Financial Wellbeing is Being Sold to the Wrong Employees

Ask most reward leaders what their financial wellbeing programme is for, and the honest answer, once you strip out the EVP language, is that it helps people make better long-term decisions with money they already have.

Pension guidance. Retirement planning. Salary sacrifice optimisation. ISA explainers. Investment choice education. Useful work, all of it. But it’s wealth-accumulation work. It’s a programme designed around the assumption that the employee is fundamentally solvent, fundamentally stable, and just needs a slightly better framework for thinking about their future.

That assumption is wrong in two directions at once.

It’s wrong about the people in financial difficulty, who do not need a manual on how to avoid getting into a hole. They need a way out of the one they are in. And it is wrong about the people at the top of the salary band, who are assumed to have it figured out, and who frequently do not.

The result is a category of benefit that is most accessible to the people who need it least, and least useful to the people who need it most.

Gregg Hall, Senior Compensation and Benefits Manager at Santander UK, has been making a version of this argument for years.

With over twenty years across construction, hospitality, gaming, and now banking, he has implemented financial wellbeing programmes in organisations with very different cultures, budgets, and tolerances for risk.

Speaking on Ben's Friends with Benefits podcast, his position is direct:

‍"There's always a big assumption that the people who earn the most are the most financially resilient. That is false."

What's broken

Financial wellbeing, as it is currently constituted in most enterprise reward portfolios, is a reframe of financial education.

The content library is broadly the same as it was ten years ago — pension contributions, mortgage planning, tax thresholds, salary sacrifice mechanics — but it has been moved out of the pensions tab and rebranded as wellbeing.

The change is mostly nominal. The underlying assumption that employees are solvent and need information rather than intervention has not moved.

There are two problems with this.

The first is that it ignores the people who cannot use it. An employee with three days of payday left and no buffer cannot act on a webinar about lifetime allowance. They are not failing to engage because the comms are bad. They are not engaging because the content is irrelevant to the position they are in. As Hall puts it:

"if actually you're at a point where you're just struggling to make ends meet and pay your debts," the standard financial wellbeing toolkit has nothing to offer.

The most common response from reward teams when usage is low among lower-paid populations is to invest in better targeting — segmented emails, network-led comms, manager nudges. None of that closes the gap, because the gap is operational. Information cannot pay rent.

The second is that it misreads the people at the top of the band. The logic of most financial wellbeing programmes is that high earners are the most financially resilient — that the curve runs cleanly from struggling at the bottom to comfortable at the top. But it doesn’t.

Hall is explicit about why:

"Someone climbs the career ladder pretty quick and got big pay rise after big pay rise, ended up buying into a big mortgage, not really focusing on pension, and then got hit with redundancy. When you're used to living on a high salary but you haven't put a rainy day aside, you haven't been putting that money into pension because you've been in a sales-based role and you've been spending your bonus and commission."

The high earner with no buffer is in the same conceptual position as the low earner with no buffer. "It impacts everybody in every earnings bracket," he says. "Just different problems at different scales."

Financial wellbeing benefits, in other words, have been built around the population in the middle — solvent, salaried, planning-curious, willing to log into a portal at lunchtime — and offered as if it served everyone, even though in reality, it doesn’t.

Why it's happening

Reward teams are not designing financial wellbeing programmes to exclude people. The design is downstream of three pressures that shape what gets built.

The first is that the supplier market is shaped around wealth accumulation. The most mature, best-funded, most easily-procured providers in this space are pension consultancies, fund managers, and financial education platforms.

Their content is good, but their content is also calibrated to the audience that historically paid for it — solvent professional employees making medium-to-long-term decisions about money. When a reward team puts a financial wellbeing programme out to procurement, the market responds with what the market sells. What gets built is what is on the shelf.

The second is that the business case for financial wellbeing has historically been written around productivity and retention, not around financial resilience. The argument senior leaders fund is the one that says financially stressed employees are less productive employees.

Hall makes this argument himself — "people who have a poor relationship with their finances, their cognitive capacity and ability decreases" — and he is right to. But it nudges the design toward broad-reach content that demonstrates engagement metrics rather than narrow interventions that demonstrate outcomes.

Webinars scale. Salary advance, debt consolidation, hardship funds, emergency savings tools — the things that actually move financial resilience — don’t scale as cleanly, don’t produce vanity metrics, and frequently require uncomfortable conversations.

Hall implemented a salary advance and loan facility at a previous employer and describes the internal reaction plainly: "It was a really contentious subject. We had some quite senior leaders that were really against it. Should we be doing this?"

The third is that benefits teams are measured on take-up. This favours rewards programmes that are easy to engage with. It doesn’t reward programmes that solve harder problems for smaller populations.

Hall's position on this is one of the strongest in the conversation:

"Senior leaders are always asking me, why aren't people using this benefit? Why aren't people using that benefit? My argument is, if one person is using it and getting value from it, it's valuable. Take-up on its own isn't a valid measure."

A salary advance product used by 4% of the workforce in a given quarter looks like a failed initiative. It looks very different to the 4% who used it, and to the employer who avoided four resignations and twelve absence days as a result. The metric is the wrong shape for the work.

The category was set up to serve the population that was easiest to serve, with the suppliers that were easiest to buy, and the metrics that were easiest to report. Over time, the design followed the path of least resistance, and the people at both ends — the ones in trouble, and the ones who looked fine — fell out of scope.

What different looks like

A financial wellbeing programme that is actually designed for financial wellbeing has three properties many current offerings do not.

It treats financial resilience as a separate intervention from financial planning. The two are not the same. Planning is what someone does when they have a margin. Resilience is what determines whether they have one. A serious programme contains both, and is honest about which it is offering to whom.

Earned wage access, emergency savings autoenrolment, hardship grants, payroll-deducted debt repayment plans, and access to regulated debt advice are resilience interventions.

Pension guidance and salary sacrifice optimisation are planning interventions. Bundling them under one tab is fine. Pretending the planning content addresses the resilience need is not.

It assumes high earners are exposed too. The data on financial fragility at the top of the salary band is well-established and consistently ignored. A programme that takes this seriously offers resilience tools to the whole population, communicates them in a way that does not make the user feel that asking is an admission of failure, and resists the segmentation reflex that tells employees on £150k that the financial support content is for somebody else.

"Everyone can be helped with budgeting, savings, pension," Hall says. "All of these basics — they impact everyone. You shouldn't just be constantly targeting low-paid people."

Take-up is a useful number, but only when read alongside metrics that capture whether the intervention worked.

Hall's own list of better pension engagement signals is instructive: "How many people have transferred a pension in over the last six months. If you're moving your old pensions into it, you're engaged. How many people logged on to the app. How many people have filled out their expression of wish form. If you care about what's in your pot, you care about where it's going if the worst happens."

Reward leaders already know which numbers tell them whether something is working. The question is whether their dashboards are allowed to show those numbers, or whether they are still reporting headline take-up because that is what they’ve been told to count.

Watch the conversation in full