Products May 16, 2018

MetLife and Ernst & Young Create Multi-Channel Wellness Program

The solution will focus on behavioral change by providing personalized wellness plans, according to MetLife.

Reported by

Following an alliance with Ernst & Young LLP (EY), MetLife has created a new financial wellness solution targeted at behavioral change among employees.

Named PlanSmart Financial Wellness, the multi-channel platform is said to build financial literacy and wellbeing by offering tailored financial wellness plans, phone support with EY financial planners, workplace seminars and one-on-one consultations with MassMutual advisers.

For more stories like this, sign up for the PLANADVISERdash daily newsletter.

“Employees are struggling when it comes to their finances—MetLife’s 16 Annual U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study (EBTS), released last month, found about half of employees, 46%, feel overwhelmed by financial decisions,” says Meredith Ryan-Reid, senior vice president, Group Benefits, MetLife. “These concerns can impact other areas of employees’ lives, including their productivity at work. By investing in financial wellness, employers can help their workforce become more engaged and productive.”

According to the survey, 84% of workers display interest in financial wellness program that offer planning, tools, etc., but only 18% of employers offer these features.

Employees utilizing the solution can save their activity and continue at another time and opt for checkup and reminder features during benefits enrollment, among other offerings.

More information on the program can be found here.

Products May 16, 2018

Sentinel Adopts Service to Improve Data Delivery and Protection

The company says it needed to stay innovative about how it operates—whether end users want to check 401(k) balances on laptops, dial into a call center to talk about short-term investments or use a mobile device to get an answer to a question about insurance coverage.

Reported by

Sentinel Benefits & Financial Group, a provider of employee benefit consulting, administration and brokerage services that include retirement plan and flexible spending account (FSA) administration, COBRA, insurance brokerage and investment advisory services, has adopted has adopted Actifio’s data-as-a-service platform to provide customers with access to relevant data when and where needed with ease.

Because Sentinel provides so many services that are dependent on data availability, the company says it needed to stay innovative about how it operates—whether end users want to check 401(k) balances on laptops, dial into a call center to talk about short-term investments or use a mobile device to get an answer to a question about insurance coverage. In addition, the company needed a solution to improve its disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity position beyond what was possible with tape backup.

For more stories like this, sign up for the PLANADVISERdash daily newsletter.

With Actifio Sky and Actifio Data-as-a-Service, Sentinel Benefits was able to create high-availability customer data solutions. For less than the cost of a backup product, Sentinel got data copy virtualization, data production with rapid recovery, instant ability to test applications and off-site DR. Since deploying Actifio, the company has significantly reduced the administrative time of its team and slashed recovery time.

Todd Larson, CIO of Sentinel Benefits, says, “The company needed data protection improvements that checked some important boxes: deduplication, compression, efficient replication and rapid restore. However, we needed more than just backup. We wanted to get to data on demand, while enabling our test/dev processes. That’s what led us to Actifio. They worked hard to understand what we wanted and why it was important for our business.”

For more information about Actifio, visit www.actifio.com. For more information about Sentinel Benefits, visit www.sbgi.com.

«