When I was an advisor to ~thirty 401(k) plans and 3,000 participants, I quickly learned that if we wanted to change the behavior of the 3,000+ participants, technology nudges would not be enough.

We needed to provide education/wellness on at least a bi-annual basis.

1/

After a few years of delivering similar presentations, I thought that I could record those presentations into video courses to scale my operations.

Boom. Financial Time Traveler was born.

2/

We definitely scaled operations, and people devoured the content, but the effect on behavior didn't change much. That bugged me.

So, I went back to physical presentations - but I made an extra effort to stay late and get to know ppl through 1 on 1s and build a relationship

3/

It was a lot more work on both the plan sponsor and my team without much margin (25bps), but there was no denying how much more effective a hybrid approach between good information and point-in-time delivery proved to be.

4/

My biggest takeaways are that financial literacy needed a big upgrade, both from a platform/access perspective and the content itself.

Further, knowing WHEN to provide info is more important than simply providing info.

Hard to scale. FAs will always be needed for this reason.