Why women like Karen Biddle Andres won’t stop fighting for financial inclusion

Continuing our series on women changemakers for #WHM, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Karen Biddle Andres , Director of Impact Strategy and Project Director of the Retirement Savings Initiative at the Aspen Institute. Not only do I deeply admire Karen’s work in the #retirementsavings space, I also consider her a friend, and it’s my genuine pleasure to share some of her work—including the Collaborative for Equitable Retirement Savings.

Ever since I’ve known Karen, she has been fighting for financial inclusion. She started her career as a bilingual financial educator, working at the grassroots level to provide people with more information about 401(k) plans in both English and Spanish. Reflecting back on that time, she says: “In factories, hotels, and meatpacking plants, I met workers trying to manage their financial lives with a hodgepodge of tools. People knew they needed to save for retirement—but they also needed access to checking accounts, emergency savings, credit, and insurance—and none of it was easy.”

After seeing the extent of financial exclusion in this country, Karen felt compelled to do more. Today, she leads a variety of initiatives to make financial security for households in America a top national priority. As such, she’s a widely recognized leader in the retirement savings space. I asked Karen to share what motivates her to keep working so hard on these huge challenges.

“Given that retirement savings represent the second largest source of household wealth in America,” Karen says, “we simply can’t close any of the wealth gaps (racial, gender, geographic, or generational) without continued progress in creating more inclusive and effective retirement savings.”

So how can we do that? According to Karen, we need to work collaboratively across the financial ecosystem, focusing on public-private partnerships, and prioritize these 3 things:

1.?????Expand access to automatic enrollment to the 57 million workers who currently can’t save for retirement at work [1]. Automatic enrollment into workplace retirement savings has proven to be the most effective way to help workers to save and get low-cost, high-quality access to capital markets.

2.?????Ensure that everyone in America has access to “match” money that can help grow savings balances. For example, the inclusion of the refundable savers match in SECURE 2.0 is an innovative way to fuel the accounts of lower income workers.

3.?????Make sure workplace retirement savings accounts work for those who do have access to them. For instance, through the Aspen Institute’s Collaborative for Equitable Retirement Savings, plan sponsors can seek to connect 401(k) transactional data with employee demographic data to create an anonymous, public database that can illuminate exactly why women and workers of color are ending up with lower retirement savings balances, even when controlling for income. Is it opt-out rates? Equity exposure? Loans? Hardship withdrawals? Getting the data is the first step—and then there will be actions to take. Per Karen, if you work for a plan sponsor, record keeper, asset manager, RIA, or other organization that would like to participate, you can go to?www.cfers.org?to learn more and help make the defined contribution system a driver of equitable wealth building.

Thank you, Karen, for sharing your own work and highlighting what we can do together to make more progress on #financialinclusion. Please check back here during the rest of Women’s History Month for two more posts about women leaders in the #retirementsavings space.

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[1] https://www.aarp.org/ppi/state-retirement-plans/national-coverage/