Financial Wellness: How OneEleven is helping people build healthy money habits that maximize happiness!
Forbes states that financial wellness is a relative measure of how well a person manages their financial life. Improving financial wellness is about practicing better money habits, setting goals and taking steps to achieve them — all with the aim of improving your overall quality of life. However, surveys indicate that managing finances is an aspect that most people do not feel confident about.
- 57% of full-time employees say finances are the biggest cause of stress in their lives
- Even among employees earning $100,000 or more per year, nearly half (47%) are stressed about their finances
- In a survey by TIAA just 22% of people gave themselves high scores when it comes to financial wellness
As a result of this an increasing number of educational institutions and employers are focusing on helping employees achieve financial wellness and stability. In fact, a report by Bank of America states that 84% of employers said that offering financial wellness tools can help reduce employee attrition.
In today’s interview, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dani Pascarella, the Founder and CEO of OneEleven — a financial wellness platform that partners with innovative companies and universities to deliver financial education and tools in an accessible, appealing, and actionable way that yields results. OneEleven’s innovative model combines education and technology with the empathy of real human coaches to maximize results.
Tarang: Hi Dani! Could you start by giving us a background of your career and how you got involved in FinTech?
Dani: Hi Tarang! So, I’ll start at the beginning, which was actually before I was born, my mom came from a tough situation and was on her own at 16. She had to work hourly jobs to support herself and put herself through school and keep a roof over her head. So survival was challenging, it was quite tough. From there, she decided that she wanted to change her future and have a different future, and started studying accounting, becoming so successful that she wound up, retiring early, because she was able to revamp her money mindset and understood how money and wealth worked. In our country, I think people who are wealthy and successful with money are just playing an entirely different game and she learned the rules and was able to do that.
Now I’m in the picture, I spent most of my childhood, just seeing the social mobility story that statistically doesn’t happen very often in our country. And that, to me, was very inspiring to see. It also gave me a playbook for how people who are good with money think versus how people who are not good with money think and what the differences are. I wound up going to Wall Street, because I thought I really want to help people achieve the same success that my family was able to have. And what better place to learn this than private banking, which is at its core managing money for wealthy individuals with at least $25 million in assets all the way up to billions. So, I learned a lot there, I think it was a dream job as one gets to see how the smartest, most innovative people manage their own personal wealth and help them to do that. But when I took a look around, I realized that the best resources and tools and help were really only reserved for the top 1%. And that’s something we see continuously. There was nothing really out there that was meant to help your everyday typical person in our country, they’re going to work, they’re working hard, they want a good life, but those financial issues are getting in the way for them.
Even the solutions out there, when I looked around, I thought, they’re missing the key ingredients that make somebody change their money mindset and have success. I saw a lot of tools and there’s education; and the reality is, that is not what’s make or break for people, what changes their situation is their habits, and that’s all psychology. And it felt like a lot of wealthy people making tools for people who are less wealthy, who have no idea what it’s like to walk in those shoes and to understand that mindset. So, I wound up leaving Wall Street to start OneEleven. And you know, here we are growing, really quickly, it’s exciting to be able to create a solution that is tailored for somebody who is not already wealthy.
Tarang: Let's talk about OneEleven and why people should be interested in this, especially your target audience.
Dani: Yeah, so OneEleven, it’s a mobile financial wellness app. And what we do is we combine the empathy of real human coaches, and digital tools that are rooted in psychology to help people change the relationship with money for good. So, it’s kind of like here’s our app, because today’s consumer expects a sleek app and you’ve got to be in their pocket to be able to help them to do anything for that that high touch experience. But it’s also that we as people are here to help you, every single member gets their own dedicated wealth coach, and this is somebody who trained in psychology just as much as they trained in finance, and this is very unique to us. I would say if you looked at the financial industry, and I’ve worked for many top firms, I’m a certified financial planner myself, there’s no training on mindset and psychology. What we do is our coaches are really focused on that and goal setting and how do we create habits and change behavior. So users have unlimited access to chat, they can even set up video calls, and they have this support system and accountability partner that is the most critical factor for success, plus all the tools and education. And what we’re doing is we’re using that technology and the coach to create a completely personalized experience that is tailored to the individual. So, giving them exactly what they need, at the moment they need it with the human coaching and support that’s going to help them stay on track, manage setbacks, and achieve their goals.
Tarang: Can you talk a bit more about the business model? Who are your biggest users, your biggest competitors? And how do you keep the service affordable, yet effective?
Dani: Yeah, so great questions. I would say our power users fall into two different buckets. The first is ambition driven people who understand that being in control of your money is important and they want to make sure that they’re doing a good job with their money the same way they’re having success in their career and other areas of their life. So we get a lot of people like that, who are just driven, and they want to succeed. And that’s why they’re here. Because we’re delivering what they need in a really convenient format that speaks to them. The second group is those who have experienced financial hardship. So, the biggest growth area of our business, is we partner with employers, and they buy this for their employees as a benefit, which is huge, it makes so much sense for companies because money is the number one cause of turnover and turnover costs 1000s of dollars. So, if you can eliminate that turnover for a fraction, or reduce it for a fraction of the price of what it would cost you to deal with that turnover, it’s massive ROI for the business from a financial standpoint. And then you also have employees who feel like, wow, money is the number one cause of stress in our country; and my employer just gave me something that’s going to alleviate that, how much you know, goodwill you have and loyalty from your employees, if you’re helping them deal with the most challenging thing in their lives. So that’s a massive area of growth for us. And that’s, and that’s what we see on the platform. The way we keep it affordable, I say that’s our core IP, what we are excelling at is, I think so first of all, like humans are a part of financial wellness, I think there are so many different competitors out there with their views, and it’s a fair view that technology is enough, or that, we can have a human touch, but it’s a call center, or they can write in when they need help. My view is I’ve seen what it looks like to not have money, I’ve been doing this on the frontlines for a very long time with people from all walks of life, ranging from inner city students, I’ve had experience working with them all the way up to the wealthiest on Wall Street in my private banking career. And what I can tell you is, if somebody is struggling with this, or they’re trying to achieve goals, the biggest factor for success is actually that human component, behavior change is very, very hard. As humans, we are hardwired to resist any type of change ever. So, if you ask anybody, what’s something difficult in your life that you’ve experienced? And how did you overcome it? The answer is almost always not, oh, I have this app, or I read this book, it’s, you know, I had a person in my life that mentored me or supported me or held me accountable and helped me to achieve my goal. So our view at OneEleven is that it’s not possible to actually change behavior and change that that mindset without the intervention of a person and I know it’s a lot of investors do not like that this is our view, but it is ours because when you look at behavior science, what we find is there’s no other way if you want to have efficacy, and really change lives. So that’s our view. And our core IP now is knowing what basically using technology to allow our coaches to work with our members in a highly leveraged way.
Tarang: What challenges did you face when you started OneEleven? And do you feel that being a female entrepreneur has a unique set of challenges that males might not face?
Dani: Yeah, so many challenges, I think anybody who starts a business and says it was not challenging is just completely lying because it’s always very challenging. And I think it’s hard no matter who you are, is my answer to that. I think figuring out things for me, my first hurdle was just the encouragement to start is always a big one, and then I wasn’t technical. So I actually had to go learn how to build products, like went over to General Assembly took some classes, really did a lot of self-educating. And now I run our product team, and I built our whole product, but that was a learning curve as I’d spent my whole life preparing for finance, I didn’t realize I wanted to prepare for the technical side of things until much later. So that was in my life, I think that was probably the learning curve that I jumped up the fastest. When it comes to being I know, you asked the question about being a woman. And I think, you know, the statistics are very clearly out there, right? less than 2% of venture capital goes to female founders. I’m not only female, I’m multiracial. So again that number now drops below 1%. And, you know, just access to capital, I think a challenge. If you look at it from a statistical standpoint, that’s the reality we live in, I always like to think you can’t focus on that. I mean, if I looked at the statistics, and I said, less than 1% of the money goes to someone like me, I probably wouldn’t have started, I think you have to be so compelled by what a world with your solution looks like, and how many people you can help that you just push right past the challenges, and you have the grit to say, you know what, I’m going to be the 1% and move forward. So I say those are the those are the challenges when I was starting, I’d say now the biggest thing is motivating people to do their best work, and really work as a team, I think, as a founder, it’s, you know, to, it’s really putting people in the right places to succeed. And it’s part art part science and a whole lot of you know, it’s really hard to learn that other than in real time with actual people so, and the bigger you get the, you know, the newer faces and the faster you have to do it. So, I think managing teams at scale is just like it’s, you know, it’s something that is always challenging in any organization.
Tarang: What is the vision for OneEleven? Do you see the company expanding services or into new segments of the market?
Dani: We are on a mission to help people change the relationship with money for good. Our big overall vision is, we want to be the go to masters at cracking financial behavior change at scale, which is a very, very hard thing to do. There is actually a study on all the different financial literacy programs out there, the Washington Post actually published this, and it said, existing solutions lead to a 0.01% change. 0.01% long term behavior change when you look at people who have come out of these programs, which is mind blowing, because think about how much money from donations from even, you know, startups, and it’s just like, oh, everybody has financial literacy, it’s so important. All these programs are happening nationwide and it’s like taking your money and lighting it on fire. That’s what it is, no, one long term is like coming out of this really any better off, they might feel like they did something because they you know, they read a book, or they downloaded an app, or they attended a session or whatever, but the end of the day, like they’re, they’re no better off than they were before. So our vision is we really want to be not just a successful business that’s growing quickly and profitable, but at the forefront of that science. And a lot of that is now in the works, it’s really exciting. But being at the forefront of those, we’re doing longitudinal studies, and, you know, and really tracking just long term how this impacts people. So that’s the grand vision. And I think we’re going to be very slammed with this for a long time. As much as it’s nice to think about other products or things that we can do. The reality is more than half of Americans are paycheck to paycheck, we have a whole generation of baby boomers that are getting old, they’re not going to be able to work anymore. They don’t have ample retirement savings, and they’re going to be their kids problems. And guess what their kids all have student loans and credit card debt. And if we think it’s messy now, with inflation and student loans coming back, just wait 5-10 years. So my view is we have our hands full, this is the number one problem for over half of our country. And I think we’re going to be working on that for a very long time before we even get into to new products.
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