Candidly Introduces Benefits-Aware Financial Guidance for Employees

The AI-native platform now offers personalized financial guidance that draws on an employee's specific benefits, pay, and debt, delivered through its conversational AI, Cait.

NEW YORK, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Candidly, the AI-native financial guidance and technology platform, today announced a new employee-facing offering: benefits-aware financial guidance that provides the workforce with holistic financial guidance grounded in their own finances and the benefits they are already offered. The solution expands Candidly's employer-sponsored benefits suite, which to date has centered on student debt and college planning, and now spans an employee's broader financial life.

Employers invest heavily in benefits, but many go underutilized due to low awareness and the need for personalized, holistic guidance to fully understand and take advantage of the full suite of benefits their employer is offering. Making the most of these benefits is rarely a matter of maximizing one piece in isolation — retirement contributions, health savings, equity compensation, and debt repayment all draw from the same paycheck and interact in ways that are hard for any one person to figure out on their own. That complexity has a real cost: each year, about 34% of employees forfeit their employer 401(k) match, and the average family HSA holder falls nearly $4,700 short of their account's contribution limit, leaving that portion of their available tax advantage unused.

"The 99% deserve the same level of care devoted to the 1%. The wealthy have long had experts dedicated to untangling the complexity of their finances; everyone else has been left to figure out how their 401(k), HSA, equity, and debt all fit together on their own. We are thrilled to launch personalized, holistic, and actionable guidance, that is benefits-aware, to improve financial outcomes for all," said Laurel Taylor, Founder and CEO of Candidly. "Our agentic capabilities essentially bring a virtual roundtable of subject matter experts to serve each and every employee, at scale, in a real-time conversation with precise, deterministic computation and calculation across both sides of the balance sheet."

The new offering draws on an employee's own data, including payroll, benefits enrollment, the employer program design and plan design documents, subject to applicable permissions and authorizations, so its guidance reflects what each person is actually eligible for and adapts as their circumstances change. Rather than optimizing each benefit in isolation, it works across an employee's full financial life, connecting benefits, savings, and debt into a single, personalized financial guidance experience.

Employees navigate the platform with Cait, Candidly's Conversational AI Tool, that works through financial questions and planning considerations in plain language and draws on dynamic interactive visualizations and custom dashboards to forecast progress, compare scenarios, and track goals over time. The offering is designed to support greater awareness and actionability across existing benefits, reduce the routine benefits questions employers field, and deliver personalized financial guidance and planning tools to every employee.

Capabilities

The offering includes nine capabilities that provide guidance across both the assets and liabilities sides of the personal balance sheet, covering a broad range  of employees' financial lives:

• Understand benefits: benefits guidance across the employer's plan documents, so guidance reflects actual eligibility
• Navigate education costs: student debt management and college planning
• Manage daily finances: budgeting, account guidance, and debt management across credit cards, mortgage, auto, and personal loans
• Build for the future: retirement planning, employer equity plans, 529 plans and 530a Trump Accounts.

Candidly makes these capabilities available to partners that use them to power financial experiences for their own customers, and is now packaging them into a holistic offering that employers can provide directly to employees.

Availability

The benefits-aware financial guidance offering will be available to employers this fall. To learn more, visit https://getcandidly.com/benefits-aware-financial-guidance/.

Candidly provides financial education, guidance, and planning tools. Candidly does not provide tax, legal, investment, or other financial advice or recommend specific investments or financial products. Individuals should consult their own tax, legal, and financial advisors regarding their specific circumstances.

About Candidly

Candidly is the category-defining AI-native financial guidance platform that delivers holistic financial guidance to employees through employers, financial institutions, and workplace service providers. Founded in 2016, the company's mission is to help hardworking Americans move beyond debt, into wellness and ultimately wealth through comprehensive, holistic, and personalized digital experiences. Through these partnerships, Candidly is positioned to serve 1 in 2 U.S. workers.

Candidly is backed by leading venture capital and strategic investors including Altos Ventures, Breton Capital, Cercano Management, Rethink Impact, Salesforce Ventures, and several additional notable investors. For more information, visit www.getcandidly.com.

SOURCE Candidly