Financial wellness programs have become a critical component of workplace benefits that can help attract and retain talented employees. These programs have soared in importance since the COVID-19 pandemic, especially those that provide participants with personalized and actionable recommendations for steps to take to improve their own financial well-being. Join us for a conversation among experts in customer experience design and financial wellness to discuss best practices for creating a holistic financial wellness program in the post-pandemic world. Panelists will share best practices and data-backed information on participant behavior, usage and engagement from Financial Fitness Group and Corporate Insight
Transcription:
Trish Rothchild: (00:07)
Hello friends. Thank you for being here. I do know, I posted on my LinkedIn last night that we would make it worth your while to be in Manhattan at 2:30 or 3 o'clock on a June Friday. So this is a great turnout. We're very appreciative of your time. I'm actually standing just to like, make sure we get a little extra energy while we kick off this super important topic, I'm Trish Rothchild. I am on the board of the financial fitness group, and I am joined here by the founder and president of the firm, Joe Saari, along with two of our friends from the corporate insight group. And we're really excited to bring some data to share with you today really on, both the importance of financial wellness programs and more importantly, the impact, the outcomes, and then how to set up a financial wellness program whether it's through financial fitness group or, through other tools or resources that you have at your disposal. So I hope you'll get a lot out of it, just by quick way of background, I spent all of my career at Morningstar was a little over 25 years, and I worked with the financial fitness group there, they power Morningstar investing classroom that the Morningstar analysts weren't really in the mood to write a lot of educational content, but we knew that it was really important to have, and we were very fortunate to have financial fitness group power that, that service, which they do today, along with many other financial services and state government outlets, which Joe will talk about and now I'm on the board of financial fitness group. I'm also on the board of Risk alise and the CFA Institute board of governors so without further ado, Joe, why don't you give a quick intro and and then we'll turn it over to Olivia and Andrew.
Joe Saari: (02:02)
All right, Thanks. Great to be here. And thank you all for being here on a Friday. And I always think we might get Manhattans when you said something special, but next time I hope, so my background is in academian publishing. I was a graduate student and then faculty member at the university of Wisconsin Madison, for just under a decade through that. And, I had a side passion, which was helping people learn about money. I am a registered investment advisor, atleast by license, I actually never actively manage money. I was more passionate about teaching people to invest, but for the last 20 years or so, I've been blessed to work with probably 60, 70 of the nation's largest firms helping provide content tools, but ultimately wellness to improve the way that people interact with their money. So you'll hear plenty from me and our team, but I'll turn it back over to Trion. Oh, actually I have one quick thing, I guess, to give you overview on the financial fitness group as well, those of you don't know us, we're a leading provider of FINRA compliant software service based solutions to financial service firms. we do work with about 60 or so over the nation's largest firms, a few clients for your typical client logo slide, more importantly though, I think for today's topic over a hundred thousand advisors use some of our content tools and resources to communicate with clients about topics, like why in a volatile market, it might make sense to get and stay invested, wouldn't be relevant today. I'm sure. Right so.
Trish Rothchild: (03:31)
Andrew and Olivia are joining us from corporate insight group and they have quite a bit of expertise on this topic through the clients they work with often in the retirement participant space, but there's quite a lot of overlap with what we can do or need to do in the wealth management space as well. So I think that the data that they have to share will be super relevant, if the two of you guys wanna just give a little intro, that'd be great.
Olivia Jack: (03:56)
Sure hi everyone. I'm Olivia Jack. I have been with corporate insight going on seven years now spent most of that time researching the plan participant and plan sponsor digital experiences. But in the last couple years have kind of expanded that focus to include the broader workplace benefit space.
Andrew Way: (04:15)
And Hey everyone, my name's Andrew Way and I'm the senior director of research at corporate insight. I currently oversee about half of our financial services and insurance research teams, but my real subject matter expertise has been in the retirement and workplace finance arenas. And I've been leading our research there for about seven or eight years now. And then for those of you who aren't familiar with who corporate insight is, we're a market research and competitive intelligence firm that specializes in the digital customer experience that leading financial insurance institutions offer to their prospects, their customers, and their advisors we've been around since 1992. And our primary goal is to help our clients who again, are these large financial and insurance institutions make a better digital experience for all that are using their platforms.
Trish Rothchild: (05:02)
So we're gonna kick it off with this question about our financial wellness programs worth the hype. And we kind of phrased it that way because it's the kind of thing that I think people might wanna pay lip service to, but don't necessarily do or don't know how to do well. And so we thought we would kick it off by trying to explain or express from the research and the experiences that we've had, what it takes and why, this is more than just something that you should talk about, but really kind of needs to be done.
Andrew Way: (05:36)
So, yeah to answer the question like are financial wellness programs worth the hype? Am I allowed to just say yes, and then we can move on to Joe here? Or no. I mean, the fact that everyone's in this room, I think means that you all recognize the fact that financial wellness is a topic is at least important, but I know sometimes people think it's just a buzzword or just content. And, we are here to say, no, it is much more than that. They are worth it. And they are, can be very impactful if implemented properly, corporate insight conducted two large financial wellness surveys recently, which is the backbone of a lot of the survey data you're gonna see in these next upcoming slides. And really our goal with these surveys was to learn a few things, one how important are financial wellness programs to employees, to consumers relative to all other sorts of workplace benefits they may receive. And then for those in financial wellness programs what features do you use, which features are you looking for? What activities are you performing? And then also how did the COVID 19 pandemic affect the financial wellbeing and the behaviors and the actions of consumers across the country. And so the first that we wanna highlight is the fact that when we ask people just straight out, how important are various workplace benefits to you, 73% responded that financial wellness programs are at least moderately important. And then when you dig down into the data and look at some of the demographics, you have some pretty interesting findings. And the first of which is simply 97% of individuals that are currently enrolled in a financial wellness program, rated them as at least moderately important and 82% rated them as very or extremely important. So what that's telling us is the fact that people in general are viewing these as important and want them made available to them in their workplace benefit suites, but people who are in the program are rating them much higher. So clearly recognizing the value they're receiving. And then we also ask employees who don't have access to a workplace financial wellness program Hey, do you want one? Do you think your employer should offer one and 85% said yes. And the most notable part about this is we ran a similar survey back in 2018. And at that time only 53% said that they wanted their employers to offer one. So that's a pretty stark difference for just a three year difference here that we're speaking about. And then lastly, when you look into some of the generational cross tabs, younger employees, younger consumers are valuing financial wellness programs higher. And I think that dovetails us into this next slide here, where we see that when you're looking at the impact the pandemic had on employees and consumers across the country, the younger generations were understandably hit the most. When you're looking at these charts here, we're looking at three sort of negative financial planning behaviors here. We specifically asked people all sorts of different actions that they took as a result of the pandemic. And the chart on the left here is looking at people that had to spend down from their savings because of the pandemic in the middle. You're looking at people who had to decrease their retirement contributions and to the right it's people that had to stop their retirement contributions all together. And the right bar, the blue one all the way to the right, in each chart, that's the total survey data. And then as you move to the left, you're going from the younger to the older generations. So the yellow is gen Z that dark blue purpleish is millennials and then so on and so forth. And, the thing that jumps out on the slide is with the millennial and gen Z bars, they're higher than the total survey in each behavior. So more millennials and gen Zs had to spend down from the personal savings than other generation groups. And then when you're looking at the retirement piece, 87% of gen Zs had to either decrease or stop their retirement contributions all together. And over 65% of millennials had to do the same. So that's speaking to just like the impact that the pandemic had financially speaking, at least on these younger generations.
Olivia Jack: (09:27)
Andrew, I just wanted to add those retirement contribution metrics, I think can be really good indicators of financial wellness, especially for those younger generations, right? Retirement is further away and saving for it is optional, unlike making a student loan payment or a mortgage payment, so when younger generations are looking for additional funds, that's gonna be often some, the first place they look to cut but financial wellness programs are great. Really can help change that because the lessons so emergency savings funds the value that just 1% can have over time, how to balance competing priorities, those are all lessons that can help people weather difficult financial times without sacrificing investing in their futures.
Andrew Way: (10:27)
Yeah, I think that's a good point. Like in essence, the retirement contributions piece, there can act as a Canary coal mine in terms of someone's own personal financial wellbeing, and so now on this next slide here, we're looking at specifically how various individuals weather the pandemic, or again, at least the financial aspects of the pandemic. And, the top bar here, this is the total survey sample. And then you're looking at people who do not have an emergency savings fund and who do have one, and then people who are not enrolled in a financial wellness program and then people that are, and one of the things that jumps out here is more than when you're looking at people who reported having a positive or a negative impact due to the pandemic double the rate of financial wellness program participants actually were positively impacted by the pandemic financially speaking, the non-financial wellness participants. So these individuals who are properly, set up to whether some of the financial downturns that came with the pandemic and you don't wanna talk about positive impacts with the pandemic, but fact of matter is, people had stable jobs, good savings, stuff like that, now they're working remotely. So they're not having to pay commuting costs. They're not paying lunch when they're out at work every day. So that's kind of where like that positive impact can come in. And then the other thing that's important from the slide is the fact that 54% of folks that don't have an emergency savings fund were negatively impacted compared to only 38% of folks with an emergency savings fund. And the tie in here is the fact that one of the first lessons that any financial wellness program worth it all teaches or expresses is how important emergency savings funds are and then they try coaching individuals early on to make sure they build that emergency savings fund before going on to perhaps more complex investing matters. And on the last slide I have here we're looking at the impact that financial wellness programs can have on consumer confidence in the retirement savings and in, engagement and positive behaviors when it comes to some of the financial financial activity. So earlier we looked at some of the negative behaviors that folks did as a direct result of the pandemic on this slide and some of the positive ones. But first we do wanna hit on the confidence piece just because when you're talking about financial wellness, it's a mistake to only look at the hard figures, when you look into someone's financial wellbeing, how they feel about their personal finances, how confident they are is just as important as what their account balance figures and things like that are saying. And so when we're surveying these individuals, 50% of financial wellness program participants are either very or extremely confident that they're gonna be able to achieve the retirement lifestyle they desire. And this is compared to only 24% of individuals who are not in a financial wellness program. So that, and then when we're looking at some of the activities at the bottom on the left side, you see those who have logged in more frequently to their financial accounts in the middle, you're looking at individuals who began financial professional financial relationships, whether that's a human advisor or a robo advisor, and on the right, you're looking at folks who were able to pay down or pay off their debts. And, the green bar with each one, our financial wellness program participants, the orangeish bar is non-financial wellness program participants double the amount of financial wellness program participants or double the rate, I should say, we're able to achieve some of these positive behaviors. So pretty much double the rate of financial wellness program participants were able to pay down or pay off their debts, double the rate where started working with a professional advisor or a robo advisor. So it's clear that these financial wellness programs have a positive impact on these spending behaviors and savings behaviors of consumers.
Trish Rothchild: (14:07)
So we hope we kind of approved the case. If you need a business case to take back to your offices about the fact that this does impact positive outcomes. And I think the confidence piece is really key. And clearly, I mean this was all research that was done during pandemic, but look at what's happening so far this year with the markets. And I think there's a lot of people who are going to be needing these types of programs, on an ongoing basis. It's not something that happens once and then we just move on, so moving more into maybe what you might call the execution. Like you make the case that this is a valuable thing to do. What does it take to successfully implement and onboard a program like this, in your organization? And I think Joe, you're probably best suited to speak to that since that's what you do.
Joe Saari: (14:54)
Sure, Yeah So first in terms of not only how to implement, but also the value, it's pretty easy to understand or participant why having access to something that's gonna help them make smarter and better decisions and give them resources could be useful. But you as a financial advisor, financial service firms, what's in it for you well beyond the fact that it's what customers and consumers want. The reality is an educated investor is a far better client, right? So if you can get a individual and be a part of that process of giving instant and unbiased answers to their common questions about money, it helps with attracting building and cultivating deeper relationships, some of the data we'll share in terms of how that onboarding and the process is how actually using technology, using some of the tools like your smartphone and a well thought out program can decrease the cost to deliver education for financial advisors by roughly 75%. You can reduce that cost about a quarter and also get better results. When we look at engagement, right? A financial wellness program is only as good as the number of people use it, right? And so people are using it. They're twice as likely to say for retirement, they're twice as likely to pay down their debt, according to drew and their team. And some of our data that we'll share too, but they need to use it, so next one, if we would in terms of my background, I mentioned academia and publishing. So when I left the university, I didn't go far. I ended up doing about 10 million in grant funded research to look at this idea of how do you get people to use financial tools? Yeah, Little secret about the publishing industry. If you look at the top three books for the last three years, you've got personal finance romance and self-help, or always kind of competing kind of one number two, number three, the one difference though about personal finance versus romance is people buy romance books and read them. Yeah. And so this whole idea of people intend to act on their best behavior on personal finance, but left our own devices. We don't do well. If you think about wellness and where it came from, we as a nation, some of us remember the ads trying to scare us to stop smoking cigarettes, billions and billions and billions of dollars were spent to try to get consumers to stop smoking. And it wasn't working. It wasn't until you actually took. And if you'd go back one, that'd be great, it wasn't until you actually took these kind of concepts of technology psychology and gain mechanics that have been used in the wellness world to help people quit smoking where now our smoking rates are some of the lowest of all over the world and corporate wellness was what drove it, same thing for financial wellness. We all say we need and want to be better, but how do you actually get people to engage? So the employer is one way. Advisors have a lot of influence and control as well. We kind of need a coach look at the personal training business for gyms. We could all go to the gym and workout on our own, but a lot of people need that extra nudge. So what we really did is we looked at a 10 million of research looking at what are the best practices that are out there. And then we did test after test, after test with thousands of organizations to understand how could you drive down the cost of getting people to do what's in their own best interest, and then also get better engagement okay. So next one, the some of the things, and this is pretty, pretty clear, what we found when you want to, whether you're a financial advisor and you wanna roll out a wellness package to your clients, or you wanna do it to small businesses or large businesses alike leadership matters. It can't be just lip services. Trisha mentioned. It really has to be something that you care care about and KPIs, like knowing what you're gonna measure when you go into it. When we roll out a program with Anthem, the insurance company for their employees, they have a pretty clear understanding of what they're trying to accomplish. And then we measure and see how we're doing against that, one of the key things we use is called a financial fitness score. And so we're measuring as, as drew mentioned, confidence, but also behavior and aptitude, and I have a little video later, that'll explain that a bit more, but beyond leadership and clear goals on what you're gonna measure communications, and the final thing is a user-centric approach, right? Look at how people are interacting and how they're learning today. I think the presentation before talked about that omnichannel approach, right? What do people want? They wanna be able to get to the information when and where they are. So if your program is only available in person, or it's only available from a computer, you can't get to it from your mobile phone or it's only available in a digital medium, you're leaving people behind. So that idea of how do you actually get a user focused approach to get people answers to what they're worried about when they want it.
Andrew Way: (19:32)
And Joe, real quick here, in terms of you mentioned the piece about like the KPIs and the data I was on a spark Institute events committee recently, one of the things they're talking about is advisors. Sometimes don't like financial wellness programs, cuz they feel like they're not getting the data. They need to help their clients. And one of the things that your organization and some of these other financial wellness programs out there do is you provide a really intuitive like reporting dashboard. That's providing tons of data on the individuals in the program, how they're achieving their goals, how they're progressing, stuff like that. So I think that piece is critically important here and could be relevant to some of the folks in the room.
Joe Saari: (20:08)
Good idea of what gets measured gets done, at the end of the day, if you're gonna deploy something, you need to be able to understand who is utilizing it, how are they utilizing? What are they using if you need a nudge? these things help one of the things on the game mechanic side and kind of recognition rewards. I was just in Wisconsin, we're lo we're launching a program with the governor's office for financial literacy where we're challenging CEOs and senior management teams of companies to invest in the financial wellbeing of their employees. And we'll recognize 'em at the governor's task force level, bronze, silver, gold, or platinum based on how good a job those companies do. And we've done something like that before and been able to found it, just that little bit of recognition at the leadership level can change the dime in terms of how these companies embrace, just like we've seen with diversity equity and inclusion, the pledge that has been out there, if you can engage top leadership to embrace in this concept makes a big difference, but you can also gamify it right down to the individual user and how they're going. So Anthem, for instance, offers points that go back against how much they can get for their wellness box, right? So as people go forward and they complete another module, they watch a video, they do a calculator, et cetera. They can get points towards, I don't know the exact dollar amount, but it's hundreds of dollars of savings that they can get off their health insurance.
Trish Rothchild: (21:25)
That's Actually how we first started working with financial fitness group at Morningstar. And it was one of the more fun projects I got to do because I put up a little store basically of swag and I had my friend do all the branding. And if you did the course, you could get the sweatshirt or the coffee mug or the umbrella and it was super popular, so that it's funny that you mentioned that that's still a good way to get people to engage.
Joe Saari: (21:49)
Yeah. One, one quick other fun story is that's about a golden pig and a pedestal, right? yeah, you gotta talk about pigs. So we, we rolled out a program about seven years ago when some of you may remember in the state of Wisconsin, there was about 30,000 people, protesting on the state capital because the governor chose to de unionize the union. Right. And so people didn't particularly like that or at least some people didn't, and we had the joy to be rolling out a financial wellness program with state employees at that time, and so the state government said you can't use the program at work. You can't log on, on your personal email and you absolutely cannot get paid for it, when you do this, so great have fun, right? So one of the women there said, well, they need it now more than ever. So she was running the department of transportation and she, she happened to be at a flea market. She picked up, she saw a pig, like a pewter pig and she saw a trophy and she said, what, if I put that pig on a pedestal and I spray brain at gold, I could offer my wellness. People who get the most people engaged in this program, a pig on a pedestal said they didn't tell me, I couldn't give away a pig on a pedestal. Right. And she said, we're gonna do a potluck cuz I can't pay you food, but you're gonna get a seat of honor and you get, hold the pig. She got 75% of the people that work in the department of transportation to complete the program with a pig on a pedestal, on a potluck. I mean, so you don't need to have a lot of money. You gotta have a lot of creativity and know what will work. Right. I'm not sure if a pig would work in New York, Wisconsin, I guess cow would've done well too. But there we go.
Trish Rothchild: (23:27)
And tell us a little bit more about the engagement model, if you could, that you guys have observed.
Andrew Way: (23:33)
Yeah, sure. So one of the things that we hit on here is we in every survey that corporate insight feels or most of them, I should say, we're asking consumers of various different financial verticals, how often are you logging in across the website and the mobile app to your account? And you see on the left here, these are the financial wellness, desktop and mobile login rates. The orange bars represent individuals that are reporting logging in at least twice a month. Green is at least weekly and you see pretty high engagement rates there in the middle. You see the defined contribution plan figures more in less than half of what the financial wellness programs are. And the reason why I bring up the defined contribution plan as a comparison is the fact that when you're in the financial wellness field, you're often competing against the record keepers in terms of who is what an employer or an organization is gonna roll out as the financial wellness solution cuz record keepers offer free. Well, I shouldn't say free, they offer at no additional cost their own financial wellness solution, but often it's just content often. It's not really a true financial wellness program. And I do think it's really important to note the difference between educational content and a true end to end financial wellness program. And then when you look at some of the other engagement metrics that we saw, financial wellness programs are stacking up favorably against brokerage websites, which you can see on the right. And in other data, it also is stacking up similarly to credit card customers and to bank accounts. And the fact that financial wellness programs are generating similar login rates and engagement rates to brokerages banks and credit cards, products that people have to check at certain frequencies in order to keep track of their finances. That just shows how powerful these programs could be in terms of engaging the users.
Trish Rothchild: (25:16)
And why do you think people are in so often? Like what is it that drives that usage?
Andrew Way: (25:22)
Yeah, that's a good question. I think it goes to some of what Joe was saying before in terms of that gamification piece is certainly part of it, but it's not gamification for gamification sake. A lot of times, especially at conferences like this, when you hear the term gamification, you're thinking, oh, okay, a cheap score or some sort of digital badge that doesn't actually do anything. That's not the case here. Probably the most important piece when it comes to gamification are the scores, the financial wellness scores. And again, it's not like a video game score that just sits there on the screen. Your financial wellness score is a representation of how financially well off you are. And if the program has been properly designed, this score is changing as the individual's account balances changed as their transactions change as their bud budgeting habits change. And so it's literally tracking their own financial progress and that's a key way to get people coming back. And then on top of that, some of the other things Joe mentioned, the fact that some of these programs can allow an organization to run a contest and have tangible incentives. Again, not just some digital incentive that doesn't do anything but extra time off or financial incentive things like these are all ways that organizations can engage their employee base and drive that digital engagement.
Joe Saari: (26:33)
So we're gonna show you an example what it looks like real quick.
Andrew Way: (27:53)
Yeah, Joe, my understanding is that's running at the next Superbowl, right?
Joe Saari: (27:56)
There you go. Yeah. It first of all, thanks to the AV guys who figured out how to embed a video, but that that's just to give you an idea of what something can look like, whether it's our platform, a program that's out there, there's a lot of good vendors. We've been blessed to reach about 4 million people. That means there's 320 million more that that need to be reached and there's other vendors too, but it gives you an idea of what something can look like and then how that could be used from an advisory firm to offer your clients or if you're trying to get the next generation wealth, maybe to your client's children and family too, if we go forward a couple things about why matter, why it matters, right? So this idea of an educated or an engaged consumer being a better customer, why does it matter that they're logging in frequently? Well, a lot of data and we did two studies, one over five years and one over two and a half years that people were actively engaging in content, tend to meet with consult with, and work with financial advisors up to three times higher rates. They tend to purchase product more readily and they tend to buy more of that product when they do, whether it's life insurance or other things, they tend to save, invest and plan. As you saw in Drew's data up to two times more likely to do some of those behaviors too, so a couple of case studies, just to give you an example so bank of America Merrill ledge we power their online education side for the direct investors. There, if you look at their web traffic on that part of their platform, they get an average user to spend over 17 minutes. That's including drop rates, right? If you actually drop out the drop rates, somebody who came to that site left versus somebody who came to that site and yeah, this is what I want. It's 22 minutes, either way you look at it, it's up to three times higher per visit than the top five financial websites, right? The amount of time that people spend on the top five websites, according to similar web is five minutes and 36 seconds. So people are actively engaged in this stuff, next slide, if you would. So why does it matter? so one of the case studies that we did was a research project with the university of Wisconsin, Madison, where we offered 20,000 people, the ability to do a financial fitness score and then looked at how many of them enroll in an online platform. And if you gave them the opportunity to meet with a financial advisor, what percentage of 'em would accept that offer? Right? In this case, it was powered by Ameriprises telephonic financial planning group outta Minneapolis. So they were able to meet virtually through the program. Ultimately, 51% of the people who completed a financial fitness score said they would like to meet with a financial advisor. Think about that 51% of people who were engaged these 20,000 people said, yeah, I'd like to meet with a financial advisor, they have to schedule a meeting they needed to show up at the meeting. Ameriprise generates a ton of leads as do most financial service firms in different forms. The probability that somebody who had been actively engaged in content that actually showed up in that meeting, they held, it was two times higher, right? Than all other lead sources that they had. But beyond that, the probability they'd actually go forward and purchase a financial plan was also up to two times more likely to buy, right? So an educated customer can be a far better customer, next slide, if you would, and by the way, actually go back real quick. If you can. I'm sorry, Trish. I'm a terrible backseat driver.
Trish Rothchild: (31:13)
I dont know why I lined up for this job.
Joe Saari: (31:15)
If you wanna see that case study, you can take out your phone and get the QR code off there. I know it's a little bit LA, but you should be able to read it and the case study's there, if you wanna grab it, so I don't see any phones coming out, so we're gonna assume that's there we go. Everyone's already ready. Yeah, other one that we're working on large life insurance company this is a company that advertises on the super bowl does a lot of lead generation. They were looking at how can we use content to engage individuals so that if they're learning, in our particular case, we provide content on tax retirement estate planning, children with special needs where something like a variable or whole life insurance might make sense. And so when we started working with them, they had about 3000 leads coming from their content on the website. within five years that grew to over nearly 80,000. So a huge increase, but what matters more is that those customers compared to all other lead sources, including referrals from their existing clients closed up to three times higher and people were purchasing up to three times more insurance. So if they spent time engaged in a wellness activity, learning about how they could take care of a child with special needs learning about the state, tax nuances of state planning, by the time they talked with that client or that advisor, they were far more ready to purchase, and final one because I am from Wisconsin, don't live there anymore.
Trish Rothchild: (32:41)
It's part of the financial wellness Prerequisite.
Joe Saari: (32:44)
Yeah, we'll bring you there someday drew and Olivia too. So I can't wait, I'm going back to Wisconsin shortly, but we did that. I mentioned challenging CEOs. So in this one we chose an industry group and we challenged the CEOs. We had the governor's office supported the governor's task force. And we said, we would recognize the CEOs of these companies and their organizational leadership for rolling out a program that target industry had 5,200 employees, 82 CEOs took the pledge that they would participate in the program and do their best job possible. And then we told 'em, we'd recognize them based on how many people could complete five hours of training over. I think it was a 10 week period. We had 4,200 out of 5,200 employees, complete the program. And then, we actually had divided in control and sample group. I am a geek. I admit it but we had moved half of the people through the program September through December the other half of the people through the program, January through may. And we tracked the retirement balances, right? And not only people say they did things like some of the data we've shared here previously, we were actually able show the controlled for all other factors, people who went through that five hours of training increased their retirement savings by 40% on average, right? So auto enrollment is great. Auto escalation is great. You can robo the heck outta everything. Great. One challenge you get, if you auto escalate and people don't change their saving habits, there's an exact correlation to the number of 401k loans. And then later credit card debt, so if people keep on spending the same thing, but you're taking 3% more of their paycheck out of their wallet, what happens, right? People run up debt elsewhere. If you can get them to stop going to Starbucks once or twice a week and get 'em to put in their retirement, you get change that can actually create wellness for life. Final thing. And then we are going through a lot of data here. So, you'll have a copy of the slides, but this is just to show that basically on average, when you look at things like emergency savings fund, which drew we talked about earlier, creating a, reviewing a financial plan and creating a, reviewing a budget. This was on a group of 18,000 employees. We moved through the program last year in the pandemics of 2020, 21 data. This is pandemic activity, we saw roughly one out of four people did one or more of these things created or added money to an emergency fund created or, reviewed a financial plan created or reviewed a budget. Right? Think about that one outta four people took an action. These actions take some work, but these are the sort of things that we want our clients to do. Financial plans obviously can be a useful tool towards increasing savings. Thank you.
Trish Rothchild: (35:29)
So when you ask people what they want what is it that they say that they value? So that's, that's some of the research that I believe you guys have done, and you could just have a some quick light on what, what folks say they value.
Olivia Jack: (35:42)
Yeah, sure. Thanks Trish, so in our survey, we also asked, what are the most important features and digital attributes of a financial wellness program and not surprisingly account information, really dominated that list. So things like the ability to view your balance, your investment holdings, your recent activity, and security related features like managing your login credentials. Again, we're all really highly rated, but looking at the top rated account information and security, that's all pretty fundamental to and standard across most financial wellness programs. So we pulled those out to see what are some of the not so standard features that people are looking for in these programs. And you can see, on the left side of this slide, that's the remaining top five features and the percentage of people who said it's very important or extremely important. And I think when you look at this list and we're not shown the features that round out that top 10, there's really three themes that emerge the importance of digital platform design. So, things like responsive design consistent use of data visualizations a highly personalized platform all appeared in the top 10 gamified elements, something, I think we've talked a lot about today, financial on the scores, trackable goals, tangible rewards, all in the top 10. And then lastly advice, including certified coaches and actionable advice for improving wellbeing and then turning to what people are actually doing, we also ask our survey respondents about that, and you can see the top, most common activities on the right side here. And I think it's telling that those themes are still salient, even though we did include account information and security activities in that list. So just kind of turning into executing, and implementing those most important features. Again, we think it's a best practice to position that financial wellness assessment as part of the initial or onset steps of the program providing a score that includes kind of an overall, an overall ranking or number or value, but also that kind of breaks down relative areas of strength and weakness, so you can see some examples of scores from surprisingly financial fitness group and, best funny moves here and then again, updating those scores as people make progress and giving them positive feedback, outside of scores, in progress, tracking other gamified elements like peer comparisons rewards programs those can all be kind of like light a competitive edge in people, but scores and progress tracking are pretty table stakes for most effective programs, looking at some other features that are really highly sought after, but pretty rare firms can look at those features to differentiate from the competition. So those include fraud, monitoring, benefits, integration, and mobile apps. And then we'll take a look at kind of some things that firms should keep in mind. And, just in terms of advice, we know that different demographic groups like to get advice differently, but we also know that when people are less confident they can tend to seek out more familiar, but not necessarily well qualified sources for information, or they just don't really want advice at all. So our survey found respondents who identified as female and respondents who reported household incomes below $60,000 a year, more or less financially secure, but they also, there's only two advice channels that those two groups sought out more than, respondents who identified as male or had higher household incomes. And those were a friend who's not a financial professional and a family member. Who's not a financial professional. So meanwhile, you have respondents who are more financially secure, have higher household incomes respondents who identified as male, more likely to turn to all the other different advice channels we asked about the more reputable ones, financial advisors financial publications, retirement plan websites. So how do you engage those advice? Very groups? We think financial fitness group does a nice job of making financial coaching and advice solutions more approachable, here on this slide, you can see an example of a coach profile. So this includes personal information and anecdotes, just kind of humanizing that professional, something to connect with rather than just a list of their experiences or their certifications or accolades.
Joe Saari: (40:52)
And one clarification, we don't do the coaching ourselves. We just provide content, but we empower advisor networks that we might give 'em tips on how they should present it. So that particular coach works for a group called Francis Investment Council. They use the platform, but they connect them with their advisors, their CFPs.
Olivia Jack: (41:09)
Yeah. It's not, we're not just like leveraging it. You guys do.
Joe Saari: (41:16)
Yeah. In terms of I think on that slide, we, showed the video. So in the interest of time, but this idea of using different mediums, we do offer the ability for people to watch listen, read, right on much of the content. We do have bilingual material. We're not alone other programs that are out there, if you're going to do something be sure that you're looking at the options, corporate insights publish a report that they go through like 13 different vendors, including us, so certainly talk with them about it and look at the good things on each of the confirms that are out there, did wanna say the final thing is over.
Trish Rothchild: (41:51)
So when you're talking about communication of the program, how do you measure it and communicate, and that's, I guess the last thing we just wanna, close with as you can see, there's a lot of data here and I love the fact that it's grounded in real life results, but what is it that you really do wanna measure and how do you communicate that? So if we could just spend a couple minutes on that, and then if we, if there's questions, we should have just a couple minutes for questions.
Joe Saari: (42:18)
One, the basic idea is what gets measured gets done. So be sure that you have a dashboard, right. And be sure that, you know what, the KPIs we look at, login rates, login frequency, access, what percentage of the population, 85% of the organization that use the platform upload all of their employees into the system. So the system can communicate with them with preapproved email messages, so that the advisor or the employer doesn't need to worry about crafting the communications or delivering 'em or opt out, or can scam compliance, all that sort of fun stuff, but that ability to get metrics right, to know what's your open rate, what's your clickthrough rate? What topics were completed, what courses, if you're doing a course based structure, how many points were earned, all that should be available in some form of a dashboard? Having done this for a long time, I can tell you, you never have enough data, to answer every single question that people have, it's not our data. we provide the platform, the data is from the group that licenses it. So they're able to export that data at any time, right. They can go in there and grab the activity depending on the privacy policy of the employer or the organization to the employee, depends on what we're able to give them. sometimes it's a number number 1,6,5,3,2. So for like bank of America, we don't know who the individual is. We just know what courses, some individuals in general and what type of user they are, but they're number to us. Other times you can actually give back the actual identification. So an advisor in the case of the Ameriprise example, when the person signed up to meet with an Ameriprise advisor, that advisor, because the privacy policy had access to their financial fitness score. So they could have a meaningful conversation on that first conversation, which is probably one of the reasons their close rates were higher, right. They actually knew a lot about the person by the time they came over this is an example in terms of an organization looking at calculating the ROI to an employer and so our financial wellness score is correlated with, I was developed by professor Thomas Garman, out of Virginia tech, at least the confidence side of it, and it's correlated with outcomes, right? So we know that people who score in the bottom quartile are going to have higher levels, preventable healthcare claims. They're gonna have higher levels of employee theft, workplace accidents. They have, all sorts of things that make them more costly compared to people who become financially well. So from that, we can extrapolate, what's the benefit of getting a more financially fit workforce to the employer. This is an example from that 20,000 a subset of that 20,000 group, what's the value to the employer, right? For participating in the program, they can look at, based on the dollars spent what the ROI is, and they can compare the difference of people who connected just with the platform, which is that $522 per employee per year saving versus people who connected with an advisor or coach. Right? So not saying the numbers are perfect, it's a lot of research behind it, but it's an estimate but it at least gives the employer some, understanding when they're looking at, Hey, do we want to continue to let XYZ advisor group come in here and offer this program to our employees? They can see the benefit that their organization is getting, from it.
Trish Rothchild: (45:34)
Okay, well, we're gonna wrap up, but we do have a couple minutes. If there are questions, we're happy to take them for either the, either Andrew, Olivia, Joe, or myself, Jim, hold on. I'm coming with the mic. Okay. I guess my friends are here.
Audience Member 1: (45:57)
I guess this is a question for Joe, but it's a hard one for you to answer. Are all financial wellness programs the same, or how would you differentiate the landscape?
Joe Saari: (46:09)
They're definitely not all the same, they're gonna be different flavors of what's out there, I think there's, I like to joke there's two types of people in the world, those that read instruction manuals and those that don't right. And so the better programs are gonna be approaching content or tools or resources that go to both. Right. We find that two thirds of the users who go through a core based structure are women, so women have a much higher propensity to wanna go through that structured learning, the people who use calculators videos, tools tend to be men, usually at least me, I try to fix something. I usually go there, break it and then go back, watch a video and ultimately end up reading something that's just me, but I think some men do that with their money too. So that's one difference is not all companies are able to give all those mediums. The other aspect is how tightly integrated, some programs do offer personal financial management tools where they're going to go in and allow account aggregation, some don't, we don't directly do the PFM. We have partners who do, and so that's a differentiator too, whether that's include and then execution matters, right?
Andrew Way: (47:17)
And Joe, I can chime too, in terms of some of the differences, like we see like kind of four buckets. So, at corporate insight, we're providing ongoing tracking and analysis of all these different programs that are out there financial fitness group included. And there's like two big differences. Like in the industry, we see some account aggregations, one some firms feel strongly that you need account aggregation. You need to be pulling in this actual financial data. And that's sort of the backbone of the program. Others like you said, your organization does not do that. You have your, list of reasons as to why you don't. And the other one comes in terms of advice. Some firms feel very strongly that you do not recommend specific products. For example, if the financial wellness program says, Hey, you need help, with emergency savings, they're not gonna go and then say, Hey, fidelity offers X, Y, or Z. You should check that out. Whereas other organizations feel opposite. They think, no, it's a value prop that not only are we giving you the advice, but then we are connecting you to approve vendors to provide the solution. So just again, to answer the question in terms of how are some of these different, those two piece we see very different views and very different value props in RFPs and stuff like that on.
Joe Saari: (48:27)
And then one last thing I'll say on the PFM side, it can be very useful. Some of the vendors on the PFM side, going back, come in, and that's the only way into the program. I kind of view it as if I meet a woman that I like. And the first thing I say to her is you wanna get married, right. It's probably not gonna go very well. Right. You know? Yeah. And I think that a lot of PFM tools that the first thing you ask is, Hey, connect all of your accounts and tell me everything about you. You get a really big dropout, right? If that's the only way into the program. So we believe that kind of the right financial wellness approaches you have, we start with confidence. People are willing to tell you how they feel about their money, right. It's not as invasive. We don't get into asking 'em about their behavior until they're actually engaged. And we actually give them the right to opt out of behavior questions too. So, and that is a difference. Some places only will let you in, if you're gonna give very specific information or PFI we think that's not the best use of the consumer's time, many people aren't ready to share that information until they have trust.
Trish Rothchild: (49:31)
Other questions. It's a little hard for me to see.
Joe Saari: (49:36)
Yeah. If you ever sit here, it's like we're being interrogated by spotlight straight in our eyes.
Trish Rothchild: (49:41)
I don't see any other questions. So we wanna thank you guys for joining us today, and we hope you got a lot out of our session.