Tom Spann | Delivering Brighter Futures to Employees

Jen Tescher:
My guest today, Tom Spann, understands that financially healthy employees are physically healthier, happier and more productive. While a consultant by training, Tom’s life outlook pivoted when he began to understand how individuals were often overwhelmed by their employee benefits. Since then, Tom has become a strong voice for the vulnerable. His company, Brightside, provides a digital financial health platform that meets employees where they’re at to guide well-being and reduce financial stress without shame or judgment.

Tom, welcome to EMERGE Everywhere.

Tom Spann:
Thanks, Jen. It’s great to be here. It’s an honor.

Jen Tescher:
So you’re the CEO and co-founder of a startup called Brightside. What is Brightside? Tell us about it.

Tom Spann:
Brightside’s a financial care company. We think we’re creating a new category centered on the idea that employers are, first of all, uniquely motivated and positioned to improve financial health. We think that the ROI is huge for employers in improving financial health in terms of lower medical costs, improved productivity, and a big thing we’re seeing is reduced turnover today. And so to drive that value for them in financial health, they’re also uniquely positioned because they have access to the paycheck. And so when you can offer products where the payments are the first things out of the paycheck, you can offer people products they can’t get anywhere else. And you can also just make it easy for employees to do things like save for the next emergency. Because there are a couple clicks because you have data from the employer, you can open a savings account and start saving from every paycheck.

And so as we looked at the problem of financial wellness in employers, it just hasn’t worked. It was engaging too few people and it wasn’t a product that families living paycheck to paycheck, which 71% of families are not financially healthy according to the Financial Health Network, they don’t want a financial plan. They don’t have assets. They don’t even barely don’t even want to budget. They want to know, what do I do now? What do I do next? They want real solutions for their problems. How do I keep from being evicted? How do I get out of this amount of credit card? Those kinds of things. And just using behavioral science and making it easy to do the right thing, you can move them forward. So we think of it as, I’m from healthcare and we had wellness in healthcare, there’s wellness companies. These companies will help you with your gym membership and meditating and coaching on certain habits and things, but they’re not for sick people. You still need doctors and hospitals when you get injured and sick. And so I think the same thing’s true in financial health.

So we view ourself as not only financial wellness, but financial urgent care and financial primary care. And a lot of FinTech solutions have emerged over the last 10 years that can be really helpful to people. But they’re point solutions and they’re often motivated to just sell more of their solution. Because you’re making money off say a paycheck loan, or earn wage access or any of those things. They’re not really business models aligned to drive financial health and they’re not always holistic. The right answer for your student loans is different if you’ve got 30 grand credit card debt than if you don’t. So I think it’s resonating with employers that rather than implementing these things separately as point solutions for their employees, think of them more as treatments. And then we’re sitting in there as the primary care and get people to the right options for them at the right time. And so we want to be this place people go first to understand their options for financial products and services. And so we think we’re creating a new front door to financial services for employees and families.

Jen Tescher:
Well, you know I love those metaphors back to healthcare and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve been so taken with Brightside and also with you, because when we met back in 2019, Brightside had been selected for Financial Health Networks Accelerator. And one of the most interesting elements of the founding story for me starts with your last startup, which was called Accolade. So we’ll come back to Brightside for sure. But let’s talk a little bit about Accolade and what you learned from that experience that led you to dream up Brightside.

Tom Spann:
Yeah, it’s funny. I probably resisted the healthcare metaphors and analogies a little bit back then, but you did inspire me back then to go ahead and really understand where the connections were. So I co-founded Accolade 15 years ago now with Michael Cline, who was our founding investor, a really genius investor and John [inaudible 00:05:50] who was just, I was fortunate to have two very smart co-founders. John was one of my colleagues at Accenture and it was a pioneer healthcare navigation company. Which is now a huge category. But back then it was really against conventional wisdom. The idea was to create one place to go, paid for by your employer for all your healthcare needs. So it was the place you go first. You’ve got a benefit question, you want to find a doctor, you’re having problems sticking to your treatment plan, whatever all those things were.

And probably most fundamentally we replaced the number on the back of the health insurance card with our number. So instead of getting typical member services of a health plan, you got somebody who really wanted to help you get the right care. And that company changed my perspective. It changed my life. I had run healthcare for Accenture for years before that. And this was just a, I think I had a perspective that these people are just knuckleheads. They’re doing the wrong things. They’re not educated. And certainly health literacy was a problem just like financial literacy is, but they’re actually all really good people trying to do the right thing. And it’s just hard to do the right thing. I’m reminded of the saying about behavioral economics, behavioral economists don’t believe people are stupid, they believe the world is hard.

That’s what I learned at Accolade and it brought me great satisfaction, joy to see the difference we’re making in people’s lives. I mean, I took that job for that reason, but the trick of Accolade was not to make it harder to do the wrong thing, which is what health insurance company’s done for years or even pre authorizations, it was let’s make the right thing easy to do. And it was the Genesis of Brightside because one of my customers at Accolade, Shawn Leavitt had done a study with Willis Towers Watson that said poor financial health was costing him three or $4,000 per employee per year.

Jen Tescher:
Wow.

Tom Spann:
And he thought, it was his idea said, “Tom, I think there’s an opportunity for a company like Accolade except for financial health instead of physical and mental health.”

Jen Tescher:
Wow. That’s incredible. So, of course my head goes to this question, did you ever think about putting the two things together in one? Like instead of starting a whole new company called Brightside, creating an arm of Accolade that dealt with people’s financial issues given how much synergy there is between people’s, the financial issues related to health and one’s financial issues at large.

Tom Spann:
So yes, the head of HR at one of my customers once came to me right after the 2007, 2008 market crash and said, “I need this kind of support for my employees. I just watched them sell all their equities at the bottom of the market.” And by then it’d come back up. And so the idea crossed my mind and the question was asked as we were starting, “Why not?” And I said, “Why hasn’t Accolade done this?” I said, “One was, healthcare’s hard enough.” It was a nontrivial challenge. All these different disease states and complexities. And I probably was naive about the business case for employers. I mean, the business case for Accolade and the results were, we were saving people 5% to 15% on their healthcare costs. So that was pretty straightforward.

So when this WTW study that Shawn did came out, that was compelling on that. And then there’s just the notion of, the people and humans that you’ve got to deal with, it may be a little bit too… Health assistant it actually was this great big job. Financial assistant at Brightside is this great big job in terms you’ve got to help people with such a range of issues. Combining them in one may be too much. But could you see two companies like that coming together someday and there being synergies there? You could.

Jen Tescher:
Yeah. That’s cool. So, when I dreamed up the idea of financial health 10 years ago, a big part of the inspiration for me was thinking about the shift that was taking place in healthcare. This idea that, we shouldn’t be just treating sickness, we should be promoting wellness and thinking about what that could look like if we applied it to people’s financial lives. If we applied it to the financial services industry. Like the example I always gave was, what’s the, in healthcare, a big challenge is getting people to take their medicine and adherence to the drug regimen. What’s the meme for that in financial services? It’s probably getting people to save. Getting people to put aside savings.

And the one place where the analogy always fell short is in healthcare obviously there’s a third party payer system, at least in this country, and in financial services, there is not. But if there were, the third party payer would be paying banks to keep people from overdrafting. As opposed to rewarding them when the customer overdrafts. That was always the best example I could come up with of the lack of alignment and what if we could align it in the way that healthcare was starting to think about, especially with changes in the way in which insurance companies were starting to reimburse for outcomes as opposed to treatments. And so I’ve heard you frame financial health as a social determinant of health. And we’ve talked a little bit about these two intersections. But I’d love to hear you talk about how you see these two issues intersecting. And why that intersection matters.

Tom Spann:
Okay. It’s really interesting to think about the notion of that third party payer. You got me thinking about some other things, but we’ll save that conversation for later. Just hit the simple thing about poor financial health is, it makes you sick and it keeps you from getting better. There’s a great book called Poverty and the Myths of Health Care Reform that makes the case that 30% of healthcare costs in this country are driven by poor financial health income inequality. And the American Psychological Association says that 72% of all stress is from finance. It’s the biggest cause or one of the biggest causes of relationship issues, all these kinds of things, and stress affects every system in your body. There’s tons of scientific evidence that it’s huge and it’s seven of the top 10 medicines in this country are for stress related disorders.

They’re also drugs and anxiety and depression meds and it’s a huge burden. Stress is a huge burden on the healthcare system. And I had Steve Klasko CEO of Jefferson Health said, “Everybody’s trying to address behavioral health today. All employers are trying to tackle this problem by increasing the supply.” Often with things that aren’t proven to work. But how do I get more behavioral health service people? Which is important, because we have got a behavioral health crisis. It’s like, “Tom, Brightside’s addressing the demand side of that.” Trying to lower the demand for behavioral health services and improve behavioral health outcomes that way, which I think is important. And then it keeps you from getting better. It’s a social determinants of health side. Which is 44% of the people skip a doctor visit every year in this country. 25%, the first scheduled procedure.

I mean, Accolade was successful because it made it easy for people to get the right care when they needed it. And 80% of the time people had what Dr. Saul Weiner of Chicago calls a contextual barrier. Some non-clinical reason they’re not getting the healthcare. And it could be cultural issues. It could be, they’re a busy executive and don’t have time. I can certainly relate to that. But 70% of the time it’s financial was the barrier. We saw. We measured it at Accolade. And it’s a big reason people don’t take their meds. And it’s not always as clear as they can’t afford it. It’s they’re making trade offs about where their money goes and how they feel. And we had 10 people on 10 meds at 30 bucks a month for each one.

I mean, it’s like, “Oh, maybe I don’t need this one.” And they’re making their own decisions about which ones to skip and give up and all those kinds of things. So it’s clearly this big issue. And then, and if you help people get the right care, the first time what we learned at Accolade is their costs go down, their outcomes go up. If you don’t go to the doctor when you’re sick, that doesn’t increase cost. That decrease it because it keeps these people out of the hospital in more expensive care. And that doesn’t even deal with the impact of things like food deserts and the zip code he lives in is a huge term of life expectancy.

Mailman did a study at Columbia that said, it’s the fifth biggest killer in the country is poor financial health. 160,000 deaths a year or something like that caused by this. And then you think about the health equity issue of that. In a world where blacks have 10% of the net worth of whites you can look at your studies where you show the differences in financial health between Latinx, blacks, and whites and women and men. Those are the people who are suffering. Those are the people who are not getting the right healthcare. And in a world where you’re talking about, how do I drive health equity in this country? Part of it is, let’s deal with people’s financial health.

Jen Tescher:
Yeah.

Tom Spann:
They’re so intertwined.

Jen Tescher:
Yeah. Well, you can tell by how you’re able to rattle off so many statistics and studies that you started out as a consultant. I love that. It’s powerful. And unlike a lot of today’s tech founders, you didn’t start Accolade in your dorm room. You had been at Accenture for a long time, focused on healthcare for a very long time. So, how did you get from there to here? You’ve told us a little bit about where the idea came from, I think, for Accolade, but it’s one thing to have the idea, it’s another thing to decide to be a founder. Where did your interest in these issues come from in the first place?

Tom Spann:
Well, it was interesting. Like I said, Accolade changed me. I’ve got an interest in these issues that I didn’t have when I started Accolade. I started Accolade, just set a good example for my daughters to tell you the truth. I have two daughters, they were 12 and 18. And for the first time in my career, I mean, I’ve been at Accenture since I got out of college. I started out writing code, but it was really, I could run bigger chunks of Accenture with one career path option for me, I think. But I saw this opportunity. Michael Cline really had thought of the idea for Accolade again and what would I want my daughters to do if they were in the situations was like, I want them to do something, make more of a difference in the world that would be more challenging and more growth. I’d never been a CEO before. It was a lot of those kinds of reasons. And it was like, it’s kind of a cockamamie idea. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but let’s give it a shot.”

And I remember three years later I’d go to the board and I’m like, “This works. If this company is not successful, it’s on me at this point.” I probably still feel that way about that company. But once I got there and saw the struggles of good working people trying to get by in a hard complex world, I became really interested in these issues. And when Shawn presented me with the idea of tackling it and the reason, the business case to tackle it in the financial world, it’s another really complex system. And nobody is on the side of these families. I mean, there’s a lot of virtue signalers in financial health, but they are making their money off of other things and they’re punishing these people for their mistakes. And things are getting a little better with things like overdraft fees and things like that. I hope the work you do and others is going to continue that momentum, but something needs to be on these people’s side in a holistic way and that’s why we’ve got Brightside.

Jen Tescher:
Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit more now about Brightside. Tell us a little bit more about the typical user of the platform and a little bit more about, what’s the experience they have? How does it work for them?

Tom Spann:
Yeah. So we think of Brightside as having three major components, at least as the user, or the employee or one of their family members thinks about it. One is this role of a financial assistant. A human who can be this empathy layer and can extract these life context issue. I’m not, an app is not going to have a dropdown for my mom stole my car so now I lost my Uber each job and or this. So as I heard yesterday, I don’t hate to beat up parents, but a lot of these people are in communities and families that their family is a drain on them. And there’s a lot of these kinds of things where they, identity stolen and you think about things that cause you anxiety and depression.

I mean, we had somebody yesterday that was, we had two people yesterday that were suicidal. Because it feels so hopeless. But you’ve got somebody who’s giving you hope who can do some legwork for you if you need it and deal with these life context issues, the financial decisions or the right thing to do is not rocket science. We’ve got to find you some money to get out of this bind. We’ve got to do these things. But it’s hard work for people. Like we found a woman a benefit that subsidized 450 over $600 a month daycare bill. So she didn’t need to stay up all night with her kids before she went to her call center job in the morning, hoping they would sleep during the day because she couldn’t afford daycare. I mean, how productive is she as an employee? How healthy is she if she’s not sleeping? You need to think about these kinds of things.

So anyway, human is a piece of it. And then we’ve got these point solutions I talked about. We’ve got real solutions, real treatments to use the healthcare analogy again for their problems. Sometimes people need a quick $100 in advance of their next paycheck. And we can do that for free. We can provide emergency loans. Because we’re tied to the paycheck we can offer solutions people can’t get elsewhere. So we got partners that provide a no credit check loan and credit card interest rates. For example, we got partners that for people who do have better credit, we see people refinancing their credit card debt from the mid 20s to 14% interest rate. Because it’s just, you underwrite that product differently. And we’ve got a spending and savings account that are easy to use, particularly the savings account because then a couple clicks because we have the data from the employer and we know how much money may, kind of the access, the friction out of getting to these products is very low.

And particularly for something that’s purely good like savings, people could just self-serve. And then the app ties it all together. It does a lot of the data collection so people can link their credit report with Equifax. They can link their bank accounts if they have them or set up a bank account and then we can monitor against goals. Or your savings goals, your credit score improvement goals, your debt reduction goals, track how you’re doing. And we can also just, we talked about, you’ve talked about the notion of the self driving wallet. And once we have that data and we see your bank account, we see your credit report every month and say, “Hey, your credit score has got up 100 points. You can refinance your car loan.”

Banks don’t do that. But we do. And so it creates us in, because incentives are aligned, we’re putting $1,200 a month on average into people’s, a year on average into people’s pockets. Of the people we engage. We’re seeing 36% reduction in the population with subprime credit scores. We took one employer, and it wasn’t a focus campaign, it’s just dealing with people who came in. Who took their, people who weren’t contributing in the 401k population from 25% to 5%. And there was no change in the program. There was no other reason why that would change. And so we’re getting these results, but these real solutions, these products get people in the door. In healthcare we would kill for people to say, “Hey, I’m sick.” And raise their hand. And part of the genius of Accolade was, when you’re sick you turn your insurance card over and you ask, “Is this going to be covered? How do I get a doctor?” All those kinds of things. And in Brightside’s case, we’re getting 30% to 50% engagement in a population.

Jen Tescher:
Wow. That’s enormous.

Tom Spann:
Yeah. It’s 10X what financial wellness companies have gotten. But it’s because 30% to 50% of it is word of mouth. Once people understand that we’re a great place to go in an emergency, like this urgent care element of what we do, sometimes they just hear we have no credit check loans. But a huge percentage, unlike if we were a lender, we just give them a loan. Because we’re not, 35% don’t get a loan. We find a government benefit. We just found a benefit that paid $5,600 in back rent for a woman because she had a COVID related issue with her employment. These benefits are out there and now, I mean, you’re focused on it now in your current cohort. And so, there’s some interesting partners for us in that group too.

Jen Tescher:
So, do you target particular sectors when we’re thinking about employers? Are there certain sectors that make more sense for the solution or is it everybody?

Tom Spann:
It’s everybody. Poor financial health is not limited to one income band as you know. But we like to think our sweet spot in terms of driving this ROI. I mean, there is ROI but there’s not as many people making a quarter million dollars a year in salary that are in poor financial health as there are people making $25,000 a year in poor financial health. And so it’s just these populations of frontline workers. So our customers are everything from hospital systems where they have real issues with retaining and attendance of nurses. And their teams. But those are frontline workers. Insurance companies with claims people and huge populations of people making under $100,000 a year. Telecom companies, manufacturing, distribution, eCommerce, there’s frontline workforces in most businesses, some are bigger than others. Our sweet spot that we’re focused on is different than other Silicon Valley companies, for example. That’s probably not our sweet spot.

Jen Tescher:
Yeah. That makes sense. I’ve now lost my train of thought. Okay. Now I remember. So I’m glad you raised the self-driving wallet. Because lately I’ve been actually a little skeptical. And in part, because of companies like yours. Listen, I think there’s a lot that technology can do to create efficiencies, to remove friction, to enable people to focus their time and energy on stuff that only they can do. But as you’ve shared on this conversation, there is so much context that no technology is really, maybe in 100 years AI will figure it out. But it’s very hard to use technology to appreciate the context. And really also the emotion. Money is highly emotional. And as you said when the stress gets going also, it can cloud one’s judgment, one’s thinking, one’s ability to… So I’m curious how you think about this. You obviously employ humans and you have a technology platform, where is that tech touch line, if you will? And who are these people that you hire? What kind of skills do they have? What does it require to be a human in this kind of work?

Tom Spann:
Yeah. So what it requires is that people have great compassion and empathy, a great relationship skills and good problem solving skills. There’s analogies to social work and other things like that in here. A quarter right now of our financial assistance have some, our certified financial planners or some of those things because people do come to us with that full range of problems. We’re there to support the entire employee population. But even there we want to have certified financial planners that understand the behavioral science behind this. It’s not always arithmetic. It’s like, “Well, just pay off the highest credit card debt first and do this not that.” No, I think part of the problem with the financial wellness industry is A, it’s been very focused on education. There’s a great study of 201 other studies on financial education that say, “Look, it has a 0.1% impact on outcomes when it’s delivered in the one size fits all mentality.”

And we see people that are about to be evicted because they heard the message put as much as you can in your 401k. And they’re putting 16% of their paycheck in the 401k but they can’t afford their rent. And so you’ve got to understand that. I think the technology we think about it in two ways. One is, helping both ends of this. It can do a lot of that monitoring. That example I gave you, it still then says, “Hey, you should talk to your financial assistant about that car loan you need.” Because the right answer for you is still could be different depending on where you are in that moment. And things change all the time. 60% of the country has a financial shock every year.

And then the other thing is a huge amount of this technology is behind the financial assistant. So they have access to the rules engines that do the right kinds of assessments up front. This is not a, I’m another person to do… And I learned exactly. People don’t have time for a 30 minute assessment of their finances. Particularly when they’re about to be evicted or they’re staying up all night with their kids or whatever it is. But you can assess really quickly on life context, emotions, barriers, what do I need to do next? And get them to do that. And then that earns you the right to do more assessing the next time. On average we work with three different cases with the employees we serve. So it’s, they may start with their emergency, but then we’re working on improving their credit score. We’re working on improving their emergency savings.

We tie these things together. So another place that technology comes in handy is, because it’s part of our onboarding to the financial products and solutions on our platform, on the way to loan we say, “Hey, Lauren and you agreed you’re going to save 20 bucks out of each paycheck.” And it defaults the amount they agreed and they just click, yeah I want to save that of each paycheck. And then they go on. We take that teachable moment of, I needed a no credit check loan and turn it into ongoing, set it, forget it kind of savings. So the technology behind the humans, the technology to take friction out of doing the right thing like that, and the technology to monitor for both the employee and the financial assistant I think is just, we’ve got tons of opportunities to apply technology here that we’re just scratching the surface now.

Jen Tescher:
Yeah. But you couldn’t imagine doing this business with no humans. No human touch.

Tom Spann:
No. No, no. People’s problems are too complex. They have their own life context. They have different goals, dreams, aspirations, beliefs about money. You pointed out emotions is huge. How the mindset. Most of the training of the financial assistance is in our behavioral science, what we call our earn model, which is how we build that relationship and how we influence them to do the right thing for these families we serve.

Jen Tescher:
So that brings me to a slightly different issue. And this is true both in financial services and in healthcare, I think. Is the problem, one of poor access or poor experience, or poor navigation, it’s all too complicated. Or is it about behavior? Is it about making good choices? So in the financial services world this will show up sometimes as, “Oh, if only people manage their money better they wouldn’t overdraft. Let’s offer some financial education.” You’ve talked about why education may not be sufficient. You’ve talked a lot about issues of access and experience, but you have also talked about behavior. What problem do you think you’re solving for people? Is this a systemic problem or is this a behavior problem?

Tom Spann:
I think that’s part of why it’s personalized, because each person comes in with different levels of financial literacy. I’m not saying you don’t have education. What that study actually said does work is bite size education at the point of need. And so those humans can deliver that by assessing their financial literacy on whatever that topic is they need to know to make that decision. And can deal with their emotions. And can give them hope, which is key to behavior change. I mean, there’s a lot of science around, I’ve got to have agency, I’ve got to start believing in myself and I’ve got to see a path. And those things are required to get you to where you’re going.

But I’d say the biggest thing is this notion of making the right thing easy to do. Billions of dollars are spent probably every day in this country making it easy for people to do the wrong thing with their money. There’s a lot of people who don’t have, their interests are not aligned with the financial health of the person. And the biggest way to get behavior change is make something easier to do. And sometimes you make it easier by explaining why it’s good with education. Sometimes you make it easier by calming the person down again, to believe in themselves so they can make a good decision. Sometimes you make it easier by using the technology so I can open the savings account, just a couple of clicks and I’m at some place I trust. I’ve got somebody I trust saying, “Yeah, this is a good idea for you to start saving.” And so I think that’s another reason why you’ve got humans is because that dimension is different by person.

Jen Tescher:
So given the fact that in many cases the incentives for companies, healthcare providers, insurers, financial services companies, is because their incentives are not always aligned with making it easy for their customer to do the right thing. Is there a role here for government? What role does government play if at all, in changing the incentive structures? And I’m less thinking about pure regulation as I am about creating the rules of the game.

Tom Spann:
Yeah. There’s a couple places I’d love government to make this easier. I’m a capitalist so I understand banks wanting to make money and retailers wanting to make money and all of this stuff. So this isn’t their fault. But one of the biggest things I’d like to see is I’d like to make it clear, it’s a little vague right now that this should be a covered expense for a health plan for the health and wellbeing of your employees. If this is 30% of all healthcare costs, it’s the biggest driver stress, it improves outcome, it’s the biggest determinant of life expectancy, then you don’t want, why can’t an employer to say, “Yeah, this is part of my health plan expense. I can pay Brightside like I would a doctor or a hospital.” And just, it’s part of this tax deductible expense. Because I think that would take some friction out for employers. I think local governments, I guess, there’s no doubt a little more education at an earlier age, the studies that say education as a world we’re more focused on adults than employers. Right?

Jen Tescher:
Exactly.

Tom Spann:
And I think there’s something to us as a country being better at teaching children about money. It’s just, it’s so fundamental. The reason it drives stress is because it’s safety and security. It’s the roof over your head. It’s your food. And it’s your relationships. And all these things that are so important to people. It’s your tribe that you want to be in. And so being good at managing it would be great. I think I learned the hard way as a kid if I think about it. My parents took out a second loan on their car to take their honeymoon. I think they were in debt the rest of their… maybe until my youngest sister got out of college, then they got things paid off. But my dad pushed his papers across the table and said, “Here, you figure out how to go to college.” And I said, “You got to buy me food anyway.” Was my argument. So, they paid for my meal plan and I had to figure out everything else.

But that probably taught me like, “Hey, this is probably not…” And we didn’t go without a lot of stuff. We were clearly a middle class family, but just part of how you learn. At least my dad was making his finances transparent to me when I was in high school. Which was interesting.

Jen Tescher:
So, we’re in an interesting moment as a nation right now, on many fronts. But in particular now I’m thinking about the role of the corporation and the expectations. Particularly as it relates to their employees. What’s expected of companies and the rewrite of the social contract. And both of the companies that you started, Accolade and now Brightside have been focused on the employer channel. And for Accolade it makes total sense, because for a big portion of the population, they’re getting their health insurance through their employer. You could say for Brightside, well, people are getting their paycheck through their employer. And that’s a good place to start. Say more about the pros and cons of delivering through an employer. What do you think their role and responsibility is here? And you said it at the beginning, there’s real ROI here. How vital is that ultimately? How much of the business model, making these business models work is essentially because of the employer channel and finding a third party, if you will, to help pay the cost.

Tom Spann:
Yeah. I think a couple things. One is, our business is all about the ROI. It really is about, this is great for your shareholders. Like we’re going to lower your healthcare costs, we’re going to lower the cost of turnover, we’re going to get people more hours work, less absenteeism, more ready for retirement, the whole camp. There’s an array of things. And it’s going to drive diversity and equity inclusion because your financial benefits today are not used. As you know, blacks and women don’t use retirement. And they certainly don’t use financial planning services the way white males do. And so I think there’s a lot of momentum. I think the shift you’re talking about and employers we see coming, 2020 was a a distraction for HR teams. They were just trying to figure out how to keep their people safe and productive from home.

But coming out of that, you can’t afford to have a bad employer brand anymore. It affects whether not people shop in your store or buy from you or invest in you. And I don’t think CEOs want to be embarrassed by the fact they’ve got a bunch of people sleeping in their cars. That’s not the brand they want to have for their organization. And so I do think the days of, it’s okay to have a crappy employer brand are coming to an end. It’s not universal yet, but we were chatting right before we started. I said, “I’m pretty happy with the talent we’re getting and retaining because I think we’re a decent employer and we’ve got a great mission and we’ve got a fun culture and we care about people showing up as their best selves every day.” You can’t do that. So there’s a whole nother level of ROI there. That’s important, but we’re driving 41% reductions in turnover in our population.

Jen Tescher:
Wow.

Tom Spann:
That more than pays for this and in a world where, and I just think people are going to have to care about that more and more. Are caring about it more and more.

Jen Tescher:
Yeah. Well, I find that true innovators and you are one find inspiration from diverse places. And given the fact that I spent a lot of time thinking about how to break down silos, I always like to ask this question at the end of each episode, who are some of the leaders, regardless of industry that you’re inspired by and why?

Tom Spann:
It’s a pretty diverse mix. I like to listen to podcasts. I like to read. And certainly Steve Jobs was an interesting inspiration in terms of how he thought about making things easy. It just, he really had great empathy to the user and loved great design and wanted something that a product people will love. I love the fact that both Accolade and Brightside were well loved by the people who used the product. And I had some very influential employers early in my time at Accolade say, “Look, the thing that’s wrong with benefits is nobody designs them with that end user in mind.” And they complain about why they don’t get used. Well, they’re not what people want. It’s like people live in paycheck to paycheck. They don’t want financial wellness. They don’t want a financial plan. Or they don’t want to feel shamed.

The notion of you’re doing it wrong. You didn’t have a budget for your holiday gifts. Nonsense. And maybe that person was worth buying the expensive gift for. Let’s figure out what you want, what your goals are. And if you make a mistake, let’s have no shame about it. I like people who bring people together. I am really distressed by the political divisions. In this world I know great people in Philadelphia and great people in Arizona, and they might vote differently than great people in Oklahoma, where my sisters live. So Bill Frist was on my board at Accolade. He’s just such a role model of bringing people together. I mean, when I read his autobiography and his first two, he was a Republican Senator, his first two endorsements in the blurbs on the back of the book were from Ted Kennedy and Bono. It’s like, “Okay, this person. Who cares-

Jen Tescher:
That wouldn’t happen today. Right? That wouldn’t happen today.

Tom Spann:
No, it wouldn’t. It’s just like, who cares about serving others and solving the problems of the society. Right. I love it when that’s in people who at least came out of that political sphere. I would love to see more of that. And then just people who help me understand empathy and hope. Certainly like a Brene Brown or something like that. There’s a lot in the science there that is important. We don’t script our financial systems. We have workflows and things that help guide them on the financial side, but we want them to just be their authentic self. Be vulnerable. These people are being vulnerable by saying they’re in financial help. And we got to be just as vulnerable with them. And so somebody like that inspires me a lot.

Jen Tescher:
Tom, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks so much for joining me on EMERGE Everywhere.

Tom Spann:
Thanks, Jen. It was a pleasure.