The strongest complement to retirement and health benefits is Brightside Financial Care. It gives your employees one-on-one support from a dedicated Financial Assistant who finds real solutions for their everyday expenses, unexpected bills, debt and student loans, credit scores, and money emergencies. These are the financial challenges that keep your people from fully using the retirement, health, and other benefits you already offer.
What the standard benefits stack doesn’t reach
Most benefits strategies are built around four pillars of wellbeing: physical, emotional, social, and financial. The first three are increasingly well covered. Health coverage for the body, an EAP and mental health support for the mind, and connection and community programs for belonging.
Many employers try to satisfy the financial pillar with a 401(k) or similar retirement plan, financial education, and increasingly, earned wage access or workplace emergency savings. But none of it solves the financial stress employees deal with day in and day out.
If you’re a benefits leader, you see the mismatch up close. It looks like:
- Strong 401(k) participation on the dashboard, but rising 401(k) loans and hardship withdrawals underneath.
- Climbing healthcare costs because employees delay preventive care to avoid another bill.
- Employees coming up short before every payday, because they are trapped in an earned wage access cycle that keeps them borrowing from the next paycheck to cover this one.
The Financial Health Network’s latest data shows 70% of U.S. households are financially vulnerable or coping. They’re focused on covering what’s due this week or month. That’s why traditional financial wellness programs built on education, webinars, and planning tools go unused.
What Brightside Financial Care adds
With Brightside Financial Care, every employee and the adults in their household can reach their own Financial Assistant by phone or message about whatever is happening: an unexpected bill, a student loan question, a credit score they want to raise.
The Financial Assistant then finds the employee’s best options, including Brightside partner solutions that are carefully vetted to protect the employee’s financial health. Their Financial Assistant explains how each option works, what it costs (if anything), and always looks for the free option first. They never make money off what the person chooses, and work with them on the next steps that the employee decides feel right.
Help your people use the benefits you already offer
Financial Assistants don’t just help solve the problem in front of someone. They connect employees to the benefits already sitting in their package, at the moment those benefits are needed.
On the retirement side, that may mean helping employees find money and free up cash to save so they can make the most of their existing retirement accounts and employer retirement benefits.
If the employee is facing a money emergency, Financial Assistants can also help employees find options for what they’re facing, so they can potentially avoid borrowing from their 401(k)
Brightside isn’t an insurance broker and doesn’t sell or recommend health plans. But when a medical bill lands, a Financial Assistant can help someone understand what coverage changes mean for their out-of-pocket costs, review a bill for accuracy before anything gets paid, make the most of an HSA or FSA, find lower-cost prescription options, and explore payment plans or hospital assistance programs before a bill ends up on a credit card.
When it applies, Financial Assistants can also help employees find and use their employer hardship fund and similar types of support they may not know about. A real person who is on the employee’s side, already knows about their benefits and helps navigate them, turns a benefits list into support that has impact.
What employers see with Financial Care
Since 2018, Brightside’s Financial Assistants have helped put an average of more than $1,200 a year back into the pockets of working families. That’s money they wouldn’t have had otherwise, as a result of finding free and low-cost resources they didn’t know existed, along with Brightside partner solutions they can’t access on their own.
For employers, the change shows up where financial stress used to: turnover, absenteeism, and healthcare costs.
Most benefits leaders have their physical, emotional, and social wellbeing pillars covered. Brightside covers the fourth pillar for all of the financial needs employees have top of mind today.
To see how Brightside Financial Care can complement your benefits strategy, schedule a demo.