On October 16, 2024, Best Money Moves Founder & CEO Ilyce Glink accepted the Social Impact Award from Smart Business Dealmakers at their annual Chicago conference. This is her acceptance speech.
Marne, thank you for that gracious introduction. And, thank you to the nominating committee for honoring Best Money Moves with a 2024 Dealmakers’ Social Impact award.
When I began my career in financial journalism, appearing on the radio, television and writing hundreds of newspaper articles and columns each year, an advisor of mine told me I needed to have a motto for my career. After trying out a few, I landed on this: Helping people make smarter decisions with their money.
As is so often the case these days, my career has expanded from its service journalism beginnings. I started a second company, Think Glink Media, to help connect financial services companies in better, smarter, more innovative ways with the clients and customers they serviced. I co-founded a third company that connected a Fortune 100 healthcare company with healthcare consultants, experts, influencers and healthcare journalists. Once that was sold, I started thinking about how consumers were experiencing financial stress in the wake of the Great Recession. And, given that nearly 70% of our population lives paycheck-to-paycheck today, including a third of those earning more than $250,000 per year, they still are.
That’s the foundation of Best Money Moves, my financial wellness company. We help employers measure their employees’ level of financial stress with a variety of assessment tools, then leverage artificial intelligence to help personalize the information, tools, and solutions we push to each employee. (We use Anthropic, by the way, since my son works there and, well, family first!) And, we can even send employees information about their own company’s benefits. So they make smarter financial decisions every day.
For employers, we offer an unparalleled level of customization and curation out–of-the-box, the ability to build in your own benefits, grouped for specific portions of your workforce, as well as analytics that would be difficult to get anywhere else.
Today, around 1,000 companies trust Best Money Moves with their employees’ financial wellbeing. What I’ve learned is that when employees feel less financial stress, there’s a real ROI for employers: Less chronic illness and addiction issues, fewer heart attacks, better health outcomes, sure. Also, less turnover and more focused, productive employees. Their employees feel happier and sleep better. Bonus: They’re less grouchy, too.
Since Black and Brown families have about one-tenth the wealth of White families, we’ve found creative ways to work with nonprofits, religious organizations, colleges and universities, local governments and for-profit companies enmeshed in those communities. We’ve developed give-back programs to help fund their initiatives. We’ve created special versions of Best Money Moves, which we call “Pro,” to cater to micro-businesses and start-ups packed with partnerships that we believe will resonate with those employers and their employees. And, we work to make sure everyone who needs access to Best Money Moves has it.
The feedback, testimonials, and ratings we’ve received make it all worthwhile. We are helping people make smarter decisions with their money everyday. Which is enormously gratifying. Less so is the hard work we’ve done over the past eight years to educate employers on the very real benefits of a less financially-stressed workforce.
Financial stress is the #1 reported workplace stress. Financial wellness has been the #1 requested benefit for the past few years. We must all look for ways to turn down the volume on our highly stressed workforce and find opportunities to help our employees feel better about themselves, their earning potential and their financial futures.
I have a few people I’d like to thank starting with our incredible Best Money Moves team, who make us look good every day, my family for all their support, and in particular, I’d like to thank my husband, Sam, who always believes my wildest dreams will come true.
In closing, I’d like to leave you with a quote from the late Herb Kelleher, co-founder, CEO and Chairman Emeritus of Southwest Airlines until his death in 2019: Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with your employees and the rest follows from that.
Thank you.