Vestwell taps workplace financial wellness with Gradifi Solutions acquisition
The US cloud-based recordkeeping platform Vestwell is set to acquire Gradifi Solutions, a student loan benefits provider, in an attempt to capture the growing workplace financial wellness market.
Vestwell acquires Gradifi Solutions
The deal will introduce several of Gradifi Solutions’ workplace education offerings to the Vestwell platform, including student debt programmes, educational savings accounts and student loan refinancing.
The addition of these offerings places Vestwell as both a workplace retirement and education savings solutions provider, given its pre-existing provision of state savings programmes.
It confirms that the company is increasingly turning its attention towards financial wellness by connecting employees in the workplace to tools and resources that help them manage and achieve all of their financial goals.
It’s estimated that 43.5 million Americans currently have federal student loans. Following the enshrinement of the Secure 2.0 Act in April of this year, those individuals no longer have to forego their retirement schemes in order to meet their loan pay-back obligations.
This is an area that Vestwell has sought to develop on, in that employees can build savings pots for retirement while simultaneously making loan repayments.
“As millions of Americans carry student loan debt, it’s essential for employers to provide accessible tools and programmes that enable individuals to pay down their student debt while saving for retirement simultaneously,” Schumm explains.
Adding to this, he anticipates that the incorporation of Gradifi Solutions into the company’s portfolio will accelerate its product roadmap initiative alongside “a top-tier client base”.
Vestwell acquires Gradifi Solutions from Morgan Stanley, which took hold of the business as part of its acquisition of E*TRADE Financial, which closed in October 2020.
The full terms of the deal were not disclosed in the official announcement.
