Healthier financial lives for nurses

Today, the average cost of living for a single person in the US is $36,672. While licensed practical nurses’ and nursing assistants' salaries are $48,500 and $30,720, respectively, this leaves little room to have children, care for dependent relatives, or even afford much of a holiday.

Health care organizations provide their employees with some of the best medical and financial support, including savings management retirement (SMART) training, wellness programs, and tuition assistance. But, less than half of their healthcare professionals take it. However, these instruments are available for nurses to access fair and healthy financial conditions.

Why are nurses missing these opportunities? Is it the little awareness that they exist? Perhaps the lack of time to understand how they work? Or simply too many platforms to manage? We dug a little deeper.

Key findings

To find out more about how nurses approach their finances, we interviewed three registered healthcare professionals from a local hospital and found the following:

 • None of the nurses use financial apps or advisors to manage their finances outside their mobile banking.

 • The only communications they receive from their banks are one to two emails/month with statements and the occasional fraud alert.

 • All respondents claim to use 401k but do not have enough money saved to retire.

 • All healthcare professionals interviewed believe employers should provide financial support and are interested in daily reminders, financial coaching, and a holistic view of their spending.

Nurses are working 40-hour weeks, if not longer, in high-intensity roles, making burnout the number one reason for leaving the profession. Their priorities to save lives provide enough of a mental toll before it comes to monitoring multiple applications and company pages for potential benefits and cost savings.

So how can employers (hospitals, surgeries, and in-home care practices) provide meaningful financial support in a simple, effective way?

Recognizing nurses' individual financial needs

Nursing institutions are opening their eyes to new relationships with banks and fintech companies to see their workers on an individual basis and support them with their specific financial needs.

Imagine if you were a healthcare professional and your employer automatically gave you an advance paycheck to pay off the loan for your car that broke down last month? Or, a bonus for consistently working 35-40 hour weeks for three months? Maybe they could even help you save money with daily reminders, so you don’t have to work overtime to advance your financial goals?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way banks, corporations, and people can look at their data to improve their financial lives. By taking a holistic view of spending categories over periods, AI can calculate patterns to identify potential cost savings and share best practices based on the individual.

One nurse states: “A lot of nurses I know will get coffee on the way to work, buy breakfast and lunch at the canteen, and perhaps a snack to keep them going on long shifts. If we could see how much we were spending in a particular area, it might give us a better opportunity to understand our financial behavior.”

AI dashboards that connect company reward schemes with employees’ salaries, hours of work, spending capabilities, and responsibilities could provide nurses with the benefits they need at the right time. When the dashboard is powered with conversational AI, the support could be as simple as a morning reminder – “Hey, did you pack your lunch today?” – to an appraisal for recognizing their achievements – “You’ve worked really hard this week. Is it time for a day off?”

Nurses interviewed felt they did not have proper insight into the money they could save by minimizing burnout. Providing a holistic approach to financial management could give healthcare professionals a perspective on the pattern between hours worked, money spent, and their savings abilities.

Healthcare professionals can then also set savings goals and use AI to calculate how many months it would take, along with daily tips to help them reach their goals quicker. This way, there is less pressure to work extra hours, and nurses can enjoy a better work-life balance.

How does it work?

The BOND Network is a collaboration of partners from banks, to fintechs, and corporations whereby all members share their expertise, products, and commitments to improve the financial lives of their teams.

BOND.AI provides a BOND Account to all their partners in The BOND Network using their AI-powered, state-of-the-art Empathy Engine® to create realistic consumer profiles, offer personalized financial solutions, and advise the end consumers. Here’s what it looks like:

 • When a nursing employer joins The BOND Network, each of their employees will receive a physical and digital BOND card in the hospital’s or organization’s branding. Similar to a debit card, nurses can transfer as much or as little of their salary to their company-branded BOND account as they choose, add it to their digital wallets, or withdraw money from ATMs. The difference is its integration with the corporation’s benefits and how its usage creates points and rewards for the nurse/employee.

 • Each nurse with a BOND card will have a BOND score based on their financial health (income, outgoings, and spending categories). It is up to each employee to decide how much information to share. Nurses that use their company BOND card for spending can set savings goals and use their mobile dashboard to see patterns in their financial behavior. Powered by conversational AI, they can also receive small daily actions to help them reach their savings goals quicker.

 • Its simple digital onboarding functionality is completable in less than two minutes, with a walk-through of the dashboard and benefits available to each nurse.

 • Through their corporate-branded BOND platform, employers can communicate company-wide with their nurses via the chatbot feature and choose to overlay existing or additional services such as wellness programs, insurance, and tuition support.

 • Via application programming interfaces (APIs), employers joining the BOND Network can provide banking services to their nurses in one platform while bringing new customers to existing banks in the network. In addition, their nurses receive free financial advice, recommendations, and knowledge sharing to improve spending habits (and support in understanding their corporation's existing products too).

When it comes to providing the nations with healthier lives, nurses are the ones on call. Employers recognize their value but have struggled to find a meaningful financial support and recognition program. Using AI they can bring together nurses' work commitments, salary, and financial needs to offer advice and rewards in one user-friendly platform. Nurses can reem the benefits, gain personalized support, and make realistic saving plans so they can live healthier financial lives.

Read our blog post ‘Beyond the paycheck’ to find out what other companies are doing.

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