile friendly? What about customer service options?
• Can you walk me through the HR/admin dashboard?
• How does your company make money?

In most cases, implementing a financial wellness benefit is pretty low-tech, meaning you shouldn’t have to enlist your entire IT team or organize a cross-functional implementation team. That said, you should still go over the implementation process in detail during your demos. That way, you will know exactly what is required of you to get up and running. Here are two other implementation recommendations to consider:

• Evangelize with employees: Get your employees excited about this benefit before it launches. That way, they’ll be more inclined to use it once it’s implemented. You can do this by running an initial survey to gauge their specific financial needs, making all staff announcements about the program you’re building, selecting a handful of employees to do demos, establishing office hours on a monthly basis, etc. Then once it’s launched, meet with each team to go over the benefits platform and answer any questions. You could even have a vendor representative on-site as well to offer help, 1-on-1 counseling, and more. ‍
• Link to accounts to understand current financial status: Depending on the actual financial wellness benefit(s) you opt in for, you might need to link to existing accounts (like the 401k provider you currently use). This will help your employees get a more full and accurate picture of their finances in one place. Additionally, if you’re able to tap into your employees’ actual student loan balances, for example, you’ll be able to confirm that minimum payments are being met. If your combined payment (i.e. your and your employees’ contributions) are not enough to meet the minimum payment requirements, then your employees aren’t actually saving any money on interest. Being able to look up this information is one way to measure program success, find areas of improvement, further help your employees, etc.