Financial wellness may be the cure for the retirement crisis, but it’s a resource that’s barely being tapped by advisors.

Month after month, research and surveys paint a dire picture of Americans’ retirement readiness, colored by their low savings, high debt and inappropriate asset allocations.

A growing group of retirement plan advisors and sponsors are using financial wellness plans to address this issue, says Patrick Delaney, vice president of retirement marketing at T. Rowe Price.

“Financial wellness is not a passing fad,” says Delaney. “Advisors should take note and address it with clients. Sponsors say they want it. Participants say they need it. It’s an opportunity.”

Delaney defines financial wellness as the ability to both manage day-to-day finances while also addressing short or long-term savings goals. Establishing wellness is no longer viewed as a necessary precursor to financial advice.

As investing and allocating savings becomes largely a passive, automated process, advisors will have to address financial wellness to prove their value to clients and to source new business, says Delaney.

For plan advisors, financial wellness may be an existential issue, says Delaney, since most advisors are judged by sponsors on how much of a retiree’s income from his or her working years can be replaced in retirement.

“Those employees are telling us over and over again that they can’t save,” Delaney says. “That’s going to be an issue for advisors.”

What’s more, T. Rowe Price reports that most plan sponsors, 89 percent, want to establish some type of a financial wellness plan for their employees, but only 20 percent have a program in place.

Delaney believes that to capture the opportunity, advisors must take the initiative to pitch wellness programs to these sponsors. In doing so, they must tailor their pitch to a company’s point of contact for the retirement plan—usually one of several people: a small business owner; a chief financial officer; a treasurer; or someone working within a larger company’s human resources, payroll or benefits division.

“If you’re a CFO and you’re in charge of a company’s balance sheet, the biggest top-of-mind cost that you need to mitigate is health care,” Delaney says. “It’s no secret that older employees are more expensive to insure than younger employees. When you have an aging workforce unable to retire, what’s that going to do to your health-care costs?”

When addressing a human resources or benefits representative, advisors can argue that a lack of financial wellness contributes to employees’ stress, which impacts job performance, absenteeism and productivity.

Stress also increases health-care costs when employees visit the doctor for headaches, chest pain and even stress-exacerbated back pain and toothaches. Within employee families, a lack of financial wellness is linked to childhood diabetes, obesity and asthma, says Delaney, all of which eventually have a negative impact on a plan sponsor’s bottom line.

Delaney describes it as a missing link in retirement plan enhancement—while auto-enrollment increases plan participation and auto-escalation increases the amount that participants save within the plan, financial wellness addresses financial literacy and external priorities that may compete with saving and planning.

Delaney says that some advisors are offering wellness programs pro bono to their plan participants because it has led to new clients and increased assets among current clients.

“Some are charging a flat fee, but some are simply just adding it,” Delaney says. “They say that new business is showing up at their door because they’re credible on insights with respect to financial wellness. They’re the only advisor in their area who can talk to people about this topic.”

In other cases, plan sponsors and advisors may prefer wellness programs provided by a third party.

“The more robust offerings may go beyond what an advisor has [at] their fingertips,” Delaney says. “They’re going to cost more, too. The direction is going to depend a lot on what the advisor is willing to offer, and what the sponsor wants to do. Some sponsors really want to champion this beyond what most advisors are going to be able to do.”

According to Delaney, financial wellness programs can take two or more years to have a significant impact on employees, but the majority of existing programs have been around for three to five years at most.

One of the major outstanding issues with financial wellness programs is how new they are within the retirement plan space, explains Delaney. It’s difficult to know their true effectiveness because there are few case studies looking into them.

“There is no instant gratification; it’s not like auto-enrollment,” Delaney says. “It’s new, it’s rapidly evolving, and it’s difficult to measure the return on investment.”

The case studies that do exist are mostly from financial wellness providers, says Delaney, but they show dramatic results. A study from Financial Finesse showed that after a one-year period, hours missed due to unscheduled call-ins dropped from 14.8 hours per participant to 10.8 hours per participant. Health-care costs went up 19.4 percent for plan participants who did not use financial wellness programs, but decreased by 4.5 percent for those who were enrolled in the program.

In another case study by SmartDollar, 39 percent of participants who enrolled in financial wellness were able to max out their plan contributions after two years in the programs.

Plan sponsors are increasingly aware of these benefits, says Delaney, but they don’t know how to access wellness programs.

“This is the perfect opportunity for a financial advisor to say, ‘Yes, I’m your investment person, I’m your retirement plan person, but I have a place in this conversation,’” Delaney says. “Plan advisors especially are going to wish they had grabbed onto financial wellness in 2016 or 2017 as opposed to when everyone is doing it in 2019 or 2020, and it’s too late.”