Jennifer Rayner came to 401(k) plan advising due in part to a love of talking with participants. That interest is evident in her latest venture: a financial engagement workplace program that seeks to help people with the emotional side of money.

“We’re an engagement tool,” Rayner says. “We don’t do financial wellness, we don’t do budgeting, we don’t do coaching, because as far as I’m concerned that’s all there—there’s tons of it …. Our job at Moniwell is to help with the mental health side of money, to help people feel better, more confident and emotionally engaged with their finances.”

Rayner worked with plan sponsor clients and participants for about 20 years at a husband/wife owned registered investment advisory, The Retirement Consulting Group; when the owners decided to retire, she bought the business. As a player/owner of the firm, she became increasingly aware that participants weren’t engaging with topics such as deferral rates or retirement income options—they had real-world, practical concerns.

“People wanted to talk to me about the fact that they were still living with their parents, and was that bad? Or that they were getting a divorce and needed advice,” she says. “I realized that I wasn’t trained for this—I can’t be a therapist.”

To help such participants, Rayner went looking for a good financial engagement and education solution. But she couldn’t find one that fit her needs. So she dove into the world of financial psychology, eventually concluding that she’d have to create her own program. From there, she paired up with Ph.D.s working in the field, and a technology expert, to found her company in 2020 and launch its first text-based engagement offering in 2022.

Last year, Rayner brought on another retirement plan adviser she knew to be heavily engaged in participant education, Lauren Loehning, a partner at Retirement Impact. Loehning, who revels in behavioral research on participant engagement, brought both expertise and clients to the project.

Healthy Money

Rayner and Loehning started using the service with some of their plan sponsor clients, and otherwise began speaking to workplace plan advisers about the potential to use the platform with clients. Access to Moniwell costs $6 per participant annually, plus a $500 startup fee.

The Moniwell program is a combination of written content, videos and engagement tools geared toward “feel better first content,” and Rayner says the firm is working toward a chatbot. Materials include tips and tricks on how to feel more relaxed about money, links to communities and nudges around best practices. The product is white-labelled to the plan sponsor’s specifications and will link out to tools from the sponsor’s providers, including financial coaches and wealth advisers.

On top of it all is a simple communication method: text messaging. Because Moniwell is not selling services or products, it can ping participants on their phones, a tactic that the duo says has exceptionally high visibility and engagement rates.

“95% of texts are open within the first three minutes, and read, so that’s a huge difference from an email campaign, or marketing campaign, which is about 20%,” Loehning says.

Use of text messaging can, of course, my raise regulatory concerns for plan fiduciaries, and Rayner and Loehning commissioned a white paper to consider this point by Employee Retirement Income Security Act at law firm Boutwell Fay LLP. In the 23-page report, the ERISA attorneys came to the conclusion that texting is an effective means of communication that can comply with qualified plan regulation, and better meets the fiduciary duty to reach participants with educational material.

But the firm also details the importance of setting up such a program to ensure that “the educational resources and other tools for financial well-being that the program provides do not constitute investment recommendations or advice as described in the [Department of Labor] guidance.”

Halo Effect

Moniwell is offered via advisers to plan sponsors, though Rayner says the firm is considering an enterprise option.

Rayner says the service was built for maximum flexibility to adjust to the participant pool it is being offered too—with the text messaging capable of reaching employee bases that aren’t sitting at computers. It’s also available to employees even if they aren’t contributing to a workplace retirement plan. 

“We have made sure that the content engages somebody and provides them resources even if an employer isn’t offering anything,” she says. “A lot of employers are drawn to it because we call it the ‘show me you care’ tool …. When you offer something that doesn’t ask them to do something immediately, it’s just supportive, that is the halo effect on the adviser that brought and on the employer that brought it – there’s an immediate RIO from the first text.”

Loehning points to an annual study by the American Psychological Association that has found, year-after-year, that financial stress negatively affects American workers—with no end in sight.

“We’re creating all these solutions that are not moving the needle enough because we’re not catching enough of the people in the action phase,” she says. “That is really what we are doing—we’re addressing that first part, which is the emotional part of money. When you can help build someone’s confidence you are motivating them to be intrinsically engaged in the solutions that are readily available.”