Whether your financial institution is offering an in-house Health Savings Account (HSA) solution or you’re partnering with a third-party administrator, it’s important to reassess that relationship annually. You want to make sure you’re offering the most competitive, profitable HSA solution possible. You also want to ensure your HSA is a quality offering that your own employees would use and you want it to reflect positively on your brand. 

If you’re in the process of evaluating the efficacy of your HSA solution, use these three critical questions to assess whether it’s working or if it’s time to find a new partner.

Question one: Do your internal employees use your in-house HSA?

If your financial institution offers its employees an HSA, is it an in-house direct deposit account (DDA) HSA product or are you contracting with a third party administrator? 

Most financial institutions outsource their HSA needs to a third-party administrator because they have realized offering an in-house DDA solution can cause increased workloads for their HR, operations, and support departments. Additionally, the DDA solution often lacks meaningful features like easy-to-use dashboards for employees and administrators, investments, and insurance claims integration, and is a less-than-ideal offering as an employee benefit.

If you’re not offering a popular and competitive HSA product, it won’t be an effective recruitment and retention tool. So, if as a financial institution, you’ve decided to outsource your HSA benefit to a third party administrator in order to provide your employees with an effective product, that is completely understandable. But, it also means that you are sending deposits, the net interest margin on those deposits, interchange revenue, and other fee revenue away from your institution while also paying a third party administrator fees to do on top of it.

However, there is another option. If you partner with an HSA provider like Lively, you can offer a co-branded HSA solution that takes advantage of Lively’s popular, easy-to-use platform. Lively uses proprietary technology to customize its HSA plans for employers and financial institution partners. Lively’s partners get access to a cutting-edge mobile app, co-branded debit cards, and streamlined dashboards for both account holders and administrators. In addition, Lively handles employee, customer and account holder onboarding and education. 

Partnering with Lively enables your financial institution to retain all of the deposits as core assets on your books. You earn 100% of net interest margin revenue with no basis point sharing, 100% of net interchange revenue, plus all fixed fee revenue. You also get to take advantage of a competitive third-party product that will support retention and recruitment efforts. 

Question two: Which HSA solution are your existing customers using?

Approximately 53% of private sector employees are enrolled in an HSA-eligible High Deductible Health Plan. So, if you offer an in-house HSA solution or you’re partnered with a third-party HSA administrator, statistically speaking, a majority of your business customers should be offering your HSA product to their employees. If that’s not the case, then your institution is missing out on deposits, interchange and fixed fee revenue, and cross-selling opportunities. In addition, your business customers are developing a relationship with another financial institution which could inevitably take their entire business since SMEs prefer to bank in one spot.

If you’re not already capturing (and retaining) your customers’ HSA business, it’s time to reevaluate the product you’re offering. By partnering with an HSA administrator like Lively, you get a co-branded solution that is well-designed and comes with all of the popular HSA features your commercial customers look for, such as co-branded debit cards, an easy-to-use mobile app, dashboards for both account holders and administrators, and account investment options with no minimum balance. Lively also has top-rated, expert, in-house customer service.

By partnering with Lively, you make it easy for your sales team to bring those business accounts that are going elsewhere for their HSA back to your financial institution, strengthen your relationship, and increase your profit and revenue streams. 

Question three: Is your HSA helping you improve your prospecting to gain new commercial and retail customers? 

A competitive, co-branded HSA solution isn’t just for existing customers. It can help your institution bring in new relationships, as well. Whether targeting commercial or retail, you can use HSAs as a door opener, especially because 53% of private sector employees are already enrolled in HSA-eligible health plans. By partnering with Lively to offer a co-branded solution, you can reclaim deposits, interchange, fee revenue, and relationships that currently sit with another financial institution.

A Lively partnership can be an additional selling point when prospecting new commercial and retail relationships for your financial institution. Offering an HSA complements the products your bank-at-work teams, treasury officers, lending staff, and other commercial and retail customer-facing teams are selling, creating a more comprehensive package. These teams can leverage Lively’s co-branded marketing materials to stay top of mind with prospects by providing a new way to engage through employee benefits. This approach complements financial wellness needs within overall employee benefits packages, making your institution a full bundled product provider.

Through a Lively co-branded HSA, you can develop a relationship with your customers’ employees to open up potential cross-selling opportunities for your retail banking products.

Lively provides your sales team with co-branded enablement materials, support, and HSA expertise. In addition, Lively offers staff training and customer onboarding, so your teams can start marketing and selling HSAs faster.

Lively’s dedicated inside sales team can also support your sales teams to close deals by serving as your in-house HSA experts. That way your financial institution can focus on selling all of the other banking products and services your teams specialize in without the minutiae of HSA sales cycles taking up time and priority. 

Unlike many other third-party administrators, Lively is not simply selling your institution software nor expecting your team to become HSA experts and sell against all of the other competing solutions in the marketplace. That’s Lively’s job. We leverage our expertise where it’s relevant, and pair it with your expertise with all of your customers and prospects within your footprint.  The Lively partnership is designed to be just that – a partnership. We’re helping financial institutions all over the country “out-national the locals” with our industry-leading HSA platform capabilities and “out-local the nationals” with your financial institution’s physical presence, connections, relationships, and brand familiarity.

Get started with Lively

With a Lively partnership, you are the custodian of your HSAs. You hold the deposits, collect fee and interchange revenue, and we take care of the rest. We handle risk mitigation and compliance support, plan administration including onboarding, customer support, account management, tax reporting, internal partner enablement and staff education.

We price our partnership solution so that financial institutions get the greatest ROI on their HSA. Our fee schedules are clear, transparent, and include no hidden fees.

Our HSA is also a top-rated product that has been expressly designed with account holders and administrators in mind. It includes a mobile app, account holder and employer dashboards for easy account management, two different investment accounts as well as a savings account option, debit cards and unparalleled customer service for both employers and account holders. If you’re ready to stop giving away control of your commercial relationships, grow your deposits, strengthen your prospecting, and generate additional revenue, reach out today.