From available benefits to useful action

Executive takeaway

Offering a benefit and helping someone use it well are different jobs. A benefit can be valuable on paper yet feel distant from an employee's immediate question: what does this mean for my paycheck, my choices and the next thing I need to do?

Personalized financial coaching may help close that gap by connecting information to a person's goal and a manageable action. It is not a substitute for affordable benefits, good plan design or accurate administration. For buyers, the opportunity is to test whether employees become better able to make an appropriate decision, not simply whether more people click an enrollment button.

MoneyBadger's paycheck-first, private coaching approach provides a starting point for that test. Any employer-specific benefits workflow and evaluation arrangements should be defined before launch.

The participation gap is real, but its meaning needs care

National benefits data show that availability does not automatically become participation. In March 2026, 72% of private-industry workers had access to retirement benefits, while 52% participated. These figures describe all workers in the relevant population, not only those with access. BLS retirement benefits, Table 1, 2026 (opens in a new tab).

Medical benefits tell a related story. BLS reported a 65% medical-care take-up rate among private-industry workers with access. Take-up uses the population with access as its denominator, which makes it different from the participation rate for all workers. BLS medical benefits, Table 2, 2026 (opens in a new tab).

Neither statistic tells an employer how much value its own workforce is missing. An employee may use another source of health coverage. A retirement decision may involve affordability, other priorities or plan features. The data do not establish that confusion caused nonparticipation, or that every nonparticipant should enroll.

That is why a useful benefits strategy starts with diagnosis. Which employees are eligible? What do they understand? What is preventing the next step? Is the barrier information, affordability, time, administration or a considered preference? A coaching program should help surface those distinctions privately rather than label every unused benefit a failure.

Understanding matters, but information alone is not the whole mechanism

There is experimental evidence that the way employees encounter benefits can affect behavior. In a randomized study at a large university, researchers encouraged selected employees to attend a benefits fair using a small financial reward. Being in a department where employees received that encouragement increased retirement-plan enrollment by about 0.9 percentage points after four and a half months in the study's reported regression estimate. Duflo and Saez, 2003, Table II (opens in a new tab).

The intervention combined an invitation, an incentive and workplace spillovers. The researchers could not cleanly separate information from all the other mechanisms. This is evidence that engagement design can matter, not a finding about personalized coaching or a forecast for your workforce.

For a buyer, the practical implication is straightforward: do not judge support only by how much content it contains. Examine the path from a question to a decision. Can a participant locate the applicable rule, understand its effect and complete the relevant step? Does the service help them notice when an answer still needs confirmation?

For example, a retirement match explanation becomes more useful when an employee can connect the contribution to take-home pay and find the correct enrollment route. A benefits comparison becomes more useful when the employee can identify the trade-off they care about. Those are workflow hypotheses worth testing, not guaranteed outcomes.

What coaching research supports, and what your pilot must establish

A CFPB-commissioned randomized trial studied interested low- and moderate-income consumers receiving human coaching in New York and Miami. In New York, those offered coaching were about 20 percentage points more likely to report having a budget after adjustment. No factual-knowledge gain was detected. Urban Institute, 2015, Table ES.5 (opens in a new tab).

That is causal evidence for the offer of those programs in those settings. It is not evidence that MoneyBadger improves benefits uptake or that digital coaching replicates human coaching. Better benefits understanding remains something your own pilot should test, not an outcome to assume.

A buyer should translate that lesson into a testable proposition. Perhaps employees who understand a deduction can decide whether to change an election. Perhaps a clear next step helps someone obtain an official pension estimate. Perhaps a participant discovers that the current election is appropriate and takes no further action. The goal is a better-informed, completed decision, not enrollment at any cost.

There is also a limit that good coaching should make visible. If the employee understands a benefit but cannot afford the contribution, more explanation does not solve the affordability problem. If the enrollment system fails, the employer needs an administrative fix. Participants should know where to take those issues without being asked to disclose private coaching or finances to their sponsor.

A practical buyer checklist

Ask prospective providers to show the whole decision journey:

• Which employee question is the service designed to answer, and which existing benefit does it connect to?
• Does it use current employer-approved materials and direct people to official eligibility confirmation rather than infer rules from a job title?
• Can it explain the paycheck trade-off in plain language without implying that the same election is right for everyone?
• Does a supported conversation produce a clear next step, a decision to wait or a referral to the correct official source?
• Can participants distinguish coaching from an authoritative eligibility, tax, investment or pension determination?
• Can participants privately distinguish cost and administrative barriers from lack of understanding?
• Are financial details, personal goals, action details and financial well-being measures excluded from sponsor reporting, even in aggregate?
• Are reporting, procurement, access and any integrations explicitly scoped instead of presumed available?

Run a three-month understanding-to-action pilot

Choose one benefit question that participants can realistically address during the pilot. A retirement election review may fit. An annual-only enrollment change may not, unless the pilot overlaps the relevant window. Offer 100 covered pilot seats with voluntary participation, and define eligibility before interpreting any action rate.

Within the private member experience, participants can check their understanding, identify an intended next step and revisit it at follow-up. An action may be completed, changed or deliberately deferred. Treat that as a decision journey, not a requirement to enroll. Personal goals, barriers, financial actions and any financial well-being scales stay private and are not aggregated to the sponsor.

For the sponsor, agree only separately approved, non-sensitive engagement measures, with distinct counts for invited, enrolled, activated and returning participants. Suppress small groups. Do not assume a live sponsor dashboard, payroll connector or benefit-election integration. Define the evaluation and access process as part of the pilot scope.

Set the expansion decision in advance: what level of reach, return engagement and manageable delivery effort would justify continuing? Participants can privately judge usefulness and decision clarity. A small uncontrolled pilot can establish feasibility and reveal promising patterns. It cannot establish that coaching caused retention, productivity or benefits adoption to improve.

Proposed commercial pilot: 100 covered pilot seats for a three-month term with agreed start and end dates, at $1,000 per month ($3,000 total). Participation is voluntary; covered seats are not a promise of 100 active participants. Any later program is separately contracted at $10 per covered employee or union member per month, regardless of adoption or usage. No automatic pilot renewal or conversion. Scope, supported coverage, launch arrangements and reporting terms must be agreed; enterprise billing, payroll connectors and sponsor analytics are not assumed to exist.

Pilot discussion: bring one benefit, its approved materials, the relevant decision window and a named owner. Define what employees should understand, what a useful next action looks like and what remains private. Then test whether MoneyBadger helps that journey work in practice.