How City & Guilds use nudge as the bedrock of their financial wellbeing strategy

Established: 1878
Industry: Education management
No. of employees: 1,000 +

The challenge

In 2018, City & Guilds were going through a complex pension change program. Moving away from a traditional pension scheme to defined contribution only. At the same time, employee surveys and feedback identified a need for financial wellbeing support. City & Guilds also wanted to increase awareness and participation in their wider employee benefits and make data-driven decisions about what other benefits would be well received by their employees. More recently, organizational change resulted in redundancies, with City & Guilds wanting to offer as much support as possible to those affected.

The solution

In response to these challenges, City & Guilds identified the need to introduce financial education as an additional employee benefit. By launching nudge, they are able to empower their people with personalized, product-free financial skills and knowledge to better understand and take control of their money.

The personalized prompts – or ‘nudges’ - were delivered via the employee’s channel of choice, including email, SMS and WhatsApp. City & Guilds have worked with nudge to deliver personalized campaigns to educate and promote a variety of employee benefits and wellbeing initiatives, including their discounts and cashback offers through Reward Gateway and their annual flex benefits. All nudges are crafted to trigger an action and drive take-up.

Using nudgenomics, the powerful data analytics tool provided by nudge, City & Guilds are able to understand the true wants, needs and interests of their people and react accordingly. When there was an increase in people interested in mortgages, nudge worked with City & Guilds on a communications campaign to inform employees about their workplace mortgage advisory benefit, which led to increase in take-up.

With nudge fully integrated as their financial wellbeing benefit, City & Guilds implemented ‘nudge for redundancy’ to support employees affected by organizational change. This is a specialized edition of nudge that enabled them to continue providing their people with personalized financial education after they left the organization. Helping them understand their changing circumstances, make the most of the support available and plan their financial future.

nudge is now the foundation for City & Guilds financial wellbeing strategy.