Supporting Financial Wellbeing with CloudPay NOW

Josep Elias | Chief Strategy Officer, CloudPay

CloudPay’s solution for global payroll helps our customers solve several different payroll challenges. It’s one of the reasons we were marked a Star Performer in the Everest Group’s PEAK Matrix report on Multi-Country Payroll.

One of the areas that the Everest Group commended CloudPay on was our promotion of financial wellbeing, and how the various functions, insights and benchmarks within CloudPay help businesses support their employees’ finances as a whole. In this blog, we’ll explore why employee financial wellness is so important, the role payroll has to play in supporting it, and how CloudPay NOW, our on-demand pay solution, can help.

Why prioritizing financial wellbeing is important

Financial wellbeing makes a major difference to people’s lives, physically, mentally and in the world of work.

At its most tangible level, many people feel the strain of struggling to keep a roof over their head or put food on the table. Felicia Cheek of Oracle, in a recent CloudPay Payday Podcast, revealed that 78% of American workers live from one paycheck to the next, and that nearly a third of American families experience food insecurity. 

The economic challenges of the pandemic have only served to exacerbate these problems: the 2022 TIAA Financial Wellness Survey found that only 22% of Americans rate their financial wellness either nine or ten out of ten, and more than half say they are more aware of it than they were pre-COVID.

All of this affects people’s business lives as well as their personal lives. If people are worried about money, their mental and physical health suffers, which can impact their performance at work if they struggle to concentrate or start to take time off. Reports have suggested that in the UK, financial stress costs the national economy £121 billion a year, and leads to 18 million working hours lost to absences.

The role of payroll in financial wellbeing

In the TIAA Financial Wellness Survey, more than half the respondents said that employers have a responsibility to support better financial wellness among their employees. There are lots of different ways in which employers can do this, but being the most directly related department to personal finances, payroll has a uniquely pivotal role to play to help employees. In particular, there are three things payroll can do to help:

• Payslip education: many employees don’t look at their payslips, and even if they do, many don’t understand a lot of the information contained within them. Employees can gain greater control over their finances if they understand where their money is going, such as tax calculations, health insurance coverage, pension contributions, and other entitlements they may be paying for but not aware of.
• Promoting engagement: payslips, and indeed payday itself, is a good time for payroll teams to alert employees to any financial benefits or assistance available to them. This can be a list of company perks and employee benefits they’re entitled to, access to financial advice and support, or even publicly-available resources to help educate them about their finances.
• Solicit feedback: every employee’s financial status and needs will be different, and the only way to truly understand the help they need is to ask them. Feedback forms and survey invitations can be attached to payslips, generating the vital information that helps payroll and HR tailor the support services and advice that’s available.
  
  

Supporting financial wellbeing with CloudPay NOW

By using a solution like CloudPay, payroll teams are equipped with the insights that can help them provide better financial wellness support. This works best alongside an Earned Wage Access (EWA) model, where employees can accrue wages day-by-day, and independently access their earnings as and when they want. CloudPay supports EWA through our app, CloudPay NOW, which helps employees in three key areas:

• Ease of access: employees can get full visibility of their earnings at any time, and get paid at a time that suits them (for example, to fit around rent, mortgage or bill commitments)
• Manage spending trends: employees can check historical data around how much they’re spending, when and why, so they can better understand where their money is going and identify areas where they can make savings
• Educational resources: the app is full of employee guides, tips and information on how to manage finances better, and how to make changes to better support financial wellbeing
  
  

In summary

At CloudPay, we recognize the importance of financial wellbeing in the post-pandemic landscape, especially at a time when the rising cost of living is putting pressure on households all over the world. Because of this, we’re delighted that the Everest Group has commended our efforts in its PEAK Matrix Report on Multi-Country Payroll, and proud that innovations like CloudPay NOW are helping businesses support the financial wellbeing of their employees.

Take a detailed look at why CloudPay stands out for Multi-Country Payroll by downloading the full Everest Group PEAK Matrix Report.

Josep Elias | Chief Strategy Officer, CloudPay