Offering personalized benefits guidance for employees just got easier

Voya’s new integrated and holistic benefits selection experience — myVoyage personalized enrollment guidance — offers personalized digital guidance to help employees optimize their household spending across health insurance benefits, emergency savings and saving for retirement. Working with SAVVI Financial, a financial guidance company in the fin-tech space, Voya created this technology-enabled, interactive experience to help employees think about their benefits contributions and savings as a total “benefits budget,” while providing individuals with a personalized action plan.

Employees view benefits selection as a chore and want their employer to offer support tools to make it easier

“Voya has conducted extensive research with both employers and employees to better understand sentiments around the convergence of health and wealth — particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the employee side, a recent Voya survey found that 72% of employees eligible for benefits say they would prefer visiting the dentist, servicing their car or preparing for tax season over reviewing their benefit options.¹ Employees also welcome digital tools that help them make more informed benefits decisions with their complete financial picture in mind.² This sentiment concerning the complexities associated with managing multiple health and retirement benefits often rings true for employers as well.”

Rob Grubka, CEO of Health Solutions, Voya Financial 

Voya research reveals:

• 77% of employers are interested in integrated solutions.³  

• 73% of employees are interested in guidance and support tools that would help them understand how much money to put aside for retirement, emergency savings and health care expenses.⁴

“Voya’s new online experience helps address these concerns among both employers and employees in an integrated and holistic manner, which we believe sets this guidance tool apart from others in the market,” says Grubka.   

How does it work?

During their company’s enrollment period, employees will receive an invite to access myVoyage personalized enrollment guidance, which is an online experience:

• The interactive digital tool guides employee through a series of questions about their household, health coverage needs and overall savings goals.
• It then provides guidance and a personalized action plan to help employees optimize their household spending across health insurance benefits, emergency savings and retirement.
• Employees are able to interact and use sliders to see how small changes to their budget can potentially have a big impact on their future savings goals.
• Employees may access the tool year-round to help manage any life changes throughout the year.

Give added power to your employee benefits program

Prior to the national launch of myVoyage personalized enrollment guidance, Voya piloted the tool with a select group of workplace clients during their company’s 2022 benefits open enrollment period, including our own employees. The feedback was extremely encouraging and the results included a number of employees taking positive actions to help optimize their workplace benefits and savings selections.

Those who used myVoyage personalized enrollment guidance had a better understanding of the trade-offs between their health insurance premium costs and other uses for their next dollar. This helped users to make more informed decisions when selecting a health insurance plan that was best suited to help address their individual needs. Additionally, an identified percentage of users also increased their retirement savings rate and/or elected supplemental health insurance — such as critical illness, hospital indemnity, disability income or accident insurance, for example — versus those employees who did not use myVoyage personalized enrollment guidance.⁵

• Nearly 3x greater rate of switching from a PPO to a HDHP⁵

• 10% of those who had a retirement savings increase recommendation went on to increase their savings rate⁵

• 35% more likely to elect Supplemental Health insurance⁵

“At Voya, we understand that health-related costs can have a significant impact on one’s ability to save for retirement. For example, according to Voya’s own retirement plan participant data, unexpected medical expenses are noted as the No. 1 reason for hardship withdrawals from a person’s retirement plan⁶,” explained Heather Lavallee, CEO of Wealth Solutions, Voya Financial. “As employees’ health and wealth needs remain inextricably connected, the need to harmonize one’s entire savings picture is becoming increasingly important. By creating technology-enabled solutions with the customer in mind, we are focused on helping individuals optimize their decision-making, which can ultimately help lead to greater financial outcomes.”

“Our innovative myVoyage guidance tool helps to pull it all together for employees in a simple, interactive and personalized experience,” added Lavallee. “The encouraging results from our pilot demonstrate that it can be a powerful tool for employers to help their employees make better sense of their competing financial needs and — more importantly — take meaningful actions to help advance their long-term financial goals.”

Learn More