01 Today's glaring gap
Missed Opportunity: Employee Financial Wellness Programs Must Address Short-Term Needs along with Long-Term Goals
of employees now want near-term financial guidance from their employer, double the share in 2023.
Source: Bank of America
Most benefits budgets focus on retirement programs for employees. But the stress employees feel every day comes from immediate debt, thin emergency savings, and life/family events. When this month's bills take priority, retirement planning takes a back seat, and many employees reach their later career less prepared than they intended.
Guidance that starts early helps employees tackle near-term needs while staying on track for the long run, so they can retire on their own timeline. For employers, this highlights an area of opportunity to align benefits options and delivery with the pressing needs and wants of employees.
“If someone just doesn’t feel like they’re going to be able to pay the bills, all of the other wellness initiatives are just going to be an exacerbation of that. Financial wellness must be treated as the foundation.”
Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer, Brandon Hall Group™
Employees expect this and employers are slow to adapt.
According to Bank of America, employee demand for near-term financial guidance from employers doubled in two years — from 13% in 2023 to 26% in 2025. At the same time, only 54% of large employers and 32% of small employers offer financial wellness programs.
The economy and employer decisions amplify this need. Increases to keep up with the cost of living aren’t possible anymore, and annual raises can’t be expected to offset the need for financial guidance.
Brandon Hall Group™, Financial Wellness Platforms: The BrightPlan Edition (2026), pp. 8, 28
02 The cost of stress
How Financial Stress Shows Up at Work
Financial stress shows up in your workforce in their ability to focus, their health and wellbeing, and turnover. Keep in mind, replacing an employee can cost 50% to 200% of their annual pay.
Essential statistics
of financially stressed Gen Z employees report lower productivity.
PwC
of U.S. workers say money stress affects their physical health.
PNC
Financial issues for employees are eating away at workforce productivity at alarming rates. The impact on employees directly impacts the financial and operational wellness of the organization as a whole.
1Retirement Timing Costs
Employees who are not on track for retirement delay their exits. Principal Financial Group in its 2025 analysis estimates that an employee who delays retirement past age 65 costs the employer an average of about $103,000 per year. Those delayed departures typically involve higher compensation, higher medical costs and higher rates of productivity loss: a combination that creates direct financial exposure for employers.
2Benefit Utilization Gaps
Employees who lack financial literacy or guidance leave significant benefit value unclaimed. Healthcare FSAs and HSAs, matching retirement contributions and supplemental insurance all require informed enrollment decisions, and financially stressed employees consistently underutilize them. Benefit offerings are a key consideration in hiring and retaining the best employees.
EBRI found that only 18% of HSA account holders invested any of their funds outside of cash in 2024. EBRI specifically concludes that most account holders are not taking complete advantage of the tax benefits HSAs offer.
3Productivity Erosion
Financial instability generates chronic anxiety that manifests as reduced concentration, absenteeism and presenteeism. Organizations implementing comprehensive financial wellness programs achieve improvements in engagement scores, with the strongest gains among employees utilizing financial wellness support. For example, most financial services companies work 9 am to 5 pm, but for many life changing experiences, fitting the need of receiving just in time assistance into a normal business hours does not work.
PwC’s 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Survey found that 71% of financially stressed Gen Z employees report reduced productivity.
4Healthcare Cost Amplification
The connection between financial stress and physical health outcomes is well-documented. Employees experiencing financial stress report higher rates of stress-related physical health conditions, contributing to medical claim costs that dwarf the investment required to address the underlying financial challenges. PNC’s 2025 Financial Wellness in the Workplace Study points out that 54% of U.S. workers say financial stress affects their physical health.
Brandon Hall Group™, Financial Wellness Platforms: The BrightPlan Edition (2026), p. 12
03 Forces of change
Shaping a More Impactful Financial Wellness Strategy
Organizational change is a fact of life for virtually every employer. Change often leads to great uncertainty for employees, which layers new stressors on them. A lack of control over their own destiny and fears about the future impact employees, while costs and technology implications impact employers.
Four Forces Reshaping Financial Wellness Strategy
Organizational change is creating new financial stress patterns. Brandon Hall Group™ analysis identifies organizational change as an emerging and accelerating driver of employee financial stress. Early retirement incentives, workforce reductions, geographic redistributions of roles, reskilling tenured employees, M&A activity, the need for young innovators to drive change and the rapid restructuring of compensation models in response to AI-driven productivity gains are creating patterns of financial disruption that have moved from episodic to systemic.
Employees navigating involuntary career transitions need financial guidance that addresses their current situation, not a generic roadmap built for an employee on a linear career trajectory.
Select a force to read more
Brandon Hall Group™, Financial Wellness Platforms: The BrightPlan Edition (2026), pp. 14–15
04 Defining best-in-class
What to Look for in Financial Wellness Providers: Employees deserve tools that address their actual wants and needs.
The Brandon Hall Group Study identifies the essential characteristics that form the foundation of best-in-class financial wellness programming for employees. Connecting with people in ways that are personal and focused on the employee’s needs in measurable ways is essential.
Brandon Hall Group Perspective
The financial wellness market has shifted decisively from education to execution. Employers are no longer evaluating platforms based on content libraries and webinar schedules. They are evaluating them based on evidence of behavioral change: higher savings rates, reduced debt, on-time retirement and measurable reduction in financial stress. Only a small number of providers are positioned to compete on these terms.
Brandon Hall Group™ analysis of organizations shows the most effective programs share five structural characteristics that differentiate them from programs with high participation rates but limited behavioral impact.
Brandon Hall Group™, Financial Wellness Platforms: The BrightPlan Edition (2026), pp. 16–17
05 The maturity framework
Where Is Your Organization on the Financial Wellness Maturity Curve?
Moving beyond antiquated approaches to better supporting employees’ financial wellness requires a critical, honest look in the mirror. Determining your organization’s position on a Financial Wellness Maturity Curve is a good first start. Rest assured, many organizations find themselves with significant room to improve.
Brandon Hall Group™ research identifies a four-stage progression framework for financial wellness.
Select a stage to see its characteristics
Most organizations today sit at Stage 1 or Stage 2. They have retirement vehicles and occasionally offer financial education, but they have not built the infrastructure to deliver personalized, measurable, behaviorally effective financial wellness programs at scale. The market is now creating pressure to move to Stage 3 and BrightPlan is specifically designed to accelerate that transition.
Brandon Hall Group™, Financial Wellness Platforms: The BrightPlan Edition (2026), pp. 27–28
06 The BrightPlan model
How BrightPlan Delivers a Best-in-Class Employee Financial Wellness Solution
Brandon Hall Group positions BrightPlan as a leader in financial wellness. That’s because BrightPlan built a model that can truly change how employees manage critical life stressors. The report breaks the model into a few parts that work as one system.
AI guidance grounded in each employee's real finances
BrightPlan's AI coach works from the financial picture an employee chooses to share: linked accounts, goals, spending, and employer benefits. Ask it "Should I pay down debt or increase my 401(k) contribution?" and it answers from the employee's actual balances, interest rates, and employer match, not general rules of thumb. It's trained on BrightPlan's own fiduciary content, not the open internet, and BrightPlan has been investing in AI since 2019.
Learn more →Advisors who pick up where the AI left off
When an employee wants a human, a CFP® professional (or in-country equivalent) steps in already knowing their accounts, goals, retirement projections, and debt. Nobody starts over. Access is unlimited and free to employees, advisors are fiduciaries who speak the local language, and every session is surveyed, averaging 9.7 out of 10.
Learn more →Programs that turn intent into habits
Knowing what to do and doing it are different problems. BrightPlan's structured programs sequence AI coaching, advisor sessions, group support, and exercises that address the money habits people form early in life. In the Resolution Program, deployed across 40 countries, 79% of participants reported greater financial resiliency.
Learn more →Insight for employers, privacy for employees
Employers see anonymized, workforce-level trends: rising debt stress before it shows up as 401(k) loans, groups that underuse key benefits, and spikes in questions after a policy change or company announcement. Employers receive anonymized, workforce-level analytics rather than individual-level financial insights.
Built for global enterprises, without competing economic incentives
BrightPlan serves more than 10 million employees in 50+ countries, with in-country advisors and international account support. It doesn't sell financial products, sell employee data, or earn fees on assets, so its guidance has no reason to favor anything but the employee's best interest.
BrightPlan Highlights
BrightPlan data, as reported by Brandon Hall Group
- How the AI-to-advisor handoff works, and why most hybrid models keep the two separate
- What employer analytics reveal, with real-world examples
- Five scenarios where BrightPlan fits best, including replacing point solutions, supporting employees through restructuring or M&A, and building the business case for your CFO
- What it takes to implement alongside your benefits platform
- Where BrightPlan's AI is headed next
“If you can’t pay your bills, the best 401(k) in the world doesn’t help you. Financial wellness has to be treated as the benefit that enables all other benefits.”
Joe VangsgardChief Marketing Officer, BrightPlan
Get the Full Brandon Hall Group Report
What's inside
- The organizational cost of financial stress
- Five characteristics of best-in-class programs
- The four-stage maturity framework
- A CFO-focused business case framework
- Questions to ask before choosing a provider