Stories
Nick Lawlor is a believer in preparation and detail: “It reduces the chances of losing,” he laughs.
A keen marathon runner, Lawlor has completed four events in Dublin and one in Berlin. His time in the 2022 Dublin Marathon was impressive – two hours and forty-six minutes, something he attributes to his efforts in training.
He takes a similar approach to his work in financial education and advice for employees. And that business has just experienced a significant sea change.
Lawlor’s company, Employee Financial Wellness (EFW), has just become part of UK-based Wealth At Work, a group that allows employers offer financial wellness programmes through digital communications, financial education, guidance, and advice to their employees.
Lawlor closed the deal two days after finishing the Dublin Marathon at the start of last November. However, he has waited until now to announce the deal publicly, 12 months after he began working on it.
Financial wellness is a fast-growing area that Lawlor believes will become part of the basic toolkit of employers who want to give their employees the financial skills to make the right decisions about savings, pensions, investments, mortgages, and other areas such as company share options. With the macro environment hardening through rising inflation and interest rates, personal finance is more than ever a source of stress for workers.
Lawlor wants EFW to be number one in a sector that in many ways is still only emerging in Ireland.
But how will he do it? And will the UK deal accelerate his plans?
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The new owner of EFW, Wealth at Work, employs 300 people in Britain. It is an impressive business delivering financial education and guidance at scale. It works with hundreds of leading firms such as BT, Experian, and global chemical company INEOS, while it is also the trustee of many occupational pension schemes.
It has raised millions of pounds to develop its services and expand its business. In June 2021 New York-based investment firm Aquiline Capital Partners took a stake in the business, joining Equistone Partners Europe which invested in 2015. The business is led by David Cassidy, who retains a significant shareholding in the company and has more than 30 years of experience in the financial advice and investment management sector. He was chief executive of Nelson Money Managers Plc for 20 years until 2003, building the business up into a firm giving financial advice to 20,000 employees of large organisations and managing over £1 billion.
After Nelson was bought, he worked for JP Morgan, establishing a UK advisory business called JP Morgan Invest which launched in 2005. The financial crash meant JP Morgan had more to worry about, so Cassidy led an MBO of this business in 2009. The origins of Wealth at Work can be traced back to this business. Announcing the deal with EFW, Cassidy described the combined firms as planning to offer companies a one-stop shop for financial wellness solutions including digital communications, financial education, guidance, and regulated financial advice”.
He added: “This is particularly important given so many large tech companies are based in this area with other offices in Europe and across the continent. This allows us to really expand upon our already existing global reach to meet the increasing demand from existing clients who are global employers”
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Employee Financial Wellness has been working with Wealth at Work since early 2021 when they worked together on a contract to provide their services to a big international bank with operations in Britain and Ireland. The bank had 800 people in Ireland alone, so Wealth at Work asked EFW to team up with to work on this contract here. “This became a pilot,” Lawlor said.
EFW knew how to deliver financial wellness programmes with an Irish voice that was cognisant of local tax rates, pension rules, employee concerns and so on. “We really started hitting it off with Wealth at Work,” Lawlor said. “We shared the same values. We believe you only say things you would tell a family member and they have the same approach.”
When Covid-19 travel restrictions were lifted, Cassidy and his team said they’d like to fly to Dublin to meet EFW. “They’d done a lot of background checking on us and our business model already,” Lawlor said. “They asked us to tell them about the business and where the challenges are.”
Listening to Cassidy and his team, Lawlor realised that they had already solved most of the problems he was faced with. “They built their business from five people to where they are today,” Lawlor said. “The first part of their journey was like where we are today. But they had the roadmap. Where we are now, they have been already,” Lawlor said.
“Our aspiration is to grow the business and we want to condense the roadmap they have been on into the next five or six years. We know the market is there and the cost of living crisis – bad as it is for individuals – means we are more needed. There is a groundswell among employees talking to their employers about what they can do.”
Wealth at Work has invested millions in the technology behind its product which EFW can tap into. “We are now part of a group of 350 people,” Lawlor said. “So, we will be able to leverage all that knowledge and talent.”
EFW has already won big contracts with international firms like LinkedIn and Sisk. However, being part of Wealth at Work means both firms can bid for larger contracts with global companies that want to ensure that all their employees have access to the same quality of benefits. “A lot of employers have employees on both sides of the water, so they needed a partner, and so did we,” Lawlor said.
EFW, he said, aims to educate entire workforces about how to deal with money better. “Our end goal is to try and improve the employee financial literacy levels of the entire organisation,” Lawlor said.
On April 2, 2022, Wealth at Work and EFW were ready to exchange contracts but, as there was a regulated advice part to their business, they needed to wait until the autumn before they had Central Bank of Ireland approval to close the deal. EFW employs 20 people, but Lawlor said he expected this would increase by a multiple in the coming years.
The business works with clients in both the public and private sectors. Most of the work it does is around financial education teaching employees about personal finance concepts and explaining and sign-posting benefits that their employers may already offer them, but they may not have availed of. EFW also provides regulated financial advice if needed. “In some cases, people want regulated financial advice,” Lawlor said. “It is about 5 or 6 per cent of the people who come onto our programmes so we will do that too.”
In time EFW would like to be able to manage wealth as well. In Britain, Wealth at Work manages about £4 billion, so it already knows this market.
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Nick Lawlor has seen firsthand the strain that money can put people under. He studied international business in DIT and spent a few years travelling in Australia and New Zealand with Áine – his then-girlfriend, now his wife – before getting his first job in finance. The position was in global settlements with Citi, but Lawlor realised he wanted to interact with people too. He studied to become a qualified financial advisor and got a job in the financial planning group Cornmarket in 2006, where he stayed until 2011.
“It was my first exposure to financial advice and I realised I liked it,” he said. In 2011 he started his own company called Lawlor Financial Planning, and obtained regulation in 2012. Lawlor had now qualified as a certified financial planner in UCD so he started to build up a business advising individuals on financial services. Ireland was in the middle of a financial crash and hundreds of thousands of people were buckling under the strain of too much debt.
Lawlor was dealing with all kinds of issues and he could see how closely having issues with money was linked to problems with mental health. In 2014 Lawlor decided to team up with Ross Maguire, a barrister, who had founded New Beginnings in 2011 to help people and businesses deal with their debts. Lawlor co-founded a new division in this business to give financial advice to people. “The mantra was, let’s see if we can fix the past, but plan for the future, was the model,” he said.
New Beginnings had a lot of clients because of the scale of the crisis, and Lawlor found a lot of his time was spent listening to people’s stories of how financial problems were impacting their lives and their families.
“People were coming in with overwhelming stories,” Lawlor said. “They were distressed. Their best plans and dreams had fallen apart and my job was to help them. I saw first hand how money can negatively impact your life.”
Listening to these stories and trying to figure out solutions, started Lawlor thinking about how poorly people were educated about how to handle their money. “A (financial) product provider’s job is to get more money into the product,” Lawlor said. “But I thought, where is the bit where the person is at the centre and we give them the tools to be able to plan for future events.”
In 2017 Lawlor launched Employee Financial Wellness to address this need. He asked two former colleagues in Cornmarket called Kieran Ward and Mark O’Grady to help him get this business going. O’Grady is in charge of the regulated advice part of the business while Ward is in charge of working with public sector clients. Maguire was involved with the company, but he has exited post the Wealth at Work deal. Lawlor continued to add qualifications including completing a masters in the University of Galway in workplace wellness.
“We wanted to be able to look at the world of work and link it to health and wellbeing,” Lawlor said. “We know there is a mass absence of any education around personal finance and this is linked to mental health and wellbeing. In school, we teach people about what an oxbow lake is but we don’t teach them about how a pension or a mortgage works. This lack of education needs to be fixed by education.”
Now backed by Wealth at Work, Lawlor believes EFW is ready to grow. It is open to acquisitions, but most of its growth will be organic. It employs 20 people, and in the next six months expects to make more key hires, and then build teams around them. “We are ready to build,” Lawlor said.
“I think by the end of the decade financial well-being will be a standard benefit among many employers,” he said. “I think financial education will be present in the workplace in the same way health insurance or a pension plan is. Most companies will offer it, and the demand among employees is only going to grow.”
