"It Just Sat There" — Jeff Tulloch on Why Financial Wellness Education Never Worked

Paul Tyler (00:01) Hi, this is Paul Tyler and welcome to another great episode of the L and A Hub podcast. And today I've got a great guest, somebody I've known for a very long time. In fact, we worked together at Met Life for many years. And it's interesting how paths keep crossing and recrossing. Jeff Tulloch, welcome to our show.

Jeff Tulloch (00:24) Yeah, Paul, like you said, we've known each other for a while and thank you for inviting me on.

Paul Tyler (00:29) Yeah. Well, if you could just tell people a little bit about who are you and what are you doing today?

Jeff Tulloch (00:36) Yeah, so I guess the background is I spent most of my career initially with two insurance carriers. One of those, as you referenced, was MetLife. I was there — those two carriers about 30 years, 25 of those years with MetLife, so the majority of the time there. Always in business development roles, trying to find ways to grow earnings and revenue for the company. One bucket of work was initially around alternative distribution, partnering up with general agencies, third-party administrators, associations, PEOs, medical carriers — just other ways to help bring MetLife products into the market. Another body of work was leading the broker and consultant relationships team — the top 20 broker/consultants that MetLife does business with. I got to know them all really, really well. And then the third body of work, which I think would be the primary crux for this conversation, Paul, was I helped MetLife get into the financial wellness business and helped build that business with MetLife, with many others at MetLife. And then I led that team. That program still exists today, grew substantially — thousands of customers, including 40% of the Fortune 500, millions of interactions with employees. And that's where I got my real passion and experience for this topic around financial education, financial wellness. So for the last five years, I've decided to go out on my own. And I am — I call myself a consultant, Paul, but I think of myself more as a practicalist. Everything I've done has always been as an operator, getting things done, building businesses. And that's what I do. So I work with brokers and consultants, financial wellness vendors, group insurance carriers, financial advisory firms, private equity, corporations, either as that consultant-type role, or as a board advisor, just trying to bring my knowledge to these organizations and add value to what they're trying to do with their businesses.

Paul Tyler (02:49) Yeah, well you're a little humble about what you did at MetLife. So maybe we could just back up there and talk a little bit about it. Now, what I would describe you did there was help build — I think probably one of the first true enterprise financial wellness programs at scale. I think PlanSmart reached around forty percent of the Fortune 500 companies, if I'm not mistaken. Is that right?

Jeff Tulloch (03:15) You're right, you're right. Yeah, yeah. The concept is exceedingly simple. It's a matter of leveraging group customers, typically larger customers in the range of a thousand employees up to the biggest in the world, hundreds of thousands of employees, and bringing forth solutions to those employees at the workplace to help them do whatever they need to do financially. It could be understanding their benefits better, it could be they were transitioning out of the workforce, whether that was getting laid off or retired and how to help them through that, or helping family financial planning or helping beneficiary assistance — a whole variety of solutions that we had. Again, really simple, and it's been tried numerous times before, but no one has done it to the scale of what we did, to your point. And to this day it continues — probably 20 years in, with thousands and thousands of corporate customers. So it's doing a really good job helping the company, the company being MetLife, but also helping MetLife's clients and the underlying employee population.

Paul Tyler (04:31) Yeah, well just — two weeks ago I was up at LIMRA's Best Minds conference and LIMRA just sort of merged in the Alliance for Lifetime Income. I don't know if Jeff you've ever worked with Alliance for Lifetime Income, but the goal is really to talk about how do we broaden the awareness of retirement savings products? And Dave Livingston there had all of the industry associations on one panel. It was impressive — NAFA, iPMA, I'm trying to think, I'm missing one or two other organizations — and the question was, how do we build better, broader retirement planning safety nets for customers? I thought it was just great that the timing worked out to talk to you about that, because I think that was kind of the problem. How did you state the problem you were solving for companies when you were building the PlanSmart program?

Jeff Tulloch (05:36) Sorry, say that again, Paul. What was the question?

Paul Tyler (05:37) What was the problem that you were really solving? If you were talking to one of the enterprise customers for PlanSmart, what was the problem you're solving for the employees and for the employer?

Jeff Tulloch (05:50) Yeah, it starts with the conversation with the employer, so that's the HR and benefits team of any given corporation. And they have a number of continual challenges that they're trying to face in their business. One is certainly attraction and retention. How do we prove continually that we're a great place to work? We really care about our employees and we help our employees. And if you know anything about HR and benefits people, that's core to who they are — they really care about people, that's part of the reason why they're in the role they are. So they're always trying to find ways — how can I help the people and therefore help the company? That's at a very high level. Beneath that, though, companies typically spend a pretty significant amount of money on benefits every year — that's obviously medical insurance and retirement plans, but it's all the other benefits a company may offer. And they're continually looking for how do we help people understand all these benefits and identify which are the best ones for them and how to take advantage of them. So that's kind of a core challenge they were always trying to solve for. And then, getting maybe to your retirement question — employers want employees to take advantage of that retirement plan and contribute to it to its maximum ability and grow their retirement savings, but then, as they're doing that, not tapping into things like 401(k) loans unless absolutely necessary. So those are just some of the examples as we're talking to employers. We would show up understanding that in a consultative conversation with the HR benefits pros as well as the brokers and consultants they worked with, to really understand their needs and then build our programs specifically to assist those needs.

Paul Tyler (08:09) Yeah, I found if you talk to people about how do we get people to save more for retirement, it's like describing an elephant blindfolded. If I'm in the independent insurance business, it's how do I sell more annuities. If I'm in the plan annuity business, I'm saying how do I put a checkbox in for some sort of annuity with some sort of income benefit on it. How do you look at financial wellness in the workplace — what's the question to be answering here to increase that safety net? How's it different from your lens?

Jeff Tulloch (08:52) Yeah. So before I answer that question, it's important to define what is financial wellness. It's not like talking about a 401(k) plan or a medical plan or a dental plan, where if I say 401(k), you know exactly what we're going to talk about. When you say financial wellness, it's a much broader topic. So for me, getting someone well financially is attempting to get to someone where they can increase their confidence. If I can increase my confidence in what's available to me and what may be best for me, maybe you can spur someone into digging into whatever it is they want to investigate a little more deeply. So part of what we always have to ask about financial wellness is, what are we trying to solve for this given individual, and helping them get that confidence. Once they have some level of confidence, what's the goal? The goal over time is to get somebody financially independent. Now let me just make this statement — that's a really difficult thing to do, to get somebody purely financially independent. But we want to take steps along that way where people can get more and more confident in their actions, seemingly reduce the amount of stress they have on their finances. So that could be just starting an initial emergency savings fund, or it could be reducing my credit card debt, or it could be trying to learn more about my retirement plan. So when we talk about financial wellness, we have to think about, okay, what are we trying to accomplish? But then, what are the solutions available to me? And again, with financial wellness, there are so many vendors and so many solutions out there nowadays, and they fall into a variety of buckets. On one side, a lot of them are very similar today — they're helping people get educated and then pointing them at solutions. But as you double-click more deeply into each of these vendors, you find they have different components that are core to their model. Some may be offering access to a financial coach or a financial advisor, and those things are different. A financial coach can provide financial assistance but typically doesn't execute action for you, whereas a financial advisor can see that action all the way through. Some are technology-only with no access to individuals. Some are really bespoke in what they do — even though they call themselves a financial wellness vendor, maybe they're really focused on low-cost loans to employees or emergency savings or some other component. So in this financial wellness space, again, what are we trying to accomplish? And then understanding that there are a lot of these different solutions out there, once you have that understanding, then you can get to your question around, okay, what do I solve for? And it's really a matter of any company sitting back thinking about, okay, what is it specifically that I'm trying to solve for? Is it increasing retirement savings, or is it, conversely, I have a lot of lower-income individuals and I'm just trying to help them not live paycheck to paycheck and get into a better initial place financially.

Paul Tyler (12:52) I think that's really interesting. Maybe talk for a minute about how do you segment an employer base? Because I think a lot of times you only think about the needs that you may have, and the needs of executives at a company are radically different from people who are on the front line. So how do you — if you did a wellness checkup — how do you segment it? And as you go down to frontline workers, what is the metric? Is it percentage of people taking payday loans? Is it percentage of employees opting into a 401(k) plan? How do you think about the landscape when you talk to a company?

Jeff Tulloch (13:38) Yeah, you need to start off consultatively, and asking a lot of questions. What is the company trying to achieve? What other benefits do they have? What other financial wellness things have they attempted? What is the makeup of their population, to your point. If it's a law firm, okay, you have a pretty good understanding of what that employee population looks like. If it's a food and beverage company, you probably have a much wider range of jobs and income levels and education levels. So it really starts with a lot of that Q&A, and then, getting a little bit more focused, it's about action, and that's what people need to accomplish here. This is a behavior change ball. It's no different than if I'm trying to lose weight or if I'm trying to stop drinking or smoking or exercise more. It's very difficult to do by myself, and my personality's different than your personality — so how I might want to engage to change my behavior is different than how you would. So one, it's a matter of understanding the makeup of the company. But then two, it's a matter of making sure the solutions that are put forth are right for that population, or if it's a varied population, that there are multiple avenues, right? So somebody might want to talk to a financial advisor and meet with them one-on-one and get really deep into their finances. Another person may not be ready for that — really, "I'm on my phone all day, I just want to do some budgeting work and some education work, let me just do some tech stuff myself." Someone else may be one step higher than that and want to aggregate accounts and do some more specific financial modeling. So to get back to your question, it's really about understanding the specific workforce you're talking to, the company, and what their individual needs are.

Paul Tyler (15:53) Yeah. Well, looking back at your experience — I remember you had a big team at Met. If you looked at all the people touching the program, what's the difference between what sets a program apart — one that just gets people to sign up versus one that actually gets people to change behavior?

Jeff Tulloch (16:14) Yeah. I'm smiling because this is a real change over the last, I'd say, few years. If I rewind maybe seven, six, five years ago, everyone was seemingly just, "I need a program, let's put a program in place." And they didn't have experience with it, but they just said, okay, let me get a program out there to start helping my people. As those programs have been implemented and have matured, data comes out of that, right? And a lot of that data is telling us, okay, how engaged is our population, who's engaged, what are the participation rates — and those things are all very, very meaningful. But the next step of our maturation here in this financial wellness world is pressing hard on those metrics, as corporations should, as vendors should, to say, where's the evidence that we're not only getting engagement and participation, but where's the evidence that people are getting better financially? So the ability for any vendor or corporation to generate — okay, here's the evidence that people are increasing their emergency savings or reducing their debt or being smarter about their benefit selections or increasing their retirement contributions or reducing their retirement loans — all of those things are kind of where the industry is now, very appropriately. Like, these things are great, but we need to get people better financially. If not, these aren't worth it. So everyone's really pushing hard on those metrics, which is the right thing to do right now. The next frontier, which I think is being approached fairly recently, is on the medical level — and this is something that I've seen for a long while and I'm really passionate about. And that is, the physical, medical well-being of an individual can largely be tied back for a lot of people to stress, right?

Paul Tyler (18:43) Mm-hmm.

Jeff Tulloch (18:44) Why do I eat some of the wrong foods? Why do I maybe have a drink at night? Why do I maybe not work out? A lot of it could be because I'm stressed out about whatever I'm stressed out about. And the number one stressor for most of us is money, right?

Paul Tyler (19:00) Well, okay, so actually interesting you say that. I saw — I think PwC did a survey, and this is in the last six months, I think — and they said that fifty-nine percent of employees are still stressed about their day-to-day finances. So — are you surprised? Fifty-nine percent.

Jeff Tulloch (19:20) No, I'm not surprised. I mean, look, whether or not you're low income, middle income, high income, I think money is a stressor for everybody. Look, if you're the CEO, your money stresses are different things — maybe I have to pay for my fourth house or third house, right? So it's a little different than someone on the low income scale. But I think it affects everybody. And for years we've looked at physical well-being of the workforce, and more recently we've zeroed in on mental well-being, and financial well-being has been the latest one. But I would suggest maybe even flipping that — if money is the number one stressor for all of us, if we can help people get better financially, then mental well-being and physical well-being will increase. And there's more and more evidence — you referenced PwC, I've seen some things recently from MassMutual, they've done a study that has proven this out. There's another company, Nudge Global, I've seen some work from them as well. So hopefully that frontier we can really help people zero in on that aspect.

Paul Tyler (20:34) Yeah, well I want to talk about what you're doing and where you're headed now. I think — back to the stress metric for me is interesting, and I don't have the base stats to look at, or I didn't see a cut based on income. Now I'd hypothesize — tell me if you disagree — that this is not correlated to how much you have in your bank account, because I've seen very wealthy people who are very stressed about their finances. But I've seen that health, wellness, longevity are actually really correlated to credit scores, which is really interesting — like if I brush my teeth, I usually go to the dentist, and if I go to the dentist regularly, I probably pay my bills off, I'm not late on my bills. How do you correlate that? Is there a correlation with income and stress, or is it something like — I can feel good and de-stressed without having a million dollars in my bank account?

Jeff Tulloch (21:35) Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if there's a direct correlation. I think there is a correlation between discipline — and that's not to say that some of us are disciplined and some of us aren't, but are there ways that we can help people become more disciplined? So an example of that, and this is another focus in this financial wellness area, is personalization — and how I want to interact. So, Uber-level personalization, so that however I'm interacting, whether it's a person or technology, really knows who I am, and very specifically my makeup, my situation, my fundamental interests and concerns — all those things kind of steer me to, okay, this is helping me very specifically. But then also the interaction — if I rewind back to the early days when we were developing our program at Met, we had the typical library of information, all these great articles and videos, right — it was great —

Paul Tyler (22:45) Education. Yeah.

Jeff Tulloch (22:48) Great stuff. Nobody used it. Because it just sat there, and we said, go here and look at all this great stuff.

Paul Tyler (22:55) Well, let's poke a little bit at that, because I would say — yeah, I remember the education, the programs, the seminars. Now Jeff, when I look at what you're involved in, it feels much more action-oriented, real-time, coach-the-coach type approach. Maybe talk to us about it. How is this shifting? How should it shift, from your vantage point?

Jeff Tulloch (23:18) Yep. So maybe you'll tell me — what apps do any of us use? I use LinkedIn a lot, I use YouTube TV on my phone, I use Instagram, etc. Those apps know me really, really well, right? The things that are posting up on Instagram most recently are around the World Cup because I'm following everything about the World Cup. So that's just one example of how things have evolved — to okay, this stuff sits out there, go find it, to now I'm interacting with something that I want to interact with, and it's getting more and more intelligent every time I use it in terms of what my interests are. So that's a real, noted change, to your question.

Paul Tyler (24:13) Yeah. Well, maybe we'll talk a little bit more about technology. I'd be interested — I know whatever you could talk to about what you're working on and the companies, I think would be interesting. Second question related is, we do a lot of work with carriers, we do a lot of work with advisors, and I'd be interested to say, where should carriers and distributors be demanding the technology heads to do right for their clients?

Jeff Tulloch (24:43) Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, I guess I'd start with corporations that are looking to employ something for their employees — expect technology to be part of the solution. It may not be the only solution, but I think there's an expectation from corporations that there is an offering there. And why is that? One, that's just an expectation of their people, of their employees, in terms of what we all expect nowadays. But also it's a matter of scalability. And if I have 10,000 employees at my workforce, if I bring in a coach or coaches or advisors only — one, it's impossible to get to everybody. And then two, that entire population isn't going to want to meet right now with a coach or a financial advisor. So there's an expectation of technology from corporations. It's certainly about scalability, getting to everyone. And then, to your comment about the advisor piece, what I've seen work well is when there is this tech-and-human co-solution, right, because I may want to use technology today, but six months from now that may be different. Maybe I want to meet with somebody, a coach, today, but six months from now I may want to leverage technology. So bringing forth both solutions lets you get to everybody, and how people want to be met.

Paul Tyler (26:30) Yeah, thinking back to a long time ago, back to Met Life, I remember how hard it was, Jeff, to actually pair advisors appropriately with the right — in the right geographic area, with the right company, and do it in a way that the company wanted it to be deployed. Is technology making it easier to actually bring in an advisor, Zoom with the technology, or do you think really technology is going to effectively fill that void instead?

Jeff Tulloch (27:08) Technology absolutely has allowed us — COVID happened, right, and all of a sudden we were all on screens like this. And so much of the education that is delivered today is done via Zoom, via Microsoft Teams. And that is certainly enabling us to get to a much larger population. So yes, the technology aspect is helping. It's not the be-all-end-all, and we always need to think about the human aspect as well.

Paul Tyler (27:48) Yeah. Interesting. Now, I think clearly brokers play a big role advising companies and doing that. I'm assuming they're still the ones effectively recommending what that benefit package is going to look like. I guess how has that changed? You mentioned bringing in mental health — if a broker's doing a really good job for a client, what does that package look like, or what should it look like over the next three years?

Jeff Tulloch (28:26) Yes, so the brokers and consultants still play a very significant role, representing the client and finding the best solutions. A couple things — during COVID, companies generally threw a lot of extra benefits at employees, just trying to help them every way they can. Over the last couple of years or few years, companies have stepped back from that. So, okay, we added — now we have 26 different benefits, let's evaluate this. Are these the right 26? Are there some we should get rid of? Are there some that should be added? And the brokers or consultants play a role helping the companies with that evaluation. So they're still very involved. And the broker or the consultant or the vendor going into that relationship needs to continually look at what HR and benefits is thinking about. They're thinking about company culture, they're thinking about that attraction and retention I talked about before, they're thinking about all the other vendors that are in place. So when we put in place a financial wellness solution, it needs to make sure it complements everything they're doing currently and doesn't compete with other things. So I'll give you an example of that, Paul. When we first rolled out our program at Met — I'll name the company — Fidelity was in a lot of the corporations with their 401(k) plans, and they were initially very concerned that we were showing up doing financial education. They said, wait a minute, that's what we do, why is MetLife coming in? Over time, we were able to demonstrate that we're not conflicting with you — in fact, we're helping you, because we're just showing up as another arm to educate and inform people, and you're going to see an uptick in terms of retirement contributions, which they did. So going back to the brokers and consultants, and then more broadly to anyone playing in this space — making sure you're developing things that are complementary and supplementing the greater mission will definitely make things better, not worse.

Paul Tyler (30:43) Interesting. All right, well, I'm going to throw a curveball for you, Jeff. You're a skier — a very competitive skier, right? I see the resort map on the wall.

Jeff Tulloch (30:56) Yeah, I'm a skier, I love skiing. Some would argue the "competitive" tag.

Paul Tyler (31:00) The competitive part. So I guess in all your skiing, what have you learned about coaching people under pressure — relieving stress, getting people to focus on a goal as opposed to worrying about the next turn?

Jeff Tulloch (31:17) Yeah, that is a curveball. I would say we are our toughest coach, right? We're so hard on ourselves. Whereas when we get input from others, oftentimes it's, "well, you're really not that bad," right? So I think that's what I would say — sometimes we are our toughest critics, our toughest coaches, because we care about ourselves, we care about our image, we care about our family. And sometimes trying to back away from that and be less critical and more constructive would be good, whether you're skiing or coaching people or coaching yourself.

Paul Tyler (32:12) Yeah, I love it. So if we have a number of carriers, a number of distributors listening, and they don't have a financial wellness program in place — either for their own employees, or they'd like to deliver this type of thing — I'm sure you could help, correct?

Jeff Tulloch (32:34) Hopefully, yes. I mean, I show up as somebody who understands group benefits and all that entails, I understand the financial advisory world, I understand brokers and consultants, and I understand this financial wellness space and what works and what doesn't work and who the various vendors are. So that's what I can bring to bear to anybody I work with. And if anyone would find value in a discussion or find value in how I can help them, I'd obviously love that conversation.

Paul Tyler (33:10) Right. And what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Jeff Tulloch (33:15) Well, obviously either through Paul Tyler —

Paul Tyler (33:18) For a slight commission. Slight commission.

Jeff Tulloch (33:20) Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, so the best way would be — my email address is jtulloch@financialwellnessconsult.com. I also have a website, financialwellnessconsult.com. But yeah, that's probably the easiest way, or via LinkedIn.

Paul Tyler (33:44) Right. Okay. Hey Jeff, listen, thanks so much for the time. It was great seeing you. Hopefully you can coach me down one of those slopes next season with a little more snow.

Jeff Tulloch (33:52) If anyone's ever out in Park City, I'd love to entertain them on the slopes.

Paul Tyler (33:57) Excellent. All right. Hey, thanks for the time, and thanks to our listeners — be sure to leave us comments, likes, on whatever platform you found us on, and most importantly, join us again next week for another great episode of The L&A Hub. Thanks.