New technologies help advisers elevate financial wellness offerings

Fintech is raising the bar on financial wellness in the workplace with digital platforms that merge personal finance tools with employer-provided benefits. 

A more holistic approach enables employees to learn budgeting, consolidate their debt and plan for the future, combating mounting financial stress while improving benefits engagement, boosting productivity and burnishing retirement readiness. 

"Offering everything under one umbrella just makes everybody's life simpler," says Sunil Gangwani, co-founder of Plootus, an innovative personal finance app designed to empower users with smarter financial planning.

Read more: Take your financial wellness benefits to the next level with 529 plans 

For benefit advisers that make these tools available to clients, it's a way to enhance their product or service offering. Seamless integration helps them upsell and cross sell income-protection products to better meet the financial needs of employees, which may include estate planning, life or disability insurance and supplemental medical coverages. 

Rishi Kumar, co-founder of financial wellness platform Kashable, believes that casting a financial safety net on top of insurance products such as high-deductible health plans and gap insurance can help employers improve retention and give brokers a competitive leg up.

Two-thirds of people responding to Kashable surveys conducted between 2022 and 2024 reported that financial stress had a severe impact on their well-being. However, more than 90% of the respondents noted that having a financial safety net provided by their employer helped alleviate that pressure.

"Most people can't withstand even one payroll worth of disruption," Kumar observes. Noting how many are ill equipped to make credit and finance choices on their own, he believes there's a need to embed financial tools into the workplace.

Read more: Benefit managers are prioritizing financial wellness support in 2025 

The three pillars of this approach involve transactional, wealth and credit-related activities. With an embedded-finance approach, financial services are provided through non-finance platforms. Examples include financing e-commerce purchases integrated into the point of sale through a company or Klarna, a popular buy-now-pay-later option that spreads cost over several payments. 

The use of comprehensive digital platforms has yielded impressive results. As many as 87% of employees who have access to financial wellness resources have higher job satisfaction, according to a study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) that also found a 20% increase in retention rates for this group over a five year period. Moreover, EBRI noted that employees who participate in financial wellness programs show a 20% increase in productivity compared to those without such resources. 

Read more: Supporting financial wellness with HSAs and FSAs

Employees are looking for guidance on the best-performing funds to invest their employer-provided savings in and which risk strategy to choose, according to Gangwani. Users of his platform, which also helps secure plan participants with the lowest fees, also are able to calculate how far they are from their retirement goal. 

For those who still carry student loan debt, he says there's a need to educate this segment of the workforce about the importance of still participating in a 401(k) plan and not leaving any matching contributions from their employer on the table. 

A common indicator of financial failure in the benefits space is when people borrow from their 401(k) plan to pay for emergency expenses, Kumar says. His company was able to reduce 401(k) borrowing by 34% during a three year period for one of its biggest clients, Huntington Ingalls Industries, the nation's largest military shipbuilder with 40,000-plus employees. Plan participants were taking out loans totaling about $40 million to $45 million a year — a troubling trend that Kashable reversed while retention also improved by 22%.

Incorporating fiscally responsible choices into default options is a chief objective of embedded finance. For example, Kumar says building affordability testing into financial services will help determine how much a person can reasonably afford to borrow and pay back. "We only allow for one loan at a time," he says. "We have auto repayments through payroll that makes for a default borrowing behavior that improves people's credit scores and puts them on a path to prosperity for the rest of their lives."