NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--UBS Global Wealth Management has announced its enhanced UBS Workplace Wealth Solutions offering with updated, personalized digital capabilities to address its corporate clients’ employees financial wellness concerns to help expand their employees’ understanding of their personal finances.
UBS Workplace Wealth Solutions currently provides 10,000 employers and over 2 million employees with a comprehensive suite of solutions across financial wellness, equity compensation and retirement programs, as well as institutional consulting services.
“The expanded tools and capabilities will help meet the needs of our current and prospective clients across all generations and income levels, providing financial wellness guidance and innovative workplace solutions on a user-friendly platform,” said Michael Barry, Head of Workplace Wealth Solutions, UBS Global Wealth Management. “These advancements further our strategic objective to continue to increase the value we can provide to the workplace—and businesses of all sizes—while helping employees understand their corporate benefits and improve the relationship with their money.”
Student loan debt solution
UBS is collaborating with FutureFuel.io, a platform that empowers the employees of its corporate clients, to manage student debt through its programmatic approach. This personalized offering will consider an employee’s unique financial situation and will help them manage their student debt using a range of dynamic tools, including Reassess, Round Up, Giveback, Refinance, and Roll Up. Users can then choose to implement the actions that help them feel more confident about their financial future. The average FutureFuel.io user tends to save $15,000 on accrued interest and shaves four years off their loan.1
“We believe employers, as well as financial health and wellness offerings, can no longer ignore the financial struggle confronting the large majority of the emerging U.S. workforce,” said Laurel Taylor, Founder and CEO of FutureFuel.io. “The goal in bringing FutureFuel.io to corporate clients is to provide their employees access to student debt related benefits that can help to educate them and ‘crush’ student loans to ease their financial burden and position them well for future financial health.”
According to recent research, 70% of college graduates begin their financial journey burdened by student loan debt.1 Furthermore, as of the second quarter of 2020, outstanding student loan debt stood at $1.54 trillion in the United States, the second largest after mortgages.2
Beginning this fall, a UBS corporate client can provide its employees with access to the FutureFuel.io student loan offering through the enhanced UBS Financial Wellness platform.
Retirement Plan Advisor platform for small businesses
UBS Workplace Wealth Solutions has also expanded its offering to include UBS’s Retirement Plan Advisor solution, a new advisory program designed to deliver enhanced services in an efficient manner to smaller participant-directed defined contribution plans. Through this program, UBS delivers fiduciary investment advice to plan sponsors with the flexibility that they have come to expect in a non-discretionary advisory solution, including a broad selection of investments and plan providers.
Retirement Plan Advisor is unique in the retirement plan advice industry — UBS can now deliver its advisory services to more plan sponsors in the small market by leveraging a new robust platform created by Morningstar Investment Management LLC, a registered investment advisor and subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc. UBS implemented a fully customized version of Morningstar Plan Advantage, a platform designed to seamlessly integrate fund research, plan level data, fund status alerts and automated investment reporting which enables UBS to deliver enhanced services in an extremely efficient manner.
“With this new offering, UBS is helping clients decrease the burden of managing their retirement plan for smaller businesses, and at the same time, providing plan participants with access to resources that drive positive outcomes – for retirement and their broader financial well-being,” says Michael Barry.
Digital financial wellness platform
To further enhance its existing UBS Financial Wellness program, UBS Workplace Wealth Solutions is also launching a new digital experience. Built around the understanding that an individual’s finances are deeply emotional, the new digital platform combines human guidance and digital resources to provide a conversational, relevant and actionable experience that can help the employees of our corporate clients build confidence in fostering a more positive relationship with their money and developing healthy financial habits.
Now more than ever, financial wellness is making a difference. Recent UBS research shows that financial wellness programs help employees feel more in control of their financial situation, more loyal to their employer and motivated to perform their best.3
Notes to Editors
About FutureFuel.io
FutureFuel.io is a platform that supports America’s 45 million borrowers in paying off their student debt as quickly and efficiently as possible. On average, FutureFuel.io saves users $15,000 and half a decade off of their student loan payments through a personalized Student Debt FinHealth platform that optimizes federal repayment plan enrollment, automates the management of unruly student loans, gamifies spare change, and enables users to discover free money from merchants while shopping online. FutureFuel.io's comprehensive platform crushes student debt by empowering users to take small actions that make a big impact. FutureFuel.io’s institutional investors are full of heart and live at the intersection of social impact, fintech, and the future of work. Investors include some of the world’s top VCs including Salesforce Ventures, Rethink Impact, Vulcan Capital, Fiserv, Breton, the Financial Health Network, Reach Capital, the Impact Engine and G9. To learn more about FutureFuel.io’s capabilities visit: https://futurefuel.io/.
About UBS Workplace Wealth Solutions
UBS Workplace Wealth Solutions collaborates with corporate clients to deliver customized solutions across a range of programs for the workplace including financial wellness, retirement, equity plans and institutional consulting. We currently provide more than 10,000 employers and their 2 million employees in over 150 countries with access to financial guidance, support of benefits programs and an integrated experience that combines the right mix of people and technology. We work side-by-side with our clients so that their employees – and they -- feel rewarded at work and optimistic about realizing their long-term financial goals.
1FutureFuel.io website
2Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Report On Household Debt And Credit, 2020: Q2 (released August 2020)
3UBS research on employee attitudes towards financial wellness programs, 2020
