FinTech firm EvoShare, a company that provides 401(k) cashback rewards programs for credit and debit card purchases, recently announced a partnership with Albert Lea, Minn.-based intellicents, a financial services and employee benefits provider, to launch “myCents, because every cent counts.”
myCents will offer employees additional 401(k) contributions in the form of cashback from their everyday spending, according to intellicents, and will give employers “an entirely new engine for financial wellness, one that automatically puts more money in employees’ pockets, increases plan participation and contributions, and does it all without requiring employees to change their spending habits.”
“They’ve gone far with the myCents initiative,” EvoShare CEO Eugeny Prudchyenko said when asked about the genesis of the partnership. “We pitched EvoShare about a year ago at their national conference. It seemed to click, and they liked Evoshare. Although we do all this great stuff—increasing participation and increasing contribution rates—what they really cared about was the opportunity to co-brand. That was the major driver behind it. We were back and forth for a few months and they became both partners with, and clients of, EvoShare.”
‘Opening doors’
Yet, while they’ve worked on it for some time, intellicents CEO Brad Arends wasn’t sold on the concept initially.
“I’ll be frank; the first time I saw EvoShare—and perhaps I wasn’t paying close enough attention—it seemed kind of gimmicky,” Arends admitted. “But then we invited them to our sales meeting and they showed us how every time a person gets cash back and it goes into their 401(k), they will then get an email from EvoShare that we can private label to help build our brand and build relationships.”
Realizing it would make a solid addition to intellicents’ worksite financial wellness program, it offered the bonus of “opening doors.”
“Everybody’s trying to open doors with financial wellness,” Arends added. “We’re going to do an email marketing campaign that is solely tied to ‘myCents Powered by Evoshare.’ So, why myCents? We wanted our own brand. We do this all the time. We’re trying to create a national brand and we partner with a lot of people, but we like the ability to have our own branding involved with it.”
It will also be part of the firm’s recruiting efforts, “because these are tools that they get when they come on our team.”
EvoShare claims that its proprietary system that will power intellicents “turns up to 30% of every dollar spent at over 10,000 partnered local and online stores into additional contributions toward financial savings accounts such as a 401(k) or 403(b) plan, IRA or Roth IRA, and 529 College Savings Plan.”
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
