The financial wellness and earned wage access provider Even has continued its expansion into the health care vertical by signing Springfield, Mo.-based CoxHealth.
All of CoxHealth’s more than 13,000 employees, both hourly and salaried, will have access to Even’s financial wellness app that includes savings, budgeting, cash flow forecasting and EWA services, along with several other tools. CoxHealth is Even’s second client in the health care space and represents a strategic shift to expand the company beyond its core retail portfolio of clients.
“The reason CoxHealth chose us is that they felt there was an alignment in our approach and mission to helping people financially with how they treat patients medically,” said Jon Schlossberg, Even's CEO. “We can help someone with their immediate cash flow needs as CoxHealth can provide a patient with pain medication. We then work to solve the underlying problem of not having money through budgeting and building savings, much like they [CoxHealth] help patients with their long-term care and solving what ails them.
Even has long focused on the retail environment, with Walmart being its biggest client in partnership with
Schlossberg commented that Even is getting a lot of interest from the health care industry and that it is highly attractive to his company because these are more long-term and mission-based relationships. Health care providers also need to retain certain skilled positions such as nurses, meaning EWA services and financial wellness help with retention rates. And since HR departments in the health care space are lean, the selling process goes more quickly.
“Since the pandemic began, CoxHealth recognized that its employees were under a lot of stress,” noted Schlossberg. “Can you imagine a more stressful job than working at a hospital in the middle of a pandemic? CoxHealth wanted to reduce the financial stress of its employees by providing them with a responsible on-demand pay solution that could also help with budgeting and savings. They felt it was their responsibility to help alleviate the stress outside of work.”
While Even is often recognized as an EWA provider, it emphasized that wage access is only one tool in its mobile app. The first thing the Even app does for its users is tell them their work schedules, which is then used to forecast a user’s net pay, Schlossberg said. By providing users with net pay information, it allows them to know how much they can spend.
Even also provides a budgeting tool and a savings account (offered through Wells Fargo), which helps its users start to save so they become less reliant on using EWA services. Even reported that it has over 112,000 users on an automatic savings plan and that after the first three months of use the average user has saved $157 in their savings account.
Approximately 53% of Even’s users open the app every day and roughly 80% use it once a month. For users who want to utilize EWA services, Even provides push payments to a debit card using card network rails, push to a bank account as well as free cash pick up at any Walmart location.
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