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April 25, 2024
Christian Mango serves as the president of Financial Fitness for Life (FF4L). He has 26 years of financial services industry experience, having held senior sales roles at BlackRock, Amundi Pioneer Investments, Touchstone Investments, Natixis Global Associates and Citigroup Global Asset Management. Christian earned a BA in Economics from Lehigh University and an MBA from Boston College. He has authored and been featured in numerous articles about financial wellness and was named one of the defined contribution industry’s top wholesalers by the National Association of Plan Advisors (NAPA) in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. He is also a member of the Forbes Business Council.
FF4L is an award-winning financial wellness solution that couples personalized financial coaching with best-in-class technology. Their innovative approach to financial wellness leverages the scalability of technology with the proven efficacy of in-person or virtual coaching. This powerful combination has helped improving employees’ financial health and well-being in a material, substantive and measurable ways. The FF4L team understands the value of financial wellness and how it can be used as a transformative business solution.
FF4L began as a retirement plan participant education solution. The company originally focused on basic retirement savings education, such as helping participants understand their retirement plan, how much they needed to save, and what an appropriate allocation of their investments looked like. Over the years, FF4L realized that they needed to help participants with more than just retirement-related education. A significant number of participants needed help with basic financial planning education: budgeting, managing debt, being able to absorb financial shocks, and staying on track to meet financial goals. From those fundamental needs grew FF4L.
“Retirement is one piece of the financial wellness puzzle and failure to address some of the more immediate financial concerns may actually undermine efforts to better prepare employees for retirement,” explained Christian.
FF4L now provides comprehensive financial wellness coaching that engages employees at every touch point throughout the employee lifecycle and ultimately provides better outcomes for employees. That, in turn, can have a positive impact on a business’ bottom line.
Employers who embrace holistic and comprehensive financial wellness solutions typically see:
Multiple surveys have shown that employees who are offered financial wellness solutions are markedly happier, healthier, more engaged and more productive.
FF4L’s innovative approach to financial wellness coaching delivers higher levels of participant engagement and improves employees’ financial health and well-being in a material and substantial way. Because the FF4L team employs a number of different methods and resources to engage employees, they are truly able to meet plan participants where they are and how they want it. FF4L goes beyond education by helping employees take meaningful and measurable action in support of their goals.
“Our solution is built to allow for a high-level of customization. The goal is to configure the solution to align with the needs of our partners and clients and to create the most relevant and personalized experience for employees. This flexibility allows employers to connect our solution to their organizational and human capital goals as well as their culture and mission and can have a measurable impact on an organization’s bottom line,” says Christian.
The average American worker is under a tremendous amount of financial stress, and that’s having a significant impact on American businesses. The Society of Human Resource Management now estimates that financial stress, aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, is the leading cause of lost productivity, unplanned absences, lower job performance and greater distractions among employees.1
“Employers are looking for help in meeting employees’ needs and are turning towards financial wellness solutions like ours to support employees’ holistic wellbeing,” asserts Christian.
As demand for comprehensive financial wellness solutions has grown, FF4L has been able to pivot, adapt and move quickly to embrace new challenges and opportunities. Timing plays an essential role in the growth trajectory of the business.
“Timing! Timing is everything. Sometimes you’re too early and sometimes you’re too late. They key is to identify the market need, create the vision, create the mission, build the processes to deliver on those, and then be ready for the opportunity the market thrusts upon you,” explained Christian.
Christian emphasizes that having a strong team with the right people who can execute on the FF4L mission has been critical to their success. Guided by a solid vision, the team is able to deliver a consistently high level of excellence with the dedication, commitment and perseverance that their clients expect and deserve.
As a testament to Christian and his team’s success, FF4L has been featured in the “30 fastest-growing companies” issue.
“As we grow, we’ll continue to invest in our team and our people. They are at the core of our unique value proposition and are what separates us from our competitors. At the same time, we will continue to leverage technology to help us better scale our solution to continue to automate processes, simplify workloads, and ultimately reach more people,” states Christian.
Digitalization is the key. Not only is technology more accessible, but it has allowed FF4L to capture a tremendous amount of data. That data enables FF4L to personalize financial wellness to the individual employee…providing curated messaging, content and action steps. That personalization is critical to Improving employee financial well-being.
