When Recognition Becomes Rewarding with Special Guest James Gozney

[00:00:08] Welcome everyone to another episode of the HR & Payroll 2.0. I'm Pete Tiliakis and as always, I'm joined by the legendary Julie Fernandez. Welcome, Julie. Julie Fernandez Thanks, Pete. And I think today we're going to cross the pond, aren't we? And we're going to talk to some specialists in the UK and add in total rewards and fintech and we just have a whole mashing together of some pretty cool stuff.

[00:00:29] Pete Tiliakis Yeah, I've been hot on the HR tech fintech convergence. Everybody probably knows me. I've been plugging my article with HR executive, but you know, this is an area that I've been really keen to kind of focus on. Rewarding recognition has long been very much central to the employee experience, but a lot of those programs can feel very generic, disconnected and often they don't actually return ROI. I'm sure you've probably seen that Julie. But fintech is actually changing that. And this is what I love, right? It's connecting recognition and pay and spending and savings all together and giving employers another way to do that.

[00:00:59] Pete Tiliakis And this is a way to make rewards immediate, more personal and certainly more impactful. So joining us today to unpack how employers are modernizing reward recognition and making compensation work harder by using fintech and as a talent enabler is James Gosney, the CEO and founder of the UK based fintech Aslan. So welcome, James to HR and payroll 2.0. James Gosney Thanks so much, Pete. Great to be here. Pete Tiliakis Yeah, man. So full disclosure, James is one of my advisor clients. I work very closely with them. And I have been really just fascinated with

[00:01:29] what you guys have been doing with reward and recognition with a fintech solution. So yeah, man, I thought we could just jump right into this and talk about, you know, I think there's been I mean, I think we've all probably been on the other end of reward and recognition programs. Julie, I know you have, you've worked in some big, big employers. I've seen some really cool ones. And I've seen some really lame ones. And I think some of them have not entirely evolved to where we are now, right? It's it's I think it's a much different time than what gift cards and some of the traditional things can probably provide to employees.

[00:01:59] Or what they want, right? But yeah, James, let's start there, man. Reward and recognition has really, it's been part of the HR toolkit forever. But a lot of those programs feel like they've stagnated. And they haven't really created a lot of ROI. Why is that? Why are? Why have they not really progressed or innovated, if you will?

[00:02:17] Yeah, and I think you sort of start from the purpose, I guess. So why do organizations put in reward and recognition programs full stop? And there are a multitude of reasons, which shapes them what the program looks like. It can be anything from simple employee of the month celebrations to gear up the workforce through to we've just gone through a full M&A process, you know, a bunch of people have unfortunately left their desks. Now we need to re incentivize and re-engage the rest of the workforce.

[00:02:44] In that you've probably got two businesses colliding with different cultural values, different ways of working, they might be multinational. So how are we going to solve that? And that's where reward and recognition can really sort of step in to embed new cultural values or ways of working, which people have struggled with historically. Whatever the reason that people do it, I think they fall back on a certain suite of tools, which maybe worked or did work quite well a few years ago. But there's been a bunch of changes in the market, which have made it very painful today.

[00:03:13] So if we look at how we work today versus how we worked just a few years ago, the office notice board doesn't work like it used to, right? It's hybrid work. It's never worked for the desk this way. Yeah. The, you know, the saluted ones, the desk. That's, that's a challenge. AI has fundamentally reshaped how email is, you know, there's so much of it now. AI slump. Yeah.

[00:03:43] And in a consumer fintech side, the advancements have been so quick and so fast that the demands from the end employee on personalization, the bar has just risen so much higher. Yeah. That the old world of these existing now antiquated looking tools just don't engage the workforce. Yeah. Agreed. So when we look at the tooling that is there for us to use, it tends to be catalogs, vouchers, codes that you can use online.

[00:04:12] However, there are things which don't really engage the workforce. They're not going to be seen in a web portal at 4pm on a Friday waiting for the Bell to drink because people aren't there at the desk anymore. Or on those sports. So that's fundamentally why these things are no longer working as they used to. Yeah. I mean, Julie, we've talked about this.

[00:04:33] James, one of the things that I feel like the pulse on benefits and total rewards and comp leaders when we talk to them is there's a frustration with the fact that like they're doing a lot, but it's not necessarily hitting the mark. Right. We're layering in all these things, but we don't have engagement or we don't have employee. You know, we hear a lot of people saying they can't afford to use their benefits, which is here in America, which is a whole other thing. But yeah, I mean, I think there's a frustration by the employer's side because there are there's a lot of money being spent, it feels like, but not necessarily a lot of ROI coming out of them. Yeah.

[00:05:02] A lot of scatterer technique seems to be out there. You're trying to get something that appeals to most everyone. And then, you know, just budgets associated with all of those things then, you know, began to toss a filter that says, well, how much of this can you do? Right. Yeah. And what is the budget for being able to do rewards and recognitions? Do we have to scale toward the attaboy, you know, side of things and trying to engage and create, you know, create that type of feeling and attachment?

[00:05:31] Or are we doing something meaningful from a financial perspective? Yeah. And that's a great point. That's a great word. Like what is meaningful today, James? I mean, because that could be a different definition, right? To every employee type. And we've talked about, right, we've got what, five soon, six, maybe. Well, I guess not yet, six generations, but five generations in the workforce, right? Everybody's at a different maturity or maybe knowledge set with money. But what does meaningful even look like now? Look, it's a really good question.

[00:05:58] I think it really falls down to three core things. You know, ease of use, choice, and then fundamentally, is there value delivered that they recognize and understand? And if you can deliver those three things as a platform or as an employer taking the service of a platform, I think you go a long way to solving the core issues that exist in this and where people aren't seeing ROI.

[00:06:25] In today's world, to me, that's making sure that the communication channel is where they are at that moment when recognition needs to happen. And the thing that we use every single day, day in, day out, on mobile phone. And the crazy thing about the mobile phone as well is how far that's advanced. And now you have a card on your phone. Apple Pay, Google Pay. Everybody's accepting contact lists these days. We take it for granted. A few years ago, that wasn't possible.

[00:06:53] So the mechanism that FinTech has brought to allow people to redeem value in an easy way that fits with their daily habits is now here with us. Take the phone, take a card, and deliver broader than just simple reward and recognition, but the entire benefits program stuck around these two tools. And you'll get very strong engagement through the workforce. And that's when that value can be delivered. Here's this thing people need every day in life. Let's converge these two things.

[00:07:23] It's part of what I've been writing about, about how there's so many opportunities for HR and FinTech to work together. Is that kind of, would you define it that way? Look at the last decade of FinTech success globally, right? Like who are the major players? New Bank in Brazil, Revolut in Europe, Chime over in the US, Monzo also. You know, these businesses, if you went back a decade, they'd never would ever call that you'd be disrupting the traditional banking environment like that. Right.

[00:07:51] But you can because FinTech develops interesting ways of building engagement. And it generally leads with a card. So you start with a simple prepaid card to serve a single use case. Revolut, I'm traveling. I want to know foreign exchange fees, whatever it is. And then that builds from there. And look, you've got 100 of the Intel businesses coming out of it now. So where FinTech leads, others follow. And traditionally, B2C FinTech tends to lead B2B.

[00:08:19] And now we're seeing that wave coming up through the employer so that FinTech can start bringing those solutions and that engagement levels that allows the unlock of reward through these tools. So that, I guess, that's a great segue to my next question. It's like you're reading my mind. So explain how that would be different, right? If I'm an employer and I'm looking at some, you know, this, you know, FinTech innovation to help me with reward and recognition. How does that differ than the way things have been done in the past? Maybe past sort of how is it disrupting, I guess, is what I would say.

[00:08:48] Right. So you need the attention of the employee. So you've got to put something in their hands that they're going to use and engage with. The same reason that a business might subscribe to WhatsApp for business is its communication channel to its users. The users are already in WhatsApp, right? So we're all WhatsAppping away. Therefore, any business that wants to communicate with us would do well to use that same channel.

[00:09:12] So you build around an engaging tool, which in the FinTech world is often cards to deliver the value that you're seeking to deliver. For any other business, it might be the customer service line or support or order form. And in this case, we're talking about employers looking to reward and recognize their people. So when people use card-based apps, they will inevitably have notifications on their phone.

[00:09:42] Everyone wants to see their transaction. And that becomes a home app with that communication channel to the employee. So whatever you want to tell them, however you want to recognize them in whatever form, you've got that buzz in your pocket and instant recognition is available to them. So this is a core innovation. The question is how you plumb that into the employer and make that meaningful. And this comes down to a provider-by-provider assessment of looking exactly how they've structured that, how that works with the systems that you've got, and how it works with the delivery mechanism you want to offer.

[00:10:12] Yeah, you know, I love what open banking, right? You touched on that a little earlier about how FinTech sort of gave us this opportunity to go and do things outside the traditional banking system. And it's democratized a lot of this engagement. But what is so cool about it is how many of these solutions are popping up sort of in the flow of life. And that's kind of what I think you're saying here, is that you're bringing rewards into a lane that is already somewhat where the employees already are. Is that a good way to say it? Yeah, 100%.

[00:10:42] I mean, the scale of this thing is gigantic, by the way. I mean, like, if we just look here in the UK, there's a trillion pounds paid to UK employees every year. You know, to put that in some kind of perspective, I think the global corporate bond market is about $24 trillion. The refinancing rate against that, 20% percent. So you're talking just the UK payroll, probably about 25% of all of the corporate bond refinancing globally.

[00:11:10] So it's an absolutely massive opportunity to fundamentally reshape how people are paid and extract a lot of the or bring back a lot of the cost that is lost when you deliver pay through normal means to the accounts and everything that with invisible data on HR payroll or transactions. Open banking has done that for transactions. And modern tooling, which runs into payroll and HR,

[00:11:36] can bring that data in that allows everybody to see that value coming back. Yeah. A scale of, honestly, trillions of dollars globally. That's what I find really interesting is, you know, rewards and recognition has been a lane and it's not always inclusive of payroll, right? Sometimes it's part of that lane and sometimes it's separate. And then there are other different financial mechanisms in each country's healthcare solution or reimbursement of housing allowances,

[00:12:04] whatever, all sorts of other things, right, that are out there. And I think it's just interesting to know, like, how do we get to the convergence where that mechanism is a mechanism, not just in a total rewards or a rewards and recognition lane, but is a mechanism that's used by payroll or used by some of these other lanes as well? Wouldn't it, you know, it seems to me like the war of the mechanisms is coming at some point in time, right? Yeah. My mechanism is bigger than your mechanism.

[00:12:34] I don't know. That will play out. I mean, is, is FinTech really just improving the delivery of this or is it changing the way it actually can accomplish it? Reward and recognition. I mean, what are your thoughts on that, James? I mean. Why? I think it's both to be perfectly honest with you. So card-based point systems have, well, it really sort of accelerated in sort of the 50s and 60s, but they've been around for a long time. So that is largely mechanical. That's a mechanism, right?

[00:13:01] It's a mechanism of delivery with a payment card that's delivering value that the provider is choosing to pass on to the user to incentivize them to stay with them. And that tooling is now possible to bring in to the workplace in a way that never was before. The reason, the unlock there, if you like, is the fact that the data systems that the employers are all using are now largely sort of digital, software-based. One can extract the data one needs to be able to provide the systems

[00:13:30] that can give people reward on cards tied to payroll. I can integrate into a payroll system and understand the data that's coming from that or an HRIS or whatever it is. Whereas historically, like that would have been harder. The focus on the reward and recognition and the incentivization of employees and reward, particularly in a time when compensation is getting tighter and there's cost of living challenges globally,

[00:13:58] only goes to provide more incentive for employers to do that because losing employees is very, very expensive. So you're getting retention gains by delivering it properly, which materially go beyond the cost of the actual degree of the program. So this is the sort of tooling. You've got the business need. I've got a retention challenge and compensations are going far enough to satisfy my employees. And then you've got the tooling coming from the fintech side that allows that to be unlocked with the data set,

[00:14:26] which can now be delivered through the likes of your HCMs, HRIS, and payroll systems. Yeah. I mean, look, I think that, you know, we go back to this idea of these solutions being in the flow of life, right? I wrote about this. I think we've talked about on the show, Julie, about what X is doing with X money. James, I think you're probably aware of it as well. And essentially what they're doing is monetizing, well, not just monetizing, but creating the ability for a monetary mechanism on the X platform

[00:14:54] to incentivize folks that are already, the millions of people that are already using X. And they're incentivizing that through CrossFriver Bank, underpinning a bank account at 6% to hold cash in there. That's insane, right? So it tells you what they're trying to, you know, attract, but more importantly, they don't have to be PayPal or Chime or any of these things. They just fundamentally have to win their existing base who's already there. I feel like there's an element of what you're talking about, James, with this in that your customer is an enterprise

[00:15:22] who wants to do, you know, wants to help their employees. They're already engaged at their pay, giving them mechanisms to then amplify their pay is what I think you're talking about, and then rewarding them using reward and recognition through that amplifier and that mechanism where they already are, right? Where they're already engaging, presumably every day around a card. I think it's a very similar construct. That's right. And there's tax efficiencies in that as well, right? I mean, here you've got something called the Trivial Benefits Framework.

[00:15:51] It's quite close to the Dominus Fringe Benefit kind of framework in the US, I think. But it's basically sort of small gift exemption. Over here to get £100 to an employee's bank account will cost most businesses £200 today. So that's really ineffective. So where you can deliver that value through other means, it is, of course, a much higher ROI from the off. So points to a card delivered by the employer,

[00:16:21] which qualify under Trivial Benefits, will save both the employer money and the employee money on both sides of the equation. Yeah. No social security, national insurance over here on the employer's side, and then none, no social security or taxed on the employee side. Yep. So there's tangible tax sort of efficiencies that one can deliver through these mechanisms as well. I just wonder at what point buyer mentality

[00:16:47] is going to need to shift or change and to even think through the fintech lens, right? Like the tooling and the mechanics of making this happen and the efficiency beyond that. From what maybe has been historically, at least my observation, you know, you're thinking about rewards and recognition and you start having conversations with folks that are saying, well, I can offer this nifty gift catalog with all these things that people want and, you know, pixie dust points for,

[00:17:16] you know, for attaboy stuff to make everybody feel good and a MasterCard or Visa, you know, card. And like, that's the package of things that you can offer. And that's been the lens forever of, you know, of HR folks trying to figure out how do I satisfy that itch for engaged employees and bring value to them? Versus looking through the lens of how do I make it really efficient

[00:17:45] to get any of these things, right? Into this environment. And there's tooling and there are real advantages to transacting that way, right? Agreed. So I don't know if the buyer, you know, if you find buyer conversations resonate better coming from within finance and treasury versus, you know, from some part of the organization that is not HR or are you finding HR buyers that are really starting to recognize that there are efficiencies and real good business case reasons

[00:18:15] to think about it from this lens? I think that we're a card power solution. And so I sell on that pretty regularly to that stakeholder, right? To HR or heads of reward. The framing is less in a fintech lens, to be honest. You know, in that mode, it's more like, what are you seeking to achieve? Retain, engage, attract. Those are usually the core things that we're looking to do. How are you trying to do that today?

[00:18:43] You've probably got an incumbent system in there. It doesn't have the engagement you promised. That's probably because of all the communication challenges we've talked about because of the value distribution using vouchers that people don't really value. Then those vouchers expire. So your links value everywhere you look. Okay, when you travel, how do you pay for stuff with a card? Do you use your phone every day? Great. Do you think your employees use their phone every day? Yes. Brilliant. But when you tile that together,

[00:19:12] do you believe that if we can offer all your employees kind of cash back on a card that makes all their money go further, they will engage with that? Would you engage with that? And these are the, it becomes very obvious and intuitive. How do you measure something like this when it's a different mechanism than what they've used in the past, right? It's more than just adoption and usage. Like what KPIs do you see your clients kind of focusing in on these? Or does it depend on what they're trying to sort of accomplish culturally? Yeah.

[00:19:42] I mean, so engagement metrics are very key. So what portion of the workforce are adopting, but also the frequency of the use, how often are they using us? Because that's what really drives engagement, especially when you think about the purpose of rewarding recognition. So good rewarding recognition programs are seeking to build in cultural values over time. It's not a one and done, here are values, go live by them. You've got to consistently reinforce those. And so you need high frequency of use and adoption in order to be able to actually deliver

[00:20:11] the message you're trying to deliver. I've seen a number of employees who are using the platform, how often are they using the platform? And then bringing that back to the core metrics that the C-suite will care about, which is what is my reduction in attrition? Or if I'm an hour-based workforce, are people working more hours as a result of this? Do I have a drop in absenteeism? Do I need to have less cover, less agency cost? Tangible metrics that you can really track. And the data is there.

[00:20:40] You know the joiners, the movers, leaders within organization that allows you to track cohorts. Like what were they doing before? What are they doing after the implementation of the program? This site, that site, this office, that office. You can measure everything very granularly. And then the worked hours is very clear. In that hourly work, these solutions pan both salaried and hourly. But these are the core tangible things that you can then measure. And then you've got to bring it back to cost.

[00:21:10] So what is the cost of replacement in an organization? This is something you can work out with the finance team. I lose someone. What is my cost of hiring someone new? Ramping them, enabling them, getting them whatever laptop they need, whatever it is. You know, these are the costs that one build into understanding what that cost of replacement is. Yeah. There's two things I think I love about, two things I've picked up on from researching this is one, the real-time nature of this. Right in the past, like it was like, oh, go to a catalog and you can pick a thing or whatever.

[00:21:38] Now you can, if I understand correctly with FinTech, you can instantly give rewards to someone on the spot for their behavior or their actions. Is that right? A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. So you have a real-time capability. And then one of the things that you, that I'm still learning about, but this point about deferment, right? Like it's not compensation, so you're not paying that fully loaded cost, but you're still giving them some sort of award. That has to have a self-funding sort of element to it

[00:22:06] for some organizations at a certain size and volume, right? I mean, it could. Especially if you're delivering it on a tax-efficient basis. For every hundred grand you put through payroll, they're getting, you know, hundred grand of cost, 50 grand is making it to the workforce in aggregate, let's say. Right. But if you can do that on a tax-efficient basis, you're making a choice. Am I still putting a hundred grand through and they're getting all hundred? Or am I putting in 75 and they get 75? Right. And I'm making a 25K saving on that.

[00:22:34] So it just depends on the dynamic at play. But I think even beyond that, there's a material difference between getting something in the pace slip, which for better or worse, people don't check very much. Yeah. Yeah. And getting a buzz in your pocket because you've just been given a bunch of points. Yep. For free. And then that particular thing, whether you're buying next or you're setting your points for an occasion, you know,

[00:23:04] it becomes a very tangible and directly relatable reward associated with employment. What is the point in conversation full stop? It's to keep employees happy, working for you and working hard. That's the goal. So if you can do that with small gifts that makes them feel valued and important and does achieve those same goals, great to do that. Yeah. In the moment, in the flow of work. Yeah. I love it. One of the biggest things that I hear

[00:23:34] and when we're working with HR folks that are responsible for rewards and recognition programs is this feeling that there's never enough, right, to go around and maybe it goes back to the meaningful, right? Like, what does it cost me or how much do I have to pour into a program of points and things that will allow me to touch employees often enough and to touch enough employees so that it is meaningful and it's not just handed out to a select few or so infrequently

[00:24:04] that it really doesn't have, it doesn't drive the outcomes that you're looking for. Are you finding any, you know, kind of standards or best practices as far as how much is enough to actually incent regular behavior and touch a fair amount of the workforce? Yeah, I think it varies quite a lot by sector, by industry and by headcount. So, you'd be surprised at how little you need to budget

[00:24:33] to make a big difference, frankly, relative to the cost of compensation, you know, which is always the single largest expense for any business. You really don't need to put a lot through this to make a difference but I would, you know, when we build this out for our clients and we think like, what is an appropriate sizing for the workforce? You start with, okay, what do we want to do? We've got, 16 sites and we want to do employee of the month across five divisions in each of those sites and how much we're going to put through each employee month and then you've got employee of the week

[00:25:03] and then we're going to be employee of the quarter whenever it is and then we're going to have, we've got X number of managers and each manager has X number, Y number of employees or is it a sensible amount to budget for the manager? You're having conversations with managers, et cetera, you're looking at the salaries of the underlying folks and you can build out a pretty sensible structure quite quickly and there is always a component of testing on, right? So you're going to start with a certain budget to see how people move. Most important when you do this is to make sure that it's equitable. So usually people are trying to draw

[00:25:33] corporate values out of it and you want that to be evenly spread. So the MI that the central team gets back on the delivery and use of reward across different sites and managers needs to be quick, needs to be obvious and easy to accept so that then they can go to those managers and say, hey, look, Henry over here successfully managed to deploy his budget across the workforce. Yours is still stuck here. Why is that?

[00:26:01] And so there are components to that budgeting which are human and really what you're trying to do is make sure that all managers are stepping up and delivering that across the workforce. You know, if you want this to be engaging and meaningful, at some point in time you would like to think that HR organizations have similar meaningful, you know, kind of a budget allocation or a target or it's kind of well known that, yeah, well, this isn't just little tiny stuff anymore. This is, we are trying

[00:26:31] to meaningfully shift to a place where you have choices and it can be as meaningful as a merit budget or a bonus pool, right? Are you seeing a lot of behaviors that are that overtly, you know, kind of thinking about this in those terms? I think quite a lot of people start from a position of percentage of pay and they're thinking about budget and that is a fair approach but it also puts a lot of people off because any percentage of pay generally in an organization tends to be

[00:27:01] a very large amount and you're going to anyone for a budget which isn't exactly directly related to compensation. So the kind of more bottom-up approach of going, okay, how many managers, how many employees, what do we need, what is a, you know, is employee of the week, what is it, is it a coffee? Is it a lunch? You know? And you can kind of work up from that and where you do have tight budgets, it doesn't take a huge amount to make an impact actually because it's the sentiment of, oh, I've got something for free. Remarkable number

[00:27:30] of fairly well-off people will really try and optimize their points, you know? I mean, the entire credit card industry sort of survives on this really. At the end of the day, a lot of these people, does half a percent, one percent back mean anything really in their life? Probably not, but they care a lot, you know? And so, you don't need to do a ton to actually learn something which really moves the needle from the core matrix you care about. So James, one of the things

[00:28:00] that I love about following you, I would encourage everyone to follow James. He's got great, great insights on, you know, some of the tax incentives in the UK specifically that are available to employers to help employees, but that go completely overlooked or underutilized. And that is, you know, some things like pension salary sacrifice, cycle to work and electric vehicle arrangements, workplace nursery support, just some of that stuff I've seen you talk about. Tell me about that. Like, why do you think, is it just because people don't know or is it, like,

[00:28:30] what's the, how does that play into maximizing employee pay as well? It's fascinating. I mean, it really is. It's a very obvious thing to do. So your default pensions, for instance, are not optimized for what we call salary, salary exchanges. Basically, the employee and the employer both make a contribution to the pension, but instead of the employee making the contribution, which is subject to social security payments, the employer makes it

[00:29:00] and therefore it's exempt from social security payments, which we call national insurance. And there's a huge saving, you know, just this afternoon I was off a call with a client who stands to save about half a million pounds. And I think it's just been, it's overlooked because your default pensions don't do this. And for a lot of the other businesses, particularly those who maybe are less savvy about some of these things, they haven't kind of picked up on the savings that they can get.

[00:29:30] Beyond the pension, you're right, there's a lot of sort of incentives that the, over here that the government will do to try and promote certain things. So cycle to work is a big one. You can buy a bike before tax here. And that brings an advantage to the employer as well because again, they don't need to pay social security against the amount of the employee's pay, which is being used. Pete, interestingly, to the engagement topic and reward recognition, when you deliver

[00:30:00] information on the benefits, including these tax-sufficient benefits, which are going to save both the employee and the employer significant social security costs, everybody gets more bang for their buck when more people know about it. A card-based, fintech-enabled sort of solution that brings a high engagement allows anybody coming into the app to maybe trip over the benefits and suddenly say, oh, look, I've got a cycle to work. Oh, fantastic. I can optimize my pension. I can actually pay for my childcare out of gross pay.

[00:30:30] You know, there's a lot and that information advantage allows more people to take it up, which results in hard savings for both the employee and the employer and it becomes almost self-funding from that. Yeah, and I think it's great stuff and you give some great advice on how, I think you did one for your child starting school that you were showing online. I was like, man, why don't more people maybe know about that sort of thing? You know, I mean, imagine a lot do, but how many, right, go and leave that unchecked? I think that's, but how does an employer keep that from looking

[00:30:59] like some sort of base pay deferment or something, right? I mean, how do they keep it from appearing as though maybe it's some sort of a shell shift, right? Of, oh, I think some people are going to think that, right? Like, oh, yeah, sure, you're helping me get this thing, but are you taking it back from me in some other way in value? And I don't, you know, hopefully not, but how do you prevent that? Like, is it just about communication or is there more to it? I think it's about communication. I mean, so for some of it, it's really obvious, right? Like, so for the

[00:31:29] cycle to work scheme and the nursery scheme is actually just not even social security is actually taxed they're saving. You know, it's unequivocal. Like, you will save income tax and there is an understanding amongst the workforce, therefore, that that is definitely something which they are getting direct benefit from, isn't it? Yeah. With respect to some of the others, yeah, I'd agree there can be a question. So if I take our own sort of example, if we go and do something to sort of optimize a pension,

[00:31:59] there can be skepticism. Okay, you're telling me I save money, but why are they doing it? Yeah. And the answer to that is, be honest, they're saving money too, but they're reinvesting a bunch of that money back into a benefits platform for you. And this is what it is. And then you can just explain the dynamics, even if your delivery of benefits is a selfish decision from the employer as well, because they see better retention, faster time to hire,

[00:32:29] and more engagement at work, which yields a result for them. So just, I want to, man, I could keep asking you questions, but I've got a few more here to wrap this up. But like, how do you separate a very employee centered program for reward and recognition from something that is really just going to drive platform engagement, right? We want more than just them touching fintech in this case. How do you balance that so that it is, you know, the program is delivering value and not just driving adopters to the platform itself?

[00:32:59] Is measurement of the core, the core metrics you care about? Are they all engaged? Great. Am I getting the results that I want out of that then? So can I see that this cohort who have taken the platform are staying for longer than the cohort who haven't taken the platform, right? Can I see that the cohort A-B test? Exactly. That's literally it. And we track this every month. Every month we look on a trailing 12 month basis across the clients. What is the what are the

[00:33:29] joiners, leaders, leaders, what do those metrics look like and what is the percentage that you see? So that's fundamentally what you do. Just tangible metrics. Isn't it the theme of everything even as AI starts to move into our space, right? There's usage or consumption like how often are they engaging with the platform which is not necessarily and you measure that and it's not necessarily the same or equal to the outcome or the value that you're looking for, right? And at some point in time you know the

[00:33:58] whole exercise is to correlate those two and make sure that you're getting usage isn't just usage it's usage equal to value. Absolutely. How do you keep this fair, trusted, inclusive, all of that? Is that really come down to like your corporate culture and execution of this or like is there guardrails that you can build in as an employer to make sure that fintech in this context is going to be fair for everyone? So you've got to make it available to everyone firstly.

[00:34:28] Communicate it properly, make sure that everybody knows about it. If you've got a distributed workforce that's often the challenge, how do we reach them, how do we talk about it? So whatever tools you can think of, I had a good one the other day about a transport business that actually put an air freshener in the cab of all of the trucks with a QR code. So every truck is kind of getting in there and scanning the QR code and discovering their benefits that way. So be creative, think outside the box. How do you communicate with your staff?

[00:34:58] I don't know, I'm just off the cuff. I'm just thinking maybe if you've got engineers put it in the toolbox and do QR code on the toolbox. Do you find employers communicating through your app? I do find that personally across a lot of solutions that were not really meant for that, but because they are touching pay or time or something that the employee needs to be associated with on a daily basis for their role, I find communications now coming through those means that weren't in the past really the way they were communicating. Yeah, I mean,

[00:35:27] that is a service that we do, right? It came out actually, it evolved from the call service. We didn't start there. We didn't design it that way. We're not trying. That's kind of my point. I've seen a couple of solutions say, hey, we've had to turn on these really advanced collaboration capabilities because we just had so much demand for people communicating through the app. a lot of it front line sort of types, but it makes a lot of sense, right? It's where they live. It's where they're at. You know, you're paying for stuff every day in this app.

[00:35:57] You're getting to the app every day. You've got your notifications on in the app because you want to see those card payments coming in. So, sure, like, why shouldn't that be the communication channel for anything else? It's very effective. Yeah. And so, yeah, so that's exactly right. It's that WhatsApp for business and WhatsApp point I was making earlier. It's kind of like, go where they live, go where they are now, you know, and build a channel that they will use

[00:36:26] and engage with all the time. Yeah, I love it. You guys got some great metrics coming out of there, man. So, congratulations. I want to ask you one closing thing. So, if an employer was in a position right now where maybe they're struggling with their reward recognition, need to modernize, whatever, what's kind of like three things you would tell them to do in the next 90 days to get themselves to a better place with that? I mean, fundamentally, it comes down to ease of use, choice, and value that they're going to get out of the program. Ease of use is very, very important. So, if you need to modernize the program,

[00:36:56] you need to find something that they can access immediately when they want it in the moment that they want it. But us and what I've seen work, that is the mobile phone and we tie it with a card. Choice, is the concept that whatever they are trying to do, they have options that meet them. So that could be instead of it being vouchers at Amazon, it's priced a card that can spend anywhere.

[00:37:25] And then value because whatever it is that they are seeking to achieve out of that purchase or whatever journey that they're on, they care about that and then they see that in their everyday life. So when you're trying to modernize a reward and recognition program, I would really focus on the tooling that you are using to be able to communicate to staff, make sure that it's easy for them to get access to it, and then set in motion the core structural

[00:37:55] things within the management of the program that allow it to be equitable and properly executed. So that is making sure you've got the management information to understand, is it being used, who's using it well and who isn't using it well? That's particularly at the manager level. You've really got to get those managers on board and then the moment you see that that site isn't performing as well as this site, then you're on it and you're having a conversation and you're making sure that you're reinforcing it. So it's that visibility and making sure you've really got that data coming

[00:38:25] back to you as a program manager and being proactive in rectifying where you see it going well. And adoption muscle, right? If it's not adopted and used but managers don't know when to put things out there, then nobody's using nothing. I love it. Well, James, look, man, thank you so much for joining us and look, man, congrats on all the success. I mean, from what I've seen of what you guys are doing, it's really cool. It's really piqued my interest. I've written an article about it as part of a four-part series with HR executive that's running around right now.

[00:38:54] But where can folks connect with you and maybe find you on the road? Absolutely. So I'm on LinkedIn, James Gosney. Cheers to that anymore. James. Gosney at aslan.io or you can just go to our website and pop into the book meeting and you'll find us on there as well. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much as always. I really appreciate it and thank you so much to the audience and always we'll be back with more content very, very soon.