This week in employee benefits: 3 trends, a quote, and a somewhat painful statistic

This week in employee benefits and retirement,  brought three trends, a statistic of the week, and a quote of the week. Here we go:

Benefits quote of the week

This week’s quote should not surprise anyone working in employee benefits or the financial industry. In fact, we’ve run quite a few stories on the subject here at BenefitsPRO. Still, the quote feels vaguely insulting:

“US nationals are not financially savvy.” 

It comes from Arizton’s U.S. Financial Wellness Benefits Market – Industry Outlook and Forecast 2021-2026.

It’s not terribly insulting. In fact, it is a fact. And an opportunity. Which brings us to…

Trend #1: Holistic financial wellness

Holistic financial wellness is a trend that has been building momentum since late last year, thanks to the economic scalding caused by the pandemic.

It’s part of a greater drive in the industry toward the personalization of employee benefits and retirement plans. But where personalization focuses on meeting the needs of the individual employee’s situation, a holistic approach focuses on all of the aspects of a benefit offering across multiple benefits categories. Let’s hear from Arizton again:

“Large businesses are blending physical, mental, and financial programs to provide holistic support to their employees. The concept of ‘health meets wealth’ is gaining immense traction in the market because both are largely interdependent and healthcare costs are continuing to rise as well,” notes the summary of its recent Financial Wellness Benefits Market report.

The report, even the summary, has a lot of interesting statistics. But the one that is most memorable is this…

Stat of the week

The report forecasts that the financial wellness market will reach revenues of $834 million by 2026. That is a lot of money passing through employers to employee benefits and retirement advisors and vendors.

But an even more stunning statistic is this one: Almost 35% of workers at large companies have “no clue” that their employer offers benefits that include financial wellness, according to Arizton’s report.

Ouch.

Obviously some more work needs to be done with employee communications. And we realize that. Plus communications is a two-way street, after all, so HR is not all at fault. In fact…

Trend #2: HR is swamped

Besides having to deal with the aforementioned challenge of employee communications, HR is handling projects involving return-to-office planning, rehiring and recruiting, women leaving the workforce, older employees delaying retirement, poor employee mental health, the threat of increasing litigation, and mountains of (virtual) paperwork and regulations.

And HR has an extra issue that requires continued hyper-vigilance: unemployment fraud.

This week, a friend received a letter in the mail about their application for unemployment. Actually, they hadn’t applied for unemployment.

The state division of unemployment sent that letter to double check, and kudos to the employer for also emailing to double check that, hey, you didn’t do this, did you?

Apparently one explanation for the sheer size of fraud happening is that the Experian data breach of several years ago, where millions of people’s info was stolen, may have provided the names, birthdates, and Social Security numbers used in the many fraudulent unemployment applications being filed these days.

Trend #3: Traders trading badly

I lied. There are two Quotes of the Week this week. Here’s the second one:

“Almost exclusively, all of my best friends have been convicted murderers.”

That’s former UBS Group and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes in a stark statement about his time in prison, according to Bloomberg. He was released this week after serving half of his 11-year sentence for illegally manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), a bank-reported interest rate, to enhance his trading results.

After watching the recent sideshow involving retail day traders and the incredible inflation of GameStop stock, I’m interested in the trader approach to risk. That’s probably why the quote caught my eye.

But what haunts me most is the thought of possible collateral damage from the GameStop chaos. That somewhere out there are the spouses and families of the people who were part of the reddit group effort. They may have helplessly watched their beloved wipe out their retirement savings.

It’s possible. Our reporter spoke to people in the industry about effects of the GameStop squeeze on retirement plans, but whether the helplessness of family members watching finances disappear actually happened, we don’t know.