Why Financial Wellness Programs Fail—and How to Fix Them

David Rice: What do you think the key is to employee financial health and benefits?

Jason Lee: So much of the problem or the challenge of financial health really kind of boils down to everyone wants the same thing, but unfortunately when it comes to financial matters, there is no GLP-1. There is no easy way.

David Rice: What is a holistic end-to-end financial sort of wellness journey look like?

Jason Lee: Well, look, I think this word wellness is a good analogy. If you were to think about the classic hospital in your town or in your city, the ground floor is the ER, the correct or the appropriate sort of financial wellness program really needs to kind of address that full stack of needs.

David Rice: How do you see the employer financial wellness landscape evolving sort of in the next couple of years?

Jason Lee: The employer desire will still be there. The change that you will see, however, is the products and the technology will be much smarter.

David Rice: Welcome back to the People Managing People podcast — the show where we explore the messy human side of work, the technology influencing it, and the bold ideas shaping the future of people practices. Today's episode is for every leader who's ever wondered why is it so hard to get employees to care about financial wellness when literally everybody agrees that it's important?

My guest today is Jason Lee. He's a bit of a legend in the earned wage access industry, having founded DailyPay before that was acquired, and later Salt Labs before that was acquired by Chime, and he's now the chief of Chime Enterprise. He's a guy who thinks quite a bit about why savings is the most boring topic on earth, why employees don't engage with financial programs, and what it actually takes to help people save when they feel like they have nothing to save.

From Starbucks points as emergency funds to why the best wellness programs are built like hospitals with ER, diagnostics, and rehab floors, this one's packed with some cool analogies, hard truths, and insights on what it means to design financial benefits people actually use. So without further ado, let's get into it.

All right, so Jason, welcome!

Jason Lee: Thanks so much for having me, David.

David Rice: Yeah, absolutely. You're in the New York City area now?

Jason Lee: I am. I happen to be actually with my family on holiday here for a couple of days, but I would never miss this and the opportunity to spend a few minutes with you, so thanks for having me.

David Rice: Thank you for joining us from holiday and to talk a little bit about some employee financial health and benefits and have a good discussion.

So, you know, I wanted to start us something like 70% of employees who don't sit at desks, right? They face unique financial health challenges. And I'm curious, you know, what are some of the biggest hurdles that they face, and what do you think the key is to helping that demographic overcome those issues?

Jason Lee: Well look, you are right that 70% of employees who don't sit at desks, but frankly, I bet if you were to poll those who even sit at desks, they're having a hard time too. What I would say is so much of the problem or the challenge. Financial health, in my opinion, it really kind of boils down to execution.

And what I mean by that is I think everyone wants the same things. Whether when you talk to people who are in their seats or not in their seats, you talk to their employers, you talk to their family members. I mean, who among us does not want to become that much more financially healthy, have better habits.

It's a little bit like weight loss. I mean, who among us, whatever you know, want this, but unfortunately, when it comes to financial matters, there is no GLP one. There is no easy way in order to be able to do this. So I think a lot of this comes down to how do we offer and how do we have a set of tools or a set of strategies or an education process that just makes it easier, simpler, more transparent, and just a lot more effective to get folks to start developing those stronger financial habits.

David Rice: Savings is one of the things that we talk about all the time when we talk about financial health. Right, and it makes a lot of sense 'cause obviously you need that cushion. But you know, it's sort of a linchpin for having a sense of financial health. Right. But would you say that a person's ability to save is based on, is it just income?

Is it behavior? Is it both? You know, it's kind of a combination thereof, I think. But how do you look to advise people differently to develop sort of like that holistic approach to their financial wellness?

Jason Lee: Some of this will sound like mom and apple pie, but I love my mother and unfortunately I probably eat way too much apple pie.

There's no secret here. Savings happens to be one of the most boring. That is a challenge. One gene, I mean, who wakes up and says, today I want to save more. Of course not. And so to answer your first question about what are the contingencies, what are the dependencies, I would actually postulate, it has very little to do with how much you make.

It has a lot more to do with how much you spend. You know, we all have friends. We all hear those, you know, really unfortunate stories about maybe someone who might have hit the lottery, but now in five, you know, five years they're destitute. Or you know, God forbid a professional athlete who might have a $225 million contract but is now at Starbucks, you know, and Anton Walker from the Boston Celtics, and these are unfortunate stories.

They really do illustrate this core axiom, which is, it has very little to do with how much one makes it actually has to do with your spending habits. Savings is really just the opposite of not spending, because think about trying to motivate someone to take in the low income segment, to take a portion of what they already perceive to be too small.

I already think I'm underpaid. I already think my paycheck is too small. How am I gonna subdivide that in a proactive way? And so I think the actual mechanic or activity around savings tends to be so challenging for folks. You kind of have to get 'em, and you kind of have to help people do it as they're doing something else.

One of the most popular things and one of the most effective things that I see helping people save is rounding up or saving maybe a little bit as you spend. It's these types of things which really enable someone to start building and building up that savings balance. Here's another thing that I would just observe, which is.

This category of savings, and this is probably a little bit abstract, not maybe for you or your listeners, but maybe for the general population. It's the more non fungible you could make it, the better. What do I mean by that? One of the greatest savings vehicles, I think in this country for high income earners is the 401k, but for all income earners, believe it or not, are reward points. Let me say that again. Reward points.

David Rice: You mean on like a credit card?

Jason Lee: No, or like a Starbucks point. I've spoken to countless people who, you know, will buy a coffee or buy a donut or something of that nature and they'll never spend their Starbucks points. Why? When you ask them, they'll say, I think of it like an emergency savings vehicle.

If I lose my job, if I'm stuck at the airport, if I lost my wallet, I know I have this store value that I can use, and so people are walking around with 100, $300 worth of Starbucks points that they view as a bit of a savings vehicle because it's not readily spent. And so the more that you can kind of create non fungibility with your actual assets, in my opinion, that's sort of your first step or a real interesting way to get you to save more.

David Rice: Yeah, that's interesting. I do that with pet products.

Jason Lee: It's like, yeah, certainly. And I bet you look at it, I bet you refresh and you check out how many points do I have? What can I purchase with it? Then you don't actually buy anything with it.

David Rice: Or if I, like for example, I never buy treats for the dog. My dogs, I just, I'm like, well, I'll just get that with these savings, you know, because it's like, that's right.

Something I know they need or that we need to get, but I don't like how much they cost. So certainly, you know, participation rates in financial wellness programs for a lot of employers, they're not as high as the employer would like. Something like, I think 97% of employers believe it. It is their responsibility to help employees establish some kind of financial wellness.

And I've seen stats that say like two thirds of employees are craving help. So I'm kind of curious here, where are we getting tripped up? Where are we falling out of alignment? And this is not happening.

Jason Lee: The way you position, this is absolutely accurate. This is actually one of the very, very rare instances where there's a meeting of the minds between labor and management, between employers and employees.

Like there's violent agreement. Everyone wants the same thing. Employers want to help and employees want the help. But as you say, if that really were working well, then we would have a country of a lot more financially healthy people. So what's going wrong? There must be some disconnect that's occurring between people's desire on both sides, by the way, to have this happen and it not happening.

And so I think the question is a great one. This will sound borderline self-serving because I am in the business of building great products to help this happen, but I actually think it has to do a lot with that. If you were to walk in to your average employer, large company, or small, that has a financial health program, what you would find is that some of these programs, or the vast majority are antiquated, they amount to please watch these set of videos and please finish this quiz.

At the end of it, we'll give you a coupon for a personal pan pizza. It is really that rudimentary. That reminds me of the Scholastic Book Club or something. That's what I was gonna say. Yes. And so look, I had a lot of pizza from that, but it's an antiquated way of thinking about things and in today's world.

Your average 28-year-old is not gonna sit down and go through a 30 minute, a 45 minute video or read something that's 10 pages long on how to become a more effective borrower, or how to budget or how to save. So I think a lot of these programs are sort of stuck in the 1980s and 1990s way of doing things.

What they really need to do is become more modern. How do we learn about the best restaurant? Or how do we see if, man, I'm thinking about staying at this hotel. I want to kind of get real. Do you actually go to the hotel's website and look at their curated photos? And maybe some do, but what most people will do is they'll get on Instagram or they'll go on TikTok and they'll look for actual user generated content.

The real picture of what's going on. You see that education process is happening natively in the platform that we're already familiar with. Be it Instagram or be it TikTok or whatever that nativity, that organic way of learning about something is much more natural, and that's really, I think what the modern programs really need to mimic as opposed to taking you out of your context, having you sit down, watch something.

To me, that's the equivalent of looking on a hotel's website and seeing the picture of their pool. It's not inaccurate, but it's really not that helpful.

David Rice: Yeah. When we chatted before this, you likened kind of the current offerings. Another good analogy, you were saying it's like only knowing where the ER is. What is a holistic end-to-end financial sort of wellness journey look like?

Jason Lee: Well, look, I think this word wellness or financial health is a good analogy. We think about health predominantly is the physical body. And if you were to think about the classic hospital in your town or in your city, well that architecture is very intentional.

The ground floor is the er. It's the emergent place. It's where you go when there's an exigent issue. You know, my arm got chopped off. I've got like, my foot just got mangled. You know, God forbid I got into a car accident, whatever it might be. That's something that can't wait. Frankly, a lot of programs out there are about that.

You know, I, by way of a little bit of history, I actually founded an entire industry that was all about just in time money, emergency money. It's called the earn wage access industry. I created that entire industry in my basement. I founded a $2 billion company, and that's all that did. That's all we did.

We found ways to provide this important but limited benefit, which was letting people access their pay on their own schedule. But what happens then? So someone's able to get out of the ER, now they've got internal medicine issue. You know, maybe there's something going on in their blood. It's not an emergent issue, but it's something that needs to be addressed over time.

Or maybe it's some type of muscle pain in my leg, or maybe it's orthopedic surgery that I might need. God forbid you would go to the ER for that, or let's say that you wanted to be better at diet and exercise, improve your cholesterol. Do you really think you should be sitting in the ER to do that? No.

There are reasons why there are different floors at that hospital. The correct or the appropriate sort of financial wellness program really needs to kind of address that full stack of needs.

David Rice: Lemme ask you this, if you're the CHRO of a large org, you've got several locations or employees all over the world.

How are you getting the message out so that people not only know about it, but also sort of engage with the educational materials around it or begin to actually engage with it and use the benefit?

Jason Lee: Look, this is one of the biggest challenges of large companies, even small companies. Lemme just say it's the challenge of everything.

Nobody listens, nobody pays any attention.

David Rice: You sound like a content professional.

Jason Lee: No, really, everyone's on their own agenda or a father or a parent. And so nobody listens. And you know, all kidding aside, it is one of the paramount issues and challenges that HR leaders have. Let me maybe step to the side for one moment.

We're recording this podcast here in the middle of 2025. And so for those who might be listening in a later year or whatnot, we're right now in an environment and in a climate of economic uncertainty, frankly. That's not me saying that Deloitte this morning just put out their annual CFO survey and the perspective of CFOs is that, hey, this is not a great time to take risk.

The environment's much more uncertain, the number of responding CFOs who think that has doubled over the last quarter. So this is all to say right now, HR leaders are having problems and they're having struggles with getting the right resources. Budgets are going down, not up. People are being asked to do more with less, and do you really expect that they can do a multi-location, massive rollout of a new benefit from an unknown provider with a brand new offering?

There just aren't enough resources to do that. And so what I would tell you is, number one, this has always been the case where HR has really struggled with getting the word out and getting there to be a trusted brand or trusted provider. Number two in particular, in the middle of 2025. This issue is very acute because there aren't that many resources anymore.

There's no investment dollars to kind of go around. So where does that take me? How do we advise or how do we help companies with this? This will sound a little bit pedantic, but brand really matters. Meaning you put a can of Coca-Cola on a table or in the cafeteria, you don't have to explain it. You don't have to explain, Hey, we got a six pack of Coca-Cola.

Let me give you a tutorial on what to do and how to use that. There's what I would call a monetization or a leveraging of the brand, and if I were sitting in the CHRO's seat today, I would only go and provide benefits through companies that people have heard of. I don't think this is the environment where you go with a new startup or a new, I just don't think that's the case because now you have to encounter issues around trust. What does this thing do? I've never heard of it. And that requires a lot of HR time and commitment to go do those things.

David Rice: Yeah, that's a good point. It's tempting sometimes to get pulled into, you know, a new service or a shiny new thing, whatever it is. But yeah, this may not be the, trust is low, it's as low as it's ever been.

Jason Lee: And time, there's like no time. People are resource constrained and they're stretched. And so again, if we were sitting here five years ago, let's get the new FANG thing going. But there's a reason why brand and brand awareness and the accountants actually say it's an asset that sits on your balance sheet.

They have a calculation for it. It's the largest asset that Coca-Cola has is the value of that brand. And so I think that's really something that HR leaders need to think very critically about, which is how do we leverage the investment that someone else has already made? In building their brand. So we don't have to do it.

We don't have to explain it. Just throw the six pack of Coke at Coca-Cola on the table and the employees will figure it out.

David Rice: So now when we think about helping employees understand their capital, right. You know, I'm curious, how does you know your programs help them manage or understand, sorry, things like capital management, growth, expansion, things like that.

Jason Lee: Look, I think you're asking a question specifically about what we at Chime are doing with employers. We have three different categories of benefits as it relates to employee financial health, and we call them interesting names. Typically, we work with frontline workers, hourly workers, but our benefits are called capital management.

Capital growth and capital expansion. Now, before I get into telling you what those are, don't those sound like names that you would hear if you were sitting with a meeting at Fidelity or maybe JP Morgan or someone like that and not really the hourly workforce And the approach that we at Chime take is, guess what?

That's the potential we see in your employee. We actually think they can be that person. So let's get them started now. Capital management are all the things that we do to help people manage their day-to-day finances. We offer them early wage access. They get direct deposits one to two days before their payday.

It's fee free overdraft. These are all the things that people who have problems or struggles with making ends meet between pay cycles. They've got a whole raft of no fee tools that they can use. That's sort of point number one. Point number two, capital growth. As we talked about before, the most boring, boring vertical in financial health is savings, but we call it capital growth because we are really committed to enabling those employees to save hundreds upon hundreds of dollars on average through very clever organic ways.

Not, hey, let's sit down and give you a seminar on why it's good to save. But more things like rounding up, hey, putting aside a dollar here and there. When we look at, for example, the average employer, when I look at their employees who are using Chime, oftentimes I will see a savings balance of like $200 or more, and that is extraordinary when you look at it compared to the national average of everyone in America who has a savings rate of negative 2%.

David Rice: In the negative.

Jason Lee: It's negative 2%. Capital expansion is our third set of benefits, which we offer that enables people to improve and build their credit history, which ultimately impacts their credit score. People who use that product, by the way, it's remarkable. They're able to increase. What we see, rather is on average their credit score is increased by something like 30 points, and that's pretty remarkable when you look at the effect that can have on the individual.

David Rice: Interesting times lie ahead for the economy. You know, when we look at wages, employment in general right now, this feels very uncertain. So I'm curious, how do you see the employer financial wellness landscape evolving sort of in the next couple of years?

Jason Lee: Look, I think desire won't change. I mean, that study that you quoted we're already at 97%.

I've read that same study 10 years ago, that number was 41%, meaning 10 years ago, only 41% of companies believed that their employees' financial health was even their responsibility. That number has increased to 97%, so. The evolution of what I see in the future is number one, the employer desire will still be there because we've already crossed the point of understanding that investing in your employees is always good for business, always good for business.

I think the change that you will see, however, is the products and the technology will be much smarter. They'll be much easier lowering the barrier to entry. I love telling this. One quick anecdote. I had a client tell me, what do you mean we have a savings program? We use a credit union. I said, well, great.

Let's pull up the credit union right now. Let's pull up their website, save with us, open an account and in small letters, minimum $20,000 to start. I mean, who among us even has that? Yeah, and forget the hourly ones. Who has that laying around? So, but the point being, yes, like we check the box, we have a savings program, but no one's using it.

I think that as there's more pressure and more desire for employers to do things that are really worthwhile and that they can really get behind, you'll start to see the products evolve. You know, we at Chime, for instance. You could start saving not with $20,000. With 20 cents, we have no minimum, you know, so you could start saving, you get outsized interest, you get all these great privileges with 20 cents, and that's really the benefit of technology.

It really reduces a lot of the friction, a lot of the cost where we don't need you to start with 20 grand. You can start with 20 cents or 0 cents for that matter.

David Rice: Well, Jason, it's been an interesting conversation. I know financial health is on the mind of a lot of people. Like we, yeah, I mean, obviously the data's there.

Before we go, I just wanna give you a chance to, you know, plug anything you wanna plug, tell people where they can find you, learn more about what you're doing.

Jason Lee: Well look, I'm on LinkedIn and so you can find me there, Jason Lee. Believe it or not, there's one or two others on LinkedIn with my name. But you can put in Jason Lee Chime and you can find me.

So connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very active and I will respond. And if you're looking to learn more, just go to chime.com and you'll find us there.

David Rice: Excellent. The last thing that we do on every episode is we have a little tradition here on the podcast where you get to ask me a question, so I'm gonna turn it over to you. Ask me anything you want.

Jason Lee: What's one thing that is true about yourself that not a lot of people know, but that you wish more people knew about you?

David Rice: I have a pretty adventurous spirit. I think, you know, I do this podcast I talk about HR all the time. I don't know if people think about HR as being adventurous by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a person that just does love to get out, experience life in all shades, in all forms.

Whatever I can do, you know, it's very much like I have a never ending list of growing hobbies. You know, like, it's like I, I could take an interest in anything and run with it for a bit, you know? So I guess maybe that, you know, I'm not as boring as my LinkedIn might make it look.

Jason Lee: That works. So you want others to know I'm not a boring guy. Got it. There we go. Same answer.

David Rice: Alright, well Jason, thanks for coming onto the show. I really appreciate it and for giving us some of your time today.

Jason Lee: You bet. Thanks so much, David.

David Rice: All right, listeners, if you haven't done so already, head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com, get signed up for the newsletter.

And until next time, start that savings program even if you gotta start small.