Emerging Opportunity

About this series

In 2022 alone, an estimated 97 zettabytes of data were created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide, a more-than ten-fold increase from just ten years ago. A single zettabyte is one trillion gigabytes or approximately equivalent to the amount of data you would need to stream Netflix in Ultra HD for 16 million years. The colossal and growing corpus of data across all facets of life is shifting both opportunities and risks for workers. We now have better information on workers’ needs, enabling tailored benefit offerings, greater interoperability between service providers, and more avenues for workers to make use of what’s available to them. But as data on workers gathers into richer digital profiles and identities, the potential for harm grows. New technologies may improve worker financial security, but employers must remain cautiously optimistic, considering use of these tools critically and thoughtfully to ensure that they deliver on their promises of increased opportunity, wealth, and wellbeing for workers.

In this context, Aspen Digital hosted a series of workshops in early 2023 on the impacts of introducing tech tools into the services and products that employers offer to a variety of workers such as gig, hourly, undocumented, and salaried workers in an effort to support their financial wellness, both today and in the decade to come. These conversations brought together leaders from the U.S. and Europe in worker financial security, employer-offered services, and labor relations to discuss tech trends, potential opportunities, and needed alignments. We explored the intersections of topics like access to earnings, savings, and loans with personalization, alternative data sources, privacy, and worker governance.

The result is this three-part series detailing the state of current interventions, possible intersections between emerging technologies and financial wellbeing, and forward-looking insights from experts in the field. These insights culminate in a guide for HR professionals, which includes key questions to help employers navigate how to decide when and if to adopt new technologies to support their workers’ financial security, with an eye toward ethics and privacy.

AuthorS

Morgan McMurray, Shanthi Bolla, & B Cavello