Most financial wellness vendors fall into one of three buckets: a consumer app with an employer landing page, a content library of courses, or a coaching service. Each solves part of the problem. A platform ties them together and reports on the whole thing. Here's how to tell which you're looking at.
Coverage
- Does it cover the everyday (tracking, insights, budgets, goals) and the occasional (a real decision with an expert)?
- Is financial education delivered in context, or is it a separate portal employees have to remember to visit?
- Are coaches qualified, and are they paid to coach rather than to sell products?
Privacy
- Exactly what can the employer see? Ask for the HR dashboard, field by field.
- Is employer reporting built only from aggregated, de-identified data?
- Can an employee use the product without their employer seeing individual activity?
- Who owns the employee's data, and can they export or delete it?
Measurement
- What does the provider report on day one, and what only after the program matures?
- Are the metrics activation, engagement and utilisation — or vanity numbers?
- Will you get board-ready summaries, or raw exports you have to assemble yourself?
Rollout
- How long from contract to employees using it?
- How much work falls on your team versus the provider?
- Does it fit your existing benefits and communication workflow?
A useful test: ask each vendor to walk you through a single employee's month and a single HR review meeting. The strong providers can do both without hand-waving.