Candidly, the AI-native financial guidance and technology platform, announced a new employee-facing offering: benefits-aware financial guidance that provides the workforce with holistic financial guidance grounded in their own finances and the benefits they are already offered. The solution expands Candidly's employer-sponsored benefits suite, which to date has centered on student debt and college planning, and now spans an employee's broader financial life.
Employers invest heavily in benefits, but many go underutilized due to low awareness and the need for personalized, holistic guidance to fully understand and take advantage of the full suite of benefits their employer is offering. Making the most of these benefits is rarely a matter of maximizing one piece in isolation — retirement contributions, health savings, equity compensation, and debt repayment all draw from the same paycheck and interact in ways that are hard for any one person to figure out on their own. That complexity has a real cost: each year, about 34% of employees forfeit their employer 401(k) match, and the average family HSA holder falls nearly $4,700 short of their account's contribution limit, leaving that portion of their available tax advantage unused.
The new offering draws on an employee's own data, including payroll, benefits enrollment, the employer program design and plan design documents, subject to applicable permissions and authorizations, so its guidance reflects what each person is actually eligible for and adapts as their circumstances change. Rather than optimizing each benefit in isolation, it works across an employee's full financial life, connecting benefits, savings, and debt into a single, personalized financial guidance experience.
Employees navigate the platform with Cait, Candidly's Conversational AI Tool, that works through financial questions and planning considerations in plain language and draws on dynamic interactive visualizations and custom dashboards to forecast progress, compare scenarios, and track goals over time. The offering is designed to support greater awareness and actionability across existing benefits, reduce the routine benefits questions employers field, and deliver personalized financial guidance and planning tools to every employee.