FROM MALAVIKA KRISHNAN, FINANCIAL HEALTH SENIOR ASSOCIATE, GLOBAL PHILANTHROPY, JPMORGANCHASE
SEPTEMBER 2026

AFN Short Take is a blog series highlighting insights and perspectives from recent AFN programming events.

Financial stress does not stay home: employees spend roughly seven hours a week managing it, costing nearly $183 billion annually in lost productivity. Yet fewer than one-third of workers have access to benefits that help them weather a financial shock and build long-term stability—and participation lags even where access exists.

Beyond wages, benefits can be future-focused and transformative, letting workers navigate the present while preparing for a child’s education, their own retirement, or an emergency, which is why they are central to a quality job. Retirement accounts, healthcare coverage, and payroll-linked tools that increase savings for emergencies or education, all sit on that platform, impacting workers’ financial lives across businesses of all sizes.

At JPMorganChase, we believe that financial health and economic mobility are the foundation for resilient households and thriving economies. And that starts with strong public, private, and nonprofit partnerships with a commitment to innovation. Our philanthropic strategy helps drive both short-term financial resilience and long-term wealth building for communities across the United States—in particular, testing and scaling innovations that help workers access, use, and benefit from workplace financial wellness programs. We also provide benefits and programs to help our own employees build a financially secure future, including 401(k) retirement plans, stock purchase opportunities, and unlimited one-on-one financial coaching.

In July, AFN convened Tracy Durner, Director at Commonwealth, and Don Baylor, Jr., Founder and CEO of Worker Solutions, to examine how that infrastructure could work harder for low- to moderate-income (LMI) workers—and where philanthropy can play a critical role.

The Enrollment Gap

Worker Solutions calls workplace benefits “the last mile of workforce development.” In both retirement and health plans, salaried employees participate at two to three times the rate of hourly workers.

“You can get people to a place that has access, and nearly all the employers we work with have health and retirement plans. But if they’re not participating, they’re not building wealth at work.

Don Baylor, Jr., Worker Solutions

Three levers address the enrollment gap: outreach, policy, and plan design. The most important strategy addressing all three is auto-enrollment. For example, while SECURE 2.0 requires auto-enrollment for new retirement plans, existing plans and small employers with fewer than 10 employees are exempt. Because both small and large employers also often face challenges in navigating SECURE 2.0’s many provisions, from matching retirement contributions for qualified student loan payments to payroll-linked emergency savings, much of Worker Solutions’ and Commonwealth’s work is helping employers better understand their workforce’s needs and pilot solutions that drive both employee and business returns.

Willing Employers, Missing Instrumentation

Nearly all employers—96%—accept some responsibility for their workers’ financial health. What holds them back is not willingness but capacity, and four constraints stand in the way:

  • Cost pressure. Healthcare costs are expected to increase by 11.1% in 2027 absent plan changes, the largest annual jump in more than 20 years. When existing benefits strain the budget, adding new ones is a hard sell.
  • No one-size-fits-all package. The workforce, particularly at larger employers, is more multigenerational and diverse than ever, with no dominant need to design around.
  • Limited visibility into what workers need. Only 14% of HR leaders say their organization has solid data on how those workers are doing, and Commonwealth finds employers typically evaluate benefits against the median employee, often lacking the in-house capacity to examine utilization through an LMI lens—so they rarely see what their lower-paid workers actually need, use, and value.
  • Limited reach when telling workers what’s available. Employers report communicating regularly; employees report not hearing enough. Some of that is the non-wired workforce: email and intranets do not reach people driving trucks or working warehouse floors.

Cost and fit constrain what employers can offer; visibility and reach determine whether what they offer lands. Employers must address all four before they can tell whether a benefit is working.

Benefits That Build, Not Just Buffer

Commonwealth calls emergency savings the “Swiss Army knife” of benefits, one tool meeting a wide range of needs for a wide range of workers. Its data shows workers with emergency savings use the accounts more realistically than standard advice assumes. Rather than building a three-to-six-month cushion and leaving it untouched, they save, spend down when something breaks, and save again—a cycle that looks like failure against a static balance, but is the account doing its job.

Employers offering emergency savings benefits report stronger retention. Worker Solutions’ analysis finds roughly a nine-percentage-point turnover gap between employees who opt into emergency savings and those who do not—a pattern that holds across the companies they work with, and often what moves an employer to act.

Three other tools reach different moments in a worker’s financial life—medical costs, student debt, a child’s education.

Health savings accounts (HSA). Available only alongside high-deductible plans, HSAs are what Durner called a gamble for LMI workers—though the worst position is a high-deductible plan with no HSA, where roughly one in three adults sit. Employers can reduce the friction by selecting a vendor, automating deductions, and providing incentives. Workers also widely assume the funds expire the way flexible spending accounts do.

Student loan retirement match. Under SECURE 2.0, employers can match retirement contributions against an employee’s qualified student loan payment—valuable for workers carrying education debt, who can build retirement savings while paying it down.

529 education savings. A 2024 Commonwealth study found 96 percent of parents without a 529 would be interested if their employer offered one, and recent changes widened their use to vocational and credentialing programs, with a portion eligible to roll into a Roth. States are beginning to encourage employer engagement: Commonwealth’s Benefits for the Future is partnering with Pennsylvania on its tax credit for employers matching contributions to 529 and ABLE accounts.

Sequential, Not Competing

Underneath the individual tools sits a design question: whether short- and long-term savings compete for the same paycheck. Commonwealth’s data suggests they don’t. A companion fact sheet from the convening lays out the full evidence, along with where funders can help employers put emergency savings accounts in place.

“Short-term stability and long-term growth aren’t competing goals. They’re sequential ones. We’re looking for a wealth-generative system that doesn’t force workers to choose between an emergency fund and a retirement account.

Tracy Durner, Commonwealth

Such a wealth-generating system is judged by outcomes, not access—whether workers gain confidence and shed stress, not just whether accounts exist. A benefits package designed for LMI workers makes core health and retirement benefits more usable rather than competing with them. In practice, that means designing around cash flow volatility rather than annual income. Research from the JPMorganChase Institute underscores why: most hourly workers see significant month-to-month swings in earnings, and about a quarter of each swing shows up in spending.

Tailwinds Already in Place

“This does not necessarily require policy change. This is local practice, this is implementation—something I think local philanthropy was really built for at this moment.

Don Baylor, Jr., Worker Solutions

Much of the enabling policy undergirding employer action is already law.

SECURE 2.0 created pension-linked emergency savings accounts (PLESA), letting employers automatically enroll workers into a linked liquid emergency savings account inside their existing retirement account—the sequencing principle built directly into retirement plan infrastructure.

The Saver’s Match comes online in 2027, replacing a tax credit with a government match of up to $1,000 deposited into a worker’s retirement account, better suited to workers with limited tax liability.

530A (Trump) Accounts add another platform, with employers among the big four entities able to contribute to the account as an employee benefit under the legislation. Commonwealth’s research with LMI households found the federal seed deposit convinced many parents to sign up, while information gaps left others uncertain. AFN’s fact sheet comparing 529 Accounts, Children’s Savings Accounts, Baby Bonds, and 530A Accounts offers additional grounding.

Congress can authorize a benefit, but an employer in Albany, Georgia, or Englewood, Colorado, still has to find a vendor, set it up, and explain it to workers. State government and local philanthropy can close that implementation gap—state auto-IRA programs, which enroll workers whose employers offer no plan, are one model.

Where Philanthropy Can Lead

None of this is primarily a spending problem—employers already put billions into benefits. The gap is knowing what lower-paid workers need, designing for it, and executing accordingly. That expertise sits outside most HR departments, and no single employer has an obvious reason to build expertise alone. Each tool above addresses one pressure, but workers experience their finances as a whole. Philanthropy can help fill these design and adoption gaps, connecting the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. For example:

Fund pilots that generate real-world evidence. Philanthropy can back organizations with deep LMI expertise to design, deliver, and evaluate pilots directly with employers, then leverage those findings to shape industry norms.

“That evaluation function is really where I think philanthropy is uniquely positioned to fund, because it doesn’t have an obvious ROI for a single employer or an agency to take on.

Tracy Durner, Commonwealth

Build local benefits networks. Convene a region’s critical industries alongside nonprofit and third-party benefits providers, building a channel through which philanthropic support helps government and employers design benefits that meet the needs of LMI workers. Start with industries or sectors already funded for workforce development, integrating workplace financial health into those strategies not just to attract and retain talent, but to drive employee financial wellness.

Looking Ahead

An effective benefit supports a worker’s financial health and delivers a business return through recruitment, retention, and productivity—a rare convergence of the philanthropic and business cases.

Realizing that convergence depends on unglamorous work: enrollment design, trusted communication, implementation support, rigorous evaluation, and strong cross-sector collaboration. That is where philanthropy can catalyze change.

Watch the full webinar recording and explore the resources our speakers shared here.