In a recent episode of 401k Real Chat, Fred Barstein, CEO of TPSU, TRAU, and 401kTV, sat down with Lauren Loehning, co-founder of Moniwell and longtime retirement plan advisor, to discuss one of the most persistent challenges in the retirement industry: participant engagement.
Lauren shared how her experience in asset management at Eaton Vance, combined with her years as a retirement plan advisor, prompted her to focus on the human side of financial wellness. Despite offering innovative tools like emergency savings programs and HSAs, she consistently saw low participant engagement. That sparked a big realization—access to resources alone isn’t enough. Emotional connection is key—people need to feel understood before they’re ready to act.
This insight led her to team up with Jennifer Rayner, who founded Moniwell in 2020. Moniwell delivers psychology-first, emotionally intelligent messaging—primarily via SMS—to help people feel seen and understood, especially when dealing with the stress and shame often tied to money. Their approach focuses on small, relatable messages that normalize financial stress and build confidence over time.
During the conversation, Fred asked Lauren to share real-world applications of Moniwell’s approach. She explained how short, emotive, jargon-free content sent through text messaging—rather than email—has significantly improved engagement. By gently guiding participants through bite-sized educational moments, Moniwell empowers them to better understand and act on the benefits available to them.
Lauren emphasized that most benefit communication strategies skip the emotional step and move straight to information delivery, which often fails to connect. Moniwell flips that model by starting with empathy and gradually building toward action.
To learn more, visit www.moniwell.com or contact Lauren directly at [email protected].
Read the Full Transcript Here:
Fred Barstein:
Greetings, and welcome to this episode of 401k Real Chat. My name is Fred Barstein. I am the founder and CEO of TPSU, TRAU, and 401kTV. I am pleased to welcome Lauren Loehning. Welcome, Lauren.
Lauren Loehning:
Thanks, Fred. Great to be here.
Fred Barstein:
Lauren is the co-founder of Moniwell, which she joined in 2023. She’s been a retirement plan advisor for the past 10 years, and before that she worked at Eaton Vance, which was one of the major investment companies focused on the 401k. So welcome, Lauren, and get right into it. First question that I have for you, I know that we have a problem around engagement. What are you seeing with the issues in the industry overall? You’ve been around for 25 years, what are you seeing with that problem?
Lauren Loehning:
Sure. Thanks, Fred. So yeah, I would say one of the things that transitioned me in my career from working for an asset manager to becoming a retirement plan advisor is I was really interested in helping those participants that are part of those plans. It was something that I thought would be really meaningful to get into the retirement plan advisory space and really be able to move the needle. My folks, was something that they were always talking about growing up, retirement, retirement, retirement, and just really wanted to take a more active role in that. So when I opened my advisory practice about 10 years ago, bringing financial solutions to the plan sponsors I worked with was very important to me.
And for the first couple of years, I was trying different financial wellness tools, trying to roll out different strategies, whether it’s an emergency savings program or HSA, and what I learned pretty quickly was that the engagement rates and all of these different financial solutions are extremely low. And really, if you look at benefits engagement across the board, they’re low. And I noticed that the participant communication piece was something that most organizations lacked. Unless you have this very comprehensive marketing team that’s constantly reaching out to the employees, that participant communication piece often goes overlooked. And so when I started to bring solutions and promise big things, if they enroll in this new financial wellness tool, they’re going to get these great results, lo and behold, they’re getting 5 or 10% of people actually engaging in those programs, i, as an advisor, am not delivering on that promise.
So I went out on a journey to figure out how do we solve for this? At that time, and this is something that you’re interested in too, Fred, I went down the mindfulness, meditation, Vipassana path and thought, well, if I just go out there and teach everybody how to think about this and become more aware of their finances, we’ll solve that problem. And what I learned pretty quickly is that, again, people are just not that interested. We’ve got to find another way. And that’s when I teamed up with Jennifer Rayner, who had started Moniwell back in 2020. She was working on an SMS based platform that delivered psychology first, emotionally intelligent messaging to participants to help drive engagement in financial solutions. And when I learned about what she was working on, I was super excited and it was something that I definitely wanted to be a part of, and that’s when we started to work together to really move Moniwell forward to what it is today.
Because I do believe that that engagement piece is something as an industry we need to solve for it. And we spend far more time and attention creating new solutions and new products, and not really understanding how are we actually going to get these new products into the hands of participants? And retirement income is a big one because every conference I’ve been to for the last year and a half, you have a ton of content around retirement income. And I think it’s such an important piece of a overall participant’s potential investment allocation over time, I think it’s solving an actual need, but we can’t forget about the participant in that journey. We have to get them to understand what it is so that they are opting into this when it’s not the default fund. So the problem really is getting people to engage in these resources, leaning into new technology and new ways to help communicate with participants, and I think that was a major piece that we’re looking to solve for.
Fred Barstein:
Can you give me one example of something that you have found that has resulted in significant engagement?
Lauren Loehning:
Sure. So I find when you just provide access to tools and solutions, and you’re pushing out marketing campaigns, saying, “Did you know you have access to this HSA benefit?” Or, “Oh, here’s a resource for emergency savings,” you’re not motivating anyone to do anything. You’re just giving them access to information. And there’s a lot of studies around the science and psychology of decision-making and behavior change, and what it all is rooted in is that we have to start with the emotional connection first. Timi Jorgensen, I’ll throw a little bit of science at you, Fred, she did a research back in 2020 that she talked about the financial behavior hierarchy.
And what she describes there is you can equate it to Russian nesting dolls, the outer shell is affect, that’s emotion. The second shell is access, access to tools and resources. And the inner shell is action. As an industry, we tend to glaze right over that affect or that emotional piece, and we jump right into access, assuming people will take action. So if we can’t break through that emotional barrier, the stress, the fear, the shame, the guilt that people feel when money comes up, because it is a highly emotional topic, we’re never going to get the average everyday person to understand what they have access to and actually take action. There’s always going to be a portion of the population that is ready to act. We are currently servicing that population. What I’m most interested in is how do we help everybody else, the other 80% of people?
Fred Barstein:
How do you break through that? Give me an example of what you specifically do to break through that emotional barrier.
Lauren Loehning:
Yeah. So normalizing emotions is a great place to start, right. Financial stress is real. 50% of Americans are in debt. Providing them with information, providing them with tools and resources to not necessarily push away those emotions that get in the way of taking the next step, but understanding different tools to deal with them. So maybe it’s a breathing exercise or maybe it’s just recognizing that the fear is present and they don’t need to turn away from it, that they can really find ways to manage and work through it. And when you’re dripping content over time, not just a one message or something that they have to go log into, when you’re dripping content over time, you’re able to give people new perspective, or awareness, or perhaps education around the different things that they have access to. So we like to say we lead with psychology first, emotionally intelligent interactions that really address those negative emotions that can get in the way of taking the next step. Does that answer your question?
Fred Barstein:
Not really.
Lauren Loehning:
Okay.
Fred Barstein:
So I’m really looking for, I know that email maybe doesn’t work, texting does. I mean, I think you’ve mentioned that. I’m looking for something a little bit more practical than theoretical.
Lauren Loehning:
Sure. So I’ll give you a very specific example of how we’re connecting with employees on our platform. There’s obviously different ways to do that, but at Moniwell, we are a behavioral technology platform that uses AI in psychology first messaging. So we reach everyone through SMS. Text messaging is our first method. Email is an option too, but SMS typically tends to be the best way to reach everybody because everyone’s on their phone all the time and text messages are read versus emails, which aren’t always read.
And so we’re reaching them in a way, it’s not a reminder service, it’s not telling them that they have to log into this portal to do something, it’s normalizing that financial stress is present for most people, that you’re not alone in that situation. Did you know you have access to some of these resources? Would you like to watch a short video? Or here’s a blog. And everything we do is short, it’s emotive, it’s non-financial. We’re using real words that real people understand, not long words and complicated topics. We’re really breaking it down into bite-sized bits of information, and when you’re delivering that consistently over time, you’re really able to empower people, build their confidence so that they’re ready to take the next step.
Fred Barstein:
Thank you. Well, that’s all the time we have. Thank you for watching 401k Real Chat. Thank you, Lauren, for participating today. Good luck with Moniwell. And how do people get in touch with you?
Lauren Loehning:
Sure. The best way is just to visit us on our website, www.moniwell.com. And then if there’s a link here, we can certainly put my email in that and we’d be happy to chat with anyone.
Fred Barstein:
Very good. Why don’t you tell us your email in case we don’t have the link?
Lauren Loehning:
Sure. It’s [email protected].
Fred Barstein:
Very good. Thank you.
Lauren Loehning:
Thanks, Fred.
Fred Barstein:
Thanks for being here and thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more episodes like this.
