Jasmine Jor knew how to save money. That wasn’t the problem. She’d never learned what to do with it once it was sitting in her bank account, until the fintech startup where she works, Blend, started offering financial planning as part of her benefit package.
“I’ve always known that I think I should be doing some investment, but I’m on the conservative side,” Jor, who works as a systems engineer, says. “If I don’t really know what I’m doing, I better just put it in my checking account.”
Within three months of offering the new employee benefit, San Francisco-based Blend saw 30% of its employees take advantage of the service. In more than a decade of human-resources work, Blend’s People Operations Leader Steve Aguilar has never seen such a large number of employees take so quickly to a benefit.
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Outside of health insurance, financial planning is the most-utilized employee benefit at the company, Aguilar says. In April, the company partnered with Origin, a startup that specializes in providing financial advisers for employee benefit packages, becoming one of a growing number of companies that want to help their employees manage their finances and plan for retirement post-pandemic.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Aguilar says. “Typical utilization of most benefit programs will be somewhere around five to 10% — and that’s actually pretty good utilization for any single benefit.”
Jor says she appreciated that an Origin adviser was able to speak with her one-on-one and discuss her finances in a comprehensive way beyond simply retirement.
“I’m at this stage in life that I wanted to start thinking about potentially purchasing a house or any kind of more long-term planning,” she says. “Being able to kind of write those goals out was really helpful to envision what type of cash flow I should be looking at in order to achieve those goals.”
The experience has made her less wary of the industry.
“I, in the past, have had this wrong conception of, like, ‘oh, financial planning, you know, kind of taking up my money,’” she says. “[Origin] changed my perception on that industry, and how hiring someone can actually help you in the long run.”
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Origin is one of the few firms that specializes in providing financial planning as an employee benefit — Aguilar says he and his colleagues had trouble finding a lot of firms to choose from when researching the services for Blend. Besides hiring a large planning company, Origin was the only option he came across, only hearing of the company when a former Blend employee — who now works at Origin — mentioned it.
“There wasn’t anyone else,” Aguilar says. “There’s no one that’s doing this so comprehensively.”
Part of Blend’s impetus to hire Origin was that managers couldn’t answer employee’s specific questions about taxes and equity, Aguilar says.
“We want to be able to give employees an answer that isn’t ‘We can’t answer that for you, go find a financial planner,’” he says.
KeepTruckin, a fleet management company for the trucking industry, also uses Origin. Brittany Thorson, manager of Total Rewards at KeepTruckin, echoed Aguilar.
“We have always had some sort of financial planning benefit incorporated into our 401K plan, but we wanted to go a step further and ensure employees had more options and educational tools at their disposal,” Thorson told Financial Planning over email.
She says feedback from employees has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
For Thorson and Aguilar, the price is reasonable and worth the benefits.
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“Independent financial planning can be quite costly. If we, as employers, can pool our resources, and negotiate based on volume for our team, it’s a win-win,” Thorson says, adding that she believes financial planning should be a norm among companies.
Aguilar says he thinks about offering financial wellness benefits as similar to the routine health benefits his and most other companies offer: “We take care of them from the health and wellness perspective, but I think the financial wellness perspective is just as important because it’s such a sensitive topic and one that has such high stress.”
According to Metlife’s 2020 U.S. Employee Benefit Trends
Amanda Delaney has worked at Blend for four years, and runs the company’s employee experience and wellness programs. Before she signed up with Origin under Blend’s program, she had never had a financial adviser, mainly because she thought it would be expensive.
“Where do you find the financial adviser? How do you know to trust them? How much does it cost?” she says. “I think it’s different because [planning] is really specific to you.”
Before Blend hired Origin, Delaney hosted group finance workshops, which she says were very popular. But the workshops were general and most of the time employees wouldn’t want to ask questions about their personal finances in front of fifty or more people.
“Financial wellness to me is no different than going to a therapist,” she says. “I go to therapy, I have this financial adviser now, I meditate, I have my health benefits. It’s all in just taking care of yourself holistically.”
Companies providing advisory services as an employee benefit are, to some extent, hoping to plug holes in the financial-literacy education most American kids just don’t receive either at home or at school.
“It’s so missing from most young people’s education,” Jor says. “Then one day you graduate and you’re expected to know all about 401k and all those lingoes.”
