Most pre-retirees don’t seek advice from 401(k) providers
Most pre-retirees ignore the financial wellness tools and advice their 401(k) providers offer — and that's not a retirement problem. It's an HR credibility problem.
The news
A new report covered by HR Executive finds that most pre-retirees don’t seek advice from their 401(k) providers — and they largely ignore the financial wellness tools offered by their recordkeeper. This is happening at the exact life stage when those tools should matter most.
My take
This finding shouldn’t surprise anyone who has watched the benefits space closely. The tools exist. The advice is available. Employees aren’t using them. That gap is almost never about feature quality — it’s about trust and relevance architecture.
Here’s what I keep seeing in the broader pattern: HR Tech vendors build financial wellness tools from the inside out. They design around what recordkeepers want to offer, not around how employees actually make financial decisions. The result is a product that lives in a portal, requires three logins to find, and communicates in the language of compliance rather than the language of real life.
Pre-retirees aren’t disengaged because they don’t care about retirement — they’re disengaged because the experience doesn’t feel like it was built for them. The advice feels generic. The tools feel like liability coverage dressed up as helpfulness.
And here’s the strategic issue for HR leaders: when employees don’t engage with benefits at the moments that matter most — a job change, a health event, the decade before retirement — HR loses the proof point it needs to demonstrate business impact. Benefits utilization is one of the clearest signals that HR is actually reaching people, not just administering programs at them.
The recordkeepers and financial wellness vendors in this space need to stop treating low engagement as a communications problem. It’s a product-market fit problem. The advice architecture assumes employees will come to the tool. The evidence says they won’t.
The so-what
I’d tell HR leaders and their benefits technology partners the same thing: if engagement is low at the moment of highest stakes, the channel strategy and the experience design both need to be questioned — not just the marketing budget. Meeting pre-retirees where they already are (managers, HR business partners, peer conversations) matters more than optimizing a portal they’ve already decided to ignore. Financial wellness tools that aren’t embedded in the flow of real decisions aren’t wellness tools — they’re checkboxes.