How Plan Sponsors Can Leverage Technology to Promote Financial Wellness

While the majority of employers report feeling a responsibility to ensure their employees are financially secure, barriers still exist when it comes to utilizing financial wellness programs and leveraging technology, according to speakers at Tuesday’s Employee Benefit Research Institute-Milken Institute 2025 Retirement Symposium.

Alexander Alonso, chief data and analytics officer at the Society for Human Resource Management, said 94% of employers reported in a recent survey that they are responsible for their employees’ financial well-being, but only 57% actually do something about it.

“We have a scenario of cognitive dissonance where the action doesn’t meet the intent,” Alonso said.

Based on data gleaned from polling 33,000 working Americans, Alonso said 66% of workers believe they are nowhere close to achieving financial wellness or even being literate about what financial wellness should be.

Importance of Education

Laura Schumann, vice president of product development and management at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, said her organization provides multiple employer plans to small electrical cooperatives across the country.

Schumann said the organization feels strongly about providing financial education to its members. Especially as employees are working in dangerous jobs, often climbing electrical poles, Schumann said it is important that workers are not stressing about their finances and health care while they work.

More than 20 years ago, NRECA created a program called PIRC—Personal Investment and Retirement Consulting—which consists of a team of certified financial planners who and travel to the various cooperatives to conduct seminars and provide financial education. The seminars range from the basics of investing or budgeting to a full day and a half on retirement planning.

“We have some financial planning software that we use as well, and this is a very well-received program across the membership,” Schumann said.

Last year, the organization conducted 325 seminars across the country, and Schumann said thousands of employees call the service directly for financial advice. In post-call surveys with PIRC representatives, Schumann said the organization is seeing 98% satisfaction from participants.

However, Schumann said some of the online planning tools that the organization offers get little traction from employees.

“One barrier is [a lack of] urgency on the part of younger employees,” Schumann said. “We’d really love to get younger employees activated early on.”

She added that scalability is also a hurdle, as the organization tries to expand its services and technology to reach more people.

Justin Roberts, an Amazon.com senior manager of financial benefits outside of retirement, said utilization of programs should be centered on the specific benefits provided and that engagement is “not necessarily a bellwether of success.”

For example, Roberts said a benefit like adoption assistance likely will not get 50% utilization, as it does not apply to all employees, but it is still important for the employees using it. He argued that benefits like coaching services should be more broadly adopted.

How to Leverage Developing Technology

Roberts said technology will continue to be a “great discoverability tool” that will allow individuals to take a more self-service approach and use chatbots that can provide advice for their personal situation. But he said he still sees a need for “white-glove services” and one-on-one coaching with a live person.

“[Artificial intelligence] and technology [[are] kind of like Spock, and the [one-on one-coaching] is kind of like Captain Kirk,” Roberts said. “There are certain things Spock is going to do better for you, but there’s moments where you really need that Captain Kirk personalization. … I don’t think there’s one key winner. I think that different individuals at different times need different levels of engagement.”

When employees in a recent EBRI survey were asked why they do not engage with certain financial wellness programs, the biggest barrier they mentioned was not wanting to share personal and financial information with their employer.

Alonso argued that it is not a privacy issue so much as it is people not wanting to ask certain questions, in fear of indicating a state of non-well-being, non-wellness or even ignorance about financial topics.

Roberts said anytime an employer is leveraging technology, it is important to allow an opt-in function for employees and not default to allowing all of their data to be used by a chatbot. When partnering with service providers, as Amazon does with financial coaches from Brightside Benefit Inc. and Fidelity, Roberts said it is important to remain cautious about information sharing.

“We make sure that the ingress to [our partners] is at least an arm’s distance away and that we promote the confidentiality of those conversations … [by telling employees,] ‘Anything you say to your coach is going to be between you and your coach and would not be shared back with your employer,’” Roberts said.

He added that it is important for companies to hold strong to their privacy agreements, which may mean not integrating as deeply with certain partners.

When looking to provide more personalized financial wellness tools to employees, Roberts said relevant educational content specific to individuals’ needs is hard to come by, arguing that this area is “ripe for innovation.”

He said another barrier is dealing with the “hallucinations in AI” and figuring out what to do if an automated financial planning tool provided someone with the wrong information. He said this challenge needs to be overcome in order for “hyper-personalization” to really take off.